In Australia (and particularly in parts of Australia where we have extreme temperatures in Summer) the logistics of delivery and making sure orders survive the trip okay in the hot months can be difficult. The photo above is a cupcake tower I put together for New Years Eve, and anyone in South Eastern Aus knows it was pretty warm that day… 38 in fact!

Buttercream icing and anything with chocolate tends to get sad after 27 degrees, so what are the steps you can take to make sure everything arrives in the same condition it left in?

Your transport – Let’s face it, not everyone has the dollars for refrigerated trucks and transport, so the most of us are limited to some car airconditioning, which is more than fine.

In your car, before you leave:

1. Put up sunshades – will help block heat!
2. Leave windows open so the car can circulate air. If you leave them closed and hop in on a 35 degree day, it will be hotter inside than if you leave the windows open a little.
3. About 5 minutes before departure, turn the car on and blast the aircon. Leave the windows open a little still to help with circulation.
4. Point the fans of the air con directly onto where the cake/cupcakes will go. Usually this is the passenger seat or floor area.

Pre-cooling – Having everything a little cooler before you set out helps as well. With the giant cupcake, I had it in the fridge for nearly two hours before leaving. There was a time period of 3-4 hours between taking it out of the fridge and serving, so this was more than enough time for it to come back to a good serving temperature.

The cupcakes in boxes propped open slightly were under an air conditioner on a trestle table to keep them cool – the giant cupcake takes up too much space to put everything in my fridge together.

Ingredients – Your cake (and fondant) will be fine, but the problem can lie in your filling and icings!

In Buttercream you would normally use (for the simple version) one part unsalted butter and two parts icing sugar. Well, butter needs to be softened to make the buttercream in the first place so that presents issues straight away. We can substitute some of the butter for other ingredients to help the buttercream keep its shape and to stop from splitting (and leaking, it is not nice at all).

Some bakery supply stores sell creme or bakers shortening, this is also what you can use – that usually doesn’t need to be melted down like Copha but Copha is a little more easily accessible for everyone playing at home!

Copha – Most supermarkets sell Copha or a variation of it. It’s in a 250g block right near the butter, usually on a top shelf with all the cooking oils, and it is a vegetable shortening. To use it, you can substitute up to 50% of the butter for Copha, the amount you substitute is up to you. In most American buttercream and icing recipes they actually use vegetable fat or creme shortening as 100% of their butter amount in the icings which can leave a filmy mouthfeel, which is why we try to keep at least 50% of the butter in for a nice taste! I tend to go with a 1/3 shortening 2/3 butter kind of ratio.

To use, melt down the required amount of Copha until liquid and then leave to cool before making your buttercream. It can only be added as a liquid, you’ll see no matter how long you leave the block out to soften, it won’t soften like butter – which means you know it will help to keep the shape and consistency of your piped buttercream.

Also, do not use whipped cream. Don’t even attempt it at higher temperatures if you don’t have refrigerated transport (not just air conditioned). Not only do you risk some nasty illnesses, but cream splits and curdles and it is really made for fridge storage and immediate serving.

After you have piped out or smoothed your buttercream, putting it in the fridge just to set it for 15 minutes or so can really help.

I hope these tips help you get through the hot summer, enjoy!

It’s not that it was a terrible year, it’s just after June it exploded into six months straight of 60+ hour weeks and 16-19 hour days. I’m burnt out. For some reason my work just got busier and busier. I ran a class every Monday. I’ve always been around the same google ranking (nope, apparently we’re now first), but the amount of work just overloaded us and I started to feel a bit burnt out.

The quality also broke down.

It all came to a head earlier in December when we got bad feedback on a very big order. I didn’t take it as badly as I thought but I knew it was coming after we finished the work and it still hurt. I worked my butt off on that order but it just didn’t turn out like I planned. There were so many problems. It just proved we couldn’t do it after all. All I could do was profusely apologise and now wear the shame of it – whenever I see/hear about that particular place my heart hurts.

But I took the feedback on board and immediately changed how we did things. I stopped taking orders for the entire month even though we were only three days in. I set my holidays to start earlier and completely changed our menu and dropped a product for now until we can get it back on the road again. I started making new plans for class structures and offered gift vouchers for Christmas.  I stopped over booking myself.

We could have taken what probably sounds like thousands of dollars in orders this month if I continued to take them on board, but after that bad feedback and the amount of work we put into it, I started to feel burnt out. I started to dread emails and work.

