Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!  After a day of family, friends, and waaaaay too much chocolate, I thought I'd share these with you:

I was super lazy super clever this year - The Muffin had a farm-themed birthday party back in February, so I just made extra chicken, duck, lamb, bunny and carrot cookies then, and froze the the ones we didn't use for Easter.  Did you know you can freeze cookies decorated with royal icing?  It freaked me out the first time I tried it (knowing how royal normally disintegrates when faced with moisture), but if you're careful, it can be done!  I even did it with Hallowe'en cookies last year, so I can report success even with black and purple icing!

First, I bagged the cookies in ziplock bags (similar colours together) in a single layer, then placed all the bags inside a plastic box (at this point you can layer the bags carefully on top one of another).  Freeze until the day before they are required (or forget, swear, and get them out a couple of hours before they are required, like I did.  Luckily it was warm today here, so they still thawed in time).  Remove boxes from the freezer and sit them on the bench or sink (NOT in the fridge!!!) until they are Completely Thawed.  Resist the temptation to open the boxes.  Seriously, leave them alone until they're not cold anymore.  Then you can get your delicious cookies out and serve them!  Ours still looked and tasted just as good as they did the day they were made!

We also had cupcakes, decorated with home-made chocolate bunnies:

Oh dear.  This wasn't the most perfect bunny, but it was the one I got a photo of.  Sigh.

Sadly I have never yet successfully managed to temper chocolate, but these bunnies were still yummy - we just had to fridge them until they were ready to hop onto their cupcakey little homes.

Hope you and yours had a fantastic Easter!  Was the Easter Bunny good to you?

My 200th Post!

Well, it's finally here - my 200th blog post!  Due to my incredibly erratic posting habits, it has only taken me four years to get here (!), but it has definitely been fun.

To celebrate, I decided to celebrate with a lovely little Raspberry Red Velvet cupcake, topped with Grand Marnier-laced Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  Yum!  The cupcake recipe is from a book called Sparkle Cupcakes (which, if you so choose, you can purchase by following the link).  I've now baked just two of the cupcake recipes from this book, and honestly I find them not quite so light and fluffy as my usual go-to recipe (which is Billy Reece's Vanilla Vanilla recipe).  However, there are some wonderfully interesting flavour combinations in this book, and I will make more of them.  This RRV cupcake, for example, is delicious - I love red velvet for its beautiful texture and dramatic good looks, but the only criticism I sometimes have is that it doesn't really know what it is, flavour-wise.  Is it vanilla?  Is it chocolate?  What's going on?  Well these cupcakes don't dither at all - the beautiful raspberry twang comes through loud and clear, with a subtle chocolatey thing going on in the background... mm-mm!

Unfortunately I can't share the recipe with you, as it's from a cookbook and I don't like violating people's copyright, but to be honest it would probably be completely possible to replicate this just by adding some raspberry puree (or leftover raspberry coulis) to your regular red velvet recipe...  If you try it, let me know how it turns out!  Highly recommended as a flavour combination!

2012 Royal Show Entries

Once again, The Muffin and I both entered some of our baking efforts into The Perth Royal Show this year.  Here's what we entered...

Cinderella Cupcakes:  I entered these into the "Decorated Patty Cakes"  (ie cupcakes) section - and I won! 

The cupcakes themselves were my usual vanilla recipe (ie Billy Reece's Vanilla Vanilla recipe), frosted with my own vanilla buttercream.  The decorations are almost all sugarpaste (with a little CMC added).  There's a little royal icing to stick everything on, and also a tiny bit of piping on the "glass slipper" - oh, and the wheels of the carriage were lovely piped swirls of royal icing, painted with silver lustre.  But I took these photos after the Royal Show, and sadly the wheels were smashed to tiny pieces by the time I got them home!  So you'll just have to imagine them.

I was quite pleased with my little pumpkin - and it was very easy to do, too - I think with a different colour icing for the base, it would make a lovely Hallowe'en cupcake, too!

