Saturday 18 February 2012

Chocolate cupcake

I've been practising my piping skills this week... I like to think I'm getting better:


Friday 17 February 2012

Valentine's Day

I made a cake for Valentine's Day. What self-respecting cakey type person would let a day like that pass without... well, cake. I decided to go for something slightly different from my usual, and tried out a Mary Berry recipe that my mum wrote down for me.

I tested out my new heart shaped tins. The recipe was a standard 4, 4, 4, 2 mix with added cocoa powder, but I think I should have gone for the 6, 6, 6, 3 option as, while the cakes rose, they didn't finish particularly thick. But once they were sandwiched together (with chocolate buttercream) the resulting height wasn't too bad.

The icing used to cover it was one I've never done before - I melted butter and cocoa powder over a low heat, added... milk (I think!!) and then icing sugar, and ended up with something I could pour over the cake which then set very quickly. If anyone knows what this kind of icing is called, feel free to enlighten me :-)

So once this was poured over the cake and spread out relatively easily, I wiped down the cake board (it got a bit messy) and was then left with a cake that had a beautiful smooth finish on top, but not so nice around the sides. So I needed to cover the sides, and I had very few ideas. One was to use chocolate fingers, but that would have meant going to the shop, and I've already covered the subject of my laziness (and I'm not going to tell you again because I'm too lazy!) So I got out my laptop and started surfing for inspiration. I found it in the form of ribbons. I'd never made an icing bow before, and I'd seen various tutorials on the subject, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I forgot to add that I'd spent the previous afternoon making slightly more than a dozen fondant roses, which is alarmingly time consuming. And I don't have any calyx cutters, so that presented another problem. I had to try and be clever with fondant leaves instead.

So this is what I ended up with (didn't taste too bad either):

 Bit wonky, never mind...



I entered it into a competition but it didn't even get shortlisted... maybe next time.

Saturday 4 February 2012

An Elegant Disaster

So this week I decided to practise fondant modelling and methods again. I'd purchased some new kit I was keen to try out, including butterfly plunger cutters from TK Maxx (it would seem this shop is an absolute gold mine for low cost cake stuff! You have to look hard though - it's not exactly stacked neatly or by product on the shelves, it's all higgledy piggledy. I guess it provokes impulse buying.) and something I can't remember the name of right now but it is a gum tragacanth substitute. From some of the millions of online videos I've watched on the subject, gum trag makes fondant easier to work with and helps it set stronger, making it good for fondant roses with their thin edges.

I also bought some rejuvenator spirit, which it turns out I didn't need, but I'll get to that.

I considered trying out a new cupcake recipe, but two things prevented this: one being that I didn't have the right ingredients in the cupboard for anything other than vanilla and the other was that I couldn't be bothered to go to the shop. I know, I'm so lazy. It's about a 5 minute walk from my house. My baby was napping, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Anyway, vanilla cupcakes it was. I've made them before with the recipe I used (from the Primrose Bakery Cupcakes book) but I hadn't really had the chance to try them (this was the fondant family cupcakes - they were all scoffed at the party, I took that as a sign that they were good). I only made 12, so I didn't want to try one before I decorated them as that would mean I was only left with 11. You'd assume that if you follow a recipe in a book by professionals to the letter, they will turn out OK, right? It seems logical to me. Anyway, not trying one was something of a mistake.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with the cupcakes until I actually sat down with all my gear, which fills a very large box now and is already overflowing into old chocolate tins and other useful pots. I picked out the butterfly cutters and spotted the red Sugarflair paste colour I had bought, which inspired me to practise my roses again; I haven't done any for a while. This colouring made me realise that the ones I already have aren't paste after all, but more of a thick liquid. I had never seen a proper paste colour before so assumed that the ones from Hobbycraft were, but apparently not. They do the job though.

I hand painted the butterflies, which is something I've always wanted to try. I bought the rejuvenator spirit for this purpose, although it seems to be just for powdered colours rather than paste or liquid colours, as when I tried to add it to the colours, it just turned to an odd, sticky consistency; not paintable at all. I then discovered that mixing the colours with water does just as good a job.

I also put my flower cutters to good use again:


Trying to be a bit snazzy with my photography... did it work? :)



So there they were, 12 cakes I had put several hours and a lot of hard work into. I was even quite proud of how they looked. Then we tasted them.

The sponge was thick and stodgy, heavy enough to sink ships! OK, not really. But my mum didn't even finish hers, and neither did Art. They were worse than the lemon cupcakes (also from the same book, see my previous blog entry). I took them to work and offered them to everyone with the warning that they were not exactly light and fluffy, some complimented (one colleague said it was like a scone with icing on, but tasty all the same), others kept quiet... but they all got eaten either way.

A lot of people have suggested that I didn't get enough air into the mixture, but as I have said I followed the recipe exactly. It calls for several minutes (not joking) of beating with an electric hand mixer after every step, which I did. My arm was aching by the end. It even asks to do this after adding the flour, which (after several discussions with people who know what they are doing when it comes to cakes, and also coming from my own common sense) actually knocks air out of the mixture, surely?

It was also suggested that the recipe ingredients are out of balance, and I think this is closer to the mark. It calls for only 110g of butter but nearly 300g of flour. I'm used to a sponge being an equal mixture of butter, flour and sugar, but this one definitely isn't. There is also a lot of milk going into the mix, 120ml I think.

I've looked at the reviews on Amazon for the book and, while it has a lot of good reviews, all those that are less favourable say the same things I have said above - that their cakes came out hard, stodgy and often completely inedible. 

I don't think I'll be using that book again.