Cupcakes, At Last!

Last week book club was at my house, so for the first time in a long time, I made cupcakes. For my birthday at the start of the year, one of my good friends gave me the hummingbird bakery cook book. It is a lovely book full of delicious cakes, cupcakes, muffins etc but I had only ever made cookies from it. I had a look through it and found this recipe for peaches and cream cupcakes. They sounded delicious and also easy as they used a drained tin of peaches rather than fresh peaches.

The other thing I liked about the recipe is that it only had one egg and only 40g of butter. So many cupcake recipes have huge quantities of butter and numerous eggs, so not only was the recipe easy, it was also economical and fairly low in fat. Instead of making a buttercream icing, I topped the cakes with swirls of whipped cream. I love using whipped cream to top cupcakes, as I love cream far more than icing and it negates the need to serve some cream alongside the cakes. I made the cakes in pretty blue cupcake cases and topped them with little silver balls and blue flowers which I made a while ago. I think they looked really elegant and my book club friends enjoyed them too.




Peaches and Cream Cupcakes (from the Hummingbird Bakery cook book)

120g flour
140g sugar
1 ½ tsp baking powder
40g softened butter
120ml milk
1 egg
400g tin peaches, drained

• Combine flour, sugar and baking powder, then mixing in the softened butter using a cake mixer
• Combine the egg and milk and then gradually add to the dry ingredients. Mix to combine
• Place two slices of peach in each of 12 cupcake cases. Divide the cake mixture between the cases and bake at 170c for 20-25 minutes

Gluten Free for Mum

My mum is gluten free and when she comes to stay, I like to experiment with different recipes to see if I can make a normal kind of recipe gluten free without having to go and buy fancy flours etc. The easiest way to do this is to pick a recipe that doesn’t have a huge flour quantity in it and then use rice flour and cornfour as a substitute. The peach and white chocolate friands are a good example of that, and because they have a large nut content, even you cant really taste the rice flour in them.

For these gluten free friands, I took my usual friand recipe and simply substituted rice flour for flour. The rest of the recipe is exactly the same. I made the friands in cupcake cases, as even though I have friand tins, I do find it quite frustrating trying to get the cakes out of the tins, and then cleaning the tins is not easy. I used ground macadamia nuts in these friands, but you could use ground almonds instead, and I have also used coconut which is a more cost effective way of making friands. These friands are white chocolate and peach, because that is a combination that my mother loves, but I have also made them with coconut and added raspberries and white chocolate, almond and pear is another good one. If you don’t need to make these little cakes gluten free, just use normal flour.



Gluten Free Peach and White Chocolate Friands

150g butter, melted
6 egg whites, lightly whisked together just to break them up
1 ½ c icing sugar
1 c ground macadamia nuts
1/2c rice flour
150g white chocolate, chopped
1 drained tin of peaches

• Combine the melted butter, egg whites, icing sugar, grounds nuts and rice flour. Stir in the chocolate
• Spoon into friand tins or cupcake cases and top each cake with two slices of peach
• bake at 170c for 25 minutes or until cooked through

Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

In the weekend we had friends over for lunch. I made these little chocolate cherry cupcakes for our dessert. Lunch was pot luck – a good way of doing things when you have a baby and limited time. I bought some bread, made a big green salad and a chicken filo pie and our friends bought lasagne and a paella, both of which were delicious. The recipe for the cakes is one I adapted from a Julie Le Clerc recipe for a chocolate cherry bundt cake. I didn’t have morello cherries like the recipe called for and also didn’t have all the ground almonds that the recipe required, so I reduced the ground almond in take and upped the four, and used the cherries I had in the pantry.

You could make these cakes with frozen raspberries rather than the cherries and you could add chunks of chocolate, white or dark. The cherries actually mashed up a bit when I folded them through, which kind of gives my cakes more of a cherry swirl look – you could swirl good quality cherry jam through to get a similar effect. I decorated the tops of the cakes with simply whipped cream with a little vanilla bean paste added and sprinkled pink sprinkles on top and added an icing flower. So simple, but so effective!



