One Night In Paris

From one city to the next... I enjoyed a rather impromptu 24 hour trip to Paris last week with Shadi. We ate a lot, of course! 

Sugardaddy Cakes

Something tasty will be happening at the Tea Rooms this weekend. The Bake Club boys and I are teaming up to start a new cake stall, serving plenty of homemade goodies. If you're around Brick Lane this weekend, why not come over to say hello, and have some tea and biscuits? 

Giant Cat Project Exhibition Opening

The Giant Cat Project exhibition and auction officially opened on Monday night in St. Botolph's Church, beside Aldgate Station. The eponymous Giant Cat is the first thing to greet you as you step inside the church. 

 

Anne and Petra worked hard all day setting it up, and the donated items all looked beautiful together by the time I got there at 6pm. The warm interior made a perfectly cosy retreat from the drizzle outside. 

Cat Mask by Saskia 'Wild' Doornbos and Graciela Abicher

Cat Tapestry Skirt by Ali Wall

Hummingbird Bakery provided lots of cupcakes, and there was plenty of wine, coffee and tea too. 

The exhibition will be open til the end of this week, so do drop by for a look if you're in the area. The auction will end on Friday, so there's plenty of time to put in a bid if something catches your eye. You can also pop in to stroke the Giant Cat and pose for pictures with it too!

http://www.giantcatproject.com

Muesli Treacle Muffins

 The Manbeast isn't very good at starting his day with breakfast, so I thought I'd make things easy for him but baking up some easy-to-grab muffins. The inspiration came from a box of fantastic oat and treacle biscuits we picked up from Sainsburys - rich, sweet but with enough oaty goodness in it to let it pass as 'healthy'.

 These little muffins are stuffed with muesli and moist with olive oil - I wanted to produce a handsized, edible battery for busy mornings. 

Muesli Treacle Muffins

makes about 10

Ingredients

200 gm self-raising flour

100 gm muesli

2 tbsp treacle 

100 ml olive oil

100 ml milk 

2 eggs

For topping

1 tbsp demerara sugar

25 gm muesli

Directions

- Preheat oven to 175c. Mix flour and muesli in a large bowl, then add treacle to mixture.

- In another bowl, milk olive oil, eggs and milk. 

- Add the wet ingredients to the flour/muesli mixture, and stir it all up with a spoon until it's all combined. 

-Spoon the batter into muffin cases, sprinkle muesli and sugar on top and pop it into the oven for about 12 - 15 minutes.

-Enjoy! Keep them in airtight containers and they should last for up to 3 days without drying out. These would be sooooo good with some clotted cream too. 

When Cupcakes Meet Fashion

Urgh! Sorry to inflict this hideousness on your retinas, my lovelies, but I had to share the pain or go insane. This makes me want to kill, and die (and NOT in a Rachel Zoe 'I die' way). 

Jumble Sale

Alright, listen up, Londoners (or those in London over the weekend)! Artquest are holding their annual jumble sale this Sunday at The Rag Factory off Brick Lane, so make your way out East if you're looking to get your filthy mitts on some goodies. 

Fellow Bake Club member Yusuf and I have got two stalls there. (Yeah, I started a baking club, because I am soooo cool. Deal with it!) We'll be selling heaps of fantastic homemade cakes, biscuits and possibly truffles, and also a bunch of our old stuff - clothes, CDs, badges, knitting/sewing supplies. It's a sorta fundraising event for visual artists and crafters, so your money will go towards helping starving artists buy another pint of beer and a pack of fags. It's all for a good cause!

So, please come along if you're looking for a fun day out, or if you'd like to judge the quality of my baking skillzzz for yourself. I'll try not to poison you (unless you're an idiot, of course). Click over here for the map if you want to find out how to get there. 

Eaten

Saltimbocca with mushroom sauce, and a side of cous cous. This was the first pretty meal I cooked in our new kitchen.

Prosciutto and Jarlsberg cheese sandwiches.

Possibly the worst cupcake ever! A complete waste of calories. It tasted very strongly of box-mix, and the frosting was curdled. It looks like scrambled eggs in this photo. I took a snap of it because it was so unusually horrible. Cupcake = Major Fail!

Easter Sunday brekkie: instant Polish fermented soup - Barszcz Biawy - sounds gross, but it's actually delicious. With hardboiled  eggs and tinned hotdogs because we didn't have any Polish sausages. It's supposed to be a Polish Easter tradition to eat this on Easter morning.

Fried patties of minced pork, buckwheat, capsicums, and onions, served with a mushroom and red wine sauce. The Mancreature made this.

Pear, walnut and ginger cake. Recipe coming very soon.

Eat Your Heart Out

Some cupcakes I whipped up for a dinner party last night. The recipe comes via The Times website, and was contributed by Konditor and Cook. I first tasted the professionally baked version in January, when my friend H ordered the lemon chiffon cake for his birthday lunch. Though we all agreed that it was slightly too sweet, it was fairly enjoyable. When H let on that the recipe was available on The Times website, I mentally filed it away for future reference, then promptly forgot all about it (my brain is as messy as my room).

