Good to look at. Good for your eyes.

Hummingbird Bakery's Carrot Cake extravaganza - usually a 4-tier construct, but in my case an Aztec mound. It's definitely THE BEST carrot cake recipe around: moist, lots of carrots, nutty and the cream-cheese icing is deliciously zesty. No butter, but pots of sunflower oil and equal amounts of sugar, so you can take a view on the "healthiness" of it.

Football it is

blowing out the candles

This year for Zack's birthday he designed his own cake and I produced it. Entirely built on Victoria Sponge - both the main cake and the cupcakes - and then iced with the design in bright buttercream icing. He was thrilled. I guess it was an interpretation of football - a green "pitch" with cupcakes with black and white chevrons on them. He loved it, I guess I cut the grade :) #yippee

Strawberry Cupcakes

honestly the best cupcakes I've made recently. They smell so good !

The recipe by Claire Ptak on the Guardian website is a winner. It's easy to make, and the fresh strawberry puree makes it unique - you can smell the fruit inside.
Double quantities made 2 1/2 dozen, so a little batter goes a long way.

Coca Cola Cake

while browsing Nigella & Mary Berry's cake books on Thursday I stumbled upon Nigella's Coca-Cola Cake recipe. It's chocolate flavoured - exactly what Zack wanted for his birthday. So I rushed off and bought a bottle of coke (the full fat, full sugar, full caffeine version), and made it for the 7th birthday party yesterday. thanks to Haribo and Nigella for the decorative suggestion....

 

it's another really easy recipe, that requires nothing but a wooden spoon and a whisk. and comes out delicious.

Mocha cupcake recipe transformed

Those wonderful people at the Hummingbird Bakery have a wonderful Mocha cupcake recipe that I transformed into a cake for the school fair/fete. Delicious!

Nigella - chocolate guiness cake

Jackie's 40th called for Nigella's Chocolate Guiness Cake. The frosting is cream cheese, icing sugar and whipping cream - light and sweet and a perfect topping to this dense, moist chocolatey extravaganza.

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

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.

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.

courgette cake

Hmm... delicious courgette cake baked for the arrival of my brother. Filled with lemon curd & topped with cream-cheese and pistachios. Couldn't be better. Thanks Nigella !

Sour Cream Chocolate Cake & Icing

I am dead keen to make a fabulous chocolate cake or choccie cup-cakes. I've been perusing Martha's recipes, and the ones on the Waitrose site, as well as my modest collection of cookery books, and decided to try Nigella's Sour Cream Chocolate Cake because it sounded smooth and very chocolatey. Oh dear me... it's turned out to be a far-too-sweet chocolate affair. It has good chocolatey colour and a lovely fine crumb (smooth texture), but overall it's not chocolatey enough for me. Or rather, it's not as 'dark chocolate' as I'd hoped for. The recipe for the icing produced something that's lovely and smooth and light, but far too sweet. I just feel like it needs to be dark and bitter, rather than light, chocolate, whippy.
Another thing is that my decorating technique is horribly OLD FASHIONED. I don't think it works at all. So, overall, there's heaps of room for improvement.

I think I'm going to pension this cake off (to the grateful & hungry souls at Keith's office), and make the box of brownies Heath sent me for my birthday. It's one of those – just add oil, an egg and hot water – jobs. It looks painless, and might be more satisfying in the chocolate arena. Let's wait and see.