Just a personal blog, kept since 2008.
More baking – this time a purple and white swirled rosette cake for the mother of one of my best friends who is celebrating a birthday this weekend.
Can you believe this is my first purple cake? It’s travelling to Okaihau today so I hope it has a safe trip!
Been baking. These are vegan cupcakes with cream cheese flavoured duotone buttercream roses.
I know, cream cheese and buttercream do not sound vegan. Did you know professional buttercream is made from vegetable shortening? It keeps better*. Thank goodness – doing a cake decorating course without sampling the frosting would have been rather difficult.
These babies will be sold off to sweet toothed TRN staff to help me recoup the ridiculous amounts of money I’ve been spending on baking stuff lately…
*Apparently most use meringue powder though (with egg) to get the buttercream to “set” a little.
Cute! I helped Nathalie at work to make a cake for her little brother Aaron’s 8th birthday this weekend. It’s a dirt race-track with grass, if you can’t tell!
Cake is eggless chocolate cake with vegan chocolate buttercream, the grass is tinted vanilla buttercream.
The banner may be my proudest moment, so THAT’S why I bought those tiny wooden pegs!
My dear friend Sherry was the first baby born in Taupo in 1988. Having a birthday on New Years day sucks for so many reasons, including the hassle of usually not being to able to celebrate with friends.
Another of her friends organised a surprise tea party for her this weekend gone, I volunteered to make a cake. I’d made this cake before but didn’t get to taste it that time. Reports were good though so I was keen to make it again. It’s iced in Sherry’s colour, blue, quite a contrast with red velvet!
The recipe is odd in that instead of baking powder, baking soda and white vinegar are combined in the last step, added to the mixture and then whipped into the oven. The cake does rise really well.
Red Velvet Cake
Preheat the oven to 180ºC, and grease your cake tin(s) (use two if you want a layer cake like mine). I like to line the bottom of my cake tin with cut baking paper to ake it easier to remove the cake.
Sift the flour, salt and cocoa together.
In a large bowl which will eventually contain the whole mixture – cream the butter and sugar, then add each egg to the butter mixture beating thoroughly after each addition. Add and beat in the vanilla.
Whisk together the buttermilk and red food colouring. Be really careful! The red mixture will stain things easily.
Alternate between adding the buttermilk and the dry mixture to the butter mixture, beating at a low speed. This helps distribute the ingredients evenly – I was bad at this so my cake was a bit marbled.
Once the three mixtures are combined, measure the baking soda into a cup or small bowl, then add the vinegar and stir. Quickly fold this through the cake batter, fill your tin(s) and get ‘em in the oven!
Check the cake after half an hour. If it’s still super wet (check with a bamboo skewer), lower the temperature to about 160 or 170ºC and check back at 10 and then 5 minute intervals until the inserted skewer comes out clean.
Set the cake in the tin(s) to settle for ten minutes, then turn it/them onto wire racks to cool for a good hour. You can bag this cake and refrigerate it for a day or two if you are prepping in advance.
I baked this one the night before, set it in the fridge overnight and then iced it with white chocolate marscapone frosting in two colours on the day of the celebration. For the rosette frosting technique, check YouTube!
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Nom nom nom. I doubled the above recipe and baked it in two 9" round cake tins. The cake was HUGE and I think would feed 25 people. You could even thicken the layer of icing between the top and bottom layers of cake and serve the top and second tier separately as it’s essentially two cakes.
For the bunting cake topper, I made paper flags and folded the tops over a piece of blue string, then taped the back. I wound each end of the string around some sticky tack and then a bamboo skewer. Then pushed a paper straw up over the skewer and tack. The skewers are longer than the straws so you can push them easily into the cake.
I have Grand Plans for a birthday cake for a little boy in a few months! Exciting!
Made some adorable cupcakes for my workmates to celebrate our last day of work for the year tomorrow. I had these cute red and white polkadot cupcake cases from Look Sharp ($5NZD for 25, bargain!), and filled them with lemon coconut cake.
The frosting is white chocolate marscapone buttercream, and I bought a bag of Jaffas (NZ candy) to top the frosting. I initially wanted to make green holly leaves to add a bit more of a festive theme, but (fortunately) thought that was a bit ambitious.
I remembered some red and white spotted Washi tape I’d bought from Wocolate a few weeks ago – perfect! Tiny flag toppers it is!
Photos are just from my phone, but I hope they are useful for someone who’d like to get crafty and make their own wee flags. Here’s how…
Washi tape cupcake topper flags
You will need:
How?
Cut a strip of white paper slightly narrower than your Washi tape.
From the strip, cut a small rectangle – about 1.5cm long, but you don’t need to be exact.
Unroll a little of your Washi tape and place the paper on the sticky side, about 5mm from the end of the tape as shown in the photo.
Further along the roll of tape (in my pictures, to the left of the rectangle of paper) place the top of a toothpick.
Fold the Washi tape with the paper, back over the toothpick to seal the toothpick in.
Trim the Washi tape at the edge of where the two sides of tape meet. The rectangular piece of paper should be surrounded on all sides by Washi tape stuck to itself.
You have a flag! At this stage I trimmed a triangle shape into the ends of my little flags to give them a bit more character.
Make sure you warn cupcake eaters to remove the flags before eating the cupcakes!