So many people commented on this picture that it seemed like a blog post was in order to explain the story behind it.

I guess it all begins with apples. When the apple glut arrived a few months ago, I started amassing apple recipes, including this Apple Brown Sugar Cake by Azelia’s Kitchen.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been very lucky to work with Rosalind Rathouse, the one-woman powerhouse behind Cookery School at Little Portland Street in London and Rosalind’s Kitchen, a hidden little gem of a takeaway that does beautiful, healthy lunches using amazing ingredients including loads of beautiful fresh vegetables, organic produce and good-to-think sustainable fish (watch the video).

One of the things I keep hearing about from Rosalind and her customers are their cupcakes, which Rosalind says should really be called “cakes in cups” because they’re made using artisan cake-baking techniques but are baked in cups so as to be more portable.

Now enter Eleni and Eni’s birthday part last Sunday. Eleni is a friend from my past life in the City as a banker. Her and her partner are from Greece and cook amazing food – a dinner party at theirs was not to be missed. As this was a birthday, I thought it a great excuse to try another apple cake recipe and impart a bit of the orchard harvest into the festivities. I also knew a lot of people would be there, and “cakes in cups” seemed the perfect way to easily share the cake amongst many people.

One final bit of inspirado came from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Apple and Pear Crumble Cake, which has a tasty crumble topping to make the cake extra special.

So here is how I made the apple mini cakes:

1. Get two mini muffin trays (about 48 muffins) and line it with cupcake liners. (You can also halve Azelia’s recipe and use one tin, or do one tin of muffins and one mini loaf tin!)
2. Make a crumble topping with 200g cold butter, 300g flour, 100g caster sugar. Put the mix inside the fridge until ready to use.
3. Make Azelia’s Apple Brown Sugar Cake batter and spoon into the muffin tins.
4. Sprinkle a generous amount of crumble onto each muffin (it will go everywhere and be a mess – don’t worry about it; you will also have lots of crumble leftover – put it in the freezer and save it for later!)
5. Decorate each muffin with a sliced almond or two.
6. Bake at 180 C for about 20 minutes (check half-way to make sure they are baking evenly and rotate the muffin trays if needed).