Mad about Decorated Cookies

After giving fondant a try, I decided to try decorating using royal icing again. This time round, I managed to get a darker shade of pink and the colour is able to stand out against the white. Initially I wanted to try out christmas red colour, however, to achieve the colour, it requires a lot of colouring, hence I gave up.
With the blue leftover from my previous session, I have gingerbread girls and boys.
Having practiced so much, believe I am quite set for Christmas!

Blueberry muffin

Inspired by the orange cointreau muffin, I had decided to use the same recipe, tweaking it a little to become blueberry muffin. The result turn out to be good, with the same effect as my first attempt.

Warm Chocolate Cake

Have always wanted to try the warm chocolate cake recipe at home. The recipe is from my favourite blog - Aunty Yochana. It is easy to make and fuss free. Whilst baking, the cake rises and it appears very light. I put some strawberries, which blended well with the bittersweet chocolate cake.

Handmade Decorated cookies

After the first try on decorated cookies, I decided to try out using fondant to decorate the cookies instead of royal icing. As I would like to try to handmake everything, I decided to try making fondant myself also. Making fondant is actually easy and very neat, I was glad that I attempted to try it.
Since butterfly cookie is still the theme, to make my girls happy, again I gave pink a try. Kneading fondant is fun, it is like play-doh, and in fact, my young girl did regard it as play-doh as she looked at me and said, "Mummy, are you playing play-doh?" This time round, I managed to achieve the pink that I want, and sticking it on the cookie does have its effect, much better than my first try on royal icing, when the pink was too light.
However, just with fondant, the cookie does not look very nice. Royal icing is still needed to 'perk up' my cookie a bit. With pink, the next colour that I chose was baby blue. So with baby blue royal icing, I gave the cookies a border and also poka dots.

Orange Cointreau muffin

This was modified from the Grand Marnier Cake recipe which I obtained from a forum. Since I do not have Grand Marnier available, I decided to substitute it with Cointreau and also converted it into a muffin instead. The steps in making this cake is unique as it requires mixing of the dry ingredients before adding in the wet ingredients, e.g. butter. This is my first time trying this recipe and I am very glad that I tried. Whilst baking, I could see the perfect dome shape and the centre splitting a little, which is the perfect muffin result that I would like to have. I was thrilled to see the result. The feedback received is also very good - soft and spongy!

First Try at Decorated Cookies

Feeling the Christmas coming, with me attending the cookie class at Shermay's and also the christmas decorations are up on the streets.. I have decided to give the real cookies a try at decorating them, after much practicing on tracing paper. This time round, I am slightly adventurous and decided to try and use a little bit of colour - light pink, so that I can experience mixing colours as well.
Here goes, my snowflakes debut for christmas.

My girls want me to bake them the butterfly cookies, since it is a girly thing, I tried the pink colour as my first colour icing. When I first mixed the colour, I thought the pink looks so sweet, however, when I applied on the cookies, I realised that the pink is too light to create any contrast. Alas, lesson learnt, next time will have to add more colours I guess. Nonetheless, I decided to decorate with poka dots for fun. My girls love the cookies and of course, fussed over me when I was decorating them.

Lemon Cream cheese Cupcake

Having seen so much cupcake frosting, I decided to give it a try on another simple one. This cupcake turns out beautifully with the perfect dome and the lemon zest gave it a very fresh fragrant as well. The frosting is whipped using cream cheese and icing sugar, it turned out easily managed. However, will need to reduce the amount of sugar after the feedback received from the cupcake.