There is nothing better than a friend. Unless that friend has chocolates of course.

Here is a selection of some of the chocolates I made during the Ultimate Chocolate Course at Slattery’s.

Flavours include;

• Banana and Peanut Butter
• Praline
• Sea salt caramel
• Lavender
• Passion fruit sea salt
• Lemon
• Beer
• Elderflower

We also made some curry and some gorgonzola and mango, which I thought were so gross and best not to inflict on unsuspecting friends!

♥

Life’s too short to not eat cake.

I made these beauties this afternoon. Rose cupcakes with rose frosting, and beautiful moist banana cupcakes with dark chocolate frosting.

Yes, you’re right. I should be doing my dissertation right now… but they are for charity so it’s all ok!

These cakes are delicious. Of course I made more so that there was some for me to eat. The rose is divine, so sweet and sophisticated. The banana tastes like there is a frickin party in my mouth, and everybody is invited. 

Nom, nom.

Everybody reading this from the office: Gillian will be selling these cupcakes for her charity tomorrow for £1 each. 

TTFN ♥

A couple of quick bakes I have made recently…

The first is some chocolate orange birthday cupcakes for my boyfriend’s dad’s birthday.

The second is a mocha cake, just because it was a Sunday afternoon and we fancied cake and a coffee!

I am super busy with uni right now, so will be doing a little less baking for the next month (that said, I am making two dozen cupcakes tomorrow - banana chocolate and rose - for charity though!).

I still have pictures of the epic garden cake to post, so watch this space!

♥

Whats the use of worrying and feeling blue,

When days are long keep on smiling through,

Spread a little happiness till dreams come true!

The making of the epic rainbow cake. For this cake you will need to dust off your calculator and brush up on your math skills! Before you get carried away and start mixing, you must weigh the bowl that you will be making the batter in.

To start, grease and line as many 9” sandwich tins as you can get your mitts on. I line my tins with foil instead of baking paper as it sits flatter against the tin. I made up a double quantity of red velvet cake batter, however this had to be white cake so I didn’t put any cocoa in, and instead replaced this with 3tsp of vanilla extract, and I did not dye the batter red. I used this red velvet cake recipe http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/475341/Red-velvet-cupcakes. 

Now the math begins. Weigh the entire bowl of cake mix. Subtract the weight of the mixing bowl. Divide the remaining number by 6. Take a smaller bowl, pop it on the scale and press the tare/zero button to set it to zero. Weigh 1/6th of the batter into that bowl. Mix in one of the rainbow colours, I started with red and worked my way through the colours in the poem order (Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vein) so I didn’t mess up and miss any out. It is important to use a gel / concentrated food dye if you want a super funky bright rainbow. 

Repeat the above step for all of the cake mix and bake in batches of however many tins you have for 15 minutes, or until it springs back when you poke it. I had 3 tins but only two would fit in the oven at once. 

Leave to cool - this is super quick because the cakes are so thin.

Mix up a double batch of cream cheese frosting - 100g unsalted butter, 250g full fat cream cheese, 600g icing sugar. Fill and crumb coat the cake.

You now have a choice, you can either mix up a batch of frosting of your choice to smooth on / pipe frosting roses on etc. or roll out a nice thick layer of sugar paste and smooth over the cake. This can be left plain white or decorated in any which way you please. I painted mine with food dye because I had never done this before and wanted to for so long!

I hope you have a go at making this cake, it is actually amazing and is literally the epiphany of joy. Spread a little happiness :)

♥ 

They say you are what you eat, so does that mean I’m bright and sweet?

Wowzers. Gobsmacked. 

I made the WhiskKid’s rainbow cake for my dear friend Jacqui. 

It was epic. Six entire layers of delicious vanilla cake, layered with lashings of cream cheese frosting and topped off with sugar paste.

But not just any old sugarpaste. I painted the cake to resemble sailor style tattoo’s because the darling Jacqui has quite a penchant for tattoo’s. 

The cake was a total success, when I told Jacqui that there was a surprise inside she was sure that it was going to explode and I saw a grin emerge from her face as she sliced the cake to reveal the joyful secret that it held inside.

This cake is Jacqui to an absolute t. Decorated on the outside and (good) crazy within. Perfection.

I’ll post a blog of how I made this absolute delight, and the recipe - I adapted a red velvet cake recipe (because I had buttermilk to use up) just to make life hard for myself! It tasted so amazingly delicious though.

I’m crashing from my sugar high right now so I bid you farewell and sweet dreams my lovelies ♥