The Chocolate Factory

"Who can take the sunrise, sprinkle it with dew
Cover it in chocolate and a miracle or two"
- Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory

50 chocolate cupcakes that got sold out at MIL's school today!

Epic

…. FAIL!!! My intentions were good, my vision…set in stone. A sprinkling of common sense was really what was lacking.

I had my head in the clouds for quite some time before my husband’s 30^th birthday. Dead broke, I thought I’d bake him the cake of his dreams. Some dream that turned out to be.

Procrastination, the motherload of all sins got me. I put off every single thing until 4 hours before the birthday family gathering. And then the other motherload of all that it’s cracked up to be, panic, set in. I could’ve done with some ‘last minute- examination- quickly grasping half theorems’ panic… but obviously nothing useful was going to happen to me on that day. Instead I got a case of the useless nerves that just had me running around being counterproductive.

It’s supposed to be the sky, with a biplane flying through the clouds. Yeah… takes a whole lot of imagination.

Those white blobs… *shuffling feet and staring at the floor, super embarrassed* … are cake pop clouds.

Changes in photography angles weren't going to do the cake any favours either. 

My saving grace? The cake (considering all the drama) was pretty good to eat.

And… I did Google motherload. It apparently means something else. 

Keep Calm...

...and have a cupcake. Technically, a mini cupcake.

These were made last October for the Harvest Festival at our church.

The cupcakes were chocolate with buttercream frosting.

King of the Jungle

So, we celebrated my boss’ birthday at office last December… (Let’s just pretend that I didn’t have to look that up on his Facebook page). Here’s the cake I made for our King of the digital-marketing-and-social-media Jungle.  Actually Junglees would be more accurate… King of the Junglees.

This was my first attempt at butter-cream frosting a design other than Rose cakes. Be kind.

P.R.E.C.I.O.U.S

There is just one little girl in this world who I would do anything for. Just an itsy bitsy thing who makes my heart melt every time she says “aa-aaunty”. My niece, Shruthi, celebrated her 4^th birthday this October.

She loves twirling around in poofy dresses till she’s dizzy! So my sister decided that Shruthi would enjoy a ballerina themed party. Here are some details!

I really wanted to try the ‘Rose Cake’ in a light pink shade with the new Americolor food colours a friend brought from the US for me. So I used this opportunity and made one.

The ‘ballerina’ unfortunately didn’t come out as well as I'd hoped. I piped it out with melted white chocolate and dusted it with silver luster dust from Wilton. Though it didn’t look great, it was delicious! Obviously! It’s chocolate!

My sister made a gorgeous cupcake stand. Unfortunately we didn’t get any pictures of just the stand.

The cupcake toppers and birthday banner is TomKat Studio inspired! I downloaded some of her free templates and changed them around to suit the ballerina theme.

I used some of the remaining toppers on straws for the kids. Also in the last minute I came across some party hats in pink. The kids loved them!

We found some white paper bags for party favours for the kids. The silhouette was my sister's idea. So pretty!

The cake was chocolate with buttercream frosting.

Shruthi loved her cake…

...and all the presents!

Easter Eggs

I was absolutely blown away by a bird nest tutorial I found on iambaker’s blog. With four kids I’d just be mad and NOT baking amazing goodies and blogging about it. I’m pretty much stark raving crazy without even so much as a pet to care for.

It looked so good that I decided to ape it. I’m not a very inspired human being as I sometimes fake people into believing me to be.

I used the cookie dough recipe and tutorial for the nest, but wanted to make cake pops as the eggs. These were a disaster as I experimented with a different kind of chocolate that didn’t work too well. The end result of both the nest and eggs were pretty clumsy… but fortunately most of it was covered in chocolate. When there’s chocolate involved it makes everything look better... it impairs vision and judgement and makes your brain one big mush of joy. You look at the world through rose tinted glasses. That’s strangely beginning to sound like an illegal drug… but really… chocolate makes the world so much easier to live in.

I packed and gave them away to my parents, sister’s family, in-laws and a couple of friends… all the people who’ll take the worst thing I could cook up and find something to appreciate. Awesome strategy I say! And I know you’re reading this and nodding to yourself cause you’ve done it a million times too. Yeah… you, giggling behind your computer monitor. Rascally rabbit!

Here they are, all prettily packaged disguising the too-many-to-be-named flaws.

