Contessa cupcakes via Moore Wilsons

A couple of days ago when at Moore Wilsons I picked up a few cupcakes to share with a friend and D. Moore Wilsons is like a wholesale/trade specialty store. They also have a fresh part where they sell fresh and gourmet foods, they also sell baked goods brought in from other bakeries. These cupcakes were baked by a bakery called "Contessa" I'm guessing they only do wholesale as I've never heard of them.

These cupcakes were OK - but far from awesome. I had to guess with the flavours as the assistant couldn't tell me what they were - I guess that is what happens when they aren't baked in store).

Chocolate/chocolate. I think this was the best but not amazing. The cake was quite moist and light but the icing was average and hard. It had definitely been frozen/chilled - as you can probably tell from the condensation on the icing.

Citrus/white chocolate. The cake was quite dense and the icing was rock hard - seemed as though it had been frozen/chilled. Too dense for my liking and a wee bit dry.

Vegan Carrot (this one had a sign). I didn't enjoy this at all - but D did. The icing was tasteless and the cake tasted kinda floury to me. I like carrot cake to be moist and rich - which this was not.

Vanilla/pink coconut icing. The cake wasn't as dense as the white chocolate one - but still far from light and fluffy. The coconut icing was OK (tasted a bit like coconut ice) but wasn't fresh tasting. Again - suspect the freezer!

All in all, I was quite disappointed. I like the idea of a Wellington bakery that sells amazing cupcakes. Though, as D pointed out, I wouldn't eat them - so am I really missing anything. They do look pretty. I'd rather bake my own thanks.

I've had a pretty relaxing weekend, and haven't done much at all. I got a couple of books from the library which I've already read. Its going to be full on week at work so I wish I'd been a wee bit more productive. Such is life.

Now its bedtime! Only a few hours before I wake up for work!

xxxM

spicy mocha cuppycakes

These cupcakes were so good, they get their own mosaic. Spicy chocolate & coffee cupcake with creamy coffee buttercream. Original inspiration came from wanting to make a spicy coffee cupcake. I then found Martha's Mocha Spice Cake which helped a bit. I wasn't sure on adding the chocolate - but I'm glad I did. These were an absolute hit. While trying to decide between chocolate and coffee frosting - I also came across How to Eat a Cupcake's verison of Martha's cake in cupcake form. Mine ended up a bit different - but hers looks yum too! Eventually decided on a really creamy coffee buttercream, which D declared the greatest frosting of all time.

I've decided that I need to start writing down these random cupcake recipes I concoct. I can't claim I create them from scratch, because I usually start with an idea about a flavours and then switch & add ingredients from a basic cupcake recipe. There are some amazing cupcake creators out there! All that said, I've decided all my colleagues who get get regular cupcakes for nothing - need to WORK for their cupcake. So I've introduced the feedback rule! In order to guarantee baking from me, they need to provide specific feedback.

Some of the Spicy Mocha Cupcakes Feedback:

“Om nom nom! Delicious. A leeetle bit strong (coffee) for my tastes, but that doesn’t mean I’d say no if offered them again.”

“Heaven in a cupcake - why do I drink coffee?”

“Overall, best cup cake I’ve had all year! Also the first. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here is my break down of the experience. The icing is by far the dominant feature of this cup cake, it tastes great and is a excellent coffee substitute. My concerns are that it is not firm enough, and perhaps would benefit from a little more (I don’t know what you use to make it firmer). It currently is more like a processed coffee cream than an icing. I would be concerned that if I dropped it, the cream would go everywhere, where as this wouldn’t happen if it was firmer. In regards to the cake. It wasn’t until my second to last bite that I noticed the great flavour of the actual cake. The cream is quite overpowering in this sense. Perhaps a little less cream would bring out the flavour of the cake a little more. The whole experience has left me with a wonderful after taste. And an alertness matched only by a slap in the face.”

“Yum yum. Very nice and well presented - looked very professional. Little gingerbread person good size in relation to cupcake. Nice texture of cake itself. All together a wonderful eating pleasure.”

“Bloody Brilliant – my favourite so far.”

So it seems they were a success! Enthusiastic(!) commenter #3 did get a cupcake with a sizeable amount of frosting and no gingerbread man! It was quite interesting watching who went for the cupcakes topped with gingerbread men.

xxxM

oh - and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Some Lime&Cerise cupcakes I made for a friend's birthday on December 20. I am soo annoyed with myself for not taking better/more pictures of these cupcakes - they were gorgeous! Lime and vanilla flavoured cupcake with lime meringue filling (bright lime green, flowing out of the cupcake.. why oh why didn't I take a picture) and white chocolate flavoured frosting. My friend is christmas obsessed and every year she had a different colour theme - this year it was lime & cerise! Thus - the lime & cerise cupcakes. I figured lime tastes like lime and cerise tastes like pink white chocolate! I packaged them up in a white paper box with lime&cerise ribbon - they looked very pretty and I'm sure my friend was very glad to receive them. I think they would have been one of my best cupcake creations!

Have a very happy and safe New Year tonight wherever you are - its a quiet one for us!

xxxM

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

i'm back already..

more snaps of our perth trip

Scarborough beach at sunset:

While in Perth, D and I did quite a few touristy things while Paul was at work. Including - a trip to Rottnest Island! Rottness is out in the Indian ocean off the coast of Freemantle. It was an awesome ferry ride - in fact I spoke to both mum & dad while on the way out (cheap mobile phone deal) as we were bouncy up in down in the waves - it was so rough. D got a little seasick - but I was loving it.

