Funfetti Vanilla Cupcakes

Happy Friday!

TGIF indeed

So last night after taking a break from researching this terrible jelly lab report (yes I am writing a lab report on jelly) I stumbled across some excellent uses of sprinkles! Such as funfetti cakes and cupcakes and just generally sprinkles on top of everything. The best ones I found were on Sweetapolita's blog. Oh my goodness! I love her blog. It's like her life was plucked from a home and garden magazine. Her two girls are the two most adorable cakelets (as she calls them) on the planet! Anyway I am now in love with 100s and 1000s. So after class I ran to the supermarket to stock up.

Throwing in a canister of sprinkles is a great way to make vanilla cupcakes a bit more visually appealing. Lot  of people complain that vanilla is boring, I have to disagree. It is my favourite cupcake flavour. You can ice them with almost any icing type and they still taste delicious!

The recipe II used is just a plain vanilla cupcake mixture from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. It makes lovely fluffy vanillary cupcakes. You just can't beat them. Then I just literally poured in a canister of 100s and 1000s into the batter. Super easy. I decided that keeping the icing plain white against the sprinkles would be best and I think they turned out rather well. I have already devoured three of them since they were iced an hour and a half ago.

Ok so what you will need:

40g softened butter
140g castor sugar (castor sugar gives a better texture than regular sugar as it dissolves more)
120g flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla essence (although I am pretty sure I used near to three . . .)
A pinch of salt
A canister of 100s and 1000s


Preheat the oven to 170 degrees

First beat the sugar and butter until it is a nice evenly grained sandy consistency. You want to make sure there are no clumps of butter.

Next, sieve in the flour, baking powder and salt. Beat into the sugar and butter until it is nice and evenly sandy.

Next crack the egg in and splash in the milk. Beat beat beat until the mixture becomes smooth and fluffs up and becomes more voluminous.

Sprinkle time! Pour in about half to three quarters of a canister of 100s and 1000s - depending on how many you want left for the top. Mix those gently in - the colours may start to run so act quickly.

Spoon into 12 cupcake cases (in a muffin tray) and bake for 17-20 minutes or until they are starting to turn that lovely golden colour.

Take them out of the oven, leave to cool.

Make up your icing (lets say 30g butter, 3ish cups icing sugar, a good splash of vanilla, tablespoon of boiling water). Just add more icing sugar or hot water if it is too runny/thick. I don't really follow a recipe for icing. It just happens.

I used a piping bag with a 1M wilton tip on the end (the same for doing roses). I swirled them starting from the outside edge, swirling inwards.

DOUSE them in more sprinkles!

and you are good to go :)

 Sprinkles!

 Sprinkles!

 Sprinkles!

 Sprinkles!

Ok method by pictures:

 Beat your butter and sugar together until it is an even sandy consistency with no butter lumps.

 Sieve in your baking powder and flour

 Beat until a sandy consistency is reached again.

 See how sandy it is?

 Don't forget your pinch of salt.

 Add the milk and egg.

 Beat beat beat until smooth and fluffy :)

 Line your muffin tray.

 See how smooth it is? You can also see air bubbles in the batter.

 Pour in your sprinkles.

 and a few more . . .

 Yay! It looks like a unicorn threw up in my cupcake batter!

 Evenly fill up your cases.

 Pop them in the oven for 17-20 minutes

 and Bam! they come out looking lovely.

 I definately reccommend buying a piping bag and a 1M tip - you can use it for so many icing designs and no matter what, the result will always look good.

 Oh look! there is a rainbow inside! How exciting!

 I may or may not have consumed a few while "writing my report".

So here you have it. The best way to jazz up some vanilla cupcakes. This recipe is nice and cheap to make as you don't need a huge amount of butter, eggs or milk. Excellent! Also makes them kind of healthy . . . until you ice them :)

Time to watch Vampire Diaries now I think :)

Have a good night!

Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Curd Filling

Good afternoon!

Today my father requested some nice pretty cupcakes in order to give to some of the people at work as a thank you treat, Mum said I should make vanilla but I am so over vanilla, I wanted to make something different I could share with you on here. So I went through all my loose recipes that need to be copied into my book and I found a lemon cupcake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery. I have done this one before but I think this time I will cover the tops with nice bright daisies instead of my stock standard rose. These are extra delicious because when you bite in to them a stream of lemon curd flows from the center and onto your taste buds causing a delightful taste sensation.