And here's a closeup of Cinders herself - she was the most time-consuming to make (unsurprisingly perhaps, although honestly I was expecting to have a lot more grief than I did with the glass slipper, having never made an icing shoe before.  It was easier than I thought it would be).  Cinderella's head and torso (with arms attached) were skewered with a piece of uncooked linguine (I thought spaghetti would not be strong enough to hold this, as it was quite a heavy decoration for a cupcake.  The linguine was a bit thicker and stronger), and left to dry overnight.  Then when it came time to decorate the cupcake, I simply draped a biggish circle of blue sugarpaste over the cupcake for the skirt, added the poofy bits of the skirt on in a slightly lighter blue (please feel free to admire my superior knowledge of dressmaking terms), and added Cinders to the top, pushing the linguine down into the cupcake to support her.

It was a bit of a rush job getting these cupcakes done this year - I just couldn't get inspired, so I ended up leaving it until the day before the delivery day to start making the decorations!  Luckily everything dried sufficiently, and I was happy with them in the end.

Bring on the cookies!  My cookies I was very happy with - no dramas here, I had a clear vision of how I wanted them to turn out, and they did...

Some of you may recognise the Dragon Claw Cookie (top right), and you'd be right - I originally made this cookie design to enter LilaLoa's Creative Cookie Competition way back in March.  It didn't win then, but guess what?  My cookies DID win at the Show!  Woo hoo!

I also got Second Prize in the "Cake Using Honey" class, but I didn't take a photo of that, because it was pretty boring looking (no icing allowed, etc).  It's a really yummy cake though, and it was based on my Sunny Honey Cupcakes recipe.  If you haven't tried lavender and honey cupcakes yet, then you should totally go and make these immediately - they are really yummy!

As pleased as I am about my Show wins, funnily enough the prizes I was most excited about were two little "Highly Commended" certificates - and they weren't even mine.  Because The Muffin entered two classes this year, and she got Highly Commended for both!  Happy Mummy Dance!  I was SO happy she got this bit of recognition, because she works so hard on her Show cookies, and she's always been so good about saying "I don't mind if I don't win, Mummy - it's fun just entering".  But you know that deep down in her little five-year-old heart, she'd love to win something.

Here are her Decorated Cookies:

I didn't help her at all with these, she did the lot herself, including making the little sugarpaste heart and flower (I did help bake the cookies obviously, but the kids' cookies are not judged on taste, only on appearance - they are even allowed to use store-bought cookies - so the baking part doesn't count in this class).

2012 is Year Of The Farmer, so there were special "Scarecrow" classes this year in every category.  I didn't enter any of these, but The Muffin did enter the kids' special class, which was "Scarecrow Biscuit".  What they had to do was use commercial cookies and lollies to make a picture of a scarecrow, glued down with icing onto a paper plate.  Here is The Muffin's entry:

Congratulations, Muffin!  Your Daddy and I are both so proud of you!

Easter Fun

Okay, so I know Easter is all over and done (apart from the enormous mountain of chocolate currently residing in our cupboard. Wow.), but before we kiss it goodbye entirely, I thought I'd share a few things we did to celebrate on Sunday...

Coloured Eggs

Sure, everybody colours eggs for Easter, right? But we do it a little differently...

We used to do it the normal way (ie boil eggs, then soak in food colouring to colour the shells), but we found that little hairline cracks in the shell would usually cause skanky-looking coloured bits on the egg itself inside, and sometimes there was actual coloured water hiding in there as a nasty surprise for the person who cracked it open (because we colour our eggs to eat, not just to look at). When, a few years ago, my friend's small son ended up with indigo-coloured water running down his arms, I thought to myself, There Has To Be A Better Way.

So then it occurred to me that it's really the shell causing the problem - and Who Needs The Shell, Anyway? So now when we dye eggs, we hard-boil them, shell them, and then dye them. And after just a minute or two (way quicker than dyeing eggs with shells), they look like this:

Aren't they pretty?

And the best part is, it means you don't have to feed people just a whole boiled egg (which is, let's face it, kinda boring) - instead, you can halve them, scoop the yolks out and make a yummy filling to pipe back in...

And they're still pretty!

Sweeties

We had cookies (which I've already posted separately, but here they are on the platter):

Quick & easy chicky cupcakes (with Starburst Chew beaks, which incidentally are So Yummy! - I hadn't had them before):

And The Muffin and I also made some of these M&M birds (this fantastic idea is from Callye at The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle - she did them with sugar almonds as well - so cute, and so very easy!)


