It has been a busy month!

It has been a busy month! I’ve been busy experimenting in the kitchen and finding all these amazing blogs to follow. My current favourite is www.sweetapolita.com – Rosie is mindblowingly awesome. So what have I been up to? I tried my hand at some cookie making. I decided that while fun, I really don’t have that amount of patience. I’m going to stick with cakes and cupcakes for the moment.

My housemate wanted to make cupcakes for a baby shower for a work collegue so she recruited my help. She made vanilla cupcakes and then I showed her how to do the icing. Here is some photos of the finished product.

This is my fav photo!

But here is another showing all of the cupcakes.

So my most recent project was requested by a lady I work with for one of the managers who was turning the big four-o. Through a little subterfuge I found out her favourite type of cake – hummingbird – and that she hadn’t had it since her thirtith. Following Rosie’s (from Sweetapolita) Sky-high hummingbird cake recipe, I started work.

I didn’t have three 8″ cake pans so I used 9″ instead. This meant that instead of 9 layers (by cutting each layer in half), I used 6 layers and they were going to be a bit thicker. I used the left over cake batter and made cupcakes.

Here are some photos of the process:

All of the layers of the cake cooked. It took me about 5 hours as I had to bake each layer individually as my oven isn’t very big!

All layered up with frosting inbetween. 

Crumb coated and ready to be frosted.

The finished product. Ready for candles and a round of ‘Happy Birthday’!

A hastily taken photo of the inside. Everyone wanted a slice and didn’t want to wait for it!

My first order cake!

 When I first make the red velvet cake balls I took half my batch into work to test them out. The responses were good, so good in fact, one the ladies there proposed to me! She asked me then if I could make a red velvet cake for her partner’s birthday. I had to admit that I haven’t been able to bake a red velvet cake yet with out burning one side (I’ve since figured out why – too close to the oven wall). I also wanted to incorportate the cake balls into the design.

I was dreaming about cakes a couple of nights later (inspired I believe by looking at different cake websites) and thought about making a red velvet cake tower surrouded by red velvet cake balls.

My main issues was that I didn’t have a cake pan small enough. I ended up experimenting with ramikins and they worked beautifully. I made four mini cakes and had cream cheese frosting between all the layers and the outside.

I made 50 mini cake balls, all weighing 20 grams each to cover the outside. I ended up using 40 of them (always make spares just in case!).

The end result was:

She was so kind as to take a photo of when she cut the cake:

Easter Baking

I have been spending hours trawlling all these different baking blogs and came across http://bakeat350.blogspot.com and Bridget’s ah-maze-ing cookies. I wanted to try and copy her easter egg cookies back from 2009.

I was heading up to visit my grandma a week before easter for a backyard blitz session and I knew she had a full house (9 other people!) of my aunties, uncles and cousins. I thought it would be best to do some baking to help feed the hordes!

So I found a cookie recipe (I can’t remember where I found it – I think on the same website):

Brown Sugar and Spice Cookies

• 3 cups plain flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp ginger
• 1/8 tsp nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp allspice
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ cup packed brown sugar
• 250g butter
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method:

• Preheat oven to 180^oC
• Whisk flour, baking powder and spices. Set aside
• Cream butter and sugar, add the egg and extracts. Mix until well blended.
• Gradually add the flour mixture and beat just until combined, scraping down the bowl (especially the bottom). You may need to knead the stray bits of flour in.
• Roll on a floured surface and cut into desired shapes.
• Bake for 9-12 minutes.

Once my cookies had cooled (for me I ran out of time until a couple of days later), I decorated them with Royal Icing. I had a looked at heaps of different recipes but ended up settling for one that didn’t use meringue powder from PlanetCake’s book.

Royal Icing

• 250-300 g icing sugar, sifted
• 2-4 drops of acetic acid, a.k.a white vinegar
• 1 egg white

Method:

• Beat all ingredients together with electric mixers on med-high for four minutes for soft peaks.

This only makes 250g of royal icing. This caused big issues for me as it wasn’t nearly enough. I think I ended up making 5 times that all in different batches. The up side was that I got to experiment with all different textures.

I piped my borders with med-hard consistency and then let it dry. I then thined down the royal icing with water. Only add a little bit at a time. If you add too much don’t worry just add more icing sugar.

I then coloured individual batched and used piping bags as I didn’t have any squeezy bottles.

