Monday, June 14, 2010

cupcake bites

I’ve been a fan of Bakerella for a while. So cute and clever.

American recipes always make me a bit wary – sometimes the ingredients aren’t available here so substitutions are necessary, plus the measurements are not metric which can make things a bit more difficult. 

The cake pops are made with cake mix and pre made frosting.  Cake mix is no problem – now I want red velvet cake mix , but a can of cream cheese frosting?  No can get.  I can make it, but how much do you need?  How much is 16oz in (proper, metric) grams?  These are the questions that take a while to work around.

 

The solution – I used a chocolate cake mix and made cream cheese icing, and decided to guesstimate the amounts.  I put the cake through the food processor to make the crumbs and started adding the icing to it.

The first go was too wet and goopy.  More cake required, so I was lucky that I had another chocolate cake mix in the pantry.  Baked, cooled and crumbed, I was ready to try again.  This time I just added the too goopy mix to the dry crumbs until it could be rolled into a ball.  Kind of like making rum balls (not that I’ve ever made them, but I imagine it’s the same sort of thing).  Once the balls are done, I left them in the fridge overnight – I’d had enough of cake for one day.  It made Heaps.

Next step – chocolate moulds.  Half filled with melted chocolate, then pop the cake ball in so it looks like a cup cake.  Into the freezer to set a bit, then in the fridge while I do the next set.  I think if I do these again, I’ll buy more moulds so I can make more than 8 at a time. 

 

 

Then the fun part – decorating!  For some reason I have very little in the way of sprinkles – I kept looking at them in the supermarket, but didn’t buy any because I always have heaps on hand.  Usually.  Well, I’m not going to the shops so what I have will have to do. 

 

I was very excited to find Wiltons Candy Melts were available here – they’re expensive, but I thought it would be worth it to save me trying to mix colours.  But they’re not that great – they stayed fairly solid even when they were melted, so you can’t dip things easily.  I ended up using a palette knife to ice the pink ones – fiddly and not great looking.  I made the blue and yellow from white chocolate with powdered colours.  I could dip these ones, so it was a bit quicker and easier to finish them.  I tried to make lilac, but ended up with grey-ish purple-ish instead.  They’ll still taste OK (and probably no one else will notice anyway). 

 

Some are a bit wonky, but that’s why I like to make a practice batch before I am committed to an actual event.  (lesson learnt the hard way).  Plus I need more types of sprinkles. I ended up with about 6 dozen – I will take some to a dinner/quilting sweatshop on Thursday night, but some are going to be taken to work as well.  And my sons work.  They like cake.  And I have Heaps of it that I’m not going to eat.

1 comments:

Corrie said...

oh yum!oh yum oh yum oh yum!

I agree, when recipes stay a stick of butter I am lost - and that is usually the first ingredient and I know it's not 250g butter like we have here!

well done, they look delish!
Corrie:)