House Cake

Last week James bought me some silicone cake moulds for my birthday. They look like little houses.

So I made up some cake mix (using my brand new scales that James bought me for my birthday).

And I greased my moulds (using my brand new pastry brush that James bought me for my birthday).

And I put all the mix into the moulds. Turns out they were bigger than I thought. I hope they'll rise.

They did rise :) but in the wrong shape so I squished them with a teaspoon so they'd fill the mould into the corners. Maybe next time I'll cover them with foil to make them rise in the right shape.

And they turned out like this:

After they'd cooled I decorated them using the writing icing we had left over from our Gingerbread Decorating Station.

And then I fed them to James :) he's getting very good at buying me presents.

Easter egg hunt

Easter is a wonderful time for children to play games that reward them with chocolate eggs. But why should kids have all the fun? I've decided to host and Easter egg hunt for grown ups.

First I had to get some Easter Eggs. and by get, I mean make, using moulds I acquired from Pound World and Lakeland. I also got set of Easter themed cookie cutter from the 99p store.

I had two sizes of plastic mould for chocolate eggs. I did the big eggs one layer at a time, painting on a layer of melted chocolate then letting it set in the fridge for an hour or so before painting on the next layer. Once my two halves were finished I took them out of the moulds and used white chocolate to stick them together. Then I smoothed over the join with a hot teaspoon.

I made the small ones solid chocolate, which is much easier. I set the first half of eggs then filled up some more moulds, pressing the set half into the wet half. We made milk chocolate eggs, white chocolate eggs (and sprinkled some of the moulds with cocoa powder first to get that speckled look) and dark chocolate eggs. James put raisins in the dark chocolate eggs and he put rum in some of them, but I don't know how he dealt with the clumping thing because I wasn't there.

While I was waiting for all the chocolate to set we made egg shaped cookies (gingerbread). My initial plan was to ice them all pretty, but then I had a better idea - it would be more fun for the guys (and easier for me) to set up a gingerbread decorating station so they could do their own decorating once they'd found them.

Finally I got around to using my silicone moulds for Easter Egg Cakes. I made up some sponge cake mix and filled the silicone moulds with it. I covered the mould in foil to deter rising; it didn't work but there wasn't a proper crust on top and that made it much easier to trim them down. Once cooled I glued the eggs together with cream cheese frosting. I drizzled chocolate (milk and white) over them to reinforce the seam and to make them look pretty.

We wrapped all of our eggs in foil and hid them about the house.

And we had these empty plastic ones I found in the 99p store so we used those too - we hid a few about with clues to the other eggs, and little chick as well.

Our friends had fun hunting for the eggs, we had a brilliant time watching them search and it seems the gingerbread decorating station may have been a stroke of genius.

Not only that, but we received a little surprise of our own, which one of our guests kindly secreted inside James's Lego head.

Flowery Cupcakes

The other day I wanted to make some cupcakes, but I didn't have any butter (or margarine). But then I remembered an idea from the back of my mind that you can use oil instead. So I looked online for a recipe and I found one here.

So I made up the mix like it said. It's a different colour to what I'm used to. And it tastes a little different. But it's definitely cake.

So I put it in its cupcake liners and into the oven. And when I checked on them ten minutes later, I found that they had risen much more than expected.

After they'd cooked and cooled I started to think about decorating them. I wanted to do something a bit more fun than just plonking icing all over them.

I figured as it's spring now (apparently), I would work from a signs of spring theme. So I thought I'd make some flowers out of sweeties. I went in the shop and I found fruit pastilles and marshmallows.

And I thought I could maybe squish the fruit pastilles to make petals for my flowers but it didn't work - they kept springing back into shape.

So then I thought they'd be more pliable if I heated them a little bit, and that's where I got the idea for baking them. I put five sweets in a circle on a baking tray and I put them in the oven (at 200 C) until they melted and all merged into one shape. Then I took the flower out of the oven and used a knife and a spoon to mold the shape a little. And the sweets started sticking to the tools so I found my grapeseed oil and coated the tools in it to stop the stickiness.

Then I put sweets on my tray for five more flowers, because that's how many sweets I had left.  And this time I watched them more carefully and just cooked them until they started to look a little tiny bit melty (about 5 or 6 minutes). Then I took them out of the oven and squished the petals with my oily spoon. These flowers fell apart more easily than the first one, but they look better.

After everything had cooled down, I made up some icing and covered 6 of my cupcakes. Then I put a fruit pastille flower on each one and iced a little marshmallow in the middle. I think they look pretty cool.

Then I hunted through my cupboards and found half a block of marzipan that I'd completely forgotten was there. It's a good colour for daffodils, I feel.

I got 6 little blobs of marzipan and squashed them into diamond type shapes. Then I pushed the six pieces together to make a starry flower type shape.

Then I made a bunch of those.

I got some orange food colouring gel and kneaded it into a chunk of marzipan. Then I put in some more orange because it wasn't orange enough. And some more. Once it was orange enough, it was too sticky so I rolled it around in icing sugar until I could handle it.

For each daffodil I made a flat oblong shape, and then I rolled it up to make a tube. I pushed the tube onto a star flower and then I pulled the edges of it outwards to look a bit more flowery. This took patience. And in a few cases I had to eat the bit I was failing to work with and start on that one again. Especially with the really little ones.

Anywho, here's a bunch of marzipan daffodils.

And then I made some cream cheese frosting and coloured it green. Cream cheese frosting is what happens when you mix butter, icing sugar and cream cheese. It's good.

And I frosted my remaining cupcakes and put some daffodils on each one.

And then I put them next to the fruit pastille flowers for a photo shoot.