Chocolate, caramel coffe cupcakes with toffee topping

A whole mouth full, all in one. They’re PERFECT! You know when you bake something, and when you taste it you can barely believe you made it yourself that’s how nice it tastes? Making the cupcakes from this recipe was one of those times. Wauw, I must’ve gotten really lucky!



So basically, I felt like baking, especially using a new silicone cupcakemold my mom bought for me. It’s one day to halloween so the autumn-feeling fits. I regret not being able to make much for halloween or doing anything at all for it. But when you have no one to celebrate it with it gets kind of boring quite fast. I can’t exactly remember where I got the idea but I wanted to make coffee cupcakes or pudding or make carrotcake. Somehow it fitted the autumn perhaps? Just like the pumpkinbread or cake I still want to make! Anyway, it ended up with chocolate as well. The coffee I used had a caramel taste, so I got that was well. Then I tried making a toffee topping, and hell, you got yourself a damned long title. So let’s get to the recipe!



Ingredients:
225 gram selfraising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon cocao
225 gram (unsalted) butter
225 grams brown castersugar
4 eggs
3 spoons instant coffee (or two 1-cup packages)

1. Start off with preparing our instant coffee. Dumb two packages, or 3 spoons, in a cup and add about 2-3 spoons of boiling water and stir it a little. Leave it to cool a bit.
2. Weigh the dry ingredients: the flour, baking powder and cocao and sift them into a bowl.
3. In a seperate, larger bowl mix the butter with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add the caster sugar then mix again until the sugar is nicely mixed in.
4. In ANOTHER small bowl, break the four eggs and beat them slightly. Add these eggs to the butter in about 4 additions and mix everything until it is nicely mixed in.
5. Now add the dry ingredients in several additions and mix well between each addition.
6. Preheat the oven at this point to 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Don’t forget to use cupcakecups or butter and/or line a tin and fill the tin for about 3/4. Leave it in the oven for about 15-20 minutes and your cupcakes should be perfect!

I noticed this recipe takes a lot of bowls and a lot of mixing. I just realised all recipes are like that. A complete disaster for my kitchen and very environmental unfriendly that is!
Pretty standard recipe don’t you think? I imagine if you don’t like any kind of coffee you can replace the last bit with instant chocolate milk or just milk or instant ice tea or instant banana smoothie. Then again, the last two sound kind of odd, but chocolate and banana is not a wrong combination either.
And now for the toffee topping which I used on 6 cupakes!



Ingredients:
15 toffee/fudge candies
1/4 cup of milk

1. Just add this together in a pan and doubleboil it. It might take a pretty long while before it is melted though!
Do make sure you have a nice kind of toffee candy for this, because what I made just tasted plain chemical. The fact that my sister still really liked it just means she has no taste. Update: appearantly I was the only one that thought it tasted chemical. Maybe there's something wrong with my taste? -the world ends here-
I hope you’ve enjoyed!

Happy cakes with butter icing

I lost some of the picks! Can you believe it!? Horrid! But they still look really colourful on the picture. I like them, might get my mom to get some more.
Anyway, about the cakes! I’ve used a recipe I posted before. Honey cupcakes are just real easy to make and somehow they’ve only turned out well, so I just used this again. Plus there’s no need for millions basic cake recipes. The butter icing I’ve posted before as well, but hell, here I’m posting it again and I’ve changed it anyway. I’ve improved quite a bit with making this créme so I’m saying its worth it as well. Plus, I now have a new piping set, consisting of plastic bags and about 5 tips. I used a massive “drop flower tip 2D” for making this, for anyone who’s interested.



Ingredients Improved butter icing:
75 gram (unsalted) butter
250 grams powdered sugar or icing
Colouring/flavouring

1. Well, mix? With an electric mixer? We’ll be fine that way!

Ah, love recipes that only include mixing. Makes life so much easier. You can’t imagine how much work some of the icings are! Anyway, there you have it! Lovely icing! You can use on anything and everything and it’s easy and just lovely!
Ah, this recipe is not fatfree mind! Not quite caloriefree either. But nice. Real nice.

And it looks fun right? With my special colour dust spray! And picks, of which I’ve lost some. Yes! Hopefully you enjoyed and I’ll make sure to post again soon!




