Pukekos and cupcakes.

Thought I would get straight back into the blogging swing of things with some baking!

A few weeks ago my work opened up a brand new office in Takapuna, Auckland. We held a celebratory morning tea for the staff to welcome them into their brand new, fancypants, clean office. Yes, I might be a little jealous of how neat and tidy it is. There’s no clutter in there and they get amazing new comfy chairs! Very envious.

Aishia and I were asked if we could make some fun cupcakes for each member of staff at the office. Aishia designed and put together all of the little custom cupcake toppers using a circle cutter template, double-sided tape and some toothpicks. They’re so cute! Pukekos (they are a bird for anyone who doesn’t know what a pukeko is) are often seen around the swampy areas of Takapuna so it seemed fitting that they were in there somewhere!

Chocolate Cupcakes

1 and 1/2 cups sifted plain flour

3 tablespoons cocoa

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

5 tablespoons cooking oil

1 tablespoon vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup cold water

Sift and mix all dry ingredients together.

Add all wet ingredients and mix.

I also added about a half a cup of chocolate chips to these – just for fun!

Bake at 180 C for about 20 minutes.

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

This is by far the best buttercream I’ve ever made!

Recipe adapted from Savoury Sweet Life.

1 cup unsalted butter

3 and 1/2 cups icing sugar

1/2 cup and 2-3 tablespoons cocoa powder

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Cream butter with an electric mixer for a few minutes.

Sift the icing sugar and cocoa powder into a seperate bowl and mix.

Add these dry ingredients slowly to the butter till they are full mixed in.

Add vanilla extract and beat for a few minutes. Done!

Definitely going to make that chocolate buttercream frosting again! We tried the original recipe first, but the salt was far too overwhelming for us. Not a fan. Will have to try the vanilla buttercream version of it too!

Gluten-free for the bride-to-be.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I went to my friend’s hens party not last weekend but the one before, and we had to bring a food item that was gluten free). As requested by the bride, I made gluten free vanilla cupcakes - her favourite flavour!

I hunted around for a recipe for a while. So many of them had a few different kinds of flours in them and xanthan gum. All of which I was too lazy to try and find since my local supermarket didn’t sell xanthan gum. Ended up finding an extremely simple recipe that called for normal gluten free self raising flour so I went with that.

Gluten Free Vanilla Cupcakes
Taken from Katie’s Kitchen

225g softened unsalted butter
225g caster sugar
225g self raising flour (I used Orgran’s Gluten Free Self Raising Flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 175 C.
Place all the ingredients in a bowl and beat until smooth and pale.
Spoon mixture into cupcakes cases.
Bake for 20 minutes.

This recipe ended up making about 20 normal sized cupcakes, however I overfilled my first tray of them and they spilt over the sides and the tops of them split a little. Oops. My second tray came out perfect though!

The photo above shows good ones, the photo below shows the overfilled ones.

White Chocolate Frosting
Taken from How Sweet It Is

113g softened butter
2.5 cups icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
113g melted white chocolate (I used Lindt)
1-2 tablespoons milk (or more if needed)

Cream butter with electric mixer until fluffy, then add vanilla.
Slowly add in powdered sugar, half a cup at a time.
Add in melted white chocolate and beat until incorporated.
Add in milk 1 teaspoon at a time with mixer on low speed to reach desired consistency (I didn’t actually add any at all).
Add in your colouring. I used violet colouring gel.
Pipe onto cooled cupcakes.

The frosting turned out a little grainy and that only happened when I added in the chocolate so I might have done something wrong there. Ah well. The frosting tasted really good. I’m not usually into buttercream type frostings but this one was really good and I couldn’t taste the butter at all!

The cake part was super soft and melt in the mouth, almost like a sponge sort of texture. Plain vanilla cupcakes aren’t usually my thing but these were pretty good! Plus the simple recipe and low amount of ingredients made them really easy to make.

In conclusion, using the gluten free self raising flour worked out really well. You can pretty much use it in any recipe in place of normal self raising flour, or normal flour for that matter cause you can get the GF version of that in the supermarket too. Can’t wait to do more experimenting with gluten free baking. My boyfriend will be happy cause he can never eat what I bake!

A little bit of passion.

Last weekend it was my friend Aishia‘s 22nd birthday. She had a sky blue themed afternoon tea party and it was awesome! Lots of great food… white chocolate brownies, chocolate cake, breads and cheeses, fruit and of course some fantastic cheerios! I ate too much within the first 10 minutes of being there and then continued to keep eating those delicious brownies. I made a mistaaaake.

I made a batch of cupcakes for the party. Decided to make something fruity since most of the other items that Aishia was making were chocolatey.

(I also made some macarons, which weren’t very good so I didn’t end up taking them to the party. Booooooo. I will do a post on those soon though!)