Well, I read a very good saying which helped me throughout my first cookie making experience – It’s only a cookie, it will still taste good. My piping bags keeped bursting at the seam! I think I had a dodgy batch of disposable bags, grr! After trying for a little while I gave up and tried to find some squeezy bottles. I ended up getting mustard and tomato sauce bottles and things went much more smoothly from there. My advice – don’t do this unless you have squeezy bottles. I’ve read that people like cleaning the bottles more than decorating tips – I think they are crazy – cleaning these bottles are a pain but so worth it.

I watched and read about many different techniques about how to decorate them and some worked and others didn’t.

Some of my learnings:

• Don’t over fill the cookie with your base colour. If you add any decorations into this they flood over your wall and everything runs out 😦
• Be careful with the consistancy. I think mine was too thin or maybe it would have been easier with a proper squeezy bottle as mine had quite large nozzles.
• Even if the decorating ends up a total mess (like some of mine did) they really do taste yummy. Just eat your disasters and no one will ever know 😉
• If you want to make these cookies ahead of time, they freeze really well. I left mine in there for about 4 days in an airtight container and they were still great.

 

As you can see above, I got a little bit excited with the icing and now it’s dripping over the side!

 

Red Velvet Cake Balls

I’ve had baking on my mind for the last week. For me that means hours on youtube watching cake decorating tutorials and surfing countless blogs and baking websites. I’ve been greatly inspired by Bakerella (who hasn’t?) and a few others. So on one hand I have this burning desire to bake and the other a decision of no cakes, as I’ll want to eat it all with my housemate and we’ll both get fat (one of the disadvantages of this hobby). After seeing Bakerella’s red velvet cake (www.bakerella.com/red-velvet-cake/) and then her red velvet cake balls (www.bakerella.com/red-velvet-cake-balls), I had my solution.

I’ve included her Red Velvet receipe (from scratch – the only way to do it) and the cream cheese frosting receipe in Australian terms 🙂

• 2 ½ cups plain flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon cocoa
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon bi-carbonate soda (baking soda)
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ cups of vegetable oil
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 60 ml red food colouring

If you are going to make the cake balls, I used just over a cup of oil not the full amount so that I could add in more cream cheese frosting when making the balls (I like frosting!). If you want you can use the full amount of oil but just use less frosting when adding it into the crumbed cake.

The method to the madness:

• Preheat the oven to 180^oC
• Grease and flour two eight inch round cake pans
• Lightly stir eggs in a medium bowl with a wire whisk. Add remaining wet ingredients and stir together with a whisk until blended. Set aside.
• Place all the dry ingredients in your mixing bowl and stir together really well with another wire whisk.
• Add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix on medium high for about a minute or until completely combined. You don’t want any streaks!
• Pour into cake pans and then drop sharply on the counter a few times to release any air bubbles.
• Bake for about 30 mins or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

• After ten minutes, remove from pans and cool completely on a wire rack.

Now time to make the cream cheese frosting. This was the tricky thing – Bakerella says to use a can of cream cheese frosting – no such thing here. So I made it from scratch and from reading all the comments on her website a can is about a cup or so. So the ingredients are:

• 125g cream cheese
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 3 cups icing sugar

This is enough for the cake balls not to frost the cake (double it if you are making a cake).

Method:

• Beat the cream cheese and butter together on high until light and creamy.
• Add in vanilla. I used vanilla essence so in order to get a whiter colour you need to beat it for a longer time. I have no idea why.
• Once the vanilla is added, slowly add the icing sugar otherwise you and your floor will end up wearing it.
• Scrape down the sides and bottom of your bowl to make sure all the sugar in incorporated.

Once your cakes are completely cool, you can start the fun and messy part of crumbling your cakes into a large bowl.

Add in your cream cheese frosting to the cake crumbs. You can use your hands (the fun way) or try a mixing spoon. The frosting is designed to hold together the crumbs. Roll the cake into balls about the size of a 20 cent piece. It should make about 50-60 balls.

Refrigerate for several hours (I went overnight) or you can freeze to speed up the process. This stops the balls from breaking apart when you coat them in choclate.

Once the balls are set:

I used milk chocolate melts (Nestle I think) on the stove top to melt. I found that the chocolate was too thick by itself and I added a little bit of vegetable shortening (Copha) to thin it out. It was much better after than. I used a spoon to lower the ball in and coat it and then gently shook off the excess chocolate and then placed back on the tray. Only take out some of the balls from the fridge at a time so that they don’t go soft and break up. Continue on until all the balls are coated in chocolate and refrigerate.

Once all the chocolate has set, melt white chocolate and drizzle over the balls (Post note: I just found out the you should use a squeezy bottle or something similar to drizzle the white chocolate instead of the messy but optional method of using a spoon – you tend to get big drops of white chocolate on the balls).

My finished product. Yummo!