Bugs :)

Well I did promise a cupcakes post. And here it is.

So my goddaughter had a 'nature' project at her school a while ago, so I found myself making 36 vanilla cupcakes (when did the class sizes get so big?!) with bugs on. Now, while I thought this would be 'orrible, it turned out to be really quite cute. I loved the hedgehogs in particular. I don't have any pictures of the snakes that my goddaughter contributed, but I assure you, they were great :)

And check out the bumblebee!

Have a good week :)

x

Jam and Custard Cupcakes

Well, it's been three days now. You should've had time to absorb the magnificence of those banoffee cupcakes (please let me know if you try them, I delight in sharing yummy things). Which means that it's probably okay to do another post. Not that there's anything particularly special about these cupcakes. They were another experiment that semi worked and were yummy enough, but I'm not sure I'd do these again unless I needed to use up ingredients.



Jam and Custard Cupcakes

Your regular batch of vanilla cupcake batter
Your favourite jam, heated and strained to get rid of pips and to turn it into that wonderful pouring consistancy
The custard topping from the Rhubarb and Custard cupcakes of yore.

Put batter into cupcake cases, drizzle liberally with the strained jam and bake. When cool, spread another layer of jam on top before topping with the custard. In the words of Alexander the Meerkat, simples!

Banoffee Cupcakes

I'm going to share with you one of the loves of my life. For too long, I feel, have I kept this to myself. I have been selfish and arrogant. So today, I'm going to share with you the wonderful banoffee cupcakes. I even coloured the lettering in a sad attempt to impress on you all how wonderful these are.


I got the idea for these while wondering which of my favourite desserts would make good cupcakes. I've since learned that banoffee cupcakes and lemon meringue cupcakes are already popular and that pastry does not work well as a cupcake base, regardless of whether you blind bake it first or not. Although I will get back to you when I've perfected my bakewell tart cupcake.

However, I have thrown together my own recipe for these, pieced together from various other recipes that I've found along the way.

You can put a biscuit base on these - as I did for the first four or five batches - but I've found that this is a bit messy, a bit unnecessary and that people tend to complain about getting crumbs down their clothes. So I now leave out the biscuit base. It's up to you guys and your personal preference.

Banoffee Cupcakes

For the banana cupcakes:
1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup caster sugar
3tsp baking powder
1tsp bicarb of soda
pinch of salt
punch of freshly ground nutmeg
2 medium bananas, mashed
1/2 cup butter or marg, melted
2 eggs, whisked till frothy
1tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup milk

For the toffee:
Use this stuff. It will change your toffee eating life. You'll never go back. Unless you, like me, have a rubbish co-op near you that doesn't stock it. In which case, you'll need
1/3 cup brown sugar
50g butter
1 395g tin of sweetened condensed milk

For the toppings:
Whipped cream
A flake. Or some other crushed chocolate. You could use chocolate shavings if you wanted to be extra fancy :)

Make the toffee by putting all the ingredients in a pan and cook over a low heat, stirring continuously, until thick. This should take about 10 minutes. Don't let it boil and don't let it stand for any amount of time without stirring or it will stick to the pan and you won't be able to clean it. Ask me how I know this. Go on. Set the toffee aside to cool (don't taste it unless you've cooled it down beforehand. You don't want to skin your tongue or anything) and make the cupcake batter.

Sift all dry ingredients together and add the wet ones in the following order: butter, milk, vanilla, egg, banana. Mix well after each addition. Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for about 15 minutes on about 180'C. A medium heat anyway.

When cakes are done, leave to cool and then cut a cone out of the top of each. Fill this cone shape with toffee. About 10 minutes before you want to serve them, whip the cream until stiff and pipe on top (or if you can't find your beloved 1M piping nozzle like me, just spoon the cream on, spreading it out gently to look pretty). Sprinkle with crushed flake.

And watch as your friends propose, fall at your feet and declare their undying devotion.

You think I'm joking.


I'm not.

