Hey everyone! Sorry I’ve been MIA for awhile. I’ve been soo busy with work, church, apple picking and of course baking. I thought I’d take a bit of time to do some blogging

I couldn’t think of what to do for my bf for Valentine’s day… Since at the time, his V-day gift to me was a surprise, I had to come up with something romantic. I figured that since I love baking, and there are so many cute V-day themed bakeables, that I should bake something sweet. I also got the chance to use my cupcake shaped cookie cutter for the first time! I ended up baking him a bunch of basic sugar cookies decorated with royal icing

Sugar Cookies (adapted from a bunch of sources, you will see this one everywhere)
3 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup caster sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract

Cream together butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla. Add flour+baking powder cup by cup until you have a crumbly dough. Refrigerate for about half an hour (makes it easier to roll out). Roll out, cut into shapes and bake for about 15 minutes at 150-160 degrees Celsius or until a pale creamy light golden colour (don’t underbake!) Cool completely and decorate.

For the frosting for this, I simply used a mixture of royal icing powder and lemon juice, then used Wilton paste dyes to colour it.

I loved making these, sooo cute!

This cupcake shape crumbled a bit on the side when I took it off the baking sheet, so I took the opportunity to make it “interesting” haha.

I also made some pale pink hearts with sprinkles.

Then experimented with some bow ties and polka dots.

In fact, I made so many that I bundled them up and took them to the office!

You can buy (quite large) cupcake shaped cookie cutters from Alfresco Emporium (I bought mine from Cherrybrook) for $9.95

Enjoy! xoxo

Christine

This my new favorite frosting. If you haven’t tried the wonderful thing that is Swiss Meringue Buttercream, then please, please give this a try. It is sooo deliciously softly silky smooth with the most wonderful texture. Another thing about this lovely frosting is that it has only three ingredients (not counting colours and flavour of course.) You only need egg whites, granulated sugar (just regular ole sugar, no need for any of this fancy icing or caster sugar, nooo siree!)

If you get, the time I highly recommend Dyann Bake’s youtube video tutorial, it really helped me out a lot.

Ingredients  for one batch of SMBC

This is enough frosting to ice and fill one cake, or to make a ruffle cake – (keep in mind that those cakes require a lot frosting than usual to do the piped ruffles).

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup butter

Take butter out of the fridge and cut it up into cubes while it is still cold (easier to cut up) and leave it on a plate to get to room temperature. You will want to introduce the butter to the frosting in a gradual manner, but it also needs to be soft at room temperature so that it incorporates smoothly and will not give you any lumps of cold butter.

In a clean glass or metal bowl, place your room-temp egg whites and whisk briskly with a pinch of salt (if you want. I mean you don’t really have to. It’s just what Dyann Bakes says to do. I’m not sure if it really makes a discernable difference, but it makes not much difference to me, so I do it anyway.

Whisk in sugar until the egg whites and sugar are thoroughly combined. Place bowl over a pot of simmering water and whisk vigorously for about 5 minutes, or until the sugar has completely dissolved.

Take the bowl off the heat and whip with a hand or stand mixer for another 5-7 minutes or until you reach stiff peaks. At the end of the stiff peaks, the bowl should no longer be hot (so that it doesn’t melt the butter when you incorporate it.) Here’s a handy note – this is essentially Seven Minute Frosting which could be used to frost a cake straight away if that tickles your fancy. I however, prefer the addition of butter for the Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

Have your room temperature butter cut up into pieces on hand as you will need to gradually add it into the frosting slowly.

About every 10 seconds or so, drop in a lump of butter until all the butter has smoothly incorporated into the frosting.

Tint and colour your frosting. I used Wilton’s pink paste here and some vanilla extract goes simply divine in this! Note : For some reason (for me, i’m not sure if this applies to other makers-of-SMBC;) my frosting seemed to develop the colours later on in the day. E.g. I added quite a bit of paste into this frosting because it didn’t seem to affect the colour too much, but later when I came back, it had turned a deep reddish colour (instead of the pale pink I was aiming for). So if this is the same for you, add a tiny bit of colour but don’t freak out if it doesn’t go the colour you want it to – let it stand in the fridge for an hour or so and it should be the colour you’re after. I also tried using a batch of SMBC the day ater I had made it and it tinted just fine straight away… Weird much?

