The truffle shuffle.
Sometimes I will eat something and the taste will taunt me for ages afterwards.
This is exactly what happened with these chocolate truffle cookies. My friend Aishia found a recipe book called Cookies, Slices and Squares and made these amazing cookies from it and brought some to work for us to try. I pretty much died eating one. The chocolate flavour was so intense and then entire thing just melted in my mouth like chocolate would.
A few weeks later these cookies were still on my mind. An opportunity to bake them for work sprang up, a birthday morning tea!
Because my boyfriend often doesn’t get to have some of the yummy baking that Carly and I make because he’s gluten intolerant, I decided to make these gluten free so he could have some of the extras! I used Orgran’s GF plain flour in place of the normal plain flour.
Chocolate Truffle Cookies
250g 70% cocoa chocolate (broken) - I used Lindt dark chocolate
60g cocoa powder
110g butter
3 eggs
200g caster sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
75g plain flour - I used that GF plain flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
150g 70% cocoa chocolate (chopped into small chunks) - I used Lindt dark chocolate
Combine broken chocolate pieces, cocoa powder and butter in metal bowl and place over a pan of simmering water. Stir occasionally till the chocolate and butter has melted. Remove from heat, stir to combine and set aside to cool. - Thank you to Carly who did this part for me since I was running low on time.
Beat eggs and sugar with electric mixer until light and fluffy.
Beat in vanilla extract and the chocolate mixture.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt.
Add flour mixture to the butter mixture together with the chopped chocolate and stir till just combined.
Cover the dough and chill for 3 hours. - I put mine in the freezer for 30 minutes instead.
Roll the dough into small tablespoon sized balls and place 5cm apart on baking paper lined trays.
Bake for 10 minutes and then leave them to cool for a bit. - They taste SUPER good still warm from the oven.
The ones Aishia had made turned out a bit more smooth and rounded looking on top than mine and I assume that was because of the gluten free flour I used. They looked good when I was just about to take them out of the oven, then as soon as they were removed they blobbed back down and became sort of wrinkly looking.
Good thing they still tasted AMAZING. One of my favourite cookies I’ve made to date. Although it’s pretty much just chocolate… so if you’re a big chocolate fan, these are the cookies for you!
I heard your heart sing love, love, love.
As usual, I am crazy late with this… but… Happy belated Valentines Day everyone!
I’ve never really been that into Valentines Day. Just a marketing gimmick to sell stuff and all that. But I must admit, baking for Valentines Day is rather fun!
As I think I said in an earlier post, my boyfriend was away in Melbourne this Valentines Day, working on a stop motion TV ad. Because he couldn’t be with me that day he sent me a gorgeous bunch of flowers (kicking myself for not taking a photo of them!) and a delicious cake.
I ended up spending Valentines Day evening with my flatmate Carly and my cousin Tyler, watching TV. It was a great girls night in!
For the occasion I decided to make some COOKIE POPS! I’d never made cookie pops before so I just kind of winged it and they turned out awesome!
I made large heart chocolate sugar cookies (you can find the recipe in my post here) and I used some cookie pop sticks that I had from Millys. I actually made the cookies so big because of how thick the sticks were. They ended up far too big for my liking. Could be good if you were wanting to have fun large wedding cookie pop favours or something. But I think a bit smaller would have been a better. I’d have to use the smaller cake pop/lollypop sticks for smaller cookies.
I made up some pink colour flow icing and piped the outlines on. I then thinned the rest of the colour flow with water and flooded the outlines once they had set.
Definitely need to work on my outlining skills. I wobble heaps! Haha. And I probably have to work on the flooding too. Might need to make it a little bit thinner first, cause it had a few little bumps which didn’t merge back in with itself.
Pretty cute in the end though. Cookie pops are rather fun! They’d make fantastic favours and would look great on a dessert table. They’re also super simple to do!
You are a toy, you can’t fly.
Last week/weekend I helped by awesome friend Lydia with a Toy Story Themed Dessert Table for her mum’s 50th birthday party. This is how it turned out…
Lydia made these GF vanilla mini cupcakes, which I then piped the frosting and added the little fondant eyeballs that Lydia had made to make it look like the little alien dudes.
I made these GF chocolate mini cupcakes. Lydia made the chocolate buttercream frosting which I piped and added on her fondant decorations.
I made these vanilla sugar cookies and iced them to look like Rex!
I made these rectangular gingerbread cookies with Lydia iced to be Etch-A-Sketch cookies! Super cute.
