Tag Archives: cupcakes

November 26, 2012

Repost: How-to for Hello Kitty Cupcake Toppers

Finally, a sweet repost – it seems that my most photogenic posts from past times were savoury items. These cakes were a huge achievement for me, and looking back at them always makes me smile. I’ve decided to edit this post down to show just the process of creating the sweet little cupcake toppers, step by step. They were time consuming, but so worth it.

I made the toppers from shop-bought ready to roll white icing (some dyed red for the bows), a spot of yellow writing icing for the nose and the black icing pen I bought myself not so long ago for just this kind of thing. Here are the snaps with a bit of extra detail where I thought it was needed.

First, I rolled out the icing on a board rubbed with coconut oil, to stop sticking. I also had a sprinkler of icing sugar to hand to further help avoid sticking and to sprinkle over the top of the finished face shapes to give a better, matte surface for putting in the details. I had a reference picture on the screen of my laptop and I used my scribing tool to draw a kitty shape on the icing, then cut it out with the knife side of the tool. It did need some fine detail work, using the flat edge of the knife to smooth the surface and edges, the scribing tool to add little tucks around the ears and my hands to flatten the shape where it needed to be wider and pinch it where it needed to be fatter. It took a while to get the shape right. Once I had one finished, I used it as a rough template to cut out nine other shapes, knowing that the original would probably be too squashed and maimed from repeated lifting and laying to actually use. I smoothed off the edges of the nine new faces and rubbed in a fine coat of icing sugar. It’s worth mentioning here that the faces dried out as I was working with them, which meant that they were difficult to fine tune, as they were more likely to crack than to mould into the shape I wanted. I really should have had them wrapped in a damp tea towel while I worked on them, but I solved the problem by rubbing a little coconut oil into them with my fingers until they were soft again.

I thought a good place to start would be with the noses, then I’d have a central point to work around. Hello Kitty’s nose is very low on her face. I never expected to be so au fait with the dimensions of Hello Kitty’s face but there we are. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry.

I put in the eyes and whiskers next, using the thick end of my black icing pen. It was tricky, and the surface of the fondant wasn’t smooth enough to stop the pen catching a little, and sinking in at some points. You can see that some of the whiskers are a bit raggedy because of this. I’m not sure what I would have done about this – maybe rubbing more icing sugar over the top would have helped, or maybe keeping them under that hypothetical damp towel I was talking about earlier would have been a better plan.

It’s amazing how much the little bows change the whole look of these, turning them from your bog-standard surprised cats into recognisable Hello Kitties. I wish I’d taken a couple of progress photos of the bows, but really they came together very quickly. I dyed a lump of icing red by rubbing some colour into the icing with a toothpick, then kneading it through until all the marbling had disappeared and the icing was a block red. Then I made a little ball of icing, which first made into a small sausage shape then flattened with my thumb. I used the scribing tool to push in on the middle of either side, making a sort of 8 shape. Then I used the side of the knife to flatten the top and bottom, and went back to the scribing tool to make little hollows on either side of what would be the centre of the bow. Again, there was some trial and error, but once I was happy with the shape I lifted them from the board, placed them on the toppers and pressed down gently to secure, then added a final, small ball of icing for the middle. Once they were positioned I could make the final touches of pushing in the middle of each side to give a bow shape, and redefining the hollows in the bow.

Once I’d made all these, the main cake topper was a breeze – just repeat all the above steps, but bigger and less fiddly. I had got the hang of it by this time. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a break in between where I tried and failed to make the 3D Kitty, of course.

And here they are in their final positions, atop devil’s food cake with white buttercream icing:

I added a row of heart sprinkles round the edge of the main cake, as a finishing touch. I did not make these. Why, even after all the other work, does that feel a tiny bit like cheating?

