Kitchen Alchemy

For years I have been avoiding the cult of meringue buttercream.  I've done this mainly because it just seemed to hard to be bothered.  I tried French buttercream years ago, and I found while I could make it on my old Sunbeam Mixmaster, it just never worked on my Kitchenaid. But I have been watching my old school friend, Gail Turner, using Swiss Meringue Buttercream on many of her creations, and I thought, if Gail can do it, so can I.  I humbly asked for her recipe and she shared it with me.  Being ever the adventurer, I thought I'd use it for the very first time on my best friend's wedding cake - because living dangerously is fun! The process of making the meringue buttercream was relatively easy, although there is a point where you think it's gone horribly wrong.  Look away at that point, and by the time you turn your head back, a miracle will have happened! Ingredients 300g egg whites 375g caster sugar 675g unsalted butter (room temperature) 1 tsp vani

If you live in Sydney, Australia, you will know that it has been a summer of extreme weather. We’ve had two extraordinary heat waves where the temperature has reached over 45 degree Celsius. And then there have been a few occasions when we’ve suffered through extreme monsoon rains. Both types of weather create conditions for cake baking which change almost everything I know to do in the kitchen. During the heat I left the butter on the bench and it warmed to almost melting, then I used it to bake cupcakes. The result was an incredibly rich, thick cake batter which produced about six more cupcakes than usual – a surprising, good result. In the monsoon rain I created a selection of cupcakes as samples for a wedding, with four different designs using buttercream, fondant and royal icing. The buttercream never set – never even formed a shell on it which is really necessary to help it hold its form. Mean while, the fondant absorbed the moisture from the air until it became sticky

A couple of weeks ago I was scraping around looking for inspiration for some baby shower cupcakes. The weather was hot and I knew my usual piped buttercream wasn't going to cut it. At the same time I was tooling around on the internet looking for decoration ideas, when I came across a blog where a woman was putting fondant onto cupcakes with a thin layer of buttercream underneath. Back in 2009 when I first tried fondanting cupcakes I'd used white chocolate ganache as the under layer. It was really hard to get the ganache to behave well and I spent a lot of time smoothing it to form a neat dome shape. The lighbulb went on for me when I saw the buttercream under layer and I thought I'd give it a go. In addition, I have a texture mat that I really haven't put to good use in the years since I bought. I thought why not emboss a small amount of fondant on the texture mat and see what happens? It turned out to be a winning combination. Here are my tips for this c

The weather over the Easter break in Sydney was unseasonablly warm this year. So when it came time to make cupcakes for Easter, I really had to rethink the buttercream icing that is synonymous with all my cupcakes. My standard buttercream icing has a high proportion of real butter in it, which is why it tastes so good. To me it is the key differentiator between a great cupcake and one that's just acceptable. But with the weather so warm, I knew I had to reduce the amount of butter in the buttercream icing if my Easter cupcakes were not going to melt into a puddle. We've seen this happen in the last of our market days back in 2008 when the spring weather arrived. The texture and consistency needed to be as good as usual to get the beautiful shape when piping. I think the result was fantastic! See what you think. Ingredients 500g pure icing sugar 50g butter 1 tbslp full cream milk 2 tbslp cold water colouring of your choice 1/2 tsp Wilton Icing White 1. Plac

When I was 16 years old my sister and her boyfrfiend took me for dinner at a restaurant called Zorba The Buddha. I was utterly thrilled with this outing as it was in the city, to be specific, it was in Darlinghurst which was in my opinion, edgey, and it was on a school night! Zorba The Buddha was in fact run by Orange People. Or to be precise, the followers of the Bagwan Rajneesh who was at the time embroiled in some kind of sex scandal. His followers dressed in robes dyed the same saffron colour as that of the Hari Krishnas and ran the restaurant presumably to raise money for their cult. Whatever the Bagwan was up to, it had no effect on the food served at the restaurant, or the jazz music played by the saffron clad staff. I can still hear the strains of the trumpet today. But recently when I watched a documentary about the origins of saffron, it wasn't the Bagwan and his cult that immediately came to mind. It was whether or not saffron could be incorporated into a cup

