Pretty in Pink Butterflies

So I subscribed to Cake Decorating, the magazine. Yeah I am that person but in my defence they come with freebies! So far I have the first three, the first came with butterfly cutters and pink glitter, the second with piping bags and tips and the third with letter embossers. Apparently October is the month for birthdays so I thought the best way to say a blanket “Happy Birthday” to multiple friends (and really the only way I know how) was with double chocolate cupcakes.

 

Butterflies toppers first; I’ve used store bought gum paste before (for the bunny ears) but I don’t really like the taste so first mission was to make marshmallow fondant. My little sister has been making her own fondant for ages and I was always assumed it was rocket science but for the most part it’s just sticky. Most of the recipes I found are exactly the same. This video from about.com is probably the most thorough. My only tip is to use powered sugar when kneading, the mix can get very sticky. Since I couldn’t find a packet of only white mellows, I bought three packs of the strawberry and vanilla and separated the colours. I don’t like wastage so instead of colouring the white fondant I used the pink mellows for pink fondant.

Once the fondant is done I suggest refrigerating it for a bit so its firm enough to work with. For the butterfly toppers to look 3D the butterfly cut outs need to dry in the form. You can buy fondant forms/shapers but you can also make it yourself. To make the form take a large sheet of foil and fold accordion length wise.   

 

Once the butterflies are completely dry, if you’re unsure leave to dry overnight, you can decorate. I used a little bit of water to paint on the glitter and attach the cachous.

You can attach the butterflies once the glitter has dried. The thing I learnt a couple of hours later was that frosting doesn’t dry hard like butter cream and the moisture from frosting causes the butterflies to wilt a bit. My suggestion, use butter cream frosting or add the toppers just before you serve.

Magic Goodies

So my partner plays Magic The Gathering every Friday like clockwork and being the good girlfriend that I am I decided to bake him themed cookies. This particular Friday they had an event on and I didn’t want anyone to loose out so Thursday night I set out to make a hundred sugar cookies from scratch!

 I honestly did think that this would be easy, time consuming but easy. Boy did I have another thing coming! The sugar cookies were easy enough. I’ve made sugar cookies before from Joy of Baking. Joy of Baking is my first choice for recipes because most of the recipes are tested so I know it’ll turn out perfect and mine turned out amazing! I doubled the recipe to get the hundred cookies and I would suggest only baking them for only 10-12 minutes depending on size. Because they are chocolate sugar cookies you cant see them going brown so be very careful not to burn them.

Cookies done and now for the icing; again I used the recipe from The Joy of Baking. I used royal icing because it dries had and therefore easier to transport. I’ve used this recipe before but it was a very long time and never in on such a large scale. First things first, you want the icing at piping consistency. Anything thicker and you’ll need to spatular it on and anything runnier and it’ll just roll off. The best way I found to put the icing on was to pipe on a circle outline and then fill in the circle. If you don’t want the layer of icing to be too thick then put a little bit on spread it with a toothpick. Also remember that the type of food colouring you use will affect the consistency so if you want really vibrant colours I would suggest using gel or powder food colouring.    

Now for the chocolate toppers, I initially got the idea for these from Nerdy Nummies but I wasn’t about to make a hundred cupcakes by myself so I just used the chocolate toppers. In theory this looks easy; you get a template, trace it out with chocolate and leave it to dry. Not quite. This probably goes without saying but tape both the template and the wax paper that you are tracing on down. I melted the chocolate in the piping bag and then snipped a tiny hole. Because the hole needs to be relatively small make sure all the chocolate is melted otherwise it will block the opening. If I had opted for a basic shape maybe this part would have been easier but some of the symbols are tricky so this part took a lot longer than I thought. It also didn’t help that I don’t have a very steady hand so I ended up going to bed at about seven am! Here’s the end result.

 

 

 

 

Vegan Chocolate

I know I've posted about vegan cake pops with vegan chocolate but it's my gorgeous friend Sunya's birthday and nothing says Happy Birthday like chocolate and more chocolate. Now it's fair to say, I am a tad of an over achiever when it comes to baking especially when it come to making something for the first time. So with that mind set I decided on white chocolate, mint chocolate, fruit and nut and espresso! And as per usual there are certain things I learnt the hard way. I used my recipe from Gentle World, which I used last time, and the only recipe I could find for white chocolate from Bitter Sweet. Also I apologise in advance for not having photos of the making process; chocolate making is a tad tricky and there was no good time stop and document my chocolaty goodness.

