This is just a quick post to show you all some ideas for making your own biscuits and cupcakes for Children in Need, a charity run by the BBC which aims to make a difference to the lives of children all across the UK.
Yes it's that time of year again when the ghouls come out (or maybe just the trick or treaters) and some of us celebrate this freakish occasion. For me, its just another great excuse to bake some goodies along with the theme. This year - cupcakes and gingerbread people!
I opted for plain and simple (but still delicious) vanilla cupcakes with a raspberry jam filling, and chocolate cupcakes. To keep with the spooky theme I made bat and pumpkin decorations out of icing and marzipan to top the cakes, and baked them in some halloween cupcake cases.
I went for the scary look rather than the gory look - I have seen some rather disgusting looking halloween cakes which really don't look too good to eat and I'm pleased to say that mine still look rather appetising with these decorations!
Rather than making standard gingerbread people, I dressed them up to look like witches and wizards, but good ones of course! I think they look kinda cute when placed next to each other, what do you think?
I've never really celebrated halloween in a big way, but it's always nice get in the spirit anyway! I prefer to stay in, carve a pumpkin and watch episodes of Buffy (of which I am still a huge fan!). Unfortunately this year I didn't manage to get a pumpkin so instead I made something rather more exciting...stay tuned for details on that coming soon!
After making danish pastries at college, I thought I'd have a go at making puff pastry at home as the technique of making the dough is fairly similar and therefore it would be good practice for my assesment!
Puff pastry is time consuming to make, which I why I decided that Sunday would be the perfect day for attempting it! I actually found the whole process rather therapeutic and enjoyable, as I was able to take my time and work at my own (slow!) pace.
After all my hard work making puff pastry that day, later on in the week I suggested to my sister Helen that we bake something together for a change. I let Helen choose the treats, and she said she'd like to make cornflake tart (just like we used to have at school), amaretto cupcakes and rocky road (can't really go wrong there!).
For the cornflake tart, we found a recipe on the internet (see here) and used this as a guideline. Instead of normal cornflakes we used crunchy nut and reduced the sugar slightly to compensate. We also made our own shortcrust pastry rather than using ready rolled!
The amaretto cupcakes were soaked in an amaretto syrup once removed from the oven to really intensify the almond flavour and keep them moist. As the cupcakes were quite sweet, I made an almond buttercream icing rather than the sickly sweet butter icing you normally find on a cupcake.
It was my grandma who gave me my recipe for rocky road as she once made some and I thought it was absolutely divine! It is really simple thing to make, requires no baking and there are so many variations. I like to add mini marshmallows, raisins, biscuits and glace cherries to mine, but you can include whatever you like really!
I think Helen found our baking session to be quite enjoyable and a nice break from her university work so it seems likely that we will be baking together again in the near future!
A young couple, Barry and Lisa, kindly asked me if I could make 50 vanilla cupcakes for the naming ceremony of their son Jack. I was very happy to do this and felt very excited about designing the cakes for such a special event.
I was asked if I could do the baby faces with more hair than normal, as apparently their son has rather a full head of hair! I drew a few diagrams, and finally decided on the one I was going to use. I used a small round pastry cutter to cut the faces out of icing, but making the hair out of icing was rather fiddly!
I was so happy that Barry and Lisa were pleased with the finished cupcakes and I hope that everybody at the naming ceremony thoroughly enjoyed them too!
It's that time of year again, although a little late this time round. However, the longer wait for Easter time to come around again made it even more exciting! This year was a very quiet easter for me as my parents were away in France relaxing in the sun and drinking wine! I was working over Good Friday and Easter Saturday, but I managed to pursuade my younger sister Helen to come and visit me on Sunday and keep me company! Helen is very busy studying for her final university exams so revision is, unfortunatly, taking over (most of) her life. I thought I better make it worth her while so I spent the Saturday making lots of yummy easter treats.
Helen is a big fan of battenburg, and I think it is quite a spring-like cake so I thought it would be perfect for the occasion. Although I've made a regular sized battenburg before, I've always wanted to make mini versions like the Mr Kipling ones so that's exactly what I did! It was a little bit fiddly and time consuming but I think the finished cakes look pretty and rather colourful! :)
I decorated the cupcakes and easter nests with cadbury mini eggs (I had forgotten how amazing these actually are) and teeny weeny eggs which I picked up from Asda. Cute huh? I've never made chocolate easter nests before but I I thought they were delish- I will never refer to shredded wheat as 'boring' again!
I was also really pleased with my traditional spiced easter biscuits. Buttery, crisp and flavoursome- little bitesize pieces of joy!
It's that time of year again and I've been looking forward to getting in the kitchen and baking some halloween themed goodies. I haven't made cupcakes in a while so I decided on baking these, plus some tombstone shaped shortbread.
