Lamington cupcakes

Lamingtons are amazing. Just saying. 

Vanilla sponge fingers dipped in chocolate and then rolled in coconut. The larger ones have a jam center and some have a strawberry icing instead of chocolate. They played a strong part of my lunchbox during school. 

My version of these is a coconut cake base, raspberry jam center and chocolate ganache on top. I've made them before using a different coconut cake base. That one involved coconut milk and you can find it here. This was a new recipe. Apparently it is a Womens Weekly classic. The coconut flavour comes from desiccated coconut and coconut essence. Mostly the essence I think. the desiccated coconut adds to the texture. 

The recipe calls for a full cake, I found it made 18 cupcakes. The downside to 18 is that I could only half fill a tray. Partially full trays don't bake as evenly as full trays. To fix this I partly fill the empty cups with water. This helps with the even heat distribution. They took around 20-25 minutes in total. I preheated using fan forced and then switched into conventional for the baking. This mean that they rose properly. A final blast in fan forced finished off the colour on the half full tray. 

Whilst these babies cooled I started on the ganache. 300g dark chocolate broken into a bowl and 300ml of hot cream poured over. Wait about 5 minutes and give it a stir. Let it cool until thick. I then whipped it a little with the hand blender. This is when I realised that the ratio of chocolate to cream was off if I wanted silky smooth and pipable icing. Next time more cream or less chocolate. Potentially a different type of chocolate too.

The assembly is the messy part. I recommend having a sink of hot soapy water ready to go.

Cut a hole in the top of the cupcake and trim of the excess cake. You need to create a lid as well as leaving room for the jam center. 

I mix the jam up a little so that it flows into the hole better then pop the lid back on.

Once they are all done it's time to put the ganache on. Originally the plan was to pipe the ganache on. In the end it was dollop time. Once every cupcake had a suitably large dollop, I used a clean knife to smooth the tops. By then my husband and father in law had finished changing the locks on the front door. Someone broke into the house yesterday. We are missing small things like jewelry, cameras and some booze. The biggest annoyance is dealing with lock changes and a broken window. 

So once that was done, husband took over the final step with these puppies. Dipping them in coconut. They've been safely packaged to be taken to a party this evening with my father in law. Some of his friends are celebrating becoming Australian Citizens. 

The recipe for the coconut cake base is below. I used about 250g of raspberry jam. 

INGREDIENTS

• 125g butter, softened
• ½ teaspoon coconut essence
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup (40g) desiccated coconut
• 1½ cups self-raising flour
• 250g extra-light sour cream
• ⅓ cup (80ml) milk

Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan-forced). Line 2 cupcake trays with 18 wrappers. 

Beat butter, essence and sugar in a small bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time.

Transfer mixture to a large bowl. Stir in half the coconut and half the sifted flour, half the sour cream and half the milk, then add remaining coconut, flour, sour cream and milk; stir until smooth.

Divide evenly into the cup cake tins and bake until cooked when tested. Stand cup cakes in pan for 10 minutes before turning onto wire rack, top-side up, to cool. 

Baking plans for this week

It seems that I am incredibly slack at blogging. I haven't given up baking, I just haven't blogged about it yet. The list so far involves my shiny new kitchen aid mixer. I can't remember if I've posted photos of her yet. her name is Toffee

here is a photo

Yes. She is the 90th anniversary edition Candy Apple red artisan mixer and my new baby. So far we have found made many things

This is my first birthday cake. It's a chocolate mud cake with banana flavoured swiss meringue icing. The mud cake is from a womans weekly book and the icing is from howtoeatcupake. It's completely fructose friendly, made with spelt flour instead of wheat, and was well accepted by the band.

Birthday cake number two is a butter cake with a chocolate cream cheese mousse filling and a  chocolate swiss meringue icing. The sprinkles were the best bit and I made myself sick on the mousse filling the night before.

Two weeks later my man C celebrated his birthday. At his request I made my chocolate raspberry mud cake and took it into band so we weren't left with butt loads of cake.

I made him out of marzipan and he was delicious. C did complain about having a skewer up his bum but he would have fallen off otherwise. Yes, my man is a redhead.

What else has happened....

Well there's this

MY GODSON HAS ARRIVED!!!!

He's so cute and adorable.

Back to the point of this post. I've got a couple of things to bake this week. Firstly is my favourite cherry pie. The only issue is that the book that has my go to recipe for pie crust and cherry filling is sitting in in someone else's house. I loaned it to a friend and he hasn't returned it yet. Thankfully I managed to find the recipe online. I'm also planning on making a blueberry cobbler/crumble fructose friendly so that C can eat it.

Then for Thursday night I said I would provide dessert for a bbq. There's meant to be 20-30 people so I was planning cupcakes and brownies. Or I might just churn out a couple of batches of different cupcakes. So far I'm planning on bringing back my lamington cupcakes or maybe turning them into coconut with lemon icing and then having a separate chocolate thing. To make sure that I get everything baked and ready in time I may have to do some of the baking on Tuesday.

Will post photos of things as I go.

Cupcake advise needed

I've been toying with the idea for a while now of starting my own catering business. Most likely specialising in allergy friendly cakes and bakes as there seems to be a lack of people dealing with this specifically. I noticed this when helping with the catering for an engagement party and Mum's 50th earlier this year. There seem to be plenty of people who deal with wheat cupcakes but not that many who understand or a wiling to do gluten free, for example. We also found that the gluten free packet mixes are fine if eaten the day their baked but dry out really easily. They also don't come in a variety of flavours.

After having many lengthy discussions with friends who have allergies, and those that don't, we pretty much decided that I'd first need a definite product to market.

So my questions are this:

Is there actually a market an allergy friendly cupcakery?

What kinds of cupcakes do people enjoy? (flavours, size, etc)

Cup day Cupcakes

Cup Eve, Monday, was meant to be spent at the gym before attending the Russian Film Festival with D. Instead I got a phone call from D to say that his work was having a cup day cupcake competition and he needed help with the baking part of it. So because I am the awesome friend I am, I supervised his baking in my kitchen before the movie. He baked cupcakes whilst I cooked tea.

It was a very scrummy tea, easily made gluten free. Essentially a chicken, pasta and pesto salad. There are no photos but from memory it involved the following

grated carrot
avocado
capsicum
semi sundried tomatoes
olives
cucumber
pesto
lemon juice
wholemeal pasta
chicken

Cook pasta and chicken. I pan fry my chicken.
Every thing gets chopped and mixed together. Serve hot-warm.

The cupcake recipe is below. To make both these gluten free just use the gluten free versions of pasta and flour where needed!!


2 3/4 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
200g softened butter
1 3/4 cup caster sugar
4 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 170C. Line two 12 hole muffin trays with cupcake papers

Sift together the flour and baking powder. In a separate bowl, cream the butter for 1-2 minutes. Add the caster sugar a third at a time, beating for 2 minutes after each addition. After the last addition, beat until the mixture is light and fluffy and the sugar had almost dissolved. Add the eggs one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition or until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla extract and beat until combined.

Add a third of the flour to the creamed mixture and beat on low speed until combined. Add half the milk and beat until combined. Repeat this process. Add the remaining third of the flour and beat until thoroughly combined. Do not overbeat as this will toughen the mixture.

Spoon the mixture into cupcake papers, filling each about three-quarters full. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until a fine skewer inserted comes out clean. Remove cupcakes from the trays immediately and cool on a wire rack for 30 minutes before frosting.

Unfortunately we didn't win on looks but they tasted fantastic!!!