I got an order from a work friend, Francine who wanted some chocolate cupcakes with a giant chocolate cupcake for her son's 21st birthday party. As he was turning 21 I didn't think it was appropriate to create anything too flashy or childish (even though I had a Disney Princess tea party for my 21st). So I went with a cream cheese icing with a rich dark chocolate sponge, the giant cupcake also has a chocolate genache filling topped with chocolate flakes.
A little tip on how to make the chocolate flakes, take your slab of chocolate and turn it upside down so you have the smooth side facing you, then taking a large sharp knife drag the knife with even pressure towards yourself along the chocolates surface and you will quickly and easily create paper thin flakes!
The cakes turned out intense and heavenly devilish!
These are possibly the most pleasurable cakes to make. I made these with my friend Lauren years ago, after she had seen the recipe in a book and knew I would want to try them out. I hadn't made them since but decided to get nostalgic for her birthday and recreate the wonderous rainbow cake!
The process is sublimely simple, just split your cake batter into equal portions (4-5 small bowls) then add a generous amount of natural food colouring, I prefer Dr Oetker as they are cheap and not full of E numbers so are safe for the little ones. Then layer in teaspoon quantities into your paper cases. The best thing is that you can apply this process to most cake batters from vanilla to lemon, obviously not chocolate. It is a bit fiddly but I'm sure you will agree the results are wonderful, perfect for kids parties or the young at heart!
My good friend Helen of Minnie Bats Designs was collaborating with jewellery designer Sarah Hallowes for a candy shop themed exhibition/store. Helen asked me to create some cupcakes for their private view, she didn't ask for any particular type of cupcake so I was able to create anything I wanted. I went with the candy theme, bright colours topped with paste coloured dolly mixture sweets and glitter with poppy paper cases. I really liked the final cupcake design I went more on looks than an ellaborate recipe so plumped for the standard Chop's Cakes vanilla cupcake recipe taken from an old fairy cake recipe with vanilla butter cream icing.
The Candy Shop Exhibition
Minnie Bats designs (My fav is the ice-cream with kitsch leopard print cone!)
Sarah Hallowes Jewellery, cute smartie-like stud earrings
Left: The cupcakes were to be found by the green dribbling monster...obviously!
Right: Cheeky polka dot Mrs Robot in some very sexy hot pink pants created by Helen
I'm generally not a massive fan of Mr.Oliver I find him irritating with his mockney accent and stunted adjectives "pukka" and "gorgeous".
However, this is a little book I bought today from Tesco, it's only £3 and £2.50 of that goes straight to Comic Relief and half of the £2.50 goes to the Jamie Oliver Foundation which has innovative projects such as the 'Kitchen Garden Project' which is being implimented in Primary Schools over the UK, promoting food education. The real plus is that there are "a baker's dozen" (which is 13) dessert/cake recipes inside from all of Jamie's recipe books including a fudge recipe that I will definitely be trying out.
To celebrate this joyous day of the year I have made a Nutella cake. Oh yes indeed! This is a Nigella recipe that I have tweaked. It's incredibly moist, dense and very rich but devilishly good. The cake is flourless therefore making it gluten free.
Ingredients
6 large eggs, separated
Pinch of salt
125g soft unsalted butter
400g Nutella (1 large jar)
1 tablespoon Frangelico, rum or water
100g ground hazelnuts (grind them yourself in a blender, add a little water to make a paste this makes the cake a lot more moist then adding the powdery ready ground stuff)
100g dark chocolate, melted
23cm Springform tin, greased and line
Genache Topping:
100g hazelnuts
125ml double cream
1 tablespoon Frangelico, rum or water
125g dark chocolate
Preheat the oven to 180ºC, gas mark 4. In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites and salt until stiff. In a separate bowl, beat the butter and Nutella together, and then add the Frangelico (or whatever you're using), egg yolks and ground hazelnuts.
Fold in the cooled, melted chocolate, then lighten the mixture with a large dollop of egg white, which you can beat in as roughly as you want, before gently folding the rest of them in a third at a time.
Pour into the prepared tin and cook for 40 minutes or until the cake's beginning to come away at the sides, then let cool on a rack.
Toast the hazelnuts in a dry frying pan until the aroma wafts upwards and the nuts are golden-brown in parts. Transfer to a plate and let cool. This is imperative: if they go on the ganache while hot, it'll turn oily.
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add the cream, liqueur or water and chopped chocolate, and heat gently. Once the chocolate's melted, take the pan off the heat and whisk until it reaches the right consistency to ice the top of the cake. Unmould the cooled cake carefully.
