Tag: buttercream

PiÃ±ata cake

Ingredients

For the cake:

200g butter
200g caster sugar
4 medium eggs
2tsp vanilla extract
200g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder

For the buttercream:

450g icing sugar
150g butter
1tsp vanilla extract
Food colouring; purple, pink, green and blue

To decorate and fill:

Hundreds and thousands
M&Ms
Skittles
Haribo sweets
Dolly mix

What’s a piñata cake?

Cut into a normal looking sponge cake to reveal a naughty surprise – it’s packed full of sweets!

But how is it done? It’s actually quite easy to hide a hidden centre in your bakes – and we’re here to show you how.

With our simple step-by-step recipe, our piñata cake is much easier to make than you may think. All you have to do is hollow out the inside of the sponge after baking and pack it with a variety of sweets.

You can choose jellied sweets like Haribo or chocolate sweets like M&Ms, just remember to make sure your cake is completely cooled before you add the sweets otherwise they’ll melt inside.

Decorate with different coloured buttercream to make it extra special. We used purple, blue, pink and green, but you could use whichever colours you prefer – you could even go one step further a choose all the colours of the rainbow!

This cake should serve up to 6 people and will last 3 days in an airtight container. This recipe would work just as well with a chocolate cake mixture and you can also fill it with fresh fruits or chocolates – the possibilities are endless!

The cake is named after a classic pinata which kids beat to make the sweets fall out, but we wouldn’t advise taking a bat to this treat: it’s far too tasty to waste. Simply slice into the pinata cake to reveal the surprise. Little eyes will light up seeing the sweets tumble out the middle of this extra special bake.

This cake takes 25 mins to bake and 1hr to fill and decorate.

Step 1

Preheat oven 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line 2x 21cm/9inch cake tins with greaseproof paper.

Step 2

Make your sponges using the all-in-one method, pour all of the ingredients into a large mixing bowl and whisk with an electric hand whisk until combined. Once combined, pour into the cake tins making sure you they’re as even as possible.

Step 3

Bake in the oven for 20-25 mins until springy to the touch. Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack and decide which is going to be the base and which is going to be the topper. Turn the base upside down and leave to cool.

Step 4

Meanwhile prepare the buttercream. Whisk the butter and vanilla extract and gradually add in the icing sugar until combined. If the mixture is too thick, add a little water, if it’s too thin, add some more icing sugar until it reaches a creamy texture. You don’t want the mixture to be too wet as you’ll be adding food colouring to it later on. Leave to one side.

Step 5

Turn the top cake upside down and mark out a circle on the sponge using a sharp knife. Make sure you don’t cut all the way through the sponge, you want to go half way down and scoop out the insides. Do the same to the base cake.

Step 6

Once you’re happy with both sponges, cover the outside edges of each layer with a light buttercream. You can do this neatly using a small spoon or spatula.

Step 7

Pop the base cake onto your chosen serving plate or board and pack it with different sweets and chocolates. Make a little mound of sweets and when you’re happy with the amount put the topper cake on top like a lid. Press the edges down firmly so they sandwich together.

Step 8

Coat the cake in a light buttercream layer – this is a crumb coat which will stop any crumbs from sticking onto your final decorations. Leave to one side to set.

Step 9

Split the rest of the buttercream mixture evenly into 4 separate bowls. Add a few drops of food colouring to each e.g. purple, blue, green and pink and mix with a spoon until you’re happy with the colour.

Step 10

Spoon the mixtures into individual piping bags and pop them into the fridge to firm for about 5-10 mins, so the colours don’t run or blend when you pipe them onto the cake.

Step 11

Take the piping bags out of the fridge and pipe onto the cake. Start from the outside and work in drawing different coloured wavy lines with the nozzle.

Step 12

Once you’re happy with the top, work on the sides. Start from the bottom and pipe up the cake edges pulling away as you reach the top of the cake. Sprinkle the cake with hundreds and thousands to finish.

Step 13

Serve on a cake stand and cut into the middle of the cake using a sharp knife, revealing the sweetie surprise!

Equipment

2x21cm/9inch cake tins (3cm height)
Greaseproof paper
Piping bag
Electric hand whisk

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Cupcakes with buttercream icing

I’ve been complaining a lot recently. I know, I’m sorry. It’s just that things have genuinely seemed quite bleak; my whole life has felt like one long irritated thought, or one incredibly long moment holding Sam, while bent at an angle trying to do something for Kitty, one-handed (get out Playdough, cut up a pear, turn on Tom&Jerry, play “birdseed”…???…). I’ve constantly felt like it’s 2.05pm and it’s hours till bedtime and it’s raining and we’ve got no visitors and I’ve been awake since 0430 and I can feel a cold coming on. I’ve just been feeling like that all the time. I’ve felt like a weary beast of burden, or like I’m sitting in Economy on a flight to Australia, I’ve felt so far removed from my old self, my old life that I can’t even remember what I miss about it anymore.

Mothers say “I miss going out to the cinema on the spur of the moment. I miss reading a book for hours in bed,” and I think to myself, blankly “I have never done any of those things. Have I?”

