Amazing Jaffa Cake Cupcakes

 

These cupcakes taste just like eating a giant jaffa cake – they are amazing! I took them into work for my birthday and they were extremely well received, even prompting a few comments about how I should open a bakery! I think I’ll stick with the day job and I can’t take very much credit at all as these are based on a recipe from the amazing Hummingbird Bakery (their Home Sweet Home book) but I did make one key change, which I really liked – I added a whole jaffa cake to the base of the cupcake before baking. I also used self-raising flour instead of plain flour and baking powder.

 

So my cupcakes had:

A jaffa cake at the bottom

Vanilla sponge cake

An orange marmalade filling

Chocolate frosting

A mini jaffa cake on top

 

They were so good I will have to make these again!

 

I got 18 cupcakes from this recipe as I used a mixture of large and small cake cases and with the jaffa cake at the bottom, I needed less cake mix for each cupcake.

 

You need:

70g butter, softened

210g self-raising flour

250g caster sugar

210ml whole milk

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

18 Jaffa Cakes

 

For the icing

450g icing sugar

150g butter, softened

60ml milk

60g cocoa powder

18 mini Jaffa Cakes (available from supermarkets – some people commented they had never seen these before!)

 

 

Preheat oven to 170C and line muffin tins with paper cases – I used gold ones.

 

Cream the butter with the sugar and flour at the same time – this was different to my usual approach but I followed the recipe.

 

In a jug, mix the eggs, milk and vanilla extract. Gradually pour half the liquid onto the cake mixture with the mixer running if you are using a freestanding food mixer. Beat in then add the remaining liquid, mixing until smooth.

 

 

 

Place a jaffa cake, chocolate side up, in the bottom of each cake case and spoon in the cake batter on top until the cake cases are almost full.

 

 

Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes then leave to cool. Remove to a wire rack to finish cooling.

 

When the cupcakes are cold, use a teaspoon to remove a little from the centre of each cupcake, leaving a small hole. Add a spoonful of marmalade into the hole and replace the cut out piece of sponge. Press down a little so the top is roughly level with the top of the cake.

 

 

 

 

In a bowl, carefully mix the butter with the icing sugar- I always do this by hand as I find using an electric mixer makes it go everywhere! Add the cocoa powder, and gradually add the milk, beating well.

 

Using a piping bag and a star nozzle, pipe swirls of icing onto the cupcakes, and top with a mini jaffa cake. Delicious!

  

 

I love how the Jaffa cake sits really neatly in the base - I think these are some of the best cupcakes I've ever made!

 

 

I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer and Stuart aka Cakeyboi.

 

 

 

 

Rocky Horror Show Birthday Cake

My sister has been a fan of the Rocky Horror Show for years (since she was about 15 if I recall) and for her 35th birthday this week we went to see the show on stage (not for the first time, I hasten to add!). I was dressed as Magenta, if that means anything to any of you :-)
I knew that I simply had to make a Rocky Horror Show cake and right up until a few days before hadn't figured out what I was going to do. I was toying with the idea of baking a sheet cake, carving it into the shape of a pair of lips (the logo from the movie poster) and covering it in red fondant, but I was a bit worried I wouldn't get the design spot on and it would just look like a random mouth. I had a look for ideas on the internet and kept coming back to the idea of a two-tiered cake as well.

I found a chocolate cake recipe on the internet and it was a complete disaster - the first of my cakes that I think has ever sank in the middle. It also overcooked on the outside and undercooked in the middle - it tasted amazing (more like a chocolate brownie than a cake), but was no good as the base of a cake. So I decided to go back to the drawing board and make a cake I'd made before - the Brooklyn Blackout cake from the Hummingbird Bakery. I'd made it for my boyfriend's birthday cake last year so I knew it worked.

Here's the cake mixture about to go in the oven. I used my smallest round cake tin which I think is 7 inches - the cake didn't need to serve that many people and if it was going to be two tiers, I didn't want to make them too big. I used the leftover cake mixture in a tiny tin I'd found in a shop not long ago, that was only 4 inches across.

Here's the first cake when it came out of the oven - nice and deep, and springy like all good sponge cakes should be.

