My first cake!

It might seem ridiculous to some people but I had never made a cake before, by myself, till a few weeks ago. I may have 'helped' my Mum make a cake or two when I was younger, but that was about the extent of it.

A lemon yoghurt cake had come up in conversation weeks prior to this and I could not get it out of my mind! It was all I craved for days! So that was what I made for my first cake.



Lemon Yoghurt Cake

125g softened butter
1 cup caster sugar
Finely grated zest of 2 lemons
3 eggs
1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ cup plain yoghurt (I used unsweetened cause that's how I roll)

Preheat oven to 160 C fan bake.
Grease a 20cm spring-form cake tin.
Combine butter, sugar and lemon zest in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until pale and creamy.
Beat in eggs, one at a time.
Sift dry ingredients together and add alternately with yoghurt, stirring to just combine and form a smooth batter.
Spoon mixture into prepared tin and bake for 45 to 50 minutes.



A layer of lemon curd was added on top of the first cake. I then made up some Cream Cheese Frosting (whitened) and added a layer of that on top of the lemon curd. Popped the second cake on top of that and then used the remaining cream cheese frosting to cover the entire cake.



The strawberries were the perfect addition as they balanced out the sweetness of the cake. Definitely a keeper recipe! Will be making many more of these.



NOW THAT'S MY KIND OF CAKE.

P.S. Check out Carly and I's cute new yellow aprons in that last picture. A full apron for the main baker and the little waist one for the assistant! :P

Happy Belated Halloween!

I'm super late in posting this. Nearly 2 months late! Oops!

I wanted to do some fun Halloween themed cupcakes, nothing too fancy but I had the look in mind that I wanted. I made Vanilla Cupcakes and coloured them bright orange. I used this recipe minus the chocolate chips.



I used my Cream Cheese Frosting and whitened it a bit, to get rid of the yellow tinge the butter and cream cheese give it. I piped them and then sprinkled some orange candy-coated chocolate drops on top.



They turned out exactly how I wanted them! And the black and white striped cupcake papers were perfect! The little orange chocolate drops looked like little horns coming out of the frosting. Hehehe.



While I did the cupcakes, Carly made some chocolate sugar cookies in the shape of bats, pumpkins and ghosts. She used royal icing on them, which really needed to be made thinner so that we could do outlines and flood them. Now I know not to do that again!

I'll be making some of my own chocolate sugar cookies (actually I'm making them whilst writing this for my Christmas dessert table project!) so I will post the recipe for those soon.



Carly also did some chocolate covered strawberries with little scary faces on them, using the white royal icing. So cute!



So that's our awesome Halloween mini dessert table! Hope you like it!

Taylor Swift's 'Speak Now' Album Listening Party Cupcakes

Back in October my friends Shahlin and Sacha from Coup De Main asked me to make some cupcakes for their Taylor Swift advance 'Speak Now' album listening party! We had to make 48 cupcakes with frosting to match the album cover. I'd never made that amount of cupcakes before and luckily Carly helped out.



Shahlin requested chocolate / caramel flavoured cupcakes with buttercream frosting. We decided to test a few different ways of getting the caramel flavour in there with using our usual Chocolate Vegan Cupcake recipe (found here minus the peppermint essence and chocolate chips). We tried three different ways to put the caramel flavour in: a rolo in them, a piece of caramello chocolate in them or a drizzle of toffee syrup injected in them. Rolo won.



Carly and I took turns doing a dozen batch of cupcakes each at a time. That worked really well. Got to play quite a few games of Speed while we waited for each batch to bake.



Then came the buttercream frosting. The colour definitely didn't turn out how I wanted it. The frosting itself was fine but I wanted the colour to be a super vibrant pink and purple to match the colours of the dress Taylor Swift wears on the album cover. However, due to disagreements, we didn't put enough colouring in to get them to be that vibrant.



They still turned out pretty good in the end and we got some great feedback about them. Would have liked to put on some luster dust on top to make them shimmer like the album cover too but we ran out of time.



