Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Tears before bed time

The title of this post pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

On Saturday, I (Martha) hung out with my friend Mrs Duffman and her daughter (my "god"daughter) The Divine Miss O. Miss O is 18 months old and is the cutest baby ever - but I don't think we really anticipated the pull that marshmallows, smarties and cake batter would have over Miss O's temperament.

We decided to make this cake, although we ran out of time to do every detail of the picture, we did manage to make some pretty darn good cupcakes and they looked pretty too!

We started off with a basic buttercake mixture, kind of made from memory... and we were out of baking powder, but substituting bicarb resulted in fluffy and well-risen cupcakes - a minor catastrophe averted! although we did manage to create two mutants:


Apparently, not putting the patty cases in the tins is a bad idea. Still, these gave up the opportunity to make rainbow mutants, which I understand went down very well with Miss O. We also made the fatal mistake of giving Miss O a taste of cake batter:

Which was a mistake only because once she had a taste of the sugary, soft, mushy goodness, she then refused to eat anything else and we had a very teary and frustrated little girl continually pointing at the decorations and cakes and putting tiny, sticky little fingerprints on our pants :) which was exceedingly cute but I did feel a little bit mean!

Once the cakes were done, we made a nice big batch of Vienna frosting and separated it into 3 bowls, and added copious amounts of food colouring to produce blue, pink and yellow icing.




Then, we cut up little marshmallows to make petals and dipped the sticky side in bright green and pink jelly crystals:

And finished by decorating the cupcakes like this!

(note the rainbow mutant cakes, above)


All that was left was to spread the benefits of our baking and do some cleaning up!

So, while there were indeed tears before bed time, everybody ended up relatively unscathed!

ETA: Why toddlers are so cute! Miss O v Cupcake:


Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The very hungry caterpillar and other hilarious anecdotes

OK so actually, there's no anecdotes here. Also, no story about a caterpillar, but whatever.

Monday 16 August was RSPCA cupcake day! And by happy coincidence, there is one - just one - cupcake-cake (ptooey!) in The Book.

And it's this one!


Which is totally rad because not only is it made from cupcakes, but it also looks like a "critter" and thereby fulfilled the main criteria for the day.

The cake? Simple butter cake (from scratch, this time). The frosting? Fluffy Vienna coloured green and flavoured with strawberry just for fun. I actually made the cakes into mini cupcakes but i think it could have worked just as well with full sized ones. The baked cakes are completely covered with the frosting, then rolled into green-dyed coconut. It's pretty simply after that - the cupcakes got stuck to the board with icing, little feet made from chopped up snakes and a face made from licorice and a snake head.

And there you go! or as BN taught me today QED. Which is slightly out of context but meh.



The next cake coming is to celebrate the return of the Big Boss, which is awesome but - I wish it could also be a celebratory reprise of the redheads...
xxMartha