While scouring the internet for Halloween baking inspiration, I came across the idea for these brownie and sponge cupcakes at two sisters. They manage to get a much stronger orange colour in their sponge – they must have better food colouring! I used my own recipes for the brownies and sponge and included a green variation.
Ingredients (these amounts will make 12 Halloween brownie cupcakes)
I found this recipe for salted caramel cupcakes with cute jelly baby sunbathers and cocktail umbrellas in an issue of Sainsbury’s Magazine last summer and have been waiting to give it a try. I made a couple of changes to the original recipe which calls for cream cheese frosting, but if you’d like to look at it, it’s available online here.
Ingredients (makes 12-16 cupcakes)
A friend of mine who absolutely adores Cadbury Creme Eggs sent me a link to a recipe video for these creme eggs cupcakes by Chef Club UK on Facebook. I took the hint!
The original recipe includes coffee, which I left out. I also added a little baking powder to guarantee a good rise. I put a few more steps in my method than the original. But please do check out the video if you think it will help you.
This is also an ideal recipe if you don’t have a stand mixer or electric hand mixer to help you.
Ingredients (makes 6 cupcakes – just double all quantities if you want to make 12)
Wait! There’s more. Click for the rest of the recipe and lovely pics!
Ingredients (makes 8 chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons)
I had one egg white to use up, so these are the quantities I used. If you want to make a larger batch of coconut macaroons, for each extra egg white increase the dry ingredients proportionally.
These are brilliant! I can’t remember what recipe I was looking for… but fortunately my search caused me to stumble across this recipe on the Good Housekeeping website. I made a couple of small changes to the recipe but the Baileys-Nutella combination with the cheesecake swirl is lovely and I can’t recommend these enough.
Ingredients (makes 16 – 32 brownies depending on how big you cut them)
Following the success of using golden syrup in my gingerbread cake, I did a search for biscuits made using this magic ingredient. I found this super-simple golden syrup cookie recipe on the BBC Good Food website.
Ingredients (makes 12-24 cookies depending on how big you make them)
Click on the photo or the title to visit the recipe!
1. Easy chocolate biscuits – heart-shaped for Valentine’s Day
It was my elder son’s 5th birthday recently. It’s taken me a while to blog about this cake, but if you follow my posts you’ll probably already know I gave birth to our second son at around the time of my first son’s birthday and since then I’ve been a tad busy!
As I knew my sons’ birthdays would be very close together, I wanted to make a birthday cake which was simple and quick to assemble. Some internet browsing brought me to this building site / digger cake idea in the form of some photos. I did my best to copy what I saw, using my own cake recipe and various toy construction site pieces I already had.
My only tip for this recipe would be to make sure to keep some chocolate out of the mixture and pop it on top of each muffin before they go in the oven. Most of the chocolate will sink to the bottom of the muffin, so don’t skip this step if you want a better distribution of After Eight mint chocolate and some on the top.
Ingredients (makes 12 After Eight mint chocolate muffins)
After my attempt to make bread a few months back was fairly successful, I returned to The Big Book of Bread to find a finger bun recipe. They didn’t have one, so I used the one for “Devonshire splits”, figuring that a sweet bun recipe is just that and I could roll the dough into long shapes rather than rounds.
All-in-all I was pleased with the results although, when I make these again, I think I’ll leave the dough to prove for even longer because I’d like the end result to be a little lighter.
Ingredients (makes 10-12 finger buns depending on how big you make them)
