Just a last note: After this recipe, all my recipes will be by weight for two reasons:

1) We do it in my course and it’s becoming a good habit
2) Even though you can buy measuring cups from the supermarket or your local cooking supply store, they are not always quite accurate. A weight measurement instead of a cup measurement across the recipes will ensure that every recipe is exactly the same every single time you make it. Think about it, sometimes you get large eggs and sometimes they’re small – that can make all the difference!

Cheesecake Tarts (fills roughly 12-18)

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. In your mixer, beat the cream cheese with the sugar. Most cream cheese will not need any softening but if you have a brand that is particularly hard, leave it to soften slightly or pop it in the microwave for a few seconds.
3. Slowly add the eggs and vanilla, beat until combined.
4. Arrange your tart cases on a tray and fill 3/4 of each one with the mixture. Bake for 15 minutes and leave to cool.
5. When completely cooled, arrange your fruit on the top. Or eat them, if you don’t want fruit!

While it’s not this recipe, for some inspiration here’s a photo from my first Pastries class today where we made fruit tarts and a flan. I hope the fruit arrangement gives you some ideas!

Before I stage this one however I am arranging a pink and white dessert buffet so you’ll get to see more dessert goodness sooner than you all thought! How exciting is that?

Speaking of exciting, I would like to give you an update on how my Patisserie course is progressing now that SPRING IS HERE! In this certificate course it is not as “decoration intense” as the next one up (I’m really there to learn methods more than decorating), however we still do some wonderful presentation. I have my final cake module assessment this Thursday, then it’s progressing on to pastry work!

Here’s some photos of my work from the course so far

What is a dessert bar?

A dessert bar is an arrangement of desserts (and sometimes savouries) on a table in a creative way. It’s usually accompanied with a theme or colour scheme that is repeated throughout the bar, in the food, tableware and backdrop decorations. All the desserts are arranged so the bar is in symmetry, and usually has a central focal point like a cake on a stand, or a cupcake tower (or flowers).

I featured one of these masterpieces on a scale to feed 80+ people at the high tea (scroll down on the main page for the photos). I’d like to do one a bit smaller, and to take some more unique care in each dessert, with proper personalised labels and arrangements.

How can I be involved? I loved your High Tea work!

I’ll be doing a helpy-helper call out to people in Adelaide in mid-September for your help to set up and consume the dessert bar! I’m planning on doing this in early October to coincide with my mid semester holidays.

I am still looking for a theme, so this is where you come in, loyal readers! I have three boards below with some colour scheme and presentation ideas, and I’d love you to pick one. I’m going to start planning this on the 1st of September (this year is flying by!) so you have four days to vote for your favourite on the right hand side of the website in the poll box!

I can’t wait to see what you choose, thanks for voting

I made some slight adjustments to the recipe and if you follow the link above you’ll see he had macadamias – I’m not the biggest fan of nuts in brownies (also because of allergy concerns with some people) but chuck a handful or two in at the end and mix them through if desired.

Recipe: Chocolate Brownies (no nuts)

Ingredients:

• 250g Dark Chocolate
• 250g Unsalted Butter
• 205g Caster Sugar
• 175g Eggs (3 or 4 eggs depending on egg size. Advisable to measure)
• 110g Plain Flour

Method:

1. Get all your ingredients ready first. Your eggs should be as close as possible to room temperature – if you use them straight out of the fridge, it will react with the warm chocolate mixture.
2. Preheat oven to 160C and grease and line a square tray. Roughly 25-30cm square is ideal.
3. Measure out the chocolate and butter into a saucepan and set aside.
4. Whisk together the eggs and sugar in a seperate bowl, and sift out the flour in a third bowl.
5. Melt the chocolate and butter on a low heat and allow to cool slightly.
6. Pour a little amount of the chocolate mixture into the eggs and sugar and mix to combine. This will temper the mixture if the chocolate is still a bit warm. We don’t want to cook the eggs! Add the rest and whisk.
7. Add the sifted flour in stages and whisk until combined.
8. Pour into prepared pan and place straight into the oven. Here I sprinkled a handful of chocolate chips along the top for effect.
9. After about 25 minutes, have a look to see if the top is still ultra spongy – if it is, leave it another 5 minutes
10. You can test to see if it’s done with a skewer, but we still want some crumbs to cling to it, dry brownies are no fun!
11. Remove tray from oven and remove brownie slice from the tray onto a cooling tray. Let it cool completely before slicing!
12. Dust the top with icing sugar and trim all four sides, then cut into equal rectangles. Enjoy with a hot drink

