Operation Cupcake

Ever seen something that just looked really out of place? Like, say, a box of cupcakes in a war zone? If not, check this out (to see the related text, or in case the banner photos move, click on "Operation Cupcake" at the lower left of the screen).

Over the 2010 holiday season US gourmet cupcake bakery Georgetown Cupcake delivered 10,000 cupcakes to troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wow.

Found via Cupcakes Take the Cake.

Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Swirl Cupcakes

Cream cheese and chocolate chips - never a bad way to start anything. This is the beginnings of chocolate chip cheesecake swirl cupcakes, another of Betty Crocker's creations from the Big Book of Cupcakes.

This fizzy mess (reminiscent of rabies froth if you want to think of it like that) is what you get when you add baking soda to the vinegar in your cake mix. Bubbly.


With filling and cake batter prepared, it's time for cupcakes.


The recipe, which incidentally you can find in full here, says to fill one third of the cupcake well with batter, spoon in filling and then top with more batter. Which, I must say, does not promote any kind of cheesecake "swirl" as the recipe name suggests. The cupcakes you end up with following the recipe don't look much like the photo that they display with the recipe! Next time I will attempt some kind of swirling to make my cupcakes look a bit grander.

Monkey seemed to like them anyway. The main con is that they need to be stored in the fridge because of the cream cheese.

But look inside...


To make your cupcake extra awesome, heat it up in the microwave for 10-15 seconds just before you devour it. It gets all gooey and fantastic.

Heart Cookies (any kind will do :)

So Bakerella gave me a cute cookie idea to try (here's her post).

That's right. Squish your cookie dough into a heart shaped silicone muffin pan. It should work for basically any cookie mix I think, but beware of sticky bits - I was experimenting with whether I could put the jersey caramel on the bottom (as the underside seemed to come out with a more defined heart shape), but the caramels got all gooey and stuck to the silicone a bit. The topside is a better option.


Same old caramel cookies. Just a little bit different. And without the annoyance of cookie cutters :)

Banana Walnut Bread

Domestic Cowboy started a new job today so I got a bit wifely on the weekend and baked some banana bread for our work lunches. Banana Walnut Bread to be precise.

It starts out kinda ugly (especially with the flash reflecting off the bowl!).

And it ends up... well, I guess still kinda ugly. But it looks a lot more edible like this :)

A friend shared this recipe with me, and it comes from Janelle Bloom's book "Fast, Fresh and Fabulous." It must be one of her staples, because it also appears on her website's recipe page (just search for "Banana Walnut Bread" or scan down a little :).

The version that my friend wrote out for me (thanks Gemma!) suggests sprinkling the cake with a tablespoon of raw sugar just before baking. I didn't have any raw sugar, so used brown sugar instead, which gave this particular loaf a speckly, tiger-bread-ish look.


This is so good served warm with a little butter/margarine! And not nearly as bad for you as cake. It does contain half a cup of brown sugar (+ any that you sprinkle on top), but no butter in the mix itself - what you choose to spread it with is probably the least healthy part!

Janelle herself spruiks it as "low in fat but high in flavour. Great for lunchboxes or toasted for breakfast or an after school snack." Hear, hear, Janelle. Yum.

Ambition

When I grow up I want to take beautiful photos like Joy the Baker.

In the meantime I might have to try this Strawberry Cucumber Smoothie that she posted about. The combination sounds oddly appealing, like it would be fresh and invigorating. Or, you know, at least a pretty colour.

Caramel Mudcake Birthday

I suppose it's semi-awkward, but I nevertheless enjoyed making my own birthday cake. I decided it was time to prove that I actually CAN make a full-size cake, although I don' think it comes out as pretty as cupcakes would. (I like how they're little and cute.) But it was my birthday, so I had to inject some maturity (*cough*) into my birthday cake.

I blogged the recipe for this caramel mudcake and icing a while back in cupcake form. It's just the same here, except you bake it for the actual suggested time (like a grown-up :p).

