Barbie & Disney Princesses

All the princesses you can imagine ... :D
pink cupcakes with mini m&ms inside ..i tried to find smartie poos but they are apparently not available at the moment.

Cream puff math

(this picture is NOT blurry because of the photographer having eaten one too many Baileys cream puffs )

Strawberries and Cream

A basic sponge cake ( this is a sponge base i got off a japanese website) topped with strawberries and sour cream frosting. LIght tangy and delicious .

Cake pops

The most basic kind ...
It is only a matter of time before i made them .. :)
Of course you can't do cakepops without mentioning Bakerella

I started with some butter cake (pound cake) ...
then i added some butter cream frosting ...
and then some sugar hearts and fairy dust (disco dust i think they call them at bakeshops)




When I ran out of buttercream, I added some thickened cream i figured by the time you mesh the butter cream in the testure would be similar to cream....and it was still tasty and not as sweet .. :)





Then i did one more with some yoghurt with butter cake. I used strawberry yoghurt which was a bit inspired by the raspberry bullets ..:)

What a 7 year old can do ....

Who says you can't learn anything from a 7 year old .. :)

There was some butter cake, odd pieces of fruit and cream, and this was the presentation that was created :


Insisting on preparing dessert, she cut up some strawberries and skewered it and placed it on a plate of yoghurt.


We were given some granola bars at a craft fair and there were more people than bars to go around. So the little one cleverly distributed it and presented it with some frozen mixed berries on a bed of fresh cream.


Sometimes when she describes the dessert we remain skeptical, well we just need to be more trusting :)

Kids Can Cook ...

During the school holidays ( in Australia ), we decided to entertain the kids (my nieces) with a of baking class. We invited some of their friends and on the menu that day was an apple pie each, butter cookies and bruschetta for afternoon tea. The age group that day was 5- 12 . It was really interesting to see how well kids can do when they are given the opportunity. Everyone had fun and in case you are wondering, yes there was a mess but it was all in the backyard so it was all good cause the rains came the next day and cleaned it all up :)

Butterfly Cake

When I asked my little niece what she wanted for a birthday cake all she said was butterflies. So I made a few chocolate butterflies and made pink cream cheese frosting to ice a red velvet cake.

Swiss Roll ... or rather Japanese roll ?

I first tried an authentic Japanese sponge cake roll when i was at Mt Rokko in Japan. It was just so light and the cream inside was not too rich which made it a really nice balance. The sponge is made to look like a cow too and this was not only just painted on the exterior of the sponge roll it actually goes through the whole sponge sheet (unfortunately I was too busy eating to take more pictures)



So This is my attempt at the swiss roll . Pretty successful I thought although definitely not as pretty. I got this recipe from a Japanese website. I am quite proud of my attempts with a bit of guess work and google translate :)

Japanese Sponge Cake

This was an interesting experiment I found a Japanese website with detailed pictures of how to make the sponge cake. Only problem is I don't read Japanese and the translators are not 100% accurate. WIth a bit of guessing .... VOILA ....:) it tasted really good though didnt look exactly as it did in the japanese website .. :P




For those interested
http://marron-dietrecipe.com/desert/dessert_spongecake.html

Kiwi sourcream

I have been playing with t a few different frostings and have been trying this sourcream frosting which is really light and yummy. On top of that I have been attempting to stabilize my frostings with some gelatine which is interesting too. As a result a mousse like (?) Tastes alright kinda tangy not sweet at all not very stabilized though the cream :D

Red velvet disasters

Is Red Velvet still in trend ?

I guess good flavours should really never go out of trend. Thought lately I have been doing a lot of Red Velvets and sometimes while rushing things tend to go pear shaped... The other day while i was trying to whip up the cream cheese frosting and instead of adding powdered sugar I added flour . How you may ask ... well this happens when you ask someone else to help you sift sugar while you do something else...:) Was not easy to chuck out the lot of cream cheese ...:( However alls well that ends well ..




And then disaster strikes again - Overfilling cupcakes... trying to be too generous is also not a good thing ...

Toffee apple cake or toffee cake apple ?

From the humble apple cake i dressed it up to like so :

I started by peeling some apples, kept the skins, and tried to put them in a cupcake pan. (sometimes what you imagine would happen and what actually happens are two very different things ... all in the spirit of experimentation) :D



Then i fill the applecake batter and apple chunks into the batter . After baking and chilling I removed the cupcake wrappers. Then made a batch of toffee. I then stuck biscuit sticks into the cupcakes and dipped the cake into the toffee. Trying to make them look a bit like toffee apples.