The Muffin's Dinner

After all the festivities, none of us wanted a proper dinner, but I wanted The Muffin to eat something halfway decent too, so when she asked for "a cute chicken themed Easter bento", I thought sure, why not?

She had a cheese & Vegemite sandwich cut into three pieces: an Egg With Legs, and two mini chicks. The chicks have black sesame seed eyes, and one of them is just hatching out of a chocolate egg (against my better judgement. But it was out of The Muffin's present stash, so she would have eaten it eventually anyway, and it was Easter, after all). The Egg With Legs has the cheese legs painted with a tiny bit of orange food colour, and icing eyes. There are also spinach leaves, cashews, and grapes.
I'm linking this meal to Bento Of The Week over at Bento Blog Network.

Hope everyone's Easter was as fun as ours - how did you spend yours?

Over the Rainbows

Finally as promised, here are the photos of my beloved Muffin's fifth birthday party - the first one, that is!

(nb: Cake pop idea from Bubble & Sweet)

The Muffin had decided that she would like "a night party" with the family, just like the big girls (her older cousins) have. This is generally a simple get-together, where everyone brings some sort of finger food along to share for dinner. We decided on a Rainbow theme for this party, partly because it's a bright, happy and Super Easy theme to do, and partly because The Muffin and I had both fallen in love with Sweetapolita's Rainbow Doodle Cake post, and really wanted to try it out.

So I baked the cake, following Sweetapolita's recipe. The only change I made was that whilst I did fill the cake with lemon Swiss meringue buttercream, I thought it would be too soft for the outer frosting layer. It was 39 degrees Celsius on the day of the party, and SMBC is just too soft for Australian summers - I learned that the hard way! So I coated the cake in white chocolate ganache (Planet Cake style), before covering it with white fondant.

Then I let The Muffin loose with my food markers. She had a lovely time!

(please excuse the extremely attractive great cavernous hole left by one of the fattest birthday candles ever...)


When the cake was cut, it really did cause a sensation!


One thing to keep in mind if you decide to make this cake: whilst it is easy, it does take a really long time to bake (unless you have heaps of tins the same size). I only have two 8-inch cake tins, so I had to bake the cake in three batches. Not difficult, just a bit time consuming, that's all.

Another idea I'd been dying to try out was one I found over at Bubble and Sweet. Her little smiley cloud cake pops are so adorable! My version turned out a little messier (I stuck the rainbows on in a hurry while the party was actually on - I know, I am just So Organised) - but I was still really happy with the result! The Muffin helped me make the little rainbows out of fondant, too.


The Muffin and I also made some small rainbow-shaped cookies and iced them with white icing. Then when they were dry, we drew rainbows on them with the food markers! We were very pleased with these, and I couldn't believe it the day after the party when I realised: We Had Completely Forgotten To Serve The Cookies!!

So I had an idea: as The Muffin started Pre-Primary on her actual birthday, she was taking cupcakes in to school to celebrate with the class. A little change of plan re cupcake paper colours and decorations, et voila:

Rainbow Cupcakes!

Our table decorations were very simple: we simply had one helium balloon in each colour of the rainbow, each tied to a clear cellophane lolly bag with just a few lollies and a very simple novelty (it was a gesture - we don't do full-on goody bags for family parties). These we lined up along the back of the food table so that the balloons floated in a line next to each other in rainbow colour order. It looked surprisingly effective!

We had great fun with this party theme, and the best thing was how excited The Muffin was at being able to help with it all (and I think she did a great job, too!)

Of course, the following weekend (ie yesterday), she also had a Princess themed party with all her little friends - but that's another story...

The End of The Beginning

Here in Australia the end of the school year happens right about now - our long Summer holidays happen over Christmas (obviously. You know, on account of it being Summer...).

Anyway, the point is, my little girl has Finished Kindy. She'll be heading off to Pre-Primary next year. And whilst I'm actually not one of those people who says "wow, the last five years has gone so fast", I must admit that my baby is getting to be quite a big girl now!

So here are the thankyou/Christmas gifts I made for The Muffin's teachers:

The sleighs are chocolate cookies (made from LilaLoa's recipe, which is Soooo Good), held together with royal icing. To make them, I used a sleigh cutter for the sides, and a square cutter to make the little squares and rectangles I needed for the inner "box" part of the sleigh.


