Sunday 21 August 2011

Coconut Ice cake

My undisputed FAVOURITE flavour & scent is COCONUT!
I love the smell and the flavour, coconut ice cream, coconut rice & curries and coconut body butter as well as the Body shop's coconut perfume oil (almost a tie with my second favourite scent & flavour, Vanilla)
 So for a dinner party at our place last night, I made a variation of the rainbow cake in the previous post.

It was a large 3 layer coconut ice cake. The pink layers were coloured by Cochineal and a small dash of Strawberry essence and the white vanilla layer has a small splash of vanilla essence as well as a half a teaspoon of citric acid, to give it a tiny lemony zing.

I love these layer cakes, all done in under an hour for the 3 layers.

Jasper thought it looked delicious also and couldn't wait to sample to icing.

Friday 19 August 2011

Rainbow cake

I never got around to posting the photos of the rainbow cake that I made for the Norfolk Island Central school's Easter carnival here on the blog as I caused a bit of a flurry on facebook as I was baking each of the six brightly coloured layers.

You see the night before the Easter carnival for my 2 children in K-2 to take to the cake stall, I baked a 6 tier cake, one brightly coloured layer at a time and posted the photos and running commentary as I was going, so there were some eager customers ready to grab my cake(s) as it was cut in 2, when it arrived.

I only had one pan, so it baked in 6 seperate layers & I used commercial powder food colouring as the watery food colouring isn't strong enough. Each layer took about 15 minutes to bake.

The recipe is a basic cupcake recipe and so super simple. The recipe can be used for cupcakes, loaf tins and large cake tins as well.
Here it is.
CupCake recipe
1 cup of Milk
1 cup of Sugar
1 cup of Self raising flour
1 cup of Coconut
There, I told you it was simple!

This is the base recipe which is fine as it is, my best tip is to mix the coconut & milk the night before to soften the coconut and make it really creamy.
From here you can add other flavours such as orange and poppyseeds or lime and sesame seeds or even white chocolate & raspberries.

Ice with butter icing sugar. Enjoy, share with others.

Monday 1 August 2011

18 months already? where does a year and a half go?

I know where it goes...into cuddles and love and staring at this amazing, lovable little creature that comes from within and soon learns his place in the world.

Now running around, copying animal sounds, colouring with crayons and discovering new things.
Life is so much fun.

Love you our big boy Jasper.