It was fun but boy are full dessert tables a LOT of work. I don’t know how Lydia coped doing the cake and the cake pops by herself!
You can check out Lydia’s post about the two lots of cupcakes here.
Snickerdoodles!
Just a week or two before Christmas I visited an ENT specialist (ears, nose, throat) because of some on-going nasal and asthma issues. Amongst other things he is making me do, I have to be on a four week dairy-free diet. As well as no dairy, I’m not allowed chocolate flavours, like cocoa. 
Perfect timing for Christmas right? I cheated a tiny bit on Christmas and Boxing day. I couldn’t not try one of my grandmother’s custard meringue things, or the strawberry chocolate bon bons that my brother got for my stepdad! Am I right?! 
So now that I’m on holiday with nothing to do, all I want to do is bake! This whole no dairy thing got me a little stumped at first since I couldn’t use butter or milk in baking, until I discovered dairy-free margarine!
I bought myself another Christmas present, a bright red with white polka dot cookie tin, which lead to me wanting to bake cookies to fill the tin! I wanted to try something new, that involved as little dairy as possible and no cocoa. I’d seen pictures of snickerdoodles before and they intrigued me… so that’s what I made!
Snickerdoodles (using dairy-free margarine) – Makes 42
250g butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
110g firmly packed brown sugar
220 caster sugar
2 eggs
410g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon caster sugar (extra)
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon (extra)
Beat butter, extract and sugars until light and fluffy.
Add eggs, one at a time, beating until combined.
Stir in sifted flour, soda and nutmeg in two batches.
Cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 180 C and line baking tray with baking paper.
Combine the extra caster sugar and cinnamon in a small shallow bowl.
Roll level tablespoons of the dough into balls and roll in the cinnamon sugar.
Place balls about 7cm apart on tray.
Bake for 12 minutes.
They taste AMAZING.
I actually accidentally added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon into the dough mixture, which was fine by me since I love cinnamon! And I ended up making a second set of the cinnamon sugar because I used up the first lot half way through the batch.
The texture is fantastic – sort of crunchy on the outside and soft in the centre. I love them! Definitely a new favourite!
Merry Swiftmas!
A few weeks ago my friend Shahlin from Coup De Main asked me to make a dessert table for a Taylor Swift Prom evening that was to be held for a competition winner. Basically people got to submit their ideas for the perfect Taylor Swift prom night with a budget of $3,000. The winner wanted their prom night to be themed Merry Swiftmas (due to Taylor Swift’s love of Christmas).
So I spent 3 days in the kitchen(s) baking my heart out and I was really pleased with how it all turned out! You can check out the photos from the actual Coup De Main event here. Hope you like it as much as I do!
Chocolate Cupcakes
I had seen this photo online of these awesome little cupcakes that had icing that looked like a Christmas tree and though that something like that would be perfect for my dessert table.
I used the usual chocolate cupcake recipe I always use (found here minus the peppermint essence and chocolate chips) and my usual plain cream cheese frosting recipe but added kelly green colouring gel to it.
I piped them so they sort of had a Christmas tree look to them, added little silver balls and the yellow fondant stars I had made earlier in the week. Topped the stars off with some pearl luster dust and they were good to go!
Lemon Cupcakes
One of the things that was requested by the girl who won the competition was that she wanted cupcakes with the number 13 on them, like the cupcakes Paul O’Grady gave Taylor Swift (see them here). I wasn’t too keen on piping numbers so I decided to make fondant 13′s instead.
I made these vanilla cupcakes (minus the chocolate chips) and added 1 teaspoon of grated lemon rind and a tiny bit of lemon juice to it. I then used my cream cheese frosting recipe (as linked to above) with some more lemon rind and red colouring gel. I piped them with a round tip so that they looked quite a bit different to the Christmas tree chocolate cupcakes and popped the fondant 13′s on top of each one.
The humidity at the time made them blob out a little more than I cared for but what can ya do! I didn’t want to keep adding icing sugar to it cause it would have just been wayyy too sweet. These were probably my least favourite thing on the table. I had a picture in my mind how they would end up and this wasn’t quite it but that’s okay! Live and learn…
Cake Pops! (vanilla cake and vanilla frosting)
These cake pops were made by Lydia (Grace Cakes) and I, with the help of the fabulous Bakerella’s Cake Pops book. They turned out wayyyy better than I thought they would considering it was the first time I’d ever tried to make them and I had no idea what I was doing!
