Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

Today I tried my hand at using a cherry hot chocolate to flavour my cake mix. It worked really well - I used Options Cherry Hot Chocolate and some more cocoa to make it extra chocolately.

Then I made up some buttercream icing with real butter this time - tastes so good! For the dusky pink colour I used red, black and a little bit of blue, sprinkled some chocolate strands and then piped more icing on top. I've added more read colouring to the top icing to give it a different colour. Added non pareils (hundreds and thousands) and a natural colour glace cherry. 

I really love the dusky colour icing - hope I can recreate it!!

Kirsty

x

Coconut Cupcakes

After a busy three days, I finally had time to make some more cupcakes. I love coconut and so does everyone else in my household, so of course I made these.

I added 50g of desiccated coconut to the normal cupcake mixture. I always forget what this stuff is called, I always want to say 'decaffeinated coconut' or another word which I won't say when we're dealing with food!

My fan oven was set at 150° and these took about 18 minutes. There was enough mixture for 12. 6 bigger cases, and 6 smaller.

Ok, it's offical. I adore these cupcake cases. Or should I say I j'adore these cupcake cases :)

I got so excited when I found them because I love zebra print. Oh, and I love pink.

I left the cupcakes to cool on a wire rack for a good 15 minutes or so. I decided to decorate with caramelised decaffeinated desiccated coconut. All I did was put a frying pan on a medium heat, put the coconut in there and slighty browned it off (it didn't take very long!) and then added 1 tbsp of sugar, then it caramelised. Then I set it on a plate to cool down.

Whilst it was cooling, I made the butter cream. I was supposed to make it stiffer than it came out, but I ran out of icing sugar (typical), it didn't matter too much though! I was going to do glacé icing with a cherry on the top. But guess what, I ran out of glacé cherries too (that might be because I have a thing with eating them out of the pot *whistles*).

Then I spread some on the cakes and sprinkled the caramelised coconut on top. Easy! I left some plain too though. These cakes are really nice (not that I'm blowing my own trumpet or anything...), they aren't even too coconutty (that's totally a word)

De-lish!

Now the only other thing that will make me happy, is some comments on this blog. We would love any feedback, advice, or just a hello :)

Hayley xx

Marble Cupcakes

I thought I'd do some more baking today. I think I'm starting to get obsessed...and I'm worried that I'm going to keep piling on weight! I gave some of these cupcakes to a neighbour though, maybe I should have told her to expect loads more in future!

Anyway, I haven't made marble cupcakes before, it wasn't too hard to do. Just the usual cupcake recipe. But divide the mixture in to two bowls and add cocoa powder to one. Simples.

Does anyone else make as much mess as I do?? I'm definitely not one of the 'tidy as you go' gals.

I put a spoonful of mixture in to the cases. I thought I'd be a bit different and do three starting with chocolate and three vanilla.

Then I added the opposite mixture on top. Easy peasy.

To get the marbled effect, I used a knife and just swished the mixture about a bit (I use such good descriptive words!), I had lots of mixture left over so baked more cupcakes. The second time around I used a cocktail stick and I found that this worked a lot better than the knife, the first batch just looked a bit too layered!

They only took 15 minutes, at 160°. My oven (it's a fan oven) always seems to cook quicker, even if I reduce the temperature by 20°. So I always check my cakes after 10 minutes, do the cocktail stick test and leave them a bit longer. I usually just guess.

I think they turned out pretty good. Not as marbled as I expected, but I think this is because the chocolate mixture seemed thicker than the vanilla. So maybe next time I will add a little bit of milk or something.

Iced, with butter cream. Chocolate for the vanilla ones, vanilla for the chocolate. Oh, I forgot to add. With the second batch, I added 3 layers instead of 2.

Added some sprinkles to some of them :)

VOILA!

Hayley xx

Winter Cupcakes

So I was trying to perfect my cupcakes recipe (which will remain under lock&key) and also wanted to see what sort of flavours taste best. Now even if I do say so myself, my vanilla cupcakes rule so here's something different:

The ones with a walnut on top are maple; the ones with chocolate bits on top are double peanut butter; and the ones with sprinkles are coffee and baileys. 

The icing I used was buttercream icing, flavoured with either pure maple syrup, baileys or peanut butter - with maple glacé icing to decorate the maple cakes.

I've only tried the peanut butter ones so far, and it was delish! 

The second half of J'adore Les Cupcakes,

Kirsty

x

Banana Cupcakes

Banana cupcakes = delicious.

I've never made these before, but thought today I would give them a go. They were pretty simple to make. The usual cupcake recipe (2 eggs, 4oz flour. etc), with mashed banana added. I used about 3 medium bananas.

This mixture made enough for 6 large muffin cases and some. I don't like waste so after seeing I had a little bit left, I got out some small cupcake cases and had enough mixture for 4 of those.

In the oven they went. For 18 minutes at 160°

For the icing, I made vanilla butter cream. Simple, but delightful!

I decided that I would make the smaller cakes in to butterfly cakes. Especially handy if you have children who won't be able to manage a full sized cupcake.

Then I iced the cupcakes. I also left one plain one as I think they're yummy without frosting too! They are moist, the banana flavour isn't at all overpowering and the butter cream isn't sickly, so in other words - they're nice frosting or not.

TA DAH!

Kudos to the first person who can spot the damaged cake...dropped one on top of another and then one fell on the floor. I'm sure my dog won't mind polishing that one off!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Expect many more from Kirsty and I.

Bye for now,

Hayley xx

'Cheer Up' Cupcakes

A friend of ours was feeling a bit down in the dumps, so we thought we'd cheer her up with some cupcakes.

After all, cupcakes cheer everyone up!

We just used the basic cupcake recipe, adding chocolate chips to the mixture. They were in the oven for not very long (20 minutes I believe) at 180°.

For the frosting, simple butter cream was used (icing sugar and butter/margarine), we then used blue, pink and black food colouring. And red and blue together for the purple!

To finish them off, pretty pink sprinkles and silver balls were used. Yum.

We also used the remaining cupcakes (there were 4 left...they were for personal usage, ahem), half were peppermint (green food colouring and peppermint flavouring) and the other half were orange. I think it's obvious that we used orange colouring and orange flavouring!

Anyway, there we go. The first blog post. Expect many many more.

Hayley, one half of J'adore Les Cupcakes

xx