M&M Basket Cake

M&M Chocolate Finger Basket Cake

Now I didn't make this cake. My housemates did and it was yummy. It was for our other housemate who loves chocolate M&Ms. I'd seen a basket cake made with Kit Kats on the internet that my sister showed me. The cake is a overcooked chocolate pudding which gives a gorgeous moist hybrid between a chocolate fudge cake and a chocolate pudding. I am a big fan of them. Then they iced the cake in chocolate fudge icing, stuck the chocolate fingers on and then covered it in M&Ms. Simple and awesome looking. Probably one of the tastiest cakes I've ever had. Here are some examples of Kitkat basket cakes; Miss Oven Mitts, College Baker. 

Classic Sponge

Rose Petal Sponge Cake

So despite saying I was going to lay off the rose petal treats it was the only jam in the house so I made rose petal jam and cream filled vanilla sponge cake. Quite the mouthful in many ways. The sponge cake was made using Delia Smith's All-in-one-sponge which is the recipe I always use because it is dead easy. On my mothers instruction I used Soya butter to my disgust but you couldn't taste it in the cake. For more about the all in one sponge cake have a look at a previous post: Rose Petal Fairy Cakes but the basic ingredients are flour, baking powder, eggs, caster sugar and soft butter. I also used vanilla extract.

The Ingredients for an All-in-One-Sponge

I doubled the recipe so as to make two cakes but when I took them out of the oven they were a bit shallow as I suspected. Upon turning the page of the cook book I discovered that for layered cakes 50% more cake mixture was needed. Not to worry. So what happened to the other cake... Well I attempted to make lemon curd but it was all lumpy and not worth photographing and well the cake was disgusting. Still gobbled it up all the same. Fortunately, the second cake was simply filled with rose petal jam and cream and then dusted with icing sugar. Yum Yum!

The Sponge Cake Cooling

Rose And Cream Sponge Cake

Cookie Monster Cake!

Simple Cookie Monster Cake

My friends and I like making novelty cakes for eachother's birthdays that have some connection with that person. The themes can be quite obvious or totally obscure. One of my friends loves the Cookie Monster so it was easy to sort his cake out since there are plenty of examples on-line of Cookie Monster cakes and cupcakes, such as this site Coolest Birthday Cakes which has loads of examples of novelty cakes. You might see a few of mine there. The cake is simply a normal chocolate sponge which had been allowed to cool. 

Firstly, we poured melted chocolate onto the top of the cake and let it set a bit. The eyes are Jacobs Coconut Creams which are a marshmallow biscuit. They were stuck onto the cake with melted chocolate. Then to complete the eyes Cadbury's Chocolate Buttons were stuck on with a bit of melted chocolate. Note that his eyes are wonky on purpose. Then with a knife the shape of the mouth was outlined in the chocolate. 

The icing is buttercream icing with alot of blue food colouring and more icing sugar than usual to get the stiff peaks. Possibly half a bottle of colouring maybe more. In order to get the fur like texture a piping syringe with a star cap was used. I started at the bottom and worked around in layers so that the icing wouldn't slide downwards. Just after I'd squeezed the icing on I'd push the syringe into the icing and then pull away. This stopped the icing from being pulled off the cake as the syringe was pulled away. This resulted in neat peaks. 

Finally to finish it off we placed a cookie and some crumbled cookie in his mouth. Due to the large amount of food colouring in the icing no one could stomach it! The icing was very bitter so be warned sometimes it is better to buy colouring paste in order to get the right colour or it won't taste great. 

Glittery Cupcakes

Glittery Cupcakes

My housemate who co-creates most of our novelty cakes was having her 21st birthday at her parents house so I knew they'd be getting her a cake. So as not to interfere we decided to make cupcakes instead.  I had recently just got a cupcake stand as a present and some gorgeous black foil cupcake cases so we were ready to roll. We knew she was wearing a black dress with red shoes so we thought about making red and black cupcakes. We mixed the icing up but for some reason the colours wouldn't work. The black was too grey and the red was too bright. 

