Spooky Fun Baking Hallween Cakes

Last week I was very kindly sent some goodies from Hobbycraft, the package included some lovely Halloween themed cupcake cases, this in turn gave us the idea to make some spooky cakes.

I already had all the ingredients we needed in the cupboard so all I needed was some little helpers.

Ingredients 

for the cakes * 4oz of self raising flour
                     * 4oz of sugar
                     * 4oz of butter
                     * 2 eggs
                     * chocolate chips (can change to whatever ingredient you like)

for the icing * icing sugar
                    * water
                    * red food colouring

for the pumpkins * orange buttons
                            * black icing

Preparing

* Preheat the oven to 180 degrees

* Cream the sugar and the butter together

* Sift in the flour and fold into the mixture

* Crack the eggs and mix in (careful not to get any shells in there!!)

* Lastly add in the chocolate chips

* Place a teaspoon of the mixture into each of the cupcake casings

* Pop in the oven for 12-18 minutes, until golden brown

* Lick the bowl whilst waiting :)

While the cakes are baking away in the oven, it was time to create our pumpkins. This proved to be a messy task as arms and hands kept touching the icing, some of the pumpkins ended up looking a tad smudged!!

Once the cakes were cooked to perfection, we placed them on a wired rack to cool down. Nannie was then upgraded to chief icing maker. 

After the cakes had been covered in scary red icing, the girls then placed the pumpkins and some stars on top of each cake and here we have some spooktastic cakes , almost too frightening to eat!!!

Have you done any baking recently? What are your favourite cakes to make?

xxxx

What to do with strawberries??

A couple of weeks back I picked up a couple of punnets of strawberries for one whole pound, got to love a bargain!! The only problem, was that they needed to be used up quite quickly as they were going out of date.

The first punnet was easy, the girls had the strawberries cut up and put with vanilla ice cream, simple yet delicious and perfect because it was another hot day.

However I was stumped on what to do with the second punnet. That's where the trusty internet came in handy, so off to google I went.

I found the almost perfect recipe on one of my favourite sites, the Magic Belles, now their recipe was for raspberry and white chocolate muffins, so I just had to adapt it slightly because a) I had strawberries and not raspberries and b) I didn't have muffin cases, I only had normal cake cases.

Ingredients

300g plain flour
2tsp baking powder
150g caster sugar
50g butter
215ml milk
1tsp vanilla extract
100g strawberries
75g white chocolate buttons
20 cake cases

How to make

* Preheat your oven to gas mark 6/ 200 degrees

* Sift the flour, baking powder and sugar into a large bowl and mix

* Melt the butter in the microwave

* Whisk the egg, milk, vanilla extract in a bowl and then add the melted butter and mix

* Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir them together making sure the mixture stays lumpy rather than smooth

* Fold in the strawberries and white chocolate buttons

* Spoon he mixture into the cases

* Bake them in the oven for roughly 20-25 minutes until golden brown

The only thing left to do is eat them, nom nom nom.

xxxx