See?

It was actually easier than I thought it would be. I kept the decoration of the sleighs simple, as I didn't want to have to burst into tears if they all just fell to bits, but I needn't have worried.

The little sleighs are filled with home made goodies - gingerbread snowmen/trees, rum balls, lime and Malibu truffles. Also each had either a candy cane or a Starlight mint.

The kindy held a graduation morning tea to celebrate the end of kindy, so I took cupcakes:

They were white chocolate cupcakes with lemon vanilla buttercream, and I made the decorations from sugarpaste (with a little CMC added, so I guess technically modelling paste?) Please forgive my ultra-dodgy photo, clumsily doctored using Picnik! As per usual, I was in a rush and didn't get a good photo before the event...

Only two days 'til Christmas! I have one or two more yummy things up my sleeve, so hopefully I'll have time for another post before the big day... Hope your Christmas preparations are going well!

I Made Cupcakes.

These ones were my first attempt at something I've been thinking about for a while. In the event, they Were Not Worthy. But the icing was sensational: Rose Swiss Meringue Buttercream. I used Sweetapolita's SMBC recipe, and seriously, I could eat a bowlful of this stuff with a spoon...
These ones were rich pear and chocolate cupcakes with coffee buttercream, topped with a macaron shell. They were yummy.

So there you are. Not terribly exciting, I guess, and the Search For The Topkapi Cupcake continues, but at least it's cake, and not just snack foods in a muffin tin! :o)

Around here, the Christmas Baking has begun, so stay tuned for more sugary goodness in the next few weeks.

Royal Show Entries 2011

Wow, I can't believe I'm posting this so LATE. I'd been planning to post about these toward the end of Show week, while we were away on holidays. But I found myself trying to upload things using Husband's mobile phone's internet connection, which was So Slow that I gave up. And since we got home, I just seem to have been awfully busy!

Anyway, enough excuses - on to the sugary goodness...

I entered into three Classes at the Perth Royal Show this year: Decorated Biscuits (cookies), Patty Cakes (ie cupcakes), and Macarons.


The macarons were a nightmare. I made about twelve batches of the little buggers, wailing "Why did I write "macarons"? What On Earth Was I Thinking??" My macaron issues could easily fill a whole post, so I won't go into it here. Suffice to say, my macs tasted fine, and looked okay, but I was never in danger of winning any prizes! The ones I entered were the plain coloured one (at the front), and the back two pinks (the darker ones).

I was far happier with my cupcakes and my cookies. For the cookies, I decided to go with a Christmas theme:


All the decorating is royal icing, except the holly on the pudding, which I made from sugarpaste. I was really happy with how these turned out, and the judges must have agreed, because I Won! Woo hoo! The competition was a lot stiffer this year than it was last year, so I was really pleased.

Finally, for the cupcakes I decided on one of my favourite themes: Alice in Wonderland. After many preliminary sketches, and much elimination, I settled on these six designs:


You know how so often you have a clear idea of how you want something to look, and then when you make it, it doesn't turn out that way? Well this cupcake turned out Exactly as I'd imagined it - don't you Love It when that happens? I realise the Alice-Down-The-Rabbit-Hole cupcake design is not exactly an original one - it's been done by many, many people, including Planet Cake - but I've noticed that most of these designs use just a couple of flat white frills. I really wanted my Alice to have lots and lots of extra-poofy, voluminous petticoats.

Shhh - don't wake the Talking Flower - she might think you're a weed...


And don't tell the Queen that we've been Painting the Roses Red:


With all this cake, would you like a cup of tea? Or perhaps just half a cup...?


I also made a Bread-And-Butterfly with some little flowers, and a tabletop with a "Drink Me" bottle and tiny gold key.

Here's the whole set:

Most of the decorations are modelling paste, except the key, the red "paint", the "butter" and the little flowers' centres, which are all royal icing. The "Drink Me" topper (shown here sans cupcake) was sitting on top of a buttercream swirl for the Show to heighten the tabletop look.

Anyway, in case you're wondering - yep, these won their Class too! :o)

Lolly Shop Cupcakes!

The Muffin and I decorated these for our cousin's 10th birthday party, and christened them "Lolly Shop Cupcakes"!

