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!

Birthday Cupcakes

I made some birthday cupcakes as a surprise for my cousin this week. The theme I chose (mainly because I wanted to practise doing fondant figures) was to create a cake for each member of the family, with a little model of each person or pet on each cake.

The cake recipe I used was intially a basic vanilla, but to make them more interesting I spooned half the mixture into the cases, then added a tablespoon of cocoa power to the remaining mixture along with a little milk to keep the consistency right. This chocolate mixture was then added to the cases and mixed very gently to create a marbled effect. I was a little nervous doing this as I know how easy it is to upset the delicate balance of ingredients in a cake - you can't really improvise like with other recipes; making amendments to the ingredients just to see if it improves the taste; as you can end up with just a sunken mess in your cake pan - but it turned out well. They rose brilliantly, and what I ended up with was this:

I ended up having to cut the tops off in order to ice them, although given how domed cupcakes generally end up I guess I'd have had to do that anyway.

I didn't use any kind of mould for the figures - I know a lot of people use them for faces but I didn't have one, and I'm not sure I would want to use one anyway. I think it would depend on who I was making it for and what was expected.

The figures are completely edible, all made with icing with their heads fitted to the bodies with candy sticks. The fine detail is drawn onto the faces with an edible food pen.

I did little additions to reflect the person - this one is keen on growing his own veg!

This is my cousin the birthday girl.

Got to include the pets!

The family on their cakes (pink vanilla buttercream for the girls and blue for the boys!) all boxed up and ready to go. There were two cakes left over so I just covered these with the leftover icing and sugar decorations. The larger cake tops were sandwiched together with the rest of the icing - waste not want not!



I've been to Hobbycraft today and bought two new heart-shaped tins in preparation for Valentine's Day... watch this space!

Christmassy Goodness

I baked our 2011 Christmas cake back in early November. Probably not as early as it should have been, but not last-minute at least. It was a fruit cake, fed with brandy once a week until it was time to decorate!

I kept the decorating fairly simple - since it was my first Christmas cake I didn't want to try anything new for fear of messing it up completely - so it was covered with marzipan and fondant icing, and fondant decorations/writing. I didn't have any alphabet stamps, so I had to cut out the letters with a knife.

I had also intended to make a single, large gingerbread house. I found a recipe I wanted to use here (recommended for lovely soft gingerbread with a delicious spicy flavour), but was completely confused by the template (because our printer wasn't working at the time, I couldn't print the template, so I tried drawing it. But without measurements, I wasn't able to get it to the right dimensions.) I decided to improvise, using the same recipe for the gingerbread but cutting out several different shapes with pastry cutters. Once baked, I was able to use the shapes to assemble three smaller houses:

I also used the Christmas tree shaped cookie cutter to create a festive tree, and added a snowman to complete the picture.

The decorations are just jelly sweets and glacè icing.

I also sprinkled icing sugar over everything for snow.

Also, from earlier in December, were these:

Another go at practising piping buttercream icing, coloured a strong shade of blue with the colour paste. I was quite pleased with the effect I was able to achieve on the final two cakes in the picture.





I've been given 'The Home Guide to Cake Decorating' by Jane Price for Christmas (courtesy of the other Arf), as well as a guide to making fondant animals and a book of loads of cupcake recipes, so expect more to come soon!

What I want to try next:

Fondant animals.
New cupcake and buttercream recipes.