Kitchen Alchemy

If you love cake as much as I do, you were probably astounded by the mergence of Katheryn Sabbath's drip cakes last year. Her use of candy colours combined with common candy decorations are a visual feast that has sent cake aficionados wild all over the world.  I thought I'd have a go at creating a drip cake myself, after seeing a tutorial this week that uses watered down candy melts for the drip component.  I had three seven inch vanilla buttercakes in the freezer. I set out to build a mega tower, which would let me take my 30cm Perspex scraper out for a spin. As I built the layers I quickly realised I'd end up with a cake so high, it wouldn't fit in my fridge and I would have trouble getting someone to eat it. So I went for three layers of two centimetres each.  I painted each layer with raspberry jam, then scattered a few frozen raspberries across each. Then I spread 3/4 cup of what I'm calling royal buttercream - royal icing made from meringue powder with 500g o

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

Well this year I didn't shout it to the world, I suspect because I felt there were many flaws in my work that I couldn't come to terms with. But I keep going back and looking at the cake we created this year for my son's second birthday. And the more I look at it, the more I like it. We rented the "2" shaped tin from a local cake decorating shop. We made the butter cake a week in advance and put it in the freezer. It needed to sit on a board until it was frozen because the neck of the two was so fragile. It was heaps of fun cutting the cake through the middle to fill it with white chocolate ganache, but worth it as it looked a picture when it was sliced. My husband appointed himself maker of the racing cars - which was just as well as he did a brilliant job of it. I used my texture mat for fondant for the first time, and had to have two goes to get the imprint right. Note to anybody using a texture mat, use firm pressure when you roll, and only roll on

We've have the great pleasure lately to produce some big cakes for customers that have pushed our skills to new limits, and I wanted to share them with you because they're just so delicious to look at! The first was a Dora cake for a little girl turning three. Inside was a vanilla buttercake layered with white chocolate ganache. We spent quite a lot of time working up the colour density in the fondant to give this cake the vibrant theme that Dora is famous for. We thought it was all about the colours! But when our young customer laid eyes on it, the first thing she said was "Where's the monkey?". Turns out Dora doesn't go anywhere without Boots the monkey! Next time we'll have to work out how to incorporate him into the cake. Last weekend we made a cake for a new t-shirt company called Yellow & Co. Yellow's philosophy is quite simple - different colours represent different frequencies and you choose your colours based on the frequency

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

I’ve often said that chocolate is one of the two original and best flavours on the planet. What I don’t often mention is that vanilla is the other. I recently discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that vanilla is the fruit of an orchid plant from Madagascar. In fact, the vanilla planifolia vine was transported to Madagascar from Mexico (and other French colonies) in the early 1800s. The vanilla plant is actually a vine, usually found winding itself around a bamboo plant or coconut tree, which grows an orchid-type flower. In Mexico, the vanilla flower is pollinated by a bee. Outside of Mexico, the bee cannot survive, so pollination is undertaken by human hand – a laborious process which is responsible for the incredibly expensive price of vanilla bean pods. The mature pods are harