A little Baking

A Monster Post to Defeat the Fairy Cake.

Dearest readers, I trust you are all well and enjoying that lovely September sunshine which heralds back to school and college. As you know I have been fostering a little love affair with cupcakes since before the conception of this blog. My cooking endeavors will all to often end in whipping up a quick batch of cupcakes for some friend or other who needs some sugary love at that particular point in time. Although this is beyond a pleasurable activity I do feel that this has held me back in my cooking explorations as they are such a handy failsafe. So much easier to produce something you know from a recipe you trust than reaching up to the mountainous pile of cookery books opening at random and running with it. I’m making a vow with myself not to produce anymore batches for a little while at least, in order to force my self to branch out and must ask you wonderful friends to call my bluff if I ARRIVE BARING A TRAY OF THEM!

Hence this last monster post to get them out of my system. Read on to learn my secret recipe and the tips and tricks I’ve learnt in my time as a cupcake baker. I hope these little beauties will continue to be made… just in other peoples houses.

The cupcake mix:

Mix:

125g butter

125g sugar

2 eggs

125g flour

a heaped tea spoon of baking powder

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

together using an electric beater

Add:

a generous splash of milk and mix again.

Bake for 15 to 20mins @ gas mark 6.

For the icing:

I use loads of different recipes for this depending on my mood but your basic yummy one is simply 150g unsalted butter and 250g icing sugar with a little vanilla essence and a few drops of food coloring. Use an electric beater to whiz this all up and there you have your icing!

These will give you about 12 cupcakes.

 Your key to the perfect cupcake:

• The temperature of the butter you use in the icing is absolutely vital you're looking for butter that's soft but not runny. I usually stick it in the microwave for a sec but you have to watch it carefully as the second it goes runny there's no point using it as the icing will turn out horrible.
• Don't open the oven while they are baking as they will sink.
• The icing on a cupcake is its crowning glory. Never ever slap it on with a knife, the result looks child like and totally ridiculous. Cupcakes should be small perfect moments. The should NOT looking like they’ve been smushed because your icing decoration skills aren’t up to par. use an icing bag and tip (the largest of the metal kind with zig zag edges) both available very cheaply from kitchen shops such as Kitchen Compliments on Chatham Street -  http://www.kitchencomplements.ie/kc/Main/Home.asp or Stock on South King Street.
• Guide the tip of the icing bag with your left hand. Twist the top of the bag with your right in order to push the icing out.
• Never use synthetic vanilla essence. Its horrible. Most shops carry natural and synthetic and although the natural kind is considerably more synthetic bare in mind that it is the predominant flavor of your cakes and your icing and one can always tell the difference instantly.
• When spooning the cupcake mix into the cases poor a boiling kettle over the spoon that you use so that the mix slides of the spoon without any effort at all, creating a perfect shape. 

An Adventure in Stallholding, The Bretzel Bakery

I don't doubt that all you loyal readers have noticed my obsession with baked goods over the course of reading posts here at Crafty Students. You will not be surprised therefore to learn that I have recently been working for a bakery. Dublin's institution, the Bretzel Bakery have recently begun selling their bread at The Point Village Market (http://pointvillagemarket.ie/) and I have been working on the stall.



Walking into the bakery at eight AM the first morning to collect the bread I was wonderfully awoken from my groggy early morning stupor by the thick, warm, comforting smell of hundreds of loaves of freshly baked bread, waiting on rows and rows of racks waiting to be delivered to the kitchen tables of Dublin's bread lovers. Having packed the car with numerous different types of bread including beauties such as the turnover, the Bretzel twist, country store, , whole grain, sourdough, sourdough rye, granary and 100% rye I set off for a day full of interesting people and tasty nibbles of bread samples. The white fluffy turnover won my heart over the other more exotic choices... I'm clearly a traditionalist, ha! listen to me, bread choices reflecting personality, maybe thats going a bit far? I realize that my descriptive choice of calling these loaves "beauties" might seem ridiculous especially to those belonging to the white sliced pan brigade. However, I assure you it is completely fitting to bread that has been carefully baked in a small bakery on a side street of Portobello, using real ingredients (no dodgy stuff whatsoever) and recepes akin to those used traditionally by Dublin bakers since the bakery's inception in 1870.

Check out the Bretzel on facebook: (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Bretzel-Bakery/99516837141?ref=ts)

Homemade Happiness!

Mum got a lovely gift of these beautiful cupcakes today from her friend in work Alison. They are so beautiful they had to go straight up on the blog! Thank you Alison!  Handmade gifts are really so special, knowing that someone has made you something from scratch makes you appreciate that thing 100 times more. 

Alison's cupcake decorating without a doubt blows mine out of the water... I'll have to up my game. ;-) xx Nat