You should have a very evil, chocolate and delicious brownie, that’s not too chocolatey, not too dry or moist, and melts away in your mouth.

Chocolate Balls

These originated from a recipe by my Mum, from a friend, from her Mum, from a website. It has morphed and changed over the “passing down” but are really tasty! It reminds me of that spinach and sour cream dip with the bread that you can’t stop eating, that makes you sick when you eat too much, but you keep going back for more. The actual recipe is for rum balls, but we decided to leave the rum out and now I think they are even yummier.

Ingredients

• 250g milk arrowroot biscuits
• 1 cup desicated coconut
• 2 tablespoons cocoa
• 1 x 400g can sweetened condensed milk

Method

1. Crush biscuits finely (no chunks! if you have a food processor use that).
2. Add the coconut and cocoa and mix through.
3. Stir in the sweetened condensed milk.
4. Form into slightly larger than “bite-size” balls. You can then either roll them in more coconut, cocoa or sprinkles to finish them off!

They are almost like truffles except a little lighter on the chocolate and the cream. I suppose though condensed milk wouldn’t balance it out though, would it?

For those of you who follow my pursuits and projects beyond this blog, you will know that I put together a High Tea for charity as part of the Highway Apprentice competition. The twist with the High Tea was that it featured… A dessert bar!

The dessert bar included:

Cupcakes (Four flavours – red velvet, vegan vanilla, coffee kahlua and double choc)
Jelly Slice (Recipe is on this website! But no one makes it better than my Step-Mum)
Meringues, marshmallows, licorice allsorts, wafers and FruChocs
Caramel Slice
Chocolate Balls
Macarons in four flavours by Pastille Petite Desserts (Even though I can make them, I left them to someone else for this event)
Chocolate Dessert Shooters
Cheesecake Tarts

and this centrepiece show cake:

Stay tuned over the next few days for:

- The recipes for the chocolate balls and cheesecake tarts (they are easier than you think)
- DIY tips on running your own dessert bar
- Hints and tips on how to make your own cake just like this one!

To honour my non-watching of this season, I decided to finally give the delicate little thing a go. Firstly I’ll clarify a couple of things:

1) To settle all the debate and the questions, these biscuits themselves are actually macarons. Macaroon with a double o is a word used to apply to a variety of small cakes of meringue-like cookies. So technically it could probably apply as both, however if you are making the recipe with almond meal and egg whites like I am about to tell you below, they’re macarons. I’m not going to get all up in arms about it, I call it one or the other depending on how many letters I feel like pressing at the time.

This recipe is derived from the one that Callum used on Masterchef, and the original “Violet Macaroons with Raspberries and Buttercream” recipe is available on the Masterchef website.

Basic Plain Vanilla Macarons
(makes roughly 24 halves)

Ingredients

• 225g pure icing sugar (very important – if it has any other ingredients in it it’s not icing sugar it’s icing mixture, no matter what the front says)
• 130g almond meal
• 3 egg whites
• 60g caster sugar
• essence of your choice, to taste
• a few drops of food colour of your choice

