Christmas Treats

 42 Shortbread Biscuits Later...

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forwards to the new year! For Christmas this year I made everyone some shortbread biscuits which I decorated in white royal icing. 

 

I made a set of six biscuits for each couple in my own and my boyfriends close family. This meant I had to bake and decorate 42 biscuits! It was a real challenge, but I actually really enjoyed doing it! I managed to bake them and decorate them all in one day.

I then wrapped them all up in little parcels, ready to be scoffed on Christmas day!

 

For the younger ones in my boyfriends family, I made 5 melting snowmen shortbread biscuits.

These were just as fun to make as last time!

 

Christmas Cupcakes

I also made 12 orange cupcakes for Christmas day, decorated in varying degrees of buttercream, to suit everyone's different tastes. 

Chocolate Log

And finally, I made me and my boyfriend a chocolate log for our Christmas on Christmas Eve. I used Mary Berry's Chocolate Log recipe, which was very easy to follow. 

I made all these treats over the period of just two days and I was quite impressed that I managed to do so much! Hopefully all the recipients of the goodies enjoyed them!

I got a few baking gifts for Christmas, so I am hoping to do some baking before I go to London next year (very soon), so stay tuned!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Thanks for reading!

 

Melting Snowmen Shortbread

Yummy Snowmen Puddles!

So as Christmas nears I am going to be increasingly busy with baking treats! This might be my last blog before Christmas, but stay tuned for more blogs in the new year! I have a new job starting in January, so the blogs wont be as frequent, but I am hoping I will get some time to bake during the weekends!

These little chaps were made using this tutorial here LINK.

I used the BBC GoodFood Shortbread recipe to make the base of these snowmen, then drizzled on the royal 'snow' icing. I don't have a microwave and was concerned how to melt the marshmallows. I ended up using the oven and putting them in for about 20 seconds, which worked fine! The marshmallows make great melting heads!

I thought the original designs made the snowmen look a little too happy, so mine are in different states of distress!
 

These three are my favourites! They look like they are getting progressively more melted! These were really fun to make and taste great! Some special people are getting some of these today (lucky!).

If I don't manage to blog before Christmas...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading!

 

Beautiful Christmas Shortbread Biscuits

Easy to make, even easier to eat! 

So I've never made shortbread before and its quite a nice Christmas biscuit to make so I thought I would give it go. When I found a recipe online, I couldnt believe how little goes into these biscuits and how easy they are to make! You only need caster sugar, butter and plain flour!

So I baked a batch of different Christmas shapes again, but this time decorated them with royal icing.

Instead of spending loads of time making up different colours of royal icing, I thought I would just stick with a nice plain wintery white.

I think it gives a nice clean finish to the biscuits!

I didnt use any patterns for the decoration, I just used my imagination (which is probably why I had so much fun decorating them!). I would definently make these again, they are SO tasty and so easy to make! I cant really believe how much shops charge for shortbread when there is hardly anything to them!

Thanks for reading!

 

Stained Glass Biscuits

Practising New Techniques

Hello! Sorry its been a while, I've been busy recently (shocking I know!). I decided to try something a little different this time and make some stained glass effect biscuits. These are quite easy to make!

I wanted to make some Christmas biscuits so I used some round and snowflake shaped cutters and cut out some chocolate biscuit dough. I then used a smaller star shape and pointed shape (not sure what it was, looks a bit like a squashed star) to make holes in the biscuits. I then smashed (extremely good as a stress relief) some lollipops (or you can use hard boiled sweets) and filled these holes with the crumbs!

When the biscuits go in the oven (for about 9 minutes at 180C), the sweet crumbs melt and form a lovely stained glass effect in the middle of the biscuit!

I also made some huge heart ones!

 

I think they turned out pretty well! However, some of them had little bits of biscuit trapped in the sugar! I think this may have been caused by the cocoa powder melting when the sugar got really hot. Next time I think I will try using a gingerbread recipe instead and see if that makes a difference! 

In the next few days I will be updating again with some more Christmas biscuits, so stay tuned!

 

 Thanks for reading!

Cupcakes and Cookies

Improvements

I enjoyed making and eating the chocolate orange cupcakes so much I thought I would make another batch of them! This time, instead of using chocolate buttercream (which was a bit too heavy) I used chocolate ganache (single cream and plain chocolate, melted, cooled and whipped up). This gave a lovely light finish to the cupcake rather than having a heavy topping that sits in your stomach!

Now that I have learnt the basics of making and decorating cakes, I thought I would experiment a bit. 

I baked a small amount of chocolate biscuit recipe and used some small cookie cutters to make some little biscuits which I thought would make great cupcake toppers!

I used cocktail sticks to put them in the cakes, but if you are serving them to children, its best to use edible uncooked spaghetti, in case they hurt themselves! 

The cupcakes were covered in chocolate ganache and edible glitter (so pretty!). 

I then iced the little biscuits using royal icing, flooding them with different colours and designs.

My favourite ones are these heart ones! I am really pleased with how they have turned out! I feel like I am slowly getting better at baking :)

Thanks for reading!

Chocolate Orange Cupcakes

Experimenting

So you know that bbc GoodFood lemon cake recipe I keep banging on about?? Well I decided to experiment a little and use an orange instead! 

I always associate oranges with Christmas and as it is only around the corner, these chocolate orange cupcakes are perfect for those long winter nights! 

