Turtle cupcakes

Continuing on with the preparation for my friend Nhi's rainbow food birthday party, I wanted to make her these cool Squirt turtle cupcakes. Squirt is the cute baby turtle from the movie Finding Nemo. I actually saw the tutorial for how to make Squirt out of jubes and other lollies last year when I was Googling cupcake ideas for Nhi's birthday. I ended up making her Minion cupcakes last year, but I'm glad that I got the chance to go back and make these ones for her :)

It took a while to search for all the different lollies that I needed, and unfortunately I couldn't find the same kind of jubes that they used on the tutorial. As a result, my Squirt cupcakes did't look like Squirt...but they looked like turtles, which is more than I could hope for :D I was worried that they'd just look like fat little green men. 

I love getting creative with food. It just takes the eating experience to a whole new level of awesomeness. 

Check out the Squirt turtle cupcake tutorial here. Instead of using white icing, I bought some white buttercream icing (which I used to stick on the choc chip eyes) and used blue food colouring to colour it. 

 

I thought I might also show you guys the set up for the rainbow party :) We had the jelly orange wedges, rainbow fruit kebabs, fairy bread and the turtle cupcakes. We actually did pretty well and finished off majority of the food between four people. Well it was a party so we're allowed to go a bit nuts :P

Batman cake decorations

Tomorrow is my brother's birthday and I planned to make him a cake. The original plan was to make him a batman shaped ice cream cake, but I just didn't have the time and resources to make a batman shaped cake tin. I hope I get around to making it one day though. I was thinking of using some malleable metal and making a large batman shaped cookie cutter. That way I could fill it up with ice cream and bam, Batman ice cream cake!

Instead of that idea though, I decided to make some cupcakes instead. I stopped into one of my favourite bulk food stores Weigh 'n' Pay and bought some cake decorating supplies. I bought some Scolpt modelling chocolate and pre-made chocolate fudge icing.

I wanted to make a little Gotham City and Batman beacon with the modelling chocolate. I've never done anything like this before, but it was pretty straight forward, so if you are keen to try it then you really should! It's great fun. 

I'm not very good at freehand drawing, so in order to cut out the shape of the batman logo, I cut out a picture of it that I printed on paper. Here are my instructions below:

Batman Cake Decorations

What you need:

•  Modelling chocolate (I used the Scolpt brand) - of any kind of cake decorating fondant
• Yellow food colouring (only if you buy the white chocolate . There is also yellow chocolate)
• Baking paper
• Small knife with a sharp pointed tip (for better accuracy when you're cutting out the shapes)
• Rolling pin
• 2x paper cut-out of the batman logo

 Instructions:

1. Print out two pictures of the Batman logo (including the oval around the bat shape). For one of the pictures, cut out the bat shape and for the other one, cut out the whole oval.
2. Using the black Scolpt modelling chocolate, warm it up in your hands and roll it out on a flat surface lined with baking paper. I sandwiched the modelling chocolate between two sheets of baking paper so that it would get stuck on the flat surface and rolling pin. I rolled my chocolate about 0.3mm. 
3. Place the bat shaped piece of paper that you cut out onto the rolled black chocolate and cut around the paper using a knife with a small sharp pointed tip. 
4.  Using new baking paper, roll out the white Scolpt modelling chocolate. Place the oval stencil onto the chocolate and cut out the shape of the beacon. make sure you wipe the tip of the knife so that you don't get black chocolate onto the white. 
5. I used yellow food colouring to colour it yellow. You can also buy yellow modelling chocolate. 
6. Place the black Batman chocolate onto the yellow beacon  chocolate and press down very gently so that it just sticks together. 
7. For the Gotham City buildings, roll out the black chocolate and cut rectangles of different lengths. I didn't cut my building very long so they might not stand up very well when I put them on the cup cake icing. You could either cut them longer, or you can do what I'll do and use more modelling chocolate to stick some skewers onto the back and stick them into the cupcakes that way. 
8. For the windows, I rolled out white modelling chocolate and cut a very thin strip. Then I cut the strip into little squares, placing them onto the black buildings one at a time. 
9. I cut out a circle shape into the black modelling chocolate and wrote "Happy Birthday Peter" using white chocolate writing fudge which is available in the baking section of any Coles or Woolworths. 

 

The finished product :) :)

Vegan hazelnut cupcakes

I've done so much baking this year that come 2014 I'll be a domestic baking goddess! :P

Today was another baking adventure in the kitchen. I absolutely love hazelnuts and so I decided to make hazelnut cupcakes from the cookbook Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. 

Unfortunately I didn't have any vegan friendly hazelnut liqueur so I just substituted for a dash of almond essence. Still tasty, but I would have loved a stronger hazelnut flavour. I've searched far and wide with no luck finding any of the hazelnut flavouring, but I'm determined to get my hands on some eventually. 

