September Secret Post Club

There's a group of bloggers from around the world that form the Secret Post Club.  It's a lot of fun to do because you get to know people from around the world through their blogs and cards, and also you get a gift each month :)  Basically, each month everyone picks a name and sends that person a present. 

This month I received a fabulous gift from the lovely lady who writes the blog Cherished By Me.  She's a mother of five with an adorable blog and recent adventures into the world of high fashion.  She sent me the coolest retro style Union Jack tin.  It's already being used around the house, although my husband keeps mentioning that he'd like to steal it to use for his lunch box...  I have no idea where she found it, but you can see it in the picture.  As if that wasn't cool enough, the tin was filled with delicious dark chocolates from Thorntons!  I would have put them in the picture, but they seem to have evaporated (mysteriously the wrappers are still around my desk). 

Thank you so much for my fab gift!





Cake Pops under construction



For September's Secret Post Club, I was lucky enough to draw the name of Deborah.  I'd never seen her blog Messy Mummy before, but it's a good parenting blog.  It made me want to arrange a play date for our kids.  She mentioned that with two little boys, she likes (and doesn't always get) cute and girly types of things.  I wanted to give her something cute and yummy and fun, so I decided to make some cake pops. 

I made two different types: lavender cakes covered in white chocolate and rose cakes covered in dark chocolate. 

To make the lavender cakes, I baked a lavender cake and let it cool.  To get the recipe, click here.  The rose cakes are actually the exact same recipe, only with rose sugar instead of lavender sugar.  If you don't have rose sugar, you can add a few drops of rose water instead.  Just be carefully not to add to much or else it will taste like soap.

After the cakes had cooled, I made a simple butter cream frosting and added a little pink food coloring.  Then I crumbled up the cakes into bowls and added a little bit of the frosting.  They were then easy to roll into balls.  I stuck the popsicle sticks into the balls at this stage.

Then I melted a bowl of dark chocolate and dipped the rose cakes into the chocolate.  After cooling for a few seconds on wax paper, I rolled them in sprinkles.  Then I left them to cool so that the chocolate would harden.  I repeated the process with the lavender cakes in white chocolate.

I'm hoping that Deborah liked them, because I thought they were cute.

Let Them Eat Cake Pops...

Probably about a year ago now, my sister sent me a link to the Bakerella website. The ideas were absolutely adorable, and there was one magical phrase that stuck with me: Cake Pop. The basic idea is that it looks like a lollipop, but is made out of cake. Adorable.

I remembered the cake pops, but didn't do anything about the idea until recently. My nephew's birthday is on St. Patrick's Day, so I helped my girls to bake him a birthday cake. They had great fun decorating it with LOTS of sprinkles. I sandwiched two layers
of cake with frosting in the middle as well as on top, so I leveled out the cakes by cutting off the excess cake (super easy by just cutting all of it to the height of the cake pan before removing it from the pan). This left us with some left over cake.

So I rcmembered cake pops, found some sticks, and started rolling the cake into balls. It worked well because the cake was still warm and so took its form easily. Also, the cake was very moist and kind of crumbly, so the consistency worked really well.

I worked loosely from a Betty Crocker recipe. It was easy and one-step though, so here's what I did.

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda/bicarbonate of soda
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
1 cup water (room temperature)
1/2 cup milk (I used whole milk)
1 tbsp vanilla
5 oz dark chocolate, melted and cooled
2 eggs (room temperature)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Grease and flour 2 medium to large cake tins. (This recipe doesn't work well as "sandwich cakes"; it's better as a single, big, tall cake.)

2. Put all ingredients in a large mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer until it is smooth. Pour into cake tin.

3. Bake until an inserted butter knife comes out clean. Let cool, then decorated as desired OR let cool only until it is comfortable to handle, and then shape pieces of cake into balls around lollipop sticks.

I frosted the cake pops with a pretty simple chocolate buttercream. I beat together about 1 cup butter, 4 cups sugar, 2 tbsp vanilla, 2 oz melted and cooled dark chocolate, and 2 tbsp cold water until it made a smooth frosting that was easy to spread (make sure to taste test it and adjust as desired).

After giving the frosting time to stiffen, I covered the cake pops in cling film and then tied securely with ribbon. And voila, cake pops. Bite sized cake on a stick. Fantastic for when you want to be cutesy.