Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

2 minute chocolate mug cake, no eggs, no butter

Ever sat on the couch in the evening wishing you could devour a piece of chocolate cake? Now you can! It's quick, easy, not much mess and really good! From searching through your cupboards for ingredients to eating you scrumptious cake takes 10 minutes max. :)

2 minute Chocolate mug cake


What you will need:

- a microwavable mug


- 5 tablespoons of selfraising flour
- 4 tablespoons cane sugar or caster sugar
- 2 full tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
- pinch of salt

- 1/2 teaspoon white vinegar
- 1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 2 teaspoons vegetable oil (no olive oil, I like to use rice)
- 4,5 tablespoons water

Add the dry ingredients to your mug and mix well. Make an indent in the flour mix and add the wet ingredients. Stir until you have a smooth batter. Microwave on high (800 watt) for 2 minutes. Done!

Top off with powdered sugar, frosting, whipped cream or chocolate chips. Cute to look at, great to eat!

This also makes a really good housewarming, birthday or shower gift. Buy a suitable mug for the occassion, add the dry ingredients. Add some chocolate chips for a decadent touch. Put the wet ingredients in a sealable bag. Make a nice card saying how to make the cake and attach together with the wet ingredients to the mug handel. Wrap in plastic foil and you have a cute, inexpensive gift!

Make it pretty!


Friday, September 6, 2013

Sophie the Giraffe cake

Our baby turned one this week! We gave her some books, car window stickers and winter accessories. She loved unpacking them and somehow understood that the wrapping was just that, wrapping. Not the gift. Maybe our wrapping paper wasn't pretty enough...
We are celebrating her birthday this weekend so I had no issues with making a birthday cake for another little girl who turned one at almost exactly the same time as our baby girl. I know her mommy from lamaze class and it wasn't until the follow up course that we found out she had been next door on the delivery ward! We had both come in for pain killers. After 16 hours I'd had enough.... so with a nice little pump on my arm which didn't help with the pain at all but did make me relax a little, my delivery finally went into hyper drive. So did the rest of my life, how this year has flown by!

Anyhoo, the order was for a Sophie the Giraffe puzzle cake. So once again I used my trusty method of finding a picture online and tracing it off my computer screen onto thick paper. I decided to make Sophie out of off-white fondant. I used cake tools and my fingers with the pic on my computer as reference to make her look a little 3D and then painted her brown spots on. It worked really well, better than I expected. I just have an issue with her eyes, which could have been better. They just don't say friendly/ happy to me, but black spots...

I also made a ribbon on the side of the cake with the same spots and a little bow for extra detail. The rest of the decoration is made out of marzipan and the inside is chocolate mud cake with a lemon butter cream, yummy!
I did notice that the number 1 is really unrecognizable on a cake. It might have been better to say 1 year old but that didn't fit anymore. Next time I'll have to find a more suitable 1.

Now I get to make my own baby's cake! I'm quite excited because it's going to be something really different. I don't want it to have too much decoration on it because I don't want her eating that so I've decided to leave it plain and add Winnie the Pooh and Piglet silhouette figures. Next week I'll show the result of that.

Monday, August 26, 2013

How to: Black and white Mickey Mouse/Disney cake pops

My mom ordered cake pops but gave me the choice of how they would look. Those are nice orders because I can try out ideas I have without spending too much money on it. Of course I did not charge her for the fact that they weren't all the same and much more work than your standard cake pop, so it's a good deal for both of us (in my opinion anyway). 

I wanted to make black and white Fab 4 cake pops (sorry to me that will never be the Beatles..) with a color accent. Unfortunately I didn't have green or blue fondant in the house so I kept those black and white. I actually like them this way too. I think Donald Duck is very recognizable, Goofy could use a green hat and maybe some ears though.
Mickey would probably have turned out better if his buttons had been red. Wouter didn't recognize him at all, even with Minnie right next to it... Minnie turned out great in my opinion. The heart shaped confetti worked great as a bow. 
I also made these pops with the intention of adding as little sugar as I possibly could. I therefore tried to stay away from buttercream and Candy melts, instead using a sugarfree cake recipe, ganache and chocolate.
It was a good try with fairly satisfactory results!