(You will find out later that I gave up on the daisies haha)

So to get started I made the lemon curd this morning. It is pretty easy. All you need is:

Lemon Curd:
The rind and juice of two large lemons
1 cup sugar
100g butter
2 eggs, beaten

 So first zest the two lemons - I didn't really here since my lemons were ugly and I didn't want black bits in the nice smooth yellow.

 Next I recommend squeezing the lemons over your bowl through a sieve - so it catches all the pips and bits of pulp you don't want.

Next add the cup of white sugar to the bowl and place over a double boiler making sure the water does not touch the bottom of the bowl.

 Now stir to encourage the dissolving of that sugar.

 Next you are going to want to cube your 100g of butter (to increase the surface area for melting) and add it to your juice and sugar mix.

 One must always have a cup of tea on hand.

When the butter has totally melted and everything dissolved you are going to want to grab two eggs . . .

 In a separate bowl whisk the eggs up to break up the yolk . . .

  . . . like this.

 Start stirring the butter, juice and sugar mix and slowly pour in the eggs, make sure you don't stop beating! Otherwise the eggs will scramble.

 Keep stirring for 20-30 minutes until the mixture thickens quite a bit.

See how thick that looks?

 Quality control of course.

 Next, to get rid of the few bits of egg that didn't quite mix and cooked into white blobs, strain the curd through a sieve.

 And there you go, a nice jars worth of lemon curd. Just pop this in the fridge after leaving to cool to room temperature on the bench.


Now for the cupcakes.

 You will need those items above and:

Lemon Cupcakes (from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook)
120g plain flour
150g caster sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
40g unsalted butter (room temperature)
120ml milk
1 egg
(I also added a squeeze of lemon juice for extra lemony ness).

Preheat your oven to bake at 170 degrees C.

Beat the butter and sugar together to a sandy consistency.

 Sieve in the flour, baking powder and zest and beat some more to reach an even sandier consistency.

 Next add the egg milk and beat until smooth.

 A squeeze of lemon for good luck.

 Next line a 12 pan muffin tray with patty cases of your choice.

 Spoon in the mixture until the case is 2/3 full.

 Now pop these in the oven for 16 minutes at 170 degrees or until golden and springy.

 Chris pouncing on the left over scraps of batter on the beaters and in the bowl.

 16 minutes later and they look beautiful!

 Can you tell our oven is hotter at the back?

 Now I popped on a 40-something writing tip on my piping bag, filled my piping back with a spoonful of the lemon curd and then inserted the tip into the cupcake and squeezed, filling the cake with curd.

 Make you you push the tip all the way down.

 Now put your left over curd in a clean jar to store in the fridge, ready for your toast in the morning.

Now for the icing:

I just used a normal butter cream icing but added another squeeze of lemon and a couple of teaspoons of the curd in with it. I was going to make daisies but they weren't working for me today :( I was using a 104 petal tip to make the petals but no luck. I think my icing was the wrong consistency. That or my tip was too big. Anyway I first covered them with icing to make a good base for the daisies.

 My first attempt

 That one isn't too bad, it's just when I covered the whole cake it looked really weird and mono-tone. I think I need to get a couple of bags and tips and make shades of yellow. Hmm aren't daisies white? haha my bad.

 So resentfully I resorted back to roses. Bleh I really wanted cute flowers.

Hmm the back ones look messy. Today was not my day for piping. I may or may not have thrown a tantrum over them resulting in a few of them ending up upside down . . .

So here they are, lemon cupcakes with lemon curd filling. We could only fit 11 in the box so I gave the 12th to Chris and he rated them a "really good" out of ten. Shot Chris.

Anyway I am about to post up what we made for dinner tonight as part of my cheap cooking special so check that out too, corn fritters, nom nom.

See you later alligators!

A Good Day to Bake Chocolate Cake and Vanilla Cupcakes

Good evening once again.

Today my friend Ashleigh (http://kiwigirlskiwiblog.wordpress.com/) and I had a baking date. We decided to make a layered chocolate ruffle cake. There was our first mistake: layered. The cake mixture we used (thinking we would need a lot of it) was massive! Like huge! Turns out the three layers we wanted turned into five . . .

So for fear of a toppling cake that would fit no cake box alive we decided to split it into two and three stacked cakes.Leveling the tops of the cakes was such a pain, I think I will invest in one of those Wilton cake levelers.

