Hot Chocolate

 I do love it when you work out a solution to a problem – especially when it doesn't involve paying someone/buying something/spending hours searching on the internet. It can be as simple as a system for taking washing off the line (Things that needs a hot iron off first so they are at the bottom of the basket and will be ironed last when the iron is the hottest), or for keeping you Tupperware drawer tidy (lids all in one spot people!). Thankfully this was a bit more of an interesting problem to solve – how to keep melted chocolate, well… melted.

 After my recent fondant fetish (click here and here and here!), I had started experimenting with melted chocolate as a decorating tool. It started with plans for Son 2’s Minecraft birthday party, which involved making black shapes for Creeper faces.

This is a Creeper. It explodes if you get too close. Just so you know

 While I was wandering the cake supplies shop, I noticed that black chocolate melts were much cheaper per kg than the black fondant. Interesting. PLUS chocolate could be piped in fine lines for smaller creeper faces (which I was planning to put on green rice krispie squares for taking to school) , where as it would be annoying to cut out very small slivers of fondant. AND it always looked so easy when my You Tube bloggers used it – what could possibly go wrong?

 Well.

 Melted chocolate assumes a liquid form. And the hotter it is, the more liquid it becomes, to the point of it oozing and not making pretty straight lines like you are supposed to. Not good when you are a perfectionist bordering on–OCD.

Not my finest work. They either look possessed, evil or stupid (still tasted yum though).

 Melted chocolate also has a tendency to set when it cools. And this doesn't always happen once it is piped out, it can also happen while it sits in your piping bag. Which leads to lumps of semi solid chocolate blocking up your piping nozzle, and it coming out unevenly. Which leads to much Fiddling and Fixing and Touch Ups and Swearing and Stress.

Like a Monet - good from a distance but a mess up close

 At first I thought it was just the colored chocolate, as it took quite a while to melt and didn't really mix together very well. But when I had the same problem using good ol’ Cadbury that I realised it was a Chocolate Issue.

My Groot Sundaes: more "messy" than "gnarled tree" appearance
(click here for what they were supposed to look like)

 So what to do?? I could use royal icing for all of my future decorating. It pipes nicely, colours well and you can keep it in the fridge between times.

(and a little goes a long way)

 But it doesn't taste as nice. And it’s not chocolate.

 So a solution had to be found. Especially with my plans to make gingerbread trees for my Christmas gifts this year.

LOTS of gingerbread trees!  (this was batch 1 of 3)

 At first I tried microwaving the chocolate intermittently, which worked well. I found I could ice and decorate four trees before it needed a minute in the microwave. But I had to unscrew the metal piping tip and scrape out the solidified chocolate each time. Annoying. And stop piping. More annoying.

 I did think about some sort of hot water bath to put the piping bag in, but I have found the no matter how carefully you seal the bag up or pop it in several plastic bags, water still gets in and ruins your chocolate. Not helpful

 There are cool cups (as in Cold, rather than Clever and Awesome) that you can put in the freezer to keep your drinks cool over summer, I just needed a Hot version .

 So I made one myself! Pour boiling water in a large cup, place a smaller cup inside and voila!

 (I shall add a picture here when I take one at this weekend's piping session)

Pop your piping bag in it in between sprinkled sanding sugar or carefully placing cachoos and you are ready to for your next set of trees. So simple, so cheap, so effective, so clever (well, I think so).

Oh! Christmas tree (s)

 So I hope that this has helped you to keep your chocolate hot and your piping pretty.

In other Kitchen News, I received a kitchen blowtorch at the weekend, so look forward to a creme brulee post in the future (which will hopefully not be entitled “What can go wrong with a Kitchen Blowtorch" or "Effective Ways to put out a Kitchen Fire")