Some months ago my husband and I decided we would head overseas for Christmas this year. It's been a long, arduous year, and even back in September, we felt a good break was well deserved. Of course, as December 25 has gotten closer, I have been suffering from Christmas cooking withdrawals. And because I cooked my Christmas cakes in October instead of in the last few days before Christmas, it felt even worse! So last weekend I decided we must have a turkey dinner on the last Sunday before we go away. We've invited good friends to dinner tonight, and since I've gotten started early, I have decided to churn out a bunch of Christmas treats to go along with the dinner. I've taken a few old favourites and I've revamped them in a Christmas theme. Take these chocolate cupcakes - I had them left over from a cake job the other week. I've topped them with my usual chocolate butter cream, but I've decorated them to make them look like little chocolate puddin

It's been over a year now since I wrote, designed and photographed the cupcakes for the My Little Pony Cute Cupcake Recipe Book. To my delight, the initial distribution for that book has gone much wider than originally anticipated, with copies available in many mass market retailers across Australia and New Zealand. Last month I donated a My Little Pony Party Pack to my office's annual Pink Ribbon Day Raffle. The pack included a copy of the book, MLP plates, MLP serviettes, and a certificate for 24 MLP cupcakes. This week I had the pleasure of baking and delivering the cupcakes to the winner of the prize. She was invited to choose three of the cupcakes in the book. Her selection was Love (red velvet), Friendship (banana) and Sweetie Belle (vanilla). I was delighted to find that the recipes hold up to everything that was published. In the book I stated each batch of cupcake batter would make 12 cupcakes. In fact, I got 15 out of each. I had no trouble finding all the

There have been a couple of occassions now where we have made colourful cupcakes for kids functions and found that parents just won't let their kids eat our product! The first time was at a Baby Bazaar back in 2008. We were invited to set up a stall amongst mothers who were selling buckets loads of clothes and toys their kids had grown out of. The idea was to promote our product in the hope of landing private orders. We made brightly coloured cupcakes to attrack the kids, but when it came time to purchase, the parents inevitably chose plain vanilla. It happened again a couple of weeks back when we made cupcakes to donate to our son's daycare fundraiser. The cupcakes pictured looked like a technicolour dream next to most other things on the table. But again, the parents were avoiding them in favour of the plain brown offerings. I have to admit, when I give my son a cupcake I pick the icing off and just let him have the cake. But this isn't because of the colour

I am thrilled to announce I have finally published a book! It's not the long awaited Kitchen Alchemy book - it's something entirely different. I was very fortunate last year to be asked to design 12 cupcakes for the My Little Pony Cute Cupcake Book. My Little Pony is a world-wide phenomenon. The seven core ponies, Rainbow Dash, Toola Roola, Cheerilee, Pinkie Pie, Scootaloo, Star Song and Sweetie Belle have been creating fun and joy for little girls aged three to seven for over 25 years. So you can imagine I jumped at the chance to work with Hasbro and The Five Mile Press on this unique project. This month the My Little Pony Cute Cupcake Book is released in Australia through Scholastic Books. It features recipes and detailed decoration instructions for seven cupcakes based on the ponie, plus five extra cupcakes representing the world the ponies love to live in. It also comes with stickers and party invitation. I'm so excited to have been involved with the creation o

When I was a little girl I absolutely loved the idea of the Easter Bunny. On Easter Saturday night I would go to sleep knowing when I woke on Sunday morning, there would be a swathe of chocolate eggs wrapped in shiny coloured foil waiting for me beside my bed – my very own sugar treasure trove to consume as I pleased, all delivered by a mysterious chocolate-making rabbit. I wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old when my sister decided to reveal to me the true identity of the Easter Bunny. She explained that our mum would wait until we were asleep, then sneak in and place the eggs beside our beds. I could not believe this was true so I hatched a plan to wait and see who exactly brought me my Easter eggs. It wasn’t easy staying awake – after all, I was just a little kid and I led a busy life! By bedtime I was normally exhausted! But I didn’t have to wait long until a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway and then snuck into my room. I remember it well, because I wa

