Wedding anniversary at Peggy Porschen's Parlour

Halloween was our 11th wedding anniversary and of course we needed cake and where better than my favourite cake parlour in London - Peggy Porschen. If people ask where to go for tea and cake in London I always suggest Peggy's - who can fail to fall in love with such a beautiful pink parlour? This is the colour everything in my house would be if Manny would allow it! 

We opted for a cupcake each - Manny going for Chocolate Heaven and I opted for Sticky Toffee - one of their range I've wanted to try for some time. 

Manny's Chocolate Heaven cake was delicious. I'm sometimes put off chocolate cake by bad frosting - this one was as light as a feather. As was the cake.

My Sticky Toffee one was fabulous. The addition of walnuts was a little strange at first but I think it added some good texture to the cake. Again the frosting was divine.

When we finished Manny went and got the Halloween special - a pumpkin and cream cheese cupcake which we shared while finishing our coffees. I'm not that fond of pumpkin - sometimes I find it makes me gag - but this one was lovely. And the cream cheese frosting was again lovely. The cake itself was heavily spiced which I really liked. 

We left clutching two take away cupcakes (I know we're fatties but we just couldn't resist), for our trip around Brompton Cemetery where we snuggled, fed squirrels and crows, and had a lovely day. There are no photos of the second lot of cupcakes alas as when we were taking some photographs in the Cemetery I put the cakes down and the box blew over. We still ate them obviously! Manny had a Black Forest and I had a Banoffee - Manny loved his (I tried a bit and it was really flavoursome), however my Banoffee wasn't my favourite cupcake ever I have to admit - the banana flavour wasn't that strong but it was moist and fresh so better than a lot of cupcakes I've had previously. 

The perfect anniversary day out in London. 

Sticky toffee pudding with custard

Sticky toffee pudding and custard - don't those words just make you drool? Surely it can't just be me?

Last week was cold, wet and miserable. The fun and frivolity of Christmas/Hogmanay seems a long way away and January seems to take forever to be over, and is always a little grim. What I needed was some comfort food. A hug in cupcake form.

I have made sticky toffee cupcakes with caramel frosting before so the cake was a doddle for me. I really love this recipe. I could make it over and over, and eat it again and again. Till I popped.

The cake once again came out sticky and date'y and just scrumptious. There is no other word for it - scrumptious sums it up fully.

I used the Love Bakery custard frosting recipe I had previously topped my rhubarb and custard cupcakes with.  I added the specified amount of custard and it just didn't taste custardy enough, so I added more. And some more vanilla as I like my custard to be full of vanilla goodness. Alas I added a smidgen too much custard and the frosting was a little wetter than I'd have liked - it tasted fabulous but didn't pipe so well.

The cakes kept well for 3 days, the flavour maturing in the cupcake over time and the base remained moist until they were all gone.

I am Iron Anne \m/

Yesterday was my Iron Cupcake debut and I LOVED it. I was originally quite nervous (I get shy in crowds) but my cakes turned out quite well and looked rather pretty, if I do say so myself, and seemed to be gobbled up by the others at the event so all was good.

The theme for this month was fruit, and as I decided to enter quite late on in the month and didn't really have time to try out anything new (I had toyed with a bounty type cupcake with coconut - my favourite of all fruits) I opted for one of my favourite cupcakes I've ever made - the sticky toffee pudding cupcake with caramel frosting.

Iron Cupcake is held in a really nice little venue just near Moorgate/The Barbican called The Cuban. When we arrived we were greeted by a couple of lovely young men who gave us our stickers (Manny was rather chuffed with his "eater" one - I think he should wear it always!) and then we went off to register and have my cupcakes photographed professionally! I met Samantha, Iron Cupcake organiser (and boy is she organised as the event is HUGE and ran totally smoothly - even with loads of keen cupcakes!!). She was really lovely, remembering Manny's name from my blog and calling us cupcake celebs - this was also when my lovely cupcake cases from Eloise (Gourmet Cupcake) got their first compliment of many!

By the time my chums arrived and the eating commenced I'd given up trying to count how many people there were - lots! And loads of gorgeous entries both amateur and professional (I'd say approx 30 amateur and 8 or so professional but check out the official Iron Cupcake blog if you want to know more). I tried to get some pics of all the entries but as usual excitement and my crappy camera didn't really mix. The cupcake creations were amazing - a veritable greengrocers of fruity flavours - coconut, key lime, gooseberry, lemon, strawberry, St Clements, tayberry, strawberry, black forest gateaux, rhubarb, watermelon, blackberry...I could go on - there were loads and only one other sticky toffee pud. I'd thought about making a banoffee cupcake but assumed lots of people would, yet I don't think there were any - maybe everyone thought the same?

My entry in all its pretty glory - was v.proud to see them looking so pretty amongst so many other pretty cakes :)

Stunningly pretty strawberry dream vegan cupcakes from Ms Cupcake - she was one of my two votes for the professionals - gorgeous cake and I shall be visiting her stall in Greenwich v.soon! Btw the cakes were so yummy that I had to check with the baker that they were vegan - not that I think vegan cupcakes are bland but the frosting was so creamy I had to check! Delish and I urge everyone to try them!

