Salted Caramel Cheesecake

On an unrelated note, can I just say that I don’t understand “Red Velvet”.  It seems the trend at the moment is to have either red velvet cakes or cupcakes & after attempting my third different recipe.....I....am....done!!  All three attempts were tasteless and the texture of the cake wasn’t even nice.  No more red velvet for me!

Something that is successful and very, very yummy is Donna Hay’s Salted Caramel Cheesecake.  I do hope to add the recipe to this post at some point.  It is so rich that it would easily serve a crowd.  I am a cheesecake lover from way back & I have to say this one is right up at the top of the list.

Random end of 2011 baking

Because I have been slack (again) I am taking the easy way out (again) and doing a general update.

**Robot Cake**

This was for a friends child and I had a picture they had found on the internet to base it on.  It was reasonably simple to bake & carve etc but for some reason or another I just wasn’t happy with the finished product.  The birthday boy thought it was good and I guess that is all that matters!

**School Baking**

I made some snowman cookies for my son to take for his end of year class party.  I saw these on Bakerella’s site and even though mine aren’t as perfect as hers the kids ate them in a flash!!

I also made the whole class some reindeer food to help entice Santa to stop at their houses.  I had seen this idea ages ago in a scrapbooking magazine and after searching google I found the instructions and the poem and set to work.  After making about thirty of them I was wondering what I had been thinking!  It was worth it though as the kids were really appreciative which was nice.

I also made biscuits and brownies to give to the teachers and the staff in the office.

** 60th & 90th Cakes**

In November I had two extremely important cakes to create.  One was for my Mothers 60^th birthday and the other was for my Grandmothers 90^th birthday.  Oh, the pressure!!  To add to the challenge I was using my Mums kitchen (some 5 hours away from my own kitchen) and the weather was hot.

Mums cake was a Mad Hatter style cake, three tiers – chocolate mud, caramel mud & white chocolate mud.  It was my first attempt at one of these and it went pretty well.  Next time I would go a little bit smaller though and make sure the height was better.

Grans cake was supposed to look like a stack of presents but again I think I would make the tiers a bit smaller and have a bit more height.  When we took the cake down for the party it was 38 degrees and the cake also got a little squished during transportation!  The “icing on the cake”, so to speak, was when the power went off for about an hour and a half – we had to cut the cake by candlelight anyway....didn’t really matter what it looked like LOL!

The biggest lesson I learnt from creating both these cakes is to **always** check the size of your oven before ordering cake tins.  In my head the 12x12 inch square cake tin was the perfect size for the bottom tier.......unfortunately not the perfect size for my oven {insert red face here}.  Another point to consider is how on earth would you turn a cake that size out of the tin anyway?  I sure don’t have a cooling rack that is 12x12 inches!!

Delta Cream Cupcakes

I've done some more baking.  I've made Lemon Curd Squares (from Donna Hay magazine number 51) and although I had some drama getting it out of the pan, it was yummo!

I've also came accross some Oreo cupcakes on Bakerella's blog - you can find her recipe and gorgeous pics here.  I changed mine to use Delta Cream biscuits, to keep it a little Aussie.

While mine are definately not as pretty as hers, they tasted fantastic.  My major discovery was the icing recipe - Bakerella used shortening, which we don't have access to here, except for Copha, soooooo I tweaked a recipe I found in my Whoopie Pie cookbook (by Angela Drake) and came up with:

MARSHMALLOW ICING

1 packet white marshmallows
4 tbs milk
100g copha
1 cup icing sugar (maybe a bit extra)

Melt the mallows and milk in the microwave, allow to cool to about room temperature.
Melt the copha in another bowl and allow to cool slightly. Beat the icing sugar into the copha and then beat in the mallow mixture. You can add more icing sugar, if required.

I didn't really think it would work because the copha is so, so solid in it's original form, but it worked amazingly.  It was quite white (until I added the cookie crumbs to it, which I wish I'd left out!) and it was reasonably easy to pipe (a bit messy to try and spread on) and it stays soft but ends up quite stable to touch.

Mmmmmmm.