High Tea and other ways to spend election day

I am sheepishly reappearing as I have obviously been very slack!!!!! Here is some pictures of cupcakes I made for my friends birthday on Saturday.

On Friday I made gluten free chocolate cup cakes. Gluten free cooking is something that I have very little experience with and am frankly a little intimidated by it!!!! So to get around this (and as always being short of time) I brought a packet mix (Naturally Good Moist Chocolate Mud Cake Mix) and followed the instructions on the back (too easy :-)). I cooked the cakes for about 25 minutes.

I am pretty sure that my Mum dreads when I call her up and start the conversation with "Mum I've had this great idea." as it generally means I am about to embark on some crazy unobtainable quest. This however is a very rare occurrence where the idea worked perfectly. I wanted to decorate the cup cakes so I piped melted white chocolate on baking paper.

And with the addition of some rapidly setting chocolate ganache and walnuts. I got these -

I also wanted to make Maple Syrup Cupcakes (from Donna Hays Modern Classics Book 2 I think) that Mum and I had made the week before for RSPCA cupcake day at work. So Saturday morning (after I remembered to vote). I got started creaming the butter and sugars together and had walked away for a moment. All of the sudden the kitchen was filled with thick smoke emanating distressingly from our beloved mixer.

This mixer is the mixer that Mum made all of our delicious treats on when we were kids and my brother and I inherited when she got her lime green kitchen aid a few years ago.

After I turned the power off and stamped my foot a little I went and found my brother to rescue me :-). He came in turned it on and off a few times and it stopped smoking and started working again. I was then able to continue on and produce my cup cakes (phew not sure what I would have done if it had died permanently).

I think the break in mixing meant that the butter had time to reset a little as the cupcakes didn't rise as much as last week (and I was missing the trifecta of Mum, her kitchen aid and her oven). I made white chocolate ganache and dark chocolate swirls for decoration.

And if you look closely you can see from right to left the ganache going from runny to almost set as I iced.

My friends birthday party was a high tea with lots and lots cake and cucumber sandwiches and scones. It was a lot of fun and the birthday girl seemed to enjoy herself. I got lots of compliments for both sets of cupcakes. As a present I gave her a copy of the cupcake recipe and the main ingredients in a new cake container (as you can never have enough of those).

After stopping off at another friends housewarming I got home and watched a little of the election coverage to see that Australia has its first Greens seat in the lower house (Yayyyyyyy). (I promise that will be my only political comment ever).

Today I have spent studying, restraining from eating the remaining maple syrup cupcakes (I had one for breakfast), getting a little cleaning done and enjoying a sunny winters day. Oh and drinking lots of cups of tea of course.