Halloween Special!

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL!!!

Just for this month, we are offering our special Ginger cupcakes with Cinnamon buttercream frosting. 9 for £15 and 12 for £18.00!

Why not order some today through our website?

Happy Halloween cupcake fans!

xxx

National Cupcake Week

To celebrate National Cupcake Week, we are offering 10% off all cupcake orders placed with us this week! Check out our available flavours at:

www.calaveracakes.co.uk

To order simply message us at our email address: orders@calaveracakes.co.uk with your selection. We look forward to hearing from you! ♥

L'Orange du Chocolat

A while back, I decided to offer some "cakes for materials cost" to all my Facebook fans, in order to build up my portfolio. My first order came from my landlady, Jessa, who wanted some cupcakes for her boyfriend's birthday party. She wasn't too fussed on which flavours, so I suggested chocolate cakes with orange frosting, as I'd been wanting to try out orange buttercream for a while. She agreed and so I set to work.

I had also recently purchased some Regalice chocolate fondant and some star cutters, so I made chocolate cakes from my trusted recipe, topped them with a thick swirl of orange buttercream and finished them off with a chocolate fondant star and a small sprinkle of edible glitter. This is how they turned out:

Jessa took them to a garden party where they were happily devoured and as a result, a couple of her friends placed orders with me. So for any budding cupcake maker out there who is considering a way to drum up some business and build up their portfolio, I would heartily recommend offering to bake for materials cost to start you off :)

Cakes for colleagues!

Wow, goodness it has been a while since our last post! Apologies for our absence, we've just been so busy getting the new website together and since the launch of our facebook page, we've had regular orders over the past couple of months, which is fantastic news!

Thank you everyone who has become a fan of us so far, you are all wonderful people :)

Back in late June/early July, I did what every good baker does and I took some of my wares into the office to share with my colleagues. A very sweet girl who was temping with us bought me a present to thank me for training her up over the past month, and I was so touched that I couldn't very well not give something back. So, I made a batch of 12 strawberries and cream cupcakes for her last day:

A light and fluffy vanilla sponge (back to my old favourite recipe this time) with a strawberry jam centre, topped with a heavily whipped buttercream and a fresh strawberry, sprinkled with edible glitter.

They went down exceedingly well, so for our annual staff BBQ I was coerced into making some cupcakes.. I had recently bought some excellent pure peppermint extract, so I decided to take in a dozen chocolate mint cupcakes:

These consisted of the Primrose chocolate cake recipe for the sponge, a peppermint buttercream and sprinkled with dark chocolate sprinkles and edible glitter. These also received many compliments, and were set to become one of our initial range of flavours.

We've been busy making lots of cakes for you to drool over, so do pop back soon for another update!

And if you'd like to see how our website is progressing, check it out at:

www.calaveracakes.co.uk

Thank you for your support!

Claire xxx

Chocolatey goodness for Dean

On the 15th of June it was the birthday of our good friend Dean, who had graciously invited myself and my other half to go and spend the weekend at his new house with him and his fiance. As it was his birthday, I offered to bake him some cupcakes, and was given creative control.
I decided on a basic vanilla/chocolate combo - heavy on the chocolate - as it's always a crowd pleaser, even for the fussiest of tastes. I received The Hummingbird Bakery book for my birthday, so I thought I would try their recipes for vanilla cupcakes and chocolate buttercream. I bought one of those combo packs of chocolate sprinkles and used a combination of all four types to decorate these little bundles of sugar:




The vanilla cupcake mixture turned out... interesting, to say the least. It was quite runny to work with, and I found it didn't quite make enough to give a generous dozen portion in the muffin cakes. When I pulled the cakes out of the oven, they had shrunk away from the muffin tin during baking so turned out quite small, more like fairy cakes. The tops also turned out completely level, rather than the domed top I get with the Primrose Bakery recipe. The cakes were small and hadn't risen very much, I felt as though the recipe could have done with being a bit drier and to make them a bit fluffier and after reading several reviews of the Hummingbird book, I found a lot of other bakers have said they needed to adapt recipes in order to make them successful as well.

Still, I persevered and made the chocolate buttercream. This was a lot lighter than the chocolate buttercream recipe in Primrose's book, as it requires the use of cocoa powder rather than a bar of dark chocolate. The texture was almost mousse-like, and it was very tasty and easy to pipe. I think it would be ideal for use within a layer cake.

The cakes went down a treat and I will definitely use the buttercream recipe again and perhaps if I decide to use the vanilla cake recipe again, I will use it for mini cupcakes instead.

Our temporary website...

We've launched a website for ordering delicious cakes from us, but it's just temporary until we get our proper domain name and web hosting, so don't get too used to it ;)

Calavera Cakes

Check it out and let us know what you think! We aim to have our proper website launched in August.

In the meantime you can also become a fan of us on Facebook

Thanks to everyone who has become a fan so far, you will be rewarded with discounts and offers exclusive to our Facebook friends <3

30th Birthday cakes

On the 7th of May this year it was my sister-in-law's 30th birthday party. As a present to her, I offered to make her some birthday cupcakes. She gave me free reign on design and flavour, with the only specifications being that her colour theme was pink and could I please make a few gluten-free ones for my niece, who has celiacs.

