Cupcake fairy cake

Its been an exciting few days with the birth of my sisters new baby, the New Zealand Breakers winning the NBL basketball final and of course you can't forget the royal wedding.  I have been busy as well baking a few birthday cakes.  This 8" cake is for a little girl who is turning four and was having a fairy themed birthday.  I made the cake inspired from her invitations and am pretty happy with how it turned out.  It is a chocolate mud cake with butter cream frosting.

Apple Pie Cupcakes

My love of baking stems from a very early age when I would spend holidays in the kitchen with my Great Grandma helping her make apple pie.  She would always let me make my own little pie with her left over crust.  I can still taste my own little homemade pie and how proud of it I was.  I think thats why I love having my daughter help me with my baking now. Over the years I have made many pies and when my husband and I were dating I impressed him with my apple pie.  For some reason or another I have not made one since.  My husband is convinced I tricked him into thinking he would have a life of homemade pies.  One day I will start making them again but for now he will have to live with cupcakes.  Its a hard life for him.

For this reason and because im into apples this week I thought I would mix a cupcake with an apple pie.  I found inspiration from the blog site Annie's Eats: http://annies-eats.net/2008/09/26/apple-pie-cupcakes/
I love her idea of cutting out a cone shape from the cupcake with a paring knife and putting apple pie filling into it.  I then used a combination of different recipes to create my own apple pie cupcake combination.  For the cupcake recipe I used a brown sugar and cinnamon cupcake and replaced a third of the butter with applesauce to give it a more apple flavor.  For the filling I found an AMAZING apple pie filling (and I do mean amazing).  This recipe is for a huge amount of apples so that you can freeze a large amount of the filling but I simply scaled the recipe down to the amount of apples I had on hand.  To do this change the number of servings you need and Allrecipes will do the calculation for you.  For the icing I used my buttercream icing and added cinnamon and nutmeg to it.  I then made little apples out of pastry and brushed melted butter and cinnamon and sugar on them and then baked them in the oven for 180 degrees C for 10 minutes.

There really isn't too much to say about these cupcakes other than WOW.  These are good.  I may be inspired to make pies again after these.  (Do not tell my husband I said this though as he may get his hopes up!) Its a very good thing I am giving these away because I might be waking in the middle of the night for a midnight snack.

These cupcakes are going to a couple that my husband and I have gotten to know in the last couple of years.  The husband has been hugely involved in organizing my husbands hockey team which is a big commitment on his part and also a huge commitment from his wife.  They have had a roller coaster of a year and I thought that these cupcakes were long overdue.

Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Recipe:
75g butter softened
50g applesauce (if you do not have applesauce you can replace it with butter)
3/4 c brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder, sifted
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, sifted
1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C.  Cream butter, brown sugar and vanilla for about 10-12 minutes with an electric mixer.  Add applesauce and beat for another 2-3 minutes.  Add the eggs one at a time beating well after each addition.  Add the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and milk and beat until just combined.  Spoon into 12 cupcake liners and bake for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

For the stewed apples recipe go to: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Apple-Pie-Filling/Detail.aspx?prop31=1

For the buttercream frosting add 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg to my previously listed vanilla buttercream icing.

Oatmeal Apple Cookies

Day five of rain and we are all feeling a little housebound.  Today was definitely a day for baking as there was no way I was venturing out with my two babes in this weather.  After all the chocolate and unhealthy goodness over Easter weekend I was not really prepared to make what I was really wanting to make.  So a healthy cookie I went in search of.  I'm on an apple kick this week so when I came across Oatmeal Apple Cookies I knew these would be worth a try.

These biscuits are full of oats, raisins, apples and even walnuts if you choose.  To make them healthier I replaced half of the shortening with homemade applesauce.  If you don't have shortening available you can replace it with vegetable oil.  They were super easy to make and looking at the recipe I decided it was worth the risk of doubling this batch as these could be good cookies to have on hand frozen.

My first impression of these cookies were that they were more of a muffin top then a cookie.  They were very chewy and had a really nice cinnamon and raisin flavor with the nice surprise of apple. Personally though I am not crazy about them.  In fact I was a little disappointed.  I think I would prefer less oats and maybe more flour next time as I think I would have preferred them a bit softer than chewy.  I was hugely surprised though when my husband tried one and absolutely loved them and I'm guessing my daughter loved them two as I caught her trying to sneak them twice this afternoon.  Maybe I'm not really much of an oat girl?

This recipe can be found at Food.com:
http://www.food.com/recipe/oatmeal-apple-cookies-30981

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Russian Doll Cake

To top off my lovely lazy day yesterday it finished with a fabulous evening of girly dvds and junk food with some of my closest girlfriends to celebrate my dear friends birthday.   For her cake I made a Russian Doll themed cake.  I was pretty pleased with this cake as it is completely my own design from start to finish.  Usually I look at other cakes to get inspiration but this cake was a blank canvas.  It is a chocolate mudcake with a dark chocolate ganache.