They were almost too cute to eat…

4 comments | tags: baking, cake decorating, cake toppers, cupcakes, cute, Hello Kitty, kawai | posted in Cake, Original recipes

October 3, 2012

Gluten Free Chocolate and Coconut Cupcakes

By Rock Salt

Once again, I have taken on the dark art of gluten free baking, and emerged triumphant. These are soft, sweet cakes with a good coconut hit to the sponge. If anything, though, I’m most pleased with the decoration – little coconut squares that were so quick to make, and have the potential to be great cake toppers with a little more work. I kept them quite rustic this time but I’m sure they could be polished off and maybe even further decorated with icing pens… It’s a project to work on. Here’s a shot of them, so that you know what I’m talking about:

These cakes were for another leaving do (there have been oh, so many of those) and I made a batch of 30 to share around the office. There were a few leftover that got taken to the pub, but they all got snapped up in the end. Everyone seemed pretty taken with them, and some kind words were said. I won’t repeat them, because I am far too modest…

Here’s the recipe:

400g margarine
400g sugar
400g wheat free, self-raising flour (I use Dove’s Farm brand)
4 eggs
75g toasted coconut
400g coconut milk
1 tbsp vanilla

If you have read my blog before, you will probably know what I’m about to say. That’s right – use the all in one method. Put all the ingredients in a bowl, and mix with an electric mixer until just combined. Do not over mix them – a few wee lumps of margarine are fine, they’ll sort themselves out in the oven.

Distribute the cake mix between 30 cupcake cases and bake at 170C for twenty minutes, rotating half way through to make sure of an even bake and rise.

Top with your favourite chocolate icing. The one I used was a standard chocolate buttercream, with enough milk whipped through it to make a soft, fudgy frosting. It was very sweet, and stayed soft after icing. You could use a ganache, instead, with either plain or milk chocolate, or you could stick with a nice firm buttercream, or even just a drizzle of melted chocolate over the top would do the trick.

To make the coconut squares:

100g icing sugar
100g coconut
2 tbsp hot water
1 tsbp liquid glucose

Mix the coconut and icing sugar in a bowl. Add the water and glucose, and stir well. You should have a very thick, sticky paste. If it is runny, add more icing sugar and coconut. You can also add a pinch of salt if you would like it to be less sweet.

Turn the paste out of the bowl onto a cutting board or square of greaseproof paper, and shape into a six-inch square. Use a spoon to straighten up the edges and smooth down the top. Press down firmly, and try to get the thickness as even as you can. The idea is to compress the coconut as much as you can, so it’s easy to slice up later.

Leave the square to rest for several hours or overnight. It will be firm and dry to the touch. Slice into one-inch squares – you’ll have five left over in case any break or aren’t a great shape. Apply to the top of your cakes while the icing/frosting/topping is still wet.

The glucose helps bind everything together – I might be tempted to add a little more next time, but it is very sweet so I didn’t want to overdo it. If you use dark chocolate in your icing this will balance out the sweetness nicely.

9 comments | tags: baking, coconut, cupcakes | posted in Cake, Confectionery, Gluten free, Original recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian

August 6, 2012

Perfect Wheat-Free Cupcakes

By Rock Salt

My first efforts at wheat free baking were pretty woeful, all crumbling sponge and disintegrating cookies and salty tears of frustration. Since then, I’ve worked and worked on the technique and it’s paid off. If you check in often you’ll have seen lots of wheat free baking, like these mint chocolate biscuits and cupcakes, this green tea cake and this courgette, lemon and basil loaf. I pride myself now on being able to make an undetectable wheat free cupcake, and today I will be recording the secrets for posterity. This is a post with far more words than pictures, you can always skip to the end if a treatise on wheat-free baking isn’t your idea of a good time.

The first thing is to get a good wheat free flour mix. The one I use is a brand called Doves Farm. Their plain flour mix contains rice, potato, tapioca, maize and buckwheat flours, and I find it reliable and easy to work with. Discovering the right flour blend was a massive step in the right direction but it’s not the whole battle, there are still some points if technique to master. Wheat free flour is more absorbent than normal flour, so you need to add more liquid to your recipe to avoid that dry, crumbly finish. I also find that baking more gently, at a lower temperature, helps avoid drying the cakes out. Finally, make sure you use enough raising agent to encourage the cakes into pretty, golden domes instead of flat little cake islands.

So, all that preamble aside, here is my recipe for the perfect, wheat-free, vanilla cupcake. These amounts make 24 – though of course this will depend on the size of your cases.

