I made these for my fiancee and friends “dude” brunch but they didn’t turn out very “manly”, at least they ate them all!

Recipe – Lemon cupcakes with strawberries

• 100ml milk
• 150 g caster sugar
• 175 g self-­raising flour
• 3 medium eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 lemon rind, grated finely
• 1 can of strawberries in syrup

For the frosting

• 150 g unsalted butter, softened
• 250 g icing sugar
• 2 teaspoons hot water
• Half a teaspoon of lemon essence or more lemon rind (about 2 table spoons, but then the frosting will have a texture to it)

Preheat the oven to 180°C and prepare your baking tray with the liners. Mix all the ingredients except the strawberries in a food mixer and beat until creamy. Open the strawberry can and drain the liquid from the strawberries, then add the whole strawberries to the mix, don’t beat afterwards.

Pour the mixture up to 2/3 of each cupcake liner and bake for 20mins or until they have risen and are firm (you can poke them with a toothpick and if the toothpick comes clean of dough then they are done.)

While the cupcakes are cooling, Mix all the ingredients for the frosting together and beat well until the frosting is consistent and smooth. Once the cupcakes are cold, pipe the icing and even out the surface with a spatula.

Stencilling

I used stencils to decorate the cupcakes. I laid it on top of the cupcake and then with a palette spread some green icing on top of it, making sure it’s spread even. Then you lift up the stencil and all done! I’ll do a step by step tutorial next time.

Then I thought why not some lemon cheescakes! Any creamy cheesecake recipe will go well with this project but the more dense the better (they need to keep the shape once you take them out of the mould!).

Next time I’m going to try with blueberries!

I bought my mould at Kmart:

There wasn’t much out there V-cupcake wise so I had to improvise a little but I think they came out well! He really loved them and was so surprised cause he didn’t see me doing them (perks of staying up really late at night!).

The cake was chocolate with white choc bits and the frosting was coffee, so kind of mocha-ish.

Here is our figurine! 

I started with cappuccino cause I thought it would mesh well with the biscuit base and oh my, were these successful! My fiancee raided the fridge before I had time to tell him I’d made them for a girls’ night (you know dinner, talk, wine, talk, talk, talk, cake!) and when I took them to the dinner my friends loved them… If you like coffee-flavoured desserts, then you definitely must try this one!

The recipe is very similar to the lemon slices but with changes to the icing:

INGREDIENTS

• 125g butter
• 300g pack milk Arrowroot biscuits (any Maria kind of cookie is good too, adds different flavour)
• 1/2 cup condensed milk

ICING

• 1 1/2 cups pure icing sugar
• 50g melted butter
• 1-2 table spoons of instant coffee (depends on how coffee-tasting you like your desserts!)
• 60gr of dark or milk chocolate for melting
• Some cocoa powder for decorating

I had a blast creating a cupcake buffet for my two gorgeous friends’ wedding, Justine & Cat… From the design of the cupcakes paper toppers to the flavour selection and above all the fondant topper, it sure was a lot of fun!

Here is a little sketch I made for the brides with the cases, toppers, flavours and tags:

I did find out the hard way that fondant and humid Brisbane weather don’t mesh nicely…  Next time I have to work in that weather I might store the topper on a container half full of rice to see if it dries faster. Also taking photos on low light + red lights + no tripod was hard! So apologies in advance for the quality of the photos…

The flavour selection was:

• Red velvet with cream cheese frosting
• Piña Colada with Coconut frosting
• Dark chocolate with white chocolate frosting
• Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting
• Lemon/ Blueberry with lemon frosting
• Mini vanilla cupcakes

For the fondant topper, I tried to copy the dresses and hairstyles while keeping the dolls quite simple. The brides love the movie Up so I added the ballons as a quirky reference…

And here are the gorgeous brides eating my cupcakes!

That’s me as a wedding guest + cupcaketeer!

On Easter Sunday, we always go to my partner’s family house and this time I was in charge of the cake (cue happy dance and squeals here!). I wanted to have a fresh take on a chocolate cake. Something chocolate-y but a bit more unique so I came up with the tropical chocolate cake! It’s a chocolate cake with layers of coconut and pineapple cream!! Sounds strange? Well, it was definitely a happy surprise for the guests! The cake was a mix between a Bounty candy bar and a piña colada cocktail and it got a lot of compliments.

Tropical Easter cake recipe

Ingredients:

- 2 boxes of chocolate cake mix (I didn’t have time to make my own so I bought a staple: Betty Crocker’s) and whatever you need to make them (eggs and milk usually)

- 1 tin of pineapple

- 1 can of coconut cream

- 250gr of butter

- 600gr of icing sugar

- 200gr of dark chocolate

- 3 table spoons of heavy cream

- Assorted Easter eggs (if it’s Easter! if not you can just skip this step or decorate with some tropical flowers)

1. Bake the cakes and let them cool down. Cut them in half horizontally

2. Mix the sugar and butter until you get a fluffy buttercream. Then divide it into three parts.

3. I chose to make my cake with two layers of coconut and one of pineapple but you could easily have a different combination. For the coconut icing, I added the coconut cream to 2 of those three parts (don’t use coconut milk or it will end up too runny). If you want a stronger coconut flavour you could use artificial flavour or coconut flakes.

4. For the pineapple icing: I  crushed the pineapple and carefully squeezed out all the liquid, then I mixed it into the icing. At the beginning it didn’t blend well so I ended up using the food processor to get a smoother finish. Next time I might try just chopping the pineapple and using a whipped cream layer instead of the buttercream…

5. Start building your layers! Put one layer of cake, one layer of coconut frosting, another cake, then the pineapple frosting, etc until you are done with the 4 layers. Place it in the fridge.

6. While the cake is chilling, I melted the chocolate with the cream in a sauce pan and let it cool for a little. When it was more “gooey” than liquid, I took the cake out and poor the ganache over it with a spoon, particularly around the edges to get lots of drips around the cake.

7. Finally, place some eggs on top of the cake or any other decoration. Next time, I’ll be using some gum paste flowers and party umbrellas to give it a more tropical look.

Anyways, all this comes because I now have a herb garden! Well it’s more like a potted garden on my little balcony but it does make me extremely happy… makes me wonder what other things were on that list!

The latest additions to my herb garden are mint and lemon balm. I wanted t0 use the mint for baking but I wasn’t sure if it would end up being too strong or too weak! In the end it turned out great: I took a bunch of leaves (a handful), let them dry out for a couple of days and then shredded them into the chocolate dough. The cupcakes were so minty! I topped them with vanilla buttercream and melted Lindt chocolate. Yum!

The Hens’ night class went on great! The hens and the bride all looked amazing. There was a face painting girl there who did gorgeous designs full of colour and glitter. I seriously want her to come and paint my face every day in the morning!

We divided the group into two and had two mini sessions playing with fondant and sprinkles.. they even got to do bows and cut out shapes! It was definitely a fun class and I’m all for doing it again, anyone getting married? ;D

I’ve been toying with the idea of Kite cupcakes for a while and these are just a first test of the waters… now that I have a much clearer idea of how to go about it, I might try chinese kites next time!

Hope you enjoy them!