Showing posts with label Food Colouring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food Colouring. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 August 2011

Cupcakes I Want to Try

What with making boxes and coming up with ideas for cupcake variations I have decided to put together a cupcake box (hopefully 12, but I'm not sure how many will fit in my box)

My cupcake box will hold:

Chocolate Orange Cupcakes
Banana Cupcakes
Lemon Cupcakes
Orange Cupcakes
Caramelised Banana & Cinnamon Cupcakes
Toffee Crunch

I want to try:

Filling cakes
Crunchy Lemon Topping
Royal Icing Piping
Chocolate Ganache
3D Butterflies


Fillings

I really want to try this.


Cakes are generally filled with butter cream and jam, but this is personal choice, you may prefer butter cream and real strawberries, or lemon curd.  Maybe you’d like a chocolate cake with real whipped cream filling or orange marshmallow filling.

Cupcakes can be filled too, either by cutting of the top and making butterfly cakes or by piping the filling into the cake (chocolate, strawberry butter cream, jam).  In theory, like the one shown here.

Football Cake

I've decided to try any blog entries about making cakes in 'real time', which basically means I will take break every now and again while I am cooking and write a bit.  I think that I am more likely to write about the things that go wrong if I do that.

First is the Football cake which I am starting today, using the Wilton Soccer Ball cake tin.

(14:20) OK, I've started.  I increased my normal mixture to 400g as I would rather it was too big than too small (this could bite me in the arse).  Blended the butter and sugar, blended the egg and then bit by bit blended the egg into the butter mix.  Then slowly folded in the sifted flour. I prepared the tin by using Wilton's cake tin stuff, tipped in the mixture and shock and tapped the tin a lot to try and flatten the top and get rid of any air bubbles.  Have put it in the (non fan) oven, but I have no idea how long for; I'm guessing about half an hour.
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(15:00) Half hour into the cooking and the outside is cooked and the middle is not.  I've turned the cake tin and turned the oven up a little bit.
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(15:06) Just read this on the internet

How To Measure Pan Sizes:
Measure Dimensions: To determine the pan's dimensions always measure inside edge to inside edge of the pan so that you do not include the thickness of the pan in your measurement.
Measure Depth: To measure the depth, place your ruler straight up from the bottom of the pan (do not slant the ruler). If the pan edge is slanted, do not slant the ruler, measure straight up.
Pan Volume: To determine the pan's volume (how much batter it will hold), pour pre-measured water by the cupful until the pan is filled to the brim. Use a liquid measuring cup to pour water into the pan until it reaches the top.

If the new pan makes the batter shallower than in the original recipe, this will cause the heat to reach the center of the pan more quickly and you will have more evaporation. To solve this problem you need to shorten the baking time and raise the temperature of the oven slightly. To substitute a pan that is shallower than the pan in the recipe, reduce the baking time by 1/4.

If the new pan makes the batter deeper than in the original recipe, this will cause less evaporation and the batter will take longer to cook.  To solve this problem you need to lengthen the baking time and lower the temperature of the oven slightly. To substitute a pan that is deeper than the pan in the recipe, increase the baking time by 1/4.


I reckon that the bit I've highlighted might apply to my cake - I have turned the oven down a little bit.

This website, whatscookingamerica.net, tells you how to work out how much cake mix is needed.  It actually says on the Wilton website that my tin measures 8 3/4 in. diameter x 3 1/2 in. deep so I reckon I should have used 
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(15.20) Still not cooked in the middle; think I may have messed this one up.
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(15:26) Apparently the cake tin takes about 5 cups of batter.  Trying to find what this means.....
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(15:35) Google informs me that the Wilton tins generally take about 6 cups of batter.  (15:43) I still have no idea  how what recipe I should use to make 6 cups of batter.
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(15:50) I think the cake is cooked; I used the skewer method and made sure that the top/middle was springy to the touch.  It's out of the oven now and I've left it to cool for a while before I try taking it out of the tin.




You can see that the crust has over cooked.

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(16:25) The cake has cooled enough for me to take it out of the tin. It's a good size but overcooked at the edges.  Might see if I can trim the very bottom of the cake off.

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(18:00) I've watched some videos about icing a cake and I'm going to try a thin layer of icing (allowed to dry) to catch crumbs.  My concern is that once I've done that I wont be able to see the football design to ice.  I tried cutting out a template but it wasn't very good, so in the end I stuck (new) pins all over to mark the meeting points that I would later want to line with royal icing.


(18:45)  I cut the bottom of the cake (think I should have done before the cake cooled.  It hadn't cooked in the middle, so I have scooped out the insides and I'm going to fill the hole with butter cream so when it's cut there will be butter cream tips on the slices. I didn't break through the top of the cake while scooping, so the football patten is still intact.
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(19.26) Definitely undercooked in the middle.  I have scooped out as much as I dare and popped the cake back in the tin an in the oven for a while (and yes, I did take out the pins first)

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(19:54) The cake cannot be saved. RIP cake....and on to the next one.  I've made the mixture again but used 250g of butter rather than 400g before (no idea where I got 400g from!)
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I re- made the cake and it was still hard to get cooked in the middle.  I let it cool, iced over with buttercream and left it in the fridge to finish tomorrow.  Big Sigh!
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(21:47 - the next day) I got home about 17:30 today and have finally finished.









