Chocolate cake leftovers can be fun!

If you ever make a cake or a batch of cupcakes and there is some mixture left over, here's a great tip:

Dr Cupcake's Great Cake Tip #43: NEVER THROW EXTRA MIXTURE AWAY.

Take the Wombles as your role model. If you are as old as me then you'll know that the Wombles, while they were underground, overground, wombling free, were ALSO making good use of the things that they find, the things that the everyday folk leave behind:

Yes indeed. And I bet they were fond of chocolate cake (although I can't say that for sure), and further, I bet you anything you like that, had they had extra cake mixture left over from a batch, they would have turned it into a smaller tin, cooked it, and come out with something..... looking rather like this:

.... looking rather like this:

- Which they would have put in the freezer, slightly flat and unattractive-looking as it was, in the certain knowledge that, ONE DAY SOON, it would find a use.

The Wombles, whilst whipping up a batch of ganache for their last cooking project, and finding that there appeared to be too much ganache for their purposes, would, almost certainly, have done.....

....THIS, and scooped it unattractively into a sandwich bag, to be popped in the freezer for a later event.

And this is exactly what you and I should do, too.....

Because, the very next time you have a special occasion and absolutely no time to make anything fancy, you can rip your little flat cake and your messy ganache out of the freezer and do this with it, and no one will ever know that you haven't slaved over a hot stove for hours making it.

These are, obviously, little squares of rich chocolate mud cake topped with a warm, half-melted ganache and topped with some fancy sugar roses.....

.... Which I had no compunction in getting out of a packet - again, if you have the time, it's wonderful to make them yourself, but if you don't, it is really worthwhile to keep a few ready made ones in the cupboard.

I hand cut the cake squares with a sharp and heavy knife. It helps if the cake is not completely defrosted, or at least still very cold, when cutting - that way it is less crumbly and less likely to break into smaller pieces.

The good thing about the 'dolloped' ganache icing is that it hides any inconsistencies or breakages in the cake squares.

I was lucky enough to have both red and white roses to top the cakes with. The red were my favorites.

And seriously one of the best things about the whole experience was the amount of washing up that I had to do at the end, which was:











Done, finito, from go to whoa in approximately 20 minutes ... and a roomful of appreciative chocolate smeared faces were none the wiser.

So, be like the Wombles, because they're cool and stuff.

Happy wombling from Dr Cupcake!

Bunches of flowers (Made of cake)

In going to a party on the weekend, I wanted to bring something for my lovely hostess Katherine, and what could be better than a little bunch of flowers. The only difference being that I wanted the flowers to be edible.

These cakepops have a centre of chocolate mud cake, crumbled and mixed with dark chocolate ganache.











Cake pops are a lengthy process when you have to make the cake and the ganache (or filling) from scratch. However, when you have ready-made supplies of both (see pic on left) it's a lot more straightforward.

Cake and ganache both freeze beautifully so whenever I have any extra left from a project I sock it away in the freezer. Just call me Martha Stewart. At some stage I will get around to putting up the chocolate mud cake recipe I use but you can use any type of cake.

The cake needed to be crumbled into small pieces, then mixed with enough ganache to make it 'ball' against the sides of the bowl.

The aim is to get a smooth(ish) ball of cakepop 'pastry' that might be a bit sticky but hangs together really well.

Because I wanted to roll it out and stamp some cutter shapes from it, I flattened it into a rough circle by hand, wrapped it in clingfilm and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes to get it to firm up a bit.

To roll it out, a sheet of clingfilm over the top of the mixture as well as underneath is heaps easier. What I mean is, you unwrap the mixture and leave the clingfilm sitting underneath, then put a fresh piece of clingfilm in between the mix and the rolling pin. This means you can roll out the mix without it sticking to the rolling pin.

Then I used a flower cutter to get my shapes. I had to re-roll the mixture a couple of times to get all my flowers.

I then had a brilliant idea which turned out to be a massive mistake. I tried to introduce a bit of three dimensionality into the flat shapes by pressing a ball tool into the centre to make a dip, which I would then fill, after the flower was coated, with a mini M&M.

