New Home Cupcakes

Amidst all of this new Spring season of baking and making, and after some busy St. Patrick's Day/Easter preparations I have something different to tell you all about... even if this post is a couple of weeks late :-)

...and now even later thanks to our internet and cable being down for 18 hours BOO! Anyway, it's here now!

We caught up with some friends at the beginning of March and went to visit their new place as they have moved back to Toronto.  We enjoyed some delicious food and played some games - a perfect evening!!

A new home meant a new idea for me to try out.  I wanted to bake some dessert for our dinner, as well as give a housewarming edible gift and here's what I came up with ... 

As I mentioned in my St. Patrick's Day post, I've been more excited by cupcakes recently and experimenting with various decorations to go on top - a little more than just frosting and piping.  I decided that a theme of 3 things would work nicely together and wanted to do all of these with fondant icing.  I then had to decide what flavour the cupcakes had to be!... I knew that my chocolate and mint cupcakes were coming up so I didn't want to do those twice in one week, and I also didn't want to only do a vanilla ... 

Then an idea came to me - I had heard and read about coca-cola cakes but had never tried one, either in taste or in baking!  So I did a little reading and research about it and noticed that there were two main ideas regarding them - one more sweet sounding than the other.  I went with the one that sounded not as rich and sweet as the other and in fact was Nigella Lawson's recipe that I read good reviews/comments about so was happy to try that.  I also liked the idea that the glaze had a good coca-cola flavour to it, and also would leave a good flat surface for the fondant cupcake toppers I created.  

Cakes all baked and ready to be glazed.
I definitely preferred the cupcakes that didn't dome over the
top of the case,the flat surface meant for a
good spread of the glaze.

Apologies I definitely forgot to take photos of the glaze as I went along, but hopefully you can see how it turned out on top of the finished product!

For the fondant cupcake toppers I chose a house, a key, and a plaque reading 'Home Sweet Home' and created this out of Wilton roll out fondant.  For this I only needed a tiny bit of fondant... I played around a little with the colouring, I mainly used a brown, a black and a yellow/brown colour for these small pieces.  I used a food decoration marker for the Home Sweet Home writing, and a dark chocolate and white chocolate writing icing pen for the windows and door on the house.  Kind of fiddly, but I love the detailed work that brought it all together.

All the cupcake toppers assembled, the cakes were cooled and glazed and all put together to create 12 cupcakes ready for our get together the next day.  Sadly I couldn't make them the same day as I had music classes all morning, and the first Toronto FC game of the season to attend in the afternoon!!  Which did mean I trusted Jonathan to get them to me safely after work without anything bad happening to them, and phew... all arrived safe and sound :-)

The cupcakes were SO moist, and so delicious!  I almost can't call them cupcakes as they were very different to a traditional spongey bouncy cake you usually think of for a cupcake.  But, they were in cupcake form so I will continue to!  The chocolate/cocoa powder was definitely the primary flavour you tasted, but the Coke definitely added to the moist and dense texture of the cake (something kind of like a steamed pudding).  The Coca-Cola taste definitely came through more in the glaze which, with that butter and icing sugar was of course, all of the deliciousness!  

Definitely something different with this Coca-Cola cake, but a fun one to try and a delicious one to eat!  Keep reading to see the recipe below...

My favourite one, the little house.

 
And here's the recipe, very slightly adapted from Nigella Lawson's Coca-Cola Cake.

For the cupcakes:
200g (7 oz) plain flour
250g (1/2 lb) golden caster sugar (I actually used white granulated superfine sugar, and all was okay!)
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
125 ml (1/2 cup) buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g (4 oz) unsalted butter
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
175 ml (3/4 cup) Coca-Cola

Nigella suggests using a 22-23 cm springform cake pan, lined with foil to prevent the batter leaking, then greased but I used a 12 cup cupcake tin (and a few extra silicone cupcake cases) to make 16 cupcakes lined with cupcake cases, in red and white to go along with the Coca-Cola theme!

For the icing:
225g (7 oz) icing sugar
2 tablespoons (30g) butter
3 tablespoons (45ml) Coca-Cola
1 tablespoons (15ml) cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.  Preheat the oven to 180°C/ 350°F
2.  In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, bicarbonate of soda and salt.  In a measuring jug beat the egg, buttermilk and vanilla.  For this recipe I just went old school and used a mixing bowl and wooden spoon instead of using the Kitchen Aid stand mixer like I usually do!
3.  In a heavy-based saucepan, melt the butter, cocoa and Coca-Cola, heating it gently.  This frothed up like crazy which was very cool!  Pour into the dry ingredients, stir well with a wooden spoon, and then add the liquid ingredients from the jug, beating until it is well blended.
4.  Pour into the prepared tin and bake on the warm sheet for 40 minutes or until a tester comes out clean.  As Nigella did 1 cake in a large tin her cooking time of 40 minutes was longer than my 16 cupcakes.  I reckon mine were in for around 20 minutes, but definitely check them!
5.  Leave to stand for 15 minutes in the tin before unmoulding, then unclip, unwrap and turn out on a wire rack, making sure you've got a sheet of newspaper of something underneath the rack to catch any icing that drips through.  For this step I just removed the cupcakes from the tin and left to cool on a wire rack, I did also put a baking sheet underneath to catch any drips but I got to miss the steps to do with the Springform tin.
6.  Sieve the icing sugar and set aside.  In a saucepan, combine the butter, Coca-Cola and cocoa and stir over a low heat until the butter has melted.  Remove from the heat, add the vanilla and spoon in the sieved icing sugar, beating as you do so, until you have a good, spreadable, but still runny, icing.
7.  Pour icing over the cake while the cake is still warm, spread gently and leave till cool before transferring to the serving plate.  At this point I also topped the cakes with the fondant decorations before the glaze had completely cooled so they could set into it slightly.