Ice the top with the chocolate icing, and sprinkle with the whole, toasted hazelnuts. If you have used Frangelico, put shot glasses on the table and serve it with the cake.
Rather than try and explain this book to you and do a shoddy job of it, I will let the Author Dawn French explain it...
I finished this book about 3 days ago and have been glowing from the warmth of it since. It comments on family life amazingly, it's humorous but in a subtle way, it's sad and scary at the same time. Absolutely brilliant. I know your wondering why i'm writing about it on here, a baking blog but cake features a lot in the book as the gran 'Nana Pamela' bakes a different cake for each family member, which wittily reflects their very different personalities. It is also a source of comfort during difficult times in the novel. Dawn French actually thanks cake in the acknowledgments.
I finished the book one groggy morning on the tube and was delighted to find 4 cake recipes on the very last pages of the book, recipes for Nana Pamela's cakes! I knew straight away I had to make one. I decided to make the main characters cake 'Mo', which is a beetroot cake. The way Mo described the cake intrigued me from the off to make it "This time I gave her plenty of warning that I was coming, so she had made me a beetroot cake. No second-rate biscuit substitutes today. The icing was bliss - bright pink and utterly delish."
From Nana P's recipe book - Mo's Beetroot Cake -
180g caster sugar
3 medium eggs
180g plain flour
180g ground almonds
50g cocoa powder
1tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
200ml sour cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g raw, peeled and finely grated beetroot
Icing
170g icing sugar, sifted
2 tablespoons water
1/4tsp cream of tartar
1 medium egg white
1/2 tsp vanilla extraxt
drop of pink food colouring
Hazelnuts to decorate, chopped
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease a 20cm tin with vegetable oil and line the base with baking paper.
Whisk together the eggs and sugar for 5 minutes with an electric whisk, until light and fluffy. Add flour, almonds, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Beat to combine.
Beat in the sour cream and vanilla extract. Squeeze out any excess liquid from the grated beetroot and fold into the mixture.
Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 50 minutes. Remove and cool on wire rack.
Meanwhile, make the icing. Place all the ingredients into a bowl and place the bowl on top of a pan of simmering water until the sugar dissolves, stirring occassionally. Remove the pan from the heat and place on a heatproof surface and with the bowl still standing over the pan, whisk on high until the mixture forms stiff peaks.
Cover the top pf the cake with the icing and scatter iver the chopped hazelnuts.
Take a swig of home-made sloe gin. For cook.
Making this cake made me feel as if I really was part of the story, the cake isn't too sweet and has an earthy flavour from the beetroot which also helps it be so moist. A Tiny bit Marvellous is available to buy now at Waterstone's or your local bookshop.
This week I had an order for 20 chocolate and 20 vanilla cupcakes for a lovely woman, Erica. It was her birthday and she was having a party at her beautiful home in Islington. As it was an adult party with both men and women the brief was "sophisticated" and "not girly" as you have probably noticed by my previous posts of 'happy hippo cupcakes' and 'cake burgers' sophistication isn't exactly my speciality, but I was up for the challenge. I decided to keep the cakes simple but use really good ingredients and keep all decoration to a minimum e.g. no glitter or pastel coloured icing (sad face). I really enjoyed making these cupcakes as the quantity was manageable and the recipes were simple, I could just let my mind wander and let my hands do all the work. However, this tranquility was short-lived.
The next day I had to deliver them, they had to be in Islington by 6pm...in London rush hour. Everything was going smoothly until I got to the Victoria Line platform of the Underground, the platform was unusually squashed with people and the board said "TRAIN HELD". 40 chocolate-based cupcakes in stifling heat waiting for a train to not be held isn't a great combination and one that was frankly starting to panic me. I crammed on the tube and this lovely old man with a walking stick guarded the cake box from one side and I straddled it from the other, we were a magnificent team. I leaped off the train at Highbury and Islington station and made my way to Erica's house, in the hullabaloo of everything I had forgotten to put my glasses on and proceeded to walk straight past the road I had to turn down. I got directions off a traffic warden and speedily walked to Erica's house, with about two minutes to spare. When I arrived the house was absolutely overwhelming, mansion-like and immaculately decorated I plonked the cakes down on a very large table and Erica, noticing how out of breath I was kindly gave me a glass of water. Luckily the cakes were well received and only one had got slightly mushed in transit.
A little tip on how to make the chocolate flakes, take your slab of chocolate and turn it upside down so you have the smooth side facing you, then taking a large sharp knife drag the knife with even pressure towards yourself along the chocolates surface and you will quickly and easily create paper thin flakes!