Cake Pops... At last!

I read Bakerella's blog religiously and dream of making (and eating) those wonderful little things called Cake Pops. My excuse was that I didn't have most ingredients. I finally decided to try it anyway... and I'm so pleased that I did. They aren't perfect but they taste awesome!!!

This little doggie's ears are just a couple of Kellog's choco flakes. For the nose I bought Cadbury's Gems... those colourful ones and peeled off the candy coating... like I loved to do as a kid. The eyes and mouth are drawn on with edible ink sketches that a friend brought from the US. But for some reason they weren't writing well on chocolate. And yeah, I used microwave melted Milky bars for the white coating and not candy melt or even cooking chocolate.

I had asked my sister to buy me a few mini cupcake liners from the US. What I didn't realize then was that I didn't have a mini cupcake baking tray. I was looking for an alternative use for them and found inspiration on the internet. How I wish I had discovered these before my SIL's baby shower!

These came out ok for an experiment I guess. Next time round definitely got to give attention to detail, cleaner lines and finish.

Happy Birthday Mommy!

Mum asked me to bake a cake. Honestly! I might have not too subtly suggested that I want to bake one for her… but she asked me anyway. And I was super happy to try! I had so many ideas running through my mind and I showed my husband a few million sketches of the cake and I’m sure he had his doubts about having married me. Anyways, in the end I shot down all my far-fetched ‘Ultimate Cake Off’ ideas and settled for a super simple cake that looked more wedding-y than I liked. But it tasted awesome and was all gone in 2 days!

This is the cake in action…

And here’s a section of the cake…

And here’s why I think its super wedding-y…. white with red roses and silver dragees? Really?

The cake is the Best Chocolate Cake Ever from I am Baker. (Just realized that it's just the 'Best Chocolate Cake' and 'Ever' has been my own subconscious appendage.) The frosting is butter cream and the stripe technique I’ve used is also from I am Baker, though hers is SO much better.

The red ribbon and red roses are made from Marshmallow Fondant and taste yuck! I used way too much powder food colouring. My sister says it’s actually not colour but weird powder flavouring that I’ve used. We threw out all the roses but a bit of the ribbon did get eaten. It had a sort of sourness that did taste strangely nice against the sweetness of the frosting. But only strangely so!

To make the roses I followed a fondant ribbon rose tutorial on Youtube. There are so many of them and they're all pretty much the same. 

A huge blunder I made was that I decided to grind my own granulated sugar and make it icing sugar. It didn’t have the smoothness that comes with store bought icing sugar and so the roses began to crack and I had to quickly refrigerate them to get them firm. Can you see them breaking away in the picture below? Well… live and learn!

And finally that gratifying picture of the cake safely tucked away in the refrigerator after hours of slaving over it.

All you need is love

… and a whole lot of cake! Seriously. How could you go wrong with cake right? And chocolate? I baked a chocolate cake for my husband’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. Yeah. AND. His birthday is Valentine’s Day. He’s lover boy… the real deal. What can I say?

Since I’ve been baking quite a bit since Christmas I mustered me some courage and baked me a cake - frosting and all. I did get a whole lot of help from the internet… blogs specifically. Blogs are so much better than some random website that was among the first of millions of an even more random keyword search. You at least know some real person somewhere tried it and failed or succeeded. So without any further ado….. drum rolls please… here’s the cake!!!

It’s a Chocolate cake with butter cream frosting and a marshmallow fondant train cake topper.

The recipe for the Best Chocolate Cake is from I am baker. It really is the Best Chocolate Cake. EVER! Moist and chocolate and with that lovely kick of coffee.

The butter cream frosting is just that. I followed instructions on the back of the Weikfield icing sugar pack from the store. It maybe a little too sweet for some, but it's perfect for this cake.

100 gms/ 1 pack Weikfield icing sugar

50 gms butter

1 – 2 tsps milk

A few drops of vanilla essence

The cake needs to be crumb coated before you put on the icing. I Googled crumb coating and followed some video on You Tube. All videos are pretty much the same. So I guess it must be practice that makes it look so easy. Cause my crumb coating was pretty unimpressive and the entire layer of icing got speckled with chocolate crumbs. See?

