white fluffyness

I baked some chocolate cupcakes with white fluffy icing for work yesterday. D had a shared morning tea and my work colleagues always appreciate my baking! D wanted chocolate cupcakes with caramel filling and white marshmallowy icing. (To be honest, it sounded gross to me! too sweet!) I topped with a choc-covered coffee bean. They turned out alright, I added coffee to a standard chocolate batter for extra richness. I then made a caramel filling from condensed milk - but due to time pressure I was a bit lazy and didn't pipe it in after baking. Instead I folded it in with the batter. I immediately regretted this when I realised it had just sunk to the bottom.

I'll definitely pipe in after baking next time!! The other mini-diaster was that I didn't beat my first batch of icing enough. When I got up in the morning the fluffy icing had kind of lost their piped shape .... so there was a mix of melted looking and pretty. (Second batch I obviously whipped enough!!) They still looked OK....

Depsite my disappointment, it seemed everyone loved them. D got rave reviews from his dept, and one of my colleauges declared they were the best thing ever (and ate two!). I didn't eat any - for two reasons; I'm trying to be good, and they were waaaay too sweet for me.

Also from my recent cupcake exploits, I baked for when the in-laws came over. We had a BBQ for D's birthday. When I asked what cupcakes he wanted - he said purple with butterflies. I'm trying to reassure myself that he was thinking of our niece... (hehehe). So that's what I made!

I've been thinking about cupcakes a lot lately. Not eating them, creating them. It seems it is an affliction that has affected many many others in recent times. I can spend hours perusing cupcake blogs. I'm seriously thinking about trying to join Iron Cupcake or Cupcake Hero. Both are monthly challenges to bake cupcakes with a particular ingredient....

December is such a busy month, so far I've been to 6 christmas functions. I'm all christmas'ed out. (Though that won't stop me baking gingerbread this weekend...).

Some of our babies are leaving us on Saturday morning. Its going to be kinda sad, I've grown really attached. We are keeping a couple (read: three plus mum), but I'm very impressed with our ability to resist keeping them all. Two of the boys aren't going to their new home til early January so we'll have them for a wee bit longer.

OK, very much my bedtime.

x x M