This is who my other vote went to - winner of the professional category - Eloise from Gourmet Cupcake - typically I f**ked up the picture. Please forgive me - they were gorgeous - not only to look at but to eat as well. Moist flavoursome cake with tayberry filling and absolutely divine frosting. A well deserved win!
A really pretty key lime cupcake - this one caught my eye and was the first cake I made a grab for when the scrum that commenced when tasting began!

Another that caught my eye when I arrived - the black forest gateaux - there were two black forest cupcake - both yummy!

These were myself and my chum Dennis' favourite - coconut high hats. I wanted to find out who baked these as they were awesome! Great base with a marshmallow and chocolate topping covered in coconut - I could've eaten several of these! If anyone reading made these or knows who did please let me know! I may have to try my hand at baking them if not - they were lovely!

Another of my favourites - lemon meringue - lovely base with a really flavoursome lemon curd in the middle topped with sticky chewy yummy meringue!

This was the runner up in the professional category - St Clements - we didn't' get a chance to try it- the horror! But it was very pretty!

The winner in the amateur category, the beautiful and fabulously frosted watermelon. Again sorry about the pic! This was a lovely cake and the watermelon really came through in the cake - lovely moist base with gorgeous frosting. A well deserved win.

As you can see there were so many lovely cupcakes to choose from it was very difficult to choose which ones to vote for, and to eat. My friend Lucy went a bit mad and got loads - and turned a bit green towards the end of the night. I was quite sensible - tried as many as I could - either having a bite of one (or half if I really liked them) then passing it onto Manny. He was another whose eyes were bigger than his belly and kept eating well after he was full, with lots of encouragement from one of the organising guys!

After the eating, came the voting. Each baker got one set of votes (2 professionals and 3 amateurs), as did each table. Once we'd cast our votes we sat around having a good chat about which we preferred and some of us having another cake/finishing off what we started once we got a second wind.

After a short vote count the winners were announced and everyone seemed happy - except one girl who seemed perturbed to be second - which was odd - I was happy just to have taken part. I was chuffed that Gourmet Cupcake won with their tayberry.

So, the prizes were awarded and stuffed full of cupcakes and happy we headed into the night.

Next month is the first anniversary of Iron Cupcake and the theme is "celebration" - I'm already wondering what to bake! Hope to see you there.

Btw if you are interested in where the title for this blog post came from click here.

Put down the spoon and walk slowly away from the jar

I had been meaning to try to bake some sticky toffee cupcakes for some time, and this week a bad morning at work and some expensive dates in my cupboard reaching their best before date led me to taking an afternoon off work and baking these absolutely gorgeous cupcakes from a recipe by Fiona Cairns.

The recipe is pretty straight forward but I changed a couple of things. As usual it would seem with recipes involving the soaking of dates it says naff all about what to do after the soaking time. Do you drain them, or keep all the water or what? Or am I being stupid and everyone else on the planet knows automatically what to do in such circumstances? Please let me know if you are clued up as this is the second recipe this has happened in (the other is for the Sticky Toffee Pudding in the Masterchef cookbook - as you can see my use of dates is quite one-dimensional!). So, I drained off some of the liquid as it seemed a lot to add to the mixture, but kept some in and they came out perfect - moist and gooey! This is when I wish I had smelly-vision as the smell in my kitchen when they were baking was amazing, but I resisted eating even one unfrosted as I was being good!

I also made my own version of the frosting.

I originally planned to buy dulche de leche as I was feeling just too lazy to make my own in a pot of boiling water for hours (as suggested by loads of people on Twitter when I said I was going to buy it!) and I'm quite accident prone and I didn't fancy scraping sticky goo off my kitchen ceiling for months if the tin exploded - something similar happened in my aunt's kitchen with a tin of steam pudding and no matter how many times my aunt cleaned it and my uncle painted over the stain it remained there as clear as day!). Alas my local Tescos is rubbish and I couldn't get dulce de leche - so I tried to make the caramel, twice. And twice I got over cautious and took it off the heat too soon. Then I tried to make dulce de leche in the microwave as after some internet research I was led to believe it was easy and worked a treat. It didn't - although it resembled dulce de leche the taste was grainy and unpleasant and the smell put me off ever eating caramel again. So I gave up for the night. Packed the cupcakes away all snug in cupcake tins and forgot about them.

The next day I sent Manny to Waitrose armed with instructions to buy dulce de leche or Bonne Maman confiture de caramel and if he couldn't get it to text me asap and I'd go in search of it myself elsewhere.

Thankfully good old Waitrose came to the rescue and we sourced some of the confiture de caramel. Is it me or does the name confiture de caramel just oooooze off your tongue? Or maybe I'm just thinking of the oozy caramel goodness that I insisted on taste-testing for quite some time before adding to my vanilla frosting just incase it wasn't right. It was very right, and very ooooooozy!

The recipe calls for salted caramel, but (confession time) I have come to the conclusion I'm really not fond of salted caramel. Pity this realisation didn't come before I spent loads on some salted caramel popping candy lollies. So I missed out the salt and perhaps over-added the caramel - I couldn't help it, it kept turning my frosting a really lovely caramel'y colour!

I filled up my disposable piping bag (using the bag in the glass method which is fab!) and piped the cupcakes using my huge star nozzle and I have to say I'm quite proud of my efforts.

I personally think these are some of the tastiest cupcakes I've made and I recommend the recipe to everyone. I took some to work today and one of the girls in the office said I could charge for them which made me rather chuffed!