Chocolate Truffles for Valentine's Day

I'm not particularly fussed on Valentine's Day, but it was fun to make sweets with friends today :). We had a go at chocolate truffles, since that's something we could easily do together and it allows for some creativity (sort of).

I made up the truffle mix in advance since it needed to chill for at least a couple of hours before handling. It was really simple - just bring 100mL of thick cream to the boil, pour it over 200 grams of chocolate (I used dark chocolate chips), stir until smooth, and add any desired flavouring before chilling.

I based my cream to chocolate ratio on this recipe for Mint Chocolate Truffles, and made 2 batches - one with about 1 tablespoon of peppermint essence (the recipe states less, but I went with commenters suggestions) and the other with just 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence.

For coating we had cocoa, icing sugar, dessicated coconut, some pretty sprinkles, and caramel cookie crumbs. It was rather a messy process rolling the mix out into balls, so there was a lot of hand washing going on, and many paper towels used!

But the results were actually more impressive than I had expected :) I got a few kinds of candy cups and some plastic containers at the 100 yen (~dollar) store and they were a good fit. I have plenty left over for future attempts too!

Here are my partners in chocolatey crime. They did rather a good job.

We also made some banana and chocolate chip cupcakes for good measure, and they came out nice and light (well, except for the chocolate part). To the basic recipe we added about 3/4 cup of chocolate chips and it made around 18 regular sized cupcakes which needed around 25 minutes in the oven.

Finally we got to decorating them with whipped cream and leftover truffle coatings. Waste not, want not.

And there ends a very sugary Valentine's Day.

Chamomile Cupcakes with Sneaky Peppermint

I'm not very creative with my baking choices at the moment. I first made chamomile cupcakes last year (original post here) and just recently I kept thinking I should make them again.

Of course, if you're going to bake cupcakes you need someone to eat them, and I finally saw my opportunity on Saturday when we invited friends over for dinner.

Just before the teabag massacre...

I bought a box of chamomile tea, but it wasn't until I had already starting putting ingredients together that I read the label more carefully to see that it was called "Relax Chamomile" and it was actually a mixture of chamomile (>50%) and peppermint!

Thankfully peppermint is delicious, and these turned out fine. The little pepperminty aftertaste was actually kind of refreshing.

They look a bit grainier with the "Relax" tea mix, but they were still nice and light. I'll have to try some other herbal teas and see how they come out. :)

Choc Mint Oreo Cupcakes

I've made these before, but I thought they looked especially cute this time.

Partly because they were accompanied by a playing child. And then partly because I put some into a cupcake box.

I think it's extra hard to make cupcakes look bad when they're packaged in white. (Hence the fact that these now appear at the header of this blog!)

I'm concentrating on presentation here, but just in case you actually want to make these: make a chocolate cake batter, distribute in cupcake wells, stick an Oreo (or similar) in the top of each cupcake before baking, top with a little piped peppermint butter cream. Devour.

Playing catchup - caramel, banana, peach, choc mint and vanilla

Once you've found some recipes that you like, it's inevitable that they will be repeated! Here are some of my recent baked goods. (This is actually a sneaky mixed-up blog post to make me feel like I've caught up!)

Delicious caramel mudcake. The obvious option for when you're out of white sugar and too lazy to go and get some :p

I tried out my basket weave icing tip for the first time. This icing was too soft so you can't see the ridges, but I can see the potential.

I made banana cupcakes for work to farewell a colleague.

These are peach and cinnamon cupcakes, using the leftover cream cheese icing from the banana cupcakes. Icing keeps pretty well in the fridge so I often use the same icing a couple of times in a row to avoid wasting any.

This batch is chocolate wacky cake with mint Nuttelex icing - made for a friend whose little boy can't have eggs or dairy. The icing doesn't hold its shape as well, but still tastes fine.


Finally, a batch of vanilla with a mish-mash of icing flavours and colours.


My most reliable decoration methods are swirls and solid colour with a little star, so no doubt you'll continue seeing these. Hopefully over the Christmas break I'll get a chance to try some new things too :).

Mint chocolate cupcakes (with extras)

"Mum Goodwin's Chocolate Cake" (from Julie Goodwin's book Our Family Table) makes a nice adaptable chocolate cake base. And I find it kind of fascinating that it tastes so good when it doesn't actually contain any chocolate!

You don't add the cocoa and water mixture into the batter until the final mixing stage, so you get to see it go from what looks like a vanilla cake to suddenly very definitely chocolate!

A word of caution - if you make the full recipe as written into cupcakes you get around 40 little cakes out of it! So since this first run I've taken to halving it and getting the more respectable number of around 20, which you could stretch to an even 2 dozen if you made them a little on the light side.

It was a Friday night and I was feeling experimental so I put strawberry jam in the centre of some of the cupcakes.


In others I put little mint chocolate logs. I didn't realise until after baking that these were, sadly, a bit on the chewy side, but it still added an extra bit of pepperminty flavour.


I pressed Oreo cookies into the top of some of the cupcakes, because you can't really go wrong with the chocolate cake and Oreo pairing.

I tried out a "marshmallow icing" trick that I'd read of on a blog ages ago. When the cupcakes were nearly baked, I took them out and placed a marshmallow on top of each one, then finished baking them. Finally I put them under the grill for a few minutes to brown them a little... but these turned out to be a bit of a mess! Not at all how I imagined they would go, but maybe I baked the marshmallows too long, and they tasted fine anyway.

I had been meaning to make peppermint icing for a very long time, and finally I did it. Yum! Just add peppermint essence to your buttercream instead of vanilla or rosewater.


I enjoyed adding random extras to my cakes, but these basic swirls of peppermint on chocolate definitely looked the classiest.

I added just a dob of icing to the ones with jam or Nutella baked in (did I mention Nutella? I didn't end up eating one of them, but Nutella can't really fail as far as I'm concerned).

This chocolate cake recipe is going on my list of staple bases, and now I have 3 standard buttercream flavours (vanilla, rosewater and peppermint) to mix and match with :)