Saturday baking and a box

I have trendy boxes for my cakes now

Chocolate, chocolate ganache, vanilla icing and a cherry on top. Oh I found out, glace cherries are real cherries apparently. Or at least they once were.

Animal Free Chocolate Strawberry Creams

~ No animals were harmed during the making of these cupcakes! ~

I wanted to make some cupcakes that looked quite fancy but did not contain any animal products so I came up with these. I originally wanted something to enter the rspca's creative cupcake competition but my pictures are not the right format to upload to their website. So I will just share them here.

Rich chocolate cupcakes topped with a layer of chocolate ganache and piped with vanilla cream icing. Decorated with dark chocolate dipped strawberries and a chocolate swirl motif.


100% free from animal products and do not contain eggs, milk, cream or butter.

Wattle Seed and Chocolate Koalas

Also for NAIDOC week 2010 - Wattle Seed and Chocolate cakes with chocolate icing and koala faces.

And stored in my awesome new cupcake storage slash carry container with handle, courtesy of a cool present from my sister.

I presented the koala cakes in a tree which I think really completed the picture

Lemon Myrtle Passionfruit with Witchetty Grubs

For NAIDOC week celebrations we have bush tucker cooking at work. You have to make something with an Aussie ingredient. These cakes have ground lemon myrtle seed in the cake with passionfruit, and lemon icing. And a fair dinkum witchetty grub on top. Seriously. I spent ages digging those suckers out of the dirt.

Icing. It's all in the icing. I have always thought you could bake something that resembled a leathery old shoe, but add enough well positioned icing and it becomes a magical creation like no other.

Whip up enough butter or margarine and mix with powdered icing sugar, with a little milk of choice (I use soy) and flavourings as desired, and you will have a great soft yet shapeable mix which should pipe neat swirls on your cakes. I use disposable piping bags and a find a large, serated piping nozzle gives the best result.

Banana Walnut with Passionfruit Icing

My first attempt at passionfruit icing. So what I did was...

I got some fresh passionfruit and then I...wait for it, wait for it....I mixed it in with the icing! It went well with the banana cake too. Apparently. I didn't eat any. I made these for my boss's birthday, along with some Choc Chip Cherry ones.