Polka dot heart cookies for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

These are very dark chocolate cookies (or biscuits if you prefer) with royal icing and the occasional cachou.

The awesome thing about royal icing for cookies is that it sets rock hard, so you can pack them in layers and move them. I guess I'm really saying it's a very practical type of decoration. But - unlike shoes, which can only ever be one or the other - that doesn't mean they can't be pretty.

I started off doing polka dots but got a little creative and did a few other patterns using the same basic colours.

This type of decoration requires royal icing of two different consistencies: line icing (around the edge to hold everything else in place) and flooding icing (everything else).

First to the cookie: I used a 'Super Chocolatey Biscuits' recipe from the Biscuiteers Book of Iced Biscuits - in fact you'll know if you see this book around because there is a polka-dotted heart cookie just like this one on the front cover. Great book. GREAT book.

Ingredients:
275g plain flour
100g self raising flour
75g cocoa
125g granulated sugar (I used caster, it was fine)
125g salted butter, diced
125g golden syrup
I large egg

Sift the flours and the cocoa into a large bowl, then add the sugar and mix well. Rub the cubes of butter into the dry mixture with your fingers until you get a consistency like moist breadcrumbs.

Make a well in the centre and pour in the golden syrup and the egg (okay, yes I forgot to beat the egg before I added it - so sue me).

Gently mix everything together just until it forms a solid ball of dough. Then turn this out onto your benchtop.

My dough wouldn't come together properly at first so I added a little more golden syrup until it did. I think this was because the eggs I used weren't huge - just be aware that the actual quantities of the recipe are not as important as the  look and feel of it. You need to end up with a smooth, solid dough - adjust the quantities if you need to.

Divide the dough into two equal parts and wrap both in clingfilm. Place one part in the fridge while you roll out the other part.

Rolling out the dough can be tricky - the best way is to roll it out between a piece of baking paper and a piece of clingfilm. You then use the rolling pin over the top of the clingfilm. It will be a hard dough to work, you need to press firmly and evenly until you get it to about 5mm thick.
When it's at this stage, lift the dough still in the baking paper and clingfilm onto a baking tray and pop it in the fridge for 15 minutes or so before you cut the heart shapes - it's supposed to be for longer than that, but I get impatient.

Stamp the shapes out with heart cutters. I have a set of these so I was able to do about five different sizes but you could do them all one size, it wouldn't matter. I found the dough stuck to the cutters a little and had to be gently eased out of them. Put the cut-out hearts onto a baking tray lined with baking paper, leaving at least a centimetre of clearance around each shape. You can re-roll the offcuts or gather them up and shape them into a ball and keep the dough for later.

When you've filled the tray, place it back in the fridge for half an hour. This prevents the dough from rising and distorting too much during the baking process. Preheat the oven to 170C. Bake the biscuits for 14-18 minutes (check after 14) until the biscuits look firm and cooked and slightly darker in colour.Gently lift each shape onto a rack with a spatula and leave until completely cool.

Icing time yay! Now, you could use a home made royal icing, and if I was really a decent cook I guess I wouldn't mind making one, but to be honest there's a packet mix available in every supermarket that is just as good and ten times easier. So save your energy and time for the decoration and use the packet mix (if you want a recipe for royal icing there are plenty on the interwebs).

You need two batches of icing: first the line icing. The consistency of this needs to be quite thick but not so thick that you can't pipe it - something like the consistency of very thick pure cream, or maybe slightly thicker. If you're unsure, keep it thick and test it in a piping bag - can you pipe it in a thin line? If not, thin it down until you can pipe a thin, hard solid line with no gaps.

Secondly you need to make a batch of flooding icing, which is thinner - you can make this, obviously, from your line icing by simply adding a little more water. The consistency of flooding icing needs to be like pouring cream.

You then need to tint the icing - I kept half the flooding icing white and tinted half of it rose pink, and I tinted the line icing pink.

So then you need to load the line icing into a piping bag. I always use disposable piping bags because I hate washing out canvas piping bags and also I don't really trust that you can ever get them totally clean, so for hygiene reasons it's just best to go the disposable option.

Snip off a tiny end piece of the piping bag and pipe a thin line inside the edge of the cookie. I was trying to make these lines as smooth and parallel to the edge as possible, but it takes a bit of practice and a very steady hand.

I used squeeze bottles for the thinner flooding icing. So for the flooding, just aim inside the lines. Easy....

... Or is it? This is what happens when the flood overtops the levee banks. Disaster.

I discovered that this can happen for two reasons (I guess they're both obvious). The first is that you put too much flooding icing on, and it just gets too high to be held back by the line icing. The second is that you damage the line icing somehow, either in piping or subsequently. This particular cookie was ruined because I brushed the edge of the line with my finger and shifted it. Goddamn.

You can rescue this disaster by waiting for the icing to harden a little and cutting the excess away.....

... But you can't rescue it when it has pulled all the pattern off with it!
D'oh.