Baking it 'til you Make it

 My Hubby jokes that every time I try a new recipe, I always miss one (or three) ingredients. This can be due to the "I'm sure I have enough coriander/pesto/palm sugar etc in the fridge or cupboard" wishful thinking, or just totally misreading the ingredients list. I say this proves what a resourceful and experienced cook I am, in that I can always adjust or adapt to make something that closely resembles what it is supposed to. Hubby says it proves that I do things too fast and don't concentrate enough. He might have something there...
 But I do find that this can be one of the fun parts of cooking. Recipes are all well and good, but there aren't many in my receipe book that haven't had one or tweaks by me after the official First Bake (where I do really try to follow the receipe to the letter). And some people (like my sister-in-law) don't even use receipes at all! (which rather scares me) She calls herself an Instinctive Cook - a bit of this, a bit of that, trying to recreate dishes she's seen. I have had some amazing salads from her, but she is also the first to admit that she isn't a baker. Which makes sense, as there is a lot of Science and Measured Ingredients in baking, and if you gets one thing wrong you can often end up with Sludge. Sometimes delicious Sludge (like my many failed attempts at Chocolate Mousse), but looking nothing like picture.
 And THEN you can have a plan or receipe that you follow to the letter (and even have ALL the ingredients) and it's still not right. Or you decide half way through to change (either by force or choice) and it turns out better than the original plan. It's like the old performing adage: If you keep smiling, no one will know that you've stuffed up (or Fake it til you Make it). So here follows my latest baking adventures - for better or worse.

 The first one was another Nerdy Nummies inspired baked off. She did two "roll cakes", which I think in Australia we would call it a Swiss Roll. But the clever thing was that she baked a design into the cake! A plain one and a chocolate one. So clever, and a little bit fiddly but looked really impressive. So with Valentine's Day coming up (where Hubby and would I both be working, so no chance of a romantic dinner or date night), I thought I would bake something for Work.

 I decided on a chocolate heart cake and so created my own template.

 The decoration batter was mixed and coloured pink, piped in hearts and popped in the freezer.

 I then set about making the actual cake batter; which didn't seem to go quite far enough on my tray (I had decided to make a half batch as I had a smaller tray than Ro). So in the spirit of We Can Fix This, I decided to make another quarter batch of cake to fill the tray.

 I then realised that my cake was a very lovely shade of white. Hmmmm. Must have missed the Adding the Cocoa step. It is the only disadvantage of getting a recipe from a video is that most times there isn't a written step by step instructions. Ro is great as she does have an ingredients list in the information section. What I had done was written down the ingredients (including the 1/4 cup of cocoa) but then followed the Plain Roll Cake instructions and forgot to add the cocoa with the flour. Not to be daunted, I knew there was a way to salvage what was becoming a bit of a cooking disaster: I scraped the entire cake (pink batter and all) into a bowl, added the cocoa and then added the other one-quarter chocolate batter I had made. After re-piping and freezing another load of pink hearts, I added the batter, which seemed to at least fill the tray. A quick burst in the oven and it came out looking really cool....

 Hooray! I fixed it!
(well, apart from forgetting to bang the tray on the bench pre-baking which accounts for the extra air bubbles)

 I rolled the cake up and left it cool over night; rather then adding the cream and strawberries then which would make the cake soggy overnight.

 Valentine's Day morning I unrolled my cake and was a bit dismayed to see that it had cracked; had I left it to cool too long in the rolled up position? Had the run of warm weather we have had in Melbourne lately dried it out too much? It still looked rather cool, and with a few well placed toothpicks, it still did kind of look like a roll.

 Thankfully it tasted yummy and everyone "ooohed" and "aaahed" and "how did you get it looking like that?!?". So that was positive and saved it from what may have been a total disaster.

 However.

 It wasn't what I'd call a total success.

 So with a piping bag still half-full of pink batter, I resolved to try again. I had a family lunch the next day which gave me a chance to be creative and try "freehand" drawing without a template.

 Again, came out of the oven looking really clever.

But AGAIN, it cracked after cooling, even more than the chocolate one! Thankfully again, it held together and still looked really clever.



 And luckily, Family are very forgiving and enjoyed it regardless of the cracking. "Tastes great Mum!" said Son 1 helping himself to his second slice.

  

 So two yummy and cool-ish looking cakes. But it did leave me a bit unfulfilled in that I hadn't got either of these cakes to look as good as Ro's. In mulling over this, I may have had the cake too thick which caused the cracking: for the second cake I made the full cake mix but put it on a tray nearly half the size. So IF I ever try this again, I will ensure that I get the right size tray. It is a cute technique that could easily be adapted to a traditional round cake; kind of "icing" it before it bakes!