I'd make them for the bake swap I'm joining, but I don't think fresh cream travels well *le sigh*

Which reminds me, this is wicked cool. Basically, you sign up and get assigned a partner. You then send your partner a care package containing some homemade baked goods, a recipe card and a little gift. They return the favour. I'm honestly not sure which I'm looking forward to the most - making cakes or cookies and sending them to a stranger or receiving a random package in the mail with yummy treats in. It's only in effect in the UK, but if you live here, get involved! Or set up an American/French/Australian/insert-country-here bake swap. I'm crazy excited about it. And I just can't hide it. :-D

Cupcakes for a birthday

For my birthday, my mum's friend smuggled me into the spa that she works in and paid for lunch and paid for a treatment, plus I got to use all the fabulous spa rooms, pool and loungers. It was her birthday this week and because I'm poor and have no connections to any amazing places that she could go to, I thought that the best way to say a joint thank you and happy birthday would be to make her cupcakes. I'm quite good at it after all :-)

There are an extra two crammed into the box to stop them moving around - I couldn't exactly charge her for packaging when she was getting them for free and I was a bit too skint to buy a couple of the proper cupcake boxes. :-( Anyway, so the presentation wasn't as it could've been, but in all fairness, she got an extra 2 cupcakes, so I'm sure she wasn't complaining!


There's vanilla with vanilla butter cream, mocha (coffee cupcakes with mocha icing) chocolate and rhubarb and custard.

The rhubarb and custard were made with almost 50% more rhubarb than they were made with last week and the result was a bit weird. They were hardly a cake at all in the end, but when you bit into the slightly chewy crust you got a viscous rhubarb ... almost paste. It was heavenly. Next time I'd take the rhubarb content down a bit, but only because I'm on a quest to find a cake recipe, not a cakepie. But seriously guys; yum.

My mother, who normally limits her evaluation of my food to 'very nice' or constructive criticism rang me as I was at the supermarket to tell me that they were 'criminally good' and that they were the nicest things that she's ever eaten, ever. I'd say that she's exaggerating, but she doesn't do that with my food. So I was pleased! Of course, that's dependant of tastebuds. I'd also sorted the custard topping so that it was pipable (basically by whisking the cream till stiff and then folding in enough custard to taste but not enough to ruin the consistency) and she almost fell in love with that. She had about 5 ("but only two with the topping on!") and then wondered why she felt very sick *rolls eyes affectionately*

A tired mind gives you photos

A bit of a strange post I guess. I've got a few Oreo cupcakes, a few toffee cupcakes, a brand new cupcake stand and a couple of peach roses to show you :-)

Pic spam? Oh go on then.


So here is a fairly vague shot of cupcakes. We like cupcakes, we know this. The speckly ones are Oreo (I've not made them before, but they were lovely. Not quite Oreo enough for me, I think I'd put them with Oreo butter cream to finish it, but I ran out of cookies and the poor cakes were saddled with vanilla butter cream instead. With a hint of almond. Because I shake things up like that *winks*)

And here is my cupcake stand that my awesome sister (the same one that made the glorious cake) gave me for my birthday. I'm still working out how to best love this. I think I'll adorn it with some wedding-style cupcakes next week (gotta build me a portfolio yo) and see if that does it justice. We shall see. The photo definately doesn't do it justice. You've got to see it in person. It's glorious. :-)

What next? Ah yes, the combination of the finished cupcakes and the cupcake stand of joy. I was really quite happy with how these turned out, particularly as this is my first foray into the world of chocolate pretties.

I took these into my old work to say hi and I've got to show you the way they looked in the box because I had a very childish squee over how professional they looked. I need to work on my photography though. Apologies for that :)

I've also got a cake order for Friday, an elegant ganache and rose cake that just happens to also be a rainbow cake (I think the idea is that you think that the cake is a very mature and pretty 70th birthday cake and then when you cut into it you see all the pretty colours. I've just got to get my layering right lol). And part of the decoration involves fondant flowers. So I figured I'd make some roses to go on top.

That was an awful photo. My sincere apologies. Try this one.

I've got to say, I'm really quite proud of my very first rose attempt. :D

Right, I'm off to bed. You may have gathered from the overall tone of this post that I'm quite tired... but you would be too if you'd spent nearly 24 hours out of the last 48 in a hot kitchen. I know, I know, you'd think a hot kitchen would be my ideal place - and it is normally - but the fun gets taken out of it somewhat when you're cooking what someone else has decided goes on the menu and when you're cooking to a time limit. Saying that though, I do like my job at Jacqueline's and it's definately perfect for me - they're so flexible about when I work. I've been there nearly 5 years now, first as a Saturday girl, then as a holiday girl (term time I worked in Accessorize, yay!) from Uni.

Bah. My jobs are not interesting, but there's a bit of Maag-trivia for you. Hold it close and cherish it.

ARGH! Right, I'm going to bed now, my tired addled brain is crying. Night all!