Chocolate and Cherry Cupcakes (adapted from Julie Le Clerc)

125g butter
¾ c sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
3/4c ground almonds
½ c sour cream
1c self raising flour
1/2c flour
¼ c cocoa
1 can cherries, drained

• Cream butter and sugar and then add in vanilla. Beat in eggs, one at a time
• Stir in almonds and sour cream, then remaining dry ingredients, lastly folding through the cherries
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180c for 20-25 minutes
• Once cold top with whipped cream and decorate

Coconut Cupcakes

Our next door neighbours have just had a baby girl and what better way to celebrate than with some little pink cupcakes. I haven’t made that many cupcakes since harry was born – cookies seem to be the easiest thing to make with limited time. I did actually make some cupcakes for the time I hosted coffee group at my house, but I had to leave them un-iced, as I completely ran out of time to decorate them!

These cupcakes are coconut cupcakes. The recipe is scaled down to make 12 miniature sized cupcakes. I have iced them simply with a glace icing (icing sugar and water tinted pink) which meant that I didn’t have to spend a lot of time decorating them. The cakes are lovely and moist – not a lot of coconut, but just enough to give that lovely nutty texture. I sprinkled thread coconut over the top to give an indication of what is inside. The cupakes keep rally well (I think the coconut helps with that) and making mini versions means that you can have two without feeling greedy!

Coconut Cupcakes

60g butter
½ tsp coconut essence
½ c sugar
1 egg
1/4c coconut
¾ c self raising flour
½ c yoghurt
3 tbsp milk

• Cream butter, essence and sugar
• Beat in egg, then stir in dry ingredients, yoghurt and milk
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 160c for 20-222 minutes
• Once cold ice with a simple icing made with icing sugar and water, tinted pink. Sprinkle with thread coconut

Christmas Cupcakes

Seeing it is December 9 already, I thought it was about time I posted something Christmassy. I made these cupcakes last week for a client function. I made about 60 of them. The cupcake recipe came from the Crabapple bakery Cook Book and was spicy mocha cupcakes. I did scale down the amount of coffee in them – in fact I wondered if ¼ c of instant coffee powder was a mistake in the recipe? The cupcakes had a lovely density to them that you would associate with gingerbread. They were subtly spiced and also had melted chocolate in them. They kept well too – I made them in Sunday and they still tasted ok (although probably not at their best!) by Wednesday (the function was on Tuesday).

The icing I simply rolled fondant. This gives a lovely professional looking finish. Some people don’t like the taste of fondant, but rolled relatively thinly it’s not too sweet. I cut out fondant stars and Christmas trees using cutters, and sprinkled them with coloured sugar for the little cake toppers. I used lightly beaten eggwhite to adhere the sprinkles. Another way of decorating these cupcakes which would look quite cool would be to ice them with a simple white glace icing and then pop a red or green giant pebble on top.




Spiced Mocha Cupcakes (adapted from the Crabapple Bakery)

(one recipe made approx 36 cupcakes)

1 tbsp instant coffee dissolved in 1 c boiling water
150g dark chocolate
200g butter
1 ½ c brown sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3 c flour
2 tsp b powder
1 tsp b soda
2 tsp mixed spice
½ c sour cream

• Stir chocolate into hot coffee mixture and stir until smooth
• Cream butter and sugar
• Beat in eggs, one at a time
• Stir in coffee mixture and vanilla
• Stir in dry ingredients alternately with the sour cream
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 200c for 15-18 minutes

Cupcakes

A couple of weeks ago I made these cupcakes and I was so delighted with how they turned out. I really need to get back into the cupcake making thing again as they are so much fun. I also need to start thinking about Christmas treats. Now that I am nearly 30 weeks pregnant the time I used to spend baking in the evenings is now spent lying on the sofa watching Sex and the City – I have never seen this before, but started watching re-runs on Sky and am now addicted!! I need to start baking again in time for the Christmas baking extravaganza!

