Sweet Beginnings

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Raspberry Icing on the Red Velvet Cupcake

Honey Icing on the Red Velvet Cupcake

Salted Peanut Macaron

Cream Cheese Icing with Red Velvet Cupcake

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone has had some time off to unwind & relax and spend some time with family & friends before the year kicks off. I am hoping this year will be the year of many great things to come...from my kitchen. :)

We had some friends come over this afternoon for lunch and desserts. I kept to my department of baking & decorating while my better half made all sorts of yummy pizzas to serve up - We've still got lots of ingredients leftover so guess what is for dinner tomorrow night?! YUMMMM

I baked a batch of red velvet cupcakes and made 3 different flavour of icing to go with it - Honey, raspberry and plain ol' cream cheese. I didn't end up serving the cupcakes with honey or raspberry as I had some 'unwanted guests' flying around the house and taste testing it before I could serve it to my friends. Just as well I had not yet pulled out the salted peanut macarons I made as well or there would only be red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing! Thank goodness for Miss B's fruit platter - I needed the fruits more than the sweets after all the over indulgence over Christmas.

Here are the pictures of the red velvet cupcakes I took before they went down the gurglers.

I'm in the middle of designing cupcakes for the Chinese New Year which falls on 23 January 2012 - watch this space for more news!


Enjoy!!

Santa and Polar Bears

Christmas Cupcakes

Christmas Day came by, we stuffed ourselves silly with all the yummy food then groaned about how our tummies have expanded. And that was just the mains. Dessert - there will always be space for that one wee bit of sweetness. I'm glad I packed my expandable pants in my luggage - I definitely needed it.

My bit for the Christmas lunch was to bake & dress up some cupcakes!

I was supposed to have halved the recipes so I would only yield 24 cupcakes in total but in my daze I made 48. 24 red velvet cupcakes and 24 honey cupcakes. All decorated in Christmas themes. Some cupcakes were dressed up as Santa, some as polar bears and I threw in snowflake, candy cane & mistletoe as I had run out of time to do Rudolph & Santa's elves.

I couldn't pack a cake stand into our luggage, so I just used a cake board instead. Looks rather good if I must say so myself.

What shall I bake for New Year's??

Enjoy!

 

Christmas Tree Cake Pop

Christmas Tree Cake Pops

I finally made my first ever cake pop. I was always lead to believe that it was very messy and time consuming to create these little cuties but they did not take me too long to make. The part which was most time consuming was colouring the chocolate green and my kitchen did not turn out as messy as I originally thought it would be.

There is only 1 left in the kitchen now - first in first served. I really shouldn't be greedy as I was given a reindeer cake pop at work by a colleague but I'm so tempted to have the tree too!

Have a safe holiday and I hope you enjoy your Christmas break!

Enjoy!

A weekend of birthdays...

Chocolate Mud Cake with Chocolate Ganache

Tiramisu

It has been a busy weekend with 3 birthdays!

I made a simple tiramisu for my sister - nothing fancy here as you can see. For my brother, I made him a chocolate mud cake coated in a rich layer of silky smooth chocolate ganache before I finished it off by making it into a present for him. I'm trying to practice getting the sharp edges on a square cake...I think i'm getting better with each cake.

The first cake of the weekend was supposed to be an iPad 2 cake. I have everything done except the edible image of the iPad screen has gone missing. I've been looking for it everywhere around the kitchen and I can't find it! I hope it didn't accidentally get thrown out with the recycling pile. :(  I'm feeling really disappointed I can't find the image to finish the cake off. So now, I have an unfinished cake which needs to eaten by Tuesday.

To make up for the disappointment, I think I should bake some gingerbread and shortbread cookies then decorate them.

Enjoy!

Tiramisu Trial

Tiramisu

I have a busy weekend coming up! A tiramisu for a 21st. Since I've never made a tiramisu before, my mission was to have a trial run of it first. I wouldn't want to ruin this for a 21st birthday.

My colleague shared her recipe with me and it was an easy recipe to follow. My problem was finding the sponge fingers - I know I can make it myself but I wanted to follow the recipe to the letter so I went in search of the elusive sponge fingers. After going through 3 supermarkets, I finally found it!

I didn't think the recipe would result in me using up 3 different containers! I took one to work, had one at home and will give the last container away.

Enjoy!