Look at the mess!! Getting the icing in a piping bag is hell!

Whipped cream cake (with fatfree spongecake)

Admittedly I really dislike whipped cream cakes. Somehow the chemical, oversweet whipped cream cakes you buy in shops make me feel unwell after eating a piece. Maybe it’s true that everything homemade tastes a lot better, because I was quite impressed with my version! I used fruit from a can to give it some extra taste. The fruits were probably the only healthy thing about this cake, and even then they were soaked in syrup!



The spongecake I used is one of the easiest ones and needs the least ingredients. Also, because it doesn’t need any butter, it is fatfree. Because of this though, you can’t keep it well for too long. Note that if you use this spongecake for Swiss rolls or flatcakes, the baking time will be about half. Also you will have to fill and roll as soon as the cake is cool enough to touch, in stead of leaving it to cool for longer.

Ingredients spongecake:
4 large eggs
½ cup caster sugar (115 gram)
1 cup flour (115 gram)

1. Beat the eggs together with an electric mixer till you have a white and fluffy mixture. Add the sugar spoon by spoon until all is well mixed and you have a creamy, airy mixture.
2. Sift the flour and add it to the eggmixture and carefully fold it in (or just mix it in like I like tend to do).
3. Preheat the over to 180 degrees Celsius (or 350 degrees Fahrenheit) and bake the cake for about 15-20 minutes or when the top turns golden brown and a skewer comes out dry. Leave to cool and cut in half with a skewed knife so we can go to the filling!


Look at that batter! I could eat it just like that!

Ingredients whipped cream filling:
500 ml whipping cream
granulated sugar

1. Whip the whipping cream until stiff and add the granulated sugar spoon by spoon until you decide its sweet enough. You can also add colourings, essences, liquors at this point, or completely leave everything including sugar out.

After you’ve spread the whipped cream filling between and all around the cake you can add nougatine like I did. I left the cake on the bottom of the caketin for this, and held it in the air above a bowl. I filled the bowl with nougatine. I ook little hands full and pressed it to the side of the cake. It takes some time and your arm will get sore of holding a cake up plus you can’t press to hard or it won’t look nice, but my cake did in the end so I think it was worth it.
Well what do you think? I think it looks rather professional. Perhaps fruit from a can wasn’t the best choise and I shouldve gone for fresh instead. Especially since the whipped cream doesn’t last either and the whipped cream seems to suck up the juice and change colour. Other than that, it still tasted quite fine and the rest of the family loved it as well. They even thought it looked professional!

Baked pineapple with almonds & honey

Even the most simple dishes need a recipe sometimes. How else are you going to come up with some of these things? Baked pineapple with almonds & honey is, well, baked pineapple, with honey and almonds. There’s really nothing more to it. I found a recipe in a new cooking book I got, and it was called ‘Abricots with honey out of the oven’. These were, abricots, with honey poored over them, almonds on top (I think they should have mentioned this in the title), and then baked in the oven. It seems way to simple to devote two pages of a recipes book to. But then again, I wouldn’t have come up with it unless I saw a picture with such an imaginative title.
The recipe for the baked abricots also metion sprinkling some cinnamon or nutmeg over them. I could of course say I purposefully left this out on my pineapples, but I really just forgot. I didn’t bother looking at the book for such a recipe. The pineapples tasted quite fine and I got approval of my family. I wouldn’t know what it would taste like with cinnamon or nutmeg over it, but feel free to try!


Can you see the heart in the back??!

Ingredients:
Canned pineapple
Almond slices
Honey

1. Let the pineapple-juice leak from the pineapple and put the rings on a baking sheet.
2. Sprinkle the almond slices over the pineapple rings and drop the honey over that. If you have a squirting bottle like I did you can drench it over pineapple rings.
3. Preheat the oven to 150-200 degrees Celsius (300-390 Fahrenheit) and bake the pineapples for about 6-12 minutes until the almonds are golden brown. When done, put the rings on a nice plate and serve!

I told you it’s easy right? It's really nice to serve with some ice cream as well. You can really make this look pretty on a plate! I tried to make the pictures look nice again this time. Hopefully you like them!



A glass of pineapple juice to go with it, my dear?