If you ever feel like that, you need to reconsider your life. I turned my hobby into my work, and if I start to hate it, I will have nothing in my life to turn to. I play video games, but that is really the only other thing I have. The end of this month I’ve been on holidays since the 19th, and with just three orders until 2012 it has been a nice slowdown, but I’ve also been a bit bored when I have no work to do. I don’t really remember life before this.

You might get people asking you to do things all at the same time – but you have to set a limit. Help everyone, and the quality of everyone is compromised. Help just a select few, and everyone walks away absolutely delighted. You be the boss.

Have a very safe and Happy New Year, and I hope 2012 brings you all wonderful things. For me, there’s only one step to take my work, so that’s where we’re heading.

Monnie x

Disclaimer: All they’ve done is sent me some goodies. These are my honest opinions!

Ever since I started taking baking seriously I’ve used this cocoa and no other for a few reasons:

• It tastes better than the other one… which I don’t remember the name of
• It also tastes better than the homebrand one.. which I think only one major supermarket has
• It’s available everywhere

4. Start to slowly add the icing sugar. If you add too much at a time you’ll have a sugar cloud – don’t worry, you’ll see what I mean very quickly!

Now it’s good for spreading and piping, or adding to some crumbled up cake to make cake pops

Some suggested contents: A nice thick set of oven mitts to put it all in, an oven thermometer or timer (or both!) a good whisk, a silicone spatula, and a good paring knife!

I use Victorinox knives which you can find in all good cooking stores (King of Knives, Creative Cooks etc). They are black/red handle small knives that are usually in a box and are around $7.95-$9.95. If your recipient has never had a good sharp knife it will change their cooking life!

I also recommend an oven thermometer, because as I always say in all of my classes, your oven can be out by 10-20C – and can be the cause of baking failures!

Alternatively, if you want to specialise your present a little bit, why not build a cake decorating kit?

Add into it some cupcake liners, sprinkles, candles and sparklers, piping nozzles and bags, royal icing or gumpaste decorations and anything else you think might be great for that budding cake decorator friend of yours. Find a nice box and pop it all inside!

Also if you’re in Adelaide shout them a Cupcake Treats class voucher

Here are the reasons I’ve had this problem over the years – thanks to some testing that my boyfriend helped me with, we were also able to figure out the first problem and haven’t had the same problem since (unless I am not paying close enough attention and pull the tray out too early).

1. You haven’t baked them long enough

The best way to tell if your cupcakes are truly ready (of course, this is dependent on your recipe, but works for my vanilla/chocolate base recipe) is to push down on the top with a fingertip. If it fully springs back to where it was before you touched it, it is done. If your finger leaves an imprint and they don’t spring back as much as they should, they need a couple more minutes. Couple this with the cake tester into your cupcakes and you should get perfect results every time.

The reason for this is if the leavening agent hasn’t finished its work, the cakes will shrink away from the liners, giving the peeling effect, and ruining all your hard work. Yeah you could put them in cupcake wrappers or inside another liner but I just don’t feel they look quite right. The good news is you could use them to make cupcake sandwiches (cut them in half and ice in the middle, for something different) or in cake/cupcake pops, but their cupcake days are over.

2. Humidity during storage

This is caused by two things:

- Putting them into boxes before they are completely cooled, causing a “sauna” in the box
- Keeping the boxes completely closed overnight in a humid environment

If you’re in doubt, leave your box / container open slightly so that the air has a chance to circulate. This keeps the dust and airborne things out, but allows your box to breathe.

This goes DOUBLE if you are using edible image logo discs on the top of your cupcakes. If you can, put them on right at the very last minute. The sugar in the logos starts to dissolve depending on the temperature and humidity in the air, causing the edges to kind of melt over the top of the icing. They still look fine, but not as crisp as they should be.

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I believe there can also be some problems with people who live in higher altitudes, but I’ve never experienced this and don’t think it is a big issue in Australia – but you can google for solutions and recipe adjustments easily if this is something that affects you!

