Baking inspiration

I'm starting to love baking more and more, especially cupcakes are fun to make. What I love about baking is that you can use your creativity, especially when decorating (cup)cakes and cookies. You can use many different materials, colours and shapes to make it look exactly the way you want it. I haven't decorated that many cakes yet, so I only have a bit of experience with fondant and icing, but I want to enlarge my knowledge and skills of baking and decorating. Here are some pictures that inspire me when it comes to baking, doesn't everything look so yummy?

Pictures were found on weheartit.com

Do you like baking?

Cupcakes!

picture from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pioneerwoman/4495315364/in/photostream/

This is the recipe for the cupcakes I showed you yesterday, they are really quite easy to make! According to the recipe the batch will make 18 cupcakes, but I got 23 out of it.

Ingredients

For the cupcakes:
230 g soft butter
230 g very fine granulated sugar
230 g self-rising flour
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

For the decoration:
Fondant (or marzipan, whichever you prefer) in a colour you like
Decorating icing in a colour you like (the one I used was Wilton decorating icing + Wilton tips)
(for the Dutchies, you can buy both these things at Jamin, at least in my town you can..)

Steps1. Pre-heat the oven at 175 degrees. Take a cupcake tray and put cupcake shapes in the holes.
2. Put all the ingredients for the cakes in a bowl and use a mixer to mix them for 2-3 minutes. You should end up with a light, creamy mixture. Scoop this into the shapes in the cupcake tray.
3. Bake the cupcakes for 20 minutes. If you only have a cupcake tray for 12 cupcakes, you will need to bake twice.
4. Take the cupcakes out of the oven and let them cool down.
5. Spread out some powdered sugar over your working area so that the fondant does not stick. Take the fondant and roll out untill it is as a thin as you want it. Use cookie cutters to cut out different shapes.
6. Use a little bit of plain icing (mix powdered sugar and water) to stick the fondant on the cupcakes.
7. Now decorate the cupcakes with the icing. You can make any pattern or shape you like. The Wilton tubes I used are quite easy, you put a tip you like on it and squeeze.

Enjoy! :]

Source recipe: 500 cupcakes by Fergal Connolly

I'm back! (with cupcakes)

Oh my gosh, I haven't posted in more than a month... I just didn't get to it because I have been very busy with school. I have one more day of testweek on Monday and then I have 2 more weeks of 'school' but no lessons. So from now on I will try to post regularly again! Maybe you can tell me what type of posts you would like to read, what subjects are you interested in?
I made these cupcakes (sorry for the bad quality of the picture) today, and I am really happy with the result. The white stars are made of fondant (is that what it's called in English as well?) and the pink stuff is icing. This was the first time I worked with ready-made icing from a tube and I think that, for a first try, it worked out quite well! These cupcakes are really easy to make so I'll post a recipe tomorrow.