A bit rough around the edges. I suppose I should have somehow make the icing thicker so it didn't ooze off the sides so much. Or just put on less icing. Ideally, I suppose, I would have just iced the top and let dainty little caramel rivers drip down the sides. But I wanted icing all over it, so a little bit of pooling around the bottom was inevitable.

Even though I made it I still got to blow the candles out.

I even got to cut it. I hereby declare that this cake adequately serves 16 people... after a big pizza/pasta lunch. Birthday!

Double Chocolate Turkish Delight Cookies

Like chocolate cookies? Chocolate chips? Turkish delight? Why not combine all of these elements to make an epic double chocolate turkish delight cookie? I did!

Find a double chocolate cookie recipe (by "double chocolate" I just mean one that makes chocolate flavoured cookies with chocolate chips in them) and add about an equal amount of turkish delight as chocolate chips. Or more, or less... whatever you feel like. I cut the turkish delight into fairly small pieces and covered them in a little icing sugar so that they didn't stick together too badly (although I can think of much worse things than finding a big hunk of turkish delight in your chocolate chip cookie!).

I wish I had photos that adequately captured the gooey insides of these cookies, but alas, they were eaten too quickly to be well documented. You'll have to make some of your own if you want to see inside.

Serve them warm and watch them disappear before your very eyes :)

Healthy cupcakes... is this possible?

The answer to that question is... probably not. Not cupcakes that fit my definition of what a cupcake must be. If it's healthy then maybe it's a muffin or... something else.

So I guess these are "something else." For a cupcake-esque healthy-ish snack idea, check out this post from the blog Mom's Deal of the Day - Fruity Frozen Yoghurt Cups! I might just have to give this a try sometime. If you beat me to it please leave your comments below to inform the rest of us :)

This post found via the very cool and very cupcakey Cupcakes Take the Cake.

Soda Cupcakes

As I mentioned in my previous post, my recent afternoon tea did not consist just of Strawberry-Cream Cheese cupcakes (as good as they were).

There were also Soda Cupcakes.

Again, these are out of Betty Crocker's Big Book of Cupcakes. You can find the recipe for Orange Soda Cupcakes here, as part of a book preview on Google Books. I made half using orange soft drink and the other half using Vanilla Coke. Both tasted fine, but the orange worked better. The coke flavour was not very pronounced.

I think I'll keep trying other flavours. Lemonade might be good. Raspberry drink? Or Ribena even? I have already disgusted a few people by suggesting that I might try making Sarsaparilla cupcakes so I won't be offended if you think any of my other flavour ideas are awful. (Sars is not just for old people!)

Instead of just dusting with icing sugar I decided to up the fizz factor and use sherbet. This seems to work best if you mix it in with a little icing sugar, both to reduce the acidity (I was concerned someone would inhale deeply and choke on sherbet... but I'm probably just paranoid) and also because the sherbet seems to melt away and get oddly frothy if it warms up in the heat of the day.

There you have it. Fizz in a cake.

Strawberry-Cream Cheese Cupcakes

It was so nice to have a week off work over Christmas/New Year. Time to relax and do whatever. I organised an afternoon tea with friends so that I "had" to do some baking.

This is another delight from Betty Crocker's Big Book of Cupcakes - Strawberry-Cream Cheese Cupcakes.

You start with a yellow cake base, add a little square of cream cheese and spoon in a little jam... bake to produce amazingness (<-- anyone who has tasted these cupcakes knows that amazingness is, in fact, a real word).

I was mildly concerned that the jam would bubble and explode and go everywhere. But it didn't. The cupcakes greedily gobbled up the filling as they baked. Less so the mini cupcakes, but that's probably because I gloriously overfilled them.

Now. Cream cheese icing. And swirl.

If you've forgotten the joy of strawberries, you need to remember. Here's something to jog your memory.

A-mazing.

We also devoured other cool stuff, but that will have to wait till next time. Did I mention that I enjoyed my time off work? Happy new year :)