Anyway, I took the opportunity to try it out for myself yesterday, mainly because I wanted to see if I could make my version fancier than the K&C one, and also because we were going to bring a cake along to the dinner party anyway. I absolutely loathe storebought, fondant-covered birthday cakes, so tried to make mine as festival as possible, in honour of the host's birthday last Thursday. 

The recipe is fairly basic, although I had to make a few tweaks to the frosting, which still turned out far too sweet anyway. I added lime zest and the juice of about a quarter lemon to it for a stronger flavour, and also added a little bit of green food colouring to it, mainly because I liked it. The frosting was topped off with pieces of lime and lemon peel for a more colourful look. My frosting was also made with a 50-50 mixture of mascarpone and cream cheese, as I feel that mascarpone adds a creamier texture to it. And because I just like mascarpone. Oh, and I left out about 100gms of the recommended 640gms of icing sugar, since it was already toothachingly sweet. 

Let me know what you think if you do try this recipe.

On an unrelated note, look what I got in the mail from Sunny - sexy little porno earrings! She has lots more vintage porn jewellery in her Etsy shop, so I'd recommend you checking it out if you're feelin' naughty.

Guinness Genius

 

Nigella struck again on the weekend, and my tastebuds gladly gave in to temptation. This time, the weapon of choice this time was a hefty dose of her Chocolate Guinness Cake recipe, broken down into dainty little cupcake portions.

The recipe calls for lots of butter, Guinness and cream, and makes for an intensely dense,  dark cake.

 

The cream cheese icing on top imitates the froth on the top of a well-poured pint of the dark stuff, and saves the whole thing from being too sweet and brick-like.

Now, before you accuse me of being a Nigella fangirl, let me at least try to defend myself. The reason I've been turning to her recipes so often lately is because they're great for lazy people like me. She usually only requires you to stir everything together before sticking it into an oven, and that's great for someone like me, who's only really an amateur in the kitchen.

And, she never shys away from using cream and butter, which always makes everything taste so much better.

Weekend Cupcakes And Cakes

Haryo had a summer party at his penthouse on Saturday, and I decided to bring some goodies along. Since I'd had a pretty busy week, I didn't want to faff around with something that required too much preparation. So I decided to make the dark chocolate and cherry cupcakes I'd made for the Mancreature's birthday last month.

On a taste per effort ratio, this recipe is a clear winner. All you have to do is stir all the ingredients together before bunging them in the oven. If anything, making the chocolate icing seems to take the most time.

The recipe says it makes 12 cupcakes, but Nigella must have some seriously DD-cup patty pans. I doubled the quantities and ended up with 46 cupcakes - almost twice what I was supposed to have! And as luck would have it, I ran out of chocolate icing after covering about two-thirds of the cupcakes, so had to conjure something up to ice the rest.

This is what happens when I try to conjure up some icing - fluorescent pink icing. I added some fresh lime juice to it for taste, and some rosewater for, erm, nice smells.

I forgot to take a photo of the cupcakes with the chocolate icing, and the Mancreature tripped while carrying them up the bus anyway, which resulted in some fairly smooshed icing.

Haryo supplied the cupcake patterned tray.

Mine weren't the only baked good at the party. Haryo's friend Rika made this fantastic cake as well. I'm not sure what it's called or what else is in it except for chocolate, but dang, it was tasty!

Birthday Baking, Brownies and Buntings

The Mancreature turned 30 last Friday, and I made him some goodies to celebrate.

Chocolate and cherry cupcakes from a Nigella recipe.

And a giant brownie.


In case you're wondering, yes, it does say 'Happy Irthday'.

The Mancreature had received a cake from some clients on Wednesday, and brought it home to share with me. When we opened the box, he's promptly popped the 'B' candle into his mouth and chewed on it, thinking it was icing. Silly!

So anyway, I thought it'd be funny to recycle the candles and have them say 'Happy Irthday'.

I also put up a string of heart buntings on our door to decorate, and I like them so much I've left them up permanently.

UV Cupcakes

Another week, another batch of luridly coloured cakes.

Googy and I bought a packet of butter-cake mix from Frankies and a whole bag of icing sugar, in an ill-thought-out attempt to satisfy sugar cravings.
We put a tin of strawberries in with the cake mixture, which turned the cakes a delightful pink colour. But that obviously wasn't colourful enough, so we ended up making three batches of icing, mixing them all together, and piping them onto the cakes (this is where The Best Piping Bag In The World came in handy again).
The fact that we ended up with more icing mixture than cake mixture should have been a warning to us, but we piped pretty much all the icing onto the cakes anyway. And ended up with icing than tasted like sugary toothpaste on top of barely-there cupcakes.
At least they looked lovely and colourful, even if they didn't taste that great. The icing didn't glow as much under our UV lights as we thought they would, though.