These cupcakes are the same lemon cupcakes I made for my baby shower. Even though they look completely different, the flavours are virtually the same. The pink ones were baked in pink paper cases, and I actually popped a raspberry in each cake before it was baked for lemon and raspberry cakes. I then tinted cream cheese icing pink, swirled it on top and topped with edible glitter and a white chocolate heart which I had used a chocolate transfer on. It was the first time I had used edible glitter and I probably used a bit too much, but they still looked cute.

The other cupcakes I left the cream cheese icing uncoloured and then topped them with a red icing flower which I made. The cases are red, so all colour co-ordinated. Not as great looking as the pink ones but still cute and effective. The thing with cupcakes is that it’s almost all in the look rather than the taste.

Baby Shower Cupcakes for me

One thing I haven’t mentioned on my blog is that I am having a baby. I am 28 weeks pregnant with our first child and that is the main reason why my postings haven’t been as regular over the last few months as they were in the past. It is an extremely exciting time and I am pleased to say that I have been incredibly well and enjoying every minute of it.





I mentioned earlier in the week that Mum and Dad and two of my sisters were up in the weekend. Well, on Saturday Mum and my sisters hosted a baby shower for me. It was a lovely afternoon and our little baby was so spoiled! We had a lovely afternoon tea with sandwiches, asparagus rolls, a cheese board and these cupcakes and shortbread that I made. The cupcakes were lemon yoghurt cake and were topped with tinted whipped cream. I topped them with these little fondant booties which I made. There was a tutorial on one of my favourite blogs, Not Quite Nigella, some time ago. You can find it here. They are deceptively easy to make and look just so gorgeous.



The shortbread shapes are decorated with fondant and royal icing. They are pretty simple but sometimes less is more. As you will be able to tell from the colours, we are not sure what we are having, so are having a very fun time guessing!

Cupcakes for Hospice

Last Sunday was another “baking for hospice” run. I had my friend and her 4 year old and 18 month old staying with me, so the 4 year old and I decided to make cupcakes as part of my contribution to baking for hospice. After a big day out at the zoo, shopping and visiting a friend with a newborn baby, I wanted an easy non-demanding recipe to make. Something that a 4 year old could easily help me with. So I looked to my Ladies, A Plate book and decided to make the recipe in there for cupcakes. It is a very simple cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs, then the dry ingredients and milk style recipe. The cakes are plain vanilla ones, but you could change the flavouring by adding citrus zest, replacing cocoa for flour or even tinting the mixture with food colouring to get coloured cupcakes.

The recipe made 12 standard sized cupcakes. The next morning we made buttercream icing, tinting it a pale pink, and spread it on the cupcakes, topping each one with a royal icing flower which I made some time ago. My little friend decorated hers with heart shaped sprinkles. I love how something as simple as pretty pink icing and a flower can turn an otherwise plain cupcake into something special.

Cupcakes (from Ladies, A Plate)

115g butter
150g sugar
2 eggs
180g flour
1 tsp baking powder
115ml milk
1 tsp vanilla

• Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs, one at a time
• Combine flour and baking powder and fold into the creamed mixture alternately with the milk and vanilla
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180c for 20 minutes or until cooked through.
• When cold decorate with buttercream icing

Jaffa Cupcakes

A couple of weeks ago we met some friends for afternoon tea at Cornwall Park. I made these jaffa cupcakes to take. It’s quite a long story as to how I decided to make jaffa cupcakes, but here goes……

A few weeks ago I decided to make fudge for some gifts. I wanted to use a recipe from a Jo Seagar cook book which involved melting marshmallows, adding melted chocolate and other things. Instead of going to the supermarket, I stopped at the service station on the way home to buy the marshmallows. There I spotted a bag of orange flavoured M & Ms which cutely only have white or orange candy coatings. I thought they would be good add ins to the fudge to make it look a bit more decorative.

