Whoopie!

So I'd been seeing lots of people pinning Whoopie Pie recipes and after the seventy eleven zillionth pin showing up on my pinterest page I thought I'd give it a whack.
Unfortunately I picked up the wrong flour tub when I was getting my ingredients together, and instead of my good Doves Farm gluten-free blend I used the '00' Dopia pasta flour. D'oh. The worst thing was I didn't realise until AFTER I'd made the pies and the marshmallow filling.
They looked and smelled lovely, but instead of being soft and cakey they were dry and crumbly.
Mark this one down for 'try again' (this time with the right flour!)

Sugar, Sugar

Those of you who follow me on twitter will know that I went to a beginners sugarcraft workshop a few weeks ago. It was a one day class in the back room in cakebox.ie in Dun Laoghaire. Below are the fruits of my labor.

Sugarpaste roses. These were gorgeous when I left the shop, but getting bumped around on the DART and LUAS in a box too shallow for the height of the cake they got a bit mushed by the time I got home.

Fully frilled cake - actually it's not a cake. Under that 2 kgs of sugarpaste is a styrofoam form. However everything *on* it is edible. Oh wait, except for the yellow ribbon on the bottom, ok except for THAT, everything is edible. I forgot to take a closeup photo of the frill which is probably for the best as it would also show my woeful piping.

Baby Booties - Nomnomnom-what? sorry? were you saying something? *wipes sugarpaste off face*

Sleeping baby - it's supposed to be a baby, but eh. Oh well at least if I ever have to make a Wallace and Gromit cake I've got it sorted.

Chocolate Cola Cake

January 27th was National Chocolate Cake day, what nationality I'm not sure, America probably, but it takes very little prompting to bake a chocolate cake right? I decided to try a chocolate cola cake using the recipe from the BBC as a base but modified slightly to make it gluten free. I was using plain gluten free flour so added xanthan gum to help with binding and baking powder for rising.

Ingredients
250g/9oz gluten-free flour
300g/10½oz golden caster sugar
3 heaped tbsp cocoa
generous pinch bicarbonate of soda
250g/9oz butter
250ml/8½fl oz cola drink
125ml/4¼fl oz milk
2 eggs, beaten
5ml/ltsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp xanthan gum
1 heaped tsp gluten free baking powder

For the frosting
100g/3½oz butter
2 tbsp cola drink
2 tbsp cocoa
200g/7oz icing sugar

Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa, xantham gum, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl.
Heat the cola and butter over a low heat until melted but NOT hot.
Combine with the dry ingredients and milk, eggs and vanilla.

At this point the batter is EXTREMELY watery, this is ok.

Pour the batter into a cake pan and bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean at 180C\350F. I have a fan oven so I take the temperature down 20 degrees to 160C.

When the cake is out of the oven heat the butter, cola and cocoa over a low heat and then whack it up to boiling. When the mixture is bubbling (it will get thicker) pour over the icing sugar and beat until smooth. Pour over the cake while still warm and let it all cool in the pan.

I baked the cake in a 9 inch square pan (the original recipe calls for a 9 inch round pan) and while the cake was fine I found that I could have done with a bit more frosting. I think next time I'll add half again to the measurements for the frosting.

Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of the finished cake, it was amazingly moist and tasty and it didn't last very long at all. I brought it as dessert for Sunday dinner, but most of it was eaten before dinner. Here's a pic of the empty pan.

update: halloween cupcakes

yeah, yeah, only 3 months later. But I actually found some pics of the finished Red Velvet cupcakes I made for halloween. Here they are in all their finished gory (glory)

Princess Peach

'Hey' I texted my sister on Monday. 'Do you want me to bake the kids birthday cakes? Let me know!'
I didn't catch the reply until Monday evening.

'Yeah, that would be great, C wants a princess cake, I'm having a tea party for her on Wednesday'

!!!!!!

