Double Glazed Doughnut Muffins and a cupcakey Birthday.

Hi there,

Seems like it was only yesterday I blogged last as the last week or so has flew by, It has been great though I've been celebrating my birthday with family, friends and a lot of cocktails and I've been preparing for my upcoming holiday, as well as baking and cooking of course. 

I really enjoyed my Birthday this year and even though I refuse to accept that I'm hurtling towards 30 at a rate I do not like I still love Birthdays, especially the presents, hehehe. And of course true to form I received loads of baking and cupcake related gifts and cars from a wonderful selection of books on French desserts to super cute cupcake cases! And pretty much every Birthday card I received had a cupcake on it! Now I never usually post pictures of myself on my blog (In fact I never have) but I have to show you how adorable my cupcake Birthday badge was, I'm even keeping it in the cupboard to bring out again next year (really)

 You can also see a small selection of my cupcake cards, yes we put them up in the pub, hehehe.

Any way enough of my cupcakey birthday gifts for today, onto the recent baking endeavors. I don't know what it was about last week but I saw so many recipes on my favorite blogs that I felt the urge to bake so I have quite a few printed off recipes ready for a blog steal and today's was one of those.

I saw this recipe for Double Glazed Doughnut Muffins on the fantastic blog Goddess of Baking and I craved them so much I made them that very night. They looked so tasty and I figured with the cinnamon and the muffin element it was something I could get away with eating for breakfast. (well sort of.) Any way they tasted so good! I added a bit more cinnamon than advised as I love my cinnamon and I used sunflower oil instead of vegetable (as that's what I had in) and I also made my glaze a lot thicker (accidental) but that was OK as it meant that I just didn't dip them twice. I really enjoyed these and they were all eaten so fast (not all by me I promise)

Mine by far didn't look as good as the ones on Goddess of Baking blog and I definitely used cases that were far to big and I think that's why they rose a little funny but they tasted perfect and were so soft so I was happy. Next time I'll be making them in smaller cases though. Any way here they are:

I always find it a little confusing measuring things in cups as I'm so used to using grams or ounces and I don't have measuring cups so I trawled the Internet for conversions and roughly converted the recipe into grams, and as the cakes came out fine I expect the conversions were pretty right, any way here's how I made them.

Double Glazed Doughnut Muffins: adapted from Goddess of Baking 

Makes 12 - 18 (depending on if you use extremely large cases like me)

55g Unsalted butter at room temperature
4 tbsp Sunflower oil 
100g Caster sugar
75g Soft brown Sugar
2 Eggs
1 1/2 tsp Baking powder
1/4 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
3/4 tsp Ground nutmeg
2 tsp Cinnamon
pinch of salt
1 tsp Vanilla extract
280g Plain flour
240ml Milk

Glaze Ingredients:

3 tbsp Unsalted butter, melted
110g Icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp Vanilla extract
2 tbsp Hot water

Preheat the oven to 200 deg C. Line a muffin tin with papers and brush the cups with a little sunflower oil to ensure they peel off the muffins nicely.
With and electric whisk or mixer, cream together the butter, sunflower oil and sugars until smooth. Add the eggs, beating to combine.
Stir in the baking powder, Bicarbonate, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt and vanilla.
Stir the flour into the butter mixture alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with the flour and making sure everything is fully combined.
Spoon the batter evenly into the cases, filling the cases to nearly full.
Bake for 14-16 minutes or until pale golden and a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Prepare the glaze by mixing together the melted butter, icing sugar, vanilla and water. Whisk until smooth. When the muffins have cooled slightly, dip the top of the muffin into the glaze and leave to harden, they can then be dipped again. I wasn't paying attention so made my glaze way to thick and didn't need to double dip.

These are great served warm.

And that's it. Hmmm thinking about it I wish I had one of these now as a pre bedtime treat, I will definitely be making more very soon.

Any way that's enough for today but I'll be back soon with another blog steal, a recipe re-visited and to show you a special cupcake present I got!

Until then keep baking

xxx

Classic Strawberry Victoria Sponge

I didn't plan to bake a lot this weekend, I had a small order of cakes for my friends mum but I definitely wasn't baking any cakes for myself, as this weekend it was my Birthday! and surely that's an occasion when other people should give me cakes and treats! I did end up making a couple of treats though but nothing too taxing, just covering some pretzels in chocolate, and making a version of a rice crispie cake but using ammareti biscuits and marshmellow instead (which was odd but tasty).

Anyway the other weekend I went to visit my friend at her brand new house as she recently hopped on the property ladder, so taking along a house warming cake seemed like the right thing to do, and as the fridge was packed full of Strawberries and double cream I decided to go for a classic Victoria sponge, something that strangely I had never made before, which is odd because as a cake I love it, so simple yet fresh, light and tasty. I then dressed it up a little using sponge fingers, ribbon and piles of strawberries just to make it look more like a gift. and here it is:

 And here's the cake before I dressed it all up:

I actually prefer it this way, just dusted with a little icing sugar as I'm not to keen on sponge fingers, but they do make it look pretty.

This cake takes me a little longer to make as I only have 1 round cake tin so I have to make it in two batches, I should really buy more tins. 