Ok so let's get away from the disasters and back to the plot... you've managed to get the line icing sort of straight, and the flooding icing inside the lines. This is how it looks at that stage.

I thought I took a picture of polka dots being made but I can't find it, so you'll just have to imagine. The white flooding icing was in another squeeze bottle with a small circular nozzle. You need to hold the bottle vertically and squeeze very gently until a tiny drop of white icing falls onto the pink surface. It will spread a bit so don't put the dots too close to each other.

The stripe pattern starts the same way, with a plain pink flooding. The white flooding icing is piped in vertical stripes. Well, sort of vertical anyway.

I did a couple of these heart-within-a-heart shapes but I didn't like them very much because it was hard to do them accurately.

I used plain white flooding icing decorated with pink cachous for some of the smaller cookies. I really liked these because the pink line icing was just visible at the edges and it added an extra degree of detail - obviously in the shapes flooded with pink, the pink line icing is all but invisible.


Happy Valentine's Day everyone ... may you have a wonderful, happy, romantic, awesome day!

Christmas cupcakes 2: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

If you've made Santa cupcakes (see here) then you really need to make some reindeer to help the poor ole guy out. This is Rudolph.

Rudolph looks a bit worried. I think that's entirely reasonable, it's his busiest time of year after all.

I made a strategic error when planning these cupcakes. I thought that red as a background colour would look suitably bright and Christmas-y. But with a red background, Rudolph's beautiful red nose doesn't really glow like it should. I would have been better to do a dark green background.

Oh well - there's always next year.

For Rudolph's face, you need to roll out some dark brown fondant. You can get this pre-coloured and chocolate flavoured and that's what I used here.

Cut out some circles approximately one third to half the size of the top of your cupcake, then use a slightly larger circle cutter to take two elliptical 'bites' out of the sides of the circle, as shown in this picture. You're aiming for an hourglass shape that is wider at the top than the bottom.

Once you've made the cuts, round the corners by hand until you have a smooth shape. This will be Rudolph's head.

Stick the head onto the top of the cupcake, leaving a little more room above it than below it (remember you need to fit the antlers above the head). Fix it with a few drops of water.

Here are all the cupcakes with heads on.

Roll two little balls of white fondant and stick them on - these are Rudolph's eyes. Make little holes in the centres so that you can stick the pupils on.

A little tip to help you make a pair of eyes that are exactly the same size: Roll a ball of fondant larger than you need, then cut it in half exactly with a sharp knife and re-roll two separate fondant balls. This way they will be exactly the same size.

Roll two very small balls of black fondant and stick them into the indentations in the 'eyeballs' with a tiny drop of water. Beware if you use too much water next to black fondant, the colour will run.

Roll a ball of red fondant for the nose and stick it in place.

I suddenly realised after I'd made these that there should really be only one Rudolph with a red nose, the other reindeer should all have black noses. So if you wanted to be more historically accurate (if you can say that about reindeer pulling a fat man's sleigh through the air all around the world in one night) you could do seven black-nosed reindeer and one beautiful, shiny red-nosed one.

For the antlers, I used a leaf cutter, cutting out a leaf shape and then slicing it in half vertically and 'feathering' the straight edge with a sharp knife. In this pic you can see the cutter on the right, then the leaf shape and on the left you can see the finished antlers.

Fix the antlers in place and decorate the edges with some cachous if you feel like it. They provide a bit of colour variation and they are nice and shiny. I wanted to use green ones but I only had a kind of aqua colour. I like to think they look green though.

All the little Rudolphs looked rather frightened. I love how they're all looking worriedly in different directions, like they're not sure exactly what they should be scared of, but they're keeping a close eye on everything.

Merry Christmas from Dr Cupcake!!

Miniature gingerbread houses for Christmas

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without a gingerbread house. This is a wonderful European tradition that is decorative as well as yummy, and seems to be only growing in popularity the world over.

This year I was inspired by a design from Megan (notmartha.org) who made tiny houses to sit over the edge of a coffee cup. While I didn't need mine to sit on a cup, I love the miniaturising idea so I helped myself to her templates and instructions, which you can find here.

None of these pictures really show the scale of these houses but if you're trying to work out how big they are, they stand approximately 10cm (4in.) high from the base to the top of the roof.

My family is partly Norwegian in origin so I was delighted to find that gingerbread houses are a huge thing in Norway. In Bergen at Christmas each year, people build an entire gingerbread city.

It is called a Pepperkakebyen.  I KNOW.

I can't compete with those crazy Norwegians and their awesome city, but I did make a little street of tiny houses.

Actually, it would be wonderful for a Christmas party to make lots of these little houses and arrange them like a little village. Maybe I'll do that next year.

I decorated the houses all differently. I admit, I was a little distracted doing these and just used whatever I had to had, but if you planned it out in advance you could stock up on lots of little sweets for decorating.
I used royal icing, piped (messily) in loops and straight lines on the roof, then stuck a variety of lollies, mini M&Ms, hearts, stars and freckles on.

This roof was just little jelly watermelon halves, hearts and royal icing.

