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!

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!

Halloween Bakes

Halloween Cupcakes

So I had a lot of time to spare a few days ago and thus, thought baking some cupcakes would be the best way to spend my time! I popped into Lakeland and purchased my first icing set, with all the different nozzles and got creative with different icing techniques.

The cupcakes themselves were made using a very simple lemon sponge recipe. I used lemon butter cream for the piped icing and the rolled icing is shop bought (purchased from Lakeland a few months ago).

I looked online for inspiration for a few different Halloween themes. These two cupcakes are just simply orange and orange and yellow pipped butter cream with different sprinkles on.









I made these cupcakes using the 'grass' nozzle that came in my kit and just halved some rich tea fingers for the grave stones.

These were my favourite!

The base of these cupcakes were made from mixing shop bought rolled icing/sugar paste. Then I just iced the spider designs on top in black butter cream.










These two were made with rolled icing bases and black butter cream icing. I kind of just free-styled these ones! 









 

Graveyard Cake

I made this cake from a recipe from BBC GoodFood, however, I didn't have a large enough tin, so I used two smaller tins and just sandwiched the two layers together with a white chocolate butter cream. I really enjoyed making the cake, but it was a bit of a challenge for me, as there's lots of different processes in order to get the end result.

The cake didn't turn out how I wanted it to look but it still tasted great! My little ghosts were supposed to be meringue but had to be iced instead (hence why they look a bit sad). I did (after many attempts) actually make some meringue but they went all soft and sticky. I heard this happens if its a humid/damp day outside, and this is Britain, so it was naturally raining! 

The gravestones are chocolate covered rich tea fingers and iced with (runny) white icing. And the soil is double chocolate chip cookie crumbs (some cookies didn't make it to this process).

Next time I try this one I think I might use a different chocolate cake recipe, as it was very dry. And I would probably make the meringues and cake one day and decorate it the next, as it took a long time to make. :)