Showing posts with label Guilty Pleasures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guilty Pleasures. Show all posts

Thursday, 3 March 2011

Bad Taste (never tasted so good)


Way better photo than I normally take, courtesy of GP resident photographer: Stephen Howse
UPDATED DIRECTIONS BELOW

Guilty Pleasure's party on Saturday night had the fabulously horrific theme "Bad Taste". I won't go into the details of our costumes, but in addition to a one-piece sparkly silver Abba-esque jumpsuit for our Waterloo performance (ah-mazing!), JW and I managed to take on the personas of ‘Tina’ and ‘Gloria’ for the first half of the night. For those of you who’ve seen this year’s Oscar nominated 'The Fighter’ – remember Micky and Dicky's seven sisters? We were equally foul-mouthed as that lot, but dressed in an even more inappropriate trailer-park ensemble. Deliciously bad taste for sure!

I used the opportunity to do a wee bit of practice on my piping and writing skills with a swiss meringue buttercream – hence the ornately, if not delicately designed cupcakes in the photo above. I wasn’t a fan of the frosting but the yellow buttermilk cakes were outstanding.  I've made them before and even wrote about them last year, commenting on their tastiness albeit being a bit too dense.  This time around - much fluffier - did a few recipe alterations, that might have made a difference.

http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/yellow-buttermilk-cupcakes

- 4 cups all-purpose flour instead of the 3 cups cake flour (which they stubbornly refuse to sell in my local Waitrose) and 1.5 cups all-purpose flour

UPDATE: I've been told the point above is confusing. To be fair, mama knows best - I agree.  What I meant was...recipe calls for BOTH 3 cups cake flour and 1.5 cups all-purpose flour (so 4.5 cups in total).  What I did INSTEAD was just use 4 cups of all-purpose flour.  Kapish?

- Reduced the butter and sugar just a smidgen (about ¼ of sugar and 1 Tbsp butter) – less by design and more because a standard UK butter pack is 250 grams, just nearly a Tb less and figured if I was doing that, then a wee bit of sugar could go as well

Up to you how you play it – but the option is there for the reductions if you so choose – all other measurements were kept the same.

Sunday, 30 January 2011

Haste Makes Waste


I interrupt what you are all doing on this lovely Sunday evening to fill you in on a small 'oopsie' from this weekend.  

In my insanity to try and balance a full-time job (‘full-time’ being 85+ hours including Sat and Sun last weekend), my dancing, blogging, cooking, baking, cake decorating course, scarf knitting, novel reading, bracelet making...I managed a rookie failure of hysterical proportions yesterday.

Last night was January’s GP event and as per usual I was baking up some tasty treats for the girls, the bears, miss greenwood, and all sorts of other cunning characters.  It wasn't like most months when I’d a) planned ahead what I’d be baking b) hadn’t worked insane hours the previous week with little sleep and c) wasn’t feeling like a headless chicken trying to do everything. Saturday was a case of trying to get some chocolate chip cupcakes made whilst in the middle of sorting out costumes and our dance for the night, amongst other long-overdue activities (e.g. buying extension cords and dental floss).

The result?  A lovely assortment of ‘tongue’ cupcakes!

'tongues' - a close relation (the bad ass cousin) to the chocolate chip cupcake 
You see my dear friends, in my attempt to get all of the cupcakes in the oven in one go (I had 2 trays and one 5 inch round spring-form pan), I jammed the spring-form pan in on the same shelf as my my silicone tray. I assumed it fit because with just a little shove everything got right in.  It was tight, but the oven door closed easy-peasy. 

Righty-o, now what I (clearly) didn't realise is that the last row of my silicone tray had been pressed and folded over into the back of the oven - resulting in these disastrously comical 'tongues'.  Seeing as I still had the small cake and 20 perfectly baked cupcakes there were no tears or stress at the kitchen calamity.  

In fact, after a few childish photos pretending to stick out our 'tongues' we just went ahead and ate them.  After all, they were basically chocolate chip cookies.



Tuesday, 28 April 2009

Guilty Pleasures presents...



There is a time and a place for gold lamé, fluorescent pink legwarmers and a waterfall of glitter and sequins.

The time: Last Saturday night
The place: Indigo Lounge at the 02 arena

As the newest member of the recently formed dance troupe the discob$tches (yes, one word) I was in all out alter ego mode (Miss Candi Cupcakes, s'il vous plait) as I arrived through the VIP gates at the 02 arena last Saturday night.

With 4 costume changes our VIP dressing room looked like a bedazzler gone wild. To keep up energy levels for our 4 performances throughout the night and being a good Miss Cupcakes – I brought some of my specialities in for the backstage VIP (did I mention VIP :-) ?) party.

Not content with just any plain jane cupcake I pimped my cakes out discob$tch style. Ordering edible scarlet glitter and gold stars online I made basic chocolate cupcake and a vanilla butter cream frosting. Turning the frosting a shocking shade of bubble gum pink-it set off the glitter and gold stars to perfection and were really...a guilty pleasure for all.