So after we threw out an obscene amount of icing we decided to do something simple as we did not have time to pipe any icing. So we mixed up normal icing i.e. water and icing sugar and poured it onto the cupcakes. I had some green/pink edible glitter so we just sprinkled it on top of the cupcakes and voila! We had created simple tasty and pretty cupcakes. It certainly was a change from our usual creations. My other housemate created the top cupcake using edible gold stars and silver sugar balls. 

Mini Glitter Cupcakes

Another example of using the glitter was for another friends 21st in their house where once again I knew the parents would be providing the cake. This time we made mini cupcakes using silicon moulds which meant they had no cases but that didn't matter as they were bitesize. This time we did pipe un-coloured buttercream icing and then decorated the buns with the glitter and balls etc. Making and decorating mini cupcakes is quite time consuming so I invited some friends over to help decorate them. It is great fun and you can have a chat while doing it. The guys are particularly good at it.

I ♥ Macarons!

Homemade Rose Macarons

Yes I did! They weren't perfect but way better than I expected considering all the hype about them! I first came across Macarons when my French mate brought some over for my housemate as a present and I just happened to be at the table at the time and it would of just been rude of me not to try one. They were from Ladureé. At first we were like did you bring these from Paris! But no Ladureé have a counter in Brown Thomas in Dublin. So I tried a rose flavoured one and it was devine! I was hooked and armed witha a voucher for Brown Thomas I had, I bought a big box of Macarons from Ladureé. One of every flavour. Nom Nom.

The Perfect Macaron after Seriouseats.com

A friend of mine who is an excellent cook told me she had got a book on macarons but said she was disapointed as the language wasn't great and it resulted in a not so perfect macaron. Now I think she might of been talking about I ♥ Macarons the must have book on macarons but it is translated from Japanese and supposedly mainly just pretty pictures. So after alot of reading of blogs and so forth I decided to give rose macarons a go, following the advice of this guy, David Lebovitz, who seems to be the dude when it comes to pastries or something like that. He refers to a 'foot' which is the bubbly looking bit on the bottom of the macarons. See the photo above. I didn't achieve this but heres hoping I will next time!

Pencil Marks for the Macarons

Powdered Almond, Powdered Sugar, Granulated Sugar and Egg Whites

Anyway I started off by drawing circles that were about an inch in diameter on some baking paper to act as a guide when I piped the mixture out. I drew 30 of these circles, 15 on for each baking tray. I had ground almonds already but I ground them some more so they were more powdery. However this made the almond clump together. This meant I had to roast the almond on a baking tray to dry it out. I put it in the oven for 10mins and hoped for the best. In the meantime I powdered some sugar in the blender. You could use icing sugar but sometimes this has added cornflour which supposedly causes the macarons to crack. 

Mixing the Colour into the Egg Whites

I whisked the sugar and egg whites up and added the colour (half a cap of red colouring) and a cap of rose water to the mixture at this point as I was folding the rest of the ingredients in later and wouldn't be able to mix the colour at this point. I also made it slightly redder than I wanted as I knew the almonds and powdered sugar would dilute the mix. The almonds were still clumped together after roasting and it required alot of effort to sieve them into the egg whites with the icing sugar as they kept clogging up the sieve. I eventually got there. 

Piped Macarons Ready for Baking

My Syringe with a Plain Cap

So the mixture was easy to but into my syringe piper unlike butter icing which is a nightmare! Runny enough to flow out easy, thick enough to control and pipe into nice domes. I'm sure a skilled hand could spoon them out neatly if no piping bag was available. Once I'd piped them all out I had to rap the baking tray against the counter a few times to flatten the top of the macarons as they are meant to have flat tops not domes. Popped them in the oven at gas mark 1 for 15mins. They looked great. Maybe starting to golden a little which I didn't want as it would ruin the colour. I let them cool and then things went down hill a bit. 