When I make chocolate buttercream I prefer to add melted chocolate in with the butter and icing sugar as I think it gives a much nicer flavour. I sliced the cake in half and spread it with buttercream.

I also spread a thin layer of buttercream on top.

I bought some red and black roll-out icing from Renshaw over the internet; I knew right from the start these would be the colours of my Rocky Horror Show cake.

I covered the bottom cake with red fondant, and placed it on a black cake board. This is a pretty small cake board; I did have a bigger one too but it didn't fit in my cake carry case (I had to carry the cake on the train from London to Southampton) so I carried the bigger cake board separately and placed it underneath the smaller one when I arrived at my sister's house.

Here's the smaller cake - I actually made two, and placed one on top of the other, with more buttercream in the middle as well as on the top and around the sides. Unfortunately baking a cake in a 4 inch tin wasn't very easy as I had no idea how long it would take to cook, and both cakes - even though I baked them one at a time- sank in the middle. I just filled the gap with more buttercream :-)

I covered the smaller cake with black buttercream, and had an idea I rather liked - that the join should be covered by a pearl necklace (Frank N Furter wears one in the show). I made the pearls simply by rolling balls of white fondant, and used a little buttercream to stick them on.

I thought it looked pretty good with the necklace all around the cake.

And for the finishing touch... the lips. I decided the easiest way to do this was just to mould the lips out of fondant, so I took a block of red, a couple of different modelling tools and shaped it until I was happy it looked like the lips. I checked out a picture online to see how the black of the mouth and the white teeth should look, and while this is far from perfect I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I used another modelling tool to make the lines around the lips which I thought made it look a little more realistic.

I also had this small lips mould I'd bought previously on the internet, and I used it to press some small shapes out of leftover red fondant.

I decided that the black cake layer needed a little something extra so I stuck the lips (using buttercream) all around the side of the black cake.

I couldn't decide whether to place the lips flat on the cake....

... or standing up. In the end I transported the lips separately, and when I got to my sister's house I fixed it upright using two cocktail sticks for extra support. I had wanted to pipe 'happy birthday' on the black cake board, in the style of lettering used on the movie poster, but there wasn't room on the small cake board and I couldn't do it on the larger cake board as it was being transported in a shoulder bag. So I compromised by taking a paint brush and Wilton black food colouring gel and painting 'happy birhday' around the side of the bottom cake.

When I first came up with the idea I looked on the internet for some sort of cake topper (though I'm actually glad I made the lips). I didn't find anything anyway, but what I did find on Ebay was some  models of some of the characters from the show, that had been made to mark the show's 25th anniversary a few years ago. Those that were brand new and in the original packaging were selling for £20-£30, but I found two - Magenta and Rocky - sold as seen below for just a few pounds. I thought it would be fun to use them to decorate the cake, though in the end I had to stand them on the cake board as they were almost as tall as the cake! I thought they looked pretty cool and I made my sister leave the room while I assembled the cake; she seemed really pleased with it!

We ate the top layer of cake at her house then took the bottom layer with us to the restaurant where we were eating after seeing the show. It tasted lovely and went down very well.

Today is World Baking Day and the campaign is encouraging people to "bake brave" - leave their comfort zone and try something they have never done before. While I am fully anticipating at least one anonymous comment on this post calling the above cake a monstrosity, that's kind of missing the point- the Rocky Horror Show is over the top, in your face, exaggerated and delighting in its own grotesqueness. And it's a hell of a lot of fun. I think this cake was a fairly brave effort from me as I had no idea if it would turn out well or not and it's one of the most elaborate novelty cakes I've made. For that reason I'm sending it to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Laura of Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel of DollyBakes, as their challenge this month is, in conjunction with World Baking Day, to "bake brave".

Toffee Popcorn Cupcakes

Hello to anyone who is stopping by after seeing this recipe in the Macmillan Little Book of Treats! I was very pleased to be included in the charity recipe book along with Mary Berry, Antonio Carluccio, Gizzi Erskine, Rachel Khoo and so many other amazing cooks!

