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!

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. :)