Hot Cross Buns

I love lazy rainy days.  Even better are lazy rainy holiday days when hubby is home.  Today has been bliss.  Sleeping in, staying in pj's till noon, not bothering with cleaning, art project with my girl, watching movies and doing pretty much nothing but just being with one another.  I was slightly motivated to do some baking, but only slightly as I have cheated and used my bread maker.  But hey, its Good Friday and its rainy and I am loving being lazy.

As it is Good Friday I decided to try my hand at hot cross buns.  These buns are an english tradition and very popular in New Zealand.  You know easter is around the corner as soon as you see these soft sweet buns hit the shops.  I had never seen them until I moved here but I have to say they are a much nicer tradition than the easter bunny and all the chocolate.

The tradition of these buns dates back centuries and have a cross baked on the top of them in pastry that is meant to signify the cross.  They are usually eaten on Good Friday.  I like the idea of something that signifies the true meaning of easter rather than all the commercialized chocolate sold in the shops and I like it even better homemade.

I had never made them before so found a recipe off Allrecipes that looked good and gave it a try: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pull-Apart-Hot-Cross-Buns/Detail.aspx?prop31=1 
I am pretty happy with how they turned out, although I am sure I could have made them smaller and more of them as they did end up a bit big.   I do love my bread though so these will not stick around long.  Instead of the pastry cross on the top I did the cross with an icing sugar and milk paste as suggested by this recipe and I like it much better than the pastry.  It definitely adds to the buns.  I also put raisins and chocolate chips in as this is all we had in the house this morning and my husband and I couldn't agree on which flavour to do so I did both.

Easter themed Vanilla cupcakes

Ok so I have lost about 5 pounds today. Its about time too after all this baking I have been eating!  I had a bunch of kids over for an easter egg hunt.  Being the ever inspired baker that I am I decided that I would offer the kids cupcakes that I was making for this week as well as attempt to bake a cake all before the kids and their mums arrived.  Now this would have been ok had the house not also have been a disaster. So about a half hour before they arrived I was sprinting around the house picking up clothes, toys, sweeping and cleaning up my ever messy kitchen!  When everyone arrived I was still in my walking clothes from this morning (which is a good thing because I was sweating like crazy after my cleaning workout) and my daughter was still not quite dressed.  It took me awhile to feel composed but once I did it was a great morning watching the kids hunt for easter eggs and enjoy their yummy cupcakes.

I am on the hunt for the perfect vanilla cupcake.  About four years ago I was in New York city and my husband and I walked past a bakery that had a line down the road and around the block.  I was intrigued by what was so popular about this place.  I later came to find out that it was a shop solely devoted to cupcakes called Magnolia Bakery.  A friend of mine in London introduced me to the flavors of this cupcake shop with her baking.  I think I still have dreams about her cupcakes and I don't know that mine will ever taste as good as hers! So in light of this I decided the best place to start my search for the perfect vanilla cupcake was from a recipe from Magnolia Bakery.

I was pretty happy with the recipe and it definitely got a thumbs up from the man but I am going to keep testing different recipes mainly to compare.  Topped with my favorite vanilla buttercream recipe I think these cupcakes may be hard to beat.

I made this weeks cupcakes in an easter theme topped with frosting made to look like grass and a chocolate shortbread biscuit on top.  The cupcakes were nominated to go to a mother of three kids who needed a bit of brightness added to her week.  If you know anyone who needs their day brightened send me an email to nominate them to mrswoolleyscakes@gmail.co.nz

The recipe for Magnolia's Vanilla cupcakes can be found at Foodnetwork.com:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/saras-secrets/magnolias-vanilla-cupcake-recipe/index.html

Chocolate Shortbread

Ok, so here is the shock of the century: Chocolate is not one of my favorite things.  Crazy huh?  I have never been one to have chocolate bars hanging around the house.  I like it but often can take it or leave it and definitely do not crave it.  For several years my mother-in-law would buy my husband and I easter eggs and they would sit in the house uneaten for months.  It used to drive some of my friends crazy! The thing is, even though I am not crazy about chocolate itself , I LOVE two chocolate deserts: chocolate ice cream and chocolate shortbread. I think what I love about these two things is the strong cocoa taste without the overbearing sweetness.

For awhile now I have been wanting to make chocolate shortbread so I decided that Easter was a good excuse.  I found some cute easter cookie cutters (yes I rolled and cut biscuits two days in a row!) and did a bit of research before I settled on a recipe.  I followed the instructions of others and added 1/4 cup extra of cocoa and 1/4 less of flour.  I was pretty happy with the results and am looking forward to tasting them tomorrow as apparently they taste better the next day.  My husband absolutely loved them and ate three of them in less than two minutes.  He was a happy boy that I wasn't giving all of them away.

