A cupcake should be a cupcake

I'm really bothered by these yucky designer cupcakes everywhere. They are usually quite large and have a huge tall hard swirl of icing that looks like rubber. Some of them only have a gigantic dollop of icing bang in the centre, they haven't even bothered to spread the icing out nicely. Whatever happened to the plain simple small humble cupcake? It is the same with afghans. Huge wide flat afghans with a lake of icing on top. Please no! An afghan should be a small circular wedge of fudgy yet slightly crunchy cakey biscuit. And muffins. Why on earth would I want to eat a muffin the size of my head?

The other evening after a delicious steak dinner at my sister's I decided to make some nice old-fashioned plain cupcakes. Of course, I found my recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess.

The photo is a bit crap but as you can see, these are very plain-looking, yet mouth-watering cupcakes. Everyone who eats them says they are the best cupcakes they've had, and that they are exactly how a cupcake should be. I didn't ice these very well, please note that I made them again recently and I made them look much neater by slicing the humps off the top of each cupcake with a serrated knife, and then icing them. That is what Nigella said to do. And it does make them look much nicer. And then you can put sprinkles or whatever you like on them.

Cupcakes
125g butter, softened
125g caster sugar
125g self-raising flour
2 eggs
2-3 Tbs milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Icing:
125g butter, softened
225g icing sugar, sifted
1-2 tablespoons boiling water, or as much as makes a nice smooth consistency

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celcius. Line a 12 cup muffin tin with paper cases.
Put all ingredients except milk into a mixer/blender, blend until smooth. Pulse while adding the milk.
Scoop into the paper cases then bake for 15-20 minutes until golden on top. Remove from tin as soon as possible and cool on a rack.
Slice off any humped tops with a serrated knife for a flat surface to decorate. Decorate as desired, ie. I added a dash of blue food colouring to make a minty 50s green, then some chocolate sprinkles - a very nice colour combo!
Nigella doesn't really give a good icing recipe in How to be a Domestic Goddess, or if she does I can't find it, so I found another one, a simple butter icing.
Icing:
beat the butter until light and smooth, then mix in the icing sugar, followed by the boiling water.