Sunday, 12 February 2012

Clandestine Cake Club- Inspired by the Silver Screen

Well, it's taken me so long to get round to writing this up that I think i'll mainly just let the pictures do the talking:


January's Cake club was in the Knit Studio, in the Blackfriar's area of Newcastle. The great thing about this venue was that we had a great big table for all the cakes to be deposited on, which meant we could all stand around and mingle and have a good old natter while eating a whole load of cake.

I didn't get pics of everyone's cakes unfortunately but you can also read all about it in a few other places also:

-Lisa's blog- The Wonderful World of @loopygirl
-Kate's blog- Cakepoppins

These guy's blogs are always interesting, so get yourself over there and get following them!

Hayley xxx

The Great February Muffin Feud

The next installment of the Matt and Hayley Bake-off took place today.

This time, the challenge was to make 12 muffins, involving chocolate in some way, shape or form.

I'm really interested in the idea of chilli and chocolate, so I thought i'd make some sort of chilli chocolate combination. A search through my cook books found a recipe for Mexican Chocolate Cupcakes from the Cox Cookies and Cake book. This book was bought for me by a friend ages ago and I hadn't had a chance to make anything from it, so i was really keen to go ahead and have a go at one of the recipes. It's a really stylish book with a sense of humour and a lot of glitter!

I used 1 and a half quantities to adjust for muffins... And the result was, well, pretty spectacular to be honest:


The taste of these muffins is truly amazing... They are definitely the best muffins I have ever made. The muffin mixture contains cinnamon and nutmeg, and the chocolate buttercream contains cayenne pepper.

The independent judge this time was Lisa, Newcastle's Clandestine Cake Club organiser. Who better to ask to judge a muffin contest? So, we took the pictures, and we sent them to her, and she (very slowly and dramatically) reached her decision. Would it be muffin 1 (which I knew to be Matt's effort) or my muffin 2 (I must admit to feeling confident, but what if Lisa wasn't a fan of chilli?!)

Before I tell you who won, here are some more pictures of my effort:
Lovely rich, squidgy moist inside


And here are some pictures of Matt's muffins, which were chocolate muffins with a chocolate topping:

Note the slightly dry texture... explanation to follow

Lovely precise decoration.
It turns out that somehow, Matt managed to forget to put any butter into his cake mixture, hence the rather dry-looking texture.

And so, the results came in and it turned out that my muffins won, so I am the muffin queen. I am slowly but surely starting to claw back my self respect following the cheesecake debacle and loser pie episode.