 So the three stacked cake was supposed to be this ruffle cake, buuuuuuttt . . . we ran out of icing sugar (as we had already used 1.5kg worth already) and so the icing was a bit too runny (second mistake!) and the ruffles looked like the hillsides of Nelson (sliding down the hill). So that failed. So instead we just iced it. Plain and boring. We had gotten to the point of CBFed and we ended up with this:

Isn't is monstrous? And that is only three layers. I added some glitter on top to make it a wee bit fancy.

Then we wanted to cover up the bottom edge's messiness . . .

So we added a wee bit of ruffle using my mini star nozzle that had icing in it left over from the cupcakes we also made (they shall come in a sec).

Ta daa!! Doesn't that look tidier now.

Ok so what about the other two layers? 

This terrible looking melted, crumby mess went from this:

To this! WIN!

Success I think yes! WINNING!!!! All I did was start by making one rose in the middle of the cake and then just piping adjacent roses until I came to the edge (a rose is piped using a 1M Wilton nozzle and starting in the middle swirling outwards). You can see in some places there are wee incomplete roses. In the gaps in between roses I just piped a curve of icing to cover the base but to also blend in with the surrounding roses. You can also see I did it along the edges too. This was a chocolate cake with a cream cheese icing (odd mix I know). Even though I crumb coated and froze the blasted cakes I still managed to get crumbs in it, also I don't think my base layer was thick enough as you can see the cake through the icing. Sort of like trying to cover a black wall with light pink paint; you need a lot of layers.

Sorry, I am quite into taking photos at the moment. I have a really average point and shoot which is extra basic (hence the cheap price I bought it for). I originally got it so that if I went out to town and dropped it no one would cry over it. Only problem is that I haven't used it in town because I don't go anymore. I am a nana.

The cake recipe we used was really big (it used 3 cups of sugar!) so here is another recipe which tastes exactly the same but has smaller proportions and makes quite a decent cake as it is. The final batter is really runny but never fear, just make sure the bottom piece of baking paper you use to line the base of your spring form tin goes up the sides about three cm or so). 

Mocha Chocolate Cake ( a recipe from Sue!)

Add the ingredients in the order stated below, beating well between each addition.

2 large eggs

1 3/4 cups castor sugar

1/2 cup sunflower oil

1 cup buttermilk (or half and half yoghurt and milk)

1 teaspoon vanilla

then sift in together:

2 cups flour

1/2 cup cocoa

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

Once that is all beaten and smooth add:

1 cup of STRONG black coffee

Pour into a well lined spring form tin and bake at 180 degrees (Celsius!!) for 1 to 1 hour 10 minutes or until a skewer just comes out clean.

Once cool, ice with whatever you want, we usually ice this with a chocolate ganache! :) Ill pop that recipe up another day, Oh the suspense!!

So those cupcakes eh? we ended up making mini ones. Except we didn't expect to make 32 mini ones . .

By the time we got around to icing the cupcakes we had given up (or at least I had - Ashleigh made pretty, tidy swirls) so I just made big star blobs then covered them with random sprinkles. They taste delicious though. We used the Hummingbird Bakery vanilla cupcake recipe.

Vanilla Cupcakes:

40g Butter (softened)

140g castor sugar

120g flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 egg

90ml milk

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

In a bowl, beat the butter, sugar, flour and baking powder until a sandy, but even consistency is reached. Beat the egg into the mixture and beat until smooth. Then add half the milk, beat until combined and then add the rest and repeat. Then add the vanilla (adding extra for good luck :) ) and beat for a few minutes to really make sure the batter is smooth. Oh yeah don;t forget to sieve the dry ingredients first. Spoon into paper cases to 2/3 full and bake at 180 degrees (Celsius!!) for 20-ish minutes or until golden brown and spring back upon touch. Leave to cool and then ice with a plain vanilla, chocolate or other icing of your choice :) This should make about 12 (depending on how big your cases are).

Cool bananas! 

Time for a sleep I think. 

Happy baking!

Purple Velvet Cupcakes

HELLO!!Publish Post

Wow it has been over 2 weeks since I last posted. When you no longer have to study you no longer have to find means of procrastination. Chem went well(ish haha) and food systems went even better (it was a week after chem). Anyway I have been back home in Auckland a week and I am already bored. Casually needing money to buy craft supplies . .

