Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Hey People,

Tom and I went to his mum's for dinner on Saturday and I decided to make lemon meringue cupcakes, partly because I wanted to find a nice lemon recipe. To make the base cupcakes I actually just used a normal cupcake recipe and added lemon juice instead of vanilla. But they were a disaster! They were so buttery- they had like a cup of butter for a mixture meant to only make 12 cupcakes (I think I got a few more than that but still!) Here they are before going into the oven (note, I filled the cases quite high after my chocolate cupcakes I made the previous week failed to reach the top of the cups).

And here is a picture of them after baking. They look pretty good don't they? So I left the room for like two minutes and when I came back they had shrunk! It was crazy, like they completely came away from their cases. So in the end I just took them off.

Next I put holes in each cake and filled them with yummy lemon curd (so delicious- thanks for the recipe Mindy- they were definitely the highlight of the cupcakes). Aren't my holes pretty? I then made meringue (I just used the Edmond's recipe for lemon meringue pie here- you can't beat Edmond's), I tried piping it but that wasn't going to happen so I just plopped it on the top, put some coloured sprinkles on top (to match the pink and white merignue) and baked them until golden. They actually turned out okay. I think that since I used only meringue for the topping which was quite light and because the lemon curd had such a lovely strong taste it really cut through the buttery-ness of the cakes. I am going to make some more curd for cakes this weekend but think I will try a different lemon cupcake recipie and maybe ice them with lemon cream cheese). If anyone has any awesome lemon cupcake recipes let me know!

Bananery Goodness!

Howdy,

I've got a fair bit of news to tell at the moment. Well not so much news more just catching up on what I've been up to - it's been fun though! Today however I am just going to talk about yesterday when I made banana cupcakes! They were goooood.

I got the recipe from How To Eat A Cupcake (again thanks Cassie!). I made the banana ones. These ones were a much goopier cake like mixture and very yummy! I made half the recipe and got 10 cupcakes. 

For the frosting I had to get inventive as I have totally run out of sugar. That makes making frosting difficult. I seriously have no sugar of any form left in my house. No brown, no icing sugar, no caster sugar, and the white sugar was the first to run out. So anyway as I've always maintained I'm an inventive baker because I'm too lazy to get proper ingredients - though yesterday I had an excuse as the supermarket was already closed by the time I realised my sugar predicament.

Anyway so bring on Mindy inventiveness and I made up a great frosting recipe based on Swiss Meringue Buttercream. I think I'll call it Mindy's Yummy Banana Honey Frosting.

2 egg whites

100g butter

1/4 cup honey

6 teaspoons Splenda

1/2 ripe banana really really squished

1/2 tspn vanilla extract

What I did was heat the splenda, egg whites and honey on a double boiler then beat them with the egg beater until soft peaks form. I softened the butter and mixed it thoroughly with the banana and vanilla then little by little beat the butter into the egg mixture. Unfortunately no matter how much I beat it it didn't get stiff enough to hold it's star shape when piped, it just needed more butter so next time I'm going to try with more butter. But it was almost pipable and after being in the fridge set to be nice and hard and delicious. I really liked it as it wasn't too rich despite being quite sweet and it was nice a light which complimented the reasonably heavy cupcakes.

Xxx

Mindy

New Zealand, Parents, and Alton Pics

Ok so I thought I'd talk briefly about how awesome New Zealand is. I have absolutely loved being here and getting to do the stuff that I've got to do but I am getting really really really excited about going back to New Zealand. What do I love about New Zealand... everything! What do I miss about it? Well lots, I miss the buildings and especially the houses, the fact that so many houses have decent sized gardens, and with the exception of state housing areas all the houses look different from each other and are all different colours. I miss marmite. I miss all the interesting people and cultures we have there. I miss the frosty Christchurch mornings followed by beautiful sunny winter days. I miss the sea. I miss being able to hop in a car and being able to get to the beach, or the mall, or the city centre, within 20 minutes. I really miss the people I think. BUT I do fit in well here with English manners and that kind of thing, I like the slightly higher level of politeness they have here.