Cake Covering


There a few different types of icing that I can use.

Butter cream made by mixing butter and icing sugar with some flavouring and colouring.

Swiss meringue butter cream made with caster sugar melted in egg white with butter then beaten in.  It makes a very melt in the mouth version of the standard butter cream

Fondant icing hardens, but doesn’t go completed hard.  It is used to cover cakes and can also be used on cupcakes.  You can colour fondant or paint it with food colourings.

Royal icing goes really hard (think wedding cakes) and is for any features that need to be strong 3D shapes.

Cream cheese frosting is not one I fancy, but it’s made with cream cheese, icing sugar and lemon juice so this is a lower fat version.

Chocolate ganache is made by mixing cream and melted chocolate. 

Toffee topping made with butter, condensed milk, caster sugar and golden syrup.

Lemon crunch is made by sprinkling sugar over the cakes when they are fresh from the oven and then sprinkling on some lemon juice.

Ideas with Fondant & Royal Icing

Fondant can be used in several ways, coloured, painted, shaped. For example you could have the England flag painted on a white piece on fondant, or have a cross made out of red fondant and white fondant.

You can make simple flowers, animal faces, hearts, numbers etc, which can personalise the cupcakes to the receiver (birthday, Christmas etc)

Royal icing goes hard and isn’t that nice to eat (in my opinion it tastes like a hard chunk of sugar) but it’s ideal for making decorations that can be removed from the cake. 

For example:

Flowers (not the simple kind)
3D Butterflies
Simple shapes (hearts, dice, and numbers)

Chocolate, marzipan and sugar paste are also options for making shapes out of, but I’m not that brave yet.

Colours


You can have coloured butter icing and coloured fondant.


You can even have cupcakes with multiple coloured toppings


 

Or made up to look like animals


Saturday, 20 August 2011

Peppa Pig Cake # 1

I needed an another excuse to make a cake and that came along in the shape of my friends sons, both of whom had birthdays the following months.  I offered to make each a cake and it was decided that the youngest wanted Peppa Pig and the eldest liked football.

As before with the Blazer, I cut the Peppa Pig shapes out of baking paper and cut the pieces out of fondant that I had coloured. The pig came out a very dark pink and the arms are far too long, but I was pleased with the outcome.  I added a little lemon flavour to the cake and in my opinion this is much nicer than vanilla. 

Cakes I've Made in the Past

Before the days when I would just buy a heart shaped tin





The mini cupcakes made this impossible to cut nicely

Not easy to cut into equal sections


Friday, 19 August 2011

My First Cake

The baking was starting to get a hold of me; I wanted to bake, all I needed was a good excuse.  This is why my mum, my daughter and my mum's neighbour come in to the story.  My eldest daughter is just about to start secondary school and her uniform was/is mega expensive.  The blazer alone cost £25.00.  But one day my mum phoned and said that her neighbour daughter had grown out of hers and was offering it to us for free.  My mum suggested that I bake her a cake (I suspect that she meant this in a jokey way, but it sparked my imagination.

I could see the cake in my head, a fondant school blazer on top and I wanted wanted wanted to make it.  I didn't have all the ingredients for the cake, so I started with the blazer.  I had a little dark blue fondant already so it copied a photo from the internet which was the right size and cut the separate bits out.  It was tricky cutting the bits out and the cuts looks untidy.  I rounded the corners with my fingers and stuck the bits together with water and used a the icing pipe to add the white bits.(this was hard as I used the icing sugar/water variety of icing) Then in the fridge it went ready for the next day.

My fondant blazer
I remembered tips from the internet, such and rubbing butter on the tin and then covering it in flour to stop the cake cooking so I was pretty sure this cake would be fabulous.

When the cake came out it hadn't risen very well, but that's been a problem with all the cakes I've ever made but I wasn't worried.  I was careful not to open the oven while the cake was in the first half of it's cooking time, so I knew that this was not what was stopping my cake from rising. It had to be the recipe and I could always find a better one.

I ran a long metal spatula around the edge of the cake to loosen it and tipped it out on the cooking rack. The top half of the cake fell out and the bottom half stayed in the tin.  Cursing I got the rest of the cake out and left it to cool.  Maybe half an hour later it was still warmish, but no longer hot, so I started on the butter icing.

This bit was easy, although I did gets a few lumps in the icing and my electric whisk blew icing sugar all over me and my kitchen.  

By then the cake had cooled a little so I grabbed a bread knife to cut it in half so I could fill it with butter cream and jam.  This was a little messy, what with the cake already being in several pieces.  As I lifted the top piece off, it too broke in half, leaving me with a bottom half that was missing a bit of it's side and a top in two sections. I slapped it all together with butter cream and jam and then cemented the sides all back in place; it was a little lumpy but would do.

The icing ripped as I put it over the top, but I poked it into place, piped a  little butter icing around the edge and my first cake was done.

Apparently it tasted very nice, but I have no actual proof of that.



The finished cake