Halloween Cupcakes

Here are some of the gruesome green Halloween cupcakes I made for work today... Complete with pumpkins, tombstones, bones, bats and ghosts. Why the devil not...?

Please leave your comments below... x

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Baking Mad - How to Make Cupcakes

Recently I've been making quite a lot of cupcakes, so when BakingMad.com asked me to test their cupcake recipe, I jumped at the chance. It's where it all starts. In my day they were fairy cakes with a drippy bit of glace icing and a few hundreds and thousands. Nowadays they are perfectly piped creations worthy of replacing a wedding cake. Times have changed.

What I love about cupcakes is that they are so easy to make. A simple sponge mix can then be adorned with frosting, glitter, sugar paste flowers and even metallic sprays. If you get your base right, you're half way there. A pretty cupcake can transform a novice baker into an expert with the flick of a piping bag.

BakingMad.com have a series of useful videos, talking you through each step of baking. They also give you useful tips along the way. Their how to make cupcakes video shows how simple it is to make a perfect cake every time. There are also masses of cupcake recipes to choose from.

In order to rate the video I made the standard cupcakes and added coloured buttercream with some decorations. The video talks you through how to cream butter and sugar effectively, how resurrect a curdled mixture and how to get uniform cakes. I also found this fantastic decorating video.

This tutorial is ideal for beginners, as actually seeing the process at each stage is reassuring. For those of you with more advanced skills, try out some of the different recipes or piping techniques. The recipe made light, fluffy cakes which also kept well in an airtight container.

Disclaimer: Baking Mad approached me to test their recipe and method. They did not pay me to do this post.

Crazy Coloured Sweet Encrusted Cupcakes

A while ago, a friend of a friend asked me to do some cupcakes for his son's birthday party. The brief was something suitable for boys. Turns out he actually fancied monsters! After making these, my friend Sarah saw the pictures and decided she wanted some custom made cakes for her son's confirmation party. His brief? Lots of different colours. There were going to be lots of children at the party, so she asked me to do a mixture of cakes suitable for girls and boys.

So here we have it. Inspired only by a trip to the Mr Simms Sweet Shop in Bolton, and a few things I already had hidden in my box f tricks. No two cakes are exactly the same. 

I created these by making 24 plain vanilla cupcakes (use your favourite recipe) and two quantities of vanilla buttercream frosting. I then split the buttercream in four and dyed them different colours. I then used a variety of piping techniques using grass, rose, round and star piping nozzles. I also dipped some in bright sherbets. The sweets I bought included popping candy, laces, chewy sweets, cables, multicoloured rats (!) and chocolate shapes. 

They were great fun to make and I was lucky enough to be given 10/10 from the man of the moment. Robbie and his siblings spent the evening deciding which ones they were planning on devouring first, but I am assured they all made it in one piece until the party this afternoon. I accept no responsibility for a herd of children who will be on the ceiling at bedtime tonight...

Please leave your thoughts and comments below x

It was a monster mash...

A few weeks ago, a friend of a friend asked if I could do some cupcakes for his little boy's birthday party. Sure! Why the devil not. I had visions of baby blue frosting. Nooo... 

I don't have any children. I have a cat. I found myself totally out of touch with what is 'down with the kids'. Apparently, five year olds want scary monsters! My initial OCD led me down the 'arrrggghhhhh!' path, but this is the year of trying new things... so off I trot to the sweet shop. The only specialist bakery items I bought were the eyes, stars and polka dots. Everything else came from my favourite sweet shop in Bolton, Mr Simms. I walked in and announced, "I'm required to make monsters!'. 

I used the following to create my beasties:

• Vanilla cupcakes
• Vanilla frosting
• Green and blue sour sherbet (for some of the faces)
• Jelly snakes (hair)
• Red and blue cables cut on a slant (horns)
• Red and green astro-belts cut into small sections (tongues)
• Three different sized confectionary eyes
• White chocolate stars
• Dr Oetker polka dots
• Blue and green food colouring pastes
• Disposable piping bags
• Round piping nozzle
• 'Grass' piping nozzle
• White sugar paste cut into teeth
• Red gel pens to create 'blood'

They were surprisingly easy to make, but were time consuming because of the different frosting techniques used. They took about four hours from start to finish. I used the following techniques:

• 3 green spikes 
• 3 blue spikes
• 3 green swirls
• 3 blue swirls
• 3 green dipped
• 3 blue dipped
• 3 green piped
• 3 blue piped

I am informed that the birthday boy himself had two for breakfast before his party. I take no responsibility for hyperactive children...

I had a few spare cupcakes, so I decided to decorate them with just sherbet! Perfect for those who are not keen on monsters...

Please leave your comments below...

Flowers for Mother's Day

Mother's Day. A time to say thanks to your mum, or commercialised clap-trap? Either way, my mum loves anything pretty, glittery and lemon flavoured, so it had to be lemon flavoured cupcakes with a zesty frosting. She's a sucker for a pretty cake...

I did plan on using a round nozzle for these cakes, but it just didn't look right. Mother's Day had to be about frills and flowers. I also found that the best yellow colouring is... (dramatic drumroll) Asda's own natural yellow in liquid form. I found this after a near buttercream disaster with yellow colour paste which turned the frosting a sickly shade of peach! Not the look I was going for. I was thinking daffodils, not cobbler. 

Here's the recipe for the lemon sensations...