I actually liked the restraint of just using red and white - some of the others were a riot of colour and ended up looking messy.

So how do you start? There are so many different types of gingerbread out there. If you want to make houses you will need a recipe that makes a firm mixture that will dry hard-ish (think of a gingerbread man - it's not crumbly or bendy, but firm and a bit chewy - that's the texture you want for gingerbread houses).

Martha Stewart has a great recipe for this purpose here. OF COURSE she does, she's Martha Stewart.

It makes a sticky, gooey dough mix which you can see in this pic. (I actually had a near disaster with this recipe - I made it all, and tipped it out of the mixing bowl to knead it, thinking "this is so dry! How unlike Martha to make a bad recipe!" ... only to realise that I had forgotten to put the molasses in. Luckily I remembered in time and piled it back into the bowl and dumped a truckload of molasses on it, and it was fine.)

Because the dough is so sticky and tacky (well, it is if you remember the molasses) you need to chill it in the fridge or freezer for a while before even attempting to roll it out.

When you do roll it out, to prevent it sticking to your rolling pin, bench, hair, face and entire kitchen, put the dough on top of a sheet of foil, then put a sheet of clingfilm over the dough and work the rolling pin over the top of the clingfilm. This way you can roll it out flat like in this pic.

When you've rolled the dough out flat to the size of a baking tray, put it onto the baking tray you'll use (still with the foil underneath, but take the clingfilm off the top) and put it back in the fridge while you prepare your templates - I made these from notmartha's PDF. They are made of thin card that won't tear.

Grab the baking tray out of the fridge and lay the templates down on the dough and use a sharp knife to cut around them. Then GENTLY peel away the excess dough, being careful not to stretch or distort your template shapes.

The excess dough can be re-rolled.

For each house you need two of each of the three shapes. SO for instance, in this baking tray, I have enough shapes to make two houses, plus an extra frontage.

You'll need a whole afternoon for this process. It takes time.

You need to put the tray of finished shapes back in the fridge to firm up again before baking, or they will rise too much and the shapes will deform.

After they have been chilled, they can be popped in the oven for 10 minutes to bake. This tray of cooked shapes is the same tray as the one above. It was the first tray I baked and I overcooked some of the shapes - you can see at the bottom that the big oblongs are a bit too coloured.

When you first take the shapes out of the oven they are a bit soft and at this stage they can be trimmed around the edges if they have risen too much or aren't straight.

 When the shapes are cool you can start constructing the houses!

I used a packet of royal icing mix from the supermarket but if you want to make your own, of course Martha Stewart has a recipe.


I found it easiest to lay the front of the house flat and stick the two side walls on, then put the back of the house on top of these. At this point you can carefully turn the house upright and the walls should all support each other.

Next come the roof panels.

Put them both on together and hold in place for a few moments.

Then pipe some royal icing into the gap between the roof panels, and leave the house to dry.

It surprised me how stable these little houses were once they had been put together. They were pretty indestructible. It turns out royal icing has magical sticking power.

The only thing remaining is to decorate your houses in any way you see fit.

If you are doing this with little people I recommend you make the dough, the shapes, bake them and construct the houses by yourself, and then have a big decorating session with the kids - the first stages are time consuming, difficult and tedious for littlies but the decoration stage can be enjoyed by even very young kidlets.




Happy Christmas!!

Christmas Cupcakes 1: Santa Cupcake

Christmas is rolling around again... how better to celebrate than making some cupcakes of Santa!

These cupcakes are my favorite chocolate mud cake with lots of 70% dark chocolate in the mixture to make them super yummy and moist.

To make a Santa cupcake you need to start off with a base of ivory or skin colour covering the top surface of the cupcake.

You can see here that I have mixed up some bright red and some black fondant icing too.

Cut some skinny white crescent moon shapes, using the same size of circle cutter as you used to cut out the circle covering the top of your cupcake. This picture shows how you make the crescent shape - you use the same cutter twice, moving it about a centimetre on the second go. The crescent shape will be Santa's beard.

Fix the crescent shape in 'beard' position at the bottom of the 'face', attaching it with a few drops of water.

You also need a long triangle of red fondant (hat); a thin strip of white fondant (hatband); two small elliptical white shapes (moustache); a ball of red fondant (nose); and two tiny balls of black fondant (eyes).

Here are all the shapes lined up ready to go on the face:

After you have attached the beard, position the moustache pieces and attach.

These are my little santas with their beards and moustaches attached.

Next punch three small holes in the face where the nose and eyes will go.

Leave plenty of room at the top of the face for the hat.

Attach the nose and eyes into the holes with tiny drops of water (beware! If you get water around the edges of black fondant it will run, and your santa may look like he's been wearing mascara and crying).

Finally, stick the red triangle onto the upper third of the face and attach the white band on top. Fold the red 'hat' over onto the face, and if you like, roll a little white ball of fondant as a pompom for the tip of the hat and stick on. You can snip this with little scissors or a knife to make it look 'fuzzy'.

Happy Christmas!!