Which left me one day to bake and design an appropriately pink and pretty princess cake. yoiks!
Tuesday morning found me up an early down at the top of Grafton st in the cake shops getting pink icing, pink food colouring and basically any other pink thing I could find. I'd lain in bed that morning doing google image searches for 'pink princess' and I had decided on either Princess Aurora or Princess Peach. It would depend on how skillful I was with a tracing wheel really.

The cake baking part of the process didn't go so well, the first cake was pure dough when it cooled. The second cake worked out and the third cake (supposed to be the next layer) fell to pieces when I took it out of the pan while it was still too warm. doh! AT this point I just said fuck it, and cut the one cake I had in half to make a sandwich. It was only a small tea party for family so I didn't need a full 9 inch square.

To fill up the space on the cake board I cut out some extra daisies, and a couple of butterflies and embossed the letters of my nieces name in pink stars. As you can see I went with Princess Peach - although her lips are black as I forgot to get pink edible marker and I didn't trust my free hand painting skills.

The niece was thrilled with the cake, luckily 6 year olds are easily impressed. I didn't get any shots of the cake when it was cut, but yes of COURSE the cake was pink - the only part of the cake that wasn't pink was the buttercream in the sandwich.

Next week I have to start the prep for my nephews birthday cake. HINT: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Lemon Bites

Where do I start with these things? They should be easier than candy because there isn't any special temperatures or fiddly syrups that can burn. However, whether I was just doing too much I don't know, but I managed to miss the part of the recipe that said to grease a 9x9 pan and instead I threw everything into a round pizza pan. This resulted in the 'lemon bars' (because that is what they were supposed to be) cooking in half the time and turning out about half as thick as they should have been. I won't even get started on the blinding pain of lemon juice squirting in my eyes when I was squeezing enough lemons to make up 1 (american) cup of fresh lemon juice.
When the pan came out of the oven I was tempted to throw it all in the bin and try again, but it actually tasted really good, so I dumped a load of icing sugar on top and cut them into little 'bites' for finger food. Next time I'll be sure to use the correct pan size, but at least now I know that if I do mess up these little things are easy to recover and serve up.

Apple Cider Caramels

This was my first attempt at making caramels and I messed it up. The recipe said to keep the sugar syrup on medium high heat, but the candy thermometer wasn't going anywhere near the required temperature. After some thought a bit of googling (all while the syrup was bubbling away) I crossed my fingers and whacked the heat up to high. Finally the thermometer started to creep up to the proper temperature, but it took a good 30 minutes of boiling to get there.

Once the syrup had cooled enough to hold its shape I took a knife to it and started cutting it into bars which made it MUCH easier to cut into squares once it had cooled completly. What makes these caramels a little different from other caramels is the apple cider that was reduced down from 2 cups to 1/3 cup before I even started making the syrup. I'd like to try this with a good cider or apple juice to increase the apple flavour.

Once I got the caramels cut into squares, which actually involved leaning heavily on a knife and waiting for the caramel to break, I wrapped them in wax paper twists. These things are really good but you need to suck them a bit to soften them up - during which time as some friends of mine found out - you won't be able to speak for a few minutes.

Daisy Cupcakes

I got bored a couple of weeks ago, there was no one around and nothing to do and it was a crappy horrible rainy day out so I decided to do some baking. Nothing too exciting after all it was only me going to be eating whatever I produced and unless I want to turn into a telly tubby I didn't want to be eating a dozen buttercream topped cakes all by myself. So I went for these simple little cuties. I tried a different (easier) vanilla sponge recipe, still with the gluten-free flour blend which mixed and baked faster than previous attempts and topped it off with a lemon icing glaze and some daisies cut from leftover navy and yellow fondant.

