Star Wars Cupcakes

It was my lovely boyfriend's birthday on Sunday and I made him Star Wars cupcakes!

I had the idea aaaages ago and I was getting very impatient.

The cakes themselves are just a simple chocolate sponge with coloured vanilla buttercream frosting.

The tricky part was the sugarpaste faces to decorate the tops.

I had never worked with sugarpaste before so I found it tricky, especially trying to turn it black for The Darth Vaders!

I used a small bell cookie cutter for Darth and a small circle for yoda, moulding the ear shapes myself.

I thought I was going to cry when I was piping on the details but overall I was happy with the finished product and he seemed to like them!

I don't really feel in a position to post instructions because I am really a beginner at sugar craft and these were far from perfect!

I'm posting a few pictures to show people that you don't have to be an expert to do this kind of thing.

Happy baking!

Lennox Cafe Bistro (+ Pancake Tuesday!)

I was the Lennox Café Bistro with my Mam on Sunday. During the week they have a breakfast menu before 12 and then lunch for the rest of the day. On the weekend they just do brunch. From what I can see from their website the brunch menu takes dishes from both the breakfast and lunch menus they work from the rest of the time. Everything was really tasty, with consistently good ingredients used in all of the dishes, yummy! Here's what we had:

I had huevos rancheros, with chorizo, kidney beans, avocado, cheddar and a choice of egg (I had mine poached!) For those of you who don't know what "huevos rancheros" is/are (I didn't either), it's basically a tortilla wrap with all the ingredients piled on top and put into the oven. Sort of similar to an omelette, but with a base of tortilla instead of eggs. This was really tasty, all of the flavours worked well together. I will definitely be trying to make something similar myself. The only complaint I would have is that I would have liked another egg.

My Mam had the eggs florentine that came with minty hollandaise sauce. I can't really report too much on this but she has ordered them before so they must be good and they certainly look good.

I had some toasted banana and walnut bread with my tea. It was really nice toasted, crisp on the outside and moist on the inside with the added crunch of the walnuts. I'm always really impressed with banana bread because it's never right when I make it (I'll come back to this another day). It came with cream and jam, I probably would have preferred a bit of butter.

Lennox Café Bistro

31 Lennox Street

Dublin 8.

On a side note, today is pancake Tuesday, yipee! I like mine to be traditional, with just a sprinkling of sugar and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. How do you like yours?

Coconut cake with lime cream cheese frosting

It was my grandad’s birthday yesterday so I made him this birthday cake. The cake was nice and moist from the creamed coconut and the lime frosting provided a sharp contrast of flavour. I added some toasted desiccated coconut to the top, nom nom nom!

Ingredients:

• 40g creamed coconut
• 140g butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 150g self-raising flour
• 40g desiccated coconut, plus extra for toasting
• zest of 1 lime

for the frosting:

• 225g cream cheese
• 75g icing sugar
• 1 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice, or to taste

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease and line two 20cm cake tins.

Put the creamed coconut in a bowl. It may not be soft enough, so you could put it in the microwave for a few seconds. Add the butter and sugar and beat until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Fold in the flour, dessicated coconut and lime zest.

Spoon the mixture into prepared tins and level the surface. Bake in a preheated oven for 20-25 minutes until they are golden brown and a skewer comes out clean. Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack, peel off the greaseproof paper and leave them to cool completely.

For the frosting, beat the cream cheese, icing sugar and lime juice together in a bowl. Place one of the cakes onto the serving plate you are using and spread half the frosting on top. Then place the second cake on top and spread the remaining frosting on top.

Place 2-3 tablespoons of desiccated coconut into a pan on a medium heat. The coconut toasts really quickly so keep an eye on it - it can easily burn! Continuously shake the pan until all the flakes are golden-brown. When cooled scatter on top of the cake and serve! This cake is best eaten on the day you make it.

New blog

I started a baking blog a couple of weeks ago on tumblr (crumbs-baking.tumblr.com). I started to realise very quickly that tumblr isn't a very good format for blogs that aren't just image based. So I moved here! I might start adding a few of of my old posts so it doesn't look so bare!