350g wheat-free flour blend
350g golden caster sugar
350g margarine
3 eggs
4 tbsp milk
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp vanilla essence

Heat the oven to 170C.

Measure all the ingredients into a large bowl and mix with a hand held mixer until just combined. Don’t over mix, once there is no dry flour visible you’re ready.

Scoop the batter into 24 baking cases and bake for ten minutes. After this time, turn the baking trays so that the cakes that were at the front are now at the back. If your trays are split over two shelves, swap them around so they each get a shot in the centre of the oven. Bake for a further seven minutes and check. They should smell wonderfully sweet and be risen, golden and springy to the touch. Be careful not to over bake, this will dry them out.

I combined this batch of cupcakes with a chocolate mousse and a mini Twirl to make cute afternoon snacks. You can find a simple but effective recipe for a chocolate mousse here. I fitted a piping bag with a long icing tip, pushed it down into the middle of each cake and gave a good squeeze. This left a little puddle of mousse in the centre of the cake, waiting to surprise and delight. Then I changed the icing tip for a narrow circular shape, piped a wave of mousse across each cupcake and topped off with a Cadbury’s Twirl Bite. Other chocolate is available.

The vanilla sponge was really allowed to shine without this simple decoration, rather than being overwhelmed with a mountain of frosting. The chocolate mousse was a nice, rich counterpoint to the soft sponge and the wee drop on the middle was a surprising bonus. Sometimes it’s good to keep things simple, eh?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

8 comments | tags: baking, cupcakes, gluten free, mousse, vanilla | posted in Cake, Dessert, Gluten free, Original recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian

May 21, 2012

Owly Cupcakes

By Rock Salt

Every time I look at the photos of these cakes, they make me smile. They have such comical expressions – some more than others. Some of them actually look a bit peeved.

I made these for Agent Sunflower’s birthday (I’m no longer sure that is her correct code name but since most of you don’t know her anyway, that’s OK). Agent S can’t have wheat or dairy, so I had to make these allergy friendly cakes. She also loves owls, as you may have guessed from the title of the post, and after Googling ‘owl cake’ I knew exactly the kind of thing I wanted to make for her. My main inspiration came for this post on The Cupcake Blog which, in turn, came from Cuchilito Que No Corta (which means ‘The Knife That Does Not Cut); although my owls ended up different in the end, you can see the influence.

So, I started with a wheat free spiced chai cupcake. I made these using the all in one method; ie throw everything in the bowl and mix. The recipe is as follows:

200g dairy free margarine
200g plain wheat free flour
200g golden caster sugar
3 eggs (two would probably have been OK)
1/4 cup oat milk

Importantly, I didn’t add any raising agent, because I wanted the cakes to have flat tops, for decorating. To start this decorating, I made a dairy free coconut frosting by mixing 200g dairy free margarine with about 600g icing sugar, then adding 100g desiccated coconut. So far, so simple, right?

Speckly spiced chai sponge

No raising agents meant a flat top to the cakes, good for applying decoration to

Coconut icing provides a blank (and flat) canvas

Now to the fun part – the owls. To make your own, you will need:

your preferred frosting or buttercream
toasted coconut
white chocolate buttons (I used dairy free) or circles of white fondant icing
small, round cake confetti
writing icing tubes in white or clear (with glitter), orange and black

Allow the initial layer of frosting to dry completely. Then begin the owl by blocking in the shape of the wings. I found it easiest to pinch a little of the frosting from the bowl and flatten into shape with my fingers. My piping bag still hasn’t been replaced from where I burst it doing some fancy decorating… The wings will be made of two half circles which meet in the centre of the cake, like so:

The shape of the wings goes on first

Next, apply the toasted coconut to the remaining uncovered parts of the wings, to represent feathers. You can toast coconut in a hot, dry frying pan – keep an eye out and your nose tuned in to tell when it’s toasting, and don’t let it stray into burnt territory. It doesn’t take long to go from one to the other, so it’s quite important not to turn your back on it. Never turn your back on a coconut, even if it’s been taken out of its shell and flaked up. You just never know what might happen. Practise constant coconut vigilance.