I also made a batch of chocolate cupcakes and decorated them in butter icing that I dyed with red food colouring for a devilish twist! For the devil horns I used broken bits of Cadburys giant buttons-yum!
Along with the cupcakes I baked some shortbread which I flavoured with orange peel and cut into tombstone shapes. I then half coated these in milk chocolate and finished them off by icing 'RIP'- quite difficult to do when the biscuits are coated with sugar as the icing does not stick very well!
Next week I'll be using up the flesh from the pumpkin I carved- I'm thinking pumpkin pie maybe? If you have any other suggestions for baking with pumpkin please let me know :)
Superman Vanilla Cupcakes & Victoria Sandwich
My sister Helen planned an amazing surprise party for her boyfriend's 21st this year and I offered to take care of the desserts and of course, his cake. He is a huge fan of superman (mainly the whole 'look' not the actual television programme!) so she decided to have this as a theme. After discussing plans with Helen, she thought that a cake shaped and iced like the Superman logo would be the best and probably simplest thing to do, although I later found that this was still quite a challenge! She also came across some photos of Superman cupcakes online and I just couldn't resist having a go at making them myself.
I made a batch of vanilla cupcakes using a recipe from Joy of Baking and decorated them using vanilla butter icing. I made the icing blue by using icing paste colour but boy did it take a lot of paste to get it the right colour! In fact, I added so much that when people ate them, their teeth turned slightly blue-oops! Luckily, I think everybody was having such a great time that they failed to notice-phew! The superman logos on each cupcake were actually cut out of marzipan that I coloured yellow. I then made up some red fondant icing and iced on the 's' shape, which was actually much simpler than I thought. I was able to do all this in advance, saving me a lot of time on the day! They turned out looking much better than I thought they might do, and everybody seemed quite impressed, especially Rabbi!
Now, moving on to the actual cake. I found it quite difficult scaling up my Victoria sponge recipe to make a 12" square cake. In the end I made an estimate and luckily it turned out to be spot on! To make the Superman logo shape, I simply cut off one of the corners. The two halves were filled with a generous amount of vanilla butter icing and strawberry jam, which I also spread around the edges to neaten the cake up ready for the roll out icing.
That was the easy part. I have never iced a cake this big with roll out icing and I found it very challenging. Unfortunately I over estimated the size of the cake and rolled out the icing too thin. When I tried to lift the icing to cover the cake, it was so heavy that it stretched even more so I had a lot left over! I was not happy with how the cake looked at this point because the icing seemed to have cracked and wrinkled, giving it a rough finish. However, at this stage it was too late to rectify the problem so I just carried on regardless.
Now as if covering the cake was hard enough, I now had to attempt doing run-out, again a technique I have never done before. Luckily my mum was on hand to help me with this, otherwise it could have been a complete disaster! I did have a slight problem because the icing did literally 'run-out' of the outline I had drawn so unfortunately there were a few icing stains on the side of the cake making it look a bit messy. However, I managed to cover up a few of my mistakes by wrapping a piece of red ribbon around the bottom of the cake!
Although I wasn't completely happy with the end result, nobody at the party seemed to notice and thought it was amazing- especially Rabbi!
Me and Rabbi
Rabbi and his cake
My mum works at a health club and recently they held a breast cancer awareness day. To raise money, all the staff had to come to work wearing an item of pink clothing- my mum found a cheap bright pink shirt from Tesco to wear-very glamourous! As my mum is responsible for the club's cafe, she wanted to sell something to raise a bit of extra money. I thought it would be a great idea to bake some cute pink cupcakes as people usually find these hard to resist! I offered to make them and these were the results! I would have liked to make the breast cancer logo out of icing but unfortunatly I didn't have enough time so pink buttercream and sprinkles had to do! Nevertheless, they still went down well and every cupcake was sold!
On Saturday I spent the day in London with my mum and younger sister Helen. I was hoping to come across Hummingbird's or Primrose bakery but unfortunately we ran out of time to try and find them! However, I did get to nosey around the food hall in Harrods to check out the lovely cake and chocolate displays, and I was shocked to see a cake on sale for £4999!
The most expensive cake I have EVER seen!
We came home on Sunday morning which gave me the rest of the day to do some baking. I wanted to have a go at cupcakes that have a gooey filling that oozes out when you bite into them. I made chocolate cupcakes and added a teaspoon of chocolate spread, and white chocolate cupcakes with a teaspoon of raspberry jam. Unfortunately they didn't quite work out as I had planned as both the chocolate spread and jam sunk to the bottom of the mixture during baking, resulting in it getting stuck to the paper cases. Next time I will try this with a cake mixture, as the cupcake mix is like a batter and is too runny to hold any heavier ingredients. Despite this, they were still very tasty and (not) surprisingly we managed to eat them all!