Well, the fudge was a disaster! I melted the marshmallows and butter in the microwave for he advised amount of time, but it must have been a bit long and overheated the marshmallow mixture, as when I added the chocolate the whole things seized. Well, I was determined that roughly $10 worth of ingredients wasn’t going into the bin, so I beat the fudge like crazy until it sort of came together. I didn’t want to waste my m & ms by putting them into sub-standard fudge (which actually ended up tasting ok in the end anyway) so I saved them for another day.

So, when I was deciding what cupcakes to make to our picnic afternoon tea, I thought I would use the orange and white m & ms to decorate them with. I had some lovely Kerikeri oranges in the fruit bowl after our trip to the bay of islands and thought Jaffa Cupcakes would be perfect. However, in the end I decided not to decorate them with the orange M & Ms after all – they are still stashed in my pantry. Instead I topped the cakes with whipped cream (I still reckon this is the best cupcake topping as it pipes like a dream and I don’t find it too sweet) and sprinkled them with orange coloured sugar. Simple but delicious.



Jaffa Cupcakes

100g butter
2/3 c sugar
2 large eggs
3 tbsp cocoa dissolved in 3 tbsp hot water
Zest of one orange
3 tsbp freshly squeezed orange juice
2/3 c self raising flour

• Cream butter and sugar, then beat in eggs, one at a time
• Beat in cocoa dissolved in water and orange zest
• Fold in remaining ingredients
• Spoon into cupcake cases ( I got 11 cupcakes) and bake at 180c for 17-20 minutes
• When cold top with chocolate icing made with orange juice instead of water or whipped cream

SPCA Cupcake Day

We are off on holiday next week so there wont be any posting. In the meantime, it was SPCA cupcake day on Monday and I made these cupcakes to take to work for people to “buy” as a donation to the SPCA. My favourite were the dogs – so cute. The dog cupcakes are chocolate cake and the cats are vanilla. See you all in a week!

Birthday Cupcakes

My sister, her husband and my gorgeous niece and nephew have been staying for the past week. While they were here, it was my sister’s birthday. In the weekend my other two sisters came up and we had a birthday picnic on Saturday. My 5 year old niece loves baking and on Saturday morning we made these cute cupcakes for my sister’s birthday. My niece is going to be a talented baker! She has immense patience for a 5 year old when baking and a steady hand when it comes to mixing, folding and even cracking open eggs (she cracked 7 eggs over the weekend for different things we baked and not one piece of shell at all).



These cupcakes are chocolate cupcakes decorated with whipped cream that we tinted pink. We sprinkled them with some pretty pink sprinkles that I bought from foodtown and then topped them with sugar roses that the lovely Lorraine from Not Quite Nigella sent me from Sydney. The purple rosebud is actually one that I made – my first attempt at a ribbon rose and I must say I was quite pleased with the outcome. I have just started course 4 of the Wilton cake decorating classes, so will be posting about my cakes in the next few weeks.



The cupcakes were delicious and the whipped cream topping was just perfect on the pretty cakes.

Ginger and Walnut Cupcakes

It has been so long since I did some baking and brought it into work, that I thought I better do some. My poor work colleagues – when we started building the house, the builders got all the baking. Even though we finished that two months ago, I’ve been a bit remiss about bringing in morning tea.

So I decided to bring in cupcakes for morning tea today. Recently I got from the library a NZ book called Divine Cupcakes and it had a recipe in it for ginger cupcakes with ginger caramel icing and little gingerbread hearts on them – it really captured my imagination so I decided to do something similar for morning tea.



I actually used the gingerbread cupcakes from the crapbapple bakery recipe book. I played around with the recipe a bit, using sour cream instead of yoghurt and upping the spice quantities. The cupcakes have a little sliced crystallised ginger in them and also some walnuts which add a bit of interest. I used the divine cupcake recipe for the icing which makes a lovely creamy icing. I made little heart shaped gingerbread using a peggy porshen recipe. I normally use an Annabel Langbein recipe for gingerbread biscuits, but wanted to try something different and I really liked the peggy porshen recipe which uses muscavado sugar in it.

