My sister asked me nicely to do Smurf cupcakes this week. So I did :)
The cake is a simple vanilla cake recipe taken from the Cupcake book again with lots and lots of blue food colouring. I took the white chocolate recipe from the same book as the cake for the icing. The challenge here was trying to pipe the icing so it would look like a Smurf’s hat. I think I managed pretty well. What do you think? Of course, I couldn’t resist making one with red icing for papa smurf!
Cheers :)
This week I wanted to try making biscotti. It’s something I have never tried before! I’m really into trying to make new things these days. Experimentation is fun! So I found a neat little recipe on my favourite baking blog, Joy the baker. I simply changed the flavour to white chocolate and toasted almonds. Although I think I did something wrong with the method. I think I didn’t mix the dough long enough because it didn’t turn into the kind of dough you can knead. I stopped mixing when the ingredients were combined, but it was way too liquid and sticky. So I put it directly on the parchment paper lined baking sheet and put it in the oven. They still turned out very tasty and no one noticed the difference. I want to give this another try though.
As for the cupcakes, I had a request for berry, caramel or coffee, so I thought why not try to combine some of those flavours! I had some caramel handy so I started from there. I made a vanilla cupcake to let the caramel filling shine. I thought of expresso for the icing. The smell of the caramel and the expresso complemented each other well so I assumed the taste would too. I was not wrong! I took the vanilla cake and expresso icing recipes from the same book as last week, Cupcakes. Both times I tried recipes from that book they turned out amazing. I really recommend it!
Cheers!
This week marks the return of a post per week! I’ve started work again which means I can share my cupcakes and not feel the need to restrain myself from eating a batch of twelve cupcakes all by myself. To highlight my return I decided to go for a classic: chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing. Its a recipe from a book my mom gave me for my birthday simply called Cupcakes from the cupcake bakery Petits Gateaux in Montreal (sorry, links only available in french). They were fabulous! The cake rose very well without over flowing and it was perfectly soft. The icing was really good too although a lot was left over, not really complaining about that one!
With the cupcake dough I also tried out a new cake pan my brother and sister gave me. The mini cakes are really cute. I was happily surprised at how well they got out of the pan, conserving all their detail.
I have wanted to try making pie crust from scratch for a while now and with all the berries around I thought this was the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately, when I got to the grocery store they didn’t have anymore fresh blueberries. Then I thought I’d make an apple pie. It is September after all! So an apple pie is what I made! I had a lot of fun making the pie dough. I foresee more pie making in my future! I took the crust recipe from this wonderful video and took the apple filling recipe here. Joy the Baker is awesome and she has an awesome blog. If you have a minute I strongly recommend browsing through it. The pie turned out great. I can proudly call my first try at pie a success!
Cheers :)