Cherry Crumble Mini Cupcakes

Cherry Crumble Mini Cupcakes

Cupcakes:
3/4 cup butter, soft
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1 cup self-rising flour
1/4 cup regular flour
1/2 cup canned plum juice (substitute 1/2 cup milk for juice if unavailable)
1 cup canned or fresh sweet cherries, cut into small pieces

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line mini cupcake/muffin tin with paper liners.

Cream butter, sugar, and vanilla until creamy. Add in eggs one at a time, beating well. Sift in the flours and milk/juice. Mix in the cherries by hand; do not overmix.

Crumble:
1/2 cup raw sugar
1 cup flour
1/3 cup butter, cut into pieces
1/3 cup chopped pecans, if desired.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, using your hands, until the mixtures resembles coarse breadcrumbs.

Sprinkle crumble over the tops of the cupcakes, covering them well.

Bake for 10 minutes, turn pan, and bake for another 10 minutes.

This is another recipe that lied to me about quantity. It claims to make 24 mini cupcakes, but in reality there were 48. Also, regarding the plum juice. The original recipe calls for plums rather than cherries, and I picked it to use up some canned plums I had in the basement. However, although the juice was perfectly fine, the plums more or less disintegrated as soon as I took them out of the jar. I substituted the cherries because I happened to have them on hand.

I would not recommend switching in cherry juice because it's a lot stronger than plum juice, which is more or less just a simple syrup in which the plums have been floating -- so the taste is very mild. If you have a mild fruit juice on hand, maybe a pear juice even orange juice, that would probably be an all right substitute. On the other hand, milk should meet the requirements for a liquid just as well without having to worry about interfering with the taste of the cupcakes.

Adapted from Anneka Manning's Cupcakes.