Passion Fruit Curd Mother's Day Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for Mother’s Day for my mum, my mother-in-law - and me!

I’ve developed quite a taste for passion fruit recently - Passoa passion fruit liqueur is delicious and could definitely be used in baking, but since my four year old daughter was going to have these cupcakes as well I wasn’t going to use alcohol. Instead, I got the passionfruit flavour from a combination of yogurt - papaya, passion fruit and mango flavour, from Morrisons - and passion fruit curd (The Cherry Tree brand, from Ocado).

I wanted a light cupcake using yogurt in the cake mix and these were so light and airy, they probably aren’t robust enough to put a spoonful of curd into the middle but I did anyway (it just makes them a bit messy when you eat them!).

Here is the recipe I used:

125g margarine or butter, softened

150g sugar

2 eggs

150ml yogurt - I used papaya, passion fruit and mango flavour from Morrison's 

225g self-raising flour

1 heaped tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

For the filling:

Passionfruit curd - I used the Cherry Tree brand from Ocado

For the icing:

500g icing sugar

250g butter, softened

Passionfruit flavouring to taste - for example you could add a spoonful of the passionfruit curd, or passionfruit liqueur if the cakes are for adults.

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and the sugar then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Stir in the yogurt, then fold in the flour, baking powder and salt.

Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for around 15-20 minutes depending on the size until the tops are golden brown.

Allow to cool, then using a teaspoon make a small well in each cupcake and add a spoonful of passionfruit curd.

To make the buttercream, cream together the butter and icing sugar and add a spoonful of passionfruit curd, or a few drops of passionfruit liqueur if for adults only - you may need to adjust the quantity of icing sugar if the mixture is too runny.

Using a piping bag and a nozzle, pipe swirls onto the top of the cupcakes. 

I decorated these cupcakes in different ways:

SuckUK customisable cookie stamp - this is a wooden stamp that comes with a plastic disc and little letters, that you insert into the disc to make the message of your choice. You can stamp this onto a cookie before it has baked, or stamp onto a circle of fondant icing, as I did here. I've had this piece of equipment for ages but this was the first time I had used it.

It was quite fiddly to get the letters into the right places, and took a bit of trial and error to work out if they were all the right way around; there isn't a huge amount of space for a message but I managed to get 'happy' across the top, 'mothers' day along the bottom and 'day' in the middle. However, there was only one of most letters and not enough to spell out 'happy' for instance as there was only one 'p', so I had to stamp the missing letter separately. It didn't quite look the same and I was surprised given that 'happy birthday' would be, to me, the most obvious message to use on the cookie stamp that there weren't enough letters to make it! Then I piped some small buttercream flowers around the edge.

Wilton Make Any Message Letterpress Set - this was also something I received as a gift several years ago. The letters are bigger than on the SukUK stamp so I just pressed 'mum' into a circle of fondant icing and placed it on top of each cupcake with a little buttercream. Then I piped some buttercream flowers along the top and bottom.

Piped flowers: I used two different colours of buttercream (pink and purple, though the latter looks a bit grey in this photo), and two different nozzles to pipe a swirl and some smaller flowers onto each cupcake and added some edible silver balls on top.

Jolly Nation Bathtime Decoupage Mothers' Day Card

 

Mothers' Day will be really special for me this year, as I'm actually going to be a mother. Just writing that seems strange even though it's going to become a reality in just a few weeks! I expect the day itself will pass in a sleep-deprived blur so if my husband has any sense he will buy me a Mothers' Day card now!

 

I made some cards at one point early last year with various things I'd come across in my craft stash including this sheet of decoupage paper from Jolly Nation. It has a hand drawn style showing a woman relaxing in a bath with a glass of wine which is the sort of treat I think mums deserve on Mothers' Day!

 

I used a pink and pale green printed paper for the backing as it reminded me a bit of the sort of wallpaper my mum used to have in her bedroom years ago, then layered the pieces of the decoupage picture on top. I added a small 'mothers' day' sticker I had on a sticker sheet from a long time ago in the top corner.

