buttery orange cake >> cup cakes

I had some clementines that were just awful to peel. Decided the best plan was to juice them into a cake. Australian Women's Weekly have an excellent book titled "Best Food", and in there is a great recipe for Buttery Orange Cake. I made it into cupcakes. The only downside is the cooking time: 45 minutes until they're golden. Anyway, they're delicious so it's worth the while

quiche lorraine from charlotte

My dear friend Charlotte is a baking whizz and recently shared her fabulously light and tasty Quiche Lorraine recipe with me. It is scrumptious and takes about an hour in total to produce. It uses a mere 50g of gruyere which flavours the quiche entirely without overwhelming it. It is not stodgy or heavy. Really a most excellent creation.

melktert/ milktart

Milktart or "melktert" as it is colloquially known is a rich, custard tart usually in a soft pastry shell (not biscuit). It's served slightly warm or cold. The commercial offerings are usually about an inch high and cream coloured. My product was at least 2 1/2 inches high and a rich eggy yellow. You dust it with cinnamon before serving. I produced 2 of them (using 7 eggs in all) - one for (what I thought was...) International Book Week at Calvin's nursery, and the other went to the office with HRH. All devoured.

Beetroot and chocolate cupcakes

We've been reading Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale at bookclub. As I was hosting the evening, I thought it would be appropriate to serve something RED. I proved a little harder to do than I'd anticipated, but the finished product was delish.
I trawled through the recipe books and websites, and settled on this one : http://www.britishlarder.co.uk 's recipe (click on the link)
250g of 70% cocoa chocolate is a lot to go into making 16 cupcakes, but they are fabulous.
A positive: the paper wrappers came away really nicely too.
I made the chocolate fudge spread, but must say it was more like a jelly by the coooling stage, and didn't pour like the photograph shows. It looks to me like crumbly jelly-bits ontop of my cupcakes now. Not to say that it isn't yummy (and oh-so-light), but it could have been more of a "spread".
All in all however, a huge success.

chocolate fudge cake, take 2

You'll possibly remember that I made this cake for Zack's 3rd birthday last year, and you can't go wrong with a chocolate cake. So here it is with different decorations for Calvin's 2nd birthday this weekend.

syruppy lemon cake trifle

One of those Nigella wow-ers. This is her lemon syrup loaf cake, sliced up (with double syrup to drench the cake), fresh raspberries on top and then a lime syllabub poured over, topped with toasted almonds. Lovely. Just found the syllabub a bit too bitter with the lime zest.

it's tennis season : wimbledon cake

This is a great little recipe, again from Mary Berry : Wimbledon Cake. I'd never baked with semolina before, but it's simple enough and produces a very very light cake (you fold the egg yolks, sugar and semolina into the stiffly beaten egg whites). I decided to engineer a cupcake version for easier consumption. It worked. Quite delish in the hot weather.

we've been busy

NGS event : cupcakes

My friend Viv is involved with the NGS and this weekend was her turn for an "open garden" afternoon. More than 20 people volunteered to bake cake for her, and I made Nigella's cupcakes and then had to scratch my head for the butter icing. In the end I used the recipe from the Wilton Cupcake book, because I just couldn't find something in Nigella or the Bake book. It's a good recipe because it's half Trex (white vegetable fat) and half butter, so you end up with something that's very light and fluffy - hence my choice of baby pink. I pulled out the Royal (fondant) icing that I had left over from Zack's party etc. and made the little flowers. I've actually cut out more, for use in future decorating - no point in throwing the stuff away if I'm going to use it in the near future. This baking session has made me add two things to my shopping list : I need some green food colouring paste, I'd like another large star nozzle for the toppings. Having one means that I have to wash everything if I change colours.
Negatives : I used the yellow Wilton cupcake papers that I bought in the USA and because Nigella's recipe cooks at 200˚C they came out brown, and the fat content in the recipe meant they were stained. A real pity as they are pretty papers. I wonder if it would have looked better if I'd iced them in yellow ?

blumen... authority

I am always rather suspicious of brands that offer nothing more than their brand. I've never thought of Smeg as good at anything specific, let alone fridges. Similarly Kitchen Aid.
Heston Blumenthal uses a Kenwood Chef. I own a Kenwood Chef. I am very happy with it, except that I managed to lose one of the rubber feet when we moved house so now mine rocks ever so slightly when I use it. It is an excellent product with all the extra bits and bobs you might desire. End of discussion

carrot cake muffins

I have no idea where I got this recipe from, but I'd obviously downloaded it from the printing. It's a carrot cake recipe which is high in oat & apple content, and very low in fat. It doesn't use the perennial vegetable oil, but half a cup of butter instead. Bad for you ? you decide. It has 2 eggs and one extra egg white which means it's lovely and light. Personally I enjoy something a bit heavier in the carrot-cake genre, but this is not a bad offering.
Frosting (icing) is a-la Nigella. You need to be generous on the lemon or lime juice tho' to offset the carrot and oat flavour.

