a m y m c c r a c k e n

Occasion: Erin Tremewen’s high tea baby shower

Recipe: red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing

Decoration: coloured icing, edible glitter and white buttons

Erin & Paul welcomed Richmond Bob Tremewen on Christmas Eve

Occasion: Steve’s Dads weddding

Recipe: red velvet with cream cheese icing

Decoration: black & white fondant moulded into leaves, roses & rabbits

Occasion: Emma BrenBren’s B’day

Recipe: red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing

Genna from work has a friend that absolutely LOVES pirates and asked me to make her some cupcakes for her birthday – fun!

She let me choose the flavour so I used my amended red velvet recipe again (with the cocoa swapped with custard powder & no food colouring) with little pirate themed fondant decorations on top.

custard cupcakes

ingredients

• 250g plain flour
• 2 x 15ml T custard powder, sifted
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 100g soft unsalted butter
• 200g castor sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 175ml buttermilk
• 1 tsp cider vinegar or other vinegar

method

1. Preheat oven to 170°C and line a muffin tray with paper cases
2. Combine the flour, custard powder, baking powder and bicarb in a bowl
3. In another bowl, cream the butter, and sugar until light and fluffy
4. Beat in the vanilla extract
5. While still beating, add one spoonful of dried ingredients, then one egg, followed by some more dried ingredients, then the other egg, followed by the rest of the dried ingredients
6. Beat together the buttermilk and vinegar
7. Fold into creamed mixture
8. Spoon the batter evenly into the cases
9. Bake for 20 mins or until cupcakes spring back when lightly touched
10. Transfer to a wire tack to cool down completely before decorating

buttery cream cheese icing

ingredients

• 400g icing sugar, sifted
• 125g cream cheese
• 125g soft unsalted butter
• ½ tsp caramel essence

Beat all of the above ingredients together until smooth then pipe onto the cupcakes.

decoration

To create pirate themed decorations to go on the top of each cupcake I rolled out coloured fondant and used some miniature shape cutters & sculpturing/modeling tools. Then to glue parts together I used sugar glue.

 I made up about 4 dozen cupcakes for the RSPCA cupcake day this year. Please vote for my creations so I can win a baking pack for my efforts:

http://www.rspcacupcakeday.com.au/competitions/creative-cupcake/entry/?cupcake=88

I made three different types:

Hello Kitty cupcakes – Vanilla flavour with hint of apple & cinnamon decorated with blue icing and a fondant Hello Kitty and dusted with edible glitter

Rainbow Vanilla Cupcakes – rainbow cupcake (purple, pink, orange) topped with rainbow (yellow, green, blue) buttercream icing and sprinkled with edible glitter

Red Velvet Cupcakes – topped with buttery cream cheese icing, with a sprinkle of red edible glitter and decorated with black cats

Hello Kitty cupcakes

For the Hello Kitty cupcakes, I made the standard cupcake recipe that I use from the Edmonds cookbook and threw in some additional flavours:

ingredients

• 190g butter, softened
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 tsp apple essence
• 1 C caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 ½ C plain flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• ½ C milk

method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C
2. Cream butter, cinnamon, essences and sugar until light and fluffy
3. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition
4. Sift flour and baking powder together
5. Fold into creamed mixture
6. Stir in milk
7. Spoon mixture evenly into the prepared mini cupcake pan that has been lined with paper cases
8. Bake for 20 mins or until cupcakes spring back when lightly touched
9. Transfer to a wire tack to cool down before decorating

butter icing

ingredients

• 250g butter
• 400g icing sugar, sifted
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• ½ tsp apple essence
• ½ tsp food colouring

Beat all of the above ingredients together until smooth. Divide into thirds and colour each batch as desired

decoration

For decoration I created fondant Hello Kitty’s. I made a stencil out of cardboard, rolled the fondant out to about 5mm thick then cut out shapes using a craft knife.

For the features (nose & eyes) I cut out coloured bits from a liquorice allsort using a round piping tip (Steve helped out too), and for the whiskers I chopped up fruit sticks into small strips.

To make the features stick to the fondant I wet the cut out with water then pressed them on. Once dried (by the heater to speed up the drying process) I painted the eyes with black food colouring. Then, when the eyes dried out, I brushed white edible glitter over the kitty. To assemble, I piped the blue icing onto each cupcake then sprinkled with silver edible glitter, then popped on the kitty decoration.

I recommend making fondant decorations at least the day before you plan to use them so they can harden up in time.

rainbow cupcakes

For these I made the same recipe as my rainbow cupcakes post. This time round, instead of swirling the mixture before I baking, I evened it out so the cupcake colours stacked on top of each other rather than marbling.

red velvet cupcakes

For these I made Nigella’s red velvet cupcake recipe (see this post). To decorate I piped the icing on top of each cupcake, sprinkled on red glitter the placed on some black cat sprinkles.

For Michael’s (Steve’s Brothers) birthday I decided to make a cake around something he loves – dinosaurs! I didn’t want to make a shaped cake but instead little dinosaurs like the ones that I found on http://www.abakedcreation.com/2009/06/dinosaur-birthday-cupcakes.html.