What I found out when I started dipping the shapes was that the coating mixture didn't like these little depressions in the middle of an otherwise flat shape, the coating didn't work smoothly. It was either too thin on the 'petal' bits or so thick on the centre that you couldn't tell there was a dip at all. So my advice is, don't try to be too fancy.

While the coating was melting (for detailed instructions, see here) I put the flowers back in the fridge to firm up again. It's really important to keep them very cold and hard because when they get dipped into a hot coating they are liable to soften up or get a bit melty.

Firstly you dip just the top of the stick into the coating, then you stick it into one of your shapes. It was a bit tricky to do this because I had made the flowers quite thin front to back, about 2cm, and I needed to put the stick through this narrow edge. Remember I also made a dip in the middle of the flower? Yeah - that didn't go well either.

This is what it looks like when it goes right. The coating is covering the pop evenly, the extra coating is dripping off the other side whn the stick is tapped gently against the bowl.

... And this is what it looks like when it goes wrong.

... As you see, when it goes wrong, it's hard to even get it out of the bowl. What happened here is that the stick was a bit crooked when I stuck it into the narrow edge of the flower. When I dipped it, the extra weight of the melt mixture pulled the flower downwards while I was pulling upward with the stick, and the stick broke through the flower and came out - leaving a trail of dark cake crumbs through my melt mixture, which was a problem for the whole rest of the dipping session.

Anyway - back to the nicer looking ones (thank god).

When they come out of the mix, straightaway decorate them with mini M&Ms, cachous or whatever works best. I found that one M&M in the centre and a selection of metallic-coloured cachous one the petals worked quite well.

Now to show you what happens when cake pops go bad!

Yes, apart from the disaster above which didn't get as far as being decorated, I had a few really horrible cake pops:

Why are my cake pops spiky?
Spiky mounds of melt mixture (left) happen when you don't tap the extra melt mixture off fast enough, or only get one side smooth and neglect to turn the pop over to check the other side is smooth too.

Why are my cake pops rough and swirly?
This happens (right) when (a) you don't have enough mixture in the bowl, so instead of slowly lowering it vertically and covering any gaps with a spatula, you swish it around the bottom of the bowl and coat it unevenly; and (b) the melt mix is starting to cool too much.

Why do my cake pops look so WRONG?

This one at the left should never have got to decorating stage. You can see how the melt mixture was very uneven and seemed to have divided into two layers. Why bother trying to fix it with cachous... when you know it's going to have to go in the bin!

Why are my cake pop decorations uneven?

Well... possibly because you're not very good at sprinkling tiny objects onto a rapidly-drying melt surface so that they are evenly spaced! These little tiny flower shapes are pretty but beware, they are very difficult to handle well. I should have used tweezers to pick them up and place them accurately. The melt mixture dries very quickly too, so if you drop one in the wrong place, it's difficult to remove without leaving a mark on the surface. Needless to say this one got the flick as well.

Having got the ugly, yucky ones out of the way here's a reminder of what they SHOULD look like!

Once I had a decent quantity of these, I began to investigate packing options.

They were quite pretty wrapped individually in cello bags with a ribbon tie. This had the added benefit of providing a bit of protection and sealing, as it's a difficult shape to fit in a gift box.

This was the final presentation of my bunch of flowers for my hostess. I have to admit I would have liked to use fancier paper and nicer ribbons, like that swanky thick textured Japanese paper you get around expensive bunches of real flowers... but I had to make do with what was in the house already... some of Mr Cupcake's fancy printer paper.

And the great thing was that there were plenty left over to reach a wider audience. Miss Lucy Tomlin was apparently pretty happy to see a cake pop carefully taken home for her by her daddy.

That's it for flower pops... in summary, they were fun, reasonably simple, but a few traps for young players with putting sticks into relatively narrow edges. These were harder (quite a bit harder) than cake pop chicks (here) or even the strawberries (here), but definitely worth a go for a flowery bouquet of edible goodness!