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Wedding Morning Tea Cakes

Wedding Morning Tea Cakes

One of the ladies in Mum’s staffroom is getting married this weekend, so I made some suitably simply elegant cupcakes for the staffroom morning tea.

The chocolate cake recipe is from The Australian Woman’s Weekly cupcakes book

Double Chocolate Mud Cake
60g dark chocolate coarsely chopped
160ml water
90g butter, softened
220g soft brown sugar
2 eggs
100g SR flour
2 tbsp cocoa
40g almond meal

Preheat oven to 170°C (150°C fan forced). Line a standard 12 hole muffin tin with patty pans.
In a double boiler melt the chocolate in the water, stirring till smooth. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs. Sift in the remaining dry ingredients and the chocolate mixture, stirring till smooth. That is it. Then it is just a matter of dividing the mixture evenly between the 12 pans (I used a pastry bag as the mixture is quite runny) and cook for about 20 minutes.

Once they are cooled it is time to decorate.
I warmed some blackberry jam to use as the “glue” and coloured the white fondant to a very pale pink. On a well dusted silicone mat, I rolled the fondant out nice and thin, then pressed a Fiskars Texture Plate into the fondant to make it “all pretty” on top.

Place in a container and every so often open the lid a fraction and inhale the chocolate. Or you could just eat one 🙂

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Star Cakes

Wednesday at work I was pretty certain we had a birthday so I made some little cakes, if there wasn’t a birthday we would just have a nice morning tea, turns out that one of the girls did have a birthday so I was right after all.
This is what I made 🙂
Star Cakes

The cakes were lime buttercake which was really really really good. very very limey, every time I opened the container I would get this big lime hit 🙂

Lime Buttercake
This made 11 smallish cakes in a standard 12 hole muffin pan. In the future I would multiply the recipe by 1.5 to get 12 decent sized cakes.

90g butter, softened
90g cream cheese, softened
zest of 1 lime or an orange or a lemon or a grapefruit etc.
150g caster sugar
2 eggs
50g self raising flour
75g plain flour

Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan forced) and line a 12 hole muffin pan with patty pans.
Cream butter, cream cheese and sugar together till pale and light. Beat in eggs and zest, then beat in the flours till just combined. Divide the mixture amongst the patty pans and smooth down the mixture as best as you can. Bake for 15 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

To ice.
This was my first time playing with fondant icing and I quite enjoyed it. I was using readymade fondant icing so all I had do to is knead the colour in and roll it out. I do plan to have a play with making my own fondant sometime but not now.
What I did.
Warm some jam till runny and keep over a bowl/saucepan to keep it warm.
On a silicon mat or a bench top dusted with icing sugar, knead a portion of fondant till smooth, flatten fondant out into a pizza and with a toothpick dipped in food dye, prick the surface of the fondant repeatedly. Fold the fondant up and knead again till the colour is evenly distributed. You will have to do this a few times till you get the colour you desire. Roll out icing to about a 5mm thickness. Next comes the hard bit you need to find a circle cutter which is the same size as the tops of your cakes. My circle biscuit cutter was too small, next I tried a glass – too big, then I grabbed a Nalgene container, and it was the perfect size. Using your circle cutter cut out fondant rounds. Brush a cake top with the warmed jam, lift a fondant circle onto the top of the cake and smooth down. Repeat till all cakes are iced. To add the stars it is the same idea, cut out fondant, brush star with a little jam and adhere to the the fondant topped cake. Push a cachous on top and you are done 🙂