Shoes!

When designing a cake for my friend Anne's flirty thirty birthday there was only one theme choice - shoes!

This project was made in two parts; the shoe box is a large double fudge brownie, while the shoes are made from rice krispie treats. Both are decorated with butter cream icing, with the shoes receiving miniature M&Ms for a little more colour.

The shoes were carved from blocks of rice krispie treats, the below photo sequence shows their creation.

With the basic shapes created I moved on to frosting them. I used black icing to highlight the show box cover, and to outline the shoe's in-sole, outer-sole, and straps.

I hope you enjoyed the shoe cake, I know Anne loved it! :)

Making Brownies in a Mug, is it Mugalicious?

This recipe goes out to Meet My Mug, a neat blog that celebrates the mugs in our lives. While your checking that blog out you should also take a quick look at Replicca Clothing Company for some awesome handmade fashion. Now on to the brownies!

Ingredients:

4 tbsp flour
2 to 4 tbsp sugar (sweeten to taste)
2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa
A dash of salt
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp water
1/3 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp chocolate chips (optional)

and most important of all, a microwave safe mug :)

To make this treat mix all the dry ingredients together in your mug (I chose my now retro Sun Microsystems mug). Be sure to completely mix thoroughly and break up any clumps of cocoa, flour, or sugar.

Next add the oil and water, then mix until well combined. The mixture should be solid enough to support a spoon if the mug is tilted. You may add chocolate chips at this point and mix.

Now to cook the brownie all you have to do is pop your mug into a microwave and heat for 60 to 90 seconds depending on your microwave's power.

Please be careful when you remove your mug from the microwave, it's going to be piping hot! Let cool for a minute then dig in and enjoy :)

I think that I'm going to have to try this recipe at work, I don't think anyone would mind? ;)

8-Bit Brownies

To create an 8-bit brownie all you need is some brownie mix, a pan, plain white frosting, food colouring, some pallet knifes, tooth picks, and if available a icing pipette.

To start choose an 8-bit image you want to create, here I have chosen Link.

Then determine which colours you will need to create in frosting, this guide may help you achieve the hues your after: http://www.sugarcraft.com/catalog/coloring/colormixingchart.htm. For my design I only need green, tan, brown, and yellow. To make things easier on myself I tend to make a large batch of white frost, taking small portions aside to make each required colour (saving aside some white frosting to fill in left over surface later on).

Now for the fun part...

First dirty ice your brownie. This means to coat your brownie with a thin coating of frosting.

Then use a pallet knife to score the base coat of frosting into a grid pattern.

Now you can follow your pattern, filling in each square in your grid with the appropriate coloured frosting :) When your done, just use your left over white frosting to cover over the grid pattern markings.

Obviously filling in the grid pattern will require a few techniques to get all the frosting into the squares. Here are a few tips:

• An icing pipette is the easiest way to apply frosting to each square. Using the pipette does take some practice, however once you have the knack you'll enjoy the results.
• Pallet knives will allow you to spread frosting over a large area quickly, if your design doesn't have too many colour variations then it will speed up the process. I use the flat edge of the pallet knife as a wall to help keep frosting from crossing lines when initially spreading it on.
  
• Tooth picks. I use these to pull frosting into the 'corners' or towards the edge of different colours.
  
• Frosting consistency. A creamy frosting is easier to spread. Once the frosting begins to set it will start to pick up crumbs from the brownie surface - you will want to avoid having crumbs drawn across or mixed into the frosting (it disturbs the colour effect).
  

I hope that having the above guide helps to motivate you all to try out making an 8-bit brownie, enjoy!

Brownies should never be boring!

Ever need to figure out something baked to bring along to a friend's gathering?

My standard fall back is to whip up a quick batch of Brownies, nothing too special beyond the common boxed mix you may pick up at your local grocery store.

Now this is all good and greatly accepted by many people, however its not too difficult to notch it up a bit :)

My simple approach is to creatively use butter cream frosting.

Butter Cream Frosting:

1/2 cup unsalted butter

2 tbsp heavy cream

1 tsp vanilla

3 cups icing sugar

Do not melt the butter. Use an electric mixer or blender to whip the butter until creamy. Then add the cream and vanilla. With these ingredients mixed begin adding icing sugar, mixing the entire time. If you add too much sugar (frosting becomes too dry) just pour in a little more cream and mix again.

Using this base frosting you can mix in various food colourings to produce an artist's palette, and use the Brownies as a canvas.

Here are a few samples:

If you choose to carve up your batch of Brownies you can try out other creative frostings, such as making Tetrominoes.

I hope these samples provide you with some inspiration to make your next batch of Brownies exciting :)