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| Emma and I just a few short weeks before we both turned 16 |
This past Saturday is a very important day on my calendar year... January 14th. It is a day I have been celebrating every year since I was 15 years old. It is one of best friend's, Emma Elston's birthday. Emma and I have turned a few significant ages together... sweet 16, adult 18, legal age of majority 19, quarter of a century 25 and this year we turned the old triple decade 30! For those of you who don't know, my birthday is January 2nd. Every year Emma and I get to turn a year older with in weeks of each other. That also makes us both Capricorns, but that's another blog entry all in itself!
Like me, Emma has two best friend's. We were both more than happy to plan an exciting birthday for her! Her other best friend lead the planning of the day, and I took more of a backstage roll. Which I was more than happy to do, after hosting my own 30th less than 2 weeks prior. Not to mention a week before that hosting Christmas Eve at my place as well! Since it is well known that I am a passionate baker, I was placed in charge of the birthday cake. I was given the option of making it or buying it. But to me, there was no option. This was my best friend's 30th birthday, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't create her something totally unique and amazing! A store bought cake simply would not do. I had to come up with something that would "wow" her, and everyone else.
Now this was not any easy task. Emma is not the biggest dessert fan (unlike myself). In fact, she can sometimes either take it or or leave it. She is however partial to a few sweet treats... apple crisp, apple pie, nanimo bars, rice crispy squares, and the candy swedish berries. Since Emma had already had her fill of my nanimo bars at Christmas time, I ruled that one out right away. I decided that an apple upside down cake would be perfect, and probably not too complicated to find a recipe for or to make either. But still it didn't seem like enough? Then I started thinking about the swedish berries.... hmmm... what kind of dessert could I make with swedish berries? And then a light bulb went of in my head... what if I made swedish berry cupcakes! I had never even heard of such a thing before, not even on any of those cupcake shows on TV! But I was confident that I could do it.
To me, a cupcake is all about the icing. The cake must go well with the icing, but if the icing isn't any good, forget it! So I decided that the best way to make a swedish berry cupcake, would be to make the frosting taste like a swedish berry. That was going to be a bit of a challenge, but I do love a good baking challenge! I decided that the cake part should be white cake (since Emma's not big on chocolate cake). But the cake part needed a "swedish berry touch" as well. I thought about how I cut gum drops in quarters at Christmas, to make my Grammies famous gum drop cake... couldn't I do the same thing with swedish berries? Why not! So that took care of the cake part. But I still had to figure out the frosting part...
I knew that there is a shot called "swedish berry". So I asked the bartender at my work what goes in this delicious shot. She told me it is a combination of red sour puss and banana liqueur. I wasn't nuts about buying an entire bottle of each of these, just to flavour my frosting. Plus not everyone likes the alcohol taste in their desserts. So I decided that I needed to find both a banana and a raspberry syrup, but with out any sugar in them. Because butter cream frosting is already sweet enough on it's own! I searched the grocery store to find such things. I was able to find banana extract next to the vanilla extract in the spices and flavourings section. But I was out of luck where the raspberry syrup was concerned. What was I to do now? The answer is simple (well sort of), I would have to buy raspberries and make my own!
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| raspbery syrup |
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| ingredients for the cake portion |
Due to my wonky work schedule, I often do not get home from work until super late. This has lead to many late night baking sessions. The night before Emma's birthday was no different. I began baking Emma's birthday cake and cupcakes at around 11pm. The first step was to make the raspberry syrup. I placed one pint of fresh raspberries in a saucepan with a splash of water and let them boil for about 10mins. Then I strained out the seeds, and voila: sugar free homemade raspberry syrup! I promise you, it really was this simple!
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| ready to go in the oven |
Next I started the cupcakes. I learned a long time ago a baking secret from a popular food network chef. She actually uses cake mixes all the time! She explained that all a cake mix is, is the dry ingredients of a cake. You can also, alter or add to the cake mix any way you like. So for my swedish berry cupcake, I started with a regular box of white cake mix. I followed the instructions on the box, adding a bit of vanilla extract to the batter as well as 3/4 of a bag of swedish berries cut in quarters. I also substituted the water the box called for, for milk.Then I lined a cup cake baking sheet with cup cake liners, and filled them about 2/3 full. Into the oven they went on 350degrees for about 25 minutes. We all know the rule of thumb when it comes to baking cakes in the oven: The cake is cooked, when a knife or toothpick can be inserted in the cake and it comes out clean.