Happy Baking

Ingredients:

• 125g unsalted butter
• 115g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence (add another if you want it to be super vanilla)
• 60ml milk
• 245g Plain Flour
• 50g Cornflour (OR, custard powder. But I don’t want it to go that yellow, and custard powder is cornflour, colour and vanilla. So either will work).
• Rolled fondant or royal icing or your own icing to decorate

Method:

1. Soften butter, and cream with caster sugar.
2. Add milk and vanilla and mix thoroughly.
3. Sift in the flour and cornflour.
4. Fold into the mixture. This takes quite a while, and eventually it turns into a dough. Make sure you lift it and incorporate all the remaining dry floury stuff on the bottom of the bowl so everything in the bowl is now stuck to the dough.
5. Wrap in glad wrap and put in the fridge to rest for 20 minutes.
6. Do a dance!
7. Get out your dough, and break off half, put half back in the fridge.
8. You can use cornflour or flour to dust your work area (lightly, it doesn’t need much). I used cornflour because I already have it in a shaker for all my fondant work, and it won’t turn the cookies too flour-y either.
9. Flatten your dough slightly and using a rolling pin lightly start to roll it out so that it’s just under half a cm thick. Roll it out in one direction and then turn your dough 90 degrees and roll in the other until it’s all even thickness.
10. Now you can cut your shapes! I’m using a champagne glass and high heel shoe (and a flower right at the end) for my cutting. Just push down to cut the shape and lift out the cutter, you can pull away the excess dough and lift up all your shapes at the end. Don’t worry about trying to lift them off the board as you’re cutting them out, you might shrink your cut shape!
    
11. Pop them on a tray lined with baking paper and have them all evenly spaced. My tray is loaded. But I’m silly I am using a special silicon mat on a regular baking tray for these. It’s supposed to replace baking paper and remain flat, so there are no bubbles under your baked goods. We used these at TAFE but they were the Silpat brand (and all of these kinds of woven silicon mats can be quite expensive). I paid $20+ wholesale for this one.
12. Bake at 160C for 13 minutes or until the edges of your cut outs and the bottoms and edges start to brown up and they are golden.
    Here’s the important part: You expect them to be hard when you touch them in the oven to see “if they’re done”, like a cake. These cookies won’t do that. They’ll still be soft until they cool down, and then they go a little crunchy. If you bake them until they’re firm out of the oven they’ll be like rocks and totally inedible.
    When the edges just start to brown like in the pictures below you’re good to take the tray out.
    And as much as you want to, don’t move or touch them until they cool down or you’ll break your cookies. I had three casualties on each tray because I’m “clever” and also impatient.
    The champagne cookies were harder to handle because the stems are fragile, but I still had two broken shoe cookies as well.

Once they’re cooled, you can now decorate! A simple way of decorating (if you can wait that long to eat them) is with rolled fondant. Simply roll out your chosen colour, cut the shape with the same cutter (after it’s been cleaned) and dab a bit of water or sugar glue to the back of your fondant and apply to the cookie. You can ice in royal icing or a simple sugar and milk/water combo but I find any piping onto cookies super time consuming for this time, considering I’m doing 12 of each cookie plus other desserts tonight and tomorrow for Mum (jelly slice, macarons, cake and cupcakes).

I’m using Cake Art’s White Chocolate Fondant with a white edible shimmer dusting to make them super special. Enjoy! *eats all the broken ones*

Self-Raising Flour (otherwise known as SR Flour or Self-Raising Flour) is all-purpose (Plain) flour with added salt and leavening (baking powder). And sometimes you run out – so why not make your own in those times of need?

You need:

• 1 cup All-Purpose (Plain) Flour
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons Baking Powder
• Pinch of Salt

1. Sift all ingredients into a bowl together and then transfer to an airtight container or the container you normally store your flour. Easy! You can multiply this recipe if you want to make up a big batch (which is recommended)

The reason why SR Flour is sold alongside Plain Flour is that it is a perfectly uniform mix of flour and leaveners (the Baking Powder). When you make it yourself, ensure it is sifted and mixed thoroughly before storing. Again, when you go to use it in your recipe, mix and sift again (just to be sure).

It only has a shelf life of about six months before it starts losing its leavening power, which is why it is good to buy a popular brand name SR Flour (like White Wings) at the supermarket to ensure you have a packet that hasn’t been sitting there forever. Also if you’re unsure about how long yours has been in the cupboard, you can use the recipe above to make your own!

Bonus: If you don’t have Baking Powder, you can use Cream of Tartar (1 teaspoon) and Bicarb Soda (1/2 teaspoon) instead. That is, if you have those in the cupboard

Donna Hay Almond Macaron with Chocolate Filling
Makes 12 Macaron Sandwiches – bought from Foodland for $8…something

When you open the box, you get three sachets (which, compared to the pretty box, are a bit unattractive) of egg mixture, chocolate pieces and the almond mixture. The egg mixture is obviously just powdered egg white which you soak in warm water for a few minutes before whipping with a mixer.

