Boston Creme Cupcakes

Strangely, I'm not that into cupcakes, I like them, but I don't get an awful lot of satisfaction from making them. But these ones are just so good, it is a recipe I got from the Hummingbird Bakery "Cake Days" book. When I was last in london I went to the Hummingbird bakery and I wasn't really loving it. The selection seemed really small, and what we did get was good, but not amazing, and nothing I couldn't do myself, but this book has some really good recipes. I'm going down to London again at the end of the month so am hoping to try the Primrose Bakery, see how that shapes up.

I also got a new piece of kit, this breville stand up mixer. My old hand mixer had burnt out, and I was just going to get another one, but then I got some money for Christmas and decided to put it to good use. This was £60 down to £45 in the sale, and its no Kitchenaid, and isn't the most beautiful appliance, but it is SO much better than a hand mixer.

One annoying point is that it can miss a few bits at the bottom of the bowl, something I learnt the hard way, unmixed cake batter- the horror. But other than that I am really happy with it, leaves me free to potter about when things are mixing which is always a bonus.

I also got this for christmas from my sister, its a flour dredger, so it sieves the flour as well as making it really easy to gradually add, an invaluable piece of kit as I often skip the sieving due to laziness/ending up getting it all over the kitchen rather than in the bowl.

Whisky man came back in order to help me make the custard "creme" bit of this recipe, (milk, egg yolks, cornflour, plain flour and vanilla), which needs to be cooled before piping it into the cakes, as I am the worlds most impatient person I hung the bowl out the window to speed up the process, luckily there were no opportunistic squirrels

Then it just needed to be piped! I use disposable piping bags, I have had proper ones before but they are a pain to clean and can sometimes split, much easier to just chuck them out and also means you can fit any nozzle into it rather than just that paticular brand.

I had ran out of cocoa so had to make a late night visit to the shop at the end of the road and they only had rubbish cocoa so the frosting wasn't quite how I wanted it to be, but it was still nice enough.

Making cupcakes also gave me the opportunity to use my beautiful cake stand that my friends Charlie and Warren got me, normally it has apples etc on it!

Soph x

Vegan gingerbread sleigh

This is a bit of sequel to the gingerbread house, my sister is vegan and was coming to stay for Christmas so I couldn't have her turning up and not being able to eat any gingerbread! I initially thought to just make a mini house, but got a little bit creative and planned something a bit better- Santas sleigh!

Vegan recipes are easy to come by, however its hard to find one that is not american and so measured in cups. I really should buy some of those little measuring cups, thus remedying this dilemma, but instead I have this pretty little tea-cup to use instead...

So the recipe is as follows:

1 1/2 cups plain flour

1tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp all spice

Pinch of salt

1/3 cup of vegan butter (I used some from the "pure" range-its the same as any marg)

1/4 cup of sugar

And this is where I deviated from the recipe, I wanted my gingerbread to be really strong as I was constructing with it, so I added about a 1/3 of a cup of black treacle, which was also a really nice additional flavour.

Simply combine everything into a dough, using a bit of hot water as neccessary to get the mixture to the right consistency to roll it out. Ideally chill the dough for a while but as I was in a hurry I just got to it.

I didn't have any templates for my own little creation and couldn't be bothered drawing things out etc so I just cut the panels out free hand. It worked probably better than it should have, considering how slapdash I was being. A few scales I would have changed but it did the job!

The icing is where the vegan thing became problematic. Royal icing, that I used for the gingerbread house in my previous post, is so easy to work with, really strong and dries really quickly. However it has egg white in it so is not vegan friendly, I had to use a simply icing sugar and water mix. Icing the panels was fine, I simply piped the outline and then flooded it with a watery mix for the colour.

However the icing takes SO long to dry fully, and when getting everything to hold together was a nightmare. But I got there in the end, lots of propping things up and hoping they will set.

So here it is! I iced the reindeer and then covered him in cocoa powder, his nose is not vegan (shock!) but I couldn't resist cutting a jelly bean in half for it, it was quite satisfying. I  covered the cake board in icing and wanted to dust it with icing sugar to look like snow, like in the gingerbread house, but the icing just kept absorbing it, annoying. But overall I was pretty pleased with how it came out. Not my best work but a nice little addition for my sister, and I think she was pretty pleased with it.

Soph x