So the bbc GoodFood recipe makes one cake or you can use it to make 12 big muffin sized cupcakes! Yummy! These cupcakes are flavoured naturally with orange zest and orange syrup. I then made a simple chocolate buttercream using cocoa powder, which gave a great dark chocolate contrast to the zingy orange! 

Remember those molds I made? Well I thought it might be good time to try them out! I made some orange coloured sugarpaste to go with the flavour of the cupcakes and made several different cupcake 'toppers'.

I also decorated the buttercream with edible glitter (becoming my favourite decoration) and silver and pearlised dragees (balls). 

It was a lot harder then I thought it would be to make the little sugarpaste toppers! It was very difficult to get the mold out perfectly and all of them required some form of trimming or neatening! 

 

These three are my favourites! These cupcakes taste so delicious! Perhaps if you are near Nottingham you should drop me a bell and see if there are any left to eat!

P.s. All these photos are taken by my boyfriend Chris Lane. A professional videographer and photographer. 

Thanks for reading!

Cupcake Bouquet

Edible Flowers

Hello everyone! It is my boyfriends mum's birthday on Sunday and I thought a cupcake bouquet would be a lovely birthday present for her! When I went to Cake International, Queen of Hearts Couture Cupcakes showed us how to make a cupcake bouquet.

All you need is a paper plate, some plastic cups, sellotape and some tissue paper! You just stick as many cups as you like together, stick it to the plate then stick some tissue paper around the outside. Then tuck some different coloured tissue paper into each cup and there you have it!

 

I used my favourite bbc GoodFood lemon cake recipe again and separated the mixture into cupcake cases in a muffin tray. The recipe gives such moist delicious cakes! 

I then attempted to make some lemon buttercream flowers (I am not sure what these are!). I have to admit, I struggled to remember the different flowers Queen of Hearts showed us at Cake International! I am still pleased with the results though.

I then covered them in edible glitter and pearlised balls. I think Mary liked them, so all was successful! I think the end product looks pretty good, I just need some more practice with buttercream (slowly becoming my nemesis)!

 Thanks for reading!

Birthday Treats

The Giant Cookie

On Thursday last week it was my brothers birthday and I wanted to bake him something special and tasty, so I thought I'll make him a giant chocolate chip cookie!

I used a recipe that made 20 cookies and put all the cookie dough into a pizza pan, lined with greaseproof paper. These cookies are so easy to make yourself! Why not try it for someones birthday?

 I then made some buttercream to pipe around the outside and also for the writing in the middle.

Party Ice Creams

My parents requested I made some cupcake ice creams for them, my brother, my boyfriend and me for Sunday (when my brother was visiting). So, eager to please, I made some more of the fantastic cupcake ice creams, but this time I covered them in lovely edible glitter!

I really enjoyed baking these and I thought the cookie tasted delicious! I need to work on my writing a bit, but I am slowly getting better!

Thanks for reading!

Treats and Techniques

Mini Burgers and Chips

 

Hello everyone! Sorry it has been a while since I posted a blog, I've actually been a bit busy this week! I've been doing lots of different bakes this week, all in smaller quantities, so I thought one blog would do them all justice! 

These mini burgers and chips look a bit messy don't they! They were really interesting to make, and yes, they are 100% cupcake! I used a recipe from a magazine which uses piping gel to make mayonaise and ketchup in the burger, but I didnt have time to find any and used buttercream instead (which as you can see didnt really work out!). The 'lettuce' is buttercream and the 'burger' is chocolate ganache!

The 'chips' are actually fried!

The recipe states to cut up some of the cupcakes and fry them in a bit of butter and caster sugar. These babies burnt so quickly! Next time I would use a long tin to make the chips as they look more like wedges, being cut from cupcakes. Also, I would use less butter in the pan and turn them with tongs quickly!

I did like how the burgers turned out, but this was a practice of the recipe really, so they arent how I would present them normally!

Glamorous Ganache Cupcakes 

I wanted to make my boyfriend and I some cupcakes for treats, so I decided to use a small amount of a chocolate chip cupcake recipe and just have a bit of fun! I really loved the taste of the chocolate ganache I made for the mini burgers, so I thought, why not use it again for the cupcakes! I used to think that ganache was this impossible thing only experts made, but it is SO easy you wouldn't believe! Please try making it at home, as it is the most DELICIOUS tasting thing ever! 

So I decided to jazz these cupcakes up a little! I used edible glitter to get  lovely sparkle and edible pearly beads, placing them in the ganache so they look as though they are tumbling down it. I also used some chocolate coloured glitter, rolled it into white sugarpaste and made a butterfly to top it all off!

I am very please how these came out! Super tasty! 

Make Your Own Molds

When I went to the Cake Interational show, I bought a pack of silicone mold, which you can use to make your own molds. Everywhere I go, to buy new molds it is very expensive (around £10 for a pack of just 4) and this silicone cost me only £12 for one pack, which made all these molds! 

I was getting bored of just using that one butterfly cutter for everything! I used some of my own buttons and household objects to create some of these molds. I went to HobbyCraft the other day and bought several packs of different buttons and used these as molds too.

These made fantastic molds and I cant wait to use them! You can use molds for sugarpaste, chocolate and loads of other different things.

P.s. You really wont want to miss my next blog! You might start drooling!

 Thanks for reading!