We rented a couple of mountain bikes and biked around Rottnest Island. It is beautiful. The weather was fantastic. This is the view from the spot we stopped at to have our picnic lunch:

and a shot of the pier where we hung out ready for ferry pickup - the water
was so clear and you could see schools of fish


perth at night from King's park

D has morning tea this week and I want to try out some new frosting ideas, so I'm off to whip up some cupcakes!!

xxM

how long has it been?

Yeah - I've neglected this blog for ages.... you know what.. I'm not even gonna go there. Lots has happened since my last post in April (?!) and I couldn't begin to cover it all.

In 1o points:

1. We lost many of our furkids. We are now down to three permanent residents. However, that said, we've just taken on a foster - pregnant female (was) ... so we currently have Shi (mummy) and her ten darling 5 week old babies. They are separated now (rats become sexually mature at 5-6 weeks, so we separate a bit before 5 weeks to be safe). We're trying to adopt out as many as we can - but I think we'll keep a couple + mum.

2. D and I went for a trip (in Sept!) to visit my brother in Perth. We had an awesome time, and also saw the Phoenix play (read: horribly lose) while we were there.

spooky pic of my bro @ Freemantle prison on a night tour!

the beautiful Combo

It certainly gave D and I inspiration to do a whole lot more "real" travel when work and finances allow!

I promise I didn't make him carry the bags alll the time!!

3. I got a new job... or perhaps two new jobs since I last posted. I'm still within the same company, but I've now moved to IT. Which is amusing for some, as I'm not exactly an IT guru. I'm doing ok - and really enjoying the change. There are some big changes afoot in my company - so its an exciting time to be involved.

4. I'm still Guiding.. its been a full on year and I'm really proud of our girls. We've been on two camps this year and have achieved so much! We awarded four senior Guide awards and our unit has grown from 20 at the start of the year to 35! This is awesome - go Girl Guides! Its especially cool because this year we celebrated 100 years of Guiding!

5. D and I have the camping bug I think! We've been slowly acquiring gear so that we can go away camping on our own! Our car getting broken into and all my camping gear getting stolen didn't help matters - but we're getting there. We've got leave in Feb next year, so hope to go away and "rough it" for a week.

6. The whole weight-loss thing isn't going so well right now... I was really good, but I rolled right off the wagon! Back on I jump - I'm back at the gym and trying to eat well - December is the worst (yet best) month!!

7. I've still been baking up a storm and have had some great success with new cupcake variations. I'd like to get into the habit of baking a new thing once a week... so I can take pretty pictures and feed my work-mates!

chilli-choc cupcakes with chocolate ganache icing


birthday cake I made for a colleague's daughter

8. I've bought D a couple of cook books (I know, I know, gifts for him that are really for me!) and we're trying to cook two new things a week. Its been fantastic and we feel all chef-y! I definitely need to make/find us some funky aprons to style us right.

borscht (beetroot soup)

sweet potato frittata

9. I removed my 101 list... it was big! and long! I think I need a shorter list - both in term and number of items. I haven't deleted the list - I still want to work on it - but it was daunting and made me not visit my blog. So watch this space for my new short term goals!

10. I finally gave in to Facebook - so if you know me in real life - look me up! I hear its cool to have lots of friends. I've even uploaded some photos.....

That my dears, is it for tonight!

x x xM

beach walk

D and I went for a walk along the beach out at Eastbourne. I wanted to walk round to the Pencarrow Lighthouse but I was only wearing thin jandals. Rocky beach + jandals = bad combination. It was yet another gorgeous Wellington day. Recently, I've nearly forgotten I live in Wellington and think I'm back in sunny Nelson. It has been an amazing summer.

Life has been a bit crazy lately - with lots of extra hours spent at work. I've been doing a wee bit of baking - but nothing memorable. I never got round to making Easter cupcakes, which is sad because I had some great ideas.

Mum is coming for a visit this week which I am looking forward to. It will be nice to chill out and spend some time with her. D commented today that he was worried about cooking (yes... he does the bulk of the nighttime meal cooking - he loves it, I swear) as my Mum is such an amazing cook. I thought that was lovely (though I'm not 100% convinced that Mum actually lives up to this idol-lic status... Sorry Mummy!).

I made some blue and green cupcakes for D's brother's birthday. they didn't cope with the heat very well (what was I saying about Wellington weather) and the icing melted a bit....

M

Beautiful Easter cupcakes

1. peepcake, 2. Easter Cupcakes, 3. Easter Cupcakes, 4. Easter Cupcakes_1, 5. Easter egg cupcakes, 6. cupcakes; 365, 7. Bunny Cupcakes, 8. Hatching Chick Easter Cupcake, 9. Easter Cupcakes

I finally figured out how to create a mosaic over at Flickr!! So I took the opportunity to make one with photos of some of the beautiful easter cupcakes that others have made! Talk about inspiration!!!

M

cupcakey goodness

I made cupcakes. D and I both had morning tea commitments at work - what better excuse to bake?! These ones went down a treat - the green ones have green tea icing which everyone loved! This surprised me as when I talk about green tea flavoured stuff, everyone goes 'yuk'.

There would have been a lot more cupcakes if a certain kitchen disaster hadn't happened! Something went very very wrong with my vanilla cupcakes. Though, for the life of me I cannot figure out what!

I also made D some cupcakes with a red bean paste and green tea icing. Red bean paste is a traditional asian sweet and D loves it in the sweets he buys from the asian food store. D was very impressed and now wants me to try and make mooncake......

Bedtime for me...

M