I made a clafoutis...

I had heard of Clafoutis before, but never really known quite what it was, nor how to make it.  Then I came across a recipe in a magazine (nope, sorry I can't recall which one) that looked quite easy and thought, what the hey, I'll give it a go!
It seems like a custard that sets up a bit, with some fruit thrown in for good measure.  I'm not sure I'd bake one again, but am pleased that I finally have.

You can see that it didn't rise much, and has a soggy sort of texture to it.  It did pretty much taste as it looks, so was quite quick and easy to eat.  Almost like something you would think to serve a young child perhaps... Have you ever had it before?  What was your verdict?

Say Happy Birthday with purple roses

This lady loves purple.  She asked for light and dark purple roses on mini cupcakes to be the centerpiece of her birthday celebrations.  I had made sugarpaste roses before, but only once or twice, so confidently said, sure thing, I can do that!
Then spent far longer than anticipated on getting them good enough.

I used vanilla bean paste this time, rather than the usual extract, so there were tiny little dots throughout the sponge and icing.  Lovely taste, will try this variation again soon. 

They went down a storm at the birthday lunch I believe, and her children took the leftvoers in to school the next day in their packed lunches.  And every other child wanted to trade snacks, yey!!

Sticky toffee pudding cupcakes with salted caramel icing...

I had been invited to the launch party of the Great Pink Bake Off, a charity event in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer.  It was to be held in Edinburgh in an early evening on a Thursday.  I thanked the PR lady for inviting me, but explained that as I live and work in Dundee it simply wasn't feasible for me (time and childcare issues basically).  I passed the information on to my colleagues and one was able to attend.  She brought me back a goodie bag, and I set to making these Mark Greenaway Sticky Toffee pudding cupcakes for the adults coming to our tea party (the kids got the personalised mini cupcakes).

As you can see, the recipe was a bit of a palaver, with lots of different little sections to combine.  I hadn't yet made a sticky toffee pudding, despite it being one of my favourite desserts, so I quite enjoyed doing all the necessary parts.

I found making the salted caramel sauce a little tricky.  It seemed to go from white sugar to a dark brown sauce very quickly, and tasted bitter to me.  I asked Mr Becca to try it, and whilst he agreed it tasted good it also seemed burnt/bitter to him.  When making up the icing, the required amount of cream cheese was nowhere near enough for a piping consistency, so I added more cream cheese and far less caramel sauce. Then I felt I had to add in way more icing sugar to make it sweeter.  By the time I'd played about with ingredients to achieve consistency, I ended up having to throw out a fair bit of the caramel sauce...

The end result looked and tasted good though.  The combination of the delicious sponge, with the slightly bitter-sweet icing and drizzled sauce worked really well.  All the adults loved them, and even some of the kids tried them too.  I took the spares in to work the next day, and the colleague who'd been to the launch party and tried the original version deemed them a good copy indeed!  Go Becca  :)

Mini cupcakes for little princesses...

Now that I work whilst The Team are at school/work, it's a bit trickier to organise my time for baking and other fun stuff.  And for more dull stuff, like making packed lunches and getting the kids to after-school activities on time and the like, sigh...  I guess this part is a work in progress, as I hone my time management skills in a new way - that's a positive way to look at things  :)

So for the big batch of mini cupcakes I needed for tomorrow lunchtime, I started on the sugarpaste decorations on Thursday night.  I had spoken to the parents of most the young girls in question, to find out their favourite colours as I had a plan to name and decorate cupcakes in matching colours.  

 

And you can see that The Team got their names in there too, in their favourite colours of green (Mini-1) and pink (Mini-2).  And no, before you ask, I don't have those tiny cute stamps in numbers, despite trying to locate some.

I got the cupcakes baked tonight, and am pleased that nearly all of them turned out well.  But oh boy, I made way too many decorations!  I had bought some cute Disney Princess and Disney Monsters University topper discs too, and didn't have enough cupcakes to use them all - oops.  I'm sure the girls will all be a) super excited to see so many mini cupcakes just for them, and b) to see their names in their favourite colours on said cupcakes.  Roll on tomorrow!

The girls range in age from 2 to 9, they'll all like Disney Princesses, right?

 I mean, who doesn't?

Aww, I just think they're so cute!  Hope the girls do too...