The truffle shuffle.

Sometimes I will eat something and the taste will taunt me for ages afterwards.

This is exactly what happened with these chocolate truffle cookies. My friend Aishia found a recipe book called Cookies, Slices and Squares and made these amazing cookies from it and brought some to work for us to try. I pretty much died eating one. The chocolate flavour was so intense and then entire thing just melted in my mouth like chocolate would.



A few weeks later these cookies were still on my mind. An opportunity to bake them for work sprang up, a birthday morning tea!

Because my boyfriend often doesn't get to have some of the yummy baking that Carly and I make because he's gluten intolerant, I decided to make these gluten free so he could have some of the extras! I used Orgran's GF plain flour in place of the normal plain flour.



Chocolate Truffle Cookies

250g 70% cocoa chocolate (broken) - I used Lindt dark chocolate
60g cocoa powder
110g butter
3 eggs
200g caster sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
75g plain flour - I used that GF plain flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
150g 70% cocoa chocolate (chopped into small chunks) - I used Lindt dark chocolate



Combine broken chocolate pieces, cocoa powder and butter in metal bowl and place over a pan of simmering water. Stir occasionally till the chocolate and butter has melted. Remove from heat, stir to combine and set aside to cool. - Thank you to Carly who did this part for me since I was running low on time.
Beat eggs and sugar with electric mixer until light and fluffy.
Beat in vanilla extract and the chocolate mixture.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.
Add flour mixture to the butter mixture together with the chopped chocolate and stir till just combined.
Cover the dough and chill for 3 hours. - I put mine in the freezer for 30 minutes instead.
Roll the dough into small tablespoon sized balls and place 5cm apart on baking paper lined trays.
Bake for 10 minutes and then leave them to cool for a bit. - They taste SUPER good still warm from the oven.



The ones Aishia had made turned out a bit more smooth and rounded looking on top than mine and I assume that was because of the gluten free flour I used. They looked good when I was just about to take them out of the oven, then as soon as they were removed they blobbed back down and became sort of wrinkly looking.

Good thing they still tasted AMAZING. One of my favourite cookies I've made to date. Although it's pretty much just chocolate... so if you're a big chocolate fan, these are the cookies for you!

Something blue.

Back in March I posted some baking I did for my friend Aish's 22nd birthday party (passionfruit cupcakes) and mentioned that I also made another attempt at macarons that didn't work out quite right. Well here they are in all of their failed glory.

They actually don't look THAT bad. And they didn't taste THAT bad either. I just wasn't happy with them. They were a little dryer than my previous ones and their feet didn't stay puffed up. They looked perfect when I grabbed them out of the oven and as soon as they were out the just collapsed back down.



They also didn't keep their colour well. The insides of them were still the baby blue colour I had made the mixture but the shell went pale and browned. Booooooo.

I'm going to post the recipe for these ones anyway cause I think it might have been that my oven was slightly too hot for them, and maybe I over mixed them a little? I'm not sure. EIther way, the recipe might still be good so I will give it another shot some time.



Basic Macarons
From the book Macarons by Annie Rigg

200g icing sugar
100g ground almonds
120-125g egg whites
a pinch of salt
40g caster sugar



Mix icing sugar and ground almonds together thoroughly.
Beat egg whites and salt together with an electric mixer until they hold a stiff peak.
Continue to beat whilst adding the caster sugar a spoonful at a time. Mix well to ensure that the sugar is thoroughly incorporated. The mixture should become thick, white and glossy.
Add any food colouring you want in now. Mix till evenly blended.
Fold the icing sugar and almond mixture into the egg whites until thoroughly combined (this could take a few minutes).

Fill piping bag with mixture and pipe evenly sided rounds - about 5cm width - onto baking sheets.
Tap bottom of baking sheets sharply once to expel any large air bubbles.
Leave these for about 30-60 minutes to 'set'.

Preheat oven to 170 C.
Bake macarons for 10 minutes.
Leave them to cool on a the baking sheet.



In our hurry to get to the party, I asked Carly to make some chocolate ganache which didn't work out so that's why they never made it to the party. I ended up grabbing some Betty Crocker Chocolate Frosting from the supermarket and filling the macarons with that later on. It was a little too sweet for my liking but they looked alright!

I think next time I make macarons I will try chocolate ones. I also really need to work on my ganache making skills... Practice makes perfect!

Baked Explorations.

My brother is really good at picking out presents for me. And by that I mean he is really good at reading the list of things I picked out for myself and deciding what to get me from that list. :P

Thanks Cam! (He also got me Matilda on DVD! Yussss!)



Baked Explorations is the second book by the boys behind Baked, an amazing bakery in Charleston and Brooklyn. This book is all about reinventing classic American desserts. The photos make everything look super yummy!



Cannot wait to try out some of these recipes! In particular I'm looking forward to the chocolate coffee cake (pictured above), the mississippi mud pie, the maple cupcakes and the grasshopper bars (mmm mint!).

