Halloween Pumpkin Cupcakes

It’s Halloween tomorrow, so just for fun, I made some Halloween pumpkin cupcakes. 

The pumpkin cupcake recipe contains minimal sugar and is super simple to make. The recipe is available online at Kidspot here. I only made half to yield 6 cupcakes.
 

I iced my cupcakes with cream cheese frosting tinted orange. For 6 cupcakes, this recipe at Taste.com was sufficient.

The cute Halloween cupcake papers and toppers are from Coles supermarket.

For those who celebrate Halloween, I hope you have a fun night!

TWD - Blue Cheese and Fig Bites

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Blue Cheese and Fig Bites, baked in mini muffin tins. 

I subbed blue cheese for cheddar, fresh figs for fresh pear, and baked them in a standard size muffin tin. It’s a pretty forgiving recipe - I think you can sub the cheese and fruit varieties for whatever you have.

They were rather good - they’d be quite nice served on a cheeseboard.

To see what everyone else made this week and their thoughts, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Caramel-Apple Crisp

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Caramel-Apple Crisp. The name says it all.
 

I cheated and used bottled caramel sauce rather than wasting cream and time making my own.

This dessert is delicious. I made a serve for one. Go make it. That is all.

To see the other baked delights from my esteemed Dorista colleagues, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Java Mini Mads

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Java Mini Mads. These are coffee flavoured madeleines, baked in mini muffin tins.

I decided just to bake mine in a normal madeleine pan, yielding 12 madeleines.

These were delicious. The humps that I got on these were smaller than I normally get, but I’m ok with that.

To see what everyone else made this week, visit the LYL section of the TWD website. 

TWD - Scone Pudding

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Scone Pudding, made using leftover Buttermilk Scones.

The scones are sliced horizontally into thirds and layered into a baking dish, brushed with curd (I used orange curd), topped with spiced custard (I used cardamom), left to soak up the custard, then topped with sliced apple, sprinkled with sugar and baked.

This pudding is meant to be served warm, but I liked it cold as well. It made a nice change to bread and butter pudding.

To see what everyone else thought of their TWD recipe this week, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

 

Madeira Cake

It was my mum's birthday this week.  In a rare event, I was at her place for her birthday, so I made her a birthday cake.

Mum does not like rich cakes, and I heard her once mention that she liked Madeira Cake.  For this reason, I dug out my high school Day to Day Cookery book and made mum a Madeira Cake for her birthday.

This cake is quite simple to make and is rather tasty.  I added a lemon glaze to the top of my cake for a bit of extra sweetness and moisture.

If you would like to try making this cake for yourself, you will need:

120g butter

3/5 cup sugar

grated zest of one lemon

1/4 cup milk

1 1/2 cups self raising flour

Grease and line a loaf tin, and preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Cream the butter and the sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  In a separate bowl, sift the flour and stir through the lemon zest.

Add the flour and milk alternately to the cake batter (3 x 1/3 flour, 2 x 1/2 milk, starting and ending with the flour) and mix after each tranche to just combine.

Scrape the  batter into the prepared loaf tin, smoothe the top with a knife, and bake in the preheated oven for 35-40 minutes or until cooked through when tested.  

Remove the cake from the oven and leave in the tin on a wire rack for around 10 minutes before unmoulding from the tin onto the rack to cool completely.

Once the cake has cooled, you can decorate it as you please (I used a simple glaze made of icing sugar and lemon juice).

Passionfruit Coconut Cake

Recently, I made this amazing Passionfruit Coconut Cake from a recipe by Lorraine at Not Quite Nigella.  This luscious cake is flavoured with passionfruit pulp and dessicated coconut, and is topped with a delicious passionfruit flavoured buttercream. 

How good does that look!  I only made half the icing (as I don't like thick icing), and used tinned passionfruit in the cake.  

I absolutely loved this cake - moist (yep, that's a good word for a cake), light and fruity.  An absolute winner!  If you want to get in the mood for summer, this is the perfect cake to make.