Gluten-free for the bride-to-be.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I went to my friend's hens party not last weekend but the one before, and we had to bring a food item that was gluten free). As requested by the bride, I made gluten free vanilla cupcakes - her favourite flavour!

I hunted around for a recipe for a while. So many of them had a few different kinds of flours in them and xanthan gum. All of which I was too lazy to try and find since my local supermarket didn't sell xanthan gum. Ended up finding an extremely simple recipe that called for normal gluten free self raising flour so I went with that.



Gluten Free Vanilla Cupcakes
Taken from Katie's Kitchen

225g softened unsalted butter
225g caster sugar
225g self raising flour (I used Orgran's Gluten Free Self Raising Flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 175 C.
Place all the ingredients in a bowl and beat until smooth and pale.
Spoon mixture into cupcakes cases.
Bake for 20 minutes.



This recipe ended up making about 20 normal sized cupcakes, however I overfilled my first tray of them and they spilt over the sides and the tops of them split a little. Oops. My second tray came out perfect though!

The photo above shows good ones, the photo below shows the overfilled ones.



White Chocolate Frosting
Taken from How Sweet It Is

113g softened butter
2.5 cups icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
113g melted white chocolate (I used Lindt)
1-2 tablespoons milk (or more if needed)

Cream butter with electric mixer until fluffy, then add vanilla.
Slowly add in powdered sugar, half a cup at a time.
Add in melted white chocolate and beat until incorporated.
Add in milk 1 teaspoon at a time with mixer on low speed to reach desired consistency (I didn't actually add any at all).
Add in your colouring. I used violet colouring gel.
Pipe onto cooled cupcakes.



The frosting turned out a little grainy and that only happened when I added in the chocolate so I might have done something wrong there. Ah well. The frosting tasted really good. I'm not usually into buttercream type frostings but this one was really good and I couldn't taste the butter at all!

The cake part was super soft and melt in the mouth, almost like a sponge sort of texture. Plain vanilla cupcakes aren't usually my thing but these were pretty good! Plus the simple recipe and low amount of ingredients made them really easy to make.

In conclusion, using the gluten free self raising flour worked out really well. You can pretty much use it in any recipe in place of normal self raising flour, or normal flour for that matter cause you can get the GF version of that in the supermarket too. Can't wait to do more experimenting with gluten free baking. My boyfriend will be happy cause he can never eat what I bake!

A little bit of passion.

Last weekend it was my friend Aishia's 22nd birthday. She had a sky blue themed afternoon tea party and it was awesome! Lots of great food... white chocolate brownies, chocolate cake, breads and cheeses, fruit and of course some fantastic cheerios! I ate too much within the first 10 minutes of being there and then continued to keep eating those delicious brownies. I made a mistaaaake.

I made a batch of cupcakes for the party. Decided to make something fruity since most of the other items that Aishia was making were chocolatey.

(I also made some macarons, which weren't very good so I didn't end up taking them to the party. Booooooo. I will do a post on those soon though!)



Passionfruit Buttercake Cupcakes

90g softened butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 cup self-raising flour
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp

Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter, sugar, eggs and flour on low speed until just combined.
Increase speed until mixture has changed to a paler colour.
Stir in passionfruit pulp.
Divide mixture among 12 regular cupcake cases.
Bake for about 20 minutes.



I couldn't find any passionfruit at my local supermarket on the day so instead I got Tasti's Passionfruit in Sweetened Syrup. I'm not a big fan of passionfruit things that contain the black pips so I sifted those out till I was left with 1/4 of a cup of sweet pulpy syrup.



Because it's such a sugary/syrupy recipe, the tops of the cupcakes go really golden brown. Which in my opinion makes it even tastier!



I ran out of time on the day to make some of my own frosting (I wanted to do a fluffy meringue style frosting) so I ended up using Betty Crocker's Vanilla Frosting and added a bit of the passionfruit syrup and some sky blue colouring gel.

Yum yum!

As cute as a cupcake!

Being cooped up at home, with nothing to look at but the internet and television, has made me extremely hungry and craving some baking. Day time TV has been fantastic lately. There's been a great amount of cooking and baking shows on and I couldn't have been happier.

I'm constantly grabbing tissues at the moment, to tend to my leaky nose so I thought it best not to try baking anything. Might be a bit gross!



Anyway, getting back to where I was heading with this...
Since I can't bake, I'll just post photos of my baking!

My friend Aishia and I decided that we would so some baking for our boss's wedding morning tea at work, instead of just buying it all from a supermarket or caterer. We had just had some cupcakes brought in to work previously by a caterer and they were really yuck. And I knew I could do better than that!