I think the cupcakes look so cute, and I am sure that everyone at work appreciated them too!

Ginger and Walnut Cupcakes (adapted from Crabapple Bakery Cook book)

150g butter
1 ¾ c sugar
4 eggs
1 ½ tsp vanilla
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
2 c flour
¼ tsp b soda
2 tsp ginger
½ tsp allspice
2/3 c natural yoghurt
1/3 c chopped crystallised ginger (I used preserved)
¾ c chopped walnuts

• Cream butter and sugar, then beat in eggs one at a time and lastly vanilla and grated ginger
• Combine dry ingredients and stir into butter mixture alternately with sour cream
• Stir in chopped ginger and walnuts
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 170c for 20-25 minutes
• When cold frost with ginger caramel icing

Caramel Ginger icing

125g butter
200g brown sugar
80ml cream
1 tbsp ground ginger
500g icing sugar

• Melt together butter and brown sugar, then boil for 2-3 minutes
• Stir in cream and ground ginger. Leave to cool until lukewarm
• Mix in icing sugar, leave to cool and then beat until fluffy (I added a bit more cream to loosen the mixture)

Gluten Free Cakes

My Mother’s cousin came for lunch a couple of weeks ago. She is coeliac and so of course I made a gluten free lunch. I made a quiche with ham, spinach and feta in it and instead of using a pastry base, I used cooked brown rice mixed with an egg which I pre-baked. The recipe was in Taste magazine a few months ago. We had it with a baby spinach, cherry tomato and boccocini salad.

For pudding I wanted to make a gluten free cake, but not the obvious lemon and almond or orange and almond. I searched through my recipe box and actually found a number of recipes that, while not specifically marked gluten free, more or less were. My only concern was the ones with baking powder in them – I wasn’t sure whether normal baking powder is gluten free or not. So I ended up making these chocolate and ginger gluten free cakes. They actually had no flour substitute in them – simply butter, eggs and chocolate with sliced crystallised ginger sprinkled over the top. They were lovely moist little cakes and very quick and easy to prepare. We ate them with natural yoghurt.

Chocolate and Ginger Gluten Free Cakes (Julie Le Clerc)

150g butter
300g dark chocolate
3 eggs
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp vanilla
½ c crystallised ginger

• Melt butter and chocolate together
• Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla together until thick, then stir in the chocolate mixture
• Spoon into cupcake cases and sprinkle sliced crystallised ginger over each cake
• Bake at 160c for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean

Friends for Lunch

On Sunday we had two of my university friends, their partners and children over for lunch. One of my friends lives in wellington and I hadn’t seen her for two years, and I don’t get to see the other one all that often as she lives an hour on the other side of Auckland, so it was a nice catch up. I made a tart for lunch. I think that is a good kind of thing to make for Sunday lunch. It is fairly light and also it doesn’t matter if it is served piping hot, warm or room temperature, it will still taste good.



I used another recipe from Rachel Allen, Bake for this tart, amending it somewhat to my tastes. The tart as written in the book was a goats cheese, spinach and potato tart. My tart was a feta, spinach and kumara tart, mostly because I don’t really like potato, but love kumara and goats cheese is a bit of an iffy thing to serve people for lunch as people tend to either love it or hate it. Instead of stirring the parmesan through the egg and cream custard used to fill the tart, I sprinkled it in the base of the blind baked shortcrust tart, covered that with spinach, then the kumara slices, dotted with feta and poured over the custard (4 eggs, ½ c cream, a pinch each of cayenne pepper and freshly ground nutmeg, salt and pepper). The tart was lovely. We had it with a baby spinach, chickpea and feta salad with a raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

I made the cute little cupcakes pictured above for pudding. They were lemon and poppyseed cupcakes with cream cheese icing and topped with some little flowers I made at one of my cake decorating classes last year (they last forever in an air tight container). They looked very sweet and were greatly appreciated by my friend’s almost 3 year old daughter.