But in the last few days there has been a little shift, imperceptible perhaps to anyone but me. It started with Kitty, who has been going through the day like a real trooper on no afternoon nap. Up until now, if I let her have one, she’d nut out for 45 minutes and then be awake until 9pm. But if I didn’t let her have one, the afternoons were unhappy and strained: I felt so bad watching her droop sadly against the sofa, sucking her thumb, all but dozing off. Now even if I put her in bed she doesn’t go to sleep, but rolls around for a bit and then chirrups to come out. And she is cheerful all afternoon, if a bit quiet at times.

And now Sam, who will be 6 months old on the 5th November, has started to show signs of sitting up. Not solidly – these developments are so slow – but he’s getting the hang of sitting on my hip and hooking his arm around mine to hold on. If I put him in the sacred Ikea Ektorp highchair, he can sit there for maybe five minutes, batting a rattle about while Kitty covers him in stickers, until he yaps to be picked up.

Sitting up is probably the single event that a babyhood pivots on. Sitting up brings with it new abilities to concentrate on objects, to put toys with an interesting mouthfeel in the gob, to drool, gently on the carpet and watch one’s sister caper about going “bler-ler-ler-ler-ler” for your entertainment.

So all of a sudden in the darkness there is distant beam, the sweeping swoop of a searchlight that will, inevitably, pick out my lifeboat.

Don’t wish it away, people say. And I understand that. I don’t want to be flippant about it but, really, there is little about Kitty’s early babyhood that I miss. Not now, for god’s sake! Not now that we have actual conversations and in-jokes and she can tell me what she wants and where it hurts and we can discuss the complicated relationship between Tom and Jerry. We can draw each other pictures, play hide-and-seek. Her favourite thing is to put away the Ocado order. It’s just trippy. Blissful. I thought it would take years to reach the stage that all parents get to where they prefer spending time with their child than with anyone else – but in fact here we are.

Why would I miss a time when we couldn’t really communicate? When she couldn’t tell me what was wrong or why she was sad or angry or frustrated? Why would I miss a time when it was so difficult to have fun?

It is easier to have fun with Sam because I am so much better with babies than I was. The hours with Sam just don’t feel as long as they did with Kitty – even if he is having and off day and being a bit of a jerk. I’ve just done so much time, now, with little kids that I can shrug it all off. Ach, it’s just another day in the nuthouse. If he wakes up early in the morning or from his lunchtime nap I don’t curse the world and feel crushed and ill, I just think to myself that for now I just have to hang on until bedtime and, after that, I just have to hang on until he’s walking – then we’ll be laughing.

So all of a sudden I feel incredibly positive about everything. I am planning a Christmas party at our house and I am going to go WILD and get a florist in and a kids’ entertainer and stuff. I have also slowly started to get to grips with the various horrifying areas of clutter in the kitchen and playroom and it’s quite amazing what having a good clear-out can do for your general mental well-being.

And all the baking I am doing for Kitty’s nursery bake-sales is good for the soul. You do end up making an awful lot of fairy cakes when you have kids for one reason or another and I have grown sick of looking up the recipe. But then I remembered a way of making a sponge that is terribly easy and I didn’t even need to look it up to know how to do it.

It is this – you take an egg (if you want to make 6-8 fairy cakes) or 2 eggs (if you want to make a dozen or more, or a small cake) and weigh it/them. Then you use the same weight of self-raising flour, butter and caster sugar.

Then you make the cakes in the normal way – so you cream together the butter and sugar, add the egg or eggs and then fold in the flour, decant into a baking vessel and bake for about 8-10 mins.

Once you have committed this clever short-cut to memory, you can start being creative with your toppings without it feeling too onerous. I made these for a recent bake sale at nursery and I am terribly pleased with them having, as they do, a topping of piped buttercream.

You make buttercream like this:

Take half a pat of butter (125g) and leave to come to room temperature. Then you beat it together with increasing tablespoons of SIEVED – this is important – icing sugar. The actual amount of icing sugar is really up to you. Just do it and taste as you go along until you have something that is pleasingly buttery-sugary.

Then you can dye it any colour you want, (bearing in mind that combined with the slight yellowyness of the buttercream any colour won’t be wildly vibrant, but I think that is more classy anyway), beating the colour in well – (I use Dr Oetker) – and fill a piping bag with it. Using a star-shaped nozzle, pipe the buttercream in a circle around the cupcake starting from the outside and working in. It’s much, much easier than it seems – I have never done this before and it only took me one or two goes to get something I was really pleased with.

I absolutely love all those toppings you can get in the Waitrose baking aisle – tiny butterflies and pearls and stars and all that – and I attached a selection of those to the buttercream and then chilled the cupcakes until they were needed.

Pippa’s Rainbow Cake

I sometimes worry that I might be a witch. It would make sense – I am not totally unsinister, with my weird red hair, beady black eyes, fearsome straight nose and strong Welsh ancestry (full of witches, Wales).

