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My hus­band men­tioned that he’d seen a Paula Deen recipe for pink lemon­ade cake.  I thought that sounded really nice and would be a great Sum­mer­time dessert.  After look­ing at Paula’s recipe online and the com­ments by users who had found it “too dense” “too this” or “too that” I decided to run with her basic flavour idea but to tweak it and hope­fully turn out some­thing really nice.

This is what I did.  It’s really easy and very tasty.

Pink Lemon­ade Cup­cake Batter

I took a box of white cake mix and pre­pared it as directed on the box except that I don’t like to use oil in my cakes so I replaced the 1/3 cup of oil with an equiv­a­lent 1/3 cup of nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce.  To the mix I then added three heaped table­spoons of the Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix and also added a dash of Mada­gas­car Vanilla and about a table­spoon of lemon zest.  I decided I wanted my cake to be more pink than the pale colour it was cur­rently so I added a dash of pink food colour­ing until it was pink enough for me.

Ingre­di­ents so far:

1 box of Moist White Cake Mix

3 egg whites (no yolks)

1/3 cup nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce

1 & 1/4 cup of water

3 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix pow­der (not diluted)

1 tsp of Mada­gas­car Vanilla or Vanilla Essence

1 table­spoon of fresh lemon zest

Coun­try Time — Pink Lemonade

Pink food colouring

(Bak­ing purists are prob­a­bly rolling their eyes at my sug­ges­tion of using a box mix and then the addi­tion of pink food colour­ing.  It worked for what we were doing here so I’m ok with it.  If you aren’t, there are plenty of from scratch white cake recipes out there to delight your pure lit­tle baker’s hearts.)

Even though I have a pas­sion for bak­ing we try not to keep too many good­ies in the house because we both could stand to lose some weight.  So we send our good­ies off to work with my hus­band and I’ve heard his cowork­ers think this is ok.  Since they are headed for the office I decided to make cup­cakes as they are far more man­age­able than need­ing to find a knife and plates for carv­ing up a larger sin­gle cake.

Next I cre­ated a tasty com­ple­men­tary frost­ing.  I pretty much always go for my basic cream cheese frost­ing and just change it up a lit­tle to suit what it is that I’m making.

Frost­ing:

Crust­ing cream cheese buttercream

5 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time  Pink Lemon­ade Drink Powder

Pink Lemon­ade Cupcake

After the cup­cakes came out of the oven and cooled I frosted them with a gen­er­ous swirl of but­ter­cream and some sugar sprin­kles just to make them shiny.  So that’s it folks.. really a quick and easy recipe and per­fect for sum­mer meal­times or snacks.  Enjoy!  And remem­ber if you have any ques­tions don’t hes­i­tate to email me.  I try to answer all emails even if they may take a cou­ple of days to get you your response.

~ Colleen

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I’m always amazed at lit­tle ones!  How in the world did my then 4yo daugh­ter decide she wanted to learn to play the vio­lin?  While being exposed to lots of music I cer­tainly hadn’t sug­gested she learn to play an instru­ment let alone a clas­si­cal one.  No wor­ries we got her started and away she went with gusto…  Well this post isn’t about music but recently I was asked by my friends to make their 3yo daugh­ter a birth­day cake. Appar­ently she had requested “a rasp­berry on the inside” birth­day cake.  I’d never made one before but love a chal­lenge so this is how I did it.

WARNING — Heavy text as some dummy (me) for­got to take progress pho­tos… but it turned out great so bear with me folks.

First off I thought I’d start with a white cake recipe and add my rasp­berry good­ness to it.

White cake mix or this from scratch recipe…

Ingre­di­ents

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 2 tea­spoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 tea­spoons bak­ing powder
• 1/2 cup milk

Then To make it Rasp­berry Flavoured…

Ok.. great but it had to be rasp­berry flavoured…  I could not for the life of me find fresh rasp­ber­ries that day that weren’t grow­ing fur, so my next best option was a heap­ing table­spoon of rasp­berry jam (jelly) with the seeds for authen­tic­ity AND I added a 1/3 of a sachet of Rasp­berry Jello Crys­tals dis­solved into a half cup of water.

Cake Crumb

I fig­ured it wouldn’t throw off the bal­ance of the cake since it thick­ens as it sets up.  My the­ory proved right and the cake was rel­a­tively dense (with a fine crumb tex­ture like a Madeira or pound cake) but still light and very flavourful.