As for the decorating of the biscuits I decided to keep it simple and stick to the basics.  I found another royal icing recipe that used fresh lemon juice and what a difference!  I am pretty happy with how they look and the icing adds to the cookie.

For the chocolate shortbread recipe go to:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Emilys-Famous-Chocolate-Shortbread-Cookies/Detail.aspx?prop31=1  

For the royal icing recipe:
http://www.joyofbaking.com/RoyalIcing.html

Sugar cookies

For my daughters birthday last year I made a bunch of sugar cookies to look like cookie monster.  I went into the job thinking it would be easy but the actual making of the biscuits, rolling them out, cutting them out and then frosting was far too tedious of a job for what they are.  A cookie maker I was not and there was no way I would be making rolled, cut out biscuits again.  Well I am eating my words and today I decided I would be tackling this once again.  There have been a few blogs I have come across lately that showcase beautifully decorated cookies.  I have become excited about this and am determined to add this to my repertoire of treats.  Check out www.sweetopia.net to see what I am talking about and to see tutorials on decorating.

The recipe I use for sugar cookies is a really nice soft biscuit that is not too sweet and perfect for decorating or just eating on its own.   It does have to be refrigerated for an hour before rolling out so it is good to plan ahead.  I made sure I had my cookie dough made ahead so that when my daughter woke from her mid-day sleep she could help me cut them out.  I think she spent most of the time eating the cookie dough.  While the biscuits were cooling I made up royal icing ready to try my hand at decorating! I gave my girl a paint brush to paint her own biscuits and away I went.  

I tend to try and jump six steps of my abilities and sometimes this can really go against me.  I often skip learning the basics and then spend so much time playing catch up later on.  This was one of those times.  I had great intentions of drawing pictures of eggs and bunnies on these biscuits to make them an easter theme.  Instead my pictures looked like weird warped balls and crazy bunnies.  In the end I realized I wasn't quite ready for this and ended up doing flowers. 

Overall I was happy with the cookies but I may try and search for another icing recipe. The one I found was ok but I am not a huge fan of the lemon essence in it so I might keep looking or may try vanilla next time.  

For the sugar cookie recipe go to: 

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/The-Best-Rolled-Sugar-Cookies/Detail.aspx?prop31=3

Chefs Birthday cake

Ok so this goes down as probably my most stressful cake to date.  Largely due to poor time management.  I have learned many a lesson this weekend that will probably not be done again.

Lesson (1) Never ever say to yourself "this cake will be easy enough to finish tomorrow afternoon" and then leave it to the last minute.  I should know by now that this is the kiss of death.  Nothing is easy when you say it will be.

Lesson (2) Never let your 2 year old boycott sleep.   If she doesn't want to sleep make her stay in her room until she does.

Lesson (3) Never give your husband permission to go and start a building project knowing full well you have a cake to finish and you will need his help!

Lesson (4) Never try and decorate a cake while your two year old is awake.  It will be torture for you and torture for your child.  Seriously, how horrible is it for my child when I am decorating a cake and she cannot eat any of the yummy goodness that she sees!

In the end I was very pleased with the cake but was exhausted at having to tell my daughter "don't touch" about a 100 times.  By the end of the day she was crying and I nearly was too.  I think our neighbors must think this is a mad-house!

The chefs hat cake is three 6" round layers made for my sister-in-laws birthday.  The first layer is a chocolate mud, the second layer a mocha esspresso mud and the third layer is a white chocolate baileys mud.  All layers are iced with a chocolate fudge buttercream with baileys and esspresso added to it.   Everything you see is edible.

Easter Eggs

I so often underestimate my toddler and her abilities.  Most of the time she has a very limited attention span and can really only spend 15 minutes on a task.  Because of this reason I was certain she was not quite ready to color easter eggs this year but I decided to give it a go anyway.  She proved me so wrong! From the moment we boiled the eggs to the hiding and then finding of the eggs she was completely  entertained! When daddy got home that night she raced to the fridge to show him the last of her eggs that had not been consumed.  She was so proud of herself.  I even managed to get her to eat something that was healthy and not full of sugar without a fight!  

I have great memories of coloring eggs as a kid.  I remember using the little packs you could buy around easter that came with the special spoons and the food coloring.  I'm sure you could still buy these somewhere but I was certain it was easy enough to do it without them.  Fortunately I talked to my sister first and she informed me that vinegar had to be added to the water and food coloring.  I found this really helpful link that has the recipe for coloring easter eggs as well as some great tips including natural dyes.  http://allrecipes.com//HowTo/dyeing-easter-eggs/Detail.aspx  If you are finding your kids are getting bored this next week give coloring eggs a try and then have a big easter egg hunt (who says it needs to be limited to easter)!  Its a great way to spend quality time together. 

