Caramel Cupcakes

WARNING: The following recipe is so delicious one just isn't enough! These cupcakes are super yummy, the icing sort of tastes like Russian Fudge and the cupcake isn't too sweet so you can really just keep eating them (until you pop!) The only problem I have with the recipe is piping the icing. Would you believe I got it right the first time I tried?! (this was before I had taken any lessons and I actually used a disposable piping set!)

Caramel Cupcakes
Ingredients
120g Butter
1 small cup of White Sugar
1 Tbsp Golden Syrup
1 cup Milk
1 Egg
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 ½ cups Flour

• Preheat Oven to 180 degrees C.
• Heat syrup and milk, then add baking soda.
• Sift dry ingredients in separate bowl.
• Cream butter and sugar, add egg.
• Add dry ingredients and milk to creamed mixture alternatively.
• Pop into cupcake pans and bake for 17 minutes.

Caramel Icing
4 Tbsp Brown Sugar
60g Butter
1 Tbsp Milk
Approx 2 cups of Icing Sugar

• Bring brown sugar, butter and milk to the boil for one minute stirring.
• Add enough icing sugar to make it the right consistency – around two cups.
• Pipe onto cakes straight away, before the icing gets to hard.

Check out these cute cupcake cases I bought off the Internet. I love animal print!

The Who 60th Cake

Whooooo are you? Who who, who who?
I was asked to make a 60th birthday cake in the shape of Pete Townshend's signature guitar:

Because the quoted amount would be a little over their price range we changed ideas to just doing a regular round cake with The Who logo:

But of course, I had to include both, plus some lyrics so this is what I came up with...











I covered the cake board in black fondant and made the guitar out of fondant a few days in advance. I baked a yummy chocolate cake covered in delicious fudgey chocolate buttercream frosting. Covered it in blue fondant, cut out the circles and letters and stuck them on. I piped blue royal icing to try and tidy up the bottom of the cake (and failed miserably!) Then piped the birthday message and lyrics.

My 23rd Birthday Cake

Last September after finishing my Wilton cake decorating courses I made my own birthday cake and came up with a fun theme - cupcakes!

The cake was two tiers with a cupcake on top. The bottom tier had chocolate fondant twisted around as decorations with mini "cupcakes" I made out of fondant on top. The top tier was covered in chocolate fondant with pink royal icing designs and Maltesers on top (yum!) On the very top was a cupcake which I made using a brioche tin and put a marshmallow on top, I then *tried* to cover the whole thing in fondant which was really hard! Next time (if I ever do this theme again) I think an actual CUPCAKE might be easier!



I also made cookies and of course, cupcakes! These were the second iced cookies I had ever made! I actually ran out of icing so they were outlined nicely but then the "flooding" was spread as thinly as possible! Haha, ah well, you live and you learn!



The cupcakes were my first attempt at Gluten Free baking and from memory they weren't THE yummiest cupcakes ever made, but they looked great! I got a chance to make some buttercream roses and use more Maltesers!



All in all I was really pleased with how everything turned out. I'm quite excited about making another birthday cake for myself this year, hope I'll be able to top last years!

SPCA Cupcake Day

Last year I made cupcakes to sell at my work on SPCA Cupcake Day to raise funds for the SPCA. I sold the cupcake for $2.50 each and made about $40. I know it's not much, but every bit counts!

I had lots of fun making fun flavours and decorations. I made Red Velvet Birdie Cupcakes, Perky Nana Monkey Cupcakes, Chocolate Worms in Mud Cupcakes and Chocolate Orange Paw Print Cupcakes.





I can't wait to get creative with this years SPCA Cupcake Day! I'm going to try and beat my record from last year!

Top Five For Friday - Fave Food Blogs!

My Top Five Favourite Food Blogs

1) Bakerella - It was love at first site...sorry, bad pun! Everything Bakerella touches turns to gold, she can do no wrong!

2) I Am Baker - I can't explain the sheer talent I see every time I look at I am Baker, I think I visit it every two days, there always seems to be something new! Check out the cakes with the creative centres - very talented!

3) Confessions of a Cookbook Queen - I'm reasonably new here, but from what I've seen, the amazing sweet treats she comes up with are unbelievable! I also love the use of candy in all the decorating!

4) Cupcakes Take the Cake - This is another staple blog for my daily food blogging intake. There are SO many ideas, recipes and tutorials here it's mind blowing!

5) Bake at 350 - I love tutorials and this blog has the best! I love how simplified they are, I just skim down the page and the photo tutorials show me how it's done!

Tomato Cake

I know what you're thinking -gross! A tomato flavoured cake?! Not quite! Last year after completing the Wilton cake decorating course 1 I made my good friend and fellow workmate, Sandy, a birthday cake.
Now Sandy is not just like any other girl, she doesn't have the crazy sweet tooth that I do. Her love is for tomatoes! I've never seen someone eat so many tomatoes in my life! She eats them for breakfast, lunch and dinner...and as a snack too!
Being a big fan of Vege Tales I loved "Bob" the tomato so wanted to use him as inspiration for some cute tomato cake toppers. Sandy's favourite colour is yellow so that's in there too and of course I incorporated the green leafy writing just like a garden full of ripe, red tomatoes!

Birthday Cake for Sandy

Tomatoes!

Rainbow Cupcakes

I made rainbow cupcakes for my nieces 9th birthday party. It was my first attempt and they looked awesome! We had a 'turquoise with a splash of red' theme so they had a turquoise coloured cupcake case. I piped cream cheese frosting on top and labelled them as "Surprise Cupcakes" so when they bit into them they would see the surprise!