The train cake topper was too much fun. The design instructions are from Cake Journal. The tutorial uses gum paste as the core ingredient for the train. But I have no idea what that is or where to buy it. And fondant isn't sold in stores in Chennai  (or stores that I know of) and the ingredients to make fondant aren't available here either. I came across something called Marshmallow Fondant and so I substituted that for the gum paste.

Marshmallow fondant has so many versions, most using corn syrup and cream of tartar… and I don’t know what both those are. So I just opted for a recipe that doesn’t use those ingredients. Here’s the YouTube video I used to make the MM fondant. Crisco I think is vegetable shortening. So I substituted that with vanaspathi.

Microwav-ed melted marshmallows are the stickiest substance on earth. I have no comparison to make. Imagine strong hardware adhesives all together in one big mix… and imagine it 1000 times more gooey. That’s melted marshallows for you. It sticks EVERYWHERE. And all the vanaspathi in the world wouldn’t seem enough when you got that mix on your hands. And it’s just so hard to knead together.

I also couldn’t get liquid food colouring and had to use the powdered version and that made it more difficult to colour the fondant. Want to hear another funny story? I couldn’t get any white marshmallows. I only got pink ones. So all the fondant was a bright pink and I had to use a whole lot of colour to get the shades I wanted. The end product tasted a little weird cause of all the colouring… but it’s totally edible and my husband’s verdict is that it isn’t too bad. Why would I want to argue with that? 

The birthday banner is my own version of what I found on The TomKat Studio. I had some coloured paper lying around. I cut out those little triangles and wrote on the alphabets with silver glitter glue and strung them on some regular twine. The straws are just rolled up colour paper, Scotch taped in place. 

The remaining cake's now sitting in our refrigerator and gets nibbled on each time we open the door. 

And finally, the cake stand and picture frame are from Lifestyle. What picture frame? This one. 

Husband, chocolate cake and the Beatles equals one very happy me! Not necessarily in that order ;)

Baking Frenzy

Blame the light posting on my blog to baking. Mum and I are obsessed. Dad and my husband aren’t helping with their insatiable appetites either.

With my sister’s help, mum rediscovered an old recipe we loved as kids. Banana bread! (Or banana pound cake). Just can’t get enough of it!

Apple Pie!

I know I’m supposed to blog about paper crafts and photo frames, but can’t seem to get food off my mind! Mum and I haven’t yet recovered from Christmas and so the baking continues… until we get bored of it or run out of unsalted butter.

We made an apple pie yesterday (actually mum made it while I pranced around intoxicated with the wonderful smells of nutmeg, cinnamon and apples). Everything in the world just looks and feels so much better with apple pie. This is mum’s apple pie…

She normally gives me the left over pie crust dough to make dad and me some diabetic tasting ‘diamond cuts’. But this time around she also had some leftover powdered spices that we just couldn't bear to discard. So we grated up an apple and I made myself some mini apple pies in our tart tins.

 I heart thee apple pie!

Small Doses of Happiness

So I finally made those cupcakes that I’ve been dreaming forever of making. Despite all those lovely recipes online and in magazines, I chose to use my mum’s age old trusted Brownie recipe from her completely falling apart, 30 year old ‘What’s cooking in Bangalore?’ recipe book.  And of course I needed to get a little help from her too ;)

Here’s how they turned out. 

I found that reindeer cupcake topper at a local store selling Christmas décor and it was stock piled with all the other decorations.  Six pieces for Rs. 26 - YAY!!! 

I think they’re actually fruit/ food picks, but works well this way don’t you think?

See that book falling apart? Thirty years of being cooked and spilled over does that.

Cupcakes!

The thought of cupcakes make me happy! I read Bakerella’s blog and drool thinking of cupcakes. But they aren’t so popular here in India. Or are they? The only ‘cupcakish’ food I’ve come across are chocolate muffins and the plain sponge cake variety. Someone had put up a cupcake link on Facebook and that got me so excited. But it all looked pretty disappointing mainly because everything looked so fluorescent. I only hope it tasted better than it looked.

I remain undeterred though and have decided to make myself some cupcakes this Christmas. I plan to try Bakerella’s S’more Cupcakes. I could probably opt for something simpler as this would be my first try at cupcakes… but what’s trying if you’re unwilling to go the distance. So I went the distance and even bought myself some very pretty cupcake liners from Sweet Estelle’s Baking Supply on Etsy to inspire me.

Here’s hoping that this Christmas my cupcake dreams come true!