Farewell Giant Cupcake!

Friday was the day we all said goodbye to our lovely boss Cathy from our designs of death corner.  We're all going to miss her so much, and as she doesn't like attention or fuss...that is of course what she got!

There were baloons, party poppers, flowers, sweets, present after present and of course....a cake! We all mulled over ideas for the cake which at one point included, coffins, leopard print and Christmas (because she hates it!) but in the end I decided to make her a cake I knew she'd really love. In fact if there is anything she really does love it's chocolate, Cadbury's and Rolo's to be precise!

So for the bottom I covered it in a layer of vanilla buttercream and covered it with chooclate fingers, you need two boxes for this as I only had about 4 left over, so don't eat any before you've finished covering it! I would however advise that you buttercream the top of the base and place the 'top' of the cupcake on before you add the fingers as if the base isn't tall enough it could push the fingers back out.

I decided to keep the top quite classic with vanilla buttercream piped with a 1M Wilton nozzle and then I placed a rolo in the middle of each buttercream rose and also one on top. For the front I made an ivory fondant heart and piped onto the front dots and the wording 'Jog On'....don't worry it wasn't mean, she loves this humour! :) I then gave it all a liberal dusting of pink edible glitter and tied some cream and brown ribbon around the bottom - which also helped keep the fingers in place!

Luckily she loved it and shared it all around the office...it's almost like we're going to miss her isn't it :(

Nom! x

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Rolo Shortbread and Shortbread Spoons

Sometimes when you need a little 'pick me up' you know you just have to bake something, and is it just me or does shortbread feel more like a wintery treat? I'm one of those people that love winter, I do like summer don't get me wrong but I definitely prefer the cold to the warm, big jumpers, hot chocolate and blankets appeal to me much more! So when it started to get cooler recently I decided it would be a good time to start making shortbread again.

I've got this shortbread mould I got for Christmas last year which I've been meaning to try out, it's a beautiful Mrs Beeton one from Tesco, so that when you flip it over to get the shortbread out, it comes with a pretty pattern - yay! As normal I used my grandmother's Norwegian shortbread recipe, it's just the best in my opinion, but to make it a bit more special I decided to cut up Rolos into it, everyone's a bit obsessed with them at work at the moment so I thought it'd be a good place to try them out.

 Personally I think it could have done with bigger chocolate chunks for when it gets all melty (yes that's a word...ish), also when I turned it out of the mould to fish it out I noticed the mould had a big crack in it, after one use!! I did contact mention this on Twitter and Tesco saw it and got in contact with me, only to then tell me it had been to long since the purchase...even though in my tweet I did mention it was a CHRISTMAS present, I'm not sure how they didn't notice that part before saying it had been too long - of course it had been too long, boo to false hope! Rant over. It's made out of similar stuff to tiles...so I've tried to patch it up with glue and will see if it holds out next time I dare to use it. Also the pattern didn't show up on the shortbread so it was a bit of a fail all around to be honest. I did however some of the Rolo mix left so I made some extra biscuits too.

Anyway,  I had some dough left so decided to make some shortbread spoons with a mould I bought from Sew White. I'd seen on the website that you could make gingerbread spoons so thought this could be a nice idea for coffee and hot chocolate etc. I simply filled the spoons tightly with the mixture, they don't rise a crazy amount so don't have to worry about it all spilling out, and simply take out when golden. try to them let them cool before popping out of the moulds...I couldn't!

Rolo Shortbread

Recipe:
330g plain flour
250g butter
100g icing sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 big pack of sharing Rolos, I didn't use all of them, it's all about preference I guess...and you can't eat the ones you don't use after!

Method:

• Mix flour and baking powder and sift into a mixing bowl.
• Cut up the butter and crumble into mixture as well as you can.
• Add the icing sugar and mix into a smooth dough.

 

• Gease the mould with butter and roll out the dough into a
  big circle about 0.5cm thick and push into the mould.
• With whatever dough you have left, roll it into a 4/5 cm sausage and chill for 30 minutes, then just slice up and bake for 12-20 minutes until golden.

• Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
• Preheat oven to 180 degrees (160 fan oven)
• Bake for 30 minutes depending on oven, the normal time for this recipe is about
  12 minutes but as it's in a mould it takes longer, I think mine took up to 40minutes
  in the end, you'll know when it's done as it will smell EPIC and be beautiful and gold.

• Before it cools slice around the edges so it'll be easier to get out, you'll want to get it out of the mould before it fully cools or it'll get stuck.
• Eat. Nom!!!

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