Recipe the First

Well that didn't take long did it? I've not had the books a whole day and already the temptation to bake has overwhelmed me. Having such a massive choice of things made choosing what to make a little bit tricky but that was soon resolved by checking the total lack of ingredients in the cupboard. A lot of the recipes in the Baking Magic book require fondant icing - explaining why they look so damned good!. I've never seen this stuff in the supermarket and I'm almost certain you won't find it in a small co-op.

In the end my um chose something a bit different - lime and coconut cupcakes. These have cream cheese icing on them and luckily my brother was going to the shops to get some ingredients for his rocky road from the Hairy Bikers book. It was all go in our kitchen this afternoon (and a nice mess left afterwards!). Cue the inevitable disaster whenever I attempt to try something new. This time it wasn't my fault, it was my brothers who decided to come back with low fat cream cheese. Apart from not tasting nearly as nice as its full fat counterpart, it is most unsuitable for baking with. The extra ingredients they have to add to the low fat version to give it the same thick consistency meant that when I added icing sugar and whipped it (as stated in the recipe) it became the consistency of yoghurt. I was more hoping for buttercream consistency so that I could pipe it nicely onto of the cupcakes as you see them in the shops.

Despite trying to rescue it by adding extra icing sugar and leaving in the fridge to cool, it was beyond saving and I did my best to coat them with it as it was. The frosting was actually really nice and so we decided to eat the cakes in a bowl with the remainder of the topping drizzled over the top. I was a little bit disappointed that the cupcakes were a bit tasteless but then the recipe called for oil instead of butter and just one egg so there was little that could be done about that. Still, with the topping on they were very good.