Direc­tions

1. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour two eight inch round pans or line a muf­fin pan with paper liners.
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and but­ter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Com­bine flour and bak­ing pow­der, add to the creamed mix­ture and mix well. Finally stir in the milk until bat­ter is smooth, the jello crys­tals and the rasp­berry jam. Pour or spoon bat­ter into the pre­pared pan.
3. Bake for 30 to 40 min­utes in the pre­heated oven.  For cup­cakes 20–25 mins.

Rasp­berry Jam (Jelly)

For this lit­tle lady’s cake I made two 6 inch and two 8 inch round cakes to stack.

In between each match­ing pair I spread a fine layer of rasp­berry jam (jelly) and then added rasp­berry cream cheese frost­ing (my orig­i­nal recipe with some rasp­berry jello crys­tals and a small amount of jam added to it).

I placed wooden dow­els inside of McDon­alds straws into the 8 inch stacked cakes and then placed the 6 inch stacked pair on top.

Dow­els

All of the cakes were cov­ered in my crust­ing cream cheese frost­ing prior to stack­ing as they wanted it smoothed to look like fon­dant.  I then cut out about one hun­dred or so pur­ple and one hun­dred or so pink fon­dant flow­ers for dec­o­ra­tion.  This cake was to com­pli­ment a Tin­ker­bell cake topper.

The glit­ter is edi­ble sparkle glit­ter.  The cake was a lot of work but my friends loved it.  Hubby enjoyed the crumbs I had cut off the top so much I made him his very own rasp­berry cake the next day.  It was pretty much gone in an instant.  Don’t for­get to email me if you have any ques­tions.  Happy Baking!

Rasp­berry Cake

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This is the cake I made for my daugh­ter Megan’s baby shower this past week­end.  The cake on the bot­tom was yel­low cake filled with white cream cheese frost­ing and then cov­ered with the same frost­ing coloured blue.  I added balls of choco­late fon­dant to the sides and for the circles.

Baby Shower Cake

The top cake was made using the good old Wilton Teddy Bear pan.  I made this for her first birth­day some 20+ years ago so thought it would be a nice touch for this cake.  The cake is choco­late cake and is iced with a choco­late flavoured cream cheese frost­ing.  The dia­per is thinly rolled white fon­dant made using Car­rie Big­gers’ recipe.  Sorry but I can’t give that to you here because Car­rie sells it on her web­site as one of her prod­uct range.  It’s a great recipe and tastes so much bet­ter than com­mer­cially pro­duced fon­dant.  I am always hor­ri­fied when I see the fon­dant being torn off of wed­ding cakes by folks that have only had the shop bought kind.  The home made stuff is so much nicer and very edible.

Ok, so I have to “fess up.”  Even expe­ri­enced bak­ers and dec­o­ra­tors make mis­takes.  Stu­pid mis­takes actu­ally.  That bear on the top took three attempts before I got it right.  I can’t believe it since I’ve made it many times before but the first time around I didn’t add enough bat­ter to the pan so when bear came out he had NO LEGS!  Um no.  That bear became choco­late cake balls that I put into the party favour boxes for our guests to take home with them, so not a total waste.

With my sec­ond attempt I totally for­got to insert the cone into the cen­ter of the pan which ensures even cook­ing.  Not real­iz­ing my mis­take I took the “per­fect” bear from the pan and then won­dered why his head was cav­ing in.  After a crack formed I could see that the bat­ter inside was still liq­uid and not even close to being cooked.  This poor bear met his demise down the garbage dis­posal.. sorry bear num­ber 2.

So finally at 11:30pm on Fri­day night (the party was the next day) I baked off bear num­ber 3.  You might think this one worked out per­fectly.  Well not exactly.  Prob­a­bly due to the fact that it had been one heck of a busy week I did remem­ber to insert the heat cone this time BUT for­got to spray it with cook­ing spray.  As I pulled it out a crack formed across poor bear’s face.  Thank good­ness for but­ter­cream which I used to patch him up with.

So next time you make a mis­take or for­get some­thing, don’t worry too much, we all do it!

Happy bak­ing!

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Here’s a thought that crossed my spoiled mind this evening. What if, say, like my fam­ily in Aus­tralia, I can’t just run to the store and grab a box of red vel­vet cake mix off the shelf. I’ve obvi­ously for­got­ten that it wasn’t that many years ago that I didn’t even know what a red vel­vet cake was! Imag­ine that.

This week I received an email from a fel­low cake maker who asked me to share my favourite red vel­vet cake recipe since she wasn’t able to buy a box mix. Fel­low bak­ers give me mixed reac­tions when I openly admit to using (insert scary music here).… red vel­vet cake out of a box!! Well, I do and I’m not afraid to say it. Why not? It’s bad enough get­ting cov­ered in red cake mix, which I usu­ally do, with­out hav­ing to mess with red food colour­ing when mea­sur­ing it out for a “from scratch” recipe.

