Marquesas (Spanish Almond Magdaleines)

Here is a recipe to make Spanish Christmas Sweets. They are called Marquesas and are a kind of Almond Cupcakes, Magdaleines. You can eat them as breakfast, dessert, with a coffee. Hope you like them. Let me know what you think.

Ingredients:

• 100 g iced sugar
• 120 g white sugar
• Grated lemon zest (from 1/2 lemons, only the yellow part)
• 250 g ground almonds
• 40 g self raising flour
• 40 g cornflour
• 10 g baking powder
• 4 eggs
• Iced sugar for decoration 

Preparation:

1. Leave the eggs out of the fridge until they are room temperature (I left them around 6 hours).
2. In a bowl, mix together the flour, cornflour, baking powder, almond, iced sugar, and lemon zest.
3. Put water in a pan and a suitable bowl inside (so the bowl gets warm). It needs to be at a temperature that you don’t get burn (around 37ºC). At this point, leave the bowl above the hot water but take it out of the source.
4. Add the eggs and the white sugar and whisk with the electric mixer for 6 minutes. You’ll see that the mixture start growing and gets whiter.
5. Take the bowl off the pan and continue whisking for 6 more minutes.
6. Once that’s done, gradually add the almond mixture into the eggs mixture and try to mix it until you have a well-mixed batter. Try to mix it by hand and quite slow so the air in it doesn’t go, it will make your cupcakes more spongy.
7. Preheat your oven to 200 ºC. Prepare your muffin tin by greasing it or lining with muffins liners.
8. Fill your muffin tin or liners 3/4 full of cupcake batter.
9. Once the oven is at 200 ºC, reduce the temperature to 180 ºC and bake for 10-15 minutes or until golden.
10. Dust with icing sugar and leave the cupcakes cool on a wired rack.