 The next Baking Adventure was a birthday cake for me! This was inspired by another You Tube channel that I had been put on to by a baking buddy - My Cupcake Addiction. I may have stumbled across this amazing channel previously but had been scared off by her abundant use of fondant. However in my post-fear-of-fondant baking days, I was very excited by what I saw (I think I even squealed). I had seen her work before; I had Pinned a Christmas wreath cake made out of cupcakes as a potential work Christmas treat. I then saw the Christmas Tree cupcake cake, which led me to all sorts of clever Cupcake Cakes. Its such a simple-but-effective idea (bake cupcakes but ice them to look like a whole cake) and I wondered why I hadn't come across it before! So I decided to  make a Star cupcake cake.

 I used empty cupcake papers to decide how many cakes to bake and duly baked them. As my electric oven is not the worlds greatest, and I baked them in three different tins there were not all beautifully and uniformly rounded as they always look online. No matter - frosting will hide all manner of problems!!

 I had made white chocolate ganache and was going to pipe it onto each cupcake (and fill in the gaps) but quickly realised that Piping used up a lot more ganache than the frosting method! In fact I had only piped half the cupcakes before I ran out: What to do?!? Did I do the mad run to the store to buy more cream to make more ganache that then had to be cooled as quick as possible to allow it to be piped? Or adapt?

 I adapted.

 So it changed from a swirly-piped cake to a ganache-as-frosting cake. It still looked like a whole "cake" which I guess is the idea, and considering how rich the white chocolate ganache is, less was probably a good way to go!

 Next, to make the edges of the star I was going to pipe with left-over red frosting from the Lego block cake, but again it didn't look red enough, especially compared to the red cupcake papers. So I used the frosting to stick the cupcakes to the board, and used the red fondant that I still had in the cupboard from the Marvel cupcakes, which looked much more effective.

 Looking good, but how did it go on a practical level? The kids loved it as they could just pull off a cupcake and eat it (well, lick the icing off the top anyway!). It was a bit weird "cutting the cake" at Happy Birthday tine; I ended up cutting half-way through one cupcake (no touching the bottom with this cake!). But overall - a success.

 So there you go - two examples of Best Laid Plans going astray, which turned out all right in the end. Hooray!



Let Them Eat (Decorated Cup) Cake!

  So here is my latest Thing; where “Thing” is loosely defined as That Which I am currently Getting Excited over, which consumes my Thinking Time and often ends up with spending money.

 Cake Decorating.

 Which has kind of been a simmering Thing for a few years now, but has recently gone to the full rolling boil.

 There are a few sources from which this Well of Enthusiasm for the Icing and the Piping may have sprung. Firstly the many childhood hours spent pouring over the Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book (the original with the train cake on the cover – all good 80’s mums had one!) and deciding which of the amazing cakes I would have to the next 5 birthday parties. I never did end up getting The Castle but O Joy! O Rapture! the year my mum learned how to make a Dolly Varden ice cream cake!!
 Or maybe it was the rather impressive cakes my girlfriend made for her daughter’s parties (she was the first child born in our group of friends). The cakes in the first few years were good, but then she really hit her stride and we were treated to an Emerald City (for a Wizard of Oz themed party; it was The Castle! In green!!), a merry-go-round, and even a foray into rolled royal icing with a moulded sleeping child. So the bar had kind of been set high.
 
 My own personal forays were what I’d call Simple But Effective; they didn’t take hours to make (some of the above-mentioned took up to four hours to create, baking not included!) but still looked good.

 We had Mr Hankey (from South Park) ...

  … Mud Cake cut into shape with licorice arms and mouth, marshmallow hands and hat trimming and a red roll-up (how that stuff is termed  ”fruit” I have no idea) for the hat.

  Got a bit more creative for a Murder-Mystery Birthday party; props, different colored icing, “piping” and even food coloring fingerprints.

 Then I became a mum and had two annual (and sometime up to 4) birthday parties (and thus cakes) a year. Before I discovered cake toppers (the amazing printed icing sheets that kids think are waaaaaay more impressive than anything you take hours to make, and only take 10 minutes for you to decorate your cake! Win-Win!!), I did the number-cake thing for a few years. But I did refer back to the WW Cake Bible to make a Mickey Mouse…

…as well as a Spiderman. Hint – the ‘writing icing’ you can buy at the Supermarket is a godsend!!

 So all not-too-tricky, looked quite good and everyone happy.