I decided to do two batches of cupcakes so that everyone in our work team would get one each.

The first batch I made were chocolate cupcakes with some sprinkled white chocolate chips. I may have gone a little overboard with those. :P



I whipped up a chocolate buttercream frosting and piped it on using the handy 1M piping tip.

I'm never happy with how my buttercream comes out when piped - I always end up with too much air in the bag or in the mix, so then it doesn't come out all nice and smooth. Must find a way to fix this! If anyone has any tips for this please email or Tumblr ask me!



So since the frosting didn't nicely attach back to itself, I decided to pipe some little hearts out of candy melts to decorate them and cover up the bad join of the frosting. I chose yellow candy melts to match the other batch of cupcakes I was making. They turned out super cute!



Just because I hadn't had them in ages (and was really craving them!) I made lemon cream cheese cupcakes for my second batch.

This recipe might just be my favourite cupcake ever.
I love lemon.
I love cream cheese.
I love cupcakes!



Lemon cream cheese frosting was the obvious choice to pair up with these cupcakes (just add 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind to the recipe in the link).

You'd think it would be 'too much' lemon and 'too much' cream cheese. But no way. All of it. Together. So good.



This frosting looked really cute when I used the 1M tip. Super happy with how it worked out since this was the first time I had used that tip and I had heard many great things about it!

I popped some white pearl sprinkles on top and they looked really nice!



I originally intended to do these cupcakes in a real 'bride and groom' theme but I let time get away with me and never made any groom decorations, and then decided that I didn't want to make the lemon frosting teal (the colour theme of my boss's wedding) cause I thought it was weird. So this is how they turned out in the end. Ha!

They got eaten up crazy quick! It's not often that all of the food we have at our morning teas get eaten so it was great when these all got gobbled up.

Aishia made some AMAZING white chocolate brownie (which I will be making myself some time soon cause it was delish!) and chocolate chip cookies and they all got eat up too! SUCCESS!

You are a toy, you can't fly.

Last week/weekend I helped by awesome friend Lydia with a Toy Story Themed Dessert Table for her mum’s 50th birthday party. This is how it turned out…



Lydia made these GF vanilla mini cupcakes, which I then piped the frosting and added the little fondant eyeballs that Lydia had made to make it look like the little alien dudes.



I made these GF chocolate mini cupcakes. Lydia made the chocolate buttercream frosting which I piped and added on her fondant decorations.



I made these vanilla sugar cookies and iced them to look like Rex!



I made these rectangular gingerbread cookies with Lydia iced to be Etch-A-Sketch cookies! Super cute.



It was fun but boy are full dessert tables a LOT of work. I don't know how Lydia coped doing the cake and the cake pops by herself!

You can check out Lydia's post about the two lots of cupcakes here.

Cupcakes times four.

A friend of mine, Soph, had a sweet little birthday party at an adorable cafe a few weeks ago and her boyfriend, Si, asked me to make her some birthday cupcakes for it.

On a side note, go check out Soph and Si's amazing photography. If I ever get married they will totally be the photographers and I will absolutely get a stop motion video done by them!



Getting back to the cupcakes...

I had to make 40 of them and I wanted to make four different flavours, just for fun. So to make it easier I decided to make two batches with a vanilla buttercake recipe and two batches with a chocolate cake recipe so that they would be easily adaptable to other flavours.

Lemon Cupcakes



Of course the first one I HAD to make was lemon flavoured - my favourite!

I filled the vanilla buttercake cupcakes with some lemon curd (didn't make that myself cause I was a little too lazy and we already had some awesome lemon curd in the fridge that I use on toast - yum!) using the Wilton's 230 decorating tip.



I topped them off with some lemon cream cheese frosting, coloured with golden yellow colouring gel, in a pretty little swirl. Yum yum!

The black and white cases made them look like bumble bees - now I know what cases to use if I ever make honey cupcakes!



White Chocolate and Raspberry Cupcakes

These were fairly simple. I just chopped up some white chocolate (cause I failed to find white chocolate chips at my supermarket) and added it to the vanilla buttercake batter, as well as sprinkled a few on top of the batter in the cases before popping them in the oven.



I made some plain buttercream frosting and added in some raspberry essence. I couldn't taste at all while I baked this so I had to rely on my flatmate and boyfriend to tell me what things tasted like. I got my boyfriend to taste the frosting, without telling him what was in it, and he thought it was banana flavoured! Haha, might not use that essence again!

