My first giant cupcake

I was really excited when Find Me A Gift asked if I would like to review one of their cupcake gifts - I've been hoping I'd get an opportunity to try out doing a product review at some point and when I saw that a giant cupcake mould was one of the possibilties, I was in! I've been wanting to try a giant cupcake for a while now especially since after seeing all of the beautiful ones on the Nom! blog so it was great to have an excuse to try it.

I was a little disappointed in the packaging, if I'm honest it does look a bit cheap (which it is I guess, £9.99 but I noticed it's been reduced since Christmas) and I didn't think the picture on the front was particularly appealing. But what matters most it's what's inside, right?! And the silicone moulds themselves seemed good quality, no different in texture and thickness to my silicone loaf tin mould. They come with a filling insert, although I didn't use this, deciding it was better to keep it simple. As far as I can work out you put slightly less mix in the bottom than you normally would, and sit the filling insert on the top to create a 'dip' to put the filling into.

The recipe was the bit I was most worried about. My first attempt didn't go well - I followed the Primrose Bakery's instructions to use one quantity of their victoria sponge recipe, but this wasn't nearly enough. Although they did rise, attempts at a smaller scale giant cupcake were abandoned when it came to turning the cakes out, as most of it stuck to the moulds!

Back to the drawing board, and I figured I'd need about 1.5 quantities of victoria sponge mix. After some internet scouring I came up with a basic recipe. With excessively greased moulds, a bit longer cooking, less time cooling in the tin and a mahooosive dollop of patience and care - the beasts were out in one piece and I was breathing a huge sigh of relief! The patterns from the moulds didn't come out as well on the top part but this didn't bother me too much as I knew I'd be slapping on the buttercream anyway.

Now, what I should have done at this point was level the cakes off - they weren't too domed so I thought I could get away with it, and I was so paranoid of them falling apart I didn't really want to start sawing away at them! Unfortunately this next photo shows why this was a bit of mistake:

To decorate, I whipped up a double batch of Primrose Bakery buttercream and coloured half red (or more realistically, a kind of dirty pink). The base was completely covered in the plain buttercream, and then I placed the top half of the cake on top and slathered the red(ish) buttercream all over. As you can see, I had gone for a seasonal Valentine's theme, so Haribo jelly hearts and Love Hearts were deployed to try to get the effect of a heart patterned case and sprinkles. After this I decided to try to fill the gap between the layers with buttercream, and ended up making a bit of a mess with the buttercream escaping down the sides (it was quite runny buttercream!) - but despite being messy it definitely looked more like a cupcake having the two layers meeting (more flattering camera angles help too!)

Although I was proud to have managed to assemble and decorate it without it (or me) collapsing, I was still a little ashamed of the end result! I felt it looked a bit childish, which I suppose wasn't helped by the slightly cheap looking colour of the buttercream and the uneven cake layers/botched job on the buttercream.

Even though it was a bit disappointing looks-wise, the cake was surprisingly easy to cut and was actually quite nice! The buttercream was a little sweeter than I would usually do it, but because the cake slices were pretty chunky it ended up being balanced OK. I took most of it to work and everyone was surprised by how light it was, having expected a much heavier cake given the size.

My basic giant cupcake recipe:

340g butter, softened plus a bit extra for greasing
340g golden caster sugar
340g self raising flour
6 eggs, beaten
2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Grease the moulds well (I mean seriously well) and place them on a baking tray. Preheat oven to 180c.
2. Beat the butter and sugar together in a bowl until light and fluffy.
3. Sift in the flour, add the eggs and vanilla extract, and beat until smooth.
4. Tip about 2/3 of the mixture into the base mould and the remaining 1/3 into the top mould (the moulds should be about 3/4 full).
5. Bake for 1 hour until risen, golden and firm to the touch. A skewer inserted into the centre of the cakes should come out clean.
6. Cool in the moulds for 10 minutes and then carefully turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
7. Sit the cakes on top of each other to check if any levelling is needed!
8. Whip up a batch or two of your favourite buttercream and decorate as desired.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the mould. The one I used is available online here. I know you can get giant cupcake tins aswell, and I do usually prefer tins - my silicone loaf tin gives a bit of 'side bulge' which did occur here, but it's less noticeable because this is iced. Having said that, you have to be so careful getting the giant cupcake out of the mould and the silicone made it easier to jimmy the knife about and get a feel for where bits might be sticking.

