Christmas Party Treats

Gingerbread

Hello again everyone! I hope you are all getting into the Christmas spirit! Not long to go now until the big day. For those of you who don't know, my contract at the Science Museum ended a month ago :( 

Thankfully I was invited to the Christmas party! The beautiful people I used to work with always appreciated my baked goods, so I thought I would bake some Christmas treats to bring along to the party. 

Gingerbread is so easy to make and has such a lovely winter warmth to it! You can find plenty of recipes online for gingerbread. These gingerbread biscuits have ground cloves and ground ginger in them, but you can also use cinnamon or nutmeg. I also used light brown sugar, but if you prefer your gingerbread a darker colour then you can use dark brown sugar. 

I decorated these with some royal icing using a very fine writing nozzle, perfect for little details and writing.

Ginger and Salted Caramel Cupcakes

I also wanted to bake some cupcakes for everyone and I always struggle to find a Christmas cupcake recipe that really works. I've made chocolate and orange cupcakes before which also remind me of Christmas, but I wanted to try something different.

The cupcake batter contains two whole eggs and two egg yolks. I've never used a recipe like this before, but it made the ginger cake itself really soft and moist! Delicious!

The salted caramel icing is a bit tricky to make if you haven't made a caramel sauce before. But basically its a normal buttercream but using salted butter and mixing in homemade caramel sauce.

I decorated my cupcakes using edible glitter (I cant live without it!) and a small gingerbread biscuit decorated with royal icing. I love adding small biscuits to cupcakes, it makes you feel like you are getting two treats in one!

Overall I'm really happy with how they turned out and everyone seemed to enjoy eating them!

 Thanks for reading!

Mini Cakes and Cake International

Mini Cakes

Hello everyone! Its good to be blogging again! 

So, I'm starting to branch out into different cake and baking techniques now. I've wanted to try covering cakes in sugarpaste for a while, but I'm not confident enough to cover a large cake yet. So I decided to bake a large square victoria sandwich cake and cut it up to make some smaller mini cakes! These seem to be coming into 'fashion' at the moment, and they are ideal as birthday gifts! 

I made these two for my parents (as a thank you for taking me to Cake International). 

Once I had cut up the cake's, I then covered them in a thin coating of buttercream, so the sugarpaste would stick to the cake. I then rolled out enough sugarpaste to cover the whole cake and placed it over it, tucking in the corners and smoothing it down with my hands.

You can buy cake equipment called cake smoothers. These are extremely useful for smoothing the sugarpaste and creating a really good finish. I've never seen much point in buying them...untill now! My cakes turned out a little rustic and lumpy as they were very difficult to smooth over with my hands. Needless to say, my next purchase will be two cake smoothers!

I then decorated each cake using more sugarpaste, but coloured it pink and blue. The present cake is made by rolling out a ball of sugarpaste into a sausage and flattening it/rolling it out, so you've got a long piece of sugarpaste of which you can cut strips out. 

The rose is made from 10 or so small circles of sugarpaste. I cut these out using a large icing nozzle (I don't have any fancy cutters). You then take either a toothpick or a small ball tool (a plastic tool with a ball at the end of it) and roll the edges of the circles so they are flattened out. This gives a more authentic petal look, rather than a clean cut edge. 

It's difficult to explain in words how you make a sugarpaste rose, but it basically involves wrapping each petal around, building up layers, to create a rose. You can find lots of helpful clips on YouTube on how to do this! I'm very pleased with how they turned out!

Cake International

Now all my waffling is over, here are some beautiful cakes from the Cake International show at Birmingham NEC. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do!

This cake is stunning! The basket looks incredibly real!

The tiny details in this beach hut are amazing! It must have taken ages to do, but it was clearly worth it!

 This cake was my favourite, its extremely colourful and really detailed!

Another beautiful cake, taking inspiration from paper quilling! Very effective.

 

Thanks for reading!

Baking Challenges

Eight-Stranded, Plaited Loaf!

 

Recently I've had some time off from work and it's given me a chance to bake some different things. I've never tried bread before, so I thought I would attempt the famous Paul Hollywood, Great British Bake Off, Eight-Stranded, Plaited Loaf!

I'm not going to lie, this was extremely difficult to make! The actual bread wasn't that difficult to make, kneading the dough was extremely fun!

The plait is pretty complicated and the dough was pretty sticky, so every time I went wrong I had to start right from the beginning as the strands were impossible to untangle!

In the end, it wasn't too bad for a first attempt! Next time I might try some seeded bread rolls.

Chocolate Macarons

 

I attempted to make Macarons twice, the above is my second, much better attempt! I used a really basic recipe from BBC Good Food, unfortunately it left a lot of the finer details out! It felt a little bit like the Great British Bake Off technical challenge to be honest! 

So these turned out a lot better because I blitzed the dry mixture in a food processor to make it finer (A mixture of plain flour, ground almonds, coco powder and sugar). Without doing this, you get a really lumpy texture to the macaron! 

I also left them to 'dry out' before putting them in the oven, this let them form a crust on top (they should be dry to the touch) and this stops them from cracking in the oven.

Finally, I baked them on a really low temperature (140 degrees C) for a longer time, so that they dried out slowly (as the wet part of the mixture is egg white) and didn't burn!

I filled these with chocolate ganche, but the flavour combinations for these little treats are endless!

Thanks for reading!