Lets start with the white chocolate; super easy. I followed the instructions word for word and the only thing I can say is sift your sugar and soymilk well, I can’t stress this enough. For some reason the vegan confectionary sugar I bought was lumpy and I thought it would just dissolve in cacao butter but nope the mixture was lumpy and it took me twenty minutes to get it smooth. As the site says the end product is very sweet so I only put in a third of a cup of sugar and that seemed perfect.

 I had bought seashell chocolate moulds earlier on that day not really knowing what exactly I wanted to do with them, I wanted to do something interesting.  After about an hour of staring at them blankly my boyfriend chimes in with “why don’t you marble them like Guylian?” Genius! The white chocolate went on the bottom followed by the dark chocolate and gently swirled with a toothpick. After about six hours they popped out cleanly. Keep in mind that because the main component of the chocolate is butter the chocolate will feel a little greasy so leave it in there for a bit longer if you're unsure.
 

The fruit and nut was easy enough too. For these chocolates I used the same mini tart tin that I used for my mini lemon tarts. I chopped up almonds and sultanas popped it in the bottom of the pan and poured the chocolate on top.

The mint was a bit tricky. Since I couldn’t find any info about how much to put in and at what point of the making process I was pretty much flying blind. Because the coconut butter has quiet a strong aftertaste I put enough in until the mint overpowered the taste of the coconut butter. I would suggest adding the flavouring when you are thickening the chocolate so when its over cold water because I figure heating it might evaporate some of the flavour but don't quote me on this, just how my logic worked at the time. I did notice that this batch didn’t thicken as quickly which I think is due to the extra mint flavouring.

So I’ve made three batches and they’ve all turned out relatively well and I am feeling a bit overconfident and I think how hard could the espresso be? Well very! I decided to put the two recipes together because I thought the soymilk would complement the espresso well. So this is the recipe that I used:

¼ cup cacao butter

½ cup coconut butter
1 Tsp. cocoa (sifted)
1 Tsp. instant coffee
¼ Cup Confectioner’s Sugar
½ Teaspoon Soymilk Powder
a pinch of sea salt

In theory this looks right, right? Practically it turns out I learnt nothing. I combined all the dry ingredients, melted the cacao butter with the coconut butter and this is where I went wrong. I forgot how hard it was to dissolve the sugar the first time around and the instant coffee followed suite. Silly me I was under the assumption that the coffee would magically dissolve but instead it just floated there looking gross. And it kept getting worse; the chocolate wouldn’t thicken at all and I ended up having to strain the solids out and refrigerating the mixture.

 

The fruit and nut, mint and espresso were all refrigerated over night. They all came out relatively cleanly (I greased the tins with a little bit of coconut butter) except the mint. To my horror the bottom of the mint didn’t set at all and was still liquid. I suspect it has something to do with the peppermint extract I added. Instead of wasting an entire batch I carefully took off the excess bits that hadn’t set and dusted it with coco powder, so now it’s slightly more like fudge but still good! So here's the mint before and after;

 

The Fruit and Nut;

And the Espresso Hazelnut;

Because of the nature of the chocolate I individually wrapped the chocolates in foil. For the round ones I cut out round circles about four time larger then the chocolate and folded inwards and as for the shells I put a large sheet of foil in between the two chocolate moulds which helps the foil to indent the shell shapes which makes it easier to wrap.

 

 

 

 

And then my inner Martha Stewart kicked in. The candy bar labels I found on Wedding Chicks; you can customise to your liking (download and print for free!) and I the labels inspired the entire theme of the present. Then I downloaded these cute place cards templates from the Martha Stewart site and used it as the template for the cutouts for the chocolate bags. I was going for a “fifties milk bar” look!

And the finished product;

The different chocolates had individual bags and then to mixed bag just for fun!

