Cupcake Factory;

As an early christmas present, Mum bought me a cupcake factory machine, to test it out, I decided to make a batch of miniature cupcakes to see how the machine fares against the conventional oven.

Needless to say, I still prefer the oven, but this little appliance is pretty neat, it cooks the cupcakes super fast! I whipped up a batch of vanilla cupcakes, and filled them with the usual fillings; lemon butter, raspberry jam, nutella, and peanut butter frosting. I made basic buttercream frosting and mixed it with white chocolate ganache, coloured wildly with food colouring, then covered the cupcakes with different sweets, including jellybeans, hersheys kisses and kool fruit chews.

The weather was extremely humid that day, so everything was melting and misbehaving. Regardless, they turned out okay, and everyone seemed to enjoy them :)

Summer;

Coming into the warmer weather, my friend Nathan threw pool party and korean BBQ at his house. I forgot to take pictures of the lovely bonfire we had going and all the delicious food, but anyways, he'd been speaking of his love of raspberry and chocolate muffins, so I decided to make him a version of his favourite muffin. These cupcakes are vanilla and white choc chip cake, with a raspberry jam filling, topped with a vanilla buttercream. The boys basically inhaled them, which was amazing and scary to watch at the same time!!

I'd also like to mention the amazing cupcake papers, which were given to me for my birthday, they look amazing!

A dinner party with friends;

I love dinner parties, if I had my own place, I am fairly sure I would host one every week. Our dear friend Jordan hosted his triennial dinner party recently, there was an abundance of food and liquor, and I contributed my Lemon Meringue cupcakes into the mix (any excuse to get the kitchen blowtorch out!).

The artsy side of Jordan comes out, Specials: Gluttony with a side of inebriation and your choice of a hangover or salad





The table of goodness.




Lemon Meringue Cupcakes; vanilla sponge cake with lemon butter filling, and an italian buttercream frosting browned with a kitchen blowtorch. Delish.

RSPCA cupcake day

As previously mentioned, this year I participated in RSPCA cupcake day, my fundraising was extremely successful, however this would not have been possible without the help of my amazing friends, who not only bought so many of the cupcakes, but helped me decorate them all. My house was transformed into a mini-bakery for a day, and I loved it making the cupcakes and just hanging out with my friends for a good cause. Combined with the generous donations, almost $500 was raised!

Here are the cupcake pans filled and ready to go in the oven, this process was repeated 24 times!!


Here are the cupcakes baking in the oven.

Cooling cupcakes, almost ready to be filled, iced and decorated!


7 flavours of cupcakes were made:
Frogs - Vanilla cake with mint buttercream filling and icing.
Lions - Vanilla cake with lemon butter filling and lemon buttercream icing.
Dogs - Chocolate cake with chocolate fudge filling and icing.
Pigs - Strawberry swirl cake with strawberry jam filling and strawberry buttercream icing.
Chicks - Chai cake with vanilla buttercream.
Sheep - Vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream filling and icing.
Cats - Vanilla cake with peanut butter filling and peanut butter flavoured icing.


Mass production of cupcakes, cupcakes coming from my ears. The smell was divine. Bring on RSPCA cupcake day 2011!!

Apology;

I'm a terrible blogger, I know. So very slack in posting regularly. I have a 4 month backlog of bakings to be posted, so I apologise in advance for the bombardment of cupcakes about to take place...

My 20th Birthday.

For my birthday, I wanted something simple, but special, so I created this rainbow cupcake tower. I seem to have a love of rainbow cakes, but these cakes were simply vanilla cupcakes filled with jam. The vanilla buttercream was then coloured wildly to create this masterpiece. All up there were about 52 cupcakes, and they were devoured well before the end of the night :)

Forgive me for the lack of pictures, but in the whirlwind of organising a birthday party, I forgot to take some close ups.

RSPCA Cupcake Day.

So this year, I am again participating in the RSPCA cupcake day.

I have a donation page where you can make donations, please be charitable!

http://www.fundraise.rspcacupcakeday.com.au/kimberly_nguyen

Orders so far have been so very overwhelming, but it is something I am glad to see!!

I will be making exactly the same cupcakes as last year, with some new additions such a peanut butter flavoured cupcake! I can't wait, although, baking 200+ cupcakes in my little oven is going to be a task.

Bring on August 16th, RSPCA cupcake day!!

Black Forest Inspired Fudge Cake

I promised a friend a cake a LONG time ago, and I finally came up with my end of the deal. There is A LOT of love put into this cake, I'm not normally one to make full size cakes as I've had some bad experiences, but this one turned out okay! There are two layers to the cake, made with my special sour cream chocolate fudge cake recipe. I then brushed the cakes with a sour cherry syrup reduction that I made. I then coated both layers of cake with a dark chocolate ganache and waited for them to dry. To assemble the cake, I topped a layer with lots of whipped cream and cherries. I dusted the layer with some dutch cocoa and put the other layer of cake on top. Cream was piped on the edge of the cake for decoration and topped with more cherries.

This cake took me AGES to make! I think I'll just stick to the cupcakes!! =)

P.s. I'm told it was absolutely delicious though!!

Pink Party

I was helping my friend Kylie make cupcakes for a charity event she was attending. She loves pink so we had a girly day making and decorating a bunch of these cupcakes. The cake is a basic vanilla cake, with strawberry flavoured pink batter marbled through it. The icing is a royal icing coloured pink and flavoured with strawberry essence. We finished them off with some shaved white chocolate. Simple, but yummy! Also, sorry for the backlog of posts, but I take these pictures and I forget to post them until I'm clearing out my camera!

Sandwich Style Miniatures.

I made these miniature cupcakes inspired by different sandwiches. Bizarre, but it just came to me and I had to try it.

So there are:

Peanut Butter and Jelly Cupcakes, where the cake is vanilla, there is a strawberry jam filling and peanut butter buttercream.

Lemon Butter Cupcakes, where the cake is lemon, filled with a lemon curd and a lemon flavoured buttercream.

Fairy bread cupcake, where the cake is vanilla, topped with chocolate icing and hundreds and thousands.

Nutella Cupcake, the cake is vanilla, filled with nutella and topped with a nutella flavoured buttercream.

These would be perfect for a picnic, but I wrapped them up as a gift for a birthday.
Keen to try these again some time!! I think I'm onto a winner =)

Twenty.

For a friends 20th birthday recently, I made these chocolate vanilla cupcakes.
I made these '20' cake toppers which were made from melted chocolates. The cake was vanilla and the vanilla butter cream icing was tinted with a tiny bit of chocolate.

I'm still a bit new to working with and piping chocolate so some parts look not so great, but I guess it will look better with practise.

A False Alarm.

So I haven't made any cupcakes in a very long time, life has just been so hectic I haven't had time. I finally mounted my Hello Cupcake! Calendar today though (yes, I am aware that it is now nearing the end of March) and felt inspired to make some, so perhaps this weekend?

Another sign that it has been too long, I received an email from amazon.com that the new cupcake book by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson is out. For those of you that don't know, they wrote the Hello Cupcake! book, and it is amazing. I haven't made any from the book yet as american candies are quite hard to come by and expensive in Australia, but I love just flipping through it. So as financially unstable as I am, I ordered the book straight away, and it should be in my hands in 3-6 weeks.

MUST. BAKE. CUPCAKES. SOON!