Homemade Afternoon Tea

Afternoon Tea on a budget

I've always wanted to have a good afternoon tea in a posh hotel, but never been able to afford it! So I figured I would try and make my own homemade Afternoon Tea for my other half and I.

My ideal Afternoon Tea, has to include the classic and delicious Victoria Sandwich Cake! This one is made from a really basic vanilla sponge recipe and filled to the brim with strawberry jam and vanilla buttercream...YUM!

 

 Tasty Finger Sandwiches

 

The next essential food item, must be the finger sandwiches! I'm afraid to say I didn't make the bread for these (stay tuned to see my first attempt at bread), but the egg mayonnaise inside is definitely

homemade! Cress was the perfect match for the egg, but you could also use Rocket leaves.

Heavenly Scones!

Surely the best part of an Afternoon Tea is the scones with lots of jam and clotted cream! I've never made scones before, and never eaten the plain variety (I tried the ones with 'dead flies' in when I was younger and hated them!). These are so easy to make, they only take about 20 minutes to prepare and bake! I used a basic recipe from BBC Good Food (excellent online resource for quick recipes).

So two very big (and happy) bellies later...

It took a fair amount of time to make all the elements for the Afternoon Tea, but it was well worth the wait! If your super hungry, you could always just make scones and have them with a big pot of tea.

The great thing about making your own Afternoon Tea is that you make what you like. You could make a more refined version by making Macarons or Iced fancies!

Thanks for reading!

Vanilla Cupcakes

Delicious Vanilla Cupcakes

Hello everyone! So I made these cupcakes from two different recipes, the cake is a basic vanilla cupcake recipe using vanilla paste from the "Boutique Baking" book by Peggy Porschen. The vanilla buttercream is made just by mixing icing sugar, butter and vanilla paste together.

I made the buttercream in two slightly different shades of pink, to give the roses a little bit of depth to them.

The butterfly decorations are made from sugarpaste, mixed with sugarcel. This means that they set hard and don't go soft when you put them on the buttercream.

I finished the butterflies off by painting them with edible

lustre and added a sprinkle of glitter to the buttercream roses.

 

How to transport cupcakes (on a budget)

 

So usually I just put cupcakes in a spare food tub to transport them and just use foil barriers to try to stop them squashing each other. 

But today I had a brainwave! 

 

I decided to cut some plastic cups in half and place each cupcake in a cup. This means that each cupcake has a sturdy ring around it, preventing it from being squashed and stopping the icing getting stuck to the other cupcakes.  

                                           

The cupcakes are then easily released by popping them up from the base.                                                      

This method worked perfectly and is ideal if you don't have the money to buy an expensive cupcake carrier! 

I'm really pleased with how these turned out. I think the roses themselves could be better, but this is the first time I've used a star nozzle to create them. So I think I just need a bit more practice!

Thanks for reading!

Lemon and Raspberry Cupcakes

Summertime Treats

 

Hi again everyone! So I made these cupcakes only a couple of months ago and they are really good as a summertime treat. I used a recipe from the book "Boutique Baking" by Peggy Porschen, which my brother bought me for my birthday in May.

The main cake is a lemon sponge recipe, but with a few raspberries thrown in. Once you've baked them, you cover them in a lovely lemon syrup (just lemon and caster sugar which has been heated up to dissolve the sugar). This makes them so moist (I'm making my own mouth drool!).

The cupcakes were then topped with a cream cheese and lemon frosting (hence why its a bit runny) and a juicy raspberry. 

I love how these turned out! They look gorgeous and they taste even better! They are a good contrast of sharp and sweet. Perfect with a good cocktail.

By the way...if anyone would like any of these recipes, just contact me and I'll be happy to supply them! 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Belated Easter Cupcakes

Chocolate and Chicks!

Hello everyone! I know, shocking isn't it?? I'm still alive! I've neglected my blog over the past few months, but haven't neglected the baking, so expect and influx of heavenly cupcakes!

So these cute little cupcakes are chocolate fudge cupcakes! A recipe I used from one of my (now numerous) baking books. The cupcake is chocolate and the icing is chocolate fudge.

I've decorated them really simply, with broken up pieces of chocolate flake for the 'nests' and mini chocolate eggs.

You can find chocolate flakes, the mini eggs and the Easter chicks in any good pound shop! So these cupcakes are really good to make if you don't have many pennies.

I was really pleased with the way they turned out! Very cute and very tasty!

Belated Happy Easter!

Chocolate Explosion Cupcakes

Chocolate Indulgence!

Hello everyone! I'm sorry its been so long since I last updated, I'm really busy now that I am in London, working at the Science Museum! Just recently there have been lots of birthdays and events at work and I have been very busy baking cupcakes!

These yummy cupcakes are for a special someones birthday tomorrow. I took a recipe from a magazine called Cupcake Heaven. The cupcake is a mixture of vanilla and chocolate, with chocolate chips and marshmallows inbetween the two layers.

Ontop there is a mixture of vanilla and chocolate buttercream, topped with mini chocolate fingers, mini oreos and mini chocolate bars.

I made the little chocolate bars using a mold from lakeland, I think they look great!

I hope you like these cupcakes as much as I do! I really enjoyed making them and I will definetly make these again...perhaps with a few tweaks here and there ;) I will try to update my blog as often as I can, so stay tuned!! 

Thanks for reading!