Easy Vanilla Cupcake & Award

It seems that I have been posting on lots of cakes, dessert and sweet things recently. I couldn’t help it. It seems that I got lots of desserts and sweets stuffs project going on – Cupcakes, pastillage, chocolates and more cupcakes... I think there will be more desserts projects coming on for the next couple weeks… 

Anyway, these cupcakes were part of my project for this month. I was supposed to prepare these vanilla cupcakes with two different themes – Turquoise and Yellow. I made some royal icing flowers for the toppers a few days earlier and kept them in an air tight container. This is the first time made a royal icing flowers. So, the shape was a bit inconsistent.

The cupcake was then frosted with Swiss meringue butter cream and topped them with those royal icing flowers. How do they look?  Which one is your favorite? Here's the recipe for the vanilla cupcake. It was actually a basic recipe which you could find almost anywhere online. But I got them from the cupcake class that I went to last time.

Easy Vanilla Cupcake

125g butter (softened)

2 eggs

3/4tsp vanilla essence

180gm self raising flour

1/2cup milk

170gm castor sugar

1/4tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat until smooth with an electric mixer.
3. Place mixture into lined cupcake trays using a spoon, filling each until 3/4 full.
4. Bake for 15 minutes.
5. Cool completely before decorate.

Anyway... Ambreen from Simply Sweet 'n Savory had been so kind to share the versatile blogger award with me. Don't forget to visit Ambreen's blog. There are lots of interesting recipes and good looking pictures! Thank you, Ambreen :)

Experimenting: Chocolate Pasta with Vanilla Sauce

I have some egg yolk leftover from making meringue. I was in dilemma as I didn't know what to do with them. I couldn't simply throw them away, could I?

So I decided to do a bit of experiment - Chocolate Pasta with Vanilla Sauce. It sounded delicious and they would be perfect with strawberries I had.

I measured 100g of flour, used 2 egg yolk and 50g of melted chocolate and combined them together until they became a dough (I knead them with hands). Then, I rolled them and cut them into strips. Next, I boiled the pasta for 5 minutes and let it cool. And ta-dah! They became chocolate pasta (or is it pasta chocolate? Pasta au chocolat sounds great too!). Served them with cold vanilla sauce and preferred fruits.

They would taste good if I rolled the pasta a bit more thinly... or perhaps boiled them for a bit more longer? It was a nice experimenting, though...

What would you do with leftover egg yolk?

Vanilla Sponge Cake

I made these sponge cake for my parents' anniversary last week. It's been quite some times since I made these sponge cake. The last time I made them, I was still in the culinary school.

Aren't they adorable? And fluffy too...

I made two trays of them and decided to give half of them to family's friends and the save some for my family. The first cake was filled with whipped cream and cocktail fruits and frosted with more whipped cream - and these batch were given away.

The second one was filled with whipped cream and blueberry fillings (my mother likes blueberry), frosted with more whipped cream and topped with shaved chocolate - I save this one for my mom

They're not too sweet kind of treats, which is good as my mother didn't favor sweets much.

Anyway, Happy Anniversary Mom & Dad!

Vanilla Sponge Cake

8 eggs
250g castor sugar
250g soft flour
100ml water
25g ovelette
150g butter, melted
1tsp baking powder
1tbsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. In a bowl, combine all ingredients, except for butter.
3. Beat well in about 3 to 5 minutes.
4. Fold in melted butter into the batter.
5. Pour batter into a pan and bake for 30 minutes.
6. Decorate and serve :)

My Culinary Moment #2: Colored Vanilla Muffins

Last week, I was really busy with baking vanilla muffins. An ex-schoolmate ordered 1600 muffins for her wedding - as a door gift to the guest. Making 1600 muffins on your own was not easy. So, I started making these muffins a few days earlier. I made these muffins into a few colors - red, orange, pink, purple, blue and peach. And these muffins comes with a few designs too - spiral, polka dots and marbled. I think, marbled muffins looks the best!

Working with lots of muffins isn't as easy as I thought. You have to work quicker with muffins. You need to pop them into the oven once you mix the ingredients and scoop them into the paper cups to prevent loss of volume. So, I figured that I should be preparing the muffin mix in advance. I weighted the dry ingredients, sifted them and portioned them into 250g each packet. I figured that I couldn't work with large volume of muffins all in once as I was working in the kitchen by myself. There's no way that I could scoop the muffins into the pan, checking the muffins in the oven, cooling the muffins and arranging them on the table all at once.

Fortunately, my family helped me a lot with packaging (my customer requested me to package the muffins into individual packaging). Folding the small boxes and packaging those muffins were time consuming. So I am really glad that they help me with packaging and counting those muffins. THANK YOU! :)

Experimenting: Vocaloid Birthday Cupcakes

My little sister is a fan of Vocaloid. So, I thought of making some cupcakes with Vocaloid character on top. I made some vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting and started to pipe the Vocaloid using butter cream - this is how they looked like, awful! With their alien eyes... Well, at least they tasted good...

Muffin Test

I made myself some vanilla muffins yesterday. I wanted to test the oven for various size of muffins. I've always bake them in large cup. I need to try baking them on the medium and small cup. And of course, I need to try a few more muffin recipes and find the one that I really like. Well, if you had any good muffin recipe, please suggest me some :D

I sprinkled some of them with chocolate chip on the medium sized muffins. And they turned out really great! I just can't resist the chocolate chip.

Some of the small sized muffins were swirled with raspberry jam. They didn't look as great as I thought it would. I probably swirled in too many jam. The taste was good though..