Interesting experience to say the least! So those were our Taylor Swift 'Speak Now' Chocolate and Caramel Surprise Cupakes!

Blue teeaaaaaal.

Teal is one of my favourite colours right now and I really want to try out the teal colouring gel I just got. I also really wanted to test out these black and white dotty cups I bought. Decided to go with something simple but not overly plain, so I made Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes.



Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
(actually just vanilla butter cakes with added chocolate chips)

1 cup self raising flour
90g softened butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milk
A handful or two of chocolate chips



Preheat oven to 180 C.
Sift flour into bowl, add butter, vanilla extract, sugar, eggs and milk.
Beat together until ingredients are combined and the mixture changes to a paler colour.
Bake for 20 minutes.

The paper cups I used didn't really work as nicely as I had hoped. The ended up completely covered in grease from the mixture. I put them into a second cup to hide it but those just looked even worse. Bit of a bugger. I think if I really wanted to use them again I would bake them in plain cups and then pop them into the black and white dotty ones.



Vanilla Butter Cream Frosting

125g softened butter
240g icing sugar
2 tablespoons milk

Beat together. I then added in a little bit of whitener so that they yellow from the butter wouldn't effect the teal, and then popped in some teal colouring gel. They came out a lot bluer than I would have liked but the colour is still stunning!



Carly made some adorable chocolate sugar cookies in the shape of bunnies and hearts to go with the cupcakes. They tasted delicious! I'll eventually make some of these too and I'll post the recipe then.

TIP: All cupcakes should really be eaten as a cupcake sandwich, as shown in one of the pictures above. Makes them so much easier to eat when they have so much frosting! Just break the cake part in two and take the bottom half and plonk it over the frosting and squish down. Nom nom nom!

Golden.

I recently got the recipe for the chocolate cake my mum makes which I had grown up with and decided to test it out in cupcake form. So these were my Chocolate and Golden Syrup Cupcakes... (I added golden syrup into the title of these because although the cake itself is just a normal chocolate cake, the golden syrup in it really stands out to me - enough to make it a prominent flavour).



Chocolate and Golden Syrup Cupcakes

1 cup sugar
113g butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1 egg
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/5 cup boiling water
2 cups self raising flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup milk



Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter and sugar together till creamy. Add egg and golden syrup.
Dissolve cocoa in boiling water and add to mixture.
Add sifted flour.
Add baking soda dissolved in milk.
Bake until done (maybe 20-25 mins)



And of course I used my usual Cream Cheese Frosting recipe (60g softened butter, 160g cream cheese and 3 cups icing sugar) which I split in two. One batch I added whitener to and the other I added some purple colouring gel. Once piped onto the cupcakes I added some chocolate sprinkles on top. Voila!

Minty fresh.

Carly and I had wanted to make Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes for a very long time. My boyfriend isn't a fan of mint chocolate flavour so it had been put off for ages. We adapted a few recipes that we already had to create our own little masterpieces and boy were they delish!



Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
This recipe is essentially just a vegan chocolate cake recipe, with added chocolate chips, peppermint essence and put into cupcake cases!

1 and 1/2 cups plain flour
3 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons cooking oil
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cold water
1 teaspoon peppermint essence
1/2 cup chocolate chips



Preheat oven (not actually sure of heat, maybe around 160-180 C).
Mix all the dry ingredients.
Add 3/4 of the chocolate chips and mix.
Add all wet ingredients.
Divide mixture into 12 standard cupcake cases.
Sprinkle each one with the left over chocolate chips.
Bake until they look done? Haha. Not sure of the actual length of time. We just wing it.



We used our Cream Cheese Frosting recipe for the icing and added 1-2 teaspoons of peppermint essence and some green food colouring. Topped it off with some chopped up Cadbury Mint Bubbly. Yum!

These are Carly's favourites so far and are definitely right up there for me. I think I still want to perfect the recipe though, I wasn't completely sold on the vegan chocolate cake adaptation but they were still amazing and looked super cute!