For those of you who are interested in a more thorough description of what I did, I added a how to here. Otherwise you can stop reading and maybe pin my picture for me :)

HOW TO:

The filling consists of Honey Ginger Cake. I found the recipe on Homemade Baby Food Recipes.com where they also have a lot of other great sugarfree cake recipes.
I had some white chocolate ganache which I had taken out of the freezer the day before. After I crumbled the cake to pieces, I used this to stick it back together. The cake is quite moist on its own and I found that I probably could have rolled satisfactory balls without adding the ganache. Anyhoo... I rolled the mixture into balls which were way too big and then coated them with a bit of wholewheat flour just so they wouldn't be so sticky. I put them into a egg tray with plastic wrap over it and used yellow Wilton Candy melt to stick a lolly pop stick into them. (I used Candy melt because you cannot temper that small amount of chocolate.) I put the tray into the freezer for at least 15 minutes so the pops would be hard and easy to work with (hmmm sounds weird, hard and easy... you get what I mean right?)

While the pops were in the freezer I made the Mouse ears. I used chocolate drops and an apple corer. This made a nice round piece of chocolate that wasn't too thin. I also tempered white chocolate (don't know how? Check here).
I coated all the pops in white chocolate first. A quarter of the pops I put on a piece of baking paper, those were going to be the Goofy's and half I added ears to. Because the pops came from the freezer the ears needed to go on quickly, because the chocolate sets really fast. It's good though because you don't risk the ears falling off before it's set.

I wanted to use the gold balls as in the picture above for Mickey buttons. I had it all set up but then completely forgot to stick them on after dipping. When I remembered the chocolate had long since set. It beats having to draw them on though, so I would definitely do this next time.



After all the pops were dipped in white chocolate I put them in a pop holder thing and put them back in the freezer. Meanwhile I tempered dark chocolate.
Mickey, Minnie and Donald have their top half in dark chocolate and Goofy the bottom, though because his stick is on top what you're doing is the same.

Minnie got two heart shaped confetti candies on top her head and I made the spots on here dress with a lollypop stick dipped in chocolate. That's also how I made the lines on Goofy, though I think I'll use a brush for that next time.
Mickey's buttons are made from yellow Wilton Candy Melt, but as I said before I'll use the gold balls next time.

Goofy's hat and Donald's hat and bow are made from white fondant.

Make it beautiful!


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

My grandmother's pancake pie - easy and delicious

So last Friday I delivered my very first wedding cake. It was amazing if I do say so myself. Four tiers, carrot cake, champagne butter cream and fondant decoration. Luckily the bride and groom thought it was gorgeous and delicious too which is what matters in the end. Lots of the guest gave great comments also, check out the picture below to form your own opinion :)

I did find out that making wedding cakes takes a lot of time and a lot of material. I ended up charging way too little but as it was the first ever, that was ok.

Anyway, with all that work comes little time for other things so my dad baked me a pancake pie using my grandmothers recipe. He figured that I would have something to blog about without the work! Do I have an awesome dad or what?

This recipe refers to a Dutch Pancake Pie which to Americans and many other people probably, will look more like a crepe pie. The pancakes are thin and a little different so I'm just going to give the recipe for those as well. I'll blog it separately so check it HERE.

Grandma's Pancake Pie


Materials
- Pancakes (see recipe here)
- Jam, your favorite flavor(s)
- Instant custard and the ingredients you need to make it
- OR just use ready to use custard if they sell that where you live
- OR make your own custard if you feel up to it

You need to make the pancakes first. After that, go ahead and make your custard. It has to be a pudding. I'm not sure if instant custard is the same everywhere so you'll have to check the package to see how to make it.
It's easiest if you use your custard while it is still runny.

Now comes the super easy part:

Take a pancake and put it on a large plate with an edge. Pour some custard on it, or if using ready made just smear on there. Take another pancake and put it on top. Smear jam on that one and cover with another pancake. Now repeat until you have enough custard left to pour over your entire cake. (skip this part if using ready made custard) Pour the last bit over the top when it has congealed a little.

Let the cake stand until it has cooled and then pop it in the fridge.When it's cool dust some sugar over it and you're good to go :)

The wedding cake :)
 Make it beautiful!
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...