First up, red velvet cupcakes! It feels like eons ago that I set my heart on making these maroon beauties but getting the right recipe and thinking of the decorations seemed like too much work every time I wanted to get down to it, and I just kept delaying it over and over.
Eventually, I kind of stumbled upon a suitable looking recipe and decided that the wait had to end! To be honest, I had reservations about using such large amounts of food colouring, especially red food colouring, in a single recipe. This recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of the stuff which while I think is still pretty excessive, is one of the lesser amounts I've seen in a recipe. If you want to know more about the controversy surrounding red food colouring - Google it! Pretty yucky stuff.
Anyway, thankfully the cupcakes turned out alright - albeit being a little too small. Frosting them was fun though also extremely challenging given the terribly warm weather of late. The buttercream was almost impossible to pipe into patterns as it was just melting too fast once removed from the refrigerator. In the end, I decided that desperate times called for desperate measures and frosted the cupcakes in an air-conditioned room!
It wasn't an energy-bill-friendly solution but it did the trick! At least now me and my mum could pipe patterns without getting frustrated and covered up to our elbows in sticky rapidly melting buttercream.
I decided to take things slow and did the frosting over a couple of days, trying out various patterns and experimenting with the tons of frosting nozzles that my mum had accrued over the years. There were plenty of videos on YouTube as well to throw up interesting ideas and patterns.
The rose (the yellow one..my mum did the pink ones!) was the most challenging one but I managed one and needless to say, was extremely proud of it! Heh!
Next up was my sister's birthday and I knew she would want something chocolate-y but the obvious choices like a chocolate ganache cake or a chocolate mousse cake seemed kinda boring and I also wanted to do something new since I was looking for a new recipe to add to my stable!
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I had my basic mousse recipe but modifying it for this cake was quite tricky as I had to get the right consistency for the chocolate hazelnut mix. Too runny and it might not set at all! Too thick and I might end up with a clumpy mousse.
I decided that using Nutella would be the best choice for giving the chocolate hazelnut flavour I was after, so it was a bit hit or miss with my dilution of about 270 grams of the gorgeous dark brown stuff with milk. In the end the mousse turned out slightly runny and this affected the overall smoothness of the cake.
It also kept seeping under the half slice of cake and messed up the alternate arrangement of cake-mousse-cake-mousse that I wanted. Almost ended up with having not enough mousse to cover the top of the cake! That was a heart stopping moment for me I must admit...thankfully there weren't too many imperfections, although it wasn't the prettiest looking cake.
Luckily, the taste was the saving grace of the cake...and thankfully my sister loved the taste! That was encouraging enough for me to consign this recipe back to the drawing board for further tweaking!