Press the coconut in to the wings, then turn the cake upside down and tap to shake off any excess. Brush any stray parts off from the top and bottom of the cake. You will always make a frightful mess when eating a coconut-topped cake, but this will help with damage limitation. Also press two chocolate buttons or two fondant circles into the cake to act as eyes. They should stick to the freshly applied frosting and coconut wings.

Coconut wings and chocolate eyes. Isn’t that a Neil Diamond song?

Next, get in some detail using the writing icing. You could also make your own coloured royal icing for the fine detail, but those ready-to-use writing icing tubes are much easier for a project like this. I did the ears (I am aware that they look a lot like eyebrows) and little feet at this stage, but I left the beaks until just before presenting the cakes. I’ve had experience of writing icing losing its shape overnight before, most notably when I wished my mum ‘Happy Biillidiy Mmm’.

The growing brood of owls. I went through each stage with the whole batch, instead of finishing one at a time.

I went with just two talons on each foot, trying to fit in three was an exercise in fury and smudged orange icing.

The next detail is the round cake confetti, which I have used in so many decorating adventures – most notably Katie’s Button Cake and the Death Star Cake. For the owls’ eyes I chose half blue dots and half green. I held the dots on the top of my finger, one at a time, and pressed the least amount of clear glitter writing icing that I could manage on to them, just enough to make them sticky. I then pressed them, icing side down, on to the chocolate buttons or fondant circles.

I will admit now that I made the owls a little cross-eyed, because I know my friends well enough to realise that if I’d put the pupils right in the middle of the eyes, someone would have realised that they looked like boobs and I wouldn’t have got any sense out of them for the rest of the night.

Not that I did anyway.

I know that the pupil of an eye is not the coloured part. I also know that owls are not round. Nor do they have accidental eyebrows.

The final detail was, as mentioned, the beaks. I knew that there wasn’t room to draw a little triangle, so I decided that a simple line would be enough to convey beakiness. In fact, when I started drawing in the first one, I realised that if I just squeezed the icing tube firmly when I started drawing the line, and eased off as I drew it downwards, it formed a triangle by itself.

This is what we call a result.

All the owls, present and correct.

I also made a bigger owl cake for Agent Sunflower to keep to herself. This was based on my Hello Kitty cakes, and meant that Agent S could both have her cake and eat it.

I couldn’t decide which of these photos I liked best, so here are both:

29 comments | tags: baking, birthday cake, cake decorating, cupcakes, owl cake, owls | posted in Cake, Dairy free, Gluten free, Original recipes, Snacks, Vegetarian

May 2, 2012

A Minty Fresh, Gluten Free Success (or, Mint Chocolate Biscuits and Cupcakes)

By Rock Salt

I made these cake to share at work, to commiserate ourselves over one of our fold leaving to work in London. It was a sad event, though we did try to drown our sorrows in peppermint icing. When people asked me what flavour they were and I said ‘mint chocolate’, everyone responded with a variation of ’Oooh! I love mint chocolate!’. I also love mint chocolate, it’s my favourite ice cream flavour, and given that you would think I would have made mint chocolate cake before. Not so – this was my first mint chocolate creation, and I have no idea why I let it go so long. Let’s start with the best photo of the lot – the solo mint chocolate cupcake, with a mint chocolate biscuit on top:

I was beyond pleased with this project – it was the first time I successfully made gluten free biscuits, for a start. Previously I’d tried them only to end up with a structure so loosely held together that it crumbled to dust the instant you tried to take a bite, coating the inside of one’s mouth with what may as well have been ash. Sugary, floury ash. Sigh. As you can imagine, this put me off trying them again, but when I got the idea for these little biscuits I decided to take the bull by the horns and try again. I used this recipe for peppermint creams, which I’ve been eyeing up on Pinterest for some time, to make both the biscuits and peppermint fondant in the middle. I added one crucial ingredient to the biscuit dough – an egg. The humble egg; how it spelled the difference between success and failure for this blogger. I otherwise followed the recipe, swapping Dove’s Farm gluten free blend flours in for the self raising and plain flours, and oat milk for the normal milk.

Steph at Raspberri Cupcakes made these in pretty flower shapes; I had been intending to follow her lead and use my icing stamps to make flowers and hearts, but in the end I stuck with the classic round biscuit – yes, like a well known brand of biscuit that begins with O, but I insist that mine are better. I used the narrow end of the insert of a piping bag – you know, the bit that you screw the nozzle on to? – to get the shapes perfectly uniform. The uniformity is one of the most pleasing things about the biscuits, apart from them not shattering into dust when you try to eat them.

What a mess. The biscuit dough was very soft, so I had to work quickly, but I wanted it to be a little softer than a normal biscuit – gluten free baking dries out a lot more than normal baking, so if you start with something that holds a little too much liquid, you should get a good end result. I also let the dough rest in the fridge for longer than the 15 minutes in the recipe – it was in there for at least an hour. They baked for about five minutes, being so tiny – again, with gluten free baking being drier, it was even more important than usual not to over bake them.

They came out looking like this, rows and rows of identical, tiny biscuits:

While they cooled, I made the peppermint fondant. This was really easy, and you could use it as a decorative icing to cut into little shapes, if you wanted to. I used about half a teaspoon of peppermint essence and a little green food dye to get the colour and flavour I wanted. It doesn’t look very inspiring on its own though.

Now it was time to sandwich the biscuits together. I chose not to coat them in chocolate, though I would like to, because I saw the trouble Steph had getting it to set evenly, and also I was trying to do a batch of 36 cupcakes, with buttercream icing and biscuit toppers, in the few hours between work and bedtime.

I could hardly stop looking at these little wonders. Sometimes I make something that I think looks really proper, like you might have bought it in a shop, and it amazes and surprises me. And then I eat it.

While I was chilling the biscuit dough, I made an enormous batch of devil’s food cupcakes – a more enormous batch than I meant to, in fact, I got a bit confused over how much to increase the recipe by… I always use the devils food cake recipe from Cake in the Country now, you may have seen me mention it before. I don’t need another chocolate cake recipe any more. It’s particularly good for gluten free adaptation because there is so much liquid in it that it would take a long time in the oven for them to dry out. This time, I doubled the recipe, which gave 36 cupcakes, and I changed half of the vanilla essence for peppermint essence, which just gave a hint of peppermint to the finished cakes.

This is what I meant by a huge batch. Note the immense mess everywhere. I was multi tasking. Sadly, one of my tasks was not cleaning up.

My poor kitchen wasn’t really designed for this kind of thing.

Once the cakes were out of the oven (they had to be done in two batches), I started on the mint buttercream. This was easy, but sadly ‘easy’ and ‘instant’ are not the same thing… I softened a block of butter and then added double the weight of butter in icing sugar, plus a hint of green food dye and a teaspoon of peppermint essence. You could experiment with how much mint and how much colour you’d like to add, of course. I let my food mixer do the work while I made a start on the dishes and cleaning the sugar off every surface in the house, for what felt like the millionth time. Occasionally I’d go back and scrape down the sides of the bowl and check on the progress of the buttercream. When it was smooth and well combined, I made a start on the icing by rudely dropping a spoonful on each cake. Don’t they look affronted?

I did it this way so that I could make sure I had enough icing to go round – if I’d iced them properly, one at a time, I could have run out towards the end and had to go back and start over again. I also chose to spoon it on to the cakes rather than swirling – swirling uses up at least twice as much icing, there just wasn’t enough for that.

I smoothed the icing out by hand, because it stuck too much to the back of the spoon, and then pressed a wee biscuit into the top of each one. That was a quick sentence to write, and a slow process to undertake! But it was well worth it, because in the end I had this:

This time they’re jostling to get to the front, so they can be in the photo. It got dark while I was baking. It very often gets dark while I’m baking, and my photos are not improved by the situation.

These were a big success all round – they look almost exactly as I’d pictured them, though I would have preferred to have an extravagant swirl of icing, but it wasn’t practical on the day. Everyone who had one was very complimentary of them; the flavours were balanced, the chocolate sponge is so moist and the minty icing is fresh and not too heavy. Another time I might try making a mint syrup from real mint instead of relying on the synthetic essence, but I have to say it tastes great, not synthetic or plasticky at all.

My favourite part is definitely the biscuits, though. I have extra biscuit dough and fondant in the freezer, ready for the next time!