Passionfruit Buttercake Cupcakes

90g softened butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 cup self-raising flour
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp

Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter, sugar, eggs and flour on low speed until just combined.
Increase speed until mixture has changed to a paler colour.
Stir in passionfruit pulp.
Divide mixture among 12 regular cupcake cases.
Bake for about 20 minutes.

I couldn’t find any passionfruit at my local supermarket on the day so instead I got Tasti’s Passionfruit in Sweetened Syrup. I’m not a big fan of passionfruit things that contain the black pips so I sifted those out till I was left with 1/4 of a cup of sweet pulpy syrup.

Because it’s such a sugary/syrupy recipe, the tops of the cupcakes go really golden brown. Which in my opinion makes it even tastier!

I ran out of time on the day to make some of my own frosting (I wanted to do a fluffy meringue style frosting) so I ended up using Betty Crocker’s Vanilla Frosting and added a bit of the passionfruit syrup and some sky blue colouring gel.

Yum yum!

As cute as a cupcake!

Being cooped up at home, with nothing to look at but the internet and television, has made me extremely hungry and craving some baking. Day time TV has been fantastic lately. There’s been a great amount of cooking and baking shows on and I couldn’t have been happier.

I’m constantly grabbing tissues at the moment, to tend to my leaky nose so I thought it best not to try baking anything. Might be a bit gross!

Anyway, getting back to where I was heading with this…
Since I can’t bake, I’ll just post photos of my baking!

My friend Aishia and I decided that we would so some baking for our boss’s wedding morning tea at work, instead of just buying it all from a supermarket or caterer. We had just had some cupcakes brought in to work previously by a caterer and they were really yuck. And I knew I could do better than that!

I decided to do two batches of cupcakes so that everyone in our work team would get one each. The first batch I made were chocolate cupcakes with some sprinkled white chocolate chips. I may have gone a little overboard with those!

I whipped up a chocolate buttercream frosting and piped it on using the handy 1M piping tip.

I’m never happy with how my buttercream comes out when piped – I always end up with too much air in the bag or in the mix, so then it doesn’t come out all nice and smooth. Must find a way to fix this! If anyone has any tips for this please email or Tumblr ask me!

So since the frosting didn’t nicely attach back to itself, I decided to pipe some little hearts out of candy melts to decorate them and cover up the bad join of the frosting. I chose yellow candy melts to match the other batch of cupcakes I was making. They turned out super cute!

Just because I hadn’t had them in ages (and was really craving them!) I made lemon cream cheese cupcakes for my second batch.

This recipe might just be my favourite cupcake ever.
I love lemon.
I love cream cheese.
I love cupcakes!

Lemon cream cheese frosting was the obvious choice to pair up with these cupcakes (just add 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind to the recipe in the link).

You’d think it would be ‘too much’ lemon and ‘too much’ cream cheese. But no way. All of it. Together. So good.

This frosting looked really cute when I used the 1M tip. Super happy with how it worked out since this was the first time I had used that tip and I had heard many great things about it!

I popped some white pearl sprinkles on top and they looked really nice!

I originally intended to do these cupcakes in a real ‘bride and groom’ theme but I let time get away with me and never made any groom decorations, and then decided that I didn’t want to make the lemon frosting teal (the colour theme of my boss’s wedding) cause I thought it was weird. So this is how they turned out in the end. Ha!

They got eaten up crazy quick! It’s not often that all of the food we have at our morning teas get eaten so it was great when these all got gobbled up.

Aishia made some AMAZING white chocolate brownie (which I will be making myself some time soon cause it was delish!) and chocolate chip cookies and they all got eat up too! SUCCESS!

Cupcakes times four.

A friend of mine, Soph, had a sweet little birthday party at an adorable cafe a few weeks ago and her boyfriend, Si, asked me to make her some birthday cupcakes for it.

On a side note, go check out Soph and Si’s amazing photography. If I ever get married they will totally be the photographers and I will absolutely get a stop motion video done by them!

Getting back to the cupcakes…

I had to make 40 of them and I wanted to make four different flavours, just for fun. So to make it easier I decided to make two batches with a vanilla buttercake recipe and two batches with a chocolate cake recipe so that they would be easily adaptable to other flavours.

Lemon Cupcakes

Of course the first one I HAD to make was lemon flavoured – my favourite!

I filled the vanilla buttercake cupcakes with some lemon curd (didn’t make that myself cause I was a little too lazy and we already had some awesome lemon curd in the fridge that I use on toast – yum!) using the Wilton’s 230 decorating tip.

I topped them off with some lemon cream cheese frosting, coloured with golden yellow colouring gel, in a pretty little swirl. Yum yum!

The black and white cases made them look like bumble bees – now I know what cases to use if I ever make honey cupcakes!