Gosh, it's been a while.

Sorry sorry sorry! I have been insanely slack with my blog lately. Well, for months actually. I haven't even been busy. There's no excuse. So I shall be making a few posts in quick succession (hopefully!) about things that have occurred in these past few months.



As you may have noticed from one of my previous posts, I love citrus.

These are some Lemon Cream Cheese Cupcakes I made before heading off to Disney On Ice!



Lemon Cream Cheese Cupakes

90g softened butter
90g softened cream cheese
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon rind
2/3 cups castor sugar
2 eggs
1/2 plain flour
1/3 self-raising flour



Preheat oven to 160 C.
Beat butter, cream cheese, lemon rind, sugar and eggs until smooth and creamy.
Sift the flours and gradually add to the mixture. Beat on a low speed until combined.
Divide mixture between 9 standard cupcake cases (or 12 smaller - not mini - cases).
Bake for 25 minutes.



I used my usual Cream Cheese Frosting recipe, using 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind.
Yummyyyyyyy.

Home is where the heart is.

I thought I should introduce my little work space to you all. I live in a teeny apartment so there's not enough room to have my own desk so the dining table is all I have to work with.

It has everything I need. I guess if I want to start doing crafty things I will just use the rest of the table or the floor for my work area. Flatmates are gonna love that although right now lots of floor space is taken up with the boy's photography, video and sound gear.



Things I must have at my work space:

iMac Could always do with upgrading, so who will buy me one?
External hard-drive
USB hub How I got on without one of these prior to buying this one is beyond me
Wacom pen tablet Home one is an Intuos 3 (A5 size), work one is an Intuos 4 (large)
iPhone Always with me
Inspiration board Fashioned mine out of cooking twine and cute pastel coloured bulldog clips
Stack of magazines My favourite is IdN and Prodesign is pretty good too
Canon G11 Recently purchased, these photos are taken with it (will probably do a post about the camera in the near future)



And as an added bonus to my work space, my awesome Fishy sits right beside me.

Orange crush.

I'm a huge citrus fan and after making so many lemon cupcake batches, I needed to try something new. So Orange Cupakes it was.



Orange Buttercake

90g butter, softened
90g cream cheese, softened
2 teaspoons finely grated orange rind
2/3 cups (150g) caster sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cups (50g) self-raising flour
1/2 cups (75g) plain flour



Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter, cream cheese, rind, sugar and eggs with electric beater till light and fluffy.
(I added in a bit of orange food colouring here to make the cakes match the orange cupcake cases I was using)
Beat in flours on low speed till just combined.
Divide mixture between 12 standard cupcake cases.
Bake for 20 minutes.



Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

This is my favourite recipe for cream cheese frosting. For lemon flavour, replace orange rind with lemon rind. Or for plain cream cheese flavour, leave the rind out. Brilliant.

60g butter, softened
160g cream cheese, softened
3 cups icing sugar
2 teaspoons grated orange rind



Sift the icing sugar.
Beat all ingredients together until smooth and combined.



I added red colouring gel to get that rich orange/watermelon colour in the frosting and topped them off with a few edible silver dragees.

TASTY. Probably one of my favourite cupcake flavours I've worked with so far.

Mother's Day.

My mum has never been into the whole Mother's Day thing. I received an email from her a few weeks ago telling me "don't fall for any of this mother's day crap" and then went onto say "if you have any spare money at the time, buy a lotto ticket for yourself instead." She's the best.



I wanted to order her something awesome off Etsy, but then time got away from me and there was not enough to time have something sent. So instead I decided to make her a card. I found a cute design on an Etsy print (sorry, I can't find the link for it. If I do I will update this) and re-created it myself. I printed it onto Evergreen Birch 260gsm card, and made a matching paper label for the front of the envelope.



I ended up making four card and envelope sets. One for mum, one for my step-mum, and one for each of my grandmothers. I don't get to see them often so Mother's Day was a good excuse to get in touch.

It's a pity that I got them in the post too late so they will arrive a day late. My bad.