Oh, and the two people I randomly picked to pay it forward to are Megan (who doesn’t have a blog but told me about the cake shop in Howick that I must visit) and Gaye from Laws of the Kitchen. Can you guys please e-mail me to confirm that you want to play (you will each need to agree to pay it forward to two people within 365 days) and if yes, your addresses. My e-mail is tcmatdavenportsharbourdotcodotnz

Moccachino cupcakes

Yesterday I wrote about recipes from Dish magazine. Today my recipe comes from the latest issue of Taste magazine. I subscribe to three magazines – Dish, Taste and Cuisine. Taste is probably my least favourite, but I still keep subscribing to it as I don’t like to miss out!! The recipes in taste are a lot more basic than in the other two magazines and are more what I think of as every day recipes. I don’t tend to make nearly as many recipes from Taste as I do from Dish and Cuisine (especially Dish).

This month I was excited to see that one of my favourite food writers, Julie Le Clerc is now doing a monthly column for Taste. I have all of Julie le Clerc’s books and attended many of her classes when she taught occasionally at the Epicurean cook school. Julie is a fabulous baker, and her recipes in her first column for Taste were part of a baking special. All of the recipes caught my eye, but I made the recipe for moccachino cake last weekend when we had our neighbours in to have a look at our new house. Instead of making one big cake, I halved the recipe and made cupcakes.

This recipe was so easy. It was basically a melt and mix recipe, but the cake was still lovely and light, not heavy like some melt and mix cakes are. The cake didn’t have a really pronounced coffee flavour, but the chocolate wasn’t so strong that it out weighed the coffeness – it was actually a well balanced cake. The cakes were iced with a coffee buttercream icing and I put the little silver dragees on top, but chocolate coated coffee beans would have been quite appropriate.

These cakes are definitely worth trying!

Moccachino Cupcakes (adapted from a Julie Le Clerc recipe in Taste magazine)

1/3 c rice bran oil
1 tbsp instant coffee
1/3 c boiling water
50g dark chocolate
½ c & 2 tbsp sugar
¼ c cocoa
1 egg
½ c & 2 tbsp flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ c yoghurt

• Mix oil, coffee, boiling water and chocolate in a small saucepan and then warm over a gentle heat until the chocolate has melted
• Stir in the sugar and cocoa, until the sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool
• Stir in the egg (lightly beaten) then the flour and baking powder and lastly the yoghurt
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 170c for 20-25 minutes
• When cold ice with buttercream icing made with 50 g butter, 1 ½ c icing sugar, 1 tsp vanilla and 2 tbsp hot strong coffee

Breast Cancer Awareness Breakfast

A couple of weeks ago at work we had a breakfast to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer research. We had a breakfast last year as well and have decided to make it an annual thing. We do it pretty simply, serving fruit platters and croissants filled with ham and cheese. I also made these little cupcakes. They were little coconut cupcakes which I added pi9nk food colouring to, so they were actually pink inside. I iced them with cream cheese icing and made the little pink ribbons out of fondant. I was actually delighted with how they turned out.

Autumn cakes and salad

I made these little apple cakes in the weekend. I had intended to make them for hospice, but they didn’t really look pretty enough to give away. I used a recipe from Allyson Gofton’s book Bake for apple and walnut cake. I left out the walnuts and just made little apple cakes. The recipe is a very simple one – no creaming of butter etc. It is meant to be made into a large square cake, but I halved the recipe to make 6 little cupcakes. I have put the cakes in the freezer for my husband to take in his lunch. They are good every day cakes, but I guess you could dress them up with icing sugar and a dollop of whipped cream and serve them warm for a pudding. I havent given the recipe because I am not sure that I would make these again.



I love pumpkin and of course this is the time of year when they are in season and abundant. I particularly like roast pumpkin salads. Last night we had fish for dinner which I oven roasted with a crumb made from panko crumbs, capers, pine nuts and parmesan. To go with it I made a pumpkin and feta salad, simply by roasting pieces of pumpkin until tender, cooling a little and then tossing with crumbled feta and baby spinach leaves. I tossed the salad with a very lemony dressing made with the juice of half a lemon, 1 tbsp good olive oil and the chopped flesh of a ¼ of a preserved lemon. The preserved lemon went really well with the sweetness of the pumpkin and saltiness of the feta. It also gave good texture.