Anyway also I wanted to say that having spent quite a bit of time with collegues in meetings lately I love how parents act with their kids. Well the parents at work anyway. I love how they happily reject calls on their cellphone from everyone, but if it's their kids calling they always answer. I love how domestic problems warrant excusing themselves from a meeting when not much else would. It reminds me of my Dad and all his meetings I've interrupted in my life. I hope I can be like that when I'm a parent :) 

Lastly here are some more Alton Tower pics, as everyone likes pictures!

This is the entrance to the queue for Rita, and also it is a photo of me:

This is Nemesis, you can see how you're hanging in your seat, this was the one Darren and I were right up the front of the ride for:

This is air, where you sort of are in a lying down position a lot of the time you're hanging face down.

And finally this is me having a great time on the carasole - look how pretty my horsie is!

Ok time for me to go and eat porridge and watch Farscape now! Gotta love Farscape. By the way Aeryn Sun is so much hotter than Vala Mal Doran.

xxx

Mindy

Yum!

Ok so I picked a recipe! I went with the same one as last time - the goal really this time was to make round cupcakes - and I achieved it - well they could have been a nicer shape I suppose - damn fan oven. I need to figure out which is the bake without fan setting :) Anyway I've done a photo journal to document the life of my cupcakes!

• Stage 1 Pretty cupcake cases all ready to go!
• Stage 2 Mmmm yummy batter - I was good and didn't eat too much.
• Stage 3 Ta da! All cooked :) Some of them a little lopsided but not too bad.
• Stage 4 Ready to be filled.
• Stage 5 Yummy caramel custard filling I'll go into details of this after the photos.
• Stage 6 Even yummier chocolate custard filling.
• Stage 7 Caramel custard in bottom, with chocolate on top of that.
• Stage 8 Dissolving sugar in egg whites for Swiss Meringue Buttercream.
• Stage 9 The beating - by hand with an egg beater begins, this was the first rest I had to take.
• Stage 10 A long time later ready to add cocoa and vanilla.
• Stage 11 Voila 12 little cupcakes!
• Stage 12 Mmmm yummy fillings.

Right so the good thing about these cupcakes is they actually make you loose weight. If you only have one. Well that's on one condition you have to make the swiss meringue buttercream beating it by hand with an egg beater. Man that was hard work... it took me almost an hour I think all up to get the frosting made and the cupcakes frosted. That was my exercise for the day! I'm concerned though that I'm going to build up better muscles on one arm that the other as I can only beat it turning with my right hand and holding the beater with my left.

Also the fillings were to make things more interesting - I'm glad I put them in too as they were delicious. I was just going to go with the chocolate filling but then I looked at the sized holes I'd made and the amount of chocolate filling I had and realised I wouldn't have enough so I made the caramel filling too. 

So for the recipes for the fillings. This morning I found an old tin of custard in my cupboard, this was bought ages ago before I learnt how to make custard. Anyway for the caramel custard I put maybe about 1/2 cup of the custard and 25g or so of butter, and 2 tablespoons of brown sugar in a bowl and microwaved till the butter was nice and soft and mixed it up anbd cooled to room temp. It could have had a little more butter in it maybe. The chocolate custard was made in a simlar way, 3 heaped desert spoons of custard, 100g of chocolate drops, 25g butter and 1 tablespoon of milk. In the microwave for 1 minute, stir up then cool to room temp.

I got the frosting recipe from How To Eat A Cupcake it's the chocolate swiss meringue buttercream, I made half the recipe but I didn't have any chocolate left so I left that out of the recipe.

Anyway hope you're all hungry now. Hehe. Think I'll go have a cupcake.

xxx

France and Cupcakes vs Muffins

Hello it's me! I went to France for two nights, so Amy was right that's why I didn't write the last two days but cheers to Amy for keeping the momentum going! Anyway I got a bit confused when I logged onto my blog as I saw a post that I hadn't written. So to make it more obvious who is writing each blog we're going to copy Adam and Nick's page because they have the very smart idea of putting a picture at the start of the blog of the person who is writing the blog. That's why there's the really pretty picture of Amy on her blogs now. I don'thave as many cool or funny pictures as Nick and Adam unfortunately but they are just two really funny guys.

