Gosh golly wotsit it's time to fill in the gaps about all the cakes I've been harping on about.
I've used the photo above because it's the only one that exists of (some of) the 200 incredibly stylish and impossibly delicious miniature cupcakes I baked last week for my 30th party, which I shared with the lovely Freya. I eat quite a bit with Freya, and we talk about food too (the best friends are the greediest ones; much better to share than to eat with someone who doesn't get it) so maybe I should give her a clever acronymistic name for future references, but for now I quite like "the lovely Freya".
The fact this is the only picture annoys me intensely. Because as it is, it looks like I was making fairy cakes for a kids' Easter parade. In fact they are the latest (ok, about 2008/09) in chintzy urbanite sweet-toothed trends, in miniature. If you don't believe me I wrote about it here last year.
Some say it's all about the Whoopie Pie now, but they're just deconstructed cupcakes anyhow, and a bit wrong.
So these cakes, they were so not bound for suburban Brownie fundraiser hell. No, they were off to mingle with cocktails and grown ups and fancy frocks.
Pictured you see chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting (cream cheese frosting, not icing) and lemon cupcakes. Not pictured are the little red velvet pretties.
Unfortunately I overestimated the varieties of cake I could make in a single day. This meant the three types I was left with did not co-ordinate exactly as I had wished. Cue a panicked email to the lovely Freya, who yes likes eating but actually has a job and a life as well, who pointed out people would still eat them.
Oh to have her wise head atop my weary feverish shoulders.
More to the point, can you imagine if I had the type of friend who wouldn't eat my birthday cupcakes because they weren't quite colour co-ordinated? That would be like being friends with myself over and over and over. And over and over. It would be horrific. In retrospect I wish I had eaten some of the cupcakes though.
BUT THE RECIPES! Yes, the point of all this. Baking books come and go. The better ones stay. For me this means Nigella and Mrs Beeton for now (bought for me by the lovely Freya, but you'll have to ask her about the lemon sex cake, or catch me in a better mood). But the cupcake trend has unleashed a whole set of accompanying literature.
The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook is one of these. For any of you who aren't single/pathetic/female, the Magnolia Bakery "introduced" cupcakes to the UK by way of Sex and the City.
As if we needed to be told it was possible to make a cake just like our own fairy cakes but three times the size and with seven times the volume of icing. But we fell for it hook, line and muffin top anyway.
The point of the cupcake is two thirds cake to one third icing/frosting. It is the only, I repeat, the only cake in the universe and all that lies beyond that I have found myself unable to finish in one sitting. As in: I could and have finished them in one sitting, but I wouldn't do so out of choice.
This alone makes it quite a stonker of a cake and a complete anomaly in the world of food as approached by me.
I don't own the Magnolia book or any of its several follow ups, but I do own The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, a shop which is at least in the UK, even if it creates queues of tourists way out west in Notting Hill.
This is a *great* book. The asterisks are for emphasis, not irony. It understands the importance of photography, nostalgia, dreams and gluttony.
I've cooked a bunch of stuff from here. There are pies, cakes, brownies and cookies as well as cupcakes. Even some sensible loaf cakes (lemon) and a great twist on the carrot cake made with bananas, pecans and pineapple and stacked three layers high sandwiched with thick layers of cream cheese frosting.
Ok, ok. I have never made or eaten this cake, but it looks so cool in the picture I am inclined to say I have, which shows you how good the book is. It is aspirational. It makes me want to create things I am never going to. Good cookbooks must inspire you to desire to emulate the wonders on their pages, or they may as well be a magazine pamphlet on easy TV dinners. Proper food, cooked from a recipe, shouldn't be a stopgap or make do thing, however little time you have.
You don't actually have to cook the stuff. Wanting to is enough.
Enough blah. I'll give you the Red Velvet recipe. I have genuinely made them about four times and they're a signature Hummingbird cake and really different from fairy cakes. They have buttermilk and cocoa in the sponge for a sour chocolatey hit which is yummy and very grown up for such a big hunk of sugar.
So...
Preheat oven to 170C/Gas 3.
Beat 60g unsalted butter with 150g caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add in one beaten egg.
In another bowl mix 20g cocoa powder with 40ml red food colouring and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and mix to thick sludgy paste.
Add to butter mixture and blend in.
Pour in 60ml buttermilk and blend. Then 75g plain flour and beat in well
Repeat.
Beat as well as you can with your KitchenAid/cheap hand mixer/poor little arm.
When smooth, add 1/2 tsp bicarb and 1 1/2 teaspoons white wine vinegar and mix for a few more minutes.
Only fill your cupcake cases (this makes about 12) two thirds full, or you'll spill over.
Then splodge on lots of cream cheese frosting made by...
...beating 300g icing sugar with 50g unsalted butter, then beating in 125g cream cheese until light and fluffy.
if not using cream cheese use 80g or 100g butter and 25ml or 40ml milk and your flavour of choice - some cocoa powder, vanilla extract, coconut milk perhaps.
I wanted to write about Eat Me!, a new-ish book my brother-in-law gave me for my birthday. I had been planning to make pistachio and rosewater cupcakes for the party from here, but time got the better of me. Maybe I will wait until I've tried a few things.
I could post a pic of Freya and me at the bash with some of the mini cakes in the background, but I should probably get her permission first.
Oh as if she cares. Here we are -
The bloke in the middle is the lovely Freya's man, who is about to prove his manliness by running seven marathons across the Sahara in seven days.
I know.
You can sponsor him here.
Oh ok, here's another pic with some more cakes in it, and the beautiful Becca. We talk about food too, and her husband Nick is a tiptop chef. He even sustained a cooking injury this week in the name of fancy midweek dinners.
You can see all three varieties of cake here, and the "Where's my
Pussy?" card Freya gave me which mysteriously disappeared
All this week, while languishing in bed with the flu of death and tummy bug from hell I have been wondering if instead of beating warmth, joy and love into those 200 little cupcakes my friends polished off I actually infected them with anger and frustration at turning 30 and still having acne and this ghastly snot and vomit and exhaustion.
Everyone else seems ok though.
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