Before piping the frosting on I popped a fresh raspberry on top of the cupcake and piped the frosting (with a round decorating tip) around and over it. Then I topped it off with another raspberry. They looked super cute and I heard that they were really refreshing in/on them because they broke up the sweetness of the cake and frosting.



Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

Mint chocolate chip cupcakes had to be on the list! Mainly because I had the green striped cases... Hehe.

They were super simple to do as well. I just added in some chocolate chips to my plain chocolate cake recipe and popped them in the oven to bake. I considered adding some peppermint essence to the cake but I didn't want the mint flavour to be too overpowering.



I added a bit of peppermint essence to cream cheese frosting, coloured it white so that it didn't have that butter/cream cheese colour and piped it using a round decorating tip. I crunched up some mint Aero bar and popped that on top and they were done!



Chocolate Cupakes (vegan)

I had a feeling that Si and Soph might have some vegan friends in their circle so I thought I better do one cupcake that's vegan friendly, just in case. This one was really simple - I used the plain vegan chocolate cake recipe (link above), with nothing extra.



I made some chocolate buttercream frosting, piped it into a nice little swirl and then grated some dairy free milk chocolate on top just to give it a little something extra.



"They just may have been the best tasting cup cakes ever."
- Sophie Bayly

Happy Swarley Day!

Yesterday was Carly's (my friend and flatmate, also known as Swarley for those How I Met Your Mother fans) 22nd birthday and to keep with our new tradition, I made her a cake! She requested something chocolatey (I think purposely so that I couldn't eat it all up since I'm doing this no chocolate/cocoa diet... Ha!).

I wasn't feeling very inspired at the time so I was just going to do a fairly plain chocolate cake, until I remembered that I had ordered this giant cupcake cake silicone mould and it was ready and waiting for me to use for the first time! I decided not to use the filling insert piece - will have to try that out some other time when I'm feeling more creative!



So that made my decision pretty easy. I used Carly's favourite chocolate cake recipe (found here minus the peppermint essence and chocolate chips). As soon as I started pouring the batter into the moulds I realised that I should have doubled the recipe. There was not enough batter to make the cakes rise up to fill the moulds completely.

Oh well... Now I know for next time!



I was intending on making chocolate buttercream frosting but I thought brown icing was a bit boring, so I made vanilla buttercream frosting, added a little bit of vanilla extract in place of a bit of the milk and then coloured it with Wilton's Teal Colouring Gel.



I put a layer of the frosting on top of the base of the cake and grated some dairy milk chocolate, just for a little something extra on the inside! ... I desperately wanted to eat that chocolate.



I trimmed a bit of the top cake off so that it sat nicely on top of the bottom half, and popped that on.

Having never made a giant cupcake cake before, I was a little unsure about how to put the frosting on to make it look more like a cupcake. I decided to pipe it which didn't turn out so well at all. There was a little too much air in the piping back so it spurted a bit and just came out looking not that great. Luckily I could just use a spatula to get a nice smooth look.

Mr. Spatula to the rescue!



I topped the cake off with some milk chocolate drops and some chocolate sprinkles, and in the end it looked pretty cute! Especially for my first try haha.



Check out that awesome glass bell-jar style cake display I got! I had been hunting for a glass lid for a while to go on Carly's white cake stand but had serious trouble finding just the lids on their own, let alone one that would actually fit on the stand nicely.

This one turned out to be perfect!



Topped the cake off with a single candle. Forgot to actually sing Happy Birthday though... Carly blew it out before I got to that part cause we were trying too hard to get a good photo! Haha!



So... HAPPY SWARLEY DAY!!!

Merry Swiftmas!

A few weeks ago my friend Shahlin from Coup De Main asked me to make a dessert table for a Taylor Swift Prom evening that was to be held for a competition winner. Basically people got to submit their ideas for the perfect Taylor Swift prom night with a budget of $3,000. The winner wanted their prom night to be themed Merry Swiftmas (due to Taylor Swift’s love of Christmas).

So I spent 3 days in the kitchen(s) baking my heart out and I was really pleased with how it all turned out! You can check out the photos from the actual Coup De Main event here. Hope you like it as much as I do!



Chocolate Cupcakes

I had seen this photo online of these awesome little cupcakes that had icing that looked like a Christmas tree and though that something like that would be perfect for my dessert table.



I used the usual chocolate cupcake recipe I always use (found here minus the peppermint essence and chocolate chips) and my usual plain cream cheese frosting recipe but added kelly green colouring gel to it.



