I love autumn! It is probably one of my favourite seasons because I love the beautiful colours the leaves, the chill in the air, warm soups, hot chocolate with lots of cream and marshmallows, knitted jumpers, boots, snuggling up in blankets as well as the celebrations of Halloween and bonfire night leading up to Christmas! Halloween baking is another one of my favourites! As you have probably seen I have done a fair bit of Halloween baking over the past few weeks, lots of cupcakes, from scary devil and ghost vanilla cupcakes to salted caramel cupcakes with edible eyeballs and peanut butter Oreo Spider cupcakes. You can find all of the recipes on the links, This year I have been impresssed by the amount of squash and pumpkin varieties that are in the shops, they look so beautiful and my mind has been in overdrive thinking of all the things they am going to bake and cook with them. Today I decided to make a Pumpkin and Bacon soup and Spiced Pumpkin Cupcakes out of one of the squash. I found the recipe for these Spiced Pumpkin Cupcakes on the Delicious magazine website. The cupcakes are very similar to a carrot cake but they use grated squash instead of carrots, the basic recipe is the same as well as the spices and the addition of walnuts in the batter. The icing is a simple cream cheese icing with a dusting of cinnamon for that extra hint of spice.
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Today I've been doing some special birthday baking or my best friend. It's a little belated as her birthday was in July but as we work gets in the way and we live far enough apart for it to be difficult. Luckily she is staying a couple hours away for the weekend so we are meeting half way and I am treating her to an Afternoon Tea in a nice hotel in Somerset.
So, back to the baking.. well as I post all of my bakes on social media my best friend Martha sees everything I bake and usually comments on them. Birthdays can only mean one thing... I take baking requests. Anything you want within reason and I will bake it. Martha asked if she could have my Bakewell Cupcakes "because they look insane". That is what I have been baking today. These are soft almond cupcakes with a cherry conserve centre, fluffy almond buttercream topped with a glacé cherry. These look so adorable! I love the cherry on top, it reminds me of an ice cream sundae. This Blueberry Muffin recipe is a little weird for me. It is very easy to make as you start by creaming the butter and sugar together then adding the eggs and beating for 3 whole minutes!! This make the batter go really strange! It curdles loads and I began to think that something was very wrong but hoped that when I add the dry ingredients in it would come back together. My gut instinct to try Paul Hollywood's recipe was right as I added the dry ingredients into the curdled mess and mixed to combine and it looked more normal now. It was very thick, not like a cupcake batter and was quite dough like. The next step was to cover and put the batter into the fridge overnight or as long as you can keep it in there. I made my batter then went and did some housework and had my dinner so it must of been in the fridge for about 4 hours. Because this recipe is better the longer you leave the batter in the fridge, it is perfect to make in the evening before bed, ready to bake muffins in the morning for breakfast. In the morning simply scoop the batter into the muffin cases, poke about 8 blueberries into each muffin and bake in the oven for 20 minutes until risen and golden brown. I love a recipe that means you can do it in stages, as I work full time and usually try to bake on my day off but sometimes this is impossible. I love that you could make this if you have guests coming over or staying at your house because you will look like such a domestic goddess by whipping up a batch of freshly baked muffins ready for breakfast time! I decided to bake these muffins today because this year is the fist year our blueberry tree has actually produced fruit! Not only fruit but gorgeous purple plump blueberries. This makes me so happy! I love nothing more than going out into the garden and picking something we have grown then cooking with it! Our garden also has pears, all kinds of tomatoes and varieties of herbs at the moment. The only thing I have noticed about my blueberries is that they are a little bit more Tart than the shop bought ones. This is fine when they are baked into a slightly spiced muffin batter as it is a good contrast to the sweetness of the muffin.
Although I love Paul Hollywood and trust his recipes I think these muffins are a little dense. I would prefer a muffin with some vanilla in and more moist and fluffy. But I am by no means saying that I do not like these muffins and they are yummy, but I have used a different recipe in the past (which I need to find) which I personally prefer to these muffins. I am in love with how cute these cupcakes have turned out!! I love their subtle yellow smooth, fluffy buttercream and think the novelty yellow striped paper straw adds another level of cuteness.
I have been wanting to make thes for a few weeks after seeing a recipe for strawberry milkshake cupcakes on the blog Sunday Baking . But I do not like strawberry milkshakes and love banana and as the recipe uses Nesquik milkshake powder which comes in strawberry, banana and chocolate I knew I had to try the banana version. I used my usual vanilla cupcake recipe for the cupcakes and my unusual buttercream recipe for the buttercream but added a milkshake powder/milk paste to make the banana milkshake flavoured buttercream. This worked really well! I did not need to add any food colouring to the buttercream as the milkshake powder added enough colouring to make the buttercream a lovely light yellow colour. I made this batch of cupcakes for a charity bake sale at my work for a local cancer charity. But these would be great to make with kids also because they are super quick and easy and taste just like milkshake! Keep reading for the recipe: Today I have been making cupcakes.. a fairly usual thing for me to do on a Sunday but today I felt I needed to do it even more to cheer myself up! I am poorly again! My stupid immune system hates me at the moment and I keep getting virus's and infections which require me to go on antibiotics. Having a temperature and infection really makes me feel awful! It pretty much wipes me out until the antibiotics start to work! This brings me down a lot.. as I seem to be ill all the time recently!
I'm quite easy to cheer up but baking makes me very happy, it doesn't take much energy ( I can sit down on my bar stool) can be therapeutic and produces something beautiful at the end! So while I have been laid up in bed I have been thinking about what type of Cupcakes I want to make. I have been wanting to make these hidden Creme Egg centre cupcakes for quite a while now and finally got round to actually making them on my day off. The ones I actually made didn't actually have the hidden Creme Egg centre because Sainsbury's had run out of mini Creme eggs, so I just filled the centre with teaser spread and put half of a large Creme Egg on top.
I really like how they turned out and the chocolate cake was very light and fluffy and chocolatey as well as being moist. The only thing I am not completely happy with was the buttercream it seemed a little grainy and thick not as light as I would of liked, I am not sure why but I will try and fix that next time. These are pretty easy to make and are very chocolatey and a special treat for Easter. As Easter is coming up in less than a month I thought I would start my Easter baking with something a little less in your face but still with the easter theme and that was carrot cake cupcakes.
I found this recipe on Jamie Oliver's website and the cupcakes came out great but the cream cheese frosting was awful! I wanted something that you could pipe on top and look pretty but ended up with a drippy mess. Next time I will try a difffernt recipe for the frosting so that I can pipe it. The recipe below is for the pipeable cream cheese frosting I will use next time. These are pretty quick and easy to bake and are almost healthy and I think they look really cute with the little chocolate carrot on top. |
Welcome!Hello, I'm Laura and I am a 25 year old foodie with a passion for baking! When I'm not thinking, blogging about food, reading cooking magazines, searching Instagram for food porn I am usually cooking it!
This Blog started a few years ago now as a place for me to store recipes that I like and that work! I love to take pictures of food and I am on all of the social network site as polkadotcooking. I hope you enjoy my site and give me any feedback if you make anything :) Archives
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