Malteaser Birthday Cake

Here is a birthday cake I made some time in the not tooooo distant past... its a basic chocolate sponge, with chocolate icing and Malteasers! Quite tasty it was too.

Happy Birthday Mum - Zebra Cake!

For my Mum's birthday (which was way back in May) , I decided to make a zebra cake - recipe from here. The only change I made was the addition of icing, because, well, it was for a birthday, and a birthday cake needs icing!! Despite appearances, this was a very easy cake to make, with the only fiddly part being the alternate spooning of mixture into the cake tin.  The resulting pattern inside the cake was certainly worth it. THe cake tasted good too!!

Easter Baking disasters!

We invited Pam & Sid over for morning tea on Easter Sunday. Janet asked if I could make a chocolate cake and some cookies. As is usual, I started looking through my cookbooks and magazine clippings for some inspiration. I found a recipe for a chocolate sponge roll that I had kept from a baking tin I bought, so decided to give it a go. This was my first disaster. I think I cooked it wrongly, because it was a little crunchy on top, an when I tried to roll it, it just folded and broke into pieces. I tasted a bit of the broken cake, and it didnt even taste any good.  So the cake AND the recipe went in the bin.

So I moved onto the cookies while I waited for some more butter to soften for Cake take 2.  I chose some choc chip cookies from a generic tyoe of cookie and slice book that I have. Never cooked from the book before, may not do so again :-).  The cookies looked ok when they went into the oven, they puffed up and looked fine when they were nearly baked, but when the timer went off and I looked in the oven, they had flattened like pancakes! Oh dear. These ones didn't go in the bin.  We tasted them and decided they were still edlible - we renamed them "pancake cookies"

Onto cake number 2 - I made Nigella's Sponge cake recipe from "Domestic Goddess", substituting some cocoa powder for some of the flour. I like this recipe because everything gets thrown into the food processor!

My 2 sponge cakes came out of the oven looking nice and even! YAY another disaster avoided.

I decied to fill the cake with mock cream & grated chocolate, since I didnt want to go to a shop.  Heres a tip - don't make mock cream in advance because (d'uh) when you put it in the fridge it goes hard.  To fix this small problem, I just beat it up again, and added a couple of tablespoons of "Philadelphia Cream" yes, cream, not cream cheese! They have a new "cooking cream" product - its not for whipping though, so by mixing it with my mock cream, I softened the mock cream, and thickened the Philladelphia cream! Brilliant!!

the cake was goooooood!!

Happy Birthday Janet!

Janet turned 40 on the weekend, and we had a "Young at Heart" party for her.  This has kept me rather busy cooking over the past few weeks!!

We were expecting about 40 people, so I made lots of food - I cooked most of the finger food in advance and froze it.

We started with lots of different nibblies.....

Cheese, dip and crackers

Chippies!!

Cheezles!!

and of course some lollies!

The "healthy plate" - I made a big bowl of hommus. In fact, I am still eating it now :-)

Then we moved onto some hot finger food....

a pile of sausage rolls

I made 3 different kinds of meatballs - mexican beef, sweet chilli turkey & honey, rosemary lamb

I also made a batch of corn fritters, 2 kinds of puff pastry pizza scrolls (bbq meat lovers & roasted vegie), and Nigellas Ritzy Chicken Nuggets

We had a wonderful gang of waiters to help hand the food around - thanks kids!!

and because it was a "young at heart" party, we also had to play a few party games - we "pinned the nose on the koala" and also played "pass the parcel!!!

And then we had dinner!

I made 2 rather large lasagne's - one meaty and one vegie (I forgot to take a photo until after they were outside in the dark)

My Mum made this delicious salad, and there was also a potato salad from Chevonne, that I neglected to photograph! Garlic bread too!!

YUM!!

Then, there has to be some desert......

We did have a fruit platter, but we kind of left it in the fridge. oops

every kids party needs fairy bread!!

the jelly cups were a big hit!

Pam made these fairy cakes

and Janet specially requested chocolate crackles, so Chevonne & her kids made these snazzy looking ones!!

And of course, no birthday is complete without a cake..... Janet selected this one from the Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book, and I made it for her.....

HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY!!!!

A Wedding Feast

Chocolate Coca Cola Cake

I saw this recipe in a book I borrowed from the Library - "Sue Lawrence's Book of Baking", and just had to try it.....it turned out well - a deliciously moist chocolate cake.... (co-incidentally, we got home today after buying a new dvd player, and I popped in the "Nigella" dvd, which wouldn't play on our other dvd player, and Nigella made a version of this same cake....)

Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake from "Sue Lawrences Book of Baking"

250g Self Raising Flour

3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder

1/4 teaspoon bicarb soda

280g caster sugar (recipe actually calls for golden caster sugar, but I haven't seen that anywhere)

250g Butter
250ml Coca-Cola

100ml milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

for the icing
150g butter
50ml Coca-Cola
3 heaped tablespoons cocoa powder
400g icing sugar (again recipe calls for golden icing sugar)

Preheat oven to 180 c, and prepare a 24cm springform cake tin (I lined it with baking paper)

Sift flour, cocoa and bicarb into a large bowl.

Slowly melt butter and cola in a saucepan, then slowly add this to the dry ingredients along with the milk, eggs and vanilla, stirring all the time.

Once thoroughly but gently combined, pour mixture into the prepared tin and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean (it took a little longer than 40 minutes in my oven).  Leave in tin on a wirewrack for about 10 minutes, then remove from tin.  Allow to cool completely.

To make the icing : melt butter along with cola and cocoa in a saucepan.  Pour this mixture into the icing sugar and beat until smooth.  Ice the cooled cake.  I decorated the cake with coke bottle lollies.

Lemon Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes to take to  Kara's Hen's Afternoon Tea. 

I used the cupcakes from one recipe and the icing from another.  The cupcakes were made using the "Basic Cupcake Recipe" from Masterchef

Basic Cupcake recipe recipe by Katie Nichols

100g unsalted butter

185g caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract (I left this out and substituted the grated rind of 2 lemons in an attempt to make cupcakes similar to the ones Julie made on the show)

2 rggs

200g self-rasing flour

1/2 cup (125ml) milk

1. Preheat oven to 180c (160 fanforced). line muffin pans with paper cases

2. Beat Butter, sugar and vanilla (or lemon rind) with an electric mixer until pale.  Add the eggs, one at a time and beat until just combined.  Add the flour and milk in alternate batches and stir with a wooden spoon until just combined.

3. Spoon mixture into paper cases. (i managed to get 14 cupcakes from this mix)  Bake for 15-20 minutes or until cooked through.  Remove from oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.  Decorate as desired.

For my icing I changed the "Orange Icing" from the "Orange Marshmallow flower cupcake" recipe from Goodtaste magazine's September 2008 issue (page 95)

Orange Lemon Icing

300g (2 cups) Icing Sugar Mixture

1 tsp butter at room temp

2-3 tbs orange lemon juice

3-4 drops food colouring

To make icing, place the4 icing sugar, butter and juice in a small heatproof bowl and stir until a thick paste forms.  Place bowl over a sauceoan of simmering water and stir until smooth.  Stir in the food colouring.  Transfer to a piping bag and ice the cupcakes.

I had a slight disaster when the plastic bag I was using as a piping bag burdt.  But by then I had iced most of the cupcakes, so some of them were iced with a knife instead.  I decorated the tops of my cupcakes with "Sour Peach Hearts"  Pretty!!

more birthday- work cake!

The day before my birthday we had a delicious cake at work - it was a sponge cake with strawberry. YUM!!!!

Happy Birthday to ME!!

yes, after eating those mega burgers, we still found room for cake! A death by chocolate cake to be precise. It was gooooooood.

Cupcakes

yes, that little boy on the add going on about the frosting made us buy a box of cupcake mix. And they were delicious! I was a little worried, because the mixture had lumps in it and I couldn't get them out, but I just went ahead and cooked it like that, and all was good. The icing in the box was good too. Just cut the corner off and squeeze it on. Much less mess than I usually end up with. But we really didnt need to be eating 12 cupcakes :-)

Cheap Cake!

For my Mum's birthday, I looked in an old handwritten cookbook that I got from my Gran. It was kind of a late-minute decision to make a cake, so our ingredients were a little limited, so this cake, titled "cheap cake" seemed to be just the right thing!



Cheap Cake



1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon cocoa

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 cup boiling water

1 egg

1 teaspoon baking powder



Cream butter & sugar (this was difficult, so I just beat it together for quite a long time). Add egg, well beaten, then dry ingredients, then milk and lastly boiling water. Bake 1/2 hour. (I baked it at 180 degrees, since it didn't specify)

I iced the cake with a butter cream icing, lightly tinted with cocoa, with a drizzle of maple syrup also added.