So I left for Paris on Sunday night, got there late, had a nice dinner with two work collegues, got to bed late, woke up not too early, train to Nancy, had a long day at work, back to the hotel room for 20 minutes quick call to D-brain, out for dinner with same people from meeting, back to hotel late and to bed, up early back to office for more meetings, train back to Paris, another meeting (just as an observer this time), train to airport, airport for HOURS (plane delayed) plane back to East Midlands, 1.5 hours later after drive back to Doncaster arrived home. 10.30pm Tuesday night. All this equals very very exhausted Mindy! So it's weird Mum asked me how was France - well it was nice being in France but it's not like you get to really make much of the opportunity. We did have nice meals both nights though.

So I'm working from home today (just taking a morning break now actually) and at lunchtime I think I'm going to make cupcakes. Yum! I think I might just make the same recipe as last time though I am still undecided. Tomorrow's post will reveal my final decision. This cupcake making venture is primarily because I want to try out the fancy silicone cupcake cases I bought (I bought some for Kirsty face for her birthday and had to get some for myself, especially after my first batch of squarish cupcakes), vand also because I feel like it.

Question: I have been looking at a lot of cupcake websites at the moment and have come across something that baffled me. Well lets step back for a moment I did have a wee pondering in my head when I first started thinking about cupcakes and that was, what is the difference between a cupcake and a muffin. Well I'm not sure if there's an official distinction but the way I settled that one in my head was a cupcake was really just a cup sized cake whereas a muffin is more likely to be bit-ty and have a rougher texture and interesting things in it. I would have liked to say cupcakes come in cases and muffins don't but very often muffins you buy do come in cases. Oh and one other distinction is cupcakes are iced whereas muffins aren't as much, unless they are those yummy moro bar muffins with the big splodge of cream cheese icing on them. Yum! 

Anyway so I was pretty happy that cupcakes and muffins both existed in their own right and were distince entities. Then I came across savoury cupcakes. Now I'm sorry but to me these are just muffins. Even if they have a creamy cheesy "frosting" they are still just muffins. That's my two cents anyway.... thoughts?

Ok this wasn't particularly interesting, sorry but I am tired!

See you tomorrow with cupcake piccies hopefully!

xxx

New York- First Weekend

Ok ok, settle down people. I know Mindy promised you a daily blog and well, she seems to be MIA (somewhere in France I suspect). I also know that some of you out there haven't been able to contain yourself these past weeks waiting to hear about my trip to New York (I can't figure out how to upload pictures to Facebook without it crashing. Hmmm). So you are in luck!

First day in town I decided to explore central park for a bit. Gosh it is lovely! That really struck me about NY, all the lovely public spaces but when you consider that they all live in small apartments it makes sense that they have so many parks. My apartment was luckily close to the park and I spent a lot of time there over the next six weeks, running around the Jackie Onassis reservoir most mornings before work.

I was lucky enough to arrive early morning July 4th which meant two things: 1) long weekend and 2) fireworks! I went down to the East River to check them out. I was quite nervous about it since it was my first day there and I was on my own and there were LOADS of people but it was great! The fireworks themselves were cool but the most impressive thing was how long they lasted for! They had cute smiley face ones too :)

My second day I did the big one, the Cloisters and the Met. Gosh, the Cloisters was brilliant, it definitely makes it to my top 3 things in NY list. It is a small part of the Met up the top of Manhattan at the end of a beautiful garden overlooking the hudson. It is completely dedicated to Medieval Art and is housed in a reconstructed Abbey. And the whole place is so quiet, really atmospheric. I loved it! The Met was good too, I was there for ages, but it was a little crowded for me, and I kept getting lost (6 hours people!)

