Ginger and Toffee, Lemon and Lime

So just an update on a couple of different cupcakes I've made recently.

Firstly I made Ginger and Toffee cupcakes which involved using a few spices within the sponge for the ginger part and then making some toffee/caramel to go into butter icing. I used a recipe from the UK TV food website, however I adapted a couple of the parts of the recipe as I read some reviews who had tried making them, who said they wanted to add more spices to the sponge to add more flavour.

Ingredients:

150g unsalted butter

150g soft brown sugar

3 eggs

150g self raising flour

1 1/2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cinnamon

pinch of grated nutmeg

1 tbsp full-fat milk

1 tsp baking soda (I would add this as they didn't rise very much!!)

For the butter icing:

200g butter

50g soft brown sugar

3 tbsp full fat milk

200g icing sugar

- Preheat the oven 160C (fan)/180C

- Cream together butter and sugar and light and fluffy

- Sift flour together with spices

- Gradually mix the eggs and creamed butter and sugar alternating with the flour to stop the mix from curdling

- Stir through the milk

- Divide the mixture into baking cases

- Put in oven for 20-25 minutes

For the frosting:

- Melt 50g of butter in a pan with the brown sugar and cook over a low heat

- Add 2tbsp milk until it forms a thick glossy toffee sauce

- Leave to cool

-In a large mixing bowl beat butter until smooth, then add icing sugar

- Add the toffee sauce and stir through until fully mixed.

Once cupcakes are out of the oven and cool, pipe the icing on to the cupcakes. Add some ground cinnamon on top as decoration.

(The icing went a bit wonky!)

If I was to improve anything on this recipe I would add baking soda to make them rise more as they hardly rose at all. For the brown sugar I used light brown sugar, next time I would use dark brown sugar to give it a richer taste. I would also make more toffee sauce to add to the icing, as the the taste wan't strong enough!

My boyfriend absolutely loved these cupcakes (even if they were slightly flawed!). He thought these were my best yet, so I would definitely recommend this recipe.

A few days later I made some Lemon and Lime cupcakes. I just thought this would be a nice flavour combination. I just used a Primrose Bakery lemon cupcake recipe for the sponge. I then just substituted lemon for lime in the lemon butter icing recipe.

These flavours did work however the lime slightly overpowered the lemon sponge. still yummy though!

Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

I had a bunch of banana's hanging around for just a bit longer than I would have liked this week and thought what can I do with these that isn't just a banana bread?! I thought why not just put them into some cupcakes, along with some chocolate to satisfy my chocolate cravings!

I used just a basic vanilla bake recipe but added 4 mashed banana's and about two handfuls of chocolate chips!

For the icing it was just a standard chocolate buttercream.

I had bought some silver glitter flakes that I wanted to try out which you will probably JUST be able to see in the photo's below. However I can't say that I was too impressed with them. I always think that cakes look so lovely with glitter on them but I havn't managed to find the right type of glitter yet! I looked at the spray on shimmer glitter but wasn't sure it would look right or how easy it is to apply? If anyone has some good recommendations they would be more than welcome!

I'm really loving Instagram at the moment so some of my pictures have been taken on my Iphone 4 and then edited in Instagram. I've just purchased a new camera so I can hopefully take more professional photo's of my cupcakes!

First Order

So it got to Tuesday, the BIG day for my very first order (so to speak) fro my Mother-In-Law's birthday. As I said in my previous post, I was baking 12 Flake Bake and 12 Oreo cupcakes. I started early enough so that at least if anything went wrong I would have enough time to start again, so I started at about 2.30pm! Surprisingly everything was going smoothly, both sets of cakes had risen perfectly and so I was just waiting for them to cool enough so I could do the icing.

 I had made this icing a few times so thought there couldn't be too much that could go wrong. Well....from the offset it wasn't particularly going to plan. I had slightly over-whipped the cream so it was a bit more of a lumpier consistency. I managed to ice a couple of the cupcakes with it, but the piping bag was becoming really wet and slippery where it was seeping through. Then there was a lot of air bubbles which meant I couldn't pipe it consistently onto the cupcake. It ended up being a disaster!!

Thankfully I had bought just enough ingredients to completely start again. NO over-whipping this time!!

It had got to 6.30pm and after a kitchen filled with plumes of icing powder and spatters of icing everywhere I finally managed to ice all of the cupcakes and safely get them into their boxes.

99 Flake Bake

Sorry I havn't posted in a couple of weeks, I've not had the best of weeks due to a stomach bug however I am feeling fighting fit again & have already been doing some more baking! Since I made my Oreo cupcakes my boyfriends Mum asked if I could make some for her birthday. She has also asked if I could do some sort of Flake cupcakes too (12 of each). I thought no problem! However, it has now loomed to two days before I have to bake them and nerves have got the better of me. She works in my old secondary school and is going to take them in for her birthday. Hence, I have had a baking session today just to do a bit of a practice!

For the 99 Flake Bake I am using the same recipe for the Oreo icing (just without the Oreos) and using a vanilla cupcake base.

In this photo I have used a chocolate base, just because I wanted to do some strawberry icing on the vanilla bases this week!

On the actual day I hope to have them looking a bit more uniform.

I then made some vanilla cupcakes and decided to make some vanilla and strawberry butter icing. The actual cupcakes came out slightly browner than usual which was a bit annoying!! Think I just needed to turn the oven down! :/

 I wanted to attempt piping roses with two tinted icing. I think the two tints worked well, however I think I should have used a large nozzle to get more definition for the rose. Plus the icing was slightly runnier than I would have usually liked it. I just added a bit of strawberry jam to flavour the pink part of the icing which worked nicely :)

Hopefully my next attempt will be better as I always think the rose piping looks amazing! If anyone has any tips out there to make it easier be my guest!!