See, it’s a very pale pink? I had actually used an insane amount of colouring in this.

Later on, the frosting looked like this ; (this pic also gives a good idea of how beautifully this frosting pipes. Keeps its shape soooo well. Also crusts, which I like).

Weird, huh? At least I’ve figured out a happ(ier) medium now anyway. I have used this frosting so far with brownie cupcakes and also on my ruffle cake with perfect results.

Enjoy this gorgeous frosting! I will never look back to butter-milk-icing sugar as my go-to frosting!!

xoxo

Christine

This was a birthday cake for two twin boys from my church who were celebrating their first birthday. I had a bit of time to decide on what I could do for it and Mum suggested something beachy, so I set upon google to do some research. One of the cakes that I like the most was from this blog here. It looked pretty simple but effective, so I decided to go along with something similar. I still think that this original design was a lot better than mine, mine was a bit too ‘noisy’ and seemed a bit crowded, but hey, first attempt. We’re all friends here after all.. Right? Right?

Here’s what you will need for one beach cake.
One cooled sheet cake (I chose chocolate)
1 bag of Tiny Teddies
1 roll of lifesavers
some coloured fondant (you can do this yourself or buy pre-dyed)
paper umbrellas
brown sugar
candle/s

One batch of Swiss Meringue Buttercream (or an alternative amount of the buttercream of your choice. SMBC is my new fave.)
4 egg whites
1 cup of granulated sugar
1.5 cups of butter
a pinch of salt

Whisk egg whites briskly with a pinch of salt and then add in granulated sugar. Whisk to combine. Place bowl over simmering water and whisk continuously for about 4-5 minutes or until sugar has dissolved (which will ensure that the egg whites have pasteurised  ; in other words, salmonella free! hooray!) Whip egg whites with an electric mixer (or hand mixer as I used) for about 4-5 minutes or until stiff peaks have formed. By this time, your bowl should be cool to the touch. While the beaters are mixing, gradually add in cut up butter (room temperature) until your bowl becomes magically filled with creamy, dreamy swiss meringue buttercream. it is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

This cake was freakishly easier than I thought it would be and took about half an hour or less to assemble.

Ok so start out with your cooled, unadorned cake. When I started out with my cake decorating, I would often bake the cake on the day of the decorating. I’ve found its a lot easier to do it the day or the night before – less freaking out and the cake is nice and cool and won’t melt your frosting.

Start applying your buttercream icing. Since there was going to be quite a lot of frosting and other decorations on the cake, I didn’t bother to apply a crumb coat as I usually would and it turned out fine. Using a tablespoon, apply your frosting in globs and smooth them out with a spatula.

Smooth out the frosting on the cake.

Using your spatula, push the blue frosting towards the middle of the cake to create a ripply/wave-like effect.

Now is the fun part – adding all the extra details.
I added some fondant details – a starfish, a surfboard, some fish and a beach ball.

This was all a bit fiddly and was like playing with not-as-pliable play dough. For the beach ball, I made a small ball out of blue fondant and then made balls of fondant (same size) in blue and green, then cut out sections (about a sixth of the ball) then replaced each section with different colours by cutting sixth sections from the other colours. Then I added a small red top to each side of the finished beach ball with red fondant (using the tip of plain icing tip to cut out the small circle).

For the surfboard, I just used a knife to cut the fondant into the shape of a surfboard and used my fingers to try and shape it as much as possible. For the starfish, I used the smallest star shaped cookie cutter I had and used it to cut out a very thick piece of rolled fondant and then moulded it into the shape of a star fish. The fish .. well I won’t even bother to explain the fish as I think it was a rather poor effort – or at least one that could be improved greatly!

There were bears covering each other with sand.

Bears making a sand castle.

This was a very easy cake to make – made a lot easier having pre-made bears, lifesavers and paper umbrellas to help make it look authentic without any extra work for me. The sand also looked great and required no extra work either – hurray for brown sugar looking so much like sand.. I was tempted to add some blue piping gel to the waves to make it look a bit more authentic but I ran out of time (I swear I spend more time washing up than actually making the cake haha) but I think it looked fine. Would definitely make this again if I had the opportunity – give it a try! Looks pretty good and is a great beginner cake

xoxo

Christine