I piped them so they sort of had a Christmas tree look to them, added little silver balls and the yellow fondant stars I had made earlier in the week. Topped the stars off with some pearl luster dust and they were good to go!



Lemon Cupcakes

One of the things that was requested by the girl who won the competition was that she wanted cupcakes with the number 13 on them, like the cupcakes Paul O'Grady gave Taylor Swift (see them here). I wasn't too keen on piping numbers so I decided to make fondant 13's instead.

I made these vanilla cupcakes (minus the chocolate chips) and added 1 teaspoon of grated lemon rind and a tiny bit of lemon juice to it. I then used my cream cheese frosting recipe (as linked to above) with some more lemon rind and red colouring gel. I piped them with a round tip so that they looked quite a bit different to the Christmas tree chocolate cupcakes and popped the fondant 13's on top of each one.



The humidity at the time made them blob out a little more than I cared for but what can ya do! I didn't want to keep adding icing sugar to it cause it would have just been wayyy too sweet. These were probably my least favourite thing on the table. I had a picture in my mind how they would end up and this wasn't quite it but that's okay! Live and learn...

Cake Pops! (vanilla cake and vanilla frosting)

These cake pops were made by Lydia (Grace Cakes) and I, with the help of the fabulous Bakerella's Cake Pops book. They turned out wayyyy better than I thought they would considering it was the first time I'd ever tried to make them and I had no idea what I was doing!



They were a heap of fun but extremely time consuming! Check out a full blog post from me here about these cake pops with lots of details about how we made them.



Chocolate Sugar Cookies

This was the first time I've ever made cookies by myself. Quite fun! I've posted a few photos of this recipe before but they were ones that Carly had made. So here's the recipe...

125g butter
165g firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
225g plain flour
35g self raising flour
35g cocoa powder



Beat butter, sugar and egg until combined.
Stir in sifted dry ingredients in two batches.
knead dough on floured surface till smooth.
Roll between sheets of baking paper till 5mm thick.
Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 180 C and line baking tray with baking paper.
Cut out your shapes - I chose candy canes, Christmas trees and stars.
Bake for about 10-12 minutes.



I decided to have a crack at icing the cookies, and rather than making my own royal icing from scratch (having watched Carly make hers and it didn't turn out quite right) I decided to use Wilton's Color Flow as I had seen how well it turned out on the cookies done at Millys.

I found it surprisingly easy to work with (especially after Lydia had told me it was quite tricky to work with) and they came out better than I had imagined. I thought I would be quite terrible at outlining and I wasn't sure about how well the flooding would go. But it was all just fine! Not bad for my first attempt at cookies and flooding/outlining!



I also brushed on some of that pearl luster dust to make them a little more interesting! And added a few silver balls to the Christmas tree cookies. Nom nom nom!

Red Velvet Cake

The girl that won the competition had specifically requested a cake that said "Taylor Swift is Fearless so Speak Now" (a sentence that contains all 3 of Taylor Swift's album names) however I really struggled with the whole writing with icing thing. So instead I made fondant letters (actually Lydia helped me out with the letters too cause my ones just weren't working out very well) and popped those on top of the cake.



The cake itself was made with Lydia's red velvet cake recipe. As it wasn't a recipe straight out of a book or one of mine, I won't be giving it out here. But the frosting is just my plain cream cheese frosting (as seen in previous posts) with some whitener. The cake is actually made up of two cakes with a layer of frosting in the middle.

The stars were added by my boyfriend and I brushed luster dust on to all of the letters and stars. Pretty happy with the overall cake considering it was the second cake I've ever made.



Christmas lollypops and candy canes

Arranged by my wonderful boyfriend who just wanted to hurry me up so we could get out of there haha.



Triple Chocolate Fudge Brownies with a Peppermint Twist

These were sort of my add on item, to bulk up the amount of food on the table. Due to time constraints I decided to use packet brownie mix, I chose the wonderful Better Crocker pack, and added some things to make it a little more Christmas-ey (inspired by this picture here)!



I had some Betty Crocker vanilla frosting left in the fridge so I added some peppermint essence to it and some kelly green colouring to it and piped it onto the triangle shaped brownies. I then added small bits of the straight part of candy canes to be the tree trunk. Added on a few mini M&Ms and voila! Brownie Christmas trees with a peppermint twist!



So that was my first attempt at a whole dessert table. Took me 3 stressful but fun days to do it all. I think if I ever get asked to do one of these again I will split the workload with someone else, or at the very least not include cake pops in it as those were far more time consuming than I thought they would be!

Super happy with how it all turned out!