Follow the rainbow!

I'm so lazy. Its been over a month and I haven't posted anything new. I do have, however some pictures from a couple of weeks ago. I've wanted to try and bake a rainbow cake since forever but never got around to it. I can now say that I have successfully made one!

I can't find the recipe just now but it was far easier than I thought it would be. It was time consuming I have to admit, as I only had one right sized tin. This meant 6 layers had to be cooked separately. That part was very painful. I assembled the layers with the help of A LOT of buttercream and finished the crumb coat etc, it turned out far bigger than I planned. And it was heavy. Like really really heavy.

Rainbow cake

It tasted great, even after I had to put nearly half of it in the freezer. I think I'm going to try and Christmas version..red and green layers and dyed white buttercream. Should be fun!

On a roll..

I feel like I'm on such a roll this morning. I can't stop posting:) Now these were messy but lots of fun to make. My brother had his 17th birthday in February. In celebration I made a lego themed food. Its a bit childish for a 17 year old but hey! it was more for my entertainment then his:P 

I made two (I think) chocolate cakes, which I then cut into 'lego blocks'. The covering part was pretty easy, though I'm always afraid of not having enough buttercream to finish. I used marshmallows, which I cut in half as the tops of the lego blocks. Covering the marshmallows was the messy part. 

Lego Cakes

I also made little lego cupcakes. They didn't go over very well with the kids. I made the mistake of deciding to do something different. Instead of using tried and true buttercream, I made a white chocolate buttercream mix. It didn't taste very good.  

Lego Cupcake

The labels turned out pretty good though. Even if they didn't taste as good, the colours make me smile:)

Harry Potter Desert Table

To celebrate the last Harry Potter movie, my friends and I threw a Harry Potter themed party. (This post is just a bit late, I know:) This was my first attempt at setting up a desert table. Its not a grand as the professional ones but hopeful my upcoming Christmas table with be better.   

I made chocolate cauldron cakes. You can find the recipe here. Bakingdom's picture are far and a way better:) I don't think I used the correct sized tins but they did taste amazing.

I also made macarons (red and gold of course!) and Harry Potter decorated cookies. My friends made a savoury dish of pumpkin pasties, which tasted so good. We also attempted to make butterbeer. Given that there are countless recipes for butterbeer it was hard to choose one. I can't remember the one we used but it had a lot of ingredients. Actually didn't end up tasting too bad, though it was very sweet.

Harry Potter Cookies

 Harry Potter night was amazing. It was so sad to see the end of what was such a huge part of my childhood and adolescent years. I started the series when I was 9 and now I'm 19. A whole decade of Potter madness and fun!

Macaron Madness

Macarons have to be one of my favourite things to make. I admit I caught the macaron bug after seeing them on masterchef. They're just too cute. The first couple of time I made them were total disasters but after playing around with the recipe I think I have it pretty right. 

These were chocolate and rosewater macarons, a fantastic combination. I made them for a friends 18th birthday. I made a little box to pop them in, no pictures of that though.  They made a great presents.  

The ones below were...lets face it, not that nice. I use a different recipe which made the shells very tough. They look nice and flat but no one like eating them. For the inside I thought I'd try something different and use champagne favouring but it tasted more like bubble gum. Big no to champagne favourings. Though these might be great for a little kids party, they were after all, super sweet!

 The last three were all great successes thank goodness. I can't quite remember what the light green ones were though. The brown macarons were lamington inspired. I just added coconut to the chocolate ganache and dipped the shells in coconut. The yellow ones are one of my favourites. Lemon tart inspired with lemon curd filling with a dollop of cream in the middle. So delicious.

In the jungle...

More decorated cookies:) My friends held a jungle themed party last week. So I simply had to make jungle themed cookies. I got the ideas from sugarbelle- my favourite food blogger.

I was really happy with these, the icing had nice dimension and the colours worked well. I bought a black edible ink pen so I could draw on the images. It was great and made outlining the animals super easy. I was thrilled with the pen..until they dried and I saw that the ink had bled out on to the white. I was gutted, so not happy. I tried to cover it up with white dye and water painted on but it didn't work, made it look worse even. Still everyone thought they looked pretty cool:)

In addition to these I jumped back into making macaroons. I wanted them to be jungle-ish as well so I painted zebra and leopard print on the shells. It took so long but it was worth it in the end. Again the ink pen came in handy, especially for the zebra shells. I printed out several different zebra prints and then cut out circles the same size as the shells as a guide. It was then a matter of drawing on the print and filling the lines in with black dye.

Zebra Macarons

The paint turned out great so I'll definitely be doing that again. Got all these ideas floating around of christmas themed macaroons with little presents or santas...I want christmas here already, just so I can make the desserts.

Thanks!

End of school cupcakes

I thought I might slowly add some old baking photos, some from way back (like the ones below) and some I was too lazy to upload when I took. I'm not much of a good blogger I think:)

The cupcake were made for my brother's last day of year 11. I used a plain biscuit which I then dipped in chocolate to look like blackboards. The writing was a bit shoddy but I'v bought smaller piping tips so anything like this again will be heaps easier.  End of year is coming up again for my brother so got to think of another end of year thing to do-maybe graduation biscuits?

Isn't the apples just the cutest things ever!




I'm going to upload some more later-still trying to find them!

Super Heros'

Heres another photos! My little brother had a free dress day with a super hero theme so I made him cookies to match (and help him show a bit of school spirit since he hates dressing up:)

Superhero Cookies

The picture quality is terrible but you might be able to tell that the captain america cookies look a bit messy? The white icing sort of overflowed a little into the red and the lines weren't as sharp as I wanted them! And I had no idea how I was going to stop this happening with the rest. Fortunately I remembered my special 'baking paintbrush' which has ben fantastic for painting on really small details. As it turns out it is also fantastic for wiping away overflow and ensuring the lines stay nice and clean:) I used this on the batman cookies and it looks so much better.

The kids at school loved them but I'm told the icing colours turned everyones mouths lovely shades of blue and black:P I'm using americolor and its far and away better than the supermarket stuff I had been using, not to mention the amazing range of colours they have but you still have to use quite a lot (some what of an understatement) to get really vibrant colours. Any ideas on better brands? 

Anyhoo I'm off to make some cupcakes for my cousin's daughters christening. I know I should be finishing uni reading but..the cupcakes are calling me:)