chocolate fairy cakes - 29/09/10

Today was my day off from uni so decided to finally use my new book (1001 cookies, cupcakes and other tempting treats) as I bought it a few weeks ago but didn’t have time to use it before I moved. I decided that as I am planning on working my way through it I should start at the beginning and try recipe number 1. While it says there are 1001 recipes, it’s actually not quite 1001 as there are variations of quite a few of the recipes so instead of just making plain fairy cakes I decided to go for variation number 4 and make them chocolatey.

                           

                           Iced fairy cakes (makes 16)

4 oz butter

4 oz caster sugar

4 oz self-raising flour

2 eggs, lightly beaten

Cocoa powder

Decorations – silver balls and chocolate sprinkles

Icing

I decided to cheat a bit as im not great at making icing and saw some pink piping icing in Asda so thought I would try using that instead, it did not work well but you’ll see why later.

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190c
2. Line 2 bun tins with 16 cake cases.
3. Beat the butter and the sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy then gradually beat in the eggs. 
4. Sift in the flour and fold it into the mixture.
5. Add the cocoa powder.
6. Spoon the mixture into the cake cases and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

As I was making them chocolatey I was supposed to replace 1 oz of the flour with 2 tablespoons of the cocoa powder, but I forgot to do that so just added the cocoa powder after the flour, don’t think it made much of a difference to be honest.

Having recently moved into my house I haven’t really used the oven much and this was my first time baking in it so wasn’t sure about the temperature and how quickly they would cook so checked after 10 minutes and they weren’t quite done so left them a couple of minutes more, but was maybe a minute too long as they had started to burn a little bit, but as it was my first time with a new oven I didn’t think it was that bad and once decorated it wouldn’t be that noticeable anyway.

I left them a few minutes to cool down while I sorted out my icing. I have never used piping icing before so was a new experience for me. I quite liked it but it went kinda wrong so for the first one I decorated I used a knife to spread the icing around the cake, didn’t look that good. The second one went slightly better and the 4^th one I did was much improved, but still wasn’t 100% pleased with it so decided to give up with the icing for the time being and try it again another day.

 As I still had 11 cakes left to decorate I decided to use the Galaxy chocolate I had so melted it in a bowl over a pan of water on the stove.

This is where it got a bit messy, as my cakes had risen to a point so weren’t flat, which meant the melted chocolate ran a little bit but they still looked good. I then decided that as I was using melted chocolate, the chocolate sprinkles I had bought wouldn’t look very good so decided to use some silver balls instead and dropped some randomly on half of the cakes, leaving the other half plain chocolate. I did decide that I wanted to use the sprinkles, but they didn’t stick well to the pink icing so got more on the worktop than I did on the cakes.

 I tried one of the pink ones and they tasted fantastic! So despite the slight technical problems I had when decorating them it was definitely worth it. They will now be left in the kitchen so that other people I live with can help themselves to them as well, except the remaining 3 pink ones which I have kept for myselfJ

chocolate, sweetie and alice in wonderland afternoon: Monday 14th June 2010

while i have some recipes i want to try soon, i wont be able to do them for a few days yet so thought i would start with something me and a friend made a few months back, while not technically baking, it was still fun to make and eat.

About a week earlier me and my friend got talking about the fact we didn’t like trifle. I then mentioned my Nosh 4 Students cookbook has a boozy chocolate trifle, which in my opinion is nothing like a trifle, and my mum agrees on this. We then started talking about what a chocolate trifle should entail and came up with a very sickly sounding version of it. Anyway… As i had the house to myself for a few days it seemed a good time to attempt this so decided to do it this afternoon. After a brief trip to the local shop we had everything we needed for our chocolate, sweetie and alice in wonderland  afternoon.

I already had the chocolate ice cream in my freezer and it never actually got used, as we were unsure of where it should go.

So next we found a suitable sized bowl, which just happened to be the biggest glass mixing bowl we have and I put the kettle on to boil some water in order to melt the chocolate.

Dipping the marshmallows into the chocolate was fun, but rather messy, especially trying to stand them up on the plate proved tricky without getting some chocolate on you. Anyway we managed this and then moved onto crushing the biscuits with a rolling pin and I was given this happy job J though we probably made far too much noise in doing this, but it was damn fun.

After rather violently crushing the biscuits it was time to start assembling our trifle. We put the crushed biscuits in the bowl then added the jelly layer, cause I'm told that all good trifles have to have a jelly layer and ours consisted of haribo starmix, jelly tots and tooti fruiti’s. I then used the melted chocolate to make a drizzled chocolate layer over the jelly sweets and we popped it in the fridge to set for a bit while we watched some of Tim burtons Alice in wonderland.

We then sliced the mini-rolls in half and arranged them around the edge so they were tasty yet decorative, arranged the teacakes in a ring inside the mini roll circle then tipped the mini eggs into the space left inside the mini roll teacake circle which made it extra tasty as well as looking extra pretty and colourful.

As we had quite a few marshmallows left we decided to put some around the edges on top of the mini rolls and then placed them chocolate covered marshmallows in between and placed a Cadburys button on the top of the chocolate (like a little hat).

We then used the smarties to decorate the trifle and fill in the gaps between the teacakes and marshmallows.
Next came the fun part of trying to dish it up. As it had many layers it proved a little tricky. I just managed to get one of the big serving spoons down to the bottom layer and no way was I gonna be able to properly dish it up the way a proper trifle gets dished up so it required a little bit of thinking.
We decided to be a bit smarter about it. I decided to use a couple of ice cream tubs with lids as that way it would be easier to dish it up into because of its size and also the fact that if we couldn’t finish it all in one go we could then put lid on it and save it for later, and he could easily take it home with him if needed. First of all we divided the teacakes between us and each arranged them in the box how we felt was best. We then divided up the marshmallows and then the mini rolls. Due to the melted chocolate that we used it caused quite a few of the sweets to stick together, which did make it a bit easier to get the sweets.

We each dug in with a ladle/serving spoon of choice until most of the sweets were divided up and as there were some sweets hidden amongst the biscuit crumbs I used the slotted draining spoon to get the remaining sweets, leaving the crumbs in the bowl.  
     We both felt it worked very well, even though neither of us could finish our tubs because it was majorly filling. Wasn’t as sickly as I was expecting though but I guess that’s a good thing. As it was really good he decided to make me one for my 21st birthday, with a few minor alterations: biscuit layer was replaced with a big Rice Krispie layer and there were a lot of new sweet additions to it (malteasers, white chocolate, tangfastics, etc) and he also put a mound of mousse at the top as well (which is where the ice-cream was originally gonna go.