Looks pretty disgusting here, but it turns into this after 5 minutes of high speed mixing. Isn’t baking interesting?

The box says to mix until it becomes thick and glossy – and you’ll know when it happens. I’d been mixing for about 4 minutes and stopped to check the consistency, to see if it was “thick” but was still like a liquid. I mixed for another 2 minutes and then it turned into a fluffy, very shiny meringue like mixture (as above).

When you’re up to this point, you sift in the almond mix (which just seems like almond meal and some icing sugar finely ground up for you already) and fold it in. Here’s where you can colour it too, like I did..

Purple powder colouring!

If you’ve ever made macarons before you will understand a little about macaronage in this next step. To test if a macaron batter is ready for piping, you “drizzle” some of the batter back on top of itself and wait a full ten seconds for it to disappear back into the mix. If it is still very visible, you need to mix for a little longer (but check often, it’s easy to overdo it!).

This is where I stopped mixing but I should have gone just a couple more folds of the mix so it was a bit smoother (more on troubleshooting at the end).

You can spoon it onto your tray like the recipe suggests (WHY?!?!?!!) but if you want it to be rounded and fabulous like the picture you know, ON THE FRONT OF THE BOX, then you should pipe it out with a round nozzle..

(You can use a template for piping if you’re not sure about getting the sizes even, draw some circles evenly spaced out on a piece of white paper and pop it under your baking sheet!)

Here’s the error in the recipe: Bake at 160C. Noooooope. This is what happened to my first tray (and I knew this was going to happen)

Too hot!

I have two macaron books – one says preheat to 150C and turn down to 130C when they’re in the oven, the other says 150C. I knew as soon as I put that tray in that it was going to fail, and they sure did. The second tray was better as I dropped the temp by 20C – here you can tell the difference:

…We ate a lot of the shells before this point…

To finish up, you make the chocolate filling (ganache) as directed. The thing about ganache is that it can take a while to cool and set enough so it’s easy to pipe – if you need to put it in the fridge, only do it for 5 minutes at a time. I put mine in the fridge for something like 20 minutes and it was hard to pipe properly. Ganache and I aren’t really the best of friends at any rate.

And because the ganache was so hard, I cracked a bunch of the shells trying to sandwich them together, but here they are.

If you’d like to give macarons a go and can’t be bothered weighing up the egg whites, grinding almond meal and icing sugar and making sugar syrup, this is highly recommended, but please drop the oven temperature or you will be disappointed!

Troubleshooting: Shells cracking like mine did (thanks to the incorrect recipe temperature) means your oven is too hot, or that area of your oven is too hot. This also happens if you pipe too close to the edge of your baking tray because of the extra heat.

If your macarons don’t have “feet” and are flat and cracked it’s likely you’ve overmixed the batter.

Candy Melts are discs of pre coloured or flavoured “chocolate” that Wilton produces and we import into Australia (or other countries, if you’re reading this from overseas). It makes it easy to create coloured coatings for baked goods (like cake balls or pops) and also to make different coloured chocolates using moulds.

I use candy melts for my giant cupcake cases if I need a deep colour like a dark red. Prices for each pack are around the $8-10 mark depending on where you shop, which can be expensive in relation to the amount you get.

It is also quite thick when melted, so if you are coating something and need to swirl the chocolate around a bit to get all parts of the mould, it is not liquid enough – you can add a little melted Copha or vegetable oil to your candy melts (only go one teaspoon at a time). Mix very thoroughly – it will take a while for it to all come together, but it will thin it out enough so it is usable. You will absolutely need to do this for cake balls/pops because it is too thick to coat them properly. Go one teaspoon at a time as before. You want to get it to a point for dipping cake pops where you can lift your teaspoon out of the candy melts and the excess runs off, but it leaves a reasonable thickness smooth coating on the back of your spoon.

If you are spooning the candy melts into a multi-cavity chocolate mould, then you won’t really need to thin it down, it should settle on its own. You can tap the mould on the bench to remove airpockets and the candy melts will settle into the crevices. Adjust your oil/Copha additions for your own use, but in small amounds, because you can’t go backwards.

If you don’t have access to Candy Melts or you would like to try and colour your own chocolate:

Buy white chocolate discs from your baking aisle and add chocolate colouring. You can even flavour your own chocolate!

