Perfect Butter Cream Recipe

Yes, it has been a long time but I am finally writing this recipe which makes fab butter cream icing.
It is a slight variant on the recipe in Bee Nilson's "The Penguin Cookery Book" which everyone should look for in their local charity shop as I have never seen it anywhere else and it is amazing.

Ingredients:
250g icing sugar
35g unsalted butter
3 tsp water or milk
1 tsp vanilla extract (or whatever flavoring you want)

Method: 
Mix butter on it's own in order to soften it
Then beat in the icing sugar
Add the liquid and extract in order to create the desired consistency.

I find that in order to create a smooth butter cream icing the best thing to do is to just keep mixing for as long as possible so that any lumps however small are no longer there.

Butterfly Cakes

The butterfly cake is a simple yet delicious variant on the fairy or cup cake. It is the same key recipe with a more interesting topping.

Once the cakes are made and they have cooled. You remove the top of the cake and cut it in half (these halves are the cakes "wings").

You fill the whole created by the top being removed with buttercream. Although I am not a big fan of buttercream, I have found a recipe that creates a very sweet and lump-less cream. I will post this soon. 

The "wings" are dipped in a melted chocolate of your choice (I chose white) and then dipped in hundreds and thousands or sprinkles. They are then stuck in to the buttercream, with luck creating the appearance of a butterfly. 

Lemon Cupcakes

These are basically just cupcakes but with lemon extract in them... so obviously they were pretty standard. Except they were lemony.

They then have a lemon butter cream icing on them, which I have realized that I dislike... not lemon butter cream in particular but just butter cream in general. This may be down to the fact that I don't like butter.

Next Recipe: Blondies (White Chocolate Brownies)

The Football Boot Cake

I know this isn't lemon cupcakes, but I wanted to share this as it is cake related.

Last week was my brother's birthday so I helped my mum to create these

I know right if we say so ourselves, they look pretty damn cool.

We copied the design from The Birthday Cake Book by Fiona Cairns. This book is full of loads of other awesome recipes and you can buy it here  -->
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1844009858/?tag=hydra0b-21&hvadid=9551160789&ref=asc_df_1844009858

Happy Baking!

Lemon cupcakes will be next!

Vanilla Cupcakes

The very fashionable cupcakes which are ridiculously expensive to buy -£4 for a cupcake, come one! Anyway I decided to make them to Annie Bell's recipe as I have made them before but to a different recipe. 

So vanilla cupcakes are basically a normal sponge just instead of being in one large cake it is lots of little cakes. They are baked and then you ice them!

As I had some chocolate custard and crumbs left over from my mum's birthday cake I used them to ice some of them. But for most I made a vanilla buttercream icing tinted with pink food colouring and covered it in strawberry chocolate curls. So they were cupcakes.

If you want to save money, make your own as to be honest they taste pretty much the same... except posh cupcakes have better icing... but that might come with practise. 

Next Recipe: Lemon Cupcakes (sensing a theme?)