Giant, sticky, toffee and delicious.

Last year I was lucky enough to make two giant cupcakes for a lady called S.  One was a sticky toffee one, the other vanilla.  Apparently her husband loved the sticky toffee one so much that she got in touch this year to ask me to repeat the magic.  Woo hoo, was I excited!  

I hadn't done a giant cupcake for a while now, and wanted to make this one a bit different for him.  We had some delicious dates in the house, so they got finely chopped and added to the batter.  As the home-made toffee sauce colours the icing a beige shade, I felt teddy bear brown and dark brown would be the best contrast I could offer.  So I got to work with my stars, plaques and gold sparkle spray to create a cupcake worthy of a birthday man.  This time I used chocolate flavoured brown sugarpaste for the base, rather than chocolate itself, and the same toffee buttercream for the middle filling as well as the outer decoration.  A couple of chocolate champagne bottles and we were good to go.

And I believe he loved it!  Happy Birthday Mr S!

Christmas cupcakes in winter-fun flavours

P and B fancied an end-of-school/Christmas treat, so asked for a dozen cupcakes in Red Velvet and Banoffee (spiced banana cupcakes with toffee buttercream icing).  I had bought some gorgeous icing toppers from Jade at The Cupcake Company, and was only too keen to use them and make decorations to coordinate.  You'll recognise them from the Teacher treats post, as they were done soon after.  

I had just recently visited my local TK Maxx store, here in Dundee, and bought myself some Jem bow cutters.  I've tried in vain to make bows free-hand, based upon watching a selection of YouTube videos, and despaired of ever doing them well.  Then I spotted the small bow cutter set at the store, and didn't think twice.  I was able to follow the instructions, and was really pleased with the result.

These decorations were really fun to make, and coordinated well with the vintage style toppers I planned to use on the Red Velvet cupcakes.  

The banoffee ones I did a little bit differently this time, as I had some toffee sauce leftover. 

They look pretty luscious, right??!  They got great reviews too  :)

Real men eat cupcakes

B had ordered a Red Velvet birthday cake for his lady-love P and she now wanted to return the favour, as it was his birthday.  We discussed various options, and my capabilities, and settled upon a dozen mixed cupcakes in banoffee and choc raspberry.

I was really excited about baking these, because they were a variation on some I had baked previously, and because the toffee sauce is amazingly good, and I was hoping there may be a little leftover for 'taste-testing' afterwards.

As with her cake, she wanted them simply to say 'Happy Birthday B' and '43 today'.  Your cake wish is our command, P - hope he loves them...

 These are the raspberry chocolate ones...

These are the banoffee ones (see that icing?  all the colour comes from the toffee sauce, and there was a little leftover after all, yummy)

And here they all are, snuggled together in their box ready for collection and delivery to the birthday boy.

(These few were leftover, so I added a different type of buttercream swirl and popped a raspberry on top, to add to the one underneath) 

Giant cupcakes are not just for giants...

I have the email address on the blog and our Facebook page, and was lucky enough to get an email earlier this week asking me to do not one, but two, giant cupcakes for yesterday.  After checking the diary to see what other baking commitments I had, and the calendar to see what family commitments we had - I said, sure thing.

The customer was a new one, and wanted one sticky toffee giant and one vanilla with pink decorations giant cupcake.  I hadn't done any flavour other than vanilla before but was confident about the toffee as it's a similar flavour to caramel and butterscotch and I'm adept at them.  I used the vanilla cake recipe and swapped 2/3rds of the sugar for light brown muscovado sugar and it was good.  Baked up the same and smelt great.  For the icing, I searched through my books and folder (the folder is indivual random recipes that are printed from emails, or other books or other people or cut from magazines) and was beginning to panic as there were no specifically toffee recipes.  They seemed more caramel to me, and that's not what I was after.  Then I found it - Fiona Cairn's toffee buttercream recipe.  I had copied it out of this book as I liked the sound of only some of the cakes and designs she had featured.
The recipe required you to make a sauce with sugar and butter, then add cream then when cool you added it to the buttercream  I had to play about with the texture a little, so it was solid enough to pipe, but wow - did it taste good!! 

I had also made a chocolate shell for the bottom of the cupcake for the first time.  This was done by melting 200g of milk chocolate and painting it on the inside of my silicone mould.  I popped it in the freezer for 10 minutes, then painted on another layer, and so on times in total.  I turned it upside down, made a wish, then it popped right out in one piece!  Phew.  Next time I shall use a bit more chocolate, as it seemed a bit thin in places.

This is a vanilla cake with vanilla (and a round of lemon curd buttercream) buttercream, strawberry jam filling and a spray of flowers.  I think I really need to practice making flowers out of sugarpaste or flowerpaste, to give a little more variety in what I can offer.  But the customer loved it,  and that is what matters most.

Marbled toffee brownies

We had friends visiting this week, on Monday and Tuesday mornings, and I felt like trying something a little bit different for them.  I had recently come across a little booklet that had been an insert in an old, old copy of BBC Good Food magazine (I know this because it said so on the booklet, tee hee) and it was all about chocolate and sponsored by my favourite brand, Lindt.  After reading through and discovering that we were short of some ingredients for many of the recipes, or they wouldn't suit for one reason or another, I chose the aforementioned brownies.  After a brief chat with Mr Becca about the house-bound availability of fresh double cream, we determined that I'd need to run out and buy some (it was the girls' dinnertime at this point, and hair-washing bath was soon to follow (a high point of the week for dearest Daddy, not) so kind of late).  Luckily, our nearest supermarket had some and I was home quite quickly.

The recipe required that you melt 250g of dairy milk toffee sweets with the cream to make the sauce, and I only had a bag of 200g so used that.  In retrospect, I think even 300g would be better, as I can't notice the internal layer of toffee when eating the brownies.  You were to layer most of the brownie mix with the toffee mix then the remainder of the brownie mix and bake for 40-45 minutes.  The recipe called for 100g of pecan nuts roughly chopped, but I only had nibbed hazelnuts and again, in retrospect, feel that this was too much.  After it had cooled, you were to warm up the sauce and drizzle it over the top, along with some melted chocolate too. 

Luckily, both mums and all the kids loved it, and didn't feel the same way as I about the lack of toffee and abundance of nuts.  Score.