Macarons Fresh Out of the Oven

When I tried to lift the macarons off the baking paper they started to crumble! Perfect shells had formed but there was mainly just a big void of air in the centre with a bit of gooey macaron STUCK to the baking paper! Then I realised I'd used greaseproof paper not baking paper, hence the sticking problem but not why the centre was nothing but air, my Mom thinks I should of left them in for longer. Oh well I'll know next time. Never the less out of the 30 shells as I'm now calling them I managed to salvage maybe 18 or so of them i.e. 9 Macarons. :( I was not a happy bunny but I was still excited as they looked awesome!

Homemade Rose Macarons

I mixed a bit of butter, icing sugar and some rose water up and using my syringe piped it in a circle around the outside of the bottom of the macarons. Ideally I should of filled them but they were so fragile they were cracking under the weight of the filling. It was a very rich filling anyway so it didn't matter. I didn't add any colour to the the filling as the pink and white contrast is quite pretty. I was thinking of flavouring it something different. Maybe vanilla but I was too lazy to go get some from the cupboard (Does anyone else think its strange seeing cupboard written down as everyone glosses over the p?)

Homemade Rose Macarons

Homemade Rose Macarons

So there was a lot of wastage, not a lot of sticky centre, no foot but who cares. They were delicious! I am however going to lay off the rose flavoured stuff for awhile! If you are going to make them I'd read up on it first as there are loads of tips such as leaving over night to develop in flavour. Yea about that.... Anyway if you wanna read more about my tasty adventures check out my Chocolate Fondant or if you want to see some of the costume parties I've been at try the Stretcher Race! 

Badass Biscuit Cakes!

Ironman Cake

So it is tradition amoung my friends to make each other birthday cakes which are somehow related to the individual. We had a bit of a dilemma for two of the cakes as they were needed while we were staying down the country. We wouldn't have the time or the privacy (the cakes are surprises)  to make them while away and a 5hour car journey in the summer would ruin most cakes and soft icing. So the solution was to make biscuit cakes! However, we aren't ones for normal cakes so off we went to Lidl and raided the chocolate aisle. The contents of the cakes were Malteasers, Crunchie, Kinder Chocolate (those little bars), Twix, marshmallows, Mars Bars and Rice Crispies, just to name a few.

We made one cake using golden syrup and butter melted with milk chocolate and the other with condensed milk mixed with melted milk chocolate. The conclusion was that the golden syrup and butter combination set better than the condensed milk with made a very heavy cake. The bars of chocolate and marshmallows etc. were chopped into bite size pieces and then stirred into the mixtures. 

Charizard Pokemon Cake

The first cake was a Ironman head. Unfortunately, we didn't fully account for how much compaction would be required and therefore the proportions aren't quite right. The cake was formed simply by lining two saucepans with cling film and filling them up in layers while compacting with the bottom of a glass. The bases were put in the fridge and allowed to cool. The icing for the Ironman cake was from a packet of Dr. Oetker Ready to Roll Coloured Icing which is hard to find but most Tesco Stores seem to have it. The candles got out of control though!

Nom, Nom, NOM!

The second cake was not as successful. It was meant to be a mosaic of the Pokemon Charizard made from Smarties. (My friends and I are definitely of the Pokemon generation sure just look at our Costumes) The cake kind of worked but was very rough around the edges literally. The base was moulded in two small but deep oven trays also lined with cling film. Then chocolate was poured on top of the two bases while the lay side by side in order to form a smooth surface. This didn't really work since we didn't have enough chocolate and it split in the middle during travel.

To form the mosaic a picture of Charizard was printed to the scale we wanted it and the smarties laid out on top of it. Then the smarties were painstakingly transferred to the cake. The head did not really work as we didn't have the 'resolution' we needed for the detail. Finally the candles were arranged as the fire coming from his mouth and tail. There was about 30 candles but 50 would of been more effective. It still tasted good! As you can see from the photo of everyone enjoying it. Shame they didn't get to try my Marshmallows!