And it would explain a series of terrible things happening to people I hate. Three people, whom I have had cause to dislike intensely, have come to sticky ends – one had a near-fatal heart attack and was then made redundant, another broke their leg in an horrific accident and the other one actually died of cancer. All completely true. All in the last 3 years.

I cannot deny that I wished bad things for all of these people. But at the same time I cannot feel too guilty about any of it, because that would be to acknowledge that I think I really might be a witch – and that question would bring the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.

And anyway, terrible things happen to people I like, too – for example the woman I know whose newborn suddenly died last week, or my mother-in-law who had to have an emergency operation at Christmas. So if I do have any magical powers of Wicca, it probably isn’t that I bring great pain and suffering to people who cross me – it’s probably just that I bring shitty bad luck to everyone.

It is in this contrite mood that I turn to Celebrate, by Pippa Middleton. Everyone made terrific fun of this book when it came out, so furious were they all that she not only has a marvellous bottom and lovely swingy hair, but that she had landed a £400,000 book deal for writing about how to make paper chains.

But the thing is, this book is really terribly good and very inspiring and completely worth it if you are halfway inclined to throw parties but have, like me, little creative flair. And those famously obvious tips everyone scoffed at are actually perfectly sensible and not so obvious and stupid when you think of the awful, charmless parties you have been to where there’s nowhere to sit, nowhere to put your coat and not enough to eat. If I turned up at any party even half as pretty as the ones shown in the pictures in Celebrate I’d be fucking beside myself with excitement.

So anyone who says this book is no good is just a bitter, miserable sour-face and I hope something awful happens to them.

It’s also full of recipes, which I didn’t realise. They are good, all useful classics like kedgeree, gravadlax and simnel cake and she has some brilliant ideas for inexpensive mass-canapes, like baking tiny baby new potatoes and finishing them off with a blob of sour cream and caviar (she suggests Sevruga, but there is nothing wrong with Lumpfish, frankly). AND she’s got a twice-baked souffle thing, which I’ve been meaning to try for ages.

Pippa has also had the audacity to include a rainbow birthday cake, which caught my eye as it’s Kitty’s birthday quite soon and I do so like to present children with exactly what they want – i.e. hideous plastic toys with flashing light and noises, telly, full-fat, full-sugar, full-salt foodstuffs and enough E-numbers to blast them into space.

I was sceptical about the instructions for this cake, so I thought I would give it a go and possibly fuck it up, just to spread that essential extra bit of bad karma.

But even I didn’t manage to ruin it too badly, although it didn’t turn out anything like the picture. But that’s my own fault. My complaint with this cake is not the method, which would be fine if you were a little more precise, artistic and meticulous than me, but that my blue and green came out as more or less the same colour. I think if I was going to do this again, I would know my limitations and maybe stick to only four colours – two in each sandwich half.

I might even, thinking about it, if I wanted to do four colours per sandwich half, fashion a cardboard cross to sit in the tin so that you could dollop the batter with confidence and whip the card away at the last minute to leave four reasonably even segments of colour.

I am also at a loss as to how one would present this without covering it with some sort of icing, as although the colours come out beautifully on the inside, the outside goes brown during cooking. Pippa helpfully includes a recipe for buttercream icing, which does the job: 125g soft butter, 250g icing sugar, 2 tbsp freshly boiled water and whisk.

The cake itself is delicious and the batter doesn’t suffer too much from having the air knocked out of it when you mix in the food colouring.

Anyway so here we go:

Pippa’s Rainbow Cake

the exact recipe can be found on p.312 of the excellent Celebrate, which I urge you to buy if you have half a mind to.

This mixture makes enough for a 20cm round or 18cm sq cake tin.

200g self-raising flour
200g sugar
200g butter at room temperature
4 eggs !! I know rather a lot
Large pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 180C.

1 Cream together 200g butter and 200g sugar. Add the salt.

2 Whisk in the four eggs one by one. You do this to stop the mixture from curdling. I must say, I have never managed to stop a cake mixture from curdling completely even when doing this – but at the same time it has never made the cake horrible or anything. Having said all this, best not to dump all four eggs in at the same time.

3 Now fold in the flour.

4 Now divide your cake mixture into as many separate bowls as you have colours and give each bowl its own teaspoon with which to mix in the colour. Add each colour until you are happy with the saturation and then spoon the colours into your (well-greased) tin.

I was worried about this as I assumed they would all merge together and create a hideous grey/brown cake. They do not, as cake batter is reasonably stiff, but a clumsy hand such as mine means that I didn’t get a gorgeously even distribution of colour as someone more talented might have. But these things are all about practice.

3 Give the tin a little shake to even the top out and then bung in the oven for 30-40 mins.

After this has cooled you may find you need to level off the top with a knife in order to be able to sandwich your two halves together, with the prettiest cake bottom (eh? See what I did there??) facing uppermost. As I had buttercream on the outside, I filled the middle with jam.

And I was really very pleased with it. So if Pippa suddenly drops dead of a brain tumour, you will know who to blame.