Center Parcs Birthday Cake

  

For a birthday trip to center parcs I just had to make a themed birthday cake! Three tiered chocolate sponge cake with chocolate icing and cherry filling. The trees are cookies with green candy melt icing piped on. The signs are wafer with again candy melt icing and chocolate icing. The top was sprinkled with choc chips. It was very tasty!

Caramel Book Club Cupcakes

Getting some sugar paper gave me a great idea- books, on book club cupcakes, and make them caramel!

I have tried making caramel before and found it hard to get the right consistency so I opted for getting some tinned caramel to put in the mix. The only stuff supermarkets seem to sell is the nestle stuff, it tastes good.

The variations on my usual cupcake recipe were to add light and dark brown sugar and the caramel in place of the milk. The cakes came out a bit crisper than normal but that was fine. The icing was caramel heated on the hob with icing sugar mixed in. I had to get in on the cakes very quick because it goes stiff on cooling.




Experimented a bit with the books, but settled on mint chocolate wafers cut up with sheets of royal icing in between, a fruit winder bookmark and sugar paper front cover. The writing on the book covers is in edible black ink- you can get pens from large craft stores.

Next book club books are Twilight and (Vs) Dracula. Already getting ideas on that theme!

Knitted Royal Wedding

Thanks to a birthday present I now have the power to knit the royal wedding. All the patterns and ideas are from this book: Fiona Goble, Knit your own Royal Wedding which you can get from amazon

Most of the knitting projects I have done so far have been simple scarfs and hats so this is quite a challenge as it involves a lot of adding/decreasing/shaping.  Hopefully if I learn how to do the complex stuff with this project I can make lots of knitted animals and characters :-)

I thought i'd start with something small- the corgis!

Strawberry and Cream Cupcakes

It’s summer, it’s Wimbledon so it has to be time to make strawberry and cream cupcakes.

I based the recipe around the standard cake mix that I usually make but added fruits in syrup rather than the usual milk, so:

110g (just under half a standard block) unsalted butter

225g caster sugar

2 large eggs

150g self-raising flour

125g plain flour

300g tin of raspberries in syrup

You can get strawberries in a tin but for some reason the supermarket didn’t have any in so I used raspberries instead. Using tinned means you get a nice fruity syrup which mixes very well and colours the mixture so you get pinkish cakes. I whizzed up the raspberries with a hand blender first. 

Cream butter (which should be at room temperature) and sugar. Add the two eggs one at a time. Add a third of the flours, third of the syrup... etc until all added.

I was a bit worried about them not rising due to the syrup so added a teaspoon of baking powder as well. Think it could have done with two or three actually!

Cooked in the oven for around 30 minutes at 100 °C

I then decorated the top with whipped cream and strawberries and they were done!