Most cake decorating supply stores (especially online) sell chocolate colour and flavours in little vials – it is crucial you buy the correct type for chocolate, it must be oil based. You cannot use the liquid food colours from the supermarket as they are mostly water and will seize your chocolate, leaving it unusable.

To colour or flavour your chocolate, melt your white chocolate down (on a double boiler or in the microwave, however you normally do it) and then add a little sprinkle of your powder colour (or a couple of drops of your flavouring). Mix very well until the chocolate is completely streak free and all of the powder has blended in properly. If you feel you need a deeper colour, just repeat the process!

When I started baking cupcakes I was using muffin tins, then I bought one of those cupcake carriers that came with the tray from Coles, and I went from there. The carrier baking tins are made for cupcakes that stand tall and with similarly straightish sides, instead of flaring out like they do in muffin tins. They’re sold almost everywhere now. If you’re in doubt about how the cupcake will bake take a liner shopping with you and pop it in the tin to see what the shape is like.

Now for mini cupcakes.. There are two major sizes of mini cupcake that I work with, there’s the ones I use mostly which are known as the 408 size (4.08cm base diameter) These are almost impossible to find trays for. They are 2/3 the size of a regular cupcake (5.5cm base diameter). For the last two years I’ve been using the tray from this kit, and I have bought so many of these kits now just to get the trays.. Now I also use these trays.

The mini muffin trays you can buy from most cooking stores do the next size down, the 398 mini. These are a tiny bit smaller and seem to be what everyone makes so boo for me and my 408′s! They also fit those bite size tiny patty pans you can buy in the supermarket.

b_pack: What major differences are there between baking with plain flour and wholemeal flour?

Baking with wholemeal flour results in a much coarser and denser texture with your baked goods. It’s most commonly used to make bread.

Wholemeal flour has much more fibre content than plain white flour, which means it’s likely to fill you up a lot faster! You will need to add more liquid to your recipe if it isn’t already a specific wholemeal recipe because it’ll soak up a lot of the liquid already in your mixture. A lot of the nutrients are taken out of the process of making white flour, so wholemeal flour is definitely a lot better for you. It is just different to work with in colour and the end result texture is different to using plain white flour.

Not only all of that, the production process of white flour and the bleaching of flour is quite interesting.. This Wikipedia article on white bread has a little more than what I’ve said

Neena: How do you keep cakes level(ish)?

In almost all cake baking cases, there is going to be a dome or raised part on your cake you need to level off or clean up a little. But there are some things you can do to avoid a huge waste of cake..

1) Too much heat early on can cause your cakes/baked goods to rise, dome and crack in the middle. Always best to drop the temperature slightly (5-10C) and cook it longer. Remember to use an oven thermometer so you have an accurate temperature to do this!

2) Use Bake Even Strips. I don’t really mean to keep on plugging Wilton (and they’re not giving me anything for this) but they are fabulous. There are competitor products but I just think of these because I’m not familiar with anything else. To prepare them you soak them in water, squeeze excess, and wrap these strips around the base of your cake tin then pin into place. They help to prevent a hard crust from uneven baking and also stops a lot of doming issues.

After that, there’s always going to be a tiny bit of cake you need to cut off, which you can do with a large bread/cake carving knife, or a cake leveller (a metal frame with a wire or blade and you kind of saw through the cake).

Finally one last thing.. Elle sent me a tweet about the correct preparation of soufflé dishes!

(Photo from Taste)

It is so important to grease your soufflé dish correctly for optimal results, with softened butter and a pastry brush. Make sure all surfaces of your dish are coated and brush the butter from the bottom of the dish up to the top around all sides to give the soufflé a “track” on which to rise. Coat the greased dish with caster sugar (or breadcrumbs if a savoury souffle) and tap out the excess.

Egg whites stick to baking dishes, so the preparation of your soufflé dishes is very important. After you have greased, coated and filled your soufflé dishes, just before they enter the oven run your finger around the top of the dish to remove any sugar, butter or mixture so the soufflé rises evenly over the rim (this is mainly for good presentation as you usually serve soufflé straight from the oven).

Prepare all your dishes before the soufflés go into the oven (mise en place!) so you are not running around trying to get it done with your soufflé mixture waiting in the wings… you might not have a good end result

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If you have anything you would like answered please drop me a line or you can leave a comment here!