Miracles for Hospice

These little cakes that I made for hospice this month are called Miracles. The recipe came from Ladies, A Plate. The cakes are little chocolate cakes with a spoon of raspberry jam in the middle and iced with chocolate icing. They are very simple little cakes – not as rich as many of the cupcakes I make and they last in the tin for a few days.

These little chocolate cakes are what my great Aunty Jean used to make. Aunty Jean was Dad’s aunty, a very sweet lady who was a lovely baker. One of her specialties was these cakes. I cant remember whether Aunty Jean called them miracles or not (the miracle being that there is a spoon of jam in the centre!), but this recipe is very similar to the one she made. Aunty Jean would sprinkle the iced tops with chocolate hail or hundreds and thousands. I don’t like jam and so she would make a few for me without the jam, sprinkling the tops of mine with chocolate hail and the jam ones with hundreds and thousands, so I would know which ones were mine.

These are a lovely, old fashioned treat. Aunty Jean’s icing was less of a swirl, but I wanted to make mine look a bit more special for hospice.



Miracles (from Ladies A Plate)

170g flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cocoa
115g sugar
115ml milk
1 tbsp golden syrup
½ tsp baking soda
1 egg
55g butter, melted
Raspberry jam

• Warm milk, syrup and baking soda together until the mixture froths up
• Stir in dry ingredients, then the lightly beaten egg and butter. Mix well
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for 12-14 minutes at 180c
• When cold, cut a small pyramid shape out of the top of each cake and fill with ½ tsp raspberry jam. Pop lids back on top
• Ice with chocolate icing made with icing sugar, cocoa, 1 tbsp butter and hot water

Baking For Hospice

I made these cupcakes a couple of weeks ago for the monthly baking for hospice arranged by one of my readers, Nessie. The cupcakes are called Banana Fudge Cupcakes and the recipe is from the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake book. Unfortunately it is packed away, so I cant give you the exact recipe, but I can give you the idea.

The cupcakes are little banana cupcakes, studded with chopped macadamia nuts. I would suggest just using your favourite banana cake recipe. The icing is a chocolate buttercream – usual buttercream made with butter, icing sugar, cocoa and a little milk.. I topped the cupcakes with scorched almonds which I thought looked a little bit like Easter eggs. En masse the cupcakes looked quite effective. In the crabapple bakery book they topped their cupcakes with chocolate dipped macadamia nuts and drizzled them with white chocolate. I didn’t have any white chocolate at home when I made these, but I do like the idea of the drizzle.

Even though I haven’t done any baking in my new kitchen (all my baking ingredients are packed away – bench top arrives on Monday!!), I have cooked a few meals. So far we have had a mushroom risotto, chicken breasts topped with sliced almonds, cinnamon and smoked paprika and served with an orzo salad, and a fish dish cooked on top of the stove with tomatoes, olives and baby spinach leaves and served with rice and broccoli. Last night I made meatballs with minced beef, toasted pinenuts, ras al hanout (a Moroccan spice blend), smoked Maldon sea salt and crushed garlic. I served it with a bughar wheat salad that had seeded, chopped tomatoes, baby rocket and lemon juice tossed through, extra rocket with avocado and natural yoghurt. This is actually my favourite kind of after work meal – it is quick and easy to prepare and I love meatballs and I also love Moroccan flavours.

No TWD for me this week

I am sad to say that for the 4th time in 13 months I wasnt able to complete this week's TWD challenge. We were moving over the weekend and our house is not quite finished, so I dont really have a properly functioning kitchen just yet. I aim to be back on the TWD wagon next week.

One thing I did do in the weekend though was take my 5 year old niece to a cupcake decorating class. We made Easter bunny cupcakes and that is my one above.