Also I joined the wonderful Baking Mad a few weeks ago and it turns out when I registered I entered a competition and won a copy of Home Bake by Eric Lanlard. I haven't made anything from it yet but the recipes look absolutely delicious!! I'd heartily recommend both the book and Baking Mad - their site is fantastic and has a great community of bakers.
Anyways onto the actual baking I made this week...
It was my aunt and uncles 50th birthday party last night and since I've got myself a bit of a reputation for making cupcakes for special events, I offered to make them cupcakes for their guests. I couldn't decide for a loooong time what kind I was going to make because I was given open choice to do whatever I liked (often a bad thing!) but ultimately settled on a batch of chocolate and peanut butter and a batch of raspberry jam and white chocolate.
The chocolate peanut butter was a mixture of the chocolate base recipe from Hummingbird's new Cake Days book and the peanut butter frosting was from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes. I was a little wary of the latter to be honest - there seemed to be a fair amount of cream in it and I was worried it wouldn't taste 'sticky' enough. Luckily I was wrong.
The chocolate bases from Cake Days were extremely easy to make. Brought together the butter, sugar, flour and cocoa powder to resemble breadcrumbs, then add the milk and egg which you've already whisked together. Easy peasy!
Like I said, I was a touch nervous with the frosting but I didn't need to be. Peanut butter, cream cheese, cream and icing sugar mixed together to create a frosting that tasted strongly of peanut butter (with that slightly salty taste) but not too 'lip smacking'!!
I was worried it was essentially going to taste as though they were smeared with peanut butter but luckily they worked really well.
Next up was the raspberry and white chocolate cupcakes. The base and frosting was taken from the Primrose Bakery book which I always know I can have confidence in.
The bases were a straight vanilla base with goobers of raspberry jam swirled through. All extremely easy. Then once they were baked and cooled, I cored out the centre and added a dollop (official baking term) of raspberry jam inside and topped with white chocolate frosting. Their frosting recipe is normal vanilla with 100g of melted while chocolate added. The recipe also calls for 3tbsp of cream but I left it out, quite happy with the taste and consistency after adding just the chocolate.
After adding the jam I topped it with the frosting and a red fondant crown. Initially was going to put little 50s on them made from Candy Melts but decided to save that particular experiment for another day.
Took them to the party and they were really well received. In the early stages I was tempted to make Pina Colada cupcakes but then thought I'd end up just drinking the rest of the bottle and thought better of it!!
Would definitely use all the recipes again (particularly the peanut butter frosting) as they were all so easy to make.