First attempt at cake pops

I felt really bad last week as a close friend of mine had a birthday dinner I had to miss because I was making cakes.  I wanted to make it up to her and decided to have a go at making cake pops, a concept that has been made incredibly popular by Bakerella. If you don't know what I am talking about check out http://www.bakerella.com/.  The idea of putting a ball of cake on a lollipop stick and then cover it in chocolate is really quite brilliant so I am not surprised that it has gotten so much publicity.  I wish I had thought of it first!  It is the perfect small bite of cake that you need.  Enough to satisfy your taste buds.

Cake pops look really easy to make.  All they are is left over cake processed up and mixed with leftover icing.  I had both from the mocha espresso cupcakes so away I went and rolled the mixture into little balls then placed in the freezer to set. I then melted down Nestle white chocolate melts.  I placed a lollipop stick into the cake with a little bit of the white chocolate on it to help keep it on the stick and then attempted to dip the pops in the white chocolate.  I was full of confidence at this stage until I actually dipped the pops in the white chocolate.  It was all down hill from here.  I kept loosing the cake off of the stick and in the end had to spread the chocolate around the cake ball rather then dip it.  It took me awhile but they did look somewhat decent in the end but I am not sure I will be attempting this again any time soon.  It will take a little bit of practice to perfect I think.

Mocha Espresso Cupcakes

Five o'clock hits and I am a frazzled mess.  Baby is under his play gym and is not happy.  He wants mummy to hold him and is getting sick of these silly toys hanging over his head.  My toddler is stringing a whole lot of words together at a thousand miles a minute that sounds something like iwanttreatimtiredimhungrycomemumcomemumimhungryiwanttreatihelpmum and then proceeds to drag a chair from her room and attempts to help me cut up onion. When will this day be over.  Fortunately soon.  My husband walks in the door and lovingly offers to take my dear daughter for a bike ride.  Oh sweet relief, I can get a break here! And just in time.

This weeks cupcakes were nominated by a friend and go to a mum who doesn't always get that break at five o'clock that most of us desperately need.  Her husband live and works in another location most of the time so she is often on her own.  I can certainly appreciate how hard this would be and I think all mums who are raising kids on their own deserve a mother of the year award.  It is tough enough doing it with help!

I knew immediately what cupcake to make.  Any mum doing the hard stuff on their own need the help of one thing: coffee.  I love love love coffee probably more than cupcakes and cake and rely heavily on it in the mornings.  I admit: I am an addict.  Without my coffee I am not sure I would be able to function after being woken a couple times in the night.

I searched the internet until I found what I thought would be a good coffee cupcake.  The cupcake I have tried is a Mocha Espresso Cupcake and is from Jen from Mykitchenaddiction: http://www.mykitchenaddiction.com/2009/02/mocha-espresso-cupcakes/
I have to say that I love this cupcake for three reasons:
1) It is soo easy to make! Probably one of the easiest cake recipes i've come across.
2) It is so moist!  Everyone loves a moist chocolate cake and this does not disappoint.
3) It reminds me of a cake my mum made when I was a kid (but without the coffee) so it brought back great memories for me.
Anyone who loves chocolate and coffee should definitely give this cupcake a try.

Molasses Cookies

Food can have the ability to bring up strong memories of your childhood, places visited, certain people important to you and so much more.  The times I have felt most homesick have been when I haven't been able to obtain a specific ingredient to make a recipe that brings me somewhat closer to home.  On one particularly emotional Christmas for me I burst into tears in the supermarket when I realized I couldn't purchase corn syrup to make my mums famous Christmas peanut brittle.  I don't think the grocer knew quite what to do.

Today I was thinking about my Grandparents in the US and how I wished they could see my kids growing up and wish my kids could get to know them.  I decided to hit the recipe books with Ella and make my Grandpas favorite molasses cookies, a recipe my Grandma gave me several years ago.

Molasses is probably my favorite ingredient to bake with.  The thick strong syrup has a beautiful rich dark color and a very distinct smell.  Its one of those ingredients you are either in love with or you hate.  I love it.  My husband hates it.  My daughter seemed to like it and kept saying it was "spicy". I only just recently found molasses in the supermarkets here so this is the first time I have made these cookies and they instantly brought me back to my grandparents house around the holidays.  What special times these were. The cookie is the perfect chewiness and I love the subtle salty taste to it.

Ingredients
3/4 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
2 tsp baking soda
2 c flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp salt

Directions
Cream together shortening, sugar, egg and molasses.  Sift together dry ingredients and add to the creamed mixture.  Mix well and chill for at least an hour.  Form into 1" balls and roll in sugar.  Place 2" apart on a greased cookie sheet.  Bake 350 degrees F or 175 degrees C for 10-12 minutes.