New Flavours

I've tried out two new things since I last blogged: lemon and coffee cake.

The lemon was in the form of cupcakes and used a recipe from my Primrose Bakery cupcakes book. Both lemon juice and zest gave a really lemony flavour, and for some reason the recipe called for sour cream. I really don't know what that was for, but I used it anyway, and now I have a nearly-full pot of soured cream in my fridge that I don't know what to do with! I suppose I could make more lemon cakes :-)

They tasted great, although seemed a little stodgy to me. I'm not sure if that's just how the recipe is meant to turn out or if I did something wrong. I beat the mixture for ages so there was plenty of air in it. What comes to mind is the fact that, in my efforts to put the same amount of mixture in each case, I used a large measuring spoon (a 1/4 cup I think, or maybe smaller) to portion out the mixture. Perhaps I knocked the air out of them then. Or perhaps it wasn't a lack of air at all, as they rose very well. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find out somewhere along the line.

I used the book's lemon buttercream recipe too; very zingy! The icing on its own was slightly unpleasant (I have a terrible habit of licking icing off of the tops of cakes, very uncouth I know) but paired with the cake, the sweetness of the sponge and the tartness of the icing made a very good couple.

A recent trip to Hobbycraft saw me buying a set of three flower plunger cutters, so I put these to good use decorating the cupcakes:

These were the first six I decorated - I had to go out and take my son to his Nanny's (the grandparent kind, not the childcare kind... or goat for that matter), so I popped these in a box to take round there for her, planning to finish the rest when I got home. But then disaster struck as I was on my way out the door and the cakes ended up in a pile on the rug. There was icing all over the floor and, needless to say, I was very upset. But, there were plenty of cakes left, so as fast as I could, I prepared another six:

These didn't look so good, but as it turned out it didn't matter. When we got there, there was nobody home!

So we came home again, and I cut out some more flowers and finished the rest.

So that was the lemon cupcake fiasco.

As for the coffee cake, that has gone slightly better. It's a birthday cake for my boyfriend, and there are only two things he drinks; coffee and beer. I thought a beer flavoured cake might be a bit gross, so I went for coffee. It's decorated with coffee flavour buttercream icing (putting my new palette knife to good use as well), melted chocolate mixed with a little icing sugar to help it keep shape while I piped it, and of course the words 'Happy Birthday' piped on. Piping the lettering brought today's little disaster... I made the icing too thin, so the words just spread out so they were unreadable. So I wrote it again on the top of the spread out words, in icing that was meant to be black but ended up grey, and started off too thick to pipe (my piping bag burst and I had to switch to the syringe) and ended up slightly too runny when I added water to it. But thankfully not as runny as the first attempt, so it ended up readable.

Anyway...

Happy Birthday Babe!