To make these I used a packed of white icing / fondant from the supermarket. Broke it up into batches, then dyed them different colours for each type of dinosaur.

This was my first time making fondant models. I found that once I kneaded in the colours in it had softened way too much from the heat of my hands so I popped them back in the freezer for a few mins so they could harden up so they were more clay like to play with.

Here’s the t-rex…

Here’s the spikey dinosaur…

here’s the spotty dinosaur…

& here they all are…

With the left over fondant I made some dinosaur eggs that also worked as candle holders – cute!

On top of making something that looks real cool, I still wanted to make something that tasted yum so I made the same cake I made for his dad last year – a Lemon Sour Cream Cake from the Edmond’s cook book. I’ve made this a few times now and I knew I wanted it to be bigger so I doubled the following recipe.

lemon sour cream cake

Ingredients

• 125g butter, softened
• 2 tsp grated lemon rind
• 1 C sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 C plain flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ C sour cream

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C
2. Cream butter, lemon rind, sugar and eggs until light and fluffy
3. Sift flour and baking powder together
4. Fold sifted mixture into egg mixture alternatively with sour cream, mixing until smooth
5. Spoon mixture evenly into a greased and lined 20cm round cake tin
6. Bake for 45 mins, or until the cake springs back when lightly touched
7. Leave in tin for 5-10 mins then transfer to a wire tack to cool down before decorating

As I doubled the recipe I cooked the cake longer, it took approx. 1 hour and checked on it every 5 mins till ready. I think next time I’ll cook each batch separately and do this as a double layer cake as it wasn’t as light as it usually turns out – but in saying that it was still SO delicious.

If you ever want to use this recipe, instead of icing it, it’s really nice just squeeze some lemon juice over the top while it’s still warm. Then once cooled just sprinkle over a light dusting of icing sugar, mmmmmmm!!!! BUT for this time, I iced it with a lemon butter icing.

lemon butter icing

Ingredients

• 100g butter
• 2 T lemon juice
• 1 ½ C icing sugar
• 2 T water

1. Cream butter and lemon juice
2. Add icing sugar and water and beat until you get the consistency that you desire

I dyed the lemon butter icing green so it was like ‘grass’ that the dinosaurs were walking around on. Before placing the dinosaurs on the cake i brushed them with edible glitter (it’s called rainbow dust) just to give them an extra touch – and because I just ordered a pack of the edible glitter and i REALLY wanted to use it.

So here it is, my (well Michael’s) dinosaur cake!! Rar!

I popped the candels by the ’28′ when it came time to serve…

Chris’s birthday gave me a great excuse to make some creative cupcakes. I looked up heaps of images for ideas and sent them through to Athina (his wife who I made the owl cake pops for). She picked my first choice – Jack Skellington cupcakes which I was very excited about because (a) they looked AWESOME and (b) they needed fondant icing which I hadn’t used before.

The night before Chris’s birthday Athina and Briar came around. It was a very girly night of baking and watching the royal wedding (lame kiss by the way!).

We made batch of my double chocolate cupcakes. Athina had a genius idea of putting pieces of chocolate caramel in the middle from a cupcake that she had earlier in the week that had a caramel easter egg inside it,  YUM!

double chocolate cupcakes

Ingredients

• 1 ½ C self-raising flour, sifted
• 3/4 C dark choc chips
• ½ C cocoa powder
• 3/4 C caster sugar
• 3/4 C milk
• 125g butter, melted, cooled
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 tsp Vanilla Essence
• 1 block Cadbury caramelo chocolate

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200°C. Line a muffin pan with paper cases
2. Combine flour, cocoa powder, choc chips and caster sugar in a bowl. Make a well in the centre
3. Add milk, butter, eggs and vanilla essence to flour mixture
4. Using a large metal spoon, stir gently to combine
5. Half fill each muffin case with mixture into the prepared muffin pan
6. Place two pieces of caramelo chocolate in the centre of each muffin case
7. Spoon remaining mixture into prepared muffin pan, ensuring to cover each piece of chocolate
8. Bake for 15 minutes
9. Stand in pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool

decoration

Once the cupcakes cooled, we melted fondant on a double boiler (I used about half a packed / 1 cup). To assist in obtaining a smooth fondant that we could dip the cupcakes into I added some boiling water.

When at reached the desired consistency, dip the top of the now cooled cupcake into the fondant. Let the excess fondant drip off before turning back upright and placing onto the tray. We required two coats of fondant so once the first layer set, we dipped the cupcakes again.

See how smooth the fontant turned out – the cucpcakes acutally had a few cracks after baking but you couldn’t tell after the fondant went on.

Leave the fontant to set before painting on the Jack faces. We waited for about an hour. But next time I will leave these overnight and do the painting the following day – to avoid bleeding.

We googled images of different Jack faces. To paint we used black food colouring and a very fine paint brush. I did the first three or four until Athina and Briar were ready to give it a go (it was a bit nerve-wracking reaching this point and possibly stuffing it up!!).

They turned out amazing and Chris loved them (who wouldn’t??)