Now being a student living fairly close to home, I tend to find that I flit back and forth between my home city of Bristol and my new home Cardiff quite a bit, and before I headed back for my January exams and the start of a new semester it was time to spend a bit of quality time with my other half.
As quite competitive people, we tend to dabble in different head to head challenges from time-to-time to see who comes out on top, and this time it involved a bake off!
Mary Berry eat your heart out.
Now both recipes came from BBC Good Food, and looked absolutely scrummy, and with a general theme of Cupcakes for this round, I settled on Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting, whilst Oli went for a more chocolately route with his Easy Chocolate Cupcakes.
Now although I only have pictures of the finished products, I can safely say that both recipes were oh-so-easy, and the processes were very simple with clear steps to follow.
Once I'd piped my carrot cakes, they did look great, however I think my poor attempts at cute little carrots ruined them ever so slightly as detailed decoration is apparently not my strong point.
Originally I'd wanted to use white chocolate to make my carrots, however doing a practice run of making them the night before (and thank goodness I did!) I found that my food colouring split the chocolate. After doing some research, apparently I made a boo-boo by not using oil-based colour. Whoops!
But nonetheless, improvisation with colouring my cream cheese frosting and adding a LOT more icing sugar had to do, and this was the end result!
Now one thing I will say about these chocolate cupcakes is that they are extremely rich! Still absolutely delicious, but perhaps with the icing they're just a little too much? All depends on taste I suppose, as neither of us particularly like plain chocolate, which is what the recipe is based on. Definitely should have read through first!
Now Oli having had a look through google images and pinterest decided that he wanted to make his cupcakes turtle cupcakes, and this was the result! Fondant icing shapes with my horrible carrot icing colored eyes and blue sugar for 'the sea', which was an inventive idea. Along with a couple of other animals who popped along for the ride, his little fleet turned out pretty cute!
I think that between the two of us, the carrot cakes turned out to be a resounding winner, but both cupcakes got great feedback from the family members that we force-fed them to.
The recipe for the carrot cake cupcakes will be one that will be revisited though - so easy and really really scrummy to eat!
Yumm they look so good Alice.. nice post hun x
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