There are Freckle cupcakes (no frosting, just melted chocolate spread on thinly and covered with 100s & 1000s), twisty marshmallow cupcakes (with pink cherry flavoured buttercream frosting), Jelly Belly jelly bean cupcakes (with lemon buttercream frosting), Mini M&M cupcakes (with chocolate buttercream frosting), and Mini Licorice Allsort cupcakes (with chocolate buttercream frosting). The cupcakes themselves are light and fluffy lemon cake.

Yum!

Cupcakes for a Little Star!

Remember those red velvet cupcakes I put in the freezer the other day? They are no more.


My cousin's daughter celebrated her 8th birthday the other night, so I took the rest of the cupcakes along. I decided they needed something a bit bright and sparkly (because the birthday girl is bright and sparkly!), so I sprinkled the frosting with pink nonpareils, red sanding sugar and pink edible glitter.

From there, I did two different "types" of cupcake: the ones in the white papers were popped into a gorgeous shimmery red "Little Star" cupcake wrapper (I bought these on sale some time ago for just such an occasion as this), and topped with a red coloured white chocolate star.


The ones in the red papers were topped with chocolate lollipops. These were really easy to make, and the kids went mad for them. All I did was melt some dark chocolate, put blobs of it onto some baking paper using a teaspoon, and add a lollipop stick. Then I sprinkled them with some pink nonpareils and edible glitter, and popped them in the fridge to set. Once they were set hard, I added some red chocolate stars to match the cupcakes, but you could put anything on them. Or even just leave them all sprinkly and sparkly.


And the verdict on the frozen cupcakes? They were just fine - I would say this is a viable cupcake to freeze. (Although obviously there's Nothing Like a cupcake that's just come out of the oven, I do like to have Ready-To-Go cupcakes in my freezer for when I'm feeling lazy unexpected guests.)

Hope you are all finding something yummy to eat this week! Later this week: Cookies!

Red Velvet Cupcakes

So here's the thing. I've never really been into Nigella Lawson. Shocking, I know. Maybe the lady can cook, but I don't know, the whole sex siren/chef thing just all seems a bit on the pretentious side for me.

Then I found out that an old friend of mine is moving to Canada, and we were going over to his place to pinch all his extra condiments and vanilla extract have dinner and say goodbye. Which seems like unrelated information, except that I decided to take along some cupcakes with red maple leaves on top - you know, as a nod to the Canadian flag. So in keeping with the colour scheme, red velvet cupcakes seemed like the obvious choice.


And (wait for it - the point of this is coming any minute now!) recently Taste magazine featured - you guessed it - Nigella's Red Velvet Cupcakes. Since I've never found a red velvet recipe that I'm 100% happy with, I figured I might as well give them a try.

I'm so glad I did.

I take it all back, Nigella - sure you might lick your fingers and make lascivious faces at the camera a little more than I like my celebrity chefs to be doing, but boy do you know your red velvet cupcakes.

See how pretty they look, fresh out of the oven? It was almost a shame to frost them. Almost.


I thought the crumb of these cupcakes was divine - light and fluffy, but still moist, and with a lovely flavour (so often I find "light, fluffy" cake tastes like not much really - not so here). Also I was really happy with the bright red colour - some red velvet cakes I've made have not had as much colour as I would like (and yes, I know the original red velvet cake was probably just a reddish brown from the cocoa, but what can I say - this is an area where I am not a fan of subtlety. Bring On The Food Colouring!).

Anyway, I didn't use Nigella's frosting recipe, I just sort of cobbled one together - mostly butter-based, but with some cream cheese added for flavour. It was really yummy, and I wish I'd payed attention to the quantities I used. Sigh. And I coloured some white chocolate melts with red powder colouring, and piped maple leaf shapes onto baking paper. Once they were set, I popped one of top of each cupcake.


My friend was amused. And we all enjoyed the cake.

I'm interested to see how these cakes hold up to freezing (I love freezing cupcakes, it means I always have something home-baked on hand if people drop in for a coffee). Some cakes freeze better than others, so we'll see. I'll be taking the rest of the batch out on Wednesday night, so I'll be sure to let you know how they go.

And if you want the recipe, go here: Taste.com.au. And once you wade through all the over-flowery directions, you'll be glad you did.

Thanks Nigella. And... you know... sorry about not watching your shows and all.

