Triple chocolate heart shaped muffins

Using my favourite chocolate cake recipe with white and milk chocolate chips I made these muffins in some heart shaped silicon muffin cases that I got for Christmas. These were perhaps a little more well cooked than I normally would like but I am really please with the shape.

Silicon cases are a pretty good idea: far less wasteful than paper cases; they come in lots of different shapes (hearts, stars, flowers & more); and you don't need a cupcake baking tray to use them. I have found that some are harder to take the cake out of than others but just make sure that that cakes are completely cool before trying to remove them and the thicker the silicon case, the easier they are to remove.

Chocolate and hazlenut cupcakes

My second new recipe of last week was these DELICIOUS chocolate and hazelnut cupcakes with nutella frosting from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. They taste just like Nutella and match my cake stand perfectly.


I made these for my mum - she always comes over and eats ALL my cupcakes which I normally would eat gradually over a week! She's a chocoholic (a genetic trait) but still couldn't manage to eat all of these because they are so rich and filling.

Although the recipe is from a British bakery they do recommend you use American-style cupcake cases which are more like Muffin-size cases and all their cupcake recipes are based on this size. I still used normal cupcake size cases so my cakes where probably a little larger than most cupcakes and I had quite a bit of mixture left over - probably enough to make another 6 or so cakes.

I do like the recipes in this book - they all use milk in the mixture which makes them so moist. Once I've worked out the right amount I may start adding milk to my favourite vanilla and chocolate cake recipes.

Circus cupcakes with Marshmallow frosting

Last week was a week of new recipes for me (more new recipes later). Firstly I did these vanilla cakes with Marshmallow frosting based on the "Almost-homemade vanilla buttercream" recipe from Hello Cupcake - I'm not sure why it is called buttercream when it is more about the marshmallow than the butter, but nevermind! P.S. This book is soooo inspiring.


I was attracted to this recipe because it uses Marshmallow Fluff, which isn't readily available here in the UK, but my local Powerplay have started to stock American sweets including Marshmallow Fluff in Raspberry, Blueberry and Original flavour. So, if I can master this recipe then I can hopefully, try a Raspberry version, yum, yum, yum!

Now, the recipe is a bit weird for me firstly because it is measured in "cups", wtf?! We don't measure things in cups in the UK, I've never heard of that as a measurement. But after some googling I worked out that 3 1/2 cups is about 805g and that is the second weird thing... 800 grams of frosting??! Wow, I'm frosting 12 cupcakes, not 1200!

So I made an eighth of the original recipe using half the jar of Marshmallow Fluff. I had used the first half in a batch of frosting that did NOT come out well, the frosting sank into the cakes and was an overall disaster. But this batch was great, after whipping the Fluff for quite a while it was nice and thick and was so white - perfect for adding colour if you choose to.

The theme was inspired by a circus party that was posted on Party Perfect so I used some spotty cases that I've had in my stash for a while and all of my sprinkles with a primary colour theme: chocolate beans, martha stewart jimmies in red and yellow, hundreds & thousands and sugar dots that my mum got for me on her trip to Germany.

Pink and orange cupcakes

Over the past few months my family and friends have been buying sprinkles for me wherever they see them. I got sprinkles as presents for Christmas and every time I see my mum she's found some more in the £1 shop, or somewhere like that.

I've also been buying sprinkles wherever I can. In fact, I jump at the chance to go to a different supermarket just so I can check out their sprinkle collection. I know have a huge cupboard dedicated to sprinkles and baking goods which is ridiculous in my small kitchen!

Pink and orange is one of those colour combinations that you don't often see together but I personally love. On my sprinkle journeys I've picked up a few sets which I can then match together, even if they didn't come together - this includes orange, pink, white and yellow stars from Asda, pink hundreds and thousands from Sainsburys and orange and pink jimmies that I got as a present. They were my inspiration for last Sunday's cupcakes.