Red Velvet Halloween

The sister offered to make dinner for the halloween\bank holiday \ it's not your birthday weekend. I wasn't planning on making any cakes because you know, birthday girl bringing her own cake smacks of patheticness. But once again I got bored and I had some spare fondant in the cupboard AND I'd been messing around on Pinterest and saw a couple of people had pinned wee little halloween models that would be fun to try and make my own versions of that. Well it was either that or drink myself into a depressive anti-birthday stupor. So I got out my food colouring and made up some wee pumpkins (with tiny green stems!) and then using my navy food colouring I kneaded up some more for tiny little witches hats. Then since I was still bored I made up some tiny ghosts, it took me a couple of goes to get good faces, but a toothpick dipped in navy food colouring sorted that out.

Of course all these cute little halloweenies demanded to be put on top of some cakes and since it was halloween I thought I'd try a recipe with blood red sponge, and what is better than a red velvet cake? Since I knew mum was going to be eating the cakes I made them with gluten-free flour and dyed the buttercream frosting orange. The models looked cute on top of the buttercream but I'm not sure the orange buttercream went well with the lovely deep colour of the red velvet. Oh, and also I forgot to take any photos of the final product, so you'll just have to imagine what it looked like.

Blue Stars

My friends and I all love cake - it's like crack to us. So when I and D announced they were having a welcome party for their new baby it was a perfect opportunity for some baking and messing around with buttercreams. I didn't have time to get down to the shops so really the only food colour I had in the house was a couple of bottles of Squires Kitchen, one navy and one yellow. Which was handy as I had some navy and yellow cupcake papers.
I made up a batch of vanilla sponge - although I was a bit apprehensive about the recipe because I was using a gluten-free flour blend that I hadn't used before. But beginners luck or whatever it was the cupcakes baked beautifully soft and light. I'd made up the buttercream a couple of days previous and let it sit in the fridge to amalgamate or whatever - buttercream always seems to work better when it's been in the fridge overnight or for a couple of days. Piped onto the cakes it actually worked well, previous to this I'd used a syringe for piping and that always just results in the frosting spilling over the top of the syringe and all over my clothes. This time I tried a piping bag which was stiff and a pain in the arse to clean but it was easier to control. I dyed some fondant navy, cut out some stars from and waalaa some lovely cupcakes fit for a welcoming party for a little boy.

Chocolate Butterflies

It was my mothers birthday this week and as it fell on a weekday we gathered on the weekend to wish her a happy birthday. I made some gluten-free cupcakes - twice. The first batch I baked on Saturday night turned out like rubber, the tops burnt black and the bottom was overcooked rubber eggs. It was the second time I'd tried this recipe and the first time the cakes were fantastic, I don't know what happened this time round. So Sunday morning found me awake at 8 and running down to the shop to get more eggs to try again. I made the chocolate butterflies and the buttercream during the week so that was all ready to go. The butterflies took a bit of work as my piping skills aren't the best, but I think they worked out ok. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me so only got some shots of the finished product with my iphone.

I coloured the buttercream purple - or at least it was supposed to be purple. I'd bought some Squires Kitchen 'bluebell' liquid colour as I wanted a good deep colour but when I opened the bottle it exploded all over my hands - it's still sitting on my sink where it is leaking slowly down the drain. Because of the food colouring disaster I ended up mixing some blue and red 'Dr. Oetker' colouring I had in the cupboard, which mixed to a sort of pale lilac colour

instead. For the butterflies I created a 'butterfly wing' template and traced it onto wax paper, then piped the melted chocolate around the pattern. As a note to anyone who wants to try this, it's best to wait for the chocolate to cool a little as if it is too hot it will just drip from the piping bag like water. But they do say the best way to learn is to try, try and try again.

I put the cakes together when I got to my mums, rather than decorating them at home and hoping they wouldn't get banged around on Dublin Bus. Despite being a first attempt and with questionable piping skills the cakes went down a bomb. My niece and nephew spied them the minute they came in the door,. although when they did finally get their hands on them they licked off the icing and left the cake. Kids eh, I could've served them up the rubber cakes and they'd not have known the difference!