FINALLY!!! Oh I've missed you! Seems my blogger is finally working again, so here are the pics of the Lavender Cupcakes.

Winnie is a ruthless cake hunter. She's like Dog the bounty hunter, except more feline...

xoxox

Raspberry Clouds

Well, if you have been reading my blog then you know about my lemonade cake challenge. My offering is a raspberry&cloudy lemonade cupcake. I've named it Raspberry Cloud not just because of the fact that it has raspberries and cloudy lemonade in it, its because the batter is so light and fluffy its like having a lump of cloud in your mouth. Sooo yum! I'm so pleased with how they turned out and they are just the ultimate girly looking cupcake, so much so that I just had to stick a My Little Pony in the pictures; just had to...

makes approximately 26 cupcakes:

for the sponge:

• 2 cups of cloudy lemonade
• 3 cups of plain flour
• 1tbsp baking powder
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/3 tsp salt
• zest of 1 lemon
• 100g unsalted butter at room temperature
• 1 cup of fresh raspberries
• 1 1/4 cups of caster sugar
• 3 medium eggs
• 3/4 cup of butter milk

for the frosting

• 500g of cream cheese
• 3 tbsp of butter, at room temperature
• 2 cups of icing sugar
• zest of 1 lemon

optional extras

• lemon rings
• raspberries to decorate

1. first off, get you oven warming to 190'c and then line your cupcake tray with cupcake cases
2. next you need to start reducing your cloudy lemonade. put 2 cups of lemonade in a small pan and heat it till its bubbling. you want to keep it bubbling away slowly for around 20 minutes until it has more or less reduced by half and looks the tiniest bit thicker, it seams to ever so slightly coat the back of a spoon. when the syrups reduced, grate in the zest of 1 lemon and pop it to a side to cool off
3. while your lemonade is reducing you can be making your batter. take your butter and sugar and cream them together
4. sift together (twice please!) the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt
5. in a separate bowl or jug whisk together your eggs and milk and then your cooled lemonade syrup
6. in thirds, combine your egg mix and your dry flour mix into the butter. doing it in little stages helps to stop the milk and butter and eggs splitting
7. now take your cup of raspberries and pass them through a sieve into your batter. the easiest way of doing this i think, is to press them into the sieve with a spatular and this catches all the seeds in the sieve 
8. give the batter another mix to combine the raspberry puree and divide it between your cupcake cases. bake them for between 18-22 minutes depending on your oven. when they are finished baking, remove them from the oven and leave in the pan to cool for 10 minutes, after this remove them to a wire rack to cool fully
9. to make the frosting, cream your butter till it is as soft as you can get it and then mix this into your cream cheese and lemonade
10. sift in your icing sugar (at low level to reduce a mass cloud of icing dust) and then zest in your lemon. give it all a good stir together and you have your frosting
11. when the cupcakes are completely cool, serve them up with a dollop of frosting and a decorative little raspberry to top it off

xoxox

later on that night:

Ooohh my days!! I wasn't particularly optimistic about my lemonade cupcakes and was definitely  thinking that they were going to err towards the side of brick in a case BUT they are amazing. They are the lightest cakes I have ever made... here's a little pic to bide you over till I can type it up tomorrow...

xoxox

Just a little update. For one lovely, very beady eyed follower who spied my shopper bag in a previous posts picture, I thought i would put up a picture of it in all its amazing kawaii glory. I got it on my honeymoon in this amazing shop called Animation Addicts and if they had let me, I would have moved in. It was like heaven! I don't know if there big in America but we certainly don't get them here in England and this makes me beyond sad. To be fair its probably a good thing or the man would find himself wifeless and pennyless as i would have done a runner and spent all our savings on Sanrio luggage.

(being beautifully and skilfully modelled by the man) 

Another thing to update you on is the state of my noggin. It is finally looking good even though if my face in the picture is not...but hey ho, all in the name of blogging right?