I'm sharing this with Daring Cardmakers where the theme is cosy home, Cardz 4 Galz where the theme is think pink and Watercooler Wednesday where the theme is feminine.

Orange and White Chocolate Cake with Flower Nozzles Piped Buttercream Flowers

This is the cake I made for Mother's Day this year and finally tried out my set of flower piping nozzles which I got I think for my birthday last year - I hadn't gotten around to using them as I hadn't really made anything that I wanted to decorate with buttercream, but now I've seen how good they are I will definitely use them again!

The nozzles have different patterns of dots and swirls and allow you to pipe different types of flowers that look amazingly realistic and detailed. You just squeeze the buttercream out and pull up, which cuts off the flower -you pipe one at a time. These would work really well on cupcakes, or as I've done with different types and colours of flower covering a large cake, or you could do all the same type of flower on the top of the cake.

You use regular buttercream for this - it needs to be stiff enough to hold its shape but not too stiff that you can't pipe comfortably.

The cake itself is a recipe from the Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook, edited by Lynn Hill. This is one of Lynn's own recipes which I adapted a little; I didn't make the orange syrup and I used more milk as I prefer a looser batter.

You need:
225g butter
225g caster sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
225g self-raising flour
zest of 1 large orange
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp. milk

For the filling:
150g white chocolate
grated zest of 2 large oranges plus 4 tbsp. juice
200g butter, softened
75g icing sugar

Preheat oven to 190C / 170C fan. Cream the butter and the sugar and beat in the eggs. Fold in the flour, orange zest and baking powder and beat in the milk.

 

Spoon into two greased round cake tins and bake for 20-25 mins

When cooked, allow to cool in the tins then turn out onto a wire rack.

To make the filling, melt the white chocolate in a microwave or bain marie and allow to cool until it is still a consistency that you can stir. Cream together the butter and icing sugar and stir in the melted chocolate and the orange zest and juice.

Mix the buttercream (about 500g icing sugar to 250g butter) and separate into different bowls and add a couple of drops of food colouring to each one. Use the different flower piping nozzles in piping bags with each colour buttercream and pipe groups of a few flowers all around the cake. I filled in the gaps afterwards with green buttercream and a leaf nozzle, at least I think it was a leaf nozzle as it doesn't look quite right, but I still think the overall effect of the cake was good - and it tasted really nice too!

Below are some close-ups of the different flowers I piped:

 

I'm sharing this with Cook Blog Share

 

Red Gingham Mothers' Day Card

This sweet little card was a super-quick make, as most of the elements came from the same pack. I think it was a free gift with a cardmaking magazine and contained the backing paper - which looks like three different papers but it is actually one!

The sentiment in a little frame looks cute - this came from the same pack and I stuck it into the middle of the card. I had some 'happy Mothers Day' sentiments in red in a pack of stickers and placed this on the top of the card.

Mums Are Like Buttons Box Frame with Buttons - Mother's Day Gift

I've been seeing the phrase 'mums are like buttons' everywhere recently - or at least in the run up to Mothers' Day, which in the UK was March 26 this year (it falls later in the year in other countries including the US).

The whole of that phrase is 'Mums are like buttons - they hold everything together'. I thought that sounded lovely and wanted to make my mum a Mothers' Day card with it on. In fact it started out as a card and turned into a gift!

I tracked down a rubber stamp with that exact sentiment which I stamped onto a square white card blank, and using glue dots stuck buttons in various shades of red and pink around it. I realised afterwards the quote was slightly off centre which was a shame but I'm sure my mum didn't mind too much.

The card looked too heavy with the buttons and I wanted it to be more of a keepsake, so I decided to make it into a framed picture instead.

The box frames sold in Hobbycraft are brilliant for this sort of thing and they are often in half price sales where you can get the smallest size for as little as 2 pounds, so I tend to stock up on a couple every now and then.

The frame made the perfect setting for my Mothers' Day gift.