Yay for baking!

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!

Macarons: Attempt Two!

After my epic fail of a first attempt at macarons, I was determined to get it right. I knew what I had done wrong previously, so I just had to be patient and follow the recipe properly.



I decided to use a different recipe this time, since the last one I used said to only let them sit for 15 minutes, which I think is just not enough time. I found this recipe for 'the perfect macaron' on The Pink Whisk site and decided to roll with it.



I followed the recipe down to a tee. And they turned out perfect!

You should have seen Carly and I sit right next to the oven watching them bake. :'D We were so excited!



Due to my love of lemon, I decided to fill them with some sweet lemon curd. Since the curd has quite a strong flavour, I thought it best to leave the macaron shells as just the basic plain flavour and colour them with some Wilton Golden Yellow.



It was fairly late at night when I made these and I was too lazy to make my own lemon curd up so I used the Barkers Lemon Curd that I had in the fridge to fill them. SO YUM!

These were my first successful attempt at making my own macarons; Lemon Curd Macarons. I cannot wait to try out some new flavours, especially now that I have my new Macaron recipe book that Aishia got me for my birthday! :D

Hope you all like them!

I heard your heart sing love, love, love.

As usual, I am crazy late with this... but... Happy belated Valentines Day everyone!

I've never really been that into Valentines Day. Just a marketing gimmick to sell stuff and all that. But I must admit, baking for Valentines Day is rather fun!

As I think I said in an earlier post, my boyfriend was away in Melbourne this Valentines Day, working on a stop motion TV ad. Because he couldn't be with me that day he sent me a gorgeous bunch of flowers (kicking myself for not taking a photo of them!) and a delicious cake.



I ended up spending Valentines Day evening with my flatmate Carly and my cousin Tyler, watching TV. It was a great girls night in!

For the occasion I decided to make some COOKIE POPS! I'd never made cookie pops before so I just kind of winged it and they turned out awesome!



I made large heart chocolate sugar cookies (you can find the recipe in my post here) and I used some cookie pop sticks that I had from Millys. I actually made the cookies so big because of how thick the sticks were. They ended up far too big for my liking. Could be good if you were wanting to have fun large wedding cookie pop favours or something. But I think a bit smaller would have been a better. I'd have to use the smaller cake pop/lollypop sticks for smaller cookies.



I made up some pink colour flow icing and piped the outlines on. I then thinned the rest of the colour flow with water and flooded the outlines once they had set.

Definitely need to work on my outlining skills. I wobble heaps! Haha. And I probably have to work on the flooding too. Might need to make it a little bit thinner first, cause it had a few little bumps which didn't merge back in with itself.



Pretty cute in the end though. Cookie pops are rather fun! They'd make fantastic favours and would look great on a dessert table. They're also super simple to do!

Time for a quarter life crisis?

Today, I turn 25 years old. Goodie.
Should I be panicking? 5 years away from 30! Oooohhhh.

It's alright, I'm not panicking. Getting older doesn't really phase me. Yet. Haha!

Anyway... I've been spoilt. Check out my amazing gifts from my boyfriend, Carly and Aishia!



Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits - Hook
Macarons - Aishia





Cannot wait to try out some of the recipes from that Macaron book and the iced biscuit book has some fantastic tips and tricks!



Paper + Craft - Hook
Reinventing Letterpress - Hook
Whoopie Pies - Hook





I've never actually had a whoopie before, unless they are what I think they are (ginger/chocolate kisses is what they call them in New Zealand), so I'm very intrigued to try those out! There's even a giant whoopie pie cake recipe in there!

Also... Turns out that I already own that Reinventing Letterpress book. I actually added that book to my wishlist without knowing that it's the exact same book as The Little Book of Letterpress, which I already own. The inside is exactly the same, it's by the same author and everything. It just has different covers and different titles. HOW ANNOYING. So that's being sent back so that I get store credit.



Tall vase - Hook
Jurassic Park Trilogy DVD - Carly
Serendipity DVD - Carly

Carly also got me a ticket to the Bruno Mars concert coming up in April. YAY!

So yeah, I'm spoilt. Fantastic boyfriend and friends. Love you all!

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.

Macarons: Attempt One.

My macaron obsession has gotten a little out of hand lately. I'm sure my Tumblr followers can tell you that.

I've been wanting to try bake some myself for ages and finally attempted to do so the other day. I used a plain pink macaron recipe from the Woman's Weekly Cupcakes Cheesecakes and Cookies book.

What an epic fail.



I did far too many things wrong so I knew as I was making them that they weren't going to work out well. I didn't even bother making ganache to sandwich them with. They taste alright though!

At least I know what things I did wrong so that I won't make those mistakes on my next attempt! Although I have no idea how to fix the whole colour thing... they just completely lost their colour on the outside while they were in the oven.

Will have to do more research me thinks. More attempts to come!

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