Olympic Cakes!

I am most definitely caught up in the Olympic madness and as demonstrated by my enthusiastic Tweeting during the AMAZING opening ceremony I'm loving every minute of it. (FYI the opening ceremony was perfectly British and the best way to start the games. All hail Danny Boyle!) So in a moment of Olympic fever I concocted some red, white and blue cakes. Using my trusty cupcake recipe I threw in some food colouring and made some colourful cakes. 

Ingredients for cupcakes plus red and blue food colouring and flavours. 

Mixing, mixing, mixing

100% free range and organic eggs straight from our super cool hens in the garden

Things are about to get colourful!

Red mix: red colouring and strawberry flavour; Blue mix: just the colouring and the white mix: vanilla essence.

The blue isn't as navy as I would have liked but I didn't want to overdo it on the colouring and end up with dodgy tasting mixture. 

Ready for the oven.

I spooned a bit of the mixture into each case one colour at a time until it was all gone, then swirled it all together with a cocktail stick to get a marble effect.  

Ready for icing.

Iced, waiting to be eaten.

Thanks to a lack of butter I went with runny icing today and dribbled it onto the cakes. I was quite pleased with results, even if the red is a bit orange in places, I think there's something quite "Olympic" about them; they're not perfectly regular, they're definietly a little weird but when it comes to the important bit, the taste, they're a real winner.

#GoTeamGB        

Let them eat cake

I love baking. I’ve been baking ever since I was little and one of the first things I learnt to bake was Butterfly Buns. Somewhere amongst the family photos there’s a photo of a 5 or 6 year old me standing on a chair in the kitchen decorating my latest baking creation. Over the years I’ve had a go at baking various things but cupcakes have always been a particular specialty of mine, so much so that I know the recipe off by heart (admittedly there are only four ingredients and it’s pretty straight forward, but I like that I don’t need a recipe). Another great thing about cupcakes is once you’ve got the basic recipe it’s easy to add to it and create whatever flavour you like.

Basic cupcake recipe:

For the cupcakes:

• 200g golden caster sugar
• 200g margarine
• 200g self raising flour
• 4 eggs

For the buttercream:

• 350g icing sugar
• 150g margarine

To make the cupcakes:

1. Heat the oven to 180°C. Lay out the cupcakes cases in either a 12 hole muffin tin 
2. Cream together the sugar and the margarine. 
3. Mix in one egg at a time, adding a little flour with each.
4. Fold in the remaining flour and mixing until well combined.
5. Spoon the mixture evenly into the cupcake cases.
6. Bake in the oven for 15 - 20 minutes until they feel spongy and are golden in colour. 
7. Once out of the oven, place on a wire cooling rack to cool down before decorating. 

To make the buttercream:

1. Divide the margarine and icing sugar into four separate bowls and mix until light in colour and fluffy.
2. Using a piping bag swirl the icing on to the cupcakes.

There you have it, the base recipe for cupcakes and buttercream icing just waiting to be made and added to. I rarely make cupcakes without adding in some extra flavours and here are some of my most recent bakes:  

Chocolate

For the cupcakes: substitute 10g of self raising flour for cocoa powder 

For the icing: add in 100g of melted chocolate and top with decorations. 

Lemon Meringue

For the cupcakes: add in the juice and rind of one lemon to the mix. Half fill the cases, add a blob of lemon curd to each case and then top up with the remaining mixture, covering the lemon curd. 

For the icing: Add the rind of one lemon and lemon juice to suit your taste. You may have to add more icing sugar to prevent runny icing. Top with meringue pieces, I made mine using Delia’s recipe.

Jubilee 

I got really into the Jubilee spirit this year and with a glass of Pimm’s in hand I whipped up these cakes. The vanilla flavour of the cake/icing combined with the fruit was light and fresh, the cupcakes do need to be kept in the fridge but I was really pleased with this flavour.

For the cupcakes and the icing: I added vanilla essence to both, and decorate with blueberries and sliced strawberries. 


Enjoy these cupcakes with a glass of Pimm's with all the trimmings. 

Everyday I'm shuffling

I listen to The Chris Moyles Show everyday and I love it. Recently, they’ve started a new feature called “The generic MP3 player shuffle game” which aside from being brilliantly simple is also hilarious. 

Inspired by what is one of my favourite features I decided to shuffle my own “generic MP3 player” (iPod, obviously) and see what came up...  


1. You Fucking Love It - Dirty Pretty Things

2. Echoes - Klaxons

3. Tonight’s the Kind of Night - Noah and the Whale

4. You Took My Heart - Pepper and Piano

5. What the Water Gave Me - Florence and the Machine 

Given that my iPod does contain some genuinely embarrassing music, I have to say this quite a good shuffle. 

Here is the link to the most recent round of the shuffle game on the show, it’s at about 1hr 47mins: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bskqr 

Staying Alive

I love this advert, not only is funny but (unlike most adverts) it's also useful. Watch it. Remember it. Hopefully you won't have to use it, but you never know. #hardandfast   

Return of the Blogger (hopefully)

I’ve been absent from my blog for a while now but for good reason, I started uni in September and for the last three months I have been having a fantastic time doing all thing studenty. However, now that I’ve been back for the Christmas holidays I’ve had a bit of time to get my blog on again. And so begins my blogging...   

I’m Laura and currently I’m obsessed with...  

I present to you some of my current obsessions:

WIWT: (What I Wore Today)

This obsession of mine began back in August when I was flicking through a copy of Marie Claire and saw a feature/interview/profile about people who had turned their blogs into careers. One of the people who caught my eye was Poppy Dinsey. 

Poppy turned a simple New Years Resolution - blogging a photo of her outfit everyday for a year - into an actual brand and an ever expanding fashion machine. What began as a personal challenge has developed into a new social networking site for everyone to share ‘What I Wore Today’. 

To get involved with WIWT simply sign up, take a picture of your outfit, tag your clothes and wait for people to award you gold stars. It’s literally that easy. There is even a WIWT App. You don’t have to update it everyday (I stopped for 11 weeks whilst at uni due to a lack of any full length mirror #badtimes) and you don’t have to make any particular effort. One of my most successful posts was of me in my sleeping bag.     

WIWT combines fashion, the ability to be nosy about what everyone else is wearing and prizes (oh yes, WIWT runs super cool awesome competitions) to create something you are likely to be obsessed with. Try it. It’s fabulous. 

Website: www.wiwt.com

Twitter: @WIWT

Poppy’s Twitter: @PoppyD (Her tweets make me LOL. Just saying.)          

  

Dirty Works

It’s time for some equations. (yes I did just type that)

Student social life + lectures + essay deadlines = lack of sleep

Lack of sleep = dark circles + need of concealer 

Concealer is the one product I use everyday, I should probably save myself some money and just get a better nights sleep but let’s face it that is never going to happen, so I need a concealer that works.  

After a long search I have finally found a product that fits the description. Dirty Works Bye Bye Dark Circles is magic. Actual make up magic. It’s my new must have make up item, which I found in Sainsbury’s. This little cube of loveliness banishes dark circles and at less than £5 how can you resist?      

And finally...Bill Nighy

He’s amazing. An acting legend. On a scale of 1 - Alan Rickman he’s right up there at the top just oozing awesomeness. As my friend said to me the other day “He’d be the best cool Granddad ever.”