Does whatever a spider can

Zack's Spiderman Birthday Cake for the party. There, I've put it on the web. It represents hours of baking and icing. One thing I can say is that the colouring paste is a real winner - managed to get this indigo blue by being heavy handed with it. I did the black lines with the buy-in-a-tube variety which comes out very shiny. It was an efficient solution to the "black icing colouring" dilemma I was in. I'll definitely use it again.

nearly there

cupcakes again

I have laboured very hard today. I was up at 06h20 with children, and went on to ice cupcakes, make fresh buttercream, and then deliver them to the Fun Day event at the church an hour before.
This evening I have made another two dozen cupcakes, one chocolate cake and coloured one big pot of red buttercream icing. I'm annoyed at myself for losing Janine Rose's buttercream recipe because it was superb, and the stuff I made today is too crystaline (I'm assuming the ratio of icing sugar to butter is too high). Will keep hunting.
Tomorrow I need to turn the chocolate cake into a Spiderman cake, and the cupcakes into red and blue spider-satellite things. I feel tired already, but by this time tomorrow I'll have my feet up.

half way through

eager little fingers

OK, so we've got to Friday and so far we've made wicked chocolate biscuits (Apple Publishing recipe), and Nigella's cupcakes/fairy cakes recipe last night. I decorated them with the blue liquid colouring mixed into the bog-standard butter cream icing. I have now decided that the liquid colouring is terrible - just like they told me at the cupcake decorating evening. It is such terrible quality. I ended up with blue-grey which you can't really fix. What a waste of icing! Thank goodness for "confetti" which Keith sprinkled ontop. I need to buy some colouring paste now and pronto! I have to make the cake & cupcakes tomorrow for the big day on Sunday.

kwazy week

this is going to be one mad bad baking week. Thursday is a guest event at Focus, with a tie-in to A Passion For Life (nationwide) and I'm contributing. Saturday is a big Family Fun Day, and I'm baking for that too. And of course Sunday is Zack's 4th birthday party which I have promised myself I'll make spiderman cupcakes for.
I think I'll probably be all cupcaked out by next week, but it'll be fun. I picked up some glorious Wilton stuff while I was in the USA last week, so that'll steer me on my way, and i've just spotted a new buttercream recipe online which I'll have to try.

Take One - post decorating class

I've had an opportunity to test my newly acquired decorating skills and purchases. Rather than use the colouring paste, I used the liquid food colouring I've had for a few years. It is messy, and goes everywhere - stained my fingers, and more difficult to work through. I did use fondant for the flowers/ hearts, instead of the marzipan we had on the course. It behaves slightly differently. I thought Janine Rose's cupcake recipe was okay - not remarkable, not bad. I think I'll try another recipe I have from my Apple Press book of 500 Cupcakes & Muffins.

cup cake decorating evening

Tonight I'm heading out for an evening of Cupcake Decorating with the ladies at Emporium Tearooms. Can't wait. I'm also delighted to have discovered, after much searching, a company that produce these tiny little fondant icing cutters for making flowers, etc. They are Stephen Benison. Hurrah!
And just look at these people's amazing collection of cupcake cases. Awesome.

busy busy

Last weekend was Calvin's Dedication service. I made some wonderful vanilla cupcakes, and then topped them with Nigella's Blonde icing (creme fraiche & white chocolate). I stepped out and purchased a wonderful book on Canapes by Eric Treuille - made a great carrot and spring onion fritata with feta cheese & black olives, home-made blinis with creme fraiche and salmon roe (from the Japanese shop in N Finchley). I also was brave and made Nigella's scones with cream and raspberry conserve. I am usually terrified of scones as mine turn into hard little cakes in the oven, but these rose so nicely - Yum!
Tonight we had friends for dinner, and since I had heaps of ingredients left from last weekend, pulled out an old trusty friend - Jamie Oliver. Made two of his recipes this evening: wonderful lemon & lime cream tart (8 eggs), and his Fish Kedgeree. All delicious.