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| frosting ingredients |
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| mixing the frosting |
The cup cakes came out of the oven looking great, and ready to be frosted once they cooled. On to the frosting. I followed my standard butter cream frosting recipe: one 500g bag of icing sugar, 1/2c of unsalted butter (softened), and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. I used a hand mixer to blend the butter, vanilla, and slowly added the icing sugar. Once these ingredients were combined, I added my raspberry syrup, and 1 tsp of banana extract. I folded the syrup and banana extract in with a spatula, so that I wouldn't splatter any of the syrup on myself. Then came for the big moment of truth...the taste test. At this point, if the frosting tasted like crap... I was screwed. Thank God, that didn't happen... the frosting tasted EXACTLY like a swedish berry candy!!!! After a few minutes of patting myself on the back for being a sheer culinary genius (and maybe some help from above, my late Opa was fabulous European cake baker), I wrapped up the frosting and went to bed. It was 3am after all, and the cupcakes had to cool completely before I could frost them. So I set my alarm for 730am, and went to bed. Keep in mind I had to get up in the morning, frost the cupcakes, make a run to the deli, get my self packed and ready for a day of snowboarding, and meet the girl's in west Hamilton for 11am!
On to the next day, Emma's birthday! My alarm did not go off at 730am... just my luck. For some strange reason, it did not go off until 8:30? When my alarm went off, I laid there slowly waking up... thinking I had lots of time, it was only 7:30 right?! When I finally rolled over and looked at the clock, I sat up and bolted out of bed. I was now running an hour behind schedule! I guess that's what you get for staying up until 3am baking. I quickly got myself ready, hit up the deli down the street (had to grab my contribution to the ski hill lunch), and came home to frost the cupcakes.
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| the finished product! |
I grabbed my piping bag, placed a random pipe inside and began filling the piping bag with frosting. Gosh, I haven't pipped frosting in a while. I had forgotten how hard it is to do? I kept getting air bubbles in the pipping bag, making it difficult to pipe the frosting. Needless to say, it took a bit longer than I had expected to pipe the cupcakes, but somehow I managed to finish. I took the remaining 1/4 of a bag of swedish berries and topped each of the cupcakes with them. Now I was done... the cupcakes looked great! But how did they taste? No time for taste testing when you're running that late though. I packed up the cupcakes (reserving one for Jake to try), and all of the other stuff I had to bring with me and piled into the car along with my chauffeur (Jake). On the way there, I gave Jake his cupcake to try. His response? Typical guy, "It's good." Well what the hell does that mean?! Just "good", not "great" or "amazing" or "the best cupcake you've ever freakin had"!? Guess he didn't understand all of the blood, sweat and tears that had gone into making these cupcakes! He also said "they're really sweet, almost too sweet". Wow, I love how brutally honest he was. Too late to do anything about it now though!
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| the birthday girl blows out her candles |
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| 30 and fabulous |
We had a fabulous day snowboarding, picnic lunching in the ski chalet, lots of girl chat on the drive up and back, fabulous take out dinner from Papa Guyo (authentic Mexican restaurant), and a wonderful night of socialising, drinking and guitar playing (and drunken sing alongs). Emma's other best friend hosted a great bash! And how were the cupcakes received you ask? Everyone loved them! Most importantly, Emma loved them! Mission accomplished.
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| swedish berry cupcakes- A+ apple upside down cake- C- |
As for the apple upside down cake, it was just "ok". A bit of a disappointment, in my opinion. It turned out more like a apple bread than a cake. Guess it serves me right for trusting a random recipe off the internet. It did teach me though, that trusting my own ideas and creations is best. Lucky for me, I decided to blog about the cupcakes!
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