Monday 21 November 2011

Moustache cake pops for Movember!

As a woman, it's difficult to contribute to Movember in an obvious way. While all my men friends have the option of showing their support for charity by growing a moustache for the month of November, I can only marvel at their hairy efforts and sponsor them to look ever more moustachioed and Magnum-like.
HOWEVER, this year the lovely Amy found some moustache-shaped moulds, so I could do Movember with the best of the boys, via a cake pop.












This is the pack the 'Munchstache' moulds came in...








... And this is what the pack looks like with a moustache cake pop contributing to the model's look.

Even more impressive than the one in the original picture - well, larger and more fulsome anyway!!




While the moulds provided a few different shapes, it was also necessary to make the moustaches in several different colours. I went for dark brown ('the Italianate'), blonde ('the Californian') and red ('the Scotsman').

Here, I model 'the Scotsman' which is possibly the colour my mo would grow (if I was a boy).
Several of my male friends have been a bit surprised to find that their mo's have grown in a bit gingery even if their hair colour is light brown or blond.





Here I model 'the Italianate'. I think you'll agree it's rather super.

I tried to persuade Mr Cupcake to be my model but he said he didn't want to be on the blog this time. I think he may have been a bit embarrassed about being a moustache model.









Making these cake pops was challenging. While the moulds look wonderful, they were difficult to get the cake pop mixture out of because they were closed over at the top so you couldn't push them out from above. The decoration lines on the top of the mould are meant to be used as the second stage, to be pressed into the mixture when it has already been stamped - this tends to work better on biscuit doughs so was not as useful to cake pop making sadly.
Also, the shape of the moustaches was difficult to work with because they were heavy in relation to their length, and have their weakest bit in the centre, so they tended to break in half easily.




This is me trying to get a mo out of its mould. I had to run a sharp knife around the edges and coax it out gently - I also dusted the top of the mixture from which I was stamping the shapes, with icing sugar, so that it wouldn't stick in the mould.

It took some hand shaping at the edges to repair the knife damage.










Here is a mo that has come nicely out of its mould. The mixture had to be refrigerated, stamped quickly and then refrigerated again before dipping.















This is a blond mo being dipped in melt mixture.

For a bit of detail on the melt mix and using it to dip cake pops, have a look here.











To make the mo's more realistic I pulled the dipping fork over the smooth surface of the pops, to create a 'hairy', swirly effect.














Soon some red mo's were added ... I combined red, brown and yellow melts to get this colour. To be perfectly honest I wasn't 100% happy with the colour.













When you have done enough mo's of one colour you can scrape the still-hot mixture into a sandwich bag and leave it to cool down and harden in the bag. You can store it and use it again. Check that it hasn't got any stray cake pop crumbs in it though. That can mess things up for you bigtime.











With the chocky ones - sorry, the 'Italianates' - instead of putting lines on them with the dipping fork, I sprinkled them with chocky sprinkles. This looked appropriately hairy.













The mo's were apt to break in half during the dipping process. However, the melt mixture is very sticky and as long as the two halves were placed together in the proper shape, they would stick together into one piece again. With this one, you can just see how I have put some extra melt mixture on it to stick the two halves together.



Three different takes on 'the Californian'. A good mo for the beach. Accessorise with tight shorts and well developed biceps.














Three takes on 'the Italianate'. Also good for the beach, but better accessorised with chest hair and gold chains.

Top to bottom: the French Acrobat; the Merv Hughes; the Chopper.











Happy Movember everyone and don't forget to make a donation to your participating moustachioed friends!



















Thursday 10 November 2011

Torta di Riso - Italian cakes made of rice

I have good memories of rice pudding. I always think of it as an English thing, but I had an amazing French version years ago which was incredible, very decadent - you basically put a small amount of rice in the oven with a ton of cream and sugar and cook it slowly for hours. I really wish I still had that recipe.
HOWEVER, I don't, and it's ages since I've eaten rice pudding, and the only rice pudding I've even seen recently has been the tinned stuff in the supermarket (or as I prefer to call it, the Evil Empire). 
So I thought I would give this recipe for Torta di Riso a go. The name just means 'rice cake' but it's only pretending to be a cake - it's a fair dinkum rice pudding with a bit of egg in it that allows it to be moulded and stand up prettily instead of slopping around. 












I found the recipe in a book by a New Zealand author, Julie Le Clerc, called Little Cafe Cakes. The book is ten years old now but I got it only recently (thanks, downsizing Mum). 

I'll give the credit to Julie, but I'm pretty sure this is a stock standard recipe with the possible exception of the lemon flavour. The interwebs tells me that torta di riso is a traditional sweet that originated in Torano, Bedizzano and Mirteto, small villages in the Massa Carrara province of Italy - it's described simply as a cake made from milk and rice. 








Torta di Riso recipe

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup arborio rice (risotto rice)
3 1/2 cups milk
2 eggs
1/2 cup castor sugar
zest and juice of one lemon
ground almonds (for dusting cake tins)

Preheat oven to 160C. Grease the cake pans, muffin trays or whatever you'd like to use, and dust them with ground almonds. (To be sure of a good unmoulding, cut some baking paper circles and line the bottom of each mould with them - it seems like extra work but you'll thank me for the tip). 
Warm the milk in a saucepan, making sure it doesn't boil over. In another, heavy-based saucepan, heat the olive oil and add the rice, stirring for a few minutes until well coated. 
Add the hot milk to the rice and simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly to prevent it from sticking, until the rice is tender and the milk has been absorbed. This will take about 20 minutes. 