I'd definitely recommend giving the giant cupcake a go - it is fiddly and faffy and a bit scary in parts but, I don't think you lose anything on the taste. Even though I'm a bit embarrassed by my decoration, the faults are things that can hopefully be rectified with a bit of practice - plus even if it's not technically perfect you can win back points for novelty value and ginormous slices!

Grandma's Parkin

My Grandma would often bake and there would always be a tin of treats in the cupboard for when people called for a cup of tea and a chat, which they did often. She mostly made scones and tray bakes, with the cakes being cut into dainty little fingers and put into tins to store away ready for visitors. Grandma had a hostess trolley which would be loaded up with cake slices and scones and cups of tea and wheeled into the lounge for guests. This loading of the trolley was a job I loved to do when I was there and still now every time I take a lid off a cake tin and get a whiff of homebaked goodness I am transported back into her kitchen, doing the very important job of selecting slices of cake to display. Mostly I remember ginger sponge, parkin, lemon cake and scones (and a Christmas cake at Christmas), and if she knew I was coming, she would do a couple of plain scones since she knew I didn't like fruit. However, I was still happy picking the fruit out and eating them that way, since they were so nice.

I didn't start to bake myself until after she passed away, and I have always wished I could share what I make with her. I know it would have put a smile on her face for me to fill her cake tins up with home baked cake again, since in her later years, baking was one of the things she was no longer able to do. It was another way in which I could have helped her out and another connection we could have shared. I would love to know what she would think of it all - I suspect she would think I cut my slices too big and slap on far too much buttercream, and I don't think she would have much time for Kitchenaids and gadgets (now you see where I get that from!).

Anyway, I remembered that Mum had kept Grandma's little cookbook collection and I decided to have a look through to see if I could work out which recipes she used. This was the first one that jumped out as we knew she made Parkin, and it was handwritten on a well worn piece of paper.

8oz/240g medium oatmeal (this was almost impossible to find, but my Mum finally tracked it down in Holland and Barrett!)
4oz/125g self-raising flour
4oz/125g demerera sugar
2oz/55g margerine
1 egg, beaten
4oz/125g golden syrup
4oz/125g black treacle
"a little milk and ginger" - not quite sure how much I was meant to use, so did a couple of tablespoons of milk and 2 teaspoons ginger - would probably use a bit more ginger next time.

1. Preheat oven to 160c and line a 20cm square tin with baking paper.
2. Mix the oatmeal, sugar and flour together, and then rub in the margerine.

3. Gently melt together the golden syrup, treacle, ginger and milk in a pan (note: I didn't do this, I just bunged it all in, but after looking at other recipes I should have done it this way!).

4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the melted mixture along with the egg.

5. Mix to combine, then pour into the prepared tin and bake for about an hour.

6. Cool in the tin for a bit and then transfer onto a wire rack.

I'm really not too sure on the instructions since Grandma's were slightly vague, as I think her recipe was more of a note to self on the ingredients and quantities rather than a detailed step-by-step guide! We ended up spreading melted chocolate over the top aswell which is probably sacrilege... but I noticed that the Caked Crusader also made parkin recently and apparently it is best eaten spread with butter and after a few days of being stored in a tin. Ooops!

Making the parkin really took me back, since 'rubbing in the marg' and 'making a well for the egg' were the two main bits of baking with Grandma that I remembered! It tasted so familiar and distinctly 'Grandma' especially since I don't actually think I've ever eaten Parkin anywhere else.  I'm looking forward to trying some of the other recipes in her collection to see if I can conjure up some of the other tastes, smells and memories of happy times with her.

Eunice Grace Whittaker, 10.07.1920 - 10.01.2008

Cinnamon cake with blackberries

Another one that was made ages ago! I snipped this recipe out of the Sainsbury's magazine back in October-ish time, but I think it's a Dan Lepard recipe (really should have taken a note, all I have is a very neatly cut out rectangle with the recipe on). I love cinnamon cake and thought the addition of blackberries would make for a very wintry treat.... plus I was desperate for something without apples after the plethora of apple recipes I seemed to be baking in the Autumn!

Edit 17.01.12: Recipe is indeed from Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard and appeared in Sainsbury's magazine. Ingredients and method removed for copyright reasons.

