Month completed: April 2008

Not being the world’s best cook, I have never made any attempt to cook a cake except when it involves using the pre-made, ‘out of the box and in to the oven’ style ones.

So this goal was on the list to kick me out of that bad habit and see how I would go making a cake properly.

It was Nat that helped me achieve this goal. For a Christmas present last year, I received the following note:

As well as the note, she gave me all the ingredients I needed to make a big batch of cupcakes from scratch.

It took me four months to find a day to make them, but last Saturday I found the day. There were about a dozen people, including Nat and I, going for a night of go-karting on the Saturday night, so I thought what better occasion to cook cupcakes than as a pre-race delight.

Here is me having quite a lot of fun in the kitchen. I really like making a mess (it can always be cleaned up later). You can see two main things in this photo – a huge variety of lollies, and what my hair looks like when I get out of bed in the morning.

There were a couple of stumbles along the way.

1. The icing ingredients required a ‘nut of butter’. After a couple of Google searches came up with nothing, I tried to use a peanut size amount of butter. This was way less than required, so I just put in enough butter until the mixture starting to look like icing. About three big fork-fulls was what I ended up using – probably a little more than it should have been, as the common comment was that the icing was very buttery.

2. You need to leave the cupcakes to cool before applying the icing, I have discovered. Unfortunately I discovered this after using up all my blue icing, which I applied to six cupcakes straight out of the oven. Below is the result. It seems that the icing soaks into the cupcake and the butter rises to the top to form a greasy top layer. Not good.

After that, the rest of the cupcakes were left to cool before icing was applied. The finished result once that was done, and icing, lollies and sprinkles were finally put on top, was the delicious-looking array below.

They proved to be a great success at go-karting (is there anything more manly that pink and purple cupcakes at a go-kart track? I don’t think so) and I can’t wait to make my next batch.

If only I could work out what a nut of butter is….