Pina Colada Cupcakes including Lime Butter Icing

Last week I had a go at making these Pina Colada cupcakes that I found via Pinterest for a morning tea at work.

The thing that drew me to them was using Malibu as it's one of my favourite tipples and I am all about coconut  flavours and scents at the moment.

They were pretty yummy and everyone seemed to enjoy them :-)

A couple of notes though:

• I could not get the recipe frosting to work at all. I kept putting icing sugar in to try and thicken it up and  gave it a spell in the fridge but it was still too runny to ice the cakes with. In the end I invented by own lime flavoured butter icing (recipe below). I wondered if there's some different between the US and NZ ingredients that caused this?
• The Malibu syrup made the cake cases very sticky so I ended up double casing them to try and prevent too much mess
• The Malibu wasn't very strong and I did wonder if the cakes would be equally nice minus the alcohol. You could just leave it out of the sponge and forego the syrup. I might try this next time just to see. I could always eat it with a Malibu cocktail if need be :-)
• I was convinced you could buy pineapple lollies at the pick n mix but when it came to it I couldn't find them (and haven't seen them since). I did find a multi pack of summer tropical lollies that contained pineapples though so I used those as toppers. 
• I couldn't see any reference to how many cakes the recipe makes but I managed to get 15 out of it even though I was expecting only 12

Lime Butter Icing

50g Butter

100g Icing Sugar

1tbsp Lime Juice

Cream the butter with an electric whisk.

Gradually beat in the icing sugar.

Add the lime juice gradually.

Spoon onto the cupcakes and then use a fork to spread it out.

I think this amount iced about 8 of the cakes from memory (I should have written the measurements down at the time!) I ended up doing a second batch once I knew it worked okay.

I didn't have any lime zest to add but I would have tried adding that to if I had some.

If you give these cakes a go - enjoy :-)