Happy New Home guys!  Thanks for having us over :-)

It's your Birthday and it's the Super Bowl!!

A BIG Happy Birthday today to my husband Jonathan who is lucky enough to have his birthday on Super Bowl Sunday for real this year!

We're celebrating with his family and watching the game later on, but here's a quick post to let you know what cake we'll be eating!

After last year's Game Night birthday cake I was wondering what I could do this year... Cue some crazy ideas way above my station and off I went!  I was drawing ideas for days, planning the flavours of cake and the buttercream fillings... My ideas are definitely TOO crazy sometimes and there are things I should probably realise I cannot get done on a Saturday after work in the morning, with a music birthday party for a 3 year old in the afternoon, but alas - Sunday morning has arrived and I am still alive and did get 6 hours sleep!

Here's how it looks...

Super Bowl/ Birthday cake with Jonathan's favourite
things to top it off!

Popcorn was the only non-cake non-icing thing here!

I couldn't have a Super Bowl cake without
a ball now could I!?

A few shots with my macro lens!

Ravens vs. 49ers colours :-) 

SO pleased with how this turned out!  

A basic run-down on the flavours before I go...

Bottom (pitch....hmm field?) layer - Red velvet Cake with Buttercream filling.

Middle (team colour) layer - Vanilla cake with Vanilla syrup, Buttercream and cherry filling.

Top (Coke!) layer - Chocolate cake with Salted Caramel Buttercream filling.

I promise to write about the recipes I used later on and add in some links, but for now there's a birthday party to get to!!

♥ HAPPY BIRTHDAY JONATHAN ♥

Hi again, some updates on recipes and what was what now the craziness of a birthday filled weekend is over!

For the bottom layer that made up the Super Bowl field I used Red Velvet Cake that came from the Joy of Baking blog here.  I have always used this recipe, many times before and love it.  It is dense, moist and just so good!  Never needed any other recipe.  I thought this would be a great cake for the bottom layer of the cake to make sure it was sturdy enough to hold tiers on top of it.

I filled the cake with regular vanilla buttercream, a ratio of 300g icing sugar and 175g butter but double or triple depending on how much you need, and pure vanilla essence to taste - around a teaspoon for that amount.

For decoration I used Wilton fondant and did a LOT of rolling out!  I coloured most of it light green but then added a dark green touchdown strip, and then white strips, slightly thicker for the 50 yard line and then thinner ones for the other yard lines.  Originally I planned on writing the numbers on the cake as well but once it was done I decided to leave it as it already was quite full of stuff and didn't want to overcrowd the cake!

Tier number two was the Vanilla cake that also had vanilla syrup through it making it also nice and dense and very moist and yummy.  Find that recipe here from BBC's Good Food.  I always prefer using grams to cup recipes and I KNOW I can trust a British recipe for this :-)  I cooked it in a 6-inch springform pan and it required a little less time than it suggested but just keep an eye on it!

I filled this one with more of that vanilla buttercream, but to this one I also added glace cherries - halved and placed on top of the buttercream filling.  Jonathan LOVES cherries so this was all for him!

To cover this one I coloured the fondant icing with red and blue/purple and cut them into strips for the team colours for this year's Super Bowl.  And hey, researching this meant I now knew who was playing!

To top of the cake I made 2 coke cans out of Chocolate Victoria Sponge - which I wouldn't use again not for the recipe, which was yummy but tooooo spongey and soft to work easily with.  

I filled this one with Salted Caramel Buttercream and of course I have lots left over because I just made 2 cans using my empire cookie cutter but it tasted good, nice and sweet!

I covered the taller can with grey tinted icing and the smaller coke can with more of the red fondant icing.  To create the can look I used food writing markers to do the Diet Coke font and then used white writing icing to colour in the swooshy line for the Coca-Cola effect.  

Finishing touches was the popcorn around the top edge (Coke and Popcorn - it's the Super Bowl right?!)... the grass piped green buttercream using my grass tip and piping bag... and some brown all fondant superbowls with white chocolate writing icing pen stitching :-)

A BIG project, maybe my biggest and best fondant cake yet!  Half was eaten up at the party last night, just enough left to enjoy just the two of us this week!!