Maag xx

Rhubarb and Custard Cupcakes

The May challenge for the Livejournal community bakebakebake is 'custard'. You have to incorporate this into some form of baking. So, as I adore cupcakes, I made Rhubarb and Custard cupcakes. I had a quick look on the internet, but there aren't any recipes for this (although there are a couple for Rhubarb and Custard muffins, which I didn't like the look of) so I was able to make it up happily, without fear of plagiarism.

So this is my own recipe, thrown together from a number of pre-existing recipes no doubt. The confectioner's custard isn't my own recipe though, that can be credited to the Rick Stein Cookbook that I got for my 18th birthday. But even that I changed a little bit.

Rhubarb and Custard Cupcakes

For the cake:
40z butter
40z caster sugar
40z plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1/4 bicarb of soda
2 eggs, beaten

For the Rhubarb:
2tsp sugar
enough rhubarb to make about 5oz when stewed
2 tsp water

For the custard:
2 Egg yolks,
2oz caster sugar
3/4 oz (20g) cornflour
3/4 oz (20g) plain flour
10fl oz (300ml) milk
1tsp vanilla extract
150ml double/whipping cream.


First, peel, chop and stew the rhubarb (by combining water, rhubarb and the 2tsp sugar and cooking over a low heat until almost mushy. I didn't stew down completely, leaving quite a few small lumps in. I would probably stew it even less next time to have even more lumps as these gave quite a nice texture to the cake. It's a personal preference thing). I forgot to weigh the rhubarb before I cooked it, which means that I can't tell you how much is it takes to make 5 1/2 oz stewed, sorry. I wouldn't worry too much though, as the amount of rhubarb in these cupcakes is determined by how much I had. So guess.


Set this aside and let it cool. Then make the confectioners custard. You'll need to put the egg yolks, sugar, two flours and 2 tbsps of the milk into a bowl and mix together until smooth. I used a whisk, just to make sure there were no lumps at all. Put the remaining milk in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Keep watching it, because when it starts to boil it will triple in size and boil over if you're not careful. Pour the boiling milk into the egg mixture slowly, whisking constantly as you do until you have a smooth mixture. Pour this back into the saucepan and cook on a low heat, stirring (or whisking) constantly until you have a nice thick custard. Take off the heat and pour into a bowl. Cover the custard with a layer of cling film (cling wrap/ plastic wrap for Americans) pressed gently onto the surface of the custard to stop a skin forming.


Transfer this to the fridge and allow to cool completely. Preheat oven to 180'C. Now for the actual cake. Cream together the butter and the sugar and gradually add beaten eggs (adding a tablespoon of flour if the mixture starts to separate). Sift together flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt and fold into the butter, sugar and eggs. Once combined, add in the stewed rhubarb and mix in well.


Half fill muffin cases with mixture. As this was a first time cake recipe, I experimented a bit with different combinations. The first six I filled 2/3 full with the rhubarb mixture, the middle three I filled 2/3 with rhubarb mixture and put a dollop on custard on top, and the last three I half filled with rhubarb, put a dollop of custard in and then covered the custard with more rhubarb. Bake for 14 minutes, or until golden brown and firm to the touch and take out and leave to cool. These photos are a bit rushed and not as clear as I'd like, primarily because I had to rush to collect my mum from work and I wanted to take them as taste testers (nothing brings people out of the woodwork faster than cakes. I turned up to see two people and within 3 minutes of bringing these out there was an entire crowd!)


The cakes without custard baked into them had the confectioners custard as topping. To make it into a topping, I whipped 150 ml of cream (I used double as they didn't have whipping, but either will do) and folded it in to make a lighter topping. Next time I think I will do double the cream as the end result was not stiff enough to pipe or even hold its shape. It was amazingly yummy though.


I also didn't have my muffin pan with me (I was baking at my parent's house) so the cupcakes came out all sorts of funny shapes. And because the cake was weighed down with the rhubarb, it didn't rise. Which, normally would irritate me, but the texture of the cake was so beautiful that I couldn't complain.

I'm definitely making this again (I'll have to, I have an order for a rhubarb and custard cake for a birthday - apparently my mum liked them so much that she was recommending them to her friends at church and I got an order out of it!) as I'd like to sort out a pipable custard topping and maybe have a few more chunks of rhubarb in the cake itself. I also want to experiment with the sugar levels, although I have to admit, the sugar that I used made the cakes tart enough to taste properly, but sweet enough not to be unpleasant, so I was pretty happy with that :-)

All in all, a bloomin' good success I'd say!