I did however take a wonderful trip to Milly's in Ponsonby. My favourite shop ever. If its kitchen and cooking related they have it. They have a whole cave dedicated to cake decorating. Excellent. So half an hour and a grumpy Chris and $20 later I exited this paradise with a 1M nozzle and some white-violet edible glitter. So worth driving over the bridge haha and scaring myself and Chris and the rest of Auckland's motorists with my driving.

This trip was inspired by my making of these red velvet cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The nozzle I had bought a few weeks ago was too small to make the roses I had wanted on these cupcakes. Never fear, they turned out lovely anyway and were gobbled up in no time at all.

Sorry about the below average quality, I am still using my ipod's camera. Cbf charging my camera batteries . . .

Anyway so here is the messy adventure that is my purple velvet cupcakes . . .

BEAT!

Oh hey! Cookies! Something I just whipped up earlier at the request of my brother, Jack..

Ok so I use the Wilton gel food colouring, which meant that I had to add extra water to the cocoa in order to make a paste. Uhhhg it went EVEYWHERE except my white tshirt luckily. It stuck to the spatula, the spoon, the sides of the bowl. Such a pain. But lovely colour :) So worth it.

Thick paste of despair.

Reliving this sticky purple mess is just painful.

Now it just looks black.

Haha since we didn't have buttermilk (which is a by product of butter production funily enough - i'll give you the food lesson another day) but basically it is a low fat, acidic, bacterially full, lumpy mixture. I substituted it with milk with a tub of plain vanilla yogurt. The yogurt lowers the pH of the milk which is what we want :)

I couldn't resist turning the milk purple . . .

Next I added 150g of plain flour. Mixed in half the milk mixture then half the flour then half the milk then half the flour. Bam. Mixed.

Like my apron? I decided things were getting a bit too splattery for my brother's white tshirt. Time to armour up.

White wine vinegar and baking soda :) Hmm this brings me back to beach volcano building with Dad that and simple acid base chemistry. Now children, what gas is being released?

Mix this in well and beat until smooth.

 The other day I went to the supermarket and found these purple themed cases. Perfect. Hmm they were a bit too small however so the resultant cupcakes were a bit flat - an even greater surface area for which to place icing. hmm :)

Oh No!! what is this?! Left over mixture!! How terrible. I am now forced to make some mini cupcakes . . .

Plus two casual loner cupcakes . . .

Hmm  told you I made a mess . . .

Ta daaa!!!! Clean! Mum and Dad will never know.

And here they are, starting to think colouring them doesn't make much of a difference as the cocoa just drowns out all other colours. However, they do appear purple in the light, lots of light.

Here is the 1M nozzle I bought. If you want to make pretty roses this is the nozzle for you. To learn how to make them check out this tutorial I found. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYy2uiK6T94

My 12 inch piping bag was to narrow at the tip so I had to snip of about half a cm in order to fit the big nozzle.

FIRST ATTEMPT AT THE ROSE! WIN!!!!!!!

Oh arn't they pretty :) Mum will forgive me for baking almost immediately after she sees these.

Wait, ones missing . . .

Fatty  . . .  Here is Jack by the way.

Naawwwwww :) I also sprinkled them with my new glitter - which you probably can't see in this picture but trust me, it makes the roses look all dewy and lovely.

I did some experimenting on the mini cupcakes too.

 Here is the recipe adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook

60g butter softened
150g castor sugar
1 egg
10g cocoa powder
20ml purple food colouring (since I used a gel I added a dollop and a few teaspoons of water)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
120ml buttermilk
150g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
Cream cheese icing

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.

Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and beat until extra fluffy and well incorporated (see the photo above). In a separate bowl make a paste out of the cocoa, food colouring (and water) and vanilla. Add to the egg, sugar, butter mixture. Turn the beater down to slow and add half the buttermilk. beat until well combined then add the sifted flour. Add the rest of the buttermilk then flour. Beat until the mixture is smooooooth. In a small dish mix together the baking soda and vinegar then add to the rest of the batter. Beat this in well. Spoon the mixture into paper cases until two thirds full and bake for 20 minutes or until the sponge bounces back when touched. Once the cupcakes are COOL (very important) ice with a standard cream cheese icing (ask your mum if you are not sure how to make one). Dust with magical fairy glitter and immediately hide from your brother.

This should make 12 large cupcakes.

So that is my morning cupcake (and cookie making) they received an overall 8.5/10 from my brother (quite a score haha).

I also bought a ruffle nozzle . . . so next time you see me I shall have a ruffle cake to show you. Exciting.