Chocolate Collar Cake

For this chocolate cake, I had tried the Paula Deen recipe from food.com. I must say this is really best chocolate cake ever. It is just perfect; moist and fluffy. I will share this recipe below:

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups all purpose flour                      

2 cups  sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder                                    

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder                                                   

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda                                                   

1 cup milk                                                  

1 cup strong brewed coffee                                                   

3/4 cup vegetable oil

2 large eggs

 

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda. Add milk, coffee, oil, and eggs. Beat at medium speed with an electric mixer until smooth.

Pour evenly into prepared pans and bake for 23 to 25 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Let cool in pans for 10 minutes, Remove from pans, and let cool completely on wire racks.

I frosted the cake with whipped cream and made a chocolate collar around the cake. This was the first time I made this collar and tried this technique, but it was easy to do and came out beautifully. For the chocolate collar, you have to melt the chocolate and put it in a piping bag. Snip off the end of the piping bag and pipe out the chocolate in a haphazard manner over a wax paper strip. Let it stand for some minutes till the chocolate loses its shine. Then wrap this wax paper around the cake and put it in the freezer for around 10-15 minutes. After taking it out from the freezer, slowly peel off the wax paper careful enough not to break the chocolate collar.

Butterscotch Bars

These butterscotch bars are made from the original Hershey's recipe with some alterations. You will find the original recipe at https://www.hersheys.com/recipes/recipe-details.aspx?id=3106 . The few changes I made was that I had substituted the butter with Crisco or vegetable shortening. I had used 1 cup sugar mixture of brown and white sugar instead of 1 1/2 cup. Also, I had dropped the quantity of the butterscotch chips to 3/4 cup as I did not want the bars to be too sweet. They turned out very nice in flavor and also were crunchy.

Chocolate Graduation Cupcakes

This graduation cupcake was inspired from the Cake Central's Pinterest board for their Graduation Cupcake Inspiration Challenge. It was a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting and modeling chocolate decorations. The theme I had chosen was "Go and rule the world Grads". I am going to share the recipe for chocolate cupcakes which is originally adapted from Joy of Baking.

INGREDIENTS:
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup oil (original recipe calls for 1/4 cup unsalted butter at room temperature)
1/4 cup Hershey's cocoa powder
1/2 cup boiling water
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Line  muffin cups with paper liners.

In a small bowl stir until smooth the boiling hot water and the cocoa powder. Let it cool to room temperature. In another bowl, whisk together the flour and baking powder.

Then in the bowl of your electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, beat egg and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture and beat only until incorporated. Then add the oil and the cooled cocoa mixture and stir until smooth.

Fill each muffin cup about two-thirds full with batter and bake for about 15 - 20 minutes or until risen and a toothpick inserted into a cupcake comes out clean.

This makes around 12 small cupcakes (2 inch diameter) or 6 regular cupcakes.

Victoria Sponge Cupcakes

The recipe for these cupcakes were shared with me by few of my cake forum friends. I wanted to try these cupcakes from a long time and am glad that I did!! The recipe is just amazing!! The cupcakes came out so spongy and the taste was perfect..I did have the problem of dry texture though but I guess I just over baked them about  5 minutes; that surely did make difference.

INGREDIENTS:
225 g (1 2/3 cup) of self-rising flour
225 g (1 2/3 cup) of castor or confectioner's sugar
225 g (1 stick) softened butter
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (175 C). Line the muffin pan with cupcake liners. In a bowl, beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Then add one egg and beat well. Then just fold in one spoon of flour. Then add other egg and beat well; fold in one more spoon of flour. Do this till all the eggs are used up and then fold in rest of the flour. (Do not beat). Fill the cupcake liners and bake the cupcakes for about 15-18 minutes. I baked mine for about 20 minutes and they got a bit dry. So I strongly recommend to check it after 15 minutes. Let the cupcakes cool on the rack.

Once cooled, dust the cupcakes with confectioner's sugar using a strainer for even spreading. For the jam filling, I used the store bought mixed fruit jam. With an apple corer, just take out the central part of the cupcake. Insert the corer just about less than half way and pull out which will leave a hole in the center. With a jam filled pastry bag (with or without tip attachment) fill out the jam in the hole. I had used tip no.12 or the round tip for filling out the jam. Enjoy with a cup of tea!!!

TIP:
If you do not have self-rising flour, you can add 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt to all-purpose flour. I have done this almost all the times and it works out very well.

Golden Anniversary Cupcakes

The Cake Central had announced their Golden Anniversary Inspiration challenge and I had made these cupcakes as my entry. They had an inspiration board with a few pictures on it and a "white and gold theme" which we had to imbibe into our cupcakes and display. I did not win the challenge but enjoyed doing these. They are vanilla cupcakes with buttercream frosting with all the modeling chocolate decorations. This was my first time using the golden pearl dust for the golden effect on the decorations. I had made cupcake wrappers from the paper doilies and wrapped around each cupcake.

Sonic-The Hedgehog Cake

I had made this "Sonic-The Hedgehog" cake for my son's 10th birthday. I had carved this cake out of a 9x13 rectangular cake. I had used the template from the internet and just had blown it up a little to get it to the size I wanted. I usually carve the cake when it is frozen so that it becomes easy to cut it. I have used the simple star fill-in technique on this one with the star tips 16 and 18. The basic cake was a marble cake with buttercream frosting. The kids at the party were excited to see the cake.

Two-Tone Rosette Cupcakes

These strawberry cupcakes with buttercream frosting were made for my son's birthday at his school for all his classmates. I had to try out this technique of two-tone rosettes. You will find plenty of youtube videos on how to make these rosettes and they are pretty simple to make. This technique really gives a very special effect to the cupcakes and I really loved it.