You can't have missed me telling you about being a World Baking Day Ambassador. For the big day on Sunday 19th May, which is now just a week away, the sponsors Stork are inviting you to bake brave and try something a little out of your comfort zone. They asked 100 people (including me) to provide a recipe and ranked them from 1-100 depending on how difficult they are. My Spiced Apple Cake came in at level 64.
So I decided to try to up my game a little and started browsing through the recipes, starting at 100 and working backwards until something caught my eye that we had all the ingredients for. I stopped at level 83 and decided to give these Hide Away Hearts Cupcakes a go.
Click through to see the original recipe on the World Baking Day website but here's what you'll need :
Some flour, baking powder, icing sugar, red food colouring, margarine, vanilla, milk, caster sugar and - no, that isn't a mistake - SEVEN eggs !
So you want to know how we got on ?
First of all, you need to cream together the margarine and sugar, then add the red food colouring and flour to make red cake batter.
Pour it into a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes. I seem to remember you need to use gel colouring for it to retain its vibrant colour when cooking. I used Squires red food paste and it worked just fine.
While the red sponge is cooking, make a second larger batch of cake batter, this time without the food colouring.
Cream the margarine and sugar together, add half the flour, the milk, then the other half of the flour.
Use small cookie cutters to cut out shapes from the red sponge, once it's cooled. The recipe asks for hearts but my heart-shaped cookie cutter was too big so I used a variety of smaller shapes, figuring it would make an extra surprise to not know which shape you'd get.
The Madhouse Mini-testers all had great fun cutting out the red shapes and eating the offcuts !
Spoon a little cake batter into the bottom of the paper case and stand up a red sponge shape.
Spoon more cake batter on each side and over the top to hide the red shape.
Fifteen minutes later, it was the moment of truth - had I baked too far out of my comfort zone? Well, some looked perfect.
Some had the tops of the red sponge sticking out - I blame it on the oversized cookie cutters ! (Don't say a word about a bad workman blaming his tools !)
And some just looked totally misshapen and wrong !
BUT you'd be surprised what you can hide with a bit of clever icing !
Ta-da ! All ready for the kids to devour for their afternoon snack !
Now, this is where I realised that that part in the recipe where they tell you to mark two pen lines on the cupcake cases that I ignored beause I couldn't see the point is actually really important, otherwise you don't know which way to slice them to get the design showing up. Oops !
So there you have it - I baked a little braver and was really pleased with the result. Even if next time, I'll definitely mark the cases ! What about you? Will you be trying something new from the World Baking Day website? I'd love to know which level/recipe you try and how you get on - especially if you try my Spiced Apple Cake !
for more information : http://worldbakingday.com
Disclosure : As a World Baking Day ambassador, I was asked to provide a recipe and received a selection of baking goodies and ingredients.
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I bet they didn't last long. So colourful and yummy
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