Actu­ally, there is a lit­tle his­tory to my dread of red…  I used to own a small bak­ery in Aus­tralia and had left some dec­o­rat­ing items out on the din­ing table in my brand new din­ing room, in my brand new home.  To cut a long story short, my youngest daugh­ter was a climber and the result was red food colour­ing all over her and the brand new car­pet!  We bleached it out and then had to dye the car­pet back lov­ingly with teabags.  So you might now under­stand my dis­like of red food colour­ing, even if red is my favourite color!

Ok, back to the cake at hand.  I tend to look at box cake mixes as a start­ing point, and usu­ally tweak them by chang­ing out the oil with apple sauce for instance, and adding my own flavour­ings, add-ins etc. I’m sure the good peo­ple at Dun­can Hines, Betty Crocker and Pills­bury didn’t just whip them together in five min­utes. It is my under­stand­ing that they have spent years per­fect­ing their mixes for our con­ve­nience. And very often that is the time I have no com­punc­tion in reach­ing for one.

Sure there is noth­ing quite like a del­i­cately cre­ated sponge or genoise but there are times when I just need to get out two dozen cup­cakes in a hurry and trust me, 5 year olds very rarely call me out on using a box cake mix over a scratch baked cake. Their beam­ing lit­tle faces cov­ered in frost­ing are all the proof I need that some­times, it’s ok.

So let’s get this red vel­vet cake made!

Ingre­di­ents:

• 1/4 cup dutch processed (dark) cocoa powder
• 2 table­spoons red gel food coloring
• 1/4 cup hot water
• 6 table­spoons unsalted but­ter ( softened)
• 2 table­spoons veg­etable shortening
• 1 2/3 cups sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 tea­spoon pure vanilla extract
• 2  1/2 cups cake flour
• 1 tea­spoon salt
• 1 table­spoon apple cider vinegar
• 1 tea­spoon bak­ing soda

Method:

Pre­heat oven to 325°. Line muf­fin pan with paper liners.

Whisk together cocoa pow­der, food col­or­ing, and hot water. Set aside to cool.

In the bowl of your elec­tric mixer fit­ted with a pad­dle attach­ment, cream but­ter and short­en­ing until smooth. Scrape down bowl and add sugar. Beat until mix­ture is light and fluffy, about 5 min­utes. Add eggs, one at a time, beat­ing well after each addition.

Stir but­ter­milk and vanilla into the cooled cocoa mix­ture. Sift cake flour and salt together into another bowl. With the mixer on low, alter­nate adding the flour mix­ture (in 3 parts) and the cocoa mix­ture (in 2 parts) to the egg mix­ture. Beat until incor­po­rated.  Com­bine vine­gar and bak­ing soda and stir until bak­ing soda dis­solves; the mix­ture will fizz. Add to bat­ter and stir until just combined.

Fill cup­cake pans 2/3 full with bat­ter. Bake 20 to 25 min­utes, or until a tooth­pick inserted in the cen­ter comes out clean. Remove from oven, trans­fer to a wire rack, and let cool for 10 min­utes. Remove cup­cakes from pan, and let cool completely.

___________

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We so loved yesterday’s batch of Upside-down Caramel Apple Cup­cakes that I decided to make some more but this time right way up. I had a dozen plain spice cup­cakes left over to use.

This time around I peeled and chopped 2 large Pink Lady apples which are excel­lent for cook­ing with. They held their shape won­der­fully and didn’t break down when stirred into the caramel even once they were tender.

Caramel Sauce

10 oz unsalted but­ter
2/3 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 tea­spoon of nut­meg
1 table­spoon of cin­na­mon
pinch salt

Melt the but­ter over medium heat in a pan. Add the sug­ars and spices. I cooked this reduc­ing the heat a lit­tle until it bub­bled and didn’t look so watery on top. To test my caramel I place a tea­spoon full of the sauce on a glass plate and pop it in the freezer for a few min­utes to see how it’s set­ting up. You don’t want a hard tof­fee like caramel in your cup­cakes. When you get a nice soft but not runny con­sis­tency add the chopped apples and con­tinue to cook until the apples are ten­der… I wasn’t adding them to the oven this time since I was using cup­cakes I had made pre­vi­ously, so I needed to cook them a lit­tle longer.

Cut a small cap from the top of the cup­cakes by diag­o­nally insert­ing a sharp knife into the cup­cakes  from the edge towards the cen­ter about one inch.  Cut around until a small cap pops out.  You can see the shape of the well in the image below.  I trim off the point on these caps so they sit flat when I put them back on top of the caramel apple filling.

Add a heaped tea­spoon of the caramel apple fill­ing to the cup­cakes.  Replace the trimmed caps and sprin­kle with pow­dered sugar.  I think these looks so fes­tive and use col­ored cup­cake papers to suit the sea­son.  Great for those Fall par­ties, Thanks­giv­ing and other Hol­i­day festivities.

As always, if you have any ques­tions be sure and drop me a line.  I love hear­ing from you all and will do my best to answer in a clear man­ner…  Often I think my instruc­tions are clear but then again…

Cheers for now,

Colleen

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You might think I’m a lit­tle pre­ma­ture in bak­ing an item so suited to Fall weather, but there is some­thing won­der­ful about the fra­grance of cooked apple and cin­na­mon that I just couldn’t resist.

When the air con­di­tioner is on and it’s over­cast it’s easy to over­look the fact that the tem­per­a­ture out­side is actu­ally in the upper 90s.

I saw a photo of an upside-down caramel apple cup­cake on Flickr made by 4GoodnessCake and thought they looked easy enough to make, which they were.  For some rea­son I decided to chop up my apples when the ones I saw online had used a ring of apple.  The ring would have been far eas­ier to get out of the pan I’m sure and prob­a­bly would have made a more tra­di­tional flat bot­tom shape.  I had to scoop out some of the apple chunks and repo­si­tion them on the cup­cakes.  But as they cooled they set up well and stayed where they were put.

I used a recipe for Applesauce-Spice Cake from my Betty Crocker Best of Bak­ing book.  The spicy cake with added apple­sauce was great cou­pled with the cooked apple I placed into the pan before the cake mix. Step 1 — Cook the Apples This recipe test yielded enough bat­ter for two dozen cup­cakes but I only had enough cooked apples for one dozen so the remain­der are just plain old spice cakes.

• Peel and chop into small chunks two apples of your choice.  I used Granny Smith because they hold together well when cooked and that is what hubby bought back with him from the store so lit­tle choice really!
• In a skil­let I melted 1 cup of unsalted but­ter, to which I added 1 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 tea­spoon of cin­na­mon and 1/4 tea­spoon of nut­meg and just a pinch of salt to bring out the flavours.
• Add the chopped apples (or rings if you pre­fer) and cook just until they begin to get tender.
• Scoop about 1  table­spoon of this mix­ture into the bot­tom of a greased cup­cake pan.

Step 2 — The Cake Bat­ter
Seri­ously peo­ple, if you want to use a box spice cake mix — DO IT! I’m all about con­ve­nience and some­times we just don’t have the time to do it from scratch. Yeah, yeah, I know purist bak­ers are rolling their eyes…

2  1/2 cups of all pur­pose flour
2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of but­ter
1  1/2 cups of apple sauce (I pre­fer the unsweet­ened nat­ural)
1/2 cup of water
1  1/2 tsp of bak­ing soda
1  1/2 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground cin­na­mon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground all­spice
1/4 tsp bak­ing pow­der
3 eggs

Pre­heat oven to 350F (180C) degrees.  Beat all the ingre­di­ents together in your mixer on low speed, scrape the bot­tom to ensure no dry ingre­di­ents are sit­ting down there for about 30 sec­onds.  Then beat on medium high for around 3 mins until bat­ter looks rel­a­tively smooth.

You can now add this bat­ter on top of your cooked apples in the cup­cake pans, fill­ing each hole to about 2/3 full.  I use a quar­ter cup mea­sure to try and get some uni­for­mity in my cup­cake size.

Bake for around 20 min­utes or until the cake springs back when touched with a fin­ger­tip.   They will look brown due to the spice cake mix but don’t let them get too dark.   When cooked, cool in the pan for approx­i­mately ten to fif­teen min­utes.  I used a large spoon to remove mine from the pan, scoop­ing up the apple and sauce that stayed in the pan.

Have your cup­cake papers sit­ting on the cool­ing rack and place each cup­cake apple side up in the papers.  I driz­zled on any syrup and apple left in the bot­tom of the pan.  Let cool.  You can dec­o­rate any way you wish.  These were good the next day cold out of the refrig­er­a­tor or heated in the microwave with a scoop of vanilla ice­cream and some caramel sauce.

If you have any ques­tions do not hes­i­tate to com­ment here or email me.

Happy happy baking!