Rainbow Cupcakes

As the end of term approaches, Uni life gets a bit surreal. The workload evaporates, people disappear to hometowns filled with real food and people over twenty five, and everyone makes the most of a final week with friends and freedom.  What better way to fuel the fun (food-wise, anyway) than stir fry, pizza and cake.  Fortunately I was kept away from the first two but I did promise to bring some form of cake-based creation.  Having spent the previous week making (or attempting) elegant, mother-appropriate Red Velvet cupcakes, I decided to abandon all dignity, embrace my inner-child and produce a rainbow.

Somewhat ironically, I got the idea while researching the Mothers Day-themed Flavour of the Month.  Rather than just use vanilla cupcakes which might not hide the taste of food colouring, I decided to use the Love Food: The Cupcake recipe for White Chocolate and Rose Cupcakes, substituting vanilla essence for the rose water, although this would work too.  I picked white chocolate because the mixture was still light enough to show the colours, and because of all the flavours in all the chocolate bars in all the world, white is my favourite.  I suspect that the high sugar content may have something to do with this.

Once I had made the mixture, I weighed it and divided it into five portions, with what would be the top (pink) layer with slightly more than the others, as it had a larger space to fill.  I dyed each in turn, using blue and red colouring for the purple, stirring carefully so that not too much air was lost.  I then layered the colours, starting with purple in the bottom.  The recipe didn’t stretch very far; I only managed to make nine, so next time I would probably double the quantities.  This also meant that some layers didn’t sit perfectly on top of each other, so it would be better to double the quantities if you are looking for a distinctly layered effect.   

For the icing I used the Love Food: The Cupcake vanilla butter cream recipe, which produces really fluffy, sweet, melt-in-your mouth, drool-over icing.  I wanted the topping to look quite plain because the sponge was so bright, but without looking dull or in anyway refined.  Again looking to my inner child (always a useful source of inspiration) I sprinkled edible gold glitter over everything and put a pink strawberry button on the top.

The cakes were slightly overcooked, but thankfully the white chocolate flavour still came through.  The colours inside produced a suitably joyous effect to delight children young, old and inner.  Whether you’re feeling blue, seeing red or going for gold, the rainbow effect is an easy, tasty, trippy way to add some colour to your celebrations.

Christmas Cupcakes

While the majority of my Christmas holidays were taken up with present-buying, Articulate and essays, I found some time to make some cupcakes for Christmas Day.  I wanted to use flavours which taste essentially of Christmas, so I chose the Gingerbread flavoured ones I made for the course Christmas dinner and some original Chocolate Log cupcakes.

Gingerbread Cupcakes

I used the same recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days but for some reason the mixture did not smell quite as ‘Deck the Halls’ as before.  Fortunately, the Christmas muse managed to get me before I dyed the icing bright red; equally as fortunate, Tom’s mum gave me some Christmas-shaped sprinkles to decorate the cakes with, and my grandma gave me the toppers.  I have never used toppers on cupcakes; I think I am naturally drawn to decorations which are edible and preferably made almost entirely of sugar.  However, these looked sweet and were kind of a souvenir which allowed people to have a small reminder of their cake while eating it too.

Chocolate Log Cupcakes

While I doubt the wisdom of adding mint to chocolate and carrot to cake, I have a strong and unwavering belief that chocolate added to more chocolate can only lead to good things.  As such, chocolate logs rank very highly with me.  Originally I intended to make a full-sized and traditional chocolate log (the size of a full-sized standard cake, not a full-sized log) but it seemed somehow more inventive to try and reproduce that distinctive taste in a miniature form.  It was time to see if chocolate logs and cupcakes were a winning team.

For the actual cake I used the chocolate cupcake recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days, as the vanilla cupcake recipe had worked so well in the mini birthday cakes.  While the cakes cooled off after baking, I mixed up the chocolate butter cream for the filling and the icing from the recipe in Love Food: The Cupcake.  I chose this particular book because the vanilla butter cream recipe produced beautiful, light icing and adding chocolate to this seemed like an exceptionally good idea.

Once the cakes were completely cool, I used a small, sharp knife to cut out a little well in the top of each cake.  Each hole had to be deep enough to contain a reasonable amount of filling, but not so deep that it went through the cake and made it split.  Once each had been filled, I replaced the part I had cut out and iced the cakes with a pallet knife.

I used the snowflake-shaped sprinkles to cover the cakes, as I thought the white looked nice on the brown.  I cut a chocolate Flake into sections about a centimetre long, dusted these with icing sugar and put them on the cake.  You may possibly be wondering why I did not dust the whole cake with icing sugar: I had already put the snowflakes on when the Christmas muse (here embodied by my mum) suggested this.  However, I still think they turned out rather nicely and tasted quite similar to the real thing, although next time I might try a solid chocolate topping.

