Purple and Pearls

I’ve had a lovely relaxing and quiet weekend filled with my favourite things.  Baking, crafting, visiting Hobby Crafts and watching films in bed with Has.

First of all my ring from Oh, hello, friend came.

Hands up if you’ve ever heard of a Macaron… anyone?  Well me neither until about 3 months ago when I noticed this fun coloured little sandwich type biscuits popping up on every wedding blog.

They appear to be relatively easy to make… so I will be attempting to make these at some point, just to see what all the fuss is about!

The very lovely and very talented Sarah at Blue Door Bakery is opening her kitchen doors for cupcake decorating classes!

I love baking cupcakes but even more than that I love decorating them! As soon as Suzie is back from her honeymoon I intend to grab a date in Sarah’s diary and meet up to learn all about sprinkles and swirls. Too exciting!

I used my new fantastic shape cutters from Lakeland to make these sweet treats.

The recipe I followed was pretty easy.  It made around 20 large cookies

8oz Caster Sugar
8oz Butter
16oz Plain Flour
2 Eggs

Mix the sugar and butter together until light and fluffy, then beat in the 2 eggs.  Slowly sift in the plain flour and mix well.  Then wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Roll out the dough and cut out your shapes.  The cutters I had came with stencils, so I was able to mark a smaller heart in the dough.

Place on a greased baking tray and put in the oven for 10 minutes.

To decorate I used
4oz butter
6oz icing sugar
1/2 tea spoon of vanilla essence.  (I actually decided to add this when I found my icing tasted too buttery.  It was a happy find because so far everyone has commented on how delicious the icing is.)

I rolled out the icing making sure the board and rolling pin was dusted in icing sugar and cut out smaller hearts.

To make sure the icing hearts stuck to the cookie I used water and icing sugar to act as the glue

Dust lightly with icing sugar and serve to your sweet heart!

Yum!

Suzie and I had another bakey night on Friday.  We used our tried and tested recipe but decided to add some grated chocolate to the mixture, yum!  The night didn’t go without injury as I managed to grate my thumb!  Nurse Suzie was on hand with her collection of cute plasters to make me feel better!

Still not over our pirate fun filled weekend we decorated a third of our cupcakes in black icing, gold coins and skull and cross bones flags!  Arrghh!

As we are both hyped up on honeymoons (Suzie will be going to Thailand a few days after her wedding) we decorated the next batch as tropical treats!

Cupcakes made with love!  Our Valentines cupcakes surrounded by fluffy candy floss… sweet!

I’d seen a recipe for peppermint cookie sandwiches on Joy the Baker.  The looked amazing and sounded delicious.  I wanted to give my family a little Christmas favour so decided to make these.

Hayley helped me make them on Christmas Eve. You can find the recipe here.

Friday night Suzie and I made Christmas Cupcakes.

They were incredibly yummy and so easy to make.

Christmas Cupcakes.
2 large eggs, cracked open
1 tsp vanilla essence
125g/4oz caster sugar
125g/4oz soft margarine
125g/4oz self-raising flour

A sprinkle of white chocolate chips

• Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. 
• Put all the ingredients in a bowl and beat them together until the mixture is smooth and slightly lighter in colour.
• Line a bun tin or cupcake tin with paper cake cases and half-fill each case with the cake mixture.  Suzie and I made bite-sized cupcakes so our mixture obviously went a long way
• Cook the cakes for 10-12 minutes.  (Cook for 18-20 minutes for normal sized cupcakes) You can tell they are done when they have risen up, are golden in colour, and spring back into shape when lightly pressed.

To decorate

140g/5oz butter, softened
280g/10oz icing sugar
1-2 tbsp milk
a few drops food colouring

• Beat the butter in a large bowl until soft. Add half the icing sugar and beat until smooth.
• Then add the remaining icing sugar with one tablespoon of the milk.
• Beat until creamy then add the food colouring and mix well. 
• Add extra icing sugar to thicken or a little extra milk to make more runny if necessary.

We split our icing in half to make both red and green icing and then we used an icing tube to decorate our cupcakes.

We added silver balls and a star on top of our Christmas Tree Cupcakes and sprinkles icing sugar over our Christmas Poinsettia Cupcakes.

And because we hadn’t had enough sugar that evening Suzie tested her new candy floss machine out on me!

Mmmmmm Sugary!

Has and I baked some cookies to take to the festival we are at today.

 I followed this recipe from Martha Stewart

You will need:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
8 ounces good quality milk chocolate (half coarsely chopped for melted, half cut into 1/4″ chunks)
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt in a bowl and set aside.
2. Melt the coarsely chopped chocolate with the butter and then allow it to cool.
3. Beat the sugar, eggs and vanilla in the mixer. Pour in the melted chocolate, then fold in the flour until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chunks.
4. Set the oven to preheat to gas mark 3 or 160 degree and then use a 1 1/2 inch ice cream scoop (or a large spoon) to drop dough onto greased baking sheets. Bake for 15 minutes. Cookies will still be soft. Makes about 3 dozen.

Our cookies actually turned out to be quite big because we used a lot of mixture per cookie.
They were delicious!

Yum!