 Then I had the delightful opportunity to go along to a Mamma Bake Cake decorating class (www.mammabake.com.au). They come along to your house and bring EVERYTHING necessary (cupcakes, icing and ganache, piping bags and tips, patient instructor) to learn how to make amazing looking cupcakes! Brilliant!! They also sold all the tools required so I came home with six beautifully decorated (if oddly coloured) cupcakes, a new set of piping equipment (sorry Tupperware, your set was just not cutting it) and Enthusiasm to make hundreds more cupcakes.

  But where precisely was I going to use these fabulous new skills? Being a mum of two boys meant I wasn’t going to be called on very often to make roses and flowers for their cakes. In fact, Son 2’s response to my cakes? “They’re very girly ...” So I knew I had to get creative to use my new creativity.
 Luckily Christmas was coming up, and with it, lots of Catch-Ups and Dinners and Bring-a-Plates. Excellent.

 First up were some Rudolph cupcakes straight from the Mamma Bake website. I did tweak them a bit so I only had to make one lot of ganache, but as this meant there were more lollies involved so I didn’t hear any complaints!

   
 So we had piped chocolate ganache, pretzel antlers, white chocolate button with MnMs for eyes, and a half marshmallow with a half jelly baby (because I had them in the cupboard!) for the nose. They looked great and the kids (of which there were 9 at this particular gathering) devoured them with great joy. Well, they devoured the icing at least (though I’m proud that my son was one of the only to eat the cupcake as well – a good kid who appreciates good baking).

 So this was a great First Experience that taught me a few things: ganache takes a LONG time to cool/set before it gets to a good piping consistency (chilling it in the fridge helps but it still takes a few hours). And I really needed to invest in a cupcake carrier! There were quite a few large roundabouts to navigate on the way to The House, which I took at a very slow and sedate speed (Must Protect Cupcakes!!).

 Next up was a Christmas Family Gathering. I had been inspired by a photo on the Mamma Bake website of some very cute themed cupcake designs which would enable me to use more of the piping tips and techniques I had learned. So I created a few more designs of my own, baked a batch each of chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, dipped them all in white chocolate ganache, coloured my butter icing (red and green of course) and I was Ready to Pipe.

 Two not-as-frustrating-as-I-thought-it-may-have-been hours later, I had these….

 Not too bad methinks. There was lots of practising first and remembering the techniques (“ohhh, you hold it the Other way!”) and switching back and forth between colours and tips but I was pretty happy with my effort.

 And so was everyone at the party – lots of “oooohs” and “aaaahs” and “did you make those???” However, no one seemed to want to actually Eat any of them! Apparently they DID look too good to eat. Hmmm, a problem perhaps? But I did manage to send everyone home with one for their morning tea the next day, which was great as it meant I didn’t have to eat 20 or so cupcakes!

 My most recent foray was more exciting as I got to make flowers and decorate pretty girly cupcakes. My girlfriend's little girl was having her first birthday party the weekend before Christmas, and if a First Birthday isn’t the time to go all pink and flowery (especially as she has two older brothers) then I don’t know when is!! I had pretty pink proper cupcake papers (try saying that three times fast!) from her mum which made things a little interesting, in that they made taller and thinner cupcakes than the traditional concertina papers. This changed the cooking times and meant I had less “area” on top of the cupcake to work with. As I had done my previous “practice” on larger diameter cupcakes I was a little concerned about whether there would be any issues with the smaller space. Plus I was piping ganache with a smaller tip which we hadn’t been shown in class (so I wasn’t sure how it would turn out or if it would work at all). PLUS it was the first time I was making Proper Flowers since the class. So after a few deep calming breaths, I waded in.

 The flowers went alright….

 And the rest of them turned out pretty good as well!

The 6 different designs

Close up of The Rose
 

Ready for the Party!

  But again, hardly any were eaten at the party! Whether the papers made them too tricky to eat (you have to rip them away from the cupcake; much trickier than the normal papers), or people were put off my too much icing/decoration on top (I try not to pipe too high or too much as this is something I don’t like about a lot of cupcakes; when there is more frosting than cake!), or again they were “too pretty to eat”, even though I had made some “simpler” designs (such as the ‘1’ and ‘A’)  that would be easier to eat. Hmmm … this is not a good pattern developing here. But I still had fun doing them (and I’ve got to get value for money from my piping set) so I will carry on!

 Next Up? I’m looking for inspiration for some Lego related cupcakes for Son 1’s birthday.

Pipe on!