I originally created this recipe for a competition run by the Hummingbird Bakery to design a new cupcake, which I didn't win. I liked the cupcake so much though that I decided to enter it in a competition to appear in the Macmillan charity recipe book.

I wanted to combine the American feel of the Hummingbird Bakery with something a bit more British, and I also had a look at their website to make sure I didn't enter a cupcake flavour that they already made. I thought of popcorn right away and thought it would work from an American perspective and it was also a bit different to what they currently offer - and popcorn is becoming increasingly popular over here.

I decided to make toffee flavour cake with toffee buttercream and popcorn on the top, drizzled with a toffee sauce. I also knew I wanted to get cupcake cases that looked like retro popcorn buckets and I managed to find something on Etsy (see below).

So for this recipe, which makes about a dozen, you need:

For the cake:

175g unsalted butter, softened

175g light brown (muscovado) sugar

3 eggs

175g self-raising flour

6 tbsp soda water

1 packet of Dr. Oetker fudge chunks

For the frosting:

butter and icing sugar to make buttercream - I didn't actually weigh the quantity as I kept adding icing sugar until it got to the right consistency

For the toffee sauce:

50g brown sugar

50g butter

3 tbsp double cream

Plus a bag of popcorn

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and the sugar

Add the eggs and mix well

Add the flour

I was sent these fudge chunks by Dr Oetker to review

Add the fudge chunks and the soda water

 Put a spoonful of the mixture into each cake case and then cook for 20 minutes

To make the toffee sauce, put the butter and sugar in a pan and heat until the sugar has dissolved. Add the cream and heat gently until thickened.

The sauce will turn a lovely caramel colour

Make some buttercream with butter and icing sugar - it needs to be quite stiff

Add half the toffee sauce to the buttercream and mix in

When the cakes have cooled, spread some toffee buttercream on top

Either get some ready made popcorn or pop some in the microwave or your popcorn maker if you have one

Stick pieces of popcorn onto the top of each cupcake

Drizzle the rest of the toffee sauce over the top.

Now for the final touch - I got these popcorn cupcake wrappers from Etsy. I just had to download and print them out, cut them out and stick around the cupcake cases with sellotape. You can find similar wrappers online or could even make your own.

I think these look really cute, and would be great for a party.

A close-up of the inside of the cake. You can see the fudge pieces have held their shape, which is great - I like the fact that they don't just melt away when the cake is baking. The bag is a handy size and just right for a batch of cupcakes. You could also use the fudge pieces on top of a cake to decorate - I will definitely be using these again.

I was really pleased with these - if you take a bite of the whole thing, the popcorn on top gives a really interesting change of texture, the toffee sauce oozes down just right, and the sponge is light and fluffy.

Dr. Oetker sent me a selection of products to review, though I was not required to make positive comments. I used their fudge chunks in this recipe and was really pleased with them.

 For new visitors to my blog, I should also point out that I regularly enter blog challenges - that is, when another blogger asks for recipes to be sent in that fit a particular theme. There are plenty of these challenges around, and I run one myself called Alphabakes where my co-host Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker choose a different letter of the alphabet each month, and ask bakers to make something beginning with that letter or using an ingredient that begins with that letter. You can take part even if you don't have a blog - just email us a photo! Check out the Alphabakes tab on the side bar to find out what this month's letter is.

So when I made these cupcakes I sent them to to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Kate of What Kate Baked and Karen of Lavender and Lovage, as their theme was cupcakes and muffins.

Glitz & Glamour Hummingbird Cake

Cake clubs are springing up all over the place and last year Baking Addict (a.k.a. Ros) and I heard about one run by Cakes4Fun, a company that runs cake decorating classes in Putney, west London. For £10 we could gain a place in the evening session where we had to bring a cake on the theme of "glitz and glamour", and would be able to meet like-minded bakers, swap ideas and recipes and more importantly try all of their cakes!