They were a heap of fun but extremely time consuming! Check out a full blog post from me here about these cake pops with lots of details about how we made them.
Chocolate Sugar Cookies
This was the first time I’ve ever made cookies by myself. Quite fun! I’ve posted a few photos of this recipe before but they were ones that Carly had made. So here’s the recipe…
125g butter
165g firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
225g plain flour
35g self raising flour
35g cocoa powder
Beat butter, sugar and egg until combined.
Stir in sifted dry ingredients in two batches.
knead dough on floured surface till smooth.
Roll between sheets of baking paper till 5mm thick.
Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 180 C and line baking tray with baking paper.
Cut out your shapes – I chose candy canes, Christmas trees and stars.
Bake for about 10-12 minutes.
I decided to have a crack at icing the cookies, and rather than making my own royal icing from scratch (having watched Carly make hers and it didn’t turn out quite right) I decided to use Wilton’s Color Flow as I had seen how well it turned out on the cookies done at Millys.
I found it surprisingly easy to work with (especially after Lydia had told me it was quite tricky to work with) and they came out better than I had imagined. I thought I would be quite terrible at outlining and I wasn’t sure about how well the flooding would go. But it was all just fine! Not bad for my first attempt at cookies and flooding/outlining!
I also brushed on some of that pearl luster dust to make them a little more interesting! And added a few silver balls to the Christmas tree cookies. Nom nom nom!
Red Velvet Cake
The girl that won the competition had specifically requested a cake that said “Taylor Swift is Fearless so Speak Now” (a sentence that contains all 3 of Taylor Swift’s album names) however I really struggled with the whole writing with icing thing. So instead I made fondant letters (actually Lydia helped me out with the letters too cause my ones just weren’t working out very well) and popped those on top of the cake.
The cake itself was made with Lydia’s red velvet cake recipe. As it wasn’t a recipe straight out of a book or one of mine, I won’t be giving it out here. But the frosting is just my plain cream cheese frosting (as seen in previous posts) with some whitener. The cake is actually made up of two cakes with a layer of frosting in the middle.
The stars were added by my boyfriend and I brushed luster dust on to all of the letters and stars. Pretty happy with the overall cake considering it was the second cake I’ve ever made.
Christmas lollypops and candy canes
Arranged by my wonderful boyfriend who just wanted to hurry me up so we could get out of there haha.
Triple Chocolate Fudge Brownies with a Peppermint Twist
These were sort of my add on item, to bulk up the amount of food on the table. Due to time constraints I decided to use packet brownie mix, I chose the wonderful Better Crocker pack, and added some things to make it a little more Christmas-ey (inspired by this picture here)!
I had some Betty Crocker vanilla frosting left in the fridge so I added some peppermint essence to it and some kelly green colouring to it and piped it onto the triangle shaped brownies. I then added small bits of the straight part of candy canes to be the tree trunk. Added on a few mini M&Ms and voila! Brownie Christmas trees with a peppermint twist!
So that was my first attempt at a whole dessert table. Took me 3 stressful but fun days to do it all. I think if I ever get asked to do one of these again I will split the workload with someone else, or at the very least not include cake pops in it as those were far more time consuming than I thought they would be!
Super happy with how it all turned out!
Happy Belated Halloween!
I’m super late in posting this. Nearly 2 months late! Oops!
I wanted to do some fun Halloween themed cupcakes, nothing too fancy but I had the look in mind that I wanted. I made Vanilla Cupcakes and coloured them bright orange. I used this recipe minus the chocolate chips.
I used my Cream Cheese Frosting and whitened it a bit, to get rid of the yellow tinge the butter and cream cheese give it. I piped them and then sprinkled some orange candy-coated chocolate drops on top.
They turned out exactly how I wanted them! And the black and white striped cupcake papers were perfect! The little orange chocolate drops looked like little horns coming out of the frosting. Hehehe.
While I did the cupcakes, Carly made some chocolate sugar cookies in the shape of bats, pumpkins and ghosts. She used royal icing on them, which really needed to be made thinner so that we could do outlines and flood them. Now I know not to do that again!
I’ll be making some of my own chocolate sugar cookies (actually I’m making them whilst writing this for my Christmas dessert table project!) so I will post the recipe for those soon.
Carly also did some chocolate covered strawberries with little scary faces on them, using the white royal icing. So cute!
So that’s our awesome Halloween mini dessert table! Hope you like it!
