Flourless pistachio cupcakes with rosewater icing

It's probably because I have time on my hands, but I've been in the middle of some kind of reorganisation craze since I started annual leave. I've been madly moving the contents of all the kitchen cupboards and shelves around, finding things I forgot I had. Just before Christmas I turned the shelving over the buffet unit into a book case which means I now have room in my book cases for the other accumulated books that have been sitting stacked on the side table!

I've also been clearing out the pantry looking for anything that needed to be used up. I found a bag of pistachios to use and went searching the net for a pistachio cupcake recipe. All the recipes I found called for flour, and a lot of them were just vanilla cupcakes with pistachios stuck on top of the icing. I had already used the last of the flour I had making fruit cakes for Christmas so I improvised an almond meal recipe.

Ingredients (makes 12 large cupcakes)

Cupcakes:

• 1 cup whole unsalted pistachios
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 4 ounces (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon rosewater
• 4 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups almond meal

Icing:

• 125g butter or nuttalex, softened
• 1 1/2 cups pure icing sugar, sifted
• 2 tsp rosewater
• Pink food colouring (optional)

Decoration:

• 1/4 cup crushed pistachios for decorating

Directions

Cupcakes:

1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees. 
2. Using a food processor or blender, process the pistachios in small batches till finely ground.
3. Combine the pistachios, almond meal, sugar, and salt in a food processor until finely ground. 
4. Mix in butter, vanilla, rosewater, and eggs, until smooth. 
5. Divide batter among cupcake liners.Bake about 30 minutes or till a knife poked into the centre of a cake comes out clean. 
6. Leave cakes in the tin to cool.

Icing:

1. Beat butter in a large mixer till smooth and and slightly lighter in colour.
2. Mix in the icing sugar, 1/2 a cup at a time.
3. Add in rosewater and food colouring and mix till smooth.

Decoration:

1. Ice each cupcake and decorate each with a sprinkle of crushed pistachio.

The cakes were nice and moist and for an improvised recipe at 1 in the morning they turned out quite well. While tall swirls of icing always looks nicer on cupcakes, I personally think it would be too sweet to do with this cupcake.

Apologies for the camera phone photos. My camera died a while back and I haven't decided what I'm getting as a replacement yet.