Method

1. Preheat oven to 120C. It’s very important it stays at this temperature almost exactly, so be ready as always with your oven thermometers.
2. Sift almond meal and icing sugar into one bowl. Sift it again into another bowl, then back into the original bowl – so it should be sifted three times. Set aside.
3. With an electric mixer, beat the egg whites until doubled in size. Slowly add the caster sugar while mixing, and mix until it forms firm peaks. The way to tell is to lift the beaters out and if the peaks don’t drop back in, you are pretty much there. Another way is to slowly lift the bowl upside down (haha) and if the whites don’t move they’re also ready.
4. Add your essence to taste, then carefully add the food colouring. I chose only to add a little vanilla essence for this run, so my macarons are completely white.
5. Fold your sifted almond meal mixture into the egg white meringue, and keep folding gently until all combined and it starts to look smoother. The consistency should be not too runny, but not a dough either – it’s been described as a “magma”.
6. Place the mixture in a piping bag with a round tip and pipe 4 – 5cm diameter circles onto a lined baking tray. To do this, hold the bag 90 degrees half a cm off the baking paper, and squeeze. When the circle is big enough, stop piping and pull the tip out of the piped circle.
7. Leave them to rest for 15-20 minutes. If there are any little bits poking out of the top from when you piped them, you should be able to gently press them back down.
8. Place them into the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Remove them from the oven and let them to cool.

To make the filling, it is a small amount of buttercream – 85g unsalted butter and 100g sifted pure icing sugar. You can colour this too to match your macarons. Add more icing sugar as always if the buttery taste is still too much, but you also don’t want this to be a very thick and stiff buttercream. The consistency should match the light and airy taste of the macarons.

Now here’s some things that no one tells you about macarons:
- They are extremely fragile biscuits. Looking at them you would think they are completely rock solid and a full biscuit, when indeed they are meant to be slightly crispy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside. If you press too hard when handling them or picking them up from the tray, they’ll crack. I have had several disaster ones but also several perfect ones.
- You will need to use all the mixture on the first run. If you let the mixture sit too long in the bowl without piping it to form the skin, they won’t “pop” off of the tray and they will look like this:

- Now that I’ve tried this for the first time, I get the feeling there might not have been enough egg whites from the eggs that I used. I may try a fourth egg white in my next run, to see if that will improve the smoothness when piping. As you can see from the first picture, while it is great it’s not the perfect consistency, and I think it needs a little more liquid substance of some sort for that to happen. If you give that a go, let me know if it’s any better!

As always please feel free to use the contact form to send me any questions or comments, or leave a comment on a post!

Aside from macarons, I am scheduled to start a six month course in Patisserie on the 19th of July, so this blog should be a lot more active with lots of baking tips and tricks from the girl in Patisserie school!

x Monnie

Besides the moving stress, I have quietly been working on a number of projects and changes:
- I have changed my business card design, and ordered some new ones, plus a banner for any stall appearances!
- We’ve ordered some new cupcake boxes and changed our labels for packaging
- Cupcake Treats is bringing cupcake decorating parties to Adelaide, starting in July
- I was invited to another ladies night (next Friday) and am very excited to give it all another go
- Amidst the moving chaos, I took an order for 100 mini cupcakes for the Women’s & Children’s Hospital Foundation with great success

Here’s two photos I am very proud of, one is the WCH Foundation order, and the other was a 21st birthday that was this weekend just been. I will be posting with some recipe updates and a brand new one soon

The hat is made from fondant! I went on a hunt to find some pre coloured green, but the places I went to were unfortunately out of stock. I decided I’d paint it instead, as it would end up holding the same amount of green colour as if I mixed it in (and made a horrible mess).

You can paint fondant by:

1) With powdered colour, mix a tiny bit with a tiny bit of vodka. The reason vodka is used as it isn’t sticky like water on it’s own, and the alcohol evaporates as it dries.

2) With Wilton gel colour, do the same, but you only need the tiniest bit of vodka. If you paint it too thickly, it will be sticky afterwards – I put too much on the top of the hat, but the sides and brim were fine – I didn’t put as much on them.

