Valentine Muffins with Amaretto und Raspberry Buttercream

For Valentine's Day, my boyfriend got these Muffins and a small, heart-shaped cake. Amaretto muffins are his favorites and also quickly made.

He's not especially fond of raspberries or other fruits in his cakes, but pink is essential for Valentine's day and you can taste them just a bit...

For 12 muffins:

For the dough:

5 eggs

250 g sugar
Contents of one vanilla bean

350 g flour
1 Pck. baking powder
125 ml Amaretto
100 ml canola or sunflower oil

For the buttercream:

125 g white chocolate

60 g cold whipping cream

50 g raspberries (out of the fridge in winter)

100 g butter

Decorations:

25 g white chocolate

Tools:

Muffin pan
Icing bag
Cheesecloth

Preparation: 

Preheat oven to 180°C, put paper forms into the muffin pan and baking paper into the  heart shaped form, or spray with oil. 

Beat eggs with suger and vanilla until white, mix in flour, baking powder, Amaretto and Oil. Pour into the forms and bake for 25-30 minutes.

For the ganache, heat the whipping cream and the chocolate and stir well. Unfreeze and crush the raspberries.

Put the cheesecloth into a sieve, pour the raspberries into the cheesecloth and press the berry juice into the ganache. Stir and repeat until a nice hue of pink is achieved.

My ganache was still too soft for decorating with an icing bag, and I was out of white chocolate - thus I experimented a little...

And decided to make butter cream: heat the butter until soft in the microwave oven and stir into ganache. In case that the butter cream becomes flaky, just put it back onto the hearth for a bit with low temperature and whip well. In my case, the butter cream had a very nice consistency afterwards!

Melt the white chocolate in a water bath and paint little herats on a sheet of baking paper.  Glue the baking paper onto a tablet for that purpose. Put the tablet into the fridge or outside.

Ice the muffins with butter cream and decorate with hearts.













I used the fluid ganache for the heart first and rimmed it with the butter cream. I was told that the raspberry taste had the perfect level :-)