I then drizzled some of the toffee over the rest of the cake which i filled with a whipped sour cream frosting and a layer of caramelised apple chunks:




It was eaten much faster than I could get a decent shot of the insides. :)

Apple cake – Apfelkuchen

A while ago I was fortunate enough to have been passed quite a few German cake recipes. Some of them belonged to my friend's grandmother. Some of them however only had the ingredients but no method, which makes it rather interesting for me. SO i figured if you stick to the basics you can't really go very wrong :) ( this of course after trying this recipe twice i realised what neede to be done). The result was a really moist apple cake ....

The apple is added to the top


This is the baked cake. on hindside i probably should have cut the apple into bigger pieces to that they sand in a bit more or maybe pour the batter then some apple then batter again. Anyhooo there is always next time :

Peach cheese sponge

This is definitely and interesting combination. Firstly I baked a spongecake or tortenboden ( when i was given this recipe I was told that i could put anything on top of it ). Next i used a chilled cheesecake recipe ( i used one from Joy of Baking) but altered it a bit .





Cheesecake recipe

Ingridients:
250g cream cheese
2 tbs honey
250ml thickened/whipping cream
1 large can of peaches
1tsp vanilla

Method:

1. Beat cream cheese until soft
2. Put honey in and continue beating until combined. Do the same with the vanilla
3. separately beat whipping cream
4. slowly add cream to cheese mixture until combined
5. Cut up some peaches into smaller cubes and fold it into the mixture. Leave enough peaces for the decoration on top .
6. Pour mixture onto the sponge base and chill

Thank you

What better way to say thank you than with a bunch of flowers ? Edible flowers of course ..:D
Orange almond cupcakes with orange buttercream and decorated with royal icing flowers. For those familiar with royal icing 1 day of drying in humid weather isnt't the best ;) I knew i was tempting fate by attempting to stick these flowers into the cake. I was extra careful by first inserting a toothpick into the cake and creating a space for the flowers to be stuck in. Some of them stayed up ok but most of the stems just snapped. Lesson learnt. Still i liked the effect of the flowers popping up

Donuts - Masterchef Australia S2

After watching an episode of masterchef where they had a masterclass on jam filled donuts, I was motivated to try it out for myself . Instead of jam filling it I had it the classic way with sugar and cinnamon. The result was a tasty and soft donut. Not only was it really easy, it was really tasty as well. Best thing is I could make them in smaller bite sizes.

Dragonfruit cupcakes

The fruit of a cactus plant. It has and impressive colour and usually sweet tasting though not with strong flavours. The seed add a bit of crunch to the fruit almost like poppy seeds .. I was wondering what would happen if it was put in a cake ?






the fruit adds interesting colour to the batter.


Topped with cream cheese of course



Inside the cake, most of the cake is not that pink/red that i expected


The taste was pretty ordinary otherwise, just a bit of crunch with the seeds and some colour but not a lot of extra flavour .

Ingredients:

1 egg
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup flour
1/4 tsp sodium bicarbonate
3/4 cup mashed dragonfruit
1 tsp orange juice

Method

1. beat the butter and sugar until light
2. add in egg and continue beating
3. Gently fold in flour but do not overmix
4. mix orange juice and sodium bicarbonate to dragon fruit.
5. fold in fruit to the flour mixture

Cream puffs ...

At least that is what i grew up calling them :) Although when I was growing up vanilla beans weren't quite as easy to come by. I couldn't resist using vanilla beans instead of the usual vanilla essence.

Macarons Revisited

Macarons in humid weather are not a good combination.I have not attempted the italian meringue method yet primarily because I have not been successful with Macarons that use more than 1 egg white :D It is time i stepped up my "game" ... FINALLY




For this batch here is what i did

Ingredients for Macaron shells:

3 egg whites (~ 100g )
125g almond meal
100g powdered sugar

Method : ( more like what i did )
1. Aged egg whites for about 7 days ( they just happened to be there for that long)
2. dry egg whites and almond meal in oven for about 1 hour with 40C heat
3. sifted the almond meal once
4. placed the "unsiftable" almond meal into a spice blender with about the same amount of powdered sugar to grind. (After sifting the almond meal I had about 4 tablespoons or so left of coarse almond meal so i put in about 4 T of powdered sugar).
5. after grinding the almond meal i sifted all the almond meal and more of the powdered sugar again.
6. beat the eggwhites until softpeaks form then added in slowly the powdered sugar and continue beating (added a bit of clour at this stage to the meringue as well) At this stage you probably wont get stiff peaks but easier to work with meringue.
7. slowly fold in the almond meal and powdered sugar mixture . I got it to a state where it would spread a bit but not too runny .
8. leave to dry for about 1 hour (tricky in humid weather could have put it in the oven at 40C but didn't bother)
9. bake for 20mins at 140C.
10. Some of my shells didnt come off immediately so i put them back int he oven at 70C for a while 20 -30 minutes and tried to remove them again . It worked.
11. I filled the shells with cream cheese... :)

This is the first time I have tried making them this way. I will have to verify the method again to see if it was really just LUCK