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.

Christmas Colours

Christmas celebrations invariably involve eating your own body weight through a mountain of food, and I certainly did my part this year. Christmas Eve dinner was held at A+B's cosy flat in East London, where we proceeded to slowly but steadily work our way through a 12-course Polish dinner. The Mancreature tells me that it's traditional for Polish families to stuff their faces with 12 different dishes during Christmas dinner, so we took that as an excuse to eat til we nearly threw up.

I made up a tower of quince pies and lots of little Russian tea cakes to add to the party, while the Mancreature made little dumplings called uzska - little ears - and also roasted a great big hunk of beef. Turns out we needn't have brought those items, as there was more than enough food awaiting our rather late entrance.

We stuffed our greedy maws with plenty of pierogi, beetroot soup, bigos, marinated herrings, lots of sausages  and at least  four different cakes. In fact, there was so much food that we ended up having to take a half hour break halfway through the meal before we could go on and finish all 12 dishes. The Mancreature nearly ended up in a coma at the end of it, but that's because he didn't listen to my advice - just keep eating, and don't listen to your gut!

I know I'd promised to write up my recipe for quince pies before, but you'll just have to wait a little longer before I get round to doing it. I used this recipe for the biscuits, but omitted the icing sugar dusting and got creative with some chocolate-flavoured icing instead. It's currently one of my favourite biscuit recipes, as it takes hardly any time to mix up, and I've also discovered that the resulting biscuits keep fairly well too.

The next day - Christmas Day - was spent lazing around in our pyjamas, playing computer games and making more mushroom-filled uszkas! This time, I had the 'brilliant' idea of adding red and green food colouring to the dough, to produce a batch of Christmas-coloured dumplings. They looked like little embryos, but were so tasty right out of a hot water bath, with a little lot of butter slathered over them.  Lots of things taste great covered in butter...I love butter!

We didn't make them to a specific recipe, but you if'd like to try them out, here's a fairly simple one. Ours were stuffed with wild Polish mushrooms and onions, but I don't see why you can't stuff them with other ingredients if you feel like it. Once you've cooked them, you can keep them for a couple of days in the fridge, although we finished ours almost immediately. All 52 little ears.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all have a great 2010!

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.