White Chocolate and Raspberry Cupcakes

These were fairly simple. I just chopped up some white chocolate (cause I failed to find white chocolate chips at my supermarket) and added it to the vanilla buttercake batter, as well as sprinkled a few on top of the batter in the cases before popping them in the oven.

I made some plain buttercream frosting and added in some raspberry essence. I couldn’t taste at all while I baked this so I had to rely on my flatmate and boyfriend to tell me what things tasted like. I got my boyfriend to taste the frosting, without telling him what was in it, and he thought it was banana flavoured! Haha, might not use that essence again!

Before piping the frosting on I popped a fresh raspberry on top of the cupcake and piped the frosting (with a round decorating tip) around and over it. Then I topped it off with another raspberry. They looked super cute and I heard that they were really refreshing in/on them because they broke up the sweetness of the cake and frosting.

Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

Mint chocolate chip cupcakes had to be on the list! Mainly because I had the green striped cases… Hehe.

They were super simple to do as well. I just added in some chocolate chips to my plain chocolate cake recipe and popped them in the oven to bake. I considered adding some peppermint essence to the cake but I didn’t want the mint flavour to be too overpowering.

I added a bit of peppermint essence to cream cheese frosting, coloured it white so that it didn’t have that butter/cream cheese colour and piped it using a round decorating tip. I crunched up some mint Aero bar and popped that on top and they were done!

Chocolate Cupakes (vegan)

I had a feeling that Si and Soph might have some vegan friends in their circle so I thought I better do one cupcake that’s vegan friendly, just in case. This one was really simple – I used the plain vegan chocolate cake recipe (link above), with nothing extra.

I made some chocolate buttercream frosting, piped it into a nice little swirl and then grated some dairy free milk chocolate on top just to give it a little something extra.

“They just may have been the best tasting cup cakes ever.”
- Sophie Bayly

Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Album Listening Party Cupcakes

Back in October my friends Shahlin and Sacha from Coup De Main asked me to make some cupcakes for their Taylor Swift advance ‘Speak Now’ album listening party! We had to make 48 cupcakes with frosting to match the album cover. I’d never made that amount of cupcakes before and luckily Carly helped out.

Shahlin requested chocolate / caramel flavoured cupcakes with buttercream frosting. We decided to test a few different ways of getting the caramel flavour in there with using our usual Chocolate Vegan Cupcake recipe (found here minus the peppermint essence and chocolate chips). We tried three different ways to put the caramel flavour in: a rolo in them, a piece of caramello chocolate in them or a drizzle of toffee syrup injected in them. Rolo won.

Carly and I took turns doing a dozen batch of cupcakes each at a time. That worked really well. Got to play quite a few games of Speed while we waited for each batch to bake.

Then came the buttercream frosting. The colour definitely didn’t turn out how I wanted it. The frosting itself was fine but I wanted the colour to be a super vibrant pink and purple to match the colours of the dress Taylor Swift wears on the album cover. However, due to disagreements, we didn’t put enough colouring in to get them to be that vibrant.

They still turned out pretty good in the end and we got some great feedback about them. Would have liked to put on some luster dust on top to make them shimmer like the album cover too but we ran out of time.

Interesting experience to say the least! So those were our Taylor Swift ‘Speak Now’ Chocolate and Caramel Surprise Cupakes!

Blue teal.

Teal is one of my favourite colours right now and I really want to try out the teal colouring gel I just got. I also really wanted to test out these black and white dotty cups I bought. Decided to go with something simple but not overly plain, so I made Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes.

Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
(actually just vanilla butter cakes with added chocolate chips)

1 cup self raising flour
90g softened butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milk
A handful or two of chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 180 C.
Sift flour into bowl, add butter, vanilla extract, sugar, eggs and milk.
Beat together until ingredients are combined and the mixture changes to a paler colour.
Bake for 20 minutes.

The paper cups I used didn’t really work as nicely as I had hoped. The ended up completely covered in grease from the mixture. I put them into a second cup to hide it but those just looked even worse. Bit of a bugger. I think if I really wanted to use them again I would bake them in plain cups and then pop them into the black and white dotty ones.

Vanilla Butter Cream Frosting

125g softened butter
240g icing sugar
2 tablespoons milk

Beat together. I then added in a little bit of whitener so that they yellow from the butter wouldn’t effect the teal, and then popped in some teal colouring gel. They came out a lot bluer than I would have liked but the colour is still stunning!

Carly made some adorable chocolate sugar cookies in the shape of bunnies and hearts to go with the cupcakes. They tasted delicious! I’ll eventually make some of these too and I’ll post the recipe then.

TIP: All cupcakes should really be eaten as a cupcake sandwich, as shown in one of the pictures above. Makes them so much easier to eat when they have so much frosting! Just break the cake part in two and take the bottom half and plonk it over the frosting and squish down. Nom nom nom!