 

Greens and Yellows

So after two weeks of trying to track down almond flour, my macarons were born! I used Jordan Winery's recipe, word for word, but as usual I learnt a few things the hard way. First sift the almond flour otherwise the cookies feel a bit grainy when you bite into them. Second don’t leave your egg whites to sit for too long otherwise you get this;

lumpy, goopy and unpipable mix when it should look like this.

Don’t let the cookies brown on top but having said that set your oven slightly lower then the recipe says just to be on the safe side. You’ll know the cookies are done when they come off cleanly. If the cookie takes a bit of yanking let it bake for a bit more and if the bottom of the cookie still looks moist then that’s also a sign that it needs a little bit more time in the oven. There will always be  few cookies that crack (like the ones on the right) not sure why.

 The green ones were peppermint so I filled it with chocolate ganache and the yellow ones were vanilla with lemon curd! 

Red Velvet

The only thing better then red velet cupcakes is RED VELVET CAKEPOPS!

Tarty Tarts

My new obsession is French Macarons, they are so decadent, colourful and so so good. So how did I end up making tarts you ask? After hours of researching I found pastry chef Joanne Chang’s classic French Macarons. Long story short I made the fillings, lemon curd and chocolate ganache, then realised that my local supermarket didn’t stock almond flour and therefore I couldn’t make the macaron cookie itself! Trust me not to think these through but it occurred to me that I could use the fillings for tarts. So macarons to come but here are my tarts.

For the ganache I used the recipe from my earlier post, birthday banana cake and for the lemon curd I followed Joanne Chang’s curd recipe word for word. It’s the perfect curd; it’s sweet but not too sweet with the right amount of fresh lemon zest. Just a word of warning when you put the curd back on the stove be very careful as it thickens very quickly and you don’t want to over cook.

As for the tart base I put together a few different recipes until I got the dough consistency that I liked. For the dough:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 large egg yolk

Sift the dry ingredients and combine. Many recipes say to use a food processor for this step but since I don’t have one I just used my freestanding mixer, combine the butter piece by piece until the butter break down into small pea size bits. This next bit needs 4-5 tablespoons of cold water to combine the mix. Add and combine the water one tablespoon at a time so the dough doesn’t get too sticky! Knead and gather with your hands and the dough should resemble play dough when you’re done. Once combined wrap in glad wrap and chill for a minimum of half an hour. Once chilled lightly flour your work surface and roll out the dough. Just a tip; the dough rises a bit in the oven so roll out the dough a tad thinner than usual so it doesn’t rise as much as mine did. I used metal measuring cups to cut out the dough and place into a greased tin.

Pat down the dough lightly so it shapes to the tin and poke tiny holes in the bottom with a fork to avoid rising. Then chill the dough again for about 30min because I read somewhere that when you chill the dough in the shape you want it tends to retain shape better and you know what its true! Because I am me and was totally paranoid that they would burn, I baked them in a 170 degrees Celsius preheated oven. Baking time varies obviously depending on your oven but bake until the bottoms of your tart shells are browned. 

  Once chilled fill to your hearts content!

So my piping skills need practice but you get the general idea and I don’t do anything by half measures so I finished them off with a caramelised peal dusted with icing sugar, divine!

Baking and Baileys

So a couple of weeks ago I had the sudden urge bake with Baileys. I made a very successful batch of Baileys cream cheese brownies a couple of years ago but I couldn’t for the life of me find the same recipe but this one comes pretty close.

 I got the recipe from Wee Kitchen but instead of layering I marbled the cream cheese and Baileys mixture.

I also added chocolate chips to add a bit of texture to the brownie!

And because I had to buy a whole litre of Baileys since my local liquor store doesn’t believe in miniatures, I had to think of something more creative to do with the Baileys than drink it desperate housewives style. Then while on my third shot it came to me, Baileys butter cream and so the Baileys espresso cupcake was born! 

Not only was this my first attempt at making butter cream but it was also my first attempt at piping it too! I learnt the following; first don’t use a piping gun (too messy and not enough control) I’ll try a piping bag next time and second and most important I later found out that alcohol does not go well in butter cream, it stops the butter cream from hardening properly. Hey you live and learn and on the upside they tasted great! The other upside I found this cupcake carrier at the supermarket for half price, SCORE!