The quest for a good basic recipe!

Slowly but surely i'm getting there! i think i have found my favourite buttercream recipe, which i will share with you shortly, as for the sponge? Well this one was nicer than previous but still not quite there!

one thing different from the usual sponge recipes i use was that there was no vanilla essence in it, i think this made a lot of difference, positively! npow if you are interested, this is the basic sponge recipe . .

115g butter

115g sugar

115g flour

2 eggs

1tbs milk

1) beat butter and sugar together until combined and fluffy

2) mix in eggs

3) sift in flour

4) fold flour in with milk

bake in 12 cases for about 20mins, until a cocktail stick inserted comes out clean.

I baked my cupcakes in some new, dare i say it, christmas! Silicone star shaped cases, absolutely adorable, £7.50 from Marks and Spencer, i love them, even more so because they are dishwasher safe!!

Now for the frosting, what gets me about this frosing is that it has a lovely stiff texture, but when you bit into it it is so light, it just melts in your mouth, mmm.

175g butter (at room temperature)

2 tsp vanilla extract

a couple of drops of food colouring

2 tbs milk

300g sifted icing sugar

1) cream the butter, vanilla, food colouring and milk togther (i use an electric whisk as it makes it fluffier)

2) bit by bit add the icing sugar until fully incorporated

3) beat, beat, beat!! the more you beat it the lighter and fluffier it will be!

the frosting recipe is meant to be for 12 cupcakes but i found i had half left over so you may want to reduce quantities! I used my new Tala Icing Bag to ice them, this is the first time I have used an icing bag before so i dont think they look too bad!

thanks for reading

Not a cupcake, but still cake!

Brooklyn Blackout cake to be precise.

I used a recipe from the The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook and i'm not going to say it went fab but it was 8.30pm that i decided to start baking it, so i guess thas no-ones fault but my own!

Basically it is a chocolate cake, but instead of frosting or ganache, the filling is a very thick chocolate custard, now this is the part i don't recommend attempting to make when your a bit tired last thing in the evening, as not only did i make things ten times more difficult for myself but there were two casualtys from this baking session - a whisk and a sieve!

Oh yes, the joys of cornflour, i wont be using that ingredient again for a while, i mean 200g of cornflour with 120ml of water, im sure whoever wrote that recipe was somewhere laughing a very evil laugh when i was attempting to "mix" the two! And where did the sieve come into it? When the custard had thickened and i still had a whole load of lumps!! Ok, im not the worlds greatest cook, i admit that!

So anyway, witht the sponge i only had 2 cake tins instead of 3, so its not as tall and pretty but i think it still looks pretty darn nice, especially with the milk, white and dark chocolate i grated on top!

Conclusion? well i'm not a huge fan of chocolate cake anyway, there are only two i have found that i like so far - one from costa coffee, and another from thorntons, both of which are sweet and fairly gooey.  Now this cake would be labeled "tame" for the people who like chocolate cake but always complain it's too sweet, i found it not to be sweet enough for my taste, but i can understand that others would potentially enjoy this more than your other mainstream chocolate cake recipes.

What next? Back to cupcakes for me!