Gluten free ginger cupcake

Even though I'm not particularly on any special diets (except non-meat...), I sometimes like to try recipes for special diets such as gluten free, wheat free, sugar free...

So today, I'm going for "gluten free". I used rice flour as an alternative to normal flour and unrefined palm sugar instead of refined white sugar. Sounds more nutritious and healthier, no?

Since I'm a big ginger lover and brown sugar and ginger go so well, I've added a lot of ginger in the cake. When I was mixing the ingredients, the spicy flavour of ginger was hitting my nose heavenly...

I was slightly worried that the cake might not rise with rice flour but it did come out looking just perfect! As soon as I bit into one, I was like..."I'm genius..." Oops sorry... I'm normally a humble baker..., but this gluten free cupcake was so tasty. Just how I like it!

Ingredients:

Rice flour 130g

Corn flour 20g

Palm sugar (grated) 150g

Butter 150g

Egg 2

Milk 50g

Baking powder 1 tsp

Ginger powder 1tsp

Crystallised ginger (chopped)  2-3 tbsp

1.Preheat the oven to 180ºc. Cream butter and palm sugar until it's fluffy.

2. Add eggs and milk into 1 and mix well.

3. Sift together rice flour, corn flour, baking powder and ginger powder into 2. Fold in.

4. Fold chopped crystallised ginger into 3.

5. Pour the mixture into a cupcake mould. Bake in the preheated oven (180ºc) for 20-25 minutes.

Little rose cake

In my bakingdom..., it doesn't need to be a "special day" to have a cake that looks special.

So..., last weekend, although it wasn't any occasions I made this little rose cake... because... I could...

I baked a little layered pink cake, filled with raspberry jam, coated with butter cream and icing, and topped with some sugar roses. Tying out my own roses were a good practice for my sugar work and also much more fun than using ready-made sugar flowers. It remains of me of those times when I was a kid and played with clay;)

After spending hours in the kitchen, making the cake look pretty, I actually started to feel like it was a birthday or wedding or something... and that gave me a buzz of excitement for no reasons!

Hummm, the cake was yummy, especially the butter cream was so good...! I think I indeed turned a normal day into a little bit special with this cake.... ;D

Non butter cream cake

I love it when I imagine a new recipe in my head then actually try it, and it works! (Well, it's not always the case though... there have been disasters in the kitchen too...)

So, today was one of those experimental days in the kitchen. I had a pot of double cream and egg yolks that were needed to be used. After a bit of calculation about the ingredients in my head (I'm not good at maths and I have what-I-call "animal instinct..." for baking....) I decided to make one of my all time favourite "lemon drizzle cake".

I didn't use butter this time since I thought double cream will give a good amount of fat to the cake. When I mix the all the ingredients, the consistency of the mixture looked promising;)

After about 40 minutes in the oven, the cake came out as well as or even better than I expected! With a drizzle of lemon icing and poppy seeds... It tasted simply awesome. So..., I declare that my experiment was a great success!

Ingredients:

Plain flour 200g

Baking powder 1 tsp

Double cream 250g

Sugar 150g

Egg yolk 2

Egg 1

Lemon juice 3 tbsp

1.Sift flour and baking powder together. Preheat the oven to 180ºc.

2. Combine double cream and sugar in a bowl and mix to just before "soft peaks".

3. Mix in egg yolk, egg and lemon juice to 2.

4. Fold in flour and baking powder.

5. Pour the mixture into a cake tin. Bake in the preheated oven (180ºc) for 40 minutes.

6. When the cake is cooled, decorate with icing and poppy seed.

Bush de Noël

Another of my Christmas baking, Bush de Noel! I usually see this log-like cake made with chocolate, but I went for a white Christmas:)

First of all I baked a  large sponge cake for Swiss roll, which came out really well. Then I made three different fillings to go inside the cake, lemon custard, vanilla butter cream and cream cheese icing. I spread those fillings on the cake and rolled it tight. To finish it off, I covered my Swiss roll with meringue, made lines with fork, and then coloured the surface with blowtorch. Andy made me snows made with meringue to go with the log;)

I really liked my white Christmas log, but when I tasted I liked it even more! Quite frankly, this was the best sponge cake I ever made and the creams and meringue were awesome! I couldn't help having another piece!

Gingerbread house

Three days into 2012 but I'm just catching up with my 2011 Christmas baking...lazy me...

Last Christmas I made a gingerbread house...but...half way through to Andy's mum and dad house the house started shaking and gradually falling apart on my knees... and it was just a pile of biscuit rubble... I was soooo disappointed ;(

So..., this year I was determined to make a more solid house that would survived the journey. As well as the stability, I made sure that the taste was good and the design was more sophisticated.

And...here we come... my gingerbread house was indeed very solid and made it to Andy's parents' house without any problems!

Design-wise, I created stained glass windows with candy. There was a porch, nice fruity garden, gest of bears, and of course two monkeys! I also did some icing sugar pipings:) Humm, I think I did a good job this year...Very satisfied with my House of Monkeys;D