3) I would say that you shouldn’t paint it with water based colours, as I have read it actually starts to melt the fondant.. Fondant doesn’t really like water.

The ribbon around the hat is pre-coloured black fondant, and the price tag is just plain white with the numbers written on.

For a final touch I decided to cut out her name in white fondant letters and put them around the top as a contrast!

Onto the cupcake…

The chocolate case is just that – nothing special this time, just a large block of dark cooking chocolate melted in two stages. I’ve gotten really good at doing them now, managed to get it up high enough for the top of the cupcake to sit on it and not have any gaps around the sides!

As previously, the cake is the miracle chocolate cake recipe I have, and the icing is regular buttercream with dutch processed cocoa – it is not as sweet as regular cocoa, but gives a darker chocolate colour. The bottom and top layers of the cake are stuck together with some of the icing as well.

And there you have it I think they were really happy with this when I delivered it, and it looked like they were having a great time too!

You may remember this from my previous post about the Ladies Night stall I appeared at in March! I had a lot of comments from people thinking the cupcake wasn’t real, so here’s the full explanation of how it came together.

The giant cupcake itself is a chocolate cake recipe (another recipe from my Step-Mum, see Jelly Slice for the first one!) called ‘Miracle Chocolate Cake’. It was the first thing out of my recipe book that I made, and it really lives up to its name too! It is a moist chocolatey cake with the best texture and it holds its shape which is perfect for the giant cupcake.

Except this time I had a problem; I got the cake out of the pan WAY too early and it fell apart.

Luckily I was able to fix everything as the top half had only split in one place so I could disguise it with icing, and the bottom would all fit into the chocolate casing anyway.

Oh yes, the casing.

The chocolate case is made by melting chocolate and spreading it on the inside of the bottom part of the giant cupcake tin in two or three layers. I used one bag of Wilton’s Candy Melts to do it. Melt approximately half and pour into the cupcake tin, spreading it halfway up the sides and across the bottom. Don’t worry if it’s too thin, the second part will take care of the rest!

Pop it in the fridge for an hour or so – it needs to have completely set before you can do the next part. Don’t rush this.

Once it’s set hard, Melt the remaining Candy Melts and make sure you get all up the sides so it’s thick enough to support the top of the giant cupcake. Pop it in the fridge for an hour or two, until it’s set again. Leave it for as long as possible. It’s not going to completely melt when it is out but if the cake isn’t going in it for a little while, leave it in the fridge until it is.

Depending on how thick you make the casing, you may need to trim around the sides of the bottom half of your cupcake. Luckily, this was mainly a display unit and my bottom half had fallen apart after baking, so the cake bits filled up the bottom while the top sat on the edges of the chocolate case.

The icing is the easy part – I used a Wilton 1M tip and a giant piping bag to finish it, and it is still not as neat as I would have liked. I made it quite thick, as I substituted some of the butter in my buttercream for copha (vegetable shortening) instead. I needed the icing to set and not melt, and 100% butter can cause issues in warm temperatures. It wasn’t a *hot* day, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Of course, this was a display model too.

You can do that in regular recipes if you don’t think the frosting will hold out, substitute 1/4 or 1/3 of the butter in your buttercream for Copha and see the difference in the stability of your frosting!

This frosting is a regular buttercream recipe, it is almost white thanks to Wilton’s White White Icing Color.

The flowers are sugar flowers from the supermarket I have had since forever! I thought it was a good time to use them, so it looks like a fairy / princess giant cupcake.

And that’s it! This took a lot of work! If I wasn’t already baking 100 cupcakes the icing would look so much neater, but I am proud of my work anyway. I know the next one is going to be even more awesome!

We also figured out that there’s a huge problem with transporting these – I have 6 inch cake boxes but the lid doesn’t close (obviously) and depending on the icing thickness the sides can be damaged by the box! I’ll figure something out one day soon, but to get it to and from the Ladies Night this was in a large round ceramic dish with non slip material so it didn’t move in my car.