(what could this woman ^^ mean?? my acting skills are second to none) 

I've washed and washed it and I think were there. Its exactly the colour that I imagined it would be when I dyed it. PLEASE STAY THIS COLOUR FOREVER!! 

xoxox

cooking kawaii

Here is treat one from my kawaii cooking series. I think they could genuinely be the best  cupcakes i have ever made... Sometimes when I make a cake, you can forgive a maybe not quite right frosting or a mildly bland crumb because it looks so good but these tiny monsters have both. They have the good looks and amazing taste to back it up! When I decided i wanted to take on the rainbow cakes, i was thinking about design and what would really compliment them and for some reason coconut came along and would not budge...I just had this vision of the tops looking like heavenly little clouds and then cutting into the cake to reveal this amazing rainbow interior. I am beyond proud of them so please, sit back and enjoy...dum,da,da,dum (that was ment to be a drumroll, kinda thing...But you got that yes??!!) 

Dreamy Rainbow Cupcakes.....

 makes 16

• for the cupcakes:
• 340g of unsalted butter at room temperature
• 2 cups of vanilla sugar
• 6 medium eggs at room temperature
• 2tsp vanilla extract
• 3 cups of plain flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp sea salt, crushed fine. (if you only have free flowing table salt then 1/4 tsp please!)
• 1 cup of milk
• 150g of desiccated coconut
• red, pink, yellow, green, blue and violet gel food colourings. (please invest in the gel ones the runny watery ones are bad and the gel ones will last you ten times longer too!) 

• for the frosting:
• 110g of cream cheese
• 85g of butter at room temperature
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 170g of icing sugar

• to decorate:
• 200g bag of desiccated coconut
• pearl lustre dust and candy stars (these are both optional)

1. pre heat your oven to 160 centigrade 
2. line your cupcake tray with the paper liners and put to one side
3. cream your butter and vanilla sugar together until they are fluffy and pale
4. into a separate bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. pretty please, sift twice,  it really helps to remove any lumps and gives you dreamy light flour
5. mix together your eggs, milk and vanilla extract in a jug
6. in 3 stages, add the egg and milk mixture and the the dry flour mix into your butter. adding them in these little stages stops the mixture from splitting and makes your batter more manageable. after each addition, give the bowl a good scraping down to really combine any lurking clumps of flour at the bottom
7. congratulate yourself on a job well done!
8. now fold in the desiccated coconut
9. now comes the slightly fiddly bit but stick with it its easy enough just only a little repetitive
10. split the mixture between six bowls, with the first bowl having the most batter then slowly getting slightly and slightly less in each bowl you fill
11. with the handle of a teaspoon (this being my weapon of choice) take a small amount of your red gel and mix it into the largest bowl of batter. Mix in your colour well until you have achieved a shade of red your happy with. Remember you can always add more gel colour but you can't take it away so be subtle with your additions
12. repeat stage 11 with each further colour till you have six different pots of coloured mix from red to violet
13. take your red batter and with a spoon, put a blob of the mix into the centre of you liner. it should come maybe a quarter of a way up the case. next move onto you pink. take just slightly less mix and drop this into the centre of the red. you need to be able to see a ring of red around the pink (its not an exact art and you don't get perfect circles but it all comes together when baked) continue with each colour using less and less batter with each addition 
14. bake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes. test they are cooked by sinking a cocktail stick into the middle. if it comes out clean, there done. if it's still wet, pop them back in for a few minutes. when the cakes are finished, take them out of the oven and leave them in the pan for 15 minutes before moving them to a wire rack to cool completely
15. while the cakes are baking you can get on with the icing
16. the butter needs to be at room temperature and you need to cream it until it is very smooth, as light as you can get it
17. add the vanilla and cream cheese to the butter and combine. I think the best way to do this is to push the cheese and butter through a mesh sieve. it gets rid of any lumps of butter and really amalgamates the mixture. it only takes a few minutes and is so worth doing. you should be left with a runny "icing"
18. sieve in the icing sugar and fold everything together
19. by now your cupcakes should be thoroughly cooled and resemble glorious rainbow hills
20. take your coconut and lustre dust and mix them together on a large plate so that the strands of coconut are gleaming with powder - a teaspoon of dust should be enough to cover this much coconut
21. dip the exposed part of your cupcake into the icing, as you bring it out, hold it above the bowl for a few seconds to allow most of the excess to drip off
22. roll the icing covered peak into the coconut, stick as much of the coconut to it as you can and set aside. pop a star in the top and voila! 

your done! now all you need to do is finish off the rest of your cupcakes. I know its a long recipe and there is a bit of fiddling involved but come on!! look at them!! so worth it!! also hope you like the gratuitous cupcake eating pics- especially the one of Baby Winnie being a sink dwelling batter thief! The cheek!!

xoxox