Then on Sunday I took the train up to the Bronx (with Police officers in every carriage!) and went to the Bronx zoo. That was pretty cool except I spent most of the time thinking how much Tom would have liked it. The gorillas were the best- such amazing human characteristics. They also had a cool butterfly garden (which was only a little frightening) and one of those skyride things. I also saw my first chipmunk ever (but not actually in the zoo ;-) )

Ok, that's all for now folks. Stay tuned for weekend 2.....

My Butterfly Cake

Hello People,

Last week was my birthday which I thought I would honour by making my first tiered cake ever (actually I just wanted to practice making tiered cakes for a certain upcoming event). I think on the whole it went pretty well, I am relatively pleased with the result (and it tasted good too!) I have decided that the key to a successful cake is to keep it nice and busy and draw the eyes away from the crookedness and bumps in the icing ;-)

So here is me crumb coating the cake. Basically there were three tiers of carrot cake, each cut into three levels and filled with cream cheese icing and pineapple and then crumb coated in buttercream to smooth the edges in preparation for the pettinice.

And then the fabulous Kirsty came and helped me roll out and smooth down the pettinice on the tiers (and judging by the job I did on the cake board it's a good thing she did :) Here is one tier after the pettinice has been put on.

Now I tried painting the icing but that didn't really work out so I covered it in coloured fondant and piped chocolate on. That worked much better! I then attached chocolate ribbon (it neatened the edges). Here are the three tiers with the stripes and ribbon. Still kinda messy I know!

That's where the busy is better comes in. Earlier in the week I made chocolate butterflies (idea borrowed from my awesome Hello Cupcake book I bought in NYl; note the white sprinkles were individually picked out with a toothpick- that's dedication!) and chocolate leaves (the easiest cake decorating technique ever!), and whola! A three tierd, rolled icing cake.

Day at Alton Towers

Well Darren and I had an awesome awesome day at Alton Towers today. To be honest I wouldn't say it's the best amusement park in the world, but it was very unique. Of course I'm not an expert at all - I've been to Rainbow's End a couple of times, Disneyland and Dreamworld but when I was much younger. I think the difference about Alton Towers was there was a hunking great big castle right in the middle of it - seriously.

Complete with absolutely stunning grounds - some of them even didn't have terrified screaming people hurtling through them:

It was an incredibly cold and often raining day but to be honest I don't think we would have enjoyed it as much if it hadn't been - as I'm sure the weather played a big part in keeping the queues down. We only had to wait for half an hour a couple of time.

The good big rides there were quite honestly great! My favourite was Oblivion which was similar to the ride at Rainbow's end where you just drop down that pole really really quickly, the difference with this one was you were facing down at the time, staring a a big smokey hole you were about to plunge very rapidly into. It was great. Darren's favourite was Rita which was also very good - it was pretty much just like a normal roller coaster, except A LOT faster. It was awesome. 

Here is a nice picture of Darren at the Park:

I found it interesting because I don't likie these things at all until I'm actually on them! Like to be honest I was a little nervous about going and having a horrible day. And man was I really nervous before our first ride (Rita) but I loved it! Oh! But Darren is horrible, this other ride Nemisis, you are sitting down suspended and we were in the queue and got to the point where you had to decide if you wanted to queue for more time to get to sit up the front, or go in the normal queue. And Darren quite literally dragged me into the front queue! It was wicked though. You see like I said I think I don't like this type of thing but really I do.

Finally here's a cheesy rollercoaster shot for y'all:

I'll put some more photos up on facebook in due time. But you'll find Darren puts a much fuller selection up normally on his bebo - you'll have to get him to add you as a friend but he's a friendly guy so I'm sure that won't be a problem.

xxx

Mindy

All things porridge

It is hopefully a well known fact by now that I am a porridge worshipper. Porridge is without a doubt the best food in the world. I have it twice a day. But that's all old news. New news is I've been wanting to take my porridge eating experience to the next level. Ever since I read on Wikipedia that true Scottish porridge is not made with rolled oats but with steel cut  I've had a niggling feeling that I've been missing out. Recently however this niggling feeling has become a full blown mission ever since deciding that it might be easy to find steel cut oats now I live in England. Unfortunately this is far from true. However never one to shy away from a mission I am determined to track down some steel cut oats!