When I was a little girl, my family and I lived in a house that had a massive backyard (well it seemed that way at the time). In that backyard my parents took great delight in planting things that would yield food for us to eat. We had banana trees, which the cat enjoyed using as his personal scratching post. We grew strawberries and green beans in the veggie patch, which the dog enjoyed eating straight off the stalks. We had a peach tree, which never produced a peach worth eating. But we did have a lemon tree that fruited magnificently (which Mum frequently made lemon meringue pie from – a story for another day) and a passionfruit vine, which I regarded as my personal fruit supply. I would watch with anticipation as the passionfruit flowers bloomed and bees buzzed around them, working their magic. Soon after, green fruit would bud in the middle of the flowers and I would conduct daily checks to monitor their progress as they fattened and ripened. The second the passionfruit

More and more we’ve found ourselves turning to big cakes for fun, and with our son’s first birthday approaching, Mark and I decided to put our imagination to the test. It started back in March when our friend Noah turned one. We begged his Mum to let us make him a jungle cake – a four tier high chocolate cake with fondant shaped like a canopy of leaves on top, sugar tree trunks up the side and animals looking out through the tree branches. It was such an easy and fun cake to make, we knew immediately we could adapt the design to lots of different ideas. We had a chance to repeat the jungle cake shortly after for a friend’s fifth birthday – albeit it without dairy. We were delighted to find replacing the butter in both the cake and icing had no impact on flavour or shape-ability. We swapped out the fondant tree tops for a piped royal icing instead and voila, our cake began to evolve. For our boy’s birthday, we knew we wanted an under water theme. I envisaged a blue cake with mottle

I've been talking about it for years and finally it's happened - Kitchen Alchemy's first cupcake classes took place in June this year. With the help of a very organised friend, 11 ladies attended at classes presented by yours truly to learn how to decorate cupcakes. Because time was of the essence, no baking was included. However, cupcake recipes were provided for vanilla cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes and raspberry almond gluten free cupcakes. Each recipe was extensively explained to ensure when attendees tried their hand at baking at home, they had every chance of success. Since many in the class were Mums whose kids were approaching a birthday, two of the designs demonstrated were kids cupcakes. A tiger in the grass for boys, and a butterfly design for girls. But I also demonstrated how to decorate my double dutch chocolate cupcake, now that chocolate snaps are available again. And we finished off with a simple white glaze on the gluten free cake, dcorated with silve

We are off to market again this week, with four new products to add to our range. We've had a great response so far to our three key products - chocolate, strawberry and vanilla cupcakes, but we decided we'd try a "flavour of the week" approach, and found that when ever we introduced something different, it sold out! Last Friday we tried chocolate meringues - they were gone by 11.30am! Then last Saturday, we tried raspberry passionfruit cupcakes, and again, they completely sold out. Our conclusion: variety is the spice of life. So this week we are bringing the raspberry passionfruit cupcake and chocolate meringues, along with a date and walnut and a banana cupcake to market. We're excited because it means we now have eight products! Hopefully we now have something for everyone. Even gluten free folks! If you're in the neighbourhood, do drop by and see us! We'll be at the Organic Food Market in Bondi Junction Mall, Sydney, Australia, from 8.30am to 5.00pm

My husband has always enjoyed the flavour of caramel more than chocolate, so last year when we went to Brest in Brittany, France, he was delighted to discover that caramel was also the preferred flavour in that region. On our first night in Brest we had the great pleasure to dine at a traditional Brittany restaurant with our friends and hosts. Of course crepes were the main item on the menu, and both Mark and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. I forget what I had for dessert because it paled in comparison to the confection that Mark accidentally ordered. When he ordered a bowl of caramel icecream for dessert he had no idea that there would be anything else in the bowl other than icecream. Imagine his surprise (and my utter envy) when the waiter placed a massive bowl of caramel and vanilla icecream covered with delicious, hot, runny, buttery caramel sauce, topped with whipped cream? Mark’s eyes nearly popped out of his head! In fact, it wasn’t just caramel that was so important to the