The recipe was really easy, you just make up some plain cupcake batter, divide the mixture between six bowls and add lots and lots of food colouring. My only advice would be to make sure you have plenty of cupcake batter, I didn't and it was so hard to spread the mix to get 12 cupcakes! For the sake of making your lives easier I've double the recipe below so you don't have the same problem.

Rainbow Cupcakes
Recipe adapted from Cut out and Keep

Ingredients:
250g Butter
250g Caster Sugar
2 t Vanilla Extract
4 Eggs
250g Self Raising Flour
6 T Milk
Food Colouring (red, yellow, green, green, blue)

• Preheat oven to 200 degree C and line two muffin tins with cupcake cases.
• Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
• Add vanilla extract and beat until combined.
• Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
• Add flour alternately with the milk in three additions, starting and ending with the flour.
• Divide batter evenly between 6 bowls.
• Add colouring to each bowl (red, red & yellow for orange, yellow, green, blue, blue and red for purple) I used about a cap full in each bowl but you can add however much you like to create the colour intensity you want.
• Mix colouring in to incorporate it until it is combined and one colour.
• Divide the purple mixture between the cases, smooth to form the bottom layer. 
• Continue to add each layer of mixture in the correct order (blue, green, yellow, orange, red)
• Bake for 15-20 minutes or until skewer inserted comes out clean.
• Cool completely before icing with your favourite icing.

Recipe Notes:
This recipe will make approx 1 1/2 batches (18) I doubled the recipe that I used so this is just a guess!

Top Five For Friday - Dr Seuss

My Top Five Favourite Dr Suess Cakes

By The People's Cake

By Planet Cake

By Cakes by Suzy

By The Icing on the Cake

By Violet Sweet Shop

Motorbike Cake

When you do a cake decorating course something peculiar happens, people around you start thinking of occasions for you to make a cake. On one such occasion my work mate asked me to make a cake for her husband.

Sure, a cake for my work mates husband sounds easy right? Then she asked for a motorbike, then little models of her and her man!
ARGH! I didn't think I could actually pull this off but because I love a challenge, I accepted.

I started trying to make the motorbike a few days prior to the cake day. I practically tore out my hair trying to get it to look good. Then along came my hubby, my awesome, manly, knowledgeable on motorbikes hubby! He looked at the pictures of Norton bikes I had printed out and helped me. Of course he used all the fancy words like "Engine" and "Valve" I would just say back "What shape is that? A grey round thingie?"



After finishing the motorbike (what a mission that was!) I got on to making the little people. I looked up on You Tube for a tutorial and tried following that. Back then I had never even heard of Gum Paste so these little models were actually made out of Fondant! At the time I thought they looked pretty good, the next day, however, they sunk a little and were kind of looking in two different directions!



The Chocolate Cake was actually my work mates recipe! I iced it in chocolate buttercream then piped some words and decorations using light brown buttercream.



I sort of hope this is the last motorbike cake I will get asked to do...but there's a part of me that wants another challenge, so who knows?! Maybe one day I'll get asked to make a Harley Davidson cake!

Paramore & Relient K Cupcakes

Last year on the 8th of October 2010 Paramore and Relient K came to NZ to play live JUST FOR ME! ...well it felt that way. I've been a huge HUGE fan of Relient K forever (and so has my husband) and we already loved Paramore live from the last concert so we were getting very excited about this particular concert.

My friends, Hayley and Sheree, came up to Auckland all the way from Christchurch just to see Relient K (oh, and Paramore!) so I decided I'd make some cupcakes to celebrate the occasion.

I decided to model the cupcakes on some album covers by the bands:







The cupcakes are Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Frosting

Top Five For Friday - Cupcake Tips!

My Top Five Tips for Making Fabulous Cupcakes
1) Don't over mix

2) Use ingredients at room temperature

3) Read through the recipe beforehand to make sure you have all of the ingredients and the time it takes to make the recipe - then FOLLOW THE RECIPE!

4) Check cupcakes at the minimum time

5) Cool cupcakes completely before icing

Owl Cake

I made this Owl Cake for my good friend Katie's 27th birthday.



Do you like my cute Owlies? I do!

Chocolate Macarons

Last year I bought a fantastic Macaron book called Secrets of Macarons by Jose Marechal. It's very detailed and explains everything from the use of eggs in macarons to recipes and decorating ideas.

I had been wanting to use the "Swiss method" where you cook the sugar first, then add it to the egg whites, ever since I got this book. The only thing holding me back was not having a candy thermometer.



I finally bought a candy thermometer just so I could make these macarons. I decided Easter would be a great excuse to make up a fresh batch of chocolate macarons and tried out some fun decorating techniques too.



I tried out the "Stardust" decorating technique where, after piping the macarons on the baking tray, you dip a paint brush or tooth brush into some liquid food colouring and flick it over the macarons.



I was a bit upset that some of my macarons came out cracked. There are several possible reasons for this, the temperature in the oven could have been too high, the meringue mix might have needed to be worked in with the almonds more..the list goes on!

All in all, I found the Swiss method for making macarons much more stressful (getting the temperature right) but the shells looks much nicer and shinier! They were very soft and had quite a different texture to my usual macarons so again, I think I did something wrong there. All I know is, I'm not finished with making these macarons, I am going to get it right...and enjoy taste testing in the mean time!