Firstly though everytime I explain my mission to someone I get totally blank looks followed by the question what are steel cut oats... or more simply "what?". So here's a quick explanation.

Porridge (as we know it) is made from oats that have had their outer husks removed, also called oat groats. Oat groats are not flat, this is what they look like:

Rolled oats are flat they are made by steaming and flattening and often flaking oat groats. Often packets labelled as "Scottish porridge" are actually whole rolled oats where the oat is a flattened whole oat - however this is not true Scottish porridge. Rolled oats look like this:

Steel cut, pinhead, or Scottish Oats are made by cutting oat groats into smaller pieces, and make a more textured, chewier and more nuttier flavoured porrridge (so I'm told). Steel cut oats look like this:

Don't they look yummy!

I so far have a couple of leads on where I can obtain some... stay tuned for updated!

xxx 

Mindy

New Game

Howdy everyone!!

I just thought of cool new game to we can all play. I haven't posted too many of the photos from our travels on this actually blog (there are a little more on facebook and bebo) but I was thinking I'd post a photo and you could all guess what city or notable European destination it was taken at! Then after a series of several photos there'll be a prize of some sort! I'll try and make sure each one contains some sort of clue so you don't need to have visited the place to recognise it. I'm not anticipating an overwhelming response so maybe even guessing every once in awhile will be enough to get you a prize.

Ok so without further ado here's the first image, I'll start with an easy one:


Rightio what else is news.

I don't have an ipod. 

That isn't exactly news - it's been the case forever and probably always will be but it's an important fact about me that might not have come up before. In lieu of an ipod I have an extremely reliable 256mb mp3 player bought for a mere $40 about 5 years ago off trademe. I personally think it will last forever but I'll keep you updated. 

I'm also considering giving up diet coke again but doing it properly this time - not just cutting down. But I'm not quite ready to commit yet so I'll also keep you updated about that one too.

Oh and I'm in training - running training. Darren reckons he can beat me and I reckon he can't so we're having a race on the 2nd of November, 10km. Then we'll compete against other people in a proper race on the 16th November. So today I went for my first run in a week and a half and it went well I'm looking good to kick his ass!

Ok hope everyone is well!

xxx

Mindy

Sewing

Ok so I was trying to keep this all a secret as I was going to give one of my embroidery pieces to Amy and Tom as a housewarming present but I've since decided that it would be much more sensible to take it home with me instead of posting it (being that there's glass in the frame etc) and I can't keep a secret for that long sooooooo I can share pictures of the embroideries I've done. I will probably still give them one the surprise will just be now which one! I've actually been very happy with how they've turned out in the frames, it was well worth getting the mounts made for them - it makes all the difference.

So here's the first one it's from a book called "Small Scale Embroidery: In Cross Stitch and Other Techniques" by Brenda Keyes which is a really nice book, I'm actually in the middle of another cross stitch from that book and I'm planning to do one other one from it as well.

 

The second one is one I made up the design for myself with elements borrowed from other designs, and it's a bit hard to tell but actually has some gold thread in it too.  I don't like the frame on this one as much but it doesn't look too bad until you compare it to how much nicer the first frame looks! (I bought the nicer frame second).

Oh I just realised you don't get a good feel for the size of these, they are both really small the first design is 2 1/4 inches square and the second 3 inches square. Also these are know as blackwork where the design is made not from doing cross stitches but just by stitching the design with no or little filling using back stitch.

Ok that's all for now.

Bye!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMY!!!!

Happy Birthday to you

Happy Birthday to you

Happy Birthday dear Amy

Happy Birthday to you!!!!

Happy 24th Birthday to my lovely sister Amy :) I hope she has a fantastic day and doesn't get too stressed out about cake decorating considerations ;) Wish I was home to celebrate with you Ame - next year!! 

xxxx