If I asked you what kinds of flour there were, would you tell me there was just plain and self-raising? The difference between flour types is the gluten content.

You’ll know about gluten from hearing that people are gluten intolerant, or need foods that are gluten free. Gluten is the protein in wheat flour that helps make bread elastic, and gives it the chewy texture we love.

The percentage of gluten is what determines what kind of flour it is.

Plain Flour is also known as all purpose flour. It has a middle of the range gluten percentage of 10-12%. It can be used for most things, hence the all purpose name.

Self Raising Flour is plain flour with baking powder added to give it lift. You can make your own by using plain flour and baking powder together. Sometimes a specific recipe will call for them separately, if you only have SR then combine the two weights together.

The very important thing to remember with SR flour is that the baking powder can lose its potency over time.

When buying flour you should really buy anything with a recognised brand name. This means their product moves faster through the chain of distribution so you are getting a fresher product. If you do like to use Self Raising Flour, buy it in smaller amounts if you don’t bake often, and buy a good brand for a better outcome.

These are the two main types of white flour you will ever use on a home level. For specialised baking and cooking, there is cake, pastry, bread and pasta flours, which have specialised gluten percentages. Bread and Pasta flours can be purchased from some supermarkets here in Australia in a blue 1kg box (Anchor brand). All purpose flour is fine for cakes though – you don’t need to have cake flour for home baking!

The supermarkets now sell organic and wholemeal flours – I only really use normal white flour for the majority of my work (organic for some cases) but these are great too.

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Makes 12 regular size cupcakes or 20+ minis

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cup Self-Raising Flour
• 110g unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup Caster Sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon cocoa
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• red food colouring

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 160C. This is also the point where I remind you that having an oven thermometer is one of the greatest things you can do for your baking!
2. Beat butter, sugar and vanilla until all combined and fluffy.
3. Add eggs and mix until all just combined.
4. In a separate cup (I use a Pyrex Jug) measure out the 1/2 cup of buttermilk and add the food colouring until the right red colour.
5. Sift flour and cocoa and add into the mixture with half of your red buttermilk. You should get a red that’s not too fluroescent and not too light, thanks to the cocoa. Add the other halves and mix until combined but don’t overmix.
6. If you’re not happy with the colour here, add a little bit more red colouring. Don’t add anymore cocoa to try and get it darker or it will go more of a brown than a red.
7. Spoon it into your baking cases and bake for 16-18 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Check at the 16 minute mark. If you leave them in too long, they will brown on the top and contrast with the red of the cake. If they seem a bit browned, drop the oven temp by 10C and bake longer.

It always seems they’re not quite done when you poke a skewer in and it comes out clean, but the top springs back a lot. Believe in the skewer – and point it in on an angle if you’re unsure to double check. And don’t delay – they really do start turning brown quickly and you want them as spongy and red as you can get.

Leave them to cool completely evenly spaced apart before you store them anywhere or the cases will peel away from the cupcakes (due to humidity in cooling).

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 30g cream cheese
• 100g unsalted butter
• 250g icing sugar (icing sugar mixture is fine)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Cut and weigh the cream cheese and put off to the side. It needs to soften a little or you’ll have large lumps in your icing.
2. Beat the butter and vanilla, then add icing sugar one cup at a time.
3. When the sugar and butter are all combined, throw in the cream cheese.
4. Mix until just combined!

The key to this is not to overmix it – as much as you want to! You should have a nice thick sweet tasting frosting with that cream cheese kick. If it’s too thick to pipe, add a tablespoon of milk or water at a time and mix through. If you add too much liquids or it’s too warm and it starts to melt you need to add more icing sugar – you want to avoid this, so be careful and don’t overdo it

As a little extra, the hearts in the picture are just white fondant, coloured with Wilton red gel colouring, and cut out with a tiny heart cutter I have for just that. I only use the 1M Wilton tip for piping as it’s the best icecream swirl there is.

I deliver a lot of orders for Cupcake Treats for this, its our yearly Valentine’s Special – and they are all amazingly perfect and taste delicious. They’re also my favourite cupcake recipe of all time – light and fluffy velvety taste with the cream cheese kick!

One of the most popular posts on this blog is about the giant cupcakes – so here’s everything you now need to know! I have been making them for two years now and it’s only in the last.. 6-12 months or so that they are super consistent. It took a LOT of practice. This is a bit of a lengthy post but if you’re about to give one a go, or you want to improve your giant cupcake you should give this a read.

