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