I also did a little experiment with the frosting based on something I saw in Sainsbury's magazine a few months back: I split the frosting into two parts and coloured one with pink food colouring. Then I added both parts into one piping bag so it would come out half pink and half white.

I made vanilla cakes in orange and pink cases with the two-colour cream cheese frosting and decorated with the pink and orange sprinkles.

Rainbow cupcakes

If a rainbow could be made into a person, that person would be a lot like my friend Jane. Everything you could say to describe a rainbow describes Jane - bright, happy, magical, rare.

I made these rainbow cakes in celebration of Jane's birthday. I didn't see Jane for her birthday but I made these at home in tribute of when we were at uni together and would bake cakes. In fact, Jane taught me a recipe for cupcakes that has now developed into the recipe that I use every week.

So firstly, I made my favourite vanilla cake recipe but before cooking I split the batter. I would recommend that you split it equally into six bowls and then mix your colours.

I didn't split them equally and I regretted it. I tried to have a little more red so I could then add blue to make purple, etc. But as you can see from my pics I ended up with hardly any purple batter and therefore tiny cakes. Whereas I had loads of red and green batter and ended up with an unevenly sized batch.

To mix the colours all you need is red, yellow and blue food colouring and then combine them to make the colours in between. Red + yellow = orange. Yellow + blue = green. Blue + red = purple. If you can find orange, green and purple food colouring however, you are likely to get better colour that is less muddy. I already had green so I just mixed red and yellow to make orange and red and blue to make purple.

I added the food colouring directly to the batter instead of mixing it first. That meant I could see exactly what effect the colouring had on the batter. As the batter has a yellow tint anyway I needed to use more food colouring on the blue and purple to lose the yellow-ish colour.

I used coloured cases to match to add to the effect and after they were baked I frosted them with cream cheese frosting and sprinkled with rainbow coloured hundreds and thousands.

Malteaser cupcakes

A few weeks ago I was browsing flickr for some inspiration and I found these gorgeous Malteaser cakes by Monniecakes. Not just one but three Malteasers on one cake? Yum!

So, I made these with my favourite chocolate cake recipe and piped cream cheese frosting on the top. Then I topped the cakes with three Malteasers each. Sooo tasty.

For a little variation on this you could put Malteasers actually in the cake, either a whole one per cake, or crumbled up in the mixture. That would be delicious - a little like those Easter eggs with Malteaser bits in the chocolate.

Above you can see them on the new cake stand that I got for Christmas from my beautiful boyfriend.

Cream cheese frosting recipe

Most recipes only use cream cheese frosting for rich cakes like carrot or red velvet but I like this frosting on any cake, even your basic vanilla. This will be enough to frost 12 cupcakes or 6 large muffins.

Ingredients

• 100g Soft cheese (also known as cream cheese, I prefer Philadelphia)
• 25g Unsalted butter (at room temperature)
• 125g Icing sugar

Instructions

1. Add all the ingredients into a bowl with high sides (suitable for whisking).
   
2. Mix the soft cheese, unsalted butter and icing sugar with a spoon until you have a porridge-like texture (I find this step necessary so you don't get covered in a cloud of icing sugar in the next step).
3. Use an electric whisk to blend the frosting. Don't stop until all lumps of butter and cheese are whisked away (literally!) and it becomes light and fluffy - whisk for longer to make it thicker.
4. Spread over your cupcakes with a spatula or fill a zip lock bag, snip the corner and pipe.
   

The longer you whisk the frosting the thicker it will become and therefore the easier to pipe but it will be ready to spread over your cupcakes as soon as all lumps are gone.

These are the reasons I love cream cheese frosting:

• This recipe will transform any cupcake, even if you have cooked them a little too long and they are a bit crisp on top - they will still taste delicious.
  
• I find that this frosting helps to keep your cakes nice and moist if you eat them gradually over a week like me and it doesn't separate over time like butter cream.
• The frosting comes out in very white so you can add any colour to it and get a great effect. White also goes with any colour of sprinkles.