This was a great cake, perfect with a cup of tea. Think I would add more cinnamon next time but apart from that it was lovely, light and fresh with the cream and fruit. The whole cake disappeared within the afternoon as I took slices to my mum and best friend and there were hungry boys around at the house for the F1 that day so when I returned there was only crumbs remaining!

The cake pop disaster

This post is long overdue, but I've got to catch up on what I've already baked before I can share anything new! Cake pops are something I had been wanting to try for ages now but had seen many people saying how you need to set aside lots of time and have lots of patience for them (patience not being something I have at all).  But after seeing the amazing Halloween cake pops (yep told you it was long overdue) on The Pink Whisk's blog I decided to give them a go as I love all things Halloween and wanted to top the spider cakes I did last year.

It was looking good. I even managed to get the right gel paste colours, some polystyrene boxes for display and track down the proper Silver Spoon buttons (plus a few bags of pink ones, since I was so confident I thought I could make some piggy cake pops at a later date), I cleared the diary and planned time for baking, cooling, crumbing, mixing, chilling, melting, setting, colouring, decorating.... I was feeling so confident! The confidence continued to grow as I baked up my chocolate sponge, made the buttercream and mixed it all into a paste. The balls were shaped, they were in the fridge to chill. Pumpkinny indent patterns were made, the chocolate was melted, the first few were on the sticks. Success!

And then this happened.

And it just kept happening! I don't know what happened with the first few flukes, but I suspect it was probably because I hadn't chilled the balls enough. By now I was in a raging mood and so I just dumped the rest of the chocolate over the remaining balls and left them all to chill.

The disaster became less of a disaster when we tasted them, because I have to admit, there were so tasty! I love chocolate orange and so the taste of the chocolate cake with the orange chocolate was so, so good. I wish I'd taken more care in dumping on the rest of the chocolate as they could really have been pumpkin cake balls, but I'd become obsessed with them being on sticks at that point and probably wouldn't have listened to reason!

It really wasn't worth whipping up and colouring any icing but luckily I had some writing icing lurking in the cupboard so managed to fashion a few pumpkins in the end.

Cake pops are definitely something I want to try again this year as the taste was definitely worth the faff, I just need to work on my patience levels and learn not to flip my lid at the first sign of trouble! Hilariously, by far the main thing people search for when visiting my blog has always been cake pops, so sorry to disappoint everyone twice over!

Christmas Round Up

I'm sure you're all sick of looking at festive food by now, so I'll keep this brief! After the madness of last year's Blogvent, Christmas baking in my house this year was a bit more few and far-between! I only baked one new Christmas bake this year which was these Gingerbread cupcakes - recipe was from the Pink Whisk and can be found here.

They were yummy and very festive but a bit on the heavy, treacle-y side for me. Mike loved them though since he is a treacle fiend! Sadly I didn't have any cute gingerbread men to decorate them with but instead used some festive silver balls. I just used normal icing mixed with lemon juice instead of water.

I also made some star biscuits (same recipe as last year)....

... some Florentines, same as last year, which were bagged up and given as gifts, and I didn't even photograph! ....

.... and the starry Mincemeat slice, again the same as last year! Only a couple of slices got eaten, mainly because it was made on the 27th to use up the pastry and the mincemeat and everyone was already full!

 Had to be clever with the angles as some of the stars went a bit awry!

I received some lovely new baking books for Christmas, including Lola's Cupcakes and the Primrose Bakery, so I can't wait to try things out from them. One of my resolutions is to try recipes from more diverse sources since I always end up just going with BBC Good Food!

Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2012 is all that you wish for and more xxx

2011 - Top Five

Blogging has taken a backseat recently with all the Christmas stress festivities, but I'm back now with a clear Google reader and ready for 2012!

I've really enjoyed 2011 baking and blog-wise, I have been on a couple of brilliant baking courses, tried lots of new recipes and discovered lots of yummy and lovely blogs and bloggers.

Just to round off the year, with an idea stolen from the Hungry Hinny, here are my top 5 most popular posts of 2011:

5. Marbled Mocha Cake:

4. Spiced Toffee Apple Cake:

3. Toblerone Cupcakes:

2. Sausage Dog Cake (I would have pitched a fit if this hadn't been in the list given the blood, sweat and tears that went into it!):

1. Bakewell Tart Cupcakes:

Hope you all have a fab New Year's Eve whatever you're up to, and wishing you all lots of love, luck and happiness for 2012!