For a long time I ummed and ahhed over which flavours to do, what decorations, what size, how many? There was an estimate of 70 odd people coming, so I tried to make the figures one-per-customer. I decided on a mixture of minis and regular sized, my original plan was -
12 gluten-free vanilla sponge with pink marshmallow icing,
36 mini red velvet sponge with cream cheese frosting and
24 chocolate cupcakes with pink vanilla buttercream.
This would make 72 in total... a lot of cakes for my little oven! So I gradually made them over the course of a couple of days.

First of all, I made the gluten-free sponge. This was easy to make and the results were great - light, golden, fluffy and sweet. I stored them in airtight tupperware containers, ready to be iced on the morning of the party. The next evening I made the mini red velvet sponges and stupidly missed out a crucial step in the recipe - the baking powder, so they didn't fill the cups properly. (Instead of using a mini muffin tin and mini muffin cases, I purchased some Wilton's Nut cups online - they are sturdy enough to be used alone on a baking tray). The mixture also didn't stretch as far as I had hoped, and due to the lack of fluffing up, I ended up discarding several of the smaller ones, and then my cream cheese didn't quite stretch as much as it was meant to, which meant I only ended up with 24 instead of 36. They did taste nice though, and once I had piped on the cream cheese frosting and covered them with some edible glitter and pearl dragees, they weren't too shabby, so I boxed them up and popped them in the fridge ready for the following day:



Then the morning of the party came. I made the chocolate sponges - the recipe I used was from the Primrose Bakery cookbook, and my goodness - the mixture made so much, I ended up making 36 and even then throwing some remainder away. It was a little fiddly as it involves separating the egg yolks from the whites and whisking the whites meringue style, then folding them into the mixture. The recipe also calls for melting down 70% cocoa solid chocolate, so they come out very rich, but very yummy, and quite light. Then I made a mammoth portion of vanilla buttercream, swirled through a drop of pink food colouring and took a third away to make the marshmallow icing. This involved chopping up a bag of marshmallows and throughly mixing them throughout. This icing then went on top of the gluten-free vanilla sponges and were complete after a generous sprinkling of pink edible glitter:


So after that all I needed to do was to decorate the chocolate sponges with the remaining pink buttercream. I iced 24 of them using a palette knife and topped them with glitter and edible sugar violets. For the remaining 12, I piped on a large helping of frosting and sprinkled them with yet more edible glitter and some pearl dragees:




To make an edible cake topper, I bought some pink fondant icing and sculpted a 3 and a 0, carefully speared them with toothpicks and stuck them in two of the cakes on the top tier. I also made a couple of stars in the same fashion and put them on the other two top cupcakes. So here they are, all 72 cakes, set up on my faithful old cardboard cake stand, which is still going strong:



And all in all, they went down rather well - although I did make too many, as there was quite a lot of other food there to eat! They didn't go to waste though, so I'm told ;)

Successes:

• As I was taking them on the train to Portsmouth, I invested in some reuseable cardboard cupcake boxes. If you should need any, I would thoroughly recommend www.cupcakeboxes.co.uk as I found them to be quite reasonable, fast to dispatch and their service was good. They didn't send me a tracking number initially but they were very quick to respond when I emailed requesting one, and were courteous and helpful in their correspondence. The boxes have held up really well (I picked the corregated cardboard ones without the window, except for the 24 cup mini cupcake boxes, which only come with a window as shown above) and they are a nice size for transporting. They look nice too!
• First time whisking up those egg whites went rather well, although it doesn't half make your arm ache... still, that chocolate cake recipe was delicious. I would thoroughly recommend it.
• By staggering the cake baking and the decorating, I managed to bake a large amount of cakes in a short space of time (and in a small kitchen) - it was my largest order, so I'm happy that I managed to fulfil it.
  

Failures:

• The mini red velvets.. oh how I cried when I realised my mistake, because they were already in the oven at the time and I knew there wasn't anything I could do. Still, at least they were tasty, albeit a little flat.
• I made the mistake of buying the 'better value' cupcake cases (you know the ones, 100 in a pack for the price of 45! etc). They were supposed to be muffin cases but they were quite shallow and thin. Not great quality and certainly not suitable for a big chocolatey cake like I put in them...
• I ran out of butter when I was making the final batch of icing. I was only 70g short, but I was a bit miffed. Lesson learned - always buy a spare butter and icing sugar!
• Too much of one mixture, not enough of another... I ended up with enough chocolate mix to make another dozen cupcakes on top of the 36 I made, and yet the red velvet mix I used, which should have made 36, barely scraped to 32... both recipes were from different books, and I suppose a lot of this is a matter of trial and error. In the end it all balanced out, but I think in future I will aim to make more mixutre than I need, so that I have spare if I need it.
  

Ideas for next time:

• Buy mini marshmallows instead of cutting large ones up.. this is just a time-saving exercise though.
• I was quite impressed with the nut cups trick for the mini muffins, but I think I will still invest in a mini muffin tin.