Cappuccino Bars

We're not all about cupcakes at Patti's Cupcakes, but we are all about 'cake'!!!
Here is one of our favourites. These moreish bars can be frozen, without their topping, for up to 2 months. So why not make some and stick them in the freezer?

INGREDIENTS:

1 teaspoon cocoa powder, plus a little extra for dusting.
2 rounded tablespoons coffee granules
225g softened butter
225g castor sugar
4 eggs
225g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

FOR THE WHITE CHOCOLATE ICING:
100g white chocolate, broken into pieces
(plus a little extra to grate on top of the cake)
50g softened butter
3 tablespoons milk
175g icing sugar

METHOD:
Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4/fan oven 160C
butter and line the bottom of a shallow 28 x 18cm oblong tin.
Mix the cocoa and coffee granules into 2 tablespoons warm water. Put in a large
bowl with the other cake ingredients.
Whisk for about 2 minutes with an electric mixer to combine, then tip into the tin and level out. Bake for 35-40 minutes until risen and firm to the touch. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then cool on a rack. Peel off the paper.
For the icing, melt the chocolate, butter and milk in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Remove the bowl and sift in the icing sugar. Beat until smooth, then spread over the cake. Finish with a dusting of cocoa powder and a little grated white chocolate. Cut into 24 bars.

Cupcake Update

I've been a bit remiss in putting my cupcake pictures on my blog, so here are a few I've made recently.

A couple of giant cupcakes

I'm getting the hang of this giant cupcake thing. Here's one we did for ourselves last week.

It's a basic cupcake mixture with buttercream icing and lots of chocolate sprinkles and a cherry. Yummy!



We were asked to make a cupcake for a child's birthday and decided to go for butterflies and bees. We also forgot to take a photo until we were walking out of the door with it, so the pictures aren't that great as we had put it in the only container we could find - does anybody do cake boxes for giant cupcakes? We can't find them anywhere. The cake however, looked fabulous.

I just wish I'd remembered to take a proper photo because I think this is our best giant cupcake so far. Oh well - next time!

Cupcakes that Care

It was the first public outing for Patti's Cupcakes in our home town as all the other craft markets have been elsewhere. We wanted to make them not only as colourful as possible but delicious, too. We always use British butter and eggs from happy hens. We can't bear thinking that our eggs come from battery farm hens who barely have feathers on them let alone a decent life, so we make sure our eggs are from hens that are free to roam and roost and have a good life and mostly we get them from a farm not too far away from where we live. Fairtrade sugar is also important to us. If we are going to make cupcakes then we're going to make cupcakes that care!

Everyone seemed to enjoy them!

Chocolate Munchie Cake!

The overwhelming urge to make a chocolate cake hit me at the weekend. So I decided to make one with a Munchie topping. The recipe is quite simple:

6 oz softened butter
6 oz caster sugar
5 oz self raising flour - sifted
1 3/4 oz cocoa powder - sifted
3 large eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of salt

Put the oven on 180c or Gas mark 4.
Grease a 7 inch round cake tin with butter and line with greaseproof paper.
Chuck all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until combined. Don't beat too much, just enough to make it smooth.

Pour into the tin, smooth the top and bake in the middle shelf of oven for about 45-50 mins. The cake is cooked when it looks well risen and the top springs back when lightly touched with a fingertip. Or insert center of cake with skewer, it should come out clean.

Let cake sit in tin for 5 mins then gently run a knife around the edge and turn out. Put on wire rack to cool.

For icing:

5 oz butter
8 oz icing sugar - sifted
2 tablspoons cocoa powder - sifted
2 teaspoons very hot water (but I used Elmea long life cream, it makes a creamier icing)
Packets of Munchies or finger of fudges - whatever you fancy

Mix together the butter, icing sugar,cocoa powder and hot water (or cream) and plaster all over the cooled cake. Sprinkle with chopped up Munchies or fudge fingers.

Wedding Fayre

I was invited by my very good friends Jane and Sharon of Machynlleth Wedding Dresses, to take some of my cupcakes to the wedding fayre they had organized at the Llety Park Lodge in Aberystwyth on Sunday.

The lodge is a hotel situated on the roundabout near the Parc Y Lyn retail park so it's in a good spot to catch people going in and out of Morrison's supermarket and the other shops there.