Food Bloggers Unplugged

Woo hooo! I was recently tagged for Food Bloggers Unplugged by the Hungry Hinny and Jo from What do you make of my cake? - thanks ladies, I was seeing more and more entries popping up and hoping to be able to join in!

1. What, or who inspired you to start a blog?

When I started baking I was taking pictures of the stuff I'd made anyway, and had started a Baking album on Facebook already to keep a record. I'd dabbled with blogging a bit in the past and after I finished uni I was out of work for a while and had the idea to start up a blog about it just to pass some time really and keep a more detailed record, then it just kind of grew from there!

2. Who is your foodie inspiration?
I'm not sure - I don't even know what kickstarted my desire to learn to bake (although I suspect 3rd year procrastination)! I'm still building up my collection of cookbooks and trying new things so there isn't anybody in particular I can pinpoint (other than BBC Good Food!). I love reading other blogs so in terms of inspiration at the moment a lot of it comes from other bloggers as it's probably through blogs that I find the most things I want to try.

3. Your greasiest, batter - splattered food/drink book is?
I don't really have one! I do have a recipe binder though that is getting very splattered, it's full of magazine clippings, printed off and scribbled down recipes from a whole variety of places. I've yet to find any one particular book that I use a lot.

4. Tell us all about the best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it, what was it?
I'm notoriously bad when it comes to eating abroad as I'm quite fussy and paranoid - I like to know what I'm eating! So I'm never very adventurous, but a pizza I had at a place called Le Collier in Antibes sticks out in my mind - it was mahoosive (literally I could have draped it over my head, cut out some eye holes and it could have been a balaclava) and at the time was just the best thing ever because I could devour it without worrying what was in/on it! Also, Scotland is technically another country and the fish and chips we had at Anstruther a few months ago were the best fish and chips I've ever had.

5. Another food bloggers table you'd like to eat at is?
Some of the most stunning and fun looking cakes I've seen are from Butter Hearts Sugar and the Buttercream Bakery although a lot of it just looks too perfect to eat! I am a bit of a Pink Whisk girl aswell. All the blogs I read have such droolworthy stuff, I want to sample them all!

6. What is the one kitchen gadget you would ask Santa for this year (money no object of course)?
I am notoriously bad with gadgets; many cannot believe I will beat cakes by hand rather than using my shiny Kitchenaid. If money is no object I would have to get a whole new house/kitchen of my own (I currently rent) with loads and loads of cupboards and worktop space, a giant fridge/freezer and a larder and one of the those island things in the middle. And cake tins and baking trays of every possible measurements so I would never have to stress about them again!

7. Who taught you how to cook?
Nobody really! I used to bake with my Mum and Grandma when I was little, but the recent baking frenzy is just recipe following. But every time I add in eggs to the mixture I hear my Grandma's voice in my head saying "make a well for the eggs"!

8. I'm coming to you for dinner what's your signature dish?
My signature baking dish is probably really dull and I would have to say just plain old vanilla cupcakes or victoria sponge. They are the only thing I've made time and again as I always want to try new stuff, so they are the only thing I can make with any sort of confidence! Cooking wise my favourite thing to cook is chicken, potato and green bean curry.

9. What is your guilty food pleasure? 
Baked beans out of the tin, or even better... out of the fridge! I looooove extra cold baked beans. I don't think I have ever met anybody who wasn't sickened by this. On a more socially acceptable level, beetroot out of the jar! Or just CRISPS. Lots of CRISPS.

10. Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?

My all time favourite bands include The Ataris, The Offspring, Alkaline Trio, Blink 182, Green Day... some people seem to think my main musical tastes are at odds with the tea dress wearing, cake baking person I often am today.

Finally...tag 5 other food bloggers with these questions...like a hot baked potato...pass it on!

1. Maria at Goddess' Kitchen

2. Astral at The Art of Being Perfect

3. Kara at Butter Hearts Sugar

4. Natasha at Cooks Cakes and Bakes
5. Anne at Anne's Kitchen

If any of you lovely ladies want to take up my tagging, you can link your entry here and through #foodbloggersunplugged on Twitter