NOTE: If you live in Adelaide you can take this as a class and I’ll show you in person

The most important thing is that if you’re using a boxed cake mix, you will most likely need two, and do not use a sponge mix, use a butter cake or a dense cake mix (not mudcake, it will take too long). If your cake is too light after baking, wrap, freeze and then defrost – it should “dense up” a bit

1) Tins
If you can afford to, and you’re going to make giant cupcakes more than once, BUY TWO TINS. The top of the giant cupcake holds less batter than the bottom, so if you get two and pour your batter across both tins, this way you can take the top half out before the bottom is done.

2) Types of tins:
There are many giant cupcake tins out there now, Bakers Secret, Wilton, Kmart, the silicone ones – use whatever works for you. I’ve spent over $100 on Giant Cupcake tins because I bought two Wilton ones, but the $5 ones from Kmart work just fine as long as you have your oven on the right temp (GET AN OVEN THERMOMETER) and you know your oven and your recipe.

3) After baking
Once both halves are baked, flip them out onto a cooling rack and leave them for 20 minutes or so to cool down. Before they’re fully cooled, wrap them in cling wrap. Though you’re not technically supposed to do this, it helps stop the cake forming a really hard crust (and the giant cupcake ones have a really thick crust when they dry hard) so it is not hard on the outside, but not super soft and moist if you wrapped it immediately. If you’re worried about it sweating, punch a couple of holes in the wrap, but as long as your cake recipe is good and the cake is stable this won’t cause any dramas later on.

When you’re ready to use the giant cupcake, level off both top and bottom and we’re ready to go!

4) Icing preparation
I use 250g of unsalted butter and 500g of icing sugar per giant cupcake. You always have a little left – but it’s better to have some left than not have enough because you get into big trouble!
I have three layers of icing: cut the bottom of the giant cupcake in half and ice the middle, then put it back together and ice the top before you put the top half on – so that makes two. And of course the top of the giant cupcake!

It’s really up to you what you do with the bottom half but you can wrap it in fondant, make a chocolate casing or ice it in buttercream as well.

5) Icing the top
First up make sure you have a LARGE plastic pastry star tip or a 1M tip – this will give you the same results as above with the famous ice cream swirl star piping. I’d also recommend you have a 16″ or 18″ piping bag – you really don’t want to stop in the middle of piping the top and refill your bag. Also a low table so you can stand over the giant cupcake, or a turntable (lazy susan’s are $9.95 from IKEA last time I saw, which would work just fine).

Start by icing the border first, the section where the top joins the bottom. You’ll see in the photo at the top that it has a wavy border around the side. This helps to clean up any overflow from icing the layers and gives you a neat bottom. It’s hard to have a super clean piping swirl all the way up – could you maintain pressure on the piping bag for that long? My fingers hurt!

From there, you can then do a regular swirl all the way up, following the cake around all the way until you finally get to the top.

6) Transport

Transporting one of these is DIFFICULT work. If you can put it together and ice at your destination, I highly recommend it instead of transporting it iced, but if you have no choice:

• Refrigerate it for at least an hour before taking it in the car (in summer, do this for at least 2 hours, it reduces icing damage if the icing is cold and hard)
• Get someone to hold the box for you in the passenger seat to cushion against bumps
• Drive like you have 500 champagne glasses in your car not in boxes (hahaha horrible example)
• Be prepared for at least one side to be slightly damaged in transport (might end up leaning against one side of a container or box)

If you store your giant cupcake in the fridge for an extended length of time, get it out about 45-60 minutes before serving to return to room temperature so it’s easy to cut up and serve. If you have a chocolate case, use a hot knife to cut through. The cake is quite tall so you end up serving tall thin slices and it serves about 15-20 people at most.

Good luck – and if you have any questions I’ve missed please leave a comment so we can expand on some things!

A year ago I discovered JEM Cutters. If you do any baking or cake decorating and have never heard of JEM I strongly suggest you get on board! They’re a company from South Africa that makes cake decorating just a tad easier. To explain it simply, they make the templates for the difficult things.

Above are some bow and quilted cupcakes I made quite a while ago using the JEM Bow Cutter:

There are two sets of three sizes. Unless you plan on doing tiny tiny bows I recommend you get the larger set (4-6). All JEM cutters come with instructions and you need to roll your gumpaste fairly thin. It’s the easiest way to make bows that’s for sure!

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.

—

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*