We interrupt this blog to announce to chocolate and cupcake lovers every where that Cadbury Snaps are no longer available in Australia! Regular readers of Kitchen Alchemy will be familiar with our Double Dutch Chocolate cupcake, the crowning glory of which has been a Cadbury Snap. But no more! After an extensive search of the retail outlets in South Centennial and Pagewood, we can confirm that Snaps are no longer available on supermarket shelves. Rather than wonder in silence we decided to go straight to the source and find out who is to blame! A quick call to Christine at the Cadbury consumer information line confirmed what we at Kitchen Alchemy had long suspected: Snaps are a limited product only available at certain times of the year. In fact, Snaps are imported from the UK, where they come in additional exciting flavours like organge, hazelnut and honeycomb, as well as the flavours seen here: mint, caramel and of course the original. So, we are very sorry to announce that our Snap

Flush from the success of our first market stall, we've decided to plunge in the deep end and do it all again this weekend! It was hugely exciting to take our cupcakes to market last weekend. We were up and running by 8.15am, but didn't serve our first customers for at least another half an hour. When I finally relented and went off to get a latte, Murphy's Law kicked into play and Mark made our first sale in my absence. But further sales were fast to follow. It's great to see people we don't know happily purchasing our product and enjoying it! Apart from the odd homeless person (pickled in Jim Beam) we found the Bondi Junction Organic Food Markets an extremely pleasant place to spruike our wares. So we'll be there again this Saturday, July 12. Hope you can make it down to see us this time - and of course partake in a little piece of cupcake heaven.

We are thrilled to announce we are taking our cupcakes to market! On Saturday, July 5, 2008, Kitchen Alchemy will unveil its cupcakes at the Bondi Junction Organic & Grower's Market. The market opens at 9.00am and closes at 4.00pm. It's located in Bondi Junction Mall, which is on Oxford Street, right near the ramp to Bondi Junction train station. We'll be selling our vanilla cupcakes, topped with delicious strawberry or vanilla buttercream, our Double Dutch Chocolate cupcake, plus a limited number of our mini cupcakes (all vanilla with an assortment of buttercream toppings). We're really excited about this next step in our cupcake venture. If you've been a reader but never a taster, we especially hope to see you there!

If you have ever been to France and have had the great fortune to gaze into the windows of a Parisian patisserie, you would know that the French have taken cake baking to a whole other level. France, of course, is the home of cordon bleu cooking, upon which the best recipes in the western world are based. The French work wonders with pastry. They whip this, they fold that. They think of the most profound things to do with ingredients in order to produce a gastronomic feast. When I was in France last year I naturally gravitated towards every patisserie I passed. While macarons are my absolute favourite, I am also fascinated by the detailed little cakes that can be found everywhere. One of the key ingredients of these cakes is French buttercream. Now I have talked extensively on this blog about buttercream icing, which I use on most of my cupcakes. As I’ve said, the first people I saw using buttercream was a couple of Mormon missionaries. But buttercream icing bears no resemblance to Fre

I heard a shocking story yesterday of how suppliers of cupcakes for weddings have been ripping people off. The story came to me via a friend about a customer who had two daughters get married in the space of two years. One of them decided she wanted cupcakes to serve as dessert, so she sought out a supplier for a quote. Can you believe she was given a price of $15.00 per cupcake? Luckily she wasn’t sucked in by this shocking price, so they sought a second quote. Can you believe the second supplier quoted $7.00 per cupcake? When the woman commented on the price being a little high, the supplier justified themselves by saying, “Well, they are very fiddley and quite time consuming you know.” That’s utter rubbish!!! For everybody out there who is looking for cupcakes for a wedding, please note the following: 1. When you say “wedding” to any supplier, the price immediately doubles. Hide this fact for as long as you can. 2. The base price for a cupcake should be between $3.50 and $4.50. If s