Bye Bye Australia Cupcakes

Dear blog,

It's been a while. A really long while. But since I lasted posted I have moved to Japan, so I'm hoping you'll cut me some slack.

These are the cupcakes I made for our farewell party.

The pink ones had Turkish delight chunks and rosewater icing. The green ones were melon flavoured with gold glitter (because lovely friends had given me melon oil and edible glitter and I wanted to try it all out before I left the country!).

I also made gluten and dairy free chocolate and strawberry cupcakes. Because they're still awesome.

I have been baking in Japan, but you'll have to wait until next time for that. Let's face it - this is progress!

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 :)

Turkish Delight Cupcakes

Full-time work isn't doing much for my rate of blogging, but fear not - the baking continues.

Earlier in the year my friend Nicole and I were discussing how awesome turkish delight cupcakes would surely be, so I decided to make some. I couldn't find a specific recipe, but figured I couldn't go too wrong.

I used my regular vanilla cupcake recipe, but substituted rosewater for the vanilla essence, and added 4-5 chunks of chopped up turkish delight (just the regular kind from the supermarket, with chocolate coating) to each cupcake before baking them.

I really like the look of the chunks baked into the cake. Texture-y.

I made some larger muffin-sized cakes too, utilising my turkish-delight-appropriate pink patty pans.

As good as the cakes looked in their natural state, I still wanted to cover them with sweet rosewater buttercream to make sure the turkish delight flavour won the day. Start by adding just a little rosewater to the buttercream, and keep going until you decide it has reached its highest potential for awesomeness (this doesn't necessarily mean adding very much - but taste it before you slap it onto your cute little cakes!).

I only added a little bit of food colouring to the mix so the colours don't contrast very well (especially in photos), but I was happy with the soft-ish look to go with the very girly flavour.

The vanilla cake carries it off nicely, and the chewy chunks hidden away inside are my favourite part. Having put these together without a lot of thought, I happily conclude that you can't really go wrong with turkish delight cupcakes!