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!

 

 

Ice Cream Cupcakes!

Deceivingly Tasty!

These little ice creams are cupcakes! I used a recipe from Carol Deacon's book that I got at the Cake International show to create these little beauties! I am so please how they turned out!

 

The cake mixture is a plain madeira cake which has been flavoured separately with lemon, peppermint and vanilla to give different ice cream flavours. The cake mixture is then poured into the ice cream cups, which are covered in foil to stop them burning in the oven.

The pinky ones are vanilla flavoured sponge with strawberry jam buttercream. The white ones are lemon and vanilla sponges with lemon and vanilla buttercream. The mint coloured one is mint flavoured sponge and mint choc-chip buttercream! For the domed ones I just used a palette knife, but for the 'Whippy' ones I used a giant open star nozzle!

This cupcake is my favourite! Just in case you were wondering, they also taste really amazing! This is defiantly my favourite bake so far! They are quite easy to make and you can be really creative with them as you could use any sponge mix and any buttercream/topping you want.

Thanks for reading!

Cake International

Pre-Show Treats

 

So on Thursday I was having a pretty bad day, feeling a bit defeated. So the one thing that really cheers me up is to bake and decorate cakes! I feel like I'm doing something productive and I can then have a bit of lovely comfort food as a reward :)

These cakes were made using my favourite lemon cake recipe from BBC GoodFood. I just separated the mixture into 12 big cupcakes instead of one cake. The buttercream is lemon flavoured and hmmm so delicious!

My parents were kind enough to let me and my boyfriend tag along to the NEC on Friday, they were off to see HobbyCrafts and I wanted to see the Cake International Show. So I gave them both some cakes to say thank you. Now they want regular deliveries of them! :D

Inspiration

There were so many beautiful cakes! Below are some of my competition favourites! 

 

This music cake was stunning! I loved the royal icing detail and the choice of just three colours. 

This cake was in the Junior class, and I really loved the biscuits and the mouse's bum poking out of the box!

This cake was really amazing, it was Hagrid's house from Harry Potter! There was even details inside the house!

 This cake, believe it or not is made completely from buttercream! How amazing is that??

 

This cake was probably my favourite out of all of them, it has been designed around the disney film, Beauty and the Beast!

I did make a few purchases whilst I was there, including some silicone so I can make my own moulds for sugarpaste! I have a few buttons that would make great moulds, and its very expensive to buy pre-made ones, so I thought it was a good buy really!

I also bought a book by Carol Deacon (http://www.caroldeaconcakes.com/) , which she kindly signed for me! Her book is really unpretentious and shows you how to make cakes in a way which is so easy to understand! 

I also attended a small demonstration by Queen of Hearts Couture Cakes (http://www.queenofheartscouturecakes.com/), two ladies based in London who decorate all their cakes in buttercream only! They showed us how to make buttercream flowers and a cupcake bouquet! I am very eager to try these out and also make some cakes from Carol's book! So keep your eyes peeled for more blog entries!

 Thanks for Reading!

Vintage Tea Time Treats

Patience and Perseverance

The cookies I flooded last week didn't turn out as I wanted them to and I want to practice as much as I can because I really like the effect Royal Icing gives. So I flooded some more cookies (of different shapes this time) and left them to dry over night so that they went hard.

I chose some pale "vintage" colours which I thought would work well with the cookie shapes. I then iced them in white royal icing in different designs. Although they are not perfect, I am much happier with these cookies than I am with my last ones!

The three cookies below are my favourites. All the cookies are made to the same recipe as last time, but I put some more chocolate chips in. This unfortunately made the mixture more difficult to work with and thus the cookies turned out different thicknesses! Also, some of the cookies didn't have enough icing on them when they were flooded (I was being extra careful this time), so next time I will make sure the icing is as easily spread as possible.

My piping is getting better, but I need to work slower in order to get neater lines!

 Thanks for reading!

 

Learning to flood biscuits...the hard way!

Chocolate Chip Delights

So I said I was going to make some chocolate chip cookies and I did! I used a recipe from a magazine I picked up that adapts a sugar biscuit recipe. These cookies are so ideal for decorating as they are flat and taste great! I wanted to practice flooding this time using royal icing. This is where you use icing to create a hard outline and wait for it dry. Then you thin the icing down with water and fill in the area which you have outlined. It gives a lovely even and shiny finish!

  Planning Ahead 

I decided I best plan ahead and think up some designs for my biscuits first, so I know what colours I  needed to make my chosen designs. I tried to think up designs that were more child orientated and less "girly" like my last biscuits. I want to challenge myself so I thought I would jump in at the deep end. I had varying levels of success!

The Good, Bad and the Ugly

 

Flooding the base layer of the biscuits was easy enough, but it took about 2 hours to dry! I found out that I need to work on my piping skills, as the lines around the biscuits were a bit wobbly! The real difficulties came when adding more icing and flooding on top of these base layers. On a couple of biscuits I put too much icing in the area where I wanted to flood and the icing went over the outlines I had made! But now I know not too add too much icing. 

I had a lot of problems making black icing as you have to add a lot of food colouring to get a really dark black to white icing. In the end my icing turned too runny and my mickey and minnie designs didnt turn out very well! I was pleased with the cartoon 'bang' designs though!

The whole process made me really understand how to flood biscuits, the limitations of it and the advantages of it. In the future I will probably stick to using three colours as there is too many nozzles and piping bags to change otherwise! Also I would probably stick to simpler designs to being with, using different designed cookie cutters and then piping one design on top in thick icing. :)