Ingredients

Cakes:

• 110g unsalted butter - room temperature
• 225g golden caster sugar 
• 2 eggs
• 150g self-raising flour
• 125g plain flour
• 120ml milk
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 1 tsp lemon extract

Frosting:

• 250g of unsalted butter - room temperature
• 500g of icing sugar
• Juice of 1 large lemon
• Zest of 2 large lemons
• Yellow food colouring

Method
Cakes: 

• Cream the butter and sugar for about 5 minutes. 
• Add the eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly. You'll notice the mixture getting paler and thicker (this is lots of air bubbles which makes the cake as light as a feather)
• Mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl.
• Mix the milk, lemon zest and extracts in a jug. 
• Add half of the milk mix and half of the dry mix to the creamed butter and sugar. Do this carefully with a folding action.
• Repeat until all the mix is incorporated.
• Do not beat the devil out of it. You cakes will be like old boots. You spent 5 minutes whisking air into these little beauties, don't spoil it.
• Divide the mix between 12 cupcake cases in a muffin tray. These are nice and deep and will give your cakes a straight side.
• Bake on gas 4/180C for about 30 mins. You're looking for a well risen bun with a golden top.

Allow the cakes to cook completely before frosting, otherwise you will eng up with a melted mess. Mark my words.

Frosting:

• Beat the butter for about 3 minutes to soften it. It will look considerably paler than when you started.
• Add about a quarter of the icing sugar and mix by hand with a spatula. This will prevent your kitchen being redecorated.
• Add the lemon juice, the zest and the rest of the icing sugar and mix again by hand. It will be quite firm.
• Using an electric hand mixer, beat it for about a minute on a medium setting. This will incorporate everything nicely.
• Add your desired colouring (if any).
• Beat on a medium to high speed for about 5 minutes. I know this is a long time. It's time well spent.
• You know it's done when the mixture if fluffy and paler than when you started. It should taste like a little bit of heaven...

If your kitchen is very warm, you may need to pop the frosted in the fridge for 5 minutes or so. This just makes piping easier.

Decorating:

This is really down to personal taste. I used my nozzle of the moment (Wilton 1b) but used it quite loosely to create a bit of a ribbon effect. I also used a bit of edible orange glitter over the frosting before covering the cakes in either small Dr Oetker butterflies or large sugar daisies from Just Bake. I used pink and yellow spotty cupcake cases from Morrison's.

I gave mine to my mum and grandma in pink spotty cupcake carriers from Sainsbury's (£2.79 for 2).

Cheers!

Wars of the Roses...

Ever since attending the cupcake class at Hey Little Cupcake just over a week ago, I've been itching to practice the hardest cake we made... the rose.

Never one for making things easy for myself, I bought the nozzle and took up the challenge. I made these cakes using a basic vanilla cupcake recipe from the Primrose Bakery cookbook. I found this recipe to be beautifully light and fluffy, and each cake rose well. A perfect base for the main event. To make the frosting, I used the standard method of double the quantity of sugar to butter, and added pink colour paste and a little vanilla extract.

I used two different nozzles to achieve the cakes above. For the smooth piped cake in the centre I used a plain nozzle, and for the 'rose' effect cakes I used a Wilson 1b nozzle. The pink pearls are from Just Bake and the iridescent edible glitter is from Hobbycraft. The cupcake cases are a mixture of Dr Oetker and Asda's own. 

Hey Little Cupcake...

I’m all about the cake. 

I tend concentrate on flavour and form rather than sugar-craft and piped to perfection cupcakes. However, there’s always been a little part of me that wondered whether I would be totally cack-handed with a piping bag..? I must admit, i’ve never pursued the piped arts just in case I was a total icing incident waiting to happen. How embarrassing would that be? I can make a cake shaped like a sandcastle, but can’t pipe a rose on a bun? I would have been quietly devastated and may have had to hang up my oven gloves in shame.

Last week, my friend Dawn started telling me about a cupcake decorating course she was going on in Manchester. Pang. I could feel it. The unmistakeable feeling of ‘I’m just about to a) take an exam b) do a presentation c) speak on the radio’. The feeling of impending doom. Adrenaline belly-ache. It was all present and correct. Part of me really wanted to go with her, the other part was shouting ‘No! This will end horribly and will prompt a week long sulk!’

I put it out of my mind. In fact, I completely forgot about it. Until… yesterday Dawn piped up ‘there’s a place available on the course!’. Eeeek.

And there I was. Complete with pink pinny. Sat at a table with two balls of sugar paste, about to make my first lime green sugar bunny. I could see the piping bags ready to go. I was bricking it. 

I bloody loved it. The course was run by a lovely lady called Becky, who put absolutely no pressure on us to be the next Jane Asher. We made a Cookie Monster cake with blue coconut, a Viva Las Vegas cake with garish glitter and even a pretty pink rose. She showed us how to get your sugar paste free from the cutter without demolishing it, the best recipe for buttercream, different types of piping nozzle and what they did, and more importantly… not to fear the piping bag.

We left having eaten half a bag of frosting between us, laughed so much that we very nearly weed after seeing Dawn’s ‘Turd-tastic Cupcake’ (a creation all of her very own, and not to be imitated) with a box full of beautiful cakes, and the confidence to try this on our own.

Hey Little Cupcake is tucked away in Spinningfields, just a few meters from Nandos. They sell some absolutely stunning cake related artwork (want) and the tools to make your own cakes, as well as the expected cupcakes and beverages. They offer a range of courses, the next on my ‘to do’ list being Jam Making. I attended the Cupcake Decorating course, which id £35 per person and includes:

• A choice of any hot drink on arrival
• Lesson in making buttercream icing
• Piping icing in various techniques
• Creating 6 of your own Hey Little Cupcakes to take home.

Go. Even if you don’t fancy attending a course, the love and attention they have put into their premises and products makes for a wonderful experience. Find out more at Hey Little Cupcake.

Disclaimer: I paid for this course with my own hard earned British pounds. Hey Little Cupcake did not ask me to write this review. I did so because I had a belting time and would like others to experience the same.