As you can see in this pic, the texture thickens just like a risotto - in fact, at this stage it is a risotto - just made with milk instead of stock. And just like a risotto, as the texture thickens you need to check whether the rice is cooked through. 
When you have a thick texture like this, try a few grains of rice. If they're still chewy, add a bit more milk and cook until it's absorbed. 
At this stage take it off the heat and cool it down. I wanted to do this quickly so I spread it on a plate and put it in the freezer for ten minutes. 






Zest the lemon, then slice it and juice it (here is a fairly unnecessary pic of a lemon being zested). Chop the zest finely. 

Beat the eggs with the sugar in a mixing bowl, with an electric beater, until they are thick and pale and hold the ribbon. Then gently fold the cooled rice, the zest and the lemon juice into the egg mixture.









When it's well combined, spoon it into the prepared pans and bake for 15 minutes. I used some French friand tins that look very cute but are absolutely vicious because they have such sharp edges that I have cut myself a few times when washing them out. Those Frenchies!!

It should be slightly browned and springy to the touch when cooked. 

Cool before removing from the tins. Run a sharp knife around the edges of the tins before upending them onto a plate or rack. Peel the baking paper carefully off the top. 

I thought these looked a bit plain so I fancied them up a bit. I used a smidge of glace icing (just icing sugar and lemon juice in this case) to spread a little circle on the tops of the puddings, and then heaped some longer pieces of lemon zest on top. 
I had dredged these lemon zest pieces in beaten egg white, then castor sugar, to try to candy them - this would have worked beautifully if I'd done them eight hours earlier and dried them properly, but by using them straightaway they never crisped up - oh well. FA NIENTE. (doesn't matter). 


Spero che queste ti piace moltissimo!
(Hope you like 'em!)















Wednesday 9 November 2011

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!

Monday 31 October 2011

Horse race cake for Melbourne Cup (cake) Day

Melbourne Cup Day is the first Tuesday in November, the greatest event on the racing calendar all year. Others may have the Grand National and Ascot, but for an Australian there is nothing better than the race at which legends are made. 
So the least I could do was to celebrate the event with a horse race cake. 


















In Australia, it's 'the race that stops the nation' - so of course the other side of the flag had to read...













As Flemington race course has a grass racing surface (Mr Cupcake helpfully informed me of that, I assumed they raced on a sandy track) I made a little grassy ring on top of a sandy track-type surface. 

If I'd had an oval tin, I would have used that, but mehhh.... circles are good for racing too aren't they?





This was the very simple start to the horse race cake. A chocolate mud cake, adapted to be gluten free (regular readers of this blog will begin to notice a pattern here) - I swear, it makes not a jot of difference to the taste. 

I had two cake tins exactly the same size and 'nested' them to bake this, so that there would be an extra layer of insulation - the tins were quite thin so this effectively doubles the thickness of the tin and ensures a more consistent heat spread and a better result. 




I drizzled the cake with a diluted, strained apricot jam to keep it moist, then ganached the cooled cake and hot-knifed the ganache for a smooth surface (detailed instructions here).

Then I rolled out a piece of sandy-coloured fondant big enough to cover the top and sides in one piece, and draped it over, attaching it to the cake with a light painting of water. 





I smoothed the fondant from the centre outwards, using first my hands, then a cake smoother (amazing plastic contraption that looks a bit like a skinny little iron). I trimmed around the base really carefully - this is actually really hard to do, and usually I have to cover my terrible mess with a ribbon on the base. But I was really OCD about it this time, and it paid off. 










So then it was time to work on the horses. 

I'd seen a blurry front-on pic of a horse figure that some brilliant person had posted on Facebook's Cake Decorating Society page. That started me on my modelling but there was a lot of experimentation involved. 

Here you see the horse body (the big bit), and the four little legs, with toothpicks sticking out for support when the figure is put together. 






Same deal, different colour - once I had a pattern I tried to be consistent in size and shape, and kept a finished horse beside me all the time to use as a model. 











This disembodied horse's head may freak out anyone who's seen The Godfather, but I promise you it's perfectly innocent. His little head had to be made separately before being attached because of the detail on the face. 

Ears were two layers of teardrop shaped fondant in contrasting colours; his blaze (do you call it that? - Yasmin, my most knowledgeable horse friend where are you when I need you) - anyway, his STRIPE down his nose, and his muzzle, were rolled fondant cut into a strip and pressed by hand into an oval, respectively. 
The two nostrils were made with tweezers - I keep a pair exclusively to use for cake decorating. 





I was worried about whether his little legs would collapse under the weight of his big fat tummy, but fortunately he held together very well, the little darling. He looks a bit scared. Big race coming up. 












He looked even more worried when I added his mane and tail. 














So I gave him some friends as quickly as possible, to calm his nerves and get some track work underway.

Cornflour helps their little hooves from sticking to the track. 







This is a rather undignified shot of a cheeky little mare with a white mane and tail. 














Her hairy bits were created from little strips shown here - the top one is the mane, and the lower is the tail, which gets rolled up a bit at one end and attaches to a little hole in her backside with a drop of water. 












Track work now commenced in earnest with four gallopers trying to lose their paunches before the big race. 
The one at the back still looks absolutely terrified, poor darling. 







...And so it was finally time to get them onto the course. As Mr Cupcake pointed out, their jockeys have not yet mounted, so this is possibly a training run. 








Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen... have a wonderful Melbourne Cup Day and think of me and my colleagues in the office, taking a break for the few minutes of the race and accompanying it with a little bit of horse race cake!