I'm sharing this with the Addicted to Stamps challenge and Fab Funky Challenges

Lemon and Mascarpone Mothers' Day Cake with Painted Flowers

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about painting flowers using food colouring, which we did in my cake decorating class - though we did it on a covered cake board, not on an actual cake. I'd seen a few pictures of wedding cakes online - when I was researching what to do for my own - that were covered in painted flowers or designs and thought it looked really nice, so when it came to making a cake for my mum for Mother's Day today my starting point was that I wanted to paint flowers on it!

Since the cake was going to look floral and spring-like I wanted a lighter flavoured cake. I found a recipe for a Finnish lemon Mothers' Day cake that used mascarpone cheese and looked really tasty. The cake is covered with a piped mascarpone buttercream but in order to paint on mine I needed to cover it with sugarpaste. I also decided the cake would benefit from the addition of some cloudy lemonade to the mixture! In fact I changed the recipe quite a lot in the end as it also called for 4 tbsp. potato flour which I didn't have, and after I added the lemonade I decided it needed a bit more flour. And I used self-raising flour rather than plain flour and baking powder! So here's what I did:

5 eggs
200g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
150ml no-added sugar cloudy lemonade

for the syrup:
juice of 2 lemons
150g icing sugar

for the filling:
200ml double cream
200g mascarpone cheese
2 tbsp. icing sugar
6 tbsp. lemon curd

Preheat oven to 180C and grease a deep 8-inch cake tin - if your tins aren't deep enough you could use two as I did.

Whisk the eggs with the caster sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the lemonade then fold in the flour.

Pour into your cake tin(s) and bake for 35-45 minutes (more like 45 if you have a deeper cake in one tin, less if you are splitting the mixture across two tins).

Meanwhile make the syrup - heat the lemon juice and icing sugar in a small pan, stirring until the icing sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool.

Remove the cake(s) from the oven and allow to cool. If you have made one large cake, cut into two or even three layers. Soak the cakes with the lemon syrup.

To make the filling, whisk the cream until thick, then add the mascarpone and icing sugar and whip again. Spread a layer of lemon curd then a layer of cream over the bottom layer of your cake and place the other layer on top. Repeat if you have three layers.

This looks really nice and I'd have been happy just to serve it like this!

Spread a thin layer of the cream over the top and around the sides of the cake.

Roll out about 500g of fondant on a surface dusted with icing sugar until it is in a large enough sheet to cover your cake - an easy way to check is to measure both sides and the top of your cake against your rolling pin, so I know for instance my fondant needs to be as wide as 3/4 of my rolling pin.

Lift the fondant using the rolling pin and drape over the cake. Pat down the sides and cut off the excess, then smooth the top and sides using a smoother or the side of your hand and trim off any more excess.

To do the painting, it's best to leave the fondant to dry but it doesn't need to be completely hard to do this. See this post for full painting instructions. Essentially all you do is mix one or two drops of clear alcohol (the little bottles you get on planes are perfect for this) with some gel food colour. The best way I found to do this is to get some colour on a toothpick or cocktail stick, place the cocktail stick in a bowl or in an artist's palette, and pour a drop or two of alcohol onto it. Use your paintbrush to scrap the colour into the liquid, mixing until you have a liquid colour that isn't too runny. You can tell when you start to paint on the cake if it's too runny or pale, in both cases just add a bit more colour in the same way.

I decided to do different types of flowers in different colours and painted them on the top of the cake and around the sides, then mixed up some green and added stems connecting similar flowers and added leaves. I left some white space but I think with the green giving a connecting detail it looks quite nice - sort of chintzy but that was the look I was going for!

I'm sharing this cake (not literally...) with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, my co-host for Alphabakes as the letter she has chosen this month is C and I've used cream in this cake as well as mascarpone cheese.

I'm also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as their theme is Easter and spring.

Finally I'm sending it to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's Mothers' Day this month (in the UK anyway!).

