Wednesday 25 February 2015

Mini Egg Easter Cakes with a Caramel Egg Centre

It has been over a year since I blogged....and I'm kicking myself because so much fun stuff happened and I didn't record a single flippin thing on here. So I am attempting it all over again, easing myself with a nice an easy chocolate squeezy baking recipe. The original recipe (from the hummingbird bakery cookery book) used little cute fluffy chicks on top...which I couldn't find. But you can't eat them anyway so hey who cares! Sweet tooth's unite, these are scrummy. 


Ingredients

Cupcakes
100g Plain Flour
20g Cocoa Powder
140g Caster Sugar
1 and a 1/2 teaspoon of Baking Powder
Pinch of Salt
2 bags of Caramel Eggs
1 Medium Sized Egg
40g of Unsalted Butter at Room Temperature
120ml of Whole Milk
1/4 teaspoon of Vanilla Extract

Frosting
300g of Shifted Icing Sugar
100g of Unsalted Butter at Room Temperature
Green Food Colouring....not too much and not too little
40ml of Whole Milk

Decorations
2 Bags of Mini Eggs
Sprinkles!!!
(and mini fluffy chickens if you wanna be fancy )


For me laying out all the ingredients I need to use works really well. You don't need to do this, but if your unorganised like myself and become a scatter brain when you need to find different things, just get everything together first.

To begin you need to go back in time and freeze the caramel eggs...
well not really, I made the mistake of coming to do this recipe without reading the recipe first. And then I couldn't because my eggs weren't frozen. SO if you wanna make these....make sure you freeze those eggs overnight, otherwise they will just melt all inside of the cake and it won't be like a caramelly heart in the middle. 

Once the caramel eggs have frozen nicely you can begin with everything else. Preheat your over to 180c or gas mark 4. In a large bowl combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, sugar, butter and salt. Use an electric whisk to mix well on a slow speed until it is all combined. In a separate bowl add the milk, vanilla extract and the egg, whisk together gently and pour half into the flour mixture. Whisk this first half in gently, and then add the remaining milk. Whisk on a slow speed till all the mixture is lovely and smooth!


Clearly for this step it is essential to recruit the assistance of a cat...

Line a cupcake tray with cases, then carefully scoop roughly 2 teaspoons worth of mixture into the case. Try and make them all as even as possible, although I never do. 
Then place a frozen caramel egg into the middle of each cup. I would suggest placing them in a landscape kinda way so you don't need to put heaps more mixture into the cup to cover them all. Which brings me onto the next step, add a little more cake mixture on top of the eggs. Easy peasy! Pop them in the oven to bake for around 20 - 25 minutes. Check on them at the 19 minute mark.



Once they come out of the oven they should look like the above! Leave them to cool for 30 minutes minimum. You don't want the icing melting all over the show.

Making icing stresses me out, I can't stand the feel of the powder and I just destroy the kitchen in the making process. These cupcakes were sadly no exception, but hopefully you will have better luck than me. 

So get all your icing sugar in a big bowl, and then add the butter, I feel that adding it in chopped up pieces may work better. Although saying that I didn't do that...fail. But if you do do it the chopped up way, it may be less messy overall.
Using an electric whisk blend the butter and icing sugar until fluffy and blended. Then add the milk a little bit at a time. Next comes the green food colouring....the photos alongside this post are slight lies sorry. My cake icing was actually a lot more green in real life! So just go slowly but steadily with the food colouring. TIP! I used the lid of the food colouring to measure how much I put in. I'm thinking I did like 5 in total. 


And now move onto the decoration station. See what I did there?
Slap on the icing, using the back of a spoon works nicely. And top with the sprinkles and 3 x mini eggs. (Less if you have been eating the mini eggs as you have been going along)


AND TA-DA!


Baking Soundtrack
I alwwaayyys bake listening to the radio, and yesterday this song was played - how apt!







Mac Palette