The curse of the dessert struck again, and everyone was so full of potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, turkey and various other birds that no one could manage much dessert.  My granddad, dad and boyfriend managed a gingerbread one each, and my brother had a chocolate log.  Fortunately, Christmas is the best time of year to drag out celebrations, and over the next few days they were forced on various people in the spirit of good will.

Vanilla and Strawberry Cupcakes

Having iced the thirteen mini birthday cakes for Gramps, I had fourteen vanilla cupcakes left over.  I made some more butter cream icing using the recipe from Love Food: The Cupcake, adding three teaspoons of strawberry jam and mixing well.  I smoothed this onto the cakes and rolled out a small lump of fondant icing.  Using a small sharp knife I cut little hearts out of the fondant and stuck them gently on the cakes.  They still tasted light and fluffy even after a few days, and the butter cream and strawberry icing worked nicely.  Waste not want not, I suppose; you cannot have too much of some good things.

Mini Birthday Cakes

My next cake project was for my grandad’s eightieth birthday.  Birthday cakes for me have a very specific taste – soft vanilla sponge with a strawberry jam and buttercream filling and topped with beautifully sickly fondant icing.  I decided to try and emulate this specific taste in the miniature form of a cupcake.  Since birthdays are supposed to be extra happy days, I wanted to make them standout; with this in mind, I decided to try and make 3D icing balloons coming out of the cakes.

For the sponge, I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days.  For some reason the recipe uses double the amount of all the ingredients in the same bakery’s vanilla cupcake recipe in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook while claiming to produce the same amount.  I decided to try out the new one and ended up with twenty seven, rather more than I needed for Gramps.  Luckily, Grandma was making dinner for everyone on Thursday, in two days time, so I put the rest safely away and kept thirteen to write ‘Happy Birthday’ on.  Despite a new oven, the cakes came out looking generally unscathed, although a few were a bit brown on top.  While they cooled, I got on with making the balloons.

I made three balloons in green, pink and blue, and four in yellow.  I washed thirteen coloured paperclips in washing up liquid, rinsing and drying them well before straightening them out.  I bent a curve into the middle of each one, with a straight bit at the top.  At the bottom I doubled the paperclip over to stop it toppling over once the balloon was on top.  To make the balloons I used small lumps of fondant icing dyed with food colouring.  I took a small lump of the coloured icing, a couple of centimetres in diameter, and rolled this into a ball.  For the knot of the balloon I took a small bit from the coloured icing and pushed it to form a point.  I stuck this under the balloon, pushing gently until it stuck on.  I put the balloon down on a clean surface to dry, as I would need to wait until I was at Gramps’ house to assemble them. 

Meanwhile the cakes had cooled so I added a teaspoon of strawberry jam to the top of each cake and smoothed it over.  Using butter cream icing from Love Food: The Cupcake I put this on top of the jam and smoothed it down with a spoon.  Although it got a bit mixed up with the jam, this did not really matter as the taste would be the same.  I rolled out white fondant icing and used a cookie cutter to cut wavy circles large enough to cover the top of each cupcake and gently put each one on top of the jam and butter cream.  I had initially wanted to spell out ‘Happy Birthday’ on the cakes in blue fondant icing, but I did not have any cutters and was running out of time.  Instead, I used spare butter cream to stick small blue circles in the centre of each cake, and went to Gramps’ to construct the cakes.

A few of the paperclips needed bending again to make them look more like balloon strings, and I think that the ‘Happy Birthday’ message would have looked better.  The idea did not quite work as I had hoped.  However, the vanilla sponges were very light, and were proclaimed by Mum to be ‘the best we’ve had yet’, which was a nice compliment.  They really tasted just like little birthday cakes, even if the balloons left me a little deflated.

Eerily Endearing Halloween Ghost Cupcakes

Although the main focus of Halloween is the important task of warding off evil spirits, we all know that its real purpose is to dress up and eat silly amounts of sweets.  And biscuits.  And, of course, cakes.  I had a real trick up my sleeve for this year, thanks to my shiny new cupcake book; super spooky, frighteningly fearsome, eerily enticing ghost cupcakes!

I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s chocolate cupcake recipe, purely because this makes the richest and most mouthwateringly moist cupcakes known to man.  In order to make six ghosts, I made twelve large cupcakes and five smaller ones; this slightly strange numbering came about because, despite my pleading and coaxing, the mixture stubbornly refused to make one more small cupcake.  While I waited for them to cool down completely, I mixed up a quarter of the usual amount of the Hummingbird Bakery’s vanilla icing, adding a few drops of green food colouring for a Halloween effect. 