This was before I had really got into baking or cake decorating in a big way and was struggling to think of something I could make - especially as pretty much the only rule was "no fondant!". In the end I turned to a cookery book that I had recently been given - the Hummingbird Bakery's Cookbook - and realised that I had never actually made their namesake cake. I was also pretty unsure what a hummingbird cake would turn out like, since it contains pineapple, nuts, and bananas (I hate bananas!) - I have to admit I prefer chocolate cakes or ones without banana at least and I thought that making it for the cake club was a good idea, because if I didn't like it, I wouldn't have to eat it!

Unfortunately I didn't take any photos while I was making the cake, as it was before I had started this blog (though there are pictures of the finished product further down).

I found the cakes very springy when they came out of the pan, but they also looked quite thick - I had split the mixture into three pans to make three layers as shown in the recipe, but maybe the diameter of my pans was smaller than suggested, as the cakes turned out pretty deep and when I layered them together, I had a very tall cake!

I also found the buttercream frosting far too runny and had to add a lot more icing sugar in order to be able to cover the cake without it all running off. Since then I've met a few people who have said they always have problems with the frosting recipes in the Hummingbird Bakery books so it isn't just me!

I also wondered how I could make it more glitzy and glamorous and around the same time had a rare shopping trip to Hobbycraft, where I came across a Wilton candy melt mould in the shape of girly items such as a handbag, lipstick and compact mirror, and also for the first time came across edible lustre spray. This was about 6 months ago or more, and since then I've seen Dr Oetker has brought out a spray which you can buy in Tesco, but at the time it seemed pretty unusual.

I began by melting the candy melts - which were pink - in the microwave, and filling the shapes in the mould.

They looked pretty cute when they were set!

But they just weren't glitzy enough... so I sprayed them gold!
I discovered two things at this point - firstly, the lustre spray didn't hold well to the shapes. I think it's because the surface of the candy melts was too shiny or slippery and it would have worked fine if I was spraying fondant or cake, but as you can see from the picture below, when I touched the candy melts the gold rubbed off. It was a little better after it had set but I don't think the lustre spray was particularly designed to be used in this way.

The second thing I discovered was that I don't particularly like the taste of candy melts! This was the first time I had used them and I think I was expecting it to taste like, well, candy! Instead it tastes like icing sugar and as if you are eating a giant lump of icing. I think it would be fine if it was covering something like a cake pop but I don't particularly recommend eating candy melts by themselves. However, I've noticed more recently that there are flavoured candy melts available - I think I saw peanut butter - which might be nicer than the standard flavour, which I think is vanilla.

Here are the candy shapes placed rather haphazardly on top of the cake.... and then I sprayed the whole thing gold! I don't think I really knew what I was doing at this point - and I want to underline again that this was before I got into cake decorating in a big way! It looks quite random and having an entire cake sprayed gold is not something I would do again!

It's pretty bling!

I thought my cake looked very poor in comparison to the other members of the Cake Club, though none of them were as novice as I was. Funnily enough I was the only person who had not made a chocolate cake, so mine was quite welcome after the chocolate overload.... and while it may look a bit OTT, I can promise you that the Hummingbird cake tasted great! It was really light and moist and is definitely something I would make again. I just wouldn't spray it gold this time!

Here are some of the other cakes that people brought along to the Cake Club. If one of these is yours please let me know!

This cake below with the amazing chocolate collar and gold-sprayed maltesers (see, I wasn't the only one with the lustre spray!) was made by Ros from TheMoreThanOccasionalBaker.

We tried a piece of everyone's cake but after a while could only manage a few bites of each one, as there was a lot of cake! Here's the haul that I got to take home :-)

I think that cake clubs are a great idea and I'd love to go along to one again, but I was a little surprised that Cakes 4 Fun charged £10 per person - I know they have overheads as they run a shop and classes, but we didn't actually learn or gain anything from the class other than talking to the other participants about their cakes. As far as I know, other cake clubs are more informal meet-ups that don't charge a fee. Unfortunately the other reason I'm banning myself from joining the Clandestine Cake Club at the moment is that I am supposed to be on a diet and really do not need any more excuses to eat cake!
As this is a Hummingbird cake I am entering it into this month's Alphabakes challenge that I am hosting as the magic letter is H. I baked this several months ago before I had started this blog, and kept meaning to add it as a new post, so now seems as good a time as any!