Anyway the recipe I used was from the BBC good food cake app for the IPhone and it was simple but tasted perfect, with a really light consistency so definitely a recipe I will use again. all I did was substitute jam for fresh strawberries and I used icing sugar in the filling rather than caster sugar.

here it is:

Classic Victoria Sponge


200g Unsalted butter, softened
200g Self raising flour
1tsp Baking powder
200g Golden caster sugar
4 eggs
2 tbsp milk


For the filling:
150ml Double cream
50g Icing sugar
1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
punnet of fresh strawberries
Icing sugar for dusting

Heat the oven to 180degC and grease and line 2 x 20cm round sandwich tins.
Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl, then tip in all the other sponge ingredients. Using an electric whisk, beat everything together until smooth.
Divide the mix between the cake tins then bake for 20 - 25 minutes until cooked and golden and a skewer inserted comes out clean. When cool enough to handle, remove the cakes from the tins and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.


To make the filling whip the cream with the sugar and vanilla using an electric whisk until the cream holds its shape. Spread one half of the cakes with the cream (saving some for the top of the cake if required) and then layer slices of strawberry on top like so:

Then gently sandwich the cakes together. If using jam instead of strawberries simply spread one half of the cake with cream and the other with jam and sandwich together.


I then decorated my cake by spreading a tiny bit of cream on each sponge finger and positioning them around the cake and tying a ribbon around to hold them in place, I then spread the rest of the cream on top of the cake and topped with chopped strawberries and dusted with icing sugar.

As I said before, I personally prefer the cake simple without the sponge fingers but either way this cake is tasty and fresh and went down very well with my friend and her parents and we got to enjoy it after the boyfriend got roped in to assembling her new pretty black glass dining table. (Well we needed somewhere to put the cake!)

Finally I wanted to show you the cute little cake mould I bought, It was a bargain at 69p and was really only bought of the novelty. Its a cake in the shape of a cupcake, not one of those huge cupcake pans you get (but I do want one of them) But a small mini cake that make the perfect size cake for 2 to share (or 1 to scoff by themselves)  any way its a small silicone mound and seems to produce a cute little cake. Boyfriend actually tried it out the first time and made this vanilla sponge.

Isn't it cute? And it would look even cuter iced in pretty colours. It cracked a little coming out the mould but I think that was more down to impatience to plate and eat the cake.

Any way that's all for today I'm off to look through my new cake book birthday presents and drool over the pictures.

Bye for now

xxx

Linked up to Sweets for Saturday

Tuck Shop Cupcakes.

Howdy!

I havn't been able to blog in a while as the naughty USB ports on the laptop broke and it's been driving me mad, but off to the shop it went and now it's back and all fixed and shiny.  I've missed blogging but I have been busy baking, alot for orders though including 28 cake pops and 20 ice cream cone cakes, which unfortunatley because I was so rushed in making and delivering that I forgot to take any pictures.

A few weeks ago I also made some suprise cupcakes for a friend of mine. It was a friends birthday and they were having a bbq. A friend of mine asked if I'd bring cucpakes (it wasn't even the friend who was having the bbq who asked, it was my cheeky cupcake feind friend Alex) So needless to say my friends (apart from Alex) were pleasantly suprised when I turned up with 24 cupcakes! I made 12 Mojito Cupcakes as these are just perfect for a sunny BBQ and then I made 12 surprise Tuck shop cupcakes. 

My friend Alex was in fact the inspiration for these cupcakes as the week before at the pub she had ordered a dessert favorite of hers called Tuck shop ice cream cake. It was pretty much a basic ice cream cake but on top was a variety of different chopped up sweets, chocolate bars and biscuits. With the fun being in the fact it's different every time. (Alex was very disappointed that time as she didn't get a piece of mini roll and another friend did) So I decided to surprise her and incorporate this idea of a Tuck shop and variety into some extra special cupcakes with enough that she could look at them all and decide which cake had her favorite treats on.

And here they are:

 The cakes themselves are this recipe for Chocolate Cupcakes and Vanilla frosting, however I didn't just wan't treats topping the cakes so I also baked some into them. So you never knew which treats you would get inside your cake!

I started with this lot: 

A big selection of the kind of treats you could buy at a school Tuck shop. I then resisted temptation to scoff the lot and once I had filled 12 cupcake cases with the chocolate batter I dropped a peice of a few treats into each cupcake. I left the jelly sweets and jelly beans out of the batter as I felt the other treats would work better.

Once they were baked with the treats inside they looked like this:

 Then I simply piped them with Vanilla frosting and topped each with different peices of treats!

These cupcakes are definitley for the sweet tooth! My choice would be one topped with things like Fudge and caramel like this one in the front:

Apparently these cakes were very tasty, fun and definitely for someone with a sweet tooth! I would like to say I know this from personal experience but I didn't get one myself! They were all snatched up and eaten, I managed to save one and take one home but then boyfriend ate that one too! I managed to eat some of the Mojito cakes though and also a rather large slice of my friends scrummy Malteaser cheesecake! (I'll have to steal and post the recipe for that one!)

Any way that's all for today I cant look at the picture of the bowls of sweets any longer as I'm having serious cravings hehehe!

Bye for now!

Cupcake Kris