Strawberries Are Nice

Brace yourselves, cause I’m posting yet another instagram picture!

I baked this quite a while ago and I wanted to post it on here because why not? It was supposed to be a black forest cake but I couldn’t find any cherries so I used strawberries instead. Mmmmmm strawberries and cream. Here’s the recipe that I used:

Cake

• 6 eggs
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 1/2 cup plain flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup melted butter

Filling and Topping

• 450 ml whipping cream
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• as much icing sugar as you want! I used about 1/3 cup
• as much strawberries as you want. Not too much though

So you crank up your oven to 180° C and you grease your 7.5 inch cake tins. Plural for ‘tins’ because you need to split your batter into a few parts. 2 or 3 should be good. Dump your eggs, castor sugar and vanilla essence in a bowl and whisk till it becomes meringue-ish. Don’t really have a picture for how it should look like but you could YouTube how to make a gâteau. I couldn’t get this part right the first time, which is the one in the picture shown above but it looked nice so I didn’t really mind. The cake will end up denser if you don’t get it right.

Sift your flour and cocoa powder over your egg mixture, fold it in, then stir your melted butter in. Split the batter into your tins and bake for, well, mine took almost twenty minutes but it’s because my oven’s retarded. Maybe your baking time will be different. Use skewers to check. When it’s done, cooled and out of the pan whip your cream, prep your strawberries and you know, assemble it.

Next, I will make either a white chocolate or banana parfait! Or both!

Chocolate + Meringue Cupcakes

Remember that one time I said I was going to post some chocolate cupcakes on this blog? I have now fulfilled that promise. Here are my proud (edible) babies. I basically had to improvise a lot of things since the original recipe was lost. I’ve tweaked it so many times and messed with the proportions it feels like I’ve created a new recipe.

Excuse the orange tinge.

These cupcakes are probably my most successful ever. Its soft, chocolaty with bits of marshmallow surprises inside and no I’m not giving out the recipe. What? They don’t even look good on camera.

The meringue just makes it that much more special because its not too sweet or heavy like other icings; I love it!

The candied lemon slices are totally awesome and optional.

Oh and, Happy 2013 ♥

Chocolate Ganache Fruit Tart

Made an awesome chocolate ganache tart from scratch.

Strawberries and kiwis that went into it.

Making the ganache to go with it.

Pouring the ganache.

Had some fun afterwards.

It was a pretty cool experience and my second attempt at such a tart. Making the pastry was a big challenge because the climate here is so hot and humid but the ganache was a breeze! I’m really happy with how it turned out. Next up, chocolate cupcakes!