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!

Reindeer cupcakes!

So we recently had a Christmas party with just our friends, I thought I'd make some festive cupcakes, so I googled "Christmas cupcakes" for some ideas...

I was inspired by these reindeer cupcakes, they are just so cute!

So I made a basic vanilla cupcake, added some rum to make it more christmassy, I'm not sure if the flavour came through though, I could definitely smell it when it was baking, they made the house smell awesome!

Anyways, I covered them with royal icing mixed with chocolate for the brown colour. Jaffa for the nose, two mini m&m's for the eyes and a pretzel snapped in half for antlers. voila, simple as, and they look so cute!

Apple Pie Cupcakes.

Apple flavoured cupcake, filled with cinnamon buttercream and topped with apple pie filling and a cinnamon buttercream lattice piped on top.