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

February's offerings

Courgette tray bake - not sure what the occasion was. But oh, so yummy

cupcakes for Calvin's class cake sale. - SOLD -

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.

Quite a bit of baking went down in August

So our little brother turned 4! and we just had to bake him a chocolate cake - thank you Aunty Erin and the BBC for the delish recipe!

I had oodles of icing left over from various things, so decided to swirl them onto cupcakes and sprinkle them with a bit of happiness (orange & yellow sprinkles). not too shabby.

Here's a South African mainstay : melktert. It's really delicious. I used a recipe in a classic SA cookery book (Kook en Geniet) and they just AREN'T the way I remember them. I will have to hunt for another one and make them again! 's all there is to it

what to do with 3 OLD bananas?

 

The answer of course is : Nigella Lawson. Bless her!
in her book, Nigella Express, she has a lovely little recipe for banana muffins with butterscotch bits. It's got a huge amount of oil in it, but the muffins come out light and peel out of their cases with ease. What more could you ask for ? Just delicious.

Church Bake-Off : bless

 

Calvin's entry - in progress

Francis "Eagle" Lipman organised a church-wide Bake Off. Our boys were the only entries in their age group, so they won. Delightful!

For the St James Primary School Summer Fair, there was a baking competition. The entries were fantastic and so varied. Our boys made swirly cake with bright buttons. Every child was credited with participation and the winners were in 3 categories. I think it'll be an annual fixture going forward.

Applefest last week

Apple publishing have produced a bucket of little "500 of X" books. This recipe is from the cupcake one. They were delicious and disappeared in one sitting

Recipe : apple sauce & cinnamon cupcakes

makes 12

115g (4oz) unsalted butter, softened

115g (4oz) caster sugar

115g (4oz) self-raising flour

2 eggs

115g (4oz) unsweetened apple sauce

3/4 tsp cinnamon

50g (2oz) chopped pecans **

75g (3oz) sultanas ≠

1 small red eating apple, thinly sliced

2 tbsp granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 175˚C (350˚F / Gas mark 4). Grease a 12 cup muffin tin.

Place the butter, sugar, flour and egg in a bowl and beat with electric whisk until smooth, about 2 - 3 minutes.

Stir in the apple sauce, cinnamon, pecans and sultanas.

Spoon the batter into the cups. Lay the apple slices on top and sprinkle with a little sugar.

Bake for 25 minutes. Remove tin from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes

Remove the cupcakes and cool on a rack. Serve warm.

Store in an airtight container for up to 3 days, or freeze for up to 3 months :)

Ruth's notes :

** I used 1/2 pecans and 1/2 walnuts

≠ Zack wanted chocolate chips so I made up 2/3 sultanas and 1/3 chocolate chips = total weight of 75g

I tripled the recipe and it made 25 large cupcakes (filled to the top). I didn't have enough apple sauce to triple, but it doesn't seem to have made a massive difference.

This is Nigella's Apple Kuchen recipe. It's not bad but it's not amazing. The base took a lot of work - kneading and allowing it to rise overnight, etc etc. It came out lovely and bready which you then top with the apple, eggy-custard topping and the all-spice, slivered almonds, etc. It looks great but wasn't sweet enough or apple-y enough for me. I wanted something more sticky... more sweet throughout. Gotta keep trying.

cake sale at school : cupcakes

Year 1 held their fundraising cake sale on Friday. Instead of doing crunchies or flapjacks I went for something straight down the line - cupcakes with butter-cream icing. Thanks to Janine Rose, whose cupcake decorating evening I went to some time ago, I whipped up two dozen vanilla cupcakes and used up all the left over butter-cream icing that was in the fridge (pink & white). Calvin decorated them with smarties and marshmallows. We sold everything and had excellent contributions. I think we made £87.00 on the day which is fabulous.

toffee apple tower cupcakes

Australian Women's Weekly have given us the gift of a wonderful book on cakes, cupcakes and cookies. most of them are pretty ostentatious, and the photograph of this particular recipe is no exception. That being said, now that the actual cupcakes have been made, they are deliciously-scrumptious with their heavy handed helpings of grated apple and maple syrup. Huzzah!
Now all I need to do is make the icing and I can photograph them and post here.

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

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.

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 ?

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.

Birthday Cup Cakes

Tomorrow is our godson, Alessio's, 3rd birthday. I'm making cupcakes. They don't need to be overkill as it's backup food and not the main feature. Looking forward to it though - wanting to be a wee bit creative. Will post creations, and comment on Sunday :)