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 :).

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!

More of the same - mini vanilla cupcakes with rosewater buttercream

I had a half batch of rosewater buttercream frosting left over in the fridge so thought I'd try Little Betsy Baker's Vanilla Cupcake Recipe again to make mini cupcakes and spend more time playing with my new icing set (mainly star tip 22).

I guess this is obvious, but I was reading the other day on someone's blog that they weigh their cupcakes to get them all exactly the same size. So I had a go at that, but didn't know how much to actually aim for! My tray takes 24 small cupcakes and I initially put 30 grams into each case, but then had a little left over which I shared out amongst them... so I suppose they were more like 32g. And that was slightly too much. They spread out and stuck together, so next time I won't try to squeeze it all into the one pan - lesson learned.

And then I set to work on the actual decorating, which is good fun. I wanted to experiment a little bit so ended up with a varied assortment of little cakes.

As this was the same icing batch from the other day I mostly just had the pale pink colour, but I did keep a little bit without colouring (the occasional pale yellow detail that you can see). I don't mind the pastel shades, but brighter colours would be better for contrast, and I think you really need the icing to be a bit harder if you're going to be piping on top of a base layer.

I like the rosette shape (below centre) better than the traditional swirl (probably because I can't get my swirls very neat just yet).

Vanilla cupcakes with rosewater buttercream icing swirls - success!

The first time I attempted to ice cupcakes with "swirls" I used the wrong kind of icing (a soft cream cheese) and the wrong kind of icing tip (straight and not very wide). So I ended up with a random selection of squiggles and shapes, which were fine (and delicious), but not what I was aiming for.

A little reading suggested that I would do much better with a Wilton 1M star tip and a buttercream icing recipe. So my first step was to go out and buy a Wilton 12-Piece Cupcake Decorating Set (for the princely sum of around $20), still a little dubious about the difference a special tip could make.

I had my vanilla cupcakes ready to go (my first time making these using a recipe from Little Betsy Baker) and I thought they might go nicely with Cupcake Gal's buttercream frosting, using rosewater essence instead of vanilla, and just a tiny bit of red food colouring to get a pretty pale pink. It came out looking like gloriously fluffy pink clouds.

Then I set about the task of actually creating my swirls. And might I just say - the 1M star tip is fantastic! I was very pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it was to decorate each cake. They still look a little clumsy (I positioned the messiest ones furthest from the camera), but overall I was very happy with the results.

They also tasted really good! I think the vanilla cupcake recipe is a keeper - a nice standard flavour to dress up. The buttercream icing itself was a little softer than I would've liked, so I'll have to work on that. Very sweet too, which should maybe be toned down (depending on taste). I'd suggest using just 1 teaspoon of rosewater essence, or maybe even just 1/2 a teaspoon and see how it tastes.

Progress

Mixmaster acquired - check.

Vanilla cupcakes baked and ready for decorating in the morning - check.

Not a bad day.