Today (27.6.2021) is the first day of the latest Sydney lockdown. So for a fun activity we took a stroll to Summer Hill to get some baking supplies.
Tackling the ever challenging “cup cake” was our mission. Requests were taken for flavours, there was a family split, 50% craving chocolate and 50% voting for vanilla. It might have been possible to cater to everyone with a strategic sprinkling of cocoa part way through, but sadly the chocolate crew were forgotten until it was too late. (You can guess from my disappointment which I was hoping for)
Imogen was in charge so there were only a handful of catastrophes!
It is possible, I’m told, to bake with minimal mess. This was not our experience! From the outset we were running into some of the more obvious spills and sprinkles, but the bar was raised when cracking an egg into a bowl the egg landed next to the bowl not in the bowl!
Mixing in the ingredients is much more fun, especially if you have a machine to do the hard work for you. In case you fancy baking along with us, we followed this recipe:
- 150g of plain flour
- 60 g of unsalted butter
- 150g of sugar
- 2 eggs
- 125ml of milk
- 1 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 2 tsp vanilla essence
- 1 1/2 tsp vegetable oil
- cocoa powder (if you remember to use it)
Once it was all mixed up in a bowl we had a nice cakey mixture that we could spoon into some paper cupcake cases. Concentration is key here, watch out for the drips and don’t over-fill them!
Then we popped them in the oven for 20 minutes and out came some beautiful golden cupcakes.
Next up was adding icing and making them look good enough to eat! As it turns out it takes real muscles 💪🏻 to get the icing to stick to the cakes neatly!
Luckily there was help on hand to finish the job
A fun afternoon was capped off with a tasty treat for everyone (and a cup of tea). As you can see the end result looked fantastic, until, a final failure. As Imogen tried to place the cake stand down, three of the cupcakes slipped off and landed upside down on the work top, but still tasted great!
