Happy 11th Birthday my , My Monkey! Soon enough I'll get eye-rolls from deep beneath a hoodie for calling you that. I'm not ready for you to grow up so fast! Just the other day you told me "Dinosaurs aren't cool anymore" and I almost choked on my toast!
The themed birthdays are coming to an end, for which I am both grateful and sad.
This year's theme is space (instead of dinosaurs). My freaking oven is broken though!
Thank you to my lovely friend, Desiree Frances Petersen for coming to my rescue and baking the gorgeous chocolate cupcakes. I'm full of crap when it comes to cake and cupcakes. There is absolutely no time in this short life for awful cake. I don't care how pretty your icing is. If the sponge is dry and sad, you have failed. FAILED I tell you!
Speaking of the icing, which I insisted I do myself along with the decorating, was a nightmare to start, but eventually after using ALL the blue food colouring I own (which was a surprisingly large amount) I managed to achieve the colour I wanted.
I present to you, my space cupcakes!
God, I hope he doesn't call them space-cakes at school π€£π€£π€£π€£π€£
We managed to get the cupcakes successfully to the car and to the school office without dropping them, which is always nerve-wrecking, and I'm pleased to say that at 7am in the middle of winter and with load-shedding (See South Africa/ Eskom/ Scheduled power outages), it was too dark for the secretaries to see my pajamasπ€£π€£π€«π€«ππ
If your child is in Matthew's class and comes home looking like they ate a Smurf, it was my fault π€£β€οΈ
Also, thank you , Matthew was STOKED with his Warhammer stuff β€οΈβ€οΈβ€οΈβ€οΈβ€οΈ
Now for the recipe stuff, I did not use my normal chocolate icing, and of course - this time I did not bake the cupcakes myself, BUT they were almost identical to mine. I decided to opt for buttercream icing instead of the dark chocolate cream cheese icing I normally use because that really seems to only appeal to people who like cheesecake and dark chocolate. For kids, I wanted to just make it yummy and exciting (although, it's going to look like they've been out partying and drinking cocktails with too much Bols Blue Curacao.... I should have sent a warning to school about blue wee-wees).
Icing Ingredients
- I used 500g stork baking margerine (tastes like butter at half the price)
- 3 teaspoons of vanilla essence
- 500g icing sugar
- 3/4 cup of cocoa
- 1/4 cup milk
- an entire bottle of blue food colouring (plus what was left in the 1st bottle).
Method: Blend it all together and pray.
For the decorations, I headed down to the Baking Tin, our local baking supplier (oh my god it's baking HEAVEN in there). We didn't find any glow-in-the-dark alien faces, but we made do with lovely star sprinkles, mini Astros, and large sugar handcrafted stars.
Once all was done and children and cupcakes delivered to school, I decided to have a balanced breakfast π€£π€£π€«π€« I think it was well deserved, don't you?
You can find my chocolate cupcake recipe here:
Claire's Crazy Cakes, Bakes and Kitchen Hacks: Chapter 16 - Gourmet Caramel and Chocolate Cupcakes