Then came the construction.  Using one of the large cupcakes that had behaved itself and stayed in its case, I smoothed a layer of icing thick enough to act as glue on the top.  After taking one of the naughtier large cupcakes out of its wrapper, I placed this upside down on the icing.  I put another layer of icing on the upside down cupcake and placed small cupcake, also upside down, on the top.  I then cut a small slice from my block of readymade fondant icing and rolled it out between two sheets of clingfilm until it vaguely resembled a sheet.  Although my Love Food: The Cupcake book suggested smearing icing all over the tower of chocolate cake goodness, I felt this was a bit risky, so I draped the sheet over the tower, and pinched it together slightly to give it more shape.  Using melted chocolate, I carefully drew two eyes and a wiggly mouth on each sheet.

The ghosts did not look particularly scary, but then again it is quite difficult to make something formed mostly of sugar and chocolate look more blood curdling than cuddly.  They were not perfect; a few people thought that the mouths were moustaches, and some of them – the cakes – were rather oddly-shaped.  Still, they were sweet spectres, and devilishly tasty at that.

Peanut Butter and Jam Cupcakes

The world has seen many classic couples; Romeo and Juliet, fish and chips, Ben and Jerry, chocolate and chocolate.  This week I decided to explore one such dynamic duo, specifically, one inspired by the culinary geniuses of America: peanut butter and jam.  Such perfect flavouring deserves a perfect medium through which to express its greatness, and what better than the small but mighty cupcake?  

I used the peanut butter cupcake recipe in my tasty new book, Love Food: The Cupcake.  This was supposed to yield sixteen lovely, golden, peanutty cupcakes, but I ended up with fifteen.  I suppose mine were extra large lovely, golden, peanutty cupcakes.  They were extra large, anyway.  Once they had cooled down, I cut a small cone-shaped chunk out of the top and filled the space with as much strawberry preserve as I could jam in before replacing the wedge of cake.

 For the icing, I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s vanilla icing, with two heaped teaspoons of strawberry jam mixed in with a spoon at the end.  As I am currently without a pallet knife (they are on my birthday wish list, the first time any cooking accessory has featured) I piled this on with a spoon and smoothed it out, leaving it a little rough.  I would like to pretend that this was because it looks nice with the big brown peanuts, but it was actually because spoons are not as effective at smoothing out icing as pallet knifes.  I filled a bowl with peanuts and dipped the top of the cakes in them, leaving them with an unhealthily healthy topping.

The famous flavour team did not fail.  The cupcakes tasted very strongly of peanuts, so they are a miss if you don’t really like them that much – but then, if you do not like peanuts very much, you probably will not choose to make these.  The jam in the middle was, I am told, a tasty surprise; the sweetness worked well with the peanuts, and the jam-flavoured icing was sweet without being overpowering.

This delicious double act has joined forces with the humble cupcake to form a tasty new take on an old favourite.  It seems that while some good things result from a perfect pairing, really good things undeniably come in threes. 

Triple Chocolate Flake Cupcakes

A bizarre and slightly alarming habit has formed with me since I have taken up baking.  I have found myself buying books.  This in itself is not a personal revolution; as an English and American Literature student, it is a positively encouraged personal trait.  The new and unusual part of this phenomena is that they are baking books.  Where once I perused the fiction section for hours, I now find myself devouring cookbooks before I go to sleep.  I wake up surrounded by books about doughnuts and sponges.  The latest addition to my growing collection is dedicated solely to the delicate and widely variable treats that are cupcakes.

The first recipe I tried was a chocolate cupcake with a melted chocolate centre.  I felt this reflected my motto that adding chocolate to chocolate can never be a bad thing, and, also, I like chocolate.  Instead of using the plain chocolate suggested by the recipe, however, I chopped up a Cadbury’s flake and scattered the crumbs on top of the Hummingbird Bakery’s chocolate icing.

So far so good.  As it turned out, there was only one problem; the chocolate didn’t melt.  Or rather, it may have done, but because I was desperate to ice the cakes I let them cool down and the chocolate solidify.  The mixture also did not quite spread to the recipe’s eight, and I ended up with six instead.  As it happened this was perfect, leaving one cupcake for everyone and enough fridge space for everyone else.  The piping of the icing did not go quite as smoothly as I had envisioned, despite the useful tips in my new book.

Although my basic chocolate logic was correct, the application was problematic. However, this book has proved to be a lovely addition and a source of inspiration for a few upcoming cupcake escapades.