Vegan Hazelnut Cupcakes

Makes 12

Ingredients

• 1 cup & 2 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup hazelnut meal/flour
•  1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup rice milk or nut milk
• 1 tablespoon ground flaxseeds
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 teaspoon hazelnut extract or 1 tablespoon hazelnut liqueur

Directions

1. Line cupcake pan and preheat oven to 180C. In a small bowl, whisk together flaxseed and rice milk. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, hazelnut meal, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.
2. Add the maple syrup, sugar, canola oil, vanilla, and hazelnut liqueur to the rice milk mixture and beat well. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until mostly smooth.
3. Pour into liners, filling them 2/3 of the way.
4. Bake for 22 to 24 min. Give it the old toothpick test. Cool completely on racks. 

The book suggested serving these muffins with raspberry jam. I love raspberry jam and it went perfectly with the muffins :)

Vegan chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache icing

Tomorrow is my last day on my mental health placement and we organised to bring in a plate of food. One of the patients on the ward is vegan, so I decided to make vegan chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache icing for everyone to share. 

I have to get up super early tomorrow morning so I haven't had a chance to ice them and photograph them, but I will post up pictures of the recipe that I got from the cookbook Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

These babies are soft like clouds I swear. If you are a bit freaked out by the sound of vegan food, start by making these. They're crazy fluffy and so chocolaty I could die :P

I will post up my pictures after my shift tomorrow :)

Vegan vanilla cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese icing

My hosted a dinner party tonight for my brother's confirmation yesterday. My mum is one of those Asian mums that really like to go all out with guns a blazing. She was up early in the morning cooking and spent the whole day in the kitchen. She ended up cooking something like a five course meal. There were prawn crackers, deep fried quail, huge prawns on skewers, Vietnamese squid salad, vegan stir-fry, pork and seafood noodle soup (hu tieu do bien) and a Vietnamese sweet dessert (che ba ba). So everyone pretty much got full on the first five dishes I listed and when she brought out the main main meal everyone probably wished they wore their stretchy pants. 

My dad asked me to make some cupcakes for the dinner party too, since there would be lots of kiddies. I decided to make some of the vegan cupcakes that I made for the Warrior Dash fundraising. Instead of making strawberry icing, I made chocolate cream cheese icing instead. You can find the recipe inside the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

I really liked this icing because the addition of melted chocolate made the icing firmer and so when I piped the icing onto the cakes, the nice swirly shape held better. This recipe would be good for anyone who doesn't have much time to let the icing to chill. 

I didn't really get a chance to get any good photos of the cupcakes, and my camera is back at the shops to get repaired after I dropped it :( 

I got some great photos of my cousin Vera chowing down on her cupcake. I love that precious little thing. She's got one of the best personalities. Everything she does cracks me up. When I saw her today, she was in a "what's that?" phase where she'll go around the room, pointing at everything and asking "what's that?". There was this one moment where she was about to throw a tantrum because she wanted to get picked up by her mum, but then she saw a colourful stool under my desk and immediately stooped crying and asked "what's that?". Too cute!

Vegan matcha cupcakes with cream cheese icing

I'm going to have to rush this post. I like to try and get all my posts in before the day ends and this one is late because my brother and I stayed up and watch the movie Bridge to Terabithia. I had seen it back in 2007 when it first came out but I didn't remember it being quite as sad as it was when I watched it for the second time tonight. Maybe I wasn't as emotional then as I am now. Good or bad thing, I'm not sure.

Anyways, for a while now I had been wanting to try a green tea latte. It's not actually made with green tea leaves, but it is made from matcha powder which is green tea in a fine powder form. On my trip to Sydney, I finally got that chance and ordered a green tea latte at the Starbucks we stopped into. To be honest, I didn't enjoy the taste all that much. It's a strange flavour to describe, but mine is only one person's opinion so please go and try it for yourselves before deciding whether or not you like it.

Now even though I had that one bad experience, I didn't want to put matcha into my 'dislike' pile because I figured maybe it was just a one time thing. I had the opportunity to go into an Asian grocery today and I bought myself a bag of matcha powder. When I got home, i decided to whip up some vegan matcha cup cakes instead of a latte. 

I found a recipe on the website Pea Soup Eats for vegan matcha cupcakes with vegan matcha frosting. I substituted the natural sweetener Stevia for the granulated sugar. Instead of the matcha icing, I made some vegan maple cream cheese icing which I made last month (recipe here). The cupcakes were super delicious, fluffy on the inside and perfect to satisfy my always active sweet tooth. But they're just too good, I can't stop at one...

So the moral of the story: if you try something you don't like maybe just try it in a different recipe!