Chunky Peanut Brittle

My mum really likes peanuts and I decided to make her some edible gifts for Mother's Day recently, so thought that peanut brittle would be fun to try. It looked very easy to make and the recipe is indeed very simple, but as I discovered quite easy to get wrong!

 

I used this recipe thinking it was by Nigella Lawson, but realised afterwards it was posted in the community section of her website.

All you need is 100g peanuts and 100g caster sugar. Heat the sugar in a small pan over a low heat until it is caramel coloured. I learnt that it can turn very quickly and start to burn so you do need to keep an eye on it!

The recipe I used said to add the peanuts, then pour onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. But as soon as I added the peanuts to the hot sugar in the pan, they clumped together and set almost straight away. Peanut brittle is supposed to be flat, thin and - well, brittle - and by the time I was able to get it onto my baking parchment it was already in big clumps. So what I would recommend trying is spreading out your peanuts on the baking tray lined with parchment and then pouring the sugar over the top.

Mine set very quickly - it didn't even need to go in the fridge - and I broke it up into pieces and put it in a little box. I thought it tasted quite nice even if it didn't look quite right!

Regular readers may have noticed that I like to make foods inspired by fiction, whether that's movies or books. This recipe fits in with a blog challenge called Novel Food, hosted by Simona at Pulchetta.com. I read a lovely book recently by Jenny Colgan called Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop of Dreams, about a woman who moves to a small village to look after her elderly aunt, who runs the local sweetshop. She ends up learning a lot about her aunt, and herself - and sweets! Each chapter of the book begins with either a recipe or a passage from her aunt's notebook about a particular type of sweet and there is one chapter which begins with a passage on peanut brittle. So that was also partly what inspired me to make this recipe, and for that reason I'm sharing this post with Simona for her challenge.

I'm also sending this to Treat Petite, as their theme this month is mums and I made this for my mum! The challenge is hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat aka The Baking Explorer.

Tattered Lace Mother's Day Card

When I was a child I made Mothers’ Day cards at playschool and brownies and so on for my mum – and now I’m an adult I still like the homemade touch. I made this card for my mum for Mothers’ Day using a pack of die-cuts I bought on Ebay.

From what I can tell, these are from the Stephanie Weightman tattered lace collection. These are a beautiful set of die cutters but unfortunately the machines you need to use them with are quite expensive (up to £200) and some of the dies cost around £30 each, so I don’t have them. Instead, it’s easy and fairly cheap to buy a set of cuts outs that someone else has made from their die cutter, and that way you can vary what you purchase.

I used a piece of pink backing paper with a faint criss-cross backing and put a delicate die cut on top, which was like a lattice almost the size of the whole card. I then added a large circle with lace edge to one corner and a small flower in the other corner. I stuck the words 'happy Mother's day' from a pack of outline stickers to the circle.

It needed something else; I had recently bought a pack of foam hearts of different sizes and shades from Hema so layered a few of these up in the top left corner and did a row of three small hearts in the top right. It's quite a pink card, but I think it's pretty!

How to make Marshmallows from scratch

 

Did you know it’s actually quite easy to make marshmallows? You need an ingredient you probably won’t have in your store cupboard – liquid glucose – and you need a thermometer, because you have to heat the sugar to a precise temperature. You have to be very careful as well, because the sugar gets very hot – this is not really one to be making with children -  but other than that, it’s actually quite straightforward!

 

I recently took a marshmallows and meringues class at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney, a lovely little cake decorating shop with a classroom space underneath. There were 8 of us and the tutor, Sarah, was very good at explaining what we needed to do, lending a hand where it was needed, and answering questions about all aspects of the process. It was a lovely sunny day and I felt very happy leaving with my huge box of meringues and marshmallows, even though the marshmallows weren’t quite set so I had to pop them straight in the fridge at home and cut into squares the next day.

  

We were given handouts with information and recipes but I don’t have their permission to reproduce the recipe, so instead I will give a general description of what we did and a few tips – there are plenty of marshmallow recipes available on the internet.

 

Place sugar and water into a saucepan and add the liquid glucose – you can buy this in tubes in large supermarkets (e.g. Dr Oetker) as well as on specialist cake decorating websites and shops. If you wet a spoon and your finger it’s easier to push the glucose into the pan as it is extremely sticky – think a clear version of golden syrup.

 

Heat the saucepan and it’s very important not to stir the contents at all. You need a thermometer as the mixture has to be heated to precisely 114C.

 

I had a sugar thermometer already – I can’t remember where I bought it – but it’s a glass thermometer with mercury inside, so it’s pretty hard to tell the precise temperature – and it’s quite hard to read the level when you are holding the thermometer in a saucepan so you either have to figure out an angle to hold it and tilt your head, or keep taking it out to check – at which point the temperature reading drops again. So it was  a very welcome coincidence when last week I was sent an Epica Ultra-Fast digital thermometer to review!

 

 

 
It’s so easy to use and the only setting is whether you want the temperature in Centigrade or Fahrenheit; otherwise you just turn it on. It has a long tip so can reach right down into a saucepan safely, and also has a pointed tip so you could insert it into a joint of meat to test whether it is cooked in the middle. The digital display is easy to use and very clear to see, so I was able to test the temperature of my sugar and easily read the result. It even measures temperatures in decimal points so you can see as it climbs – in other words, rather than going from 100 to 101, you can see it tick up from 100.4 to 100.6 to 100.8…. which is helpful if you really need to be precise.

 

 

When I made marshmallow again at home thanks to the thermometer I knew when to start beating my egg whites; a Kitchenaid or similar is brilliant for this as you can start whisking and go back to the saucepan. I learned one interesting tip for beating egg whites which is actually the opposite of what I thought. I normally whisk egg whites until they are stiff, so for quite a long time at quite a high speed, and then add the sugar which I fold in gently. Apparently that’s completely wrong, and what you should do is whisk the egg whites on a slow speed, gradually increasing to medium, but stop when they can form soft peaks – not stiff peaks. Then add the sugar gradually, whisking each time, and then whisk at high speed until the mixture forms stiff peaks.

 

For the marshmallow we had also soaked gelatine in water and now squeezed out the water and added the gelatine to the hot sugar mixture, and carefully stirred in until it had melted. While the egg whites were being whisked, we turned the mixer down to low and very carefully poured the hot sugar and gelatine mixture into the eggs. Then we turned the mixer up to high and whisked until the eggs were stiff and glossy.

 

We lined small baking tins with clingfilm and dusted them with a  50/50 mixture of icing sugar and cornflour. We then chose to add flavours to our marshmallows; I added two spoonfuls of lemon curd to mine, while other people added cocoa powder. We spooned the marshmallow mixture into the tin and put it in the freezer to set – you can use the fridge but we were hoping to speed ours up.

 

 

They weren’t quite set by the time we wanted to take them home, but weren’t far off. It came out of the tin as one piece so I put it in the fridge at home and the next day cut into squares. The pieces are still very sticky once they are cut so you need to toss them in the same 50/50 mixture of icing sugar and cornflour. Mine were still good almost a week later; they were soft and pillowy, noticeably different to shop-bought marshmallows but at the same time still familiar as marshmallows, and the lemon flavour gave a lovely kick (though next time I might use one spoonful of lemon curd, not two). I had fun making these and really like the finished product!

 

 

 

These are really nice to parcel up in a pretty box and give for Mother’s Day – so I am sharing them with Treat Petite, the blog challenge hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat at the Baking Explorer, as their theme this month is mums.

 

 

 

Eggs are a key ingredient in marshmallows so I am also sending these to Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen.

 

 

 

The other key ingredient of course is sugar, and since the letter for my Alphabakes challenge this month is S, I am entering them in that challenge as well! Ros at the More Than Occasional Baker who runs the challenge together with me is hosting this month.

 

 

Thanks to Epica for sending me the thermometer to review. All opinions are my own.