Baking With The Muffin - Dark & White Fudge Cupcakes

One of the gifts my four year old got for her birthday this year was a cupcake kit (I know, it's hilarious, right? She's four and she owns three cookbooks and four aprons. What can I say?). This one included a recipe book called "Delicious Cupcakes" by Susanna Tee, and some paper cupcake cases, all packaged in quite a nice pink tin.

This is not something I would have bought for myself, but it's quite a nice little book for a beginner or someone who's fairly non-experimental in the kitchen (or, indeed, for a child)... And some of the recipes look quite good actually - we tried the coconut cherry cupcakes a while back, and they were pretty good, although we used our own chocolate frosting rather than the vanilla buttercream the book suggested.

Yesterday we tried out one of the chocolate recipes: Dark & White Fudge Cupcakes. The book described them as "little, light and moist cupcakes, with a tempting fudgy chocolate topping".

I have this to say about them: Weirdest Recipe Ever.

It doesn't contain any eggs. And you don't really beat anything. Basically you make a kind of buttery syrup in a saucepan, add it to the dry ingredients, stir it until it's smooth, and bake it. The topping involves making two different mixtures of chocolate, butter and water (one dark, one white), adding icing sugar to each, and beating them "until smooth and thick". What I really had trouble with was that this mixture kept solidifying before I got it onto the cakes, so I had to keep zapping it in the microwave (after Every Second Cupcake). And then it solidified really quickly on the cakes, so the chocolate curls wouldn't stick. Which I suppose doesn't really matter, but it would have been nice.


Was it worth it? No, not really. I mean, they're pleasant enough - I'm not refusing to eat them or anything. But they're incredibly process-heavy for such an ordinary little cake, and also pretty dishes-heavy, and frankly when a recipe is this much trouble, I like it to turn out Wow These Are Really Yummy, not just Yeah, They're Okay.

On the upside, The Muffin was happy - she wasn't massively keen on the white topping (weirdly, as white chocolate is actually her favourite type), but thought the dark ones were brilliant (her attitude being, "It's got chocolate in it - How Bad Can It Be?")

Hopefully our next experiment from this book will be more exciting - maybe the walnut cupcakes, or the citrussy pineapple ones...?

A great big cuppie, and a teeny tiny one...

For my birthday last week, I decided to use my Wilton's Giant Cupcake tin for the first time. I had also decided on a red and white colour scheme, so this is what I ended up with:



I'm not 100% happy with the finish on it - it was my first time using this tin, and I couldn't quite figure out how to extend the white icing down so it went under the red "cupcake liner" icing without creating a bump in the red icing. Yes, I could have made it thinner around the edges, I do realise that. But I made the ganache pretty thin on this cake, so I couldn't press too hard on the icing whilst it was on the cake, or it would have squished in. And frankly in the end I was all a bit "meh, whatever" by the time I got to that stage anyway, so a bump is what I got. I daresay this makes it Not The Most Professional Job Ever. But I figured it's my birthday cake, so I can do it however I want. Including Lazily.

I was however very happy with the swirly effect the top half of the tin gives the cake (which is why I didn't do the ganache very thick, because I didn't want to lose this effect).

I also made normal sized cupcakes in red liners with white swirled icing and a jaffa on the top of each, to mirror the look of the big one.

Anyway, with all the week's family birthdays over, we arrive at Sunday, and Mother's Day. I won't be seeing my mum this Mother's Day, as she's away on holiday, so today we are going to be having a lazy day watching Fantasia (which I got for my birthday, and which we will have to skip the scary bits of, as they would Freak The Muffin Right Out), and eating soft serve icecream from another one of my birthday presents - an awesome Cuisinart Soft Serve Icecream Maker!! Yummo. And all this after a huge breakfast cooked by my lovely Husband this morning - eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, croissants! Hmmm... maybe not the healthiest day ever... Who Cares. :o)

Oh, and the teeny tiny cupcake? That was my Mother's Day present:


Isn't it cute? Love! The necklace was from Diva (I know, 'cause I've admired them there). The little pillow was also part of my gift (it's a pincushion) - it was chosen by The Muffin from the Mothers Day stall they held at her school before the end of last term.

Hope all the mums are having a lovely day! What did your kids do for you this year?