Nutella Melt Cupcakes

 

It seems to becoming a bit of a habit of mine these baking posts. I do actually post quite often, as we have a weekly “Cake Day” at work. I also come from a long line of cake bakers. My mum bakes, my Nana bakes, my Great Grandma bakes and my Grampy bakes. There is very rarely a time when there isn’t cake around in one of my family member’s homes… which is of course very homely but not great for the waist line! Hence the mountains of running I now do!

On Friday night I came in from work and had the urge to bake. So Friday night I took over the kitchen, turned the music up and came up with the idea of Nutella Melt Cupcakes. I had a jar in the cupboard and thought it would be a great addition to my usual vanilla cupcakes.

I wanted to have a Nutella melting middle and was unsure how to go about this. I decided to make the cake mix, place that in the Cupcake moulds then add a dollop of Nutella in the middle and finally another spoonful of cake mix. This turns out not to be the answer. As you can see from pictures above the Nutella sunk to the bottom of the cakes. They are still yummy, but a little messy to eat! Next time I will be adding the Nutella to the cake after its been baked, either by scooping out the top and adding the Nutella before topping with icing, or try piping the Nutella into the middle. Anyways here’s my recipe for a simple vanilla cupcake, which you can alter as you wish!

You will need(makes 12 small, or 6 large cupcakes like above) ;

Cake Mix- 110g butter, 110g caster sugar, 2 eggs, 1tsp vanilla extract, 110g self-raising flour, 1-2 tbsp milk

Buttercream Icing- 140g butter, 280g icing sugar, 1-2 tbsp milk

Preheat your oven to 180c/ Gas 4 and line your muffin tin with paper cases. Cream your butter and sugar together in a bowl until smooth and pale. Beat in the eggs gradually and stir in the vanilla extract.

Fold in the flour, adding a little milk until the mixture is of a dropping consistency. Spoon the mixture into the paper cases. Now bake in the oven for 10-15 minute of until they are golden-brown on the top and a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Set to cool for 10 minutes, then remove from the tin and cool on a wire rack.

For your icing, beat the bitter in a large bowl until soft, then add half the icing sugar and beat until smooth. Now add the remaining icing sugar with one tbsp of milk, add more milk if necessary. Beat until the mixture is smooth and creamy. If you want to make the above cake, mix a coupe of tbsp of Nutella into your icing sugar.

If you want to make the Nutella melt cake above, before icing your cakes, scoop out the top of them, as you would when making butterfly cakes and place the Nutella into the hole on the top of the cake. Then ice your cakes as you would normally.

What do you think of my Nutella Melt Cupcakes? Do you love Nutella as much as I do?

Easter Egg Brownies| So Naughty but So Nice

 

I have been meaning to try this recipe for a little while after my best friend Sarah shared it with me, and after seeing Becky form Milk Bubble Tea bake her Creme Egg Cupcakes I had major cake envy and spent last night baking these naughty treats above.

The original recipe is for Cadbury Creme Egg Brownies and it has circulated various food blogs over the run up to Easter, but as members of my family do not like Creme Eggs my boyfriend suggested we made Cadbury Caramel Egg Brownies as well. The mixture of gooey brownies with the Caramel or creme egg filling is just divine!

You will need;

185g unsalted butter, 185g chocolate, 85g plain flour, 40g cocoa powder, 3 large eggs, 275g golden caster sugar, 3 Cadbury Creme eggs cut in half, 3 Cadbury Caramel Eggs cut in half. 

Preheat your oven to 160C and grease a 20cm square baking tin. Melt the butter and chocolate together. Break your eggs into a large bowl and tip in the golden caster sugar. Beat them together for a good 3-5 minutes, or until the mixture looks thick, creamy, pale and double its original volume.  Pour the cooler chocolate mixture onto the eggy mouse, and gently fold together.Sieve the cocoa power and flour onto the top of the mixture, then gently fold it in. Pour the mixture into your baking tray and cook for 15 minutes.

Take your tin out of the oven after 15 minutes and gently press the Cadbury Creme and Caramel Egg halves into the mix. Space them evenly apart and don’t push them too far in otherwise they will sink. Put the tin back into the oven and bake for another 5-10 minutes, or until when poking a skewer into the mixture it comes out clean. Leave to cool before removing from the tin and cutting into squares.

A little Easter treat for yourself and a fun way to make your chocolate brownies a bit more interesting! Do you think you will give them ago? What is your favourite Easter treat?

Pink Pops| How to make Popcakes

You may or may not have seen the posts about my Mum’s wedding in September. In that post you'll have seen pictures of the above Pop Cakes. My mum and I are both huge lovers of cake; any sort will do! So when I found the above book in TKMaxx I had to buy it. When flicking through the pages we came up with the idea of making pink Popcakes for her wedding as a gift for her guests.

At the time it seemed like a great idea; who wouldn’t love cute little pink cakes! However come 10.30pm the night before the wedding when we were still decorating the Popcakes, we were soon regretting it! Despite how stressful this idea became, the end result was amazing. The wedding guests were fascinated, and in awe when they discovered that my Mum had made them herself. So I thought I would show you how we did it.

Step 1- Firstly, a cake needs to be made. We used the recipe given in the book for a simple chocolate sponge cake. For the 100 popcakes that we made we had to bake 6 chocolate cakes and leave them to cool.

Step 2- To make the cake balls, the cakes were blitzed into crumbs then mixed with cream cheese, and icing sugar. This makes the cakes into a moist mouldable texture, that is quite similar to a ganache. We also added bashed up Crunchie to our mixture to add something special to half of the popcakes. We then moulded the mixture into 100 little balls, mounted them on sticks and popped them into the freezer for 15 minutes to allow them to solidify.

Step 3- The fun part; decorating! We ended up with 3 different looks for our popcakes. One was just pink icing with a pink icing rose on the top. The second was pink icing dipped into pink sugar.The third look was meant to resemble a flower, and involved pink and white swirls (as you can see above). The joy with popcakes is that you can be so creative with them, any colour, shape or design. I have seen little teacups and tea pots, dinosaurs, people, and food items such as hotdogs and slices of cake.

So that’s a short and sweet explanation on how we made our popcakes. It took a lot of time to make 100 of them, and it was a lot of hard work, but the final product was delicious and a big success with all the wedding guests. I think they are an excellent idea for wedding favours or even for Christmas presents!

So what do you think? Have you seen or tried popcakes before? Would you make any for Christmas presents or for your wedding or party?