Jane and Sharon hired an upstairs room for the fayre and I was greeted by a room full of gorgeous dresses, tiaras and veils. There is something magical about a big floaty gown and if I had a zillion pounds I'd have bought the lot -- just to swan around the house in. I could quite see myself putting out the wheelie bin wearing ivory tull!

I had an absolutely lovely day. With three grown up lads the conversation in my house rotates around football, wrestling, video games, boxing, did I mention football? So to get the chance to spend some time in a purely female environment and also have the opportunity to display my cupcakes was a real treat. We even donned tiaras to get into the spirit of things, although I must admit I was slightly worried I'd forget to take it off and dash into Morrisons with the equiviliant of the crown jewels on my head -- typically I'd chosen to wear one that wouldn't look out of place on her Majesty.

As follows are my photos.

Machynlleth Wedding Dresses have a Facebook page and sell their dresses at extremely affordable prices.

My cupcake display at the Wedding Fayre.

A satisfied customer! A little girl tucking into one of my cupcakes while her mummy looked at the dresses.

Giant Cupcakes

A few years ago someone in the U.S decided it would be fun to make a giant cupcake. Well, it wasn't unexpected when you think about it. Americans like big portions of anything so a giant cupcake was hardly a leap. It didn't take long before this idea filtered across to Britain and last Christmas a fair few women found one of these giant cupcake moulds in their Christmas stockings. (Some men are just so romantic, aren't they?)

After watching a fair few U.S television reviews (Some good. Some not) I warily bought a silicone giant cupcake mould(I say, warily because I've never used a silicone mould before and doubted it's ability to perform!)

I googled a recipe that was supposed to be the best and set to work. But there really wasn't enough mixture in the recipe and there was no way it was going to look like the gigantic cupcake in the picture. Mine looked more like giant cupcake's little brother.

Try again.

The next time I doubled the mixture of the recipe. All seemed to be going well until I noticed the bottom half didn't seem to be very firm and was taking forever to cook. Eventually I had to take it out of the oven because I was losing the will to live and that's when I suffered what is known as 'catastrophic giant cupcake collapse!' Dismayed at my caved in cupcake I took to the Internet and found out that C.G.C.C wasn't rare. People had blogged (with pictures) their monumental giant cupcake failures (no way was I doing that!) I listened to their stories and tried to learn from their mistakes.

I decided it was the silicone mould that was the trouble and splashed out on a Wilton (creme de la creme of American cake decorating people) mould which isn't in two parts like the silicone mould but joined together. I went to Youtube and watched a Wilton 'celebration expert' demonstrate this mean piece of equipment but was worried when she said 'some of you have had issues with uneven cooking' It was that C.G.C.C. all over again. Her solution? Turn it around half way through baking. Turn it which way? Front to back? Fine if you have an American oven the size of the Titanic. Umph! It wasn't looking good. But Wilton were the experts, weren't they? Everything was sure to be fine. Just follow their instructions to the T. I also purchased 'cake release' oil to prevent the cake sticking to the pan. I set to work following the Wilton recipe that came with the pan. It was very complicated. Sour cream. Brown sugar. White sugar. Coffee. Cocoa. I stared at the gigantic amount of chocolatey mixture in the bowl. Surely this was way too much? But then I told myself Wilton were the experts. What could possibly go wrong?

I won't go into detail. I'm still suffering from giant cupcake post traumatic stress. Suffice to say half way through cooking, the cake looked like something from an episode of Dr Who.

It took forever to cook. I could have powered Denmark with the amount of electricity I used. But, strangely, despite it's horrifically deformed elephant-man-like appearance the cake itself was actually quite delicious. However, my family were now referring to my giant cupcakes as "Patti's Earthquakes" and stifling giggles whenever I talked about making another one. I was becoming a figure of ridicule!

I couldn't sleep at night. I had to master this. Everyone else was making fabulous giant cupcakes, why couldn't I? What was wrong with me? Was this American phenomenon doomed to be by nemesis? (okay, overly dramatic here)

I threw out the Wilton (not literally, I chucked it to the back of the cupboard) dragged out the silicone mould and made up my OWN recipe. And now this is my 'ta-da' moment. Below is a perfectly formed, delicious giant cupcake with giant chocolate buttons on buttercream icing. But before you look at it. Stefan and I have become bored with the photographs of cupcakes we've seen on the Internet and decided to photograph them in...er...slightly unusual settings. Hence the cupcake in the guitar case. Or in other words this is what happens when you let your child loose with a camera and the words 'take a photo of that for me, will you?'