Music and Cupcakes

Red Velvet Cake.

/ Lisa / 2 Comments

I’ve been wanting to try making some red velvet cupcakes for ages. Then I bought a giant cupcake tin. It also happened to be my birthday and I had to take something to work to share.

Enter giant red velvet cupcake.

As New Zealand is not know for it’s red velvety goodness, I turned to my favourite American baking blog, Bakerella.

It is an amazing blog by a wonderful lady and her recipes are absolutely to die for.

I decided to use her red velvet cupcake recipe from Valentine’s day and adjust the cooking time for a cake. The quantities didn’t need changing at all. It fit perfectly in my giant cupcake tin.

In cooking a cake though, you need to turn the temperature down slightly and cook for longer. I ended up being quite pressed for time and cooking if for 40 minutes, but then having to go out when it wasn’t quite cooked in the middle. I just turned the oven off and left it in there. Upon my return it was perfect, albeit a bit crispy around the edges. Charred as well.

Although this did not worry me as I needed to cut the top off both the cakes to make them flat in order to put them back together again. Just like Humpty Dumpty.

Now you can ogle the food porn:

Mix all wet ingredients together.

Beautiful red.

Mix dry ingredients together.

Pour wet ingredients into dry and mix.

Pour into cake pan.

I may or may not have skipped a few photograph steps here (by accident I swear!)

What you need to do, once the cakes are cooked, have been tipped out, and cooled. Make the icing. I used Bakerella’s cream cheese icing as well, but instead of the 6 cups of icing sugar it called for, I actually only had three left in my cupboard so that’s all I put in there. It still tasted amazing though. I don’t think three cups is really necessary. It would have been super sweet and I had excess anyway.

Which I may or may not have eaten.

Anyway, with the giant cupcake, you spread some icing on the top of the base and plop the top on it – this is so they stick together.

Once all together – ice!

Tada!

 

 

On the inside. It was delicious too.

No-bake chocolate cakes.

/ Lisa / 2 Comments

These aren’t really cupcakes, but a very simple way to do a rice bubbles slice which I used to have all the time as a kid.

Ingredients

5 x 60g Mars bars
50g butter
3 1/2 cups (120g) Rice Bubbles
200g milk eating chocolate, melted

Instructions

Line a 12-hole standard muffin pan with paper cases.

Chop four of the Mars bars coarsely; cut remaining bar into slices.

Place chopped Mars bars in medium saucepan with butter; stir over low heat until smooth. Stir in Rice Bubbles.

Press mixture into cases, spread with chocolate; top with sliced Mars bar. Refrigerate about 30 minutes or until set.

I, however, did not put the chopped Mars bar on top, as Man Piece decided to help himself and ate one while I was not home.

Can I hibernate ’till next year?

/ Lisa

Oh my god. I think I might just burst.

I’m pretty sure I ate too much roast chicken and potato salad. I couldn’t even have seconds on dessert.

It’s been a fairly lazy day. Didn’t get up until after midday, then I kind of sat around doing odd bits and pieces.
I spent a bit of time googling to try and find out how to change the URL on my wordpress blog, but when I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do that, I decided to just change over to blogspot with it. Importing the past posts was relatively easy.

So Music and Cupcakes is now over here too. Yay!

Ended up finally catching Marie Antoinette on tv today. Thought it was cool, with the modern aspects added in. Reminded me of A Knight’s Tale. Caught some of The Goonies too, now that’s a blast from the childhood!

Finally I decided I wanted to smell like a peach again, so showered at about 3pm. Yes, I know this in mundane, but I swear you all love it.

I then got in the kitchen to cook some eggs! Only I did it wrong and hard boiled them instead, because that is what potato salad calls for. Also cooked the potato. Essentially made the potato salad.

God I’m awesome.

Did you know potato is one of those words, that if you say it over and over, it loses all meaning?
Just like spleen.

I was then a good daughter and hung out with my parents a bit. We ate cheese and listened to “Love Never Dies” by Andrew Lloyd Weber, then watched teh news.

Had roast chicken done on the BBQ for dinner with THREE types of salad and steamed pudding for dessert. Had ONE TIME cider. I am sufficiently stuffed and can no longer move.

I might just have to go hibernate until next year.

Anywho! I am quite impressed with my new yellow nail polish from Glassons. It is yet to chip on any finger and it’s been on for about 48 hours now. Most excellent.
Currently watching King Kong, never seen it before. May put on Star Trek though because when I woke up today I had that “Star trekking across the universe” song stuck in my head. Ugh.

Only hilarious in small doses.

Music and Cupcakes and… GO!

/ Lisa

Hello interwebs!

Welcome to my blog – Music and Cupcakes. I am a young journalist – just starting out. This is where I will post what I enjoy most and any commentary I feel like writing.

The first part of my blog is music. I am a huge music fan and write reviews for any CDs I obtain and gigs I can get to. I’ll also cover anything else I feel needs covering or needs my expert opinion on – such as movies.

The second part of my blog is cupcakes, which can actually be expanded to all sorts of baking. I love to bake and people tell me I’m really good at it. So any baking that I do will highly likely end up on here as well – the recipe, pictures and tips on how to make them.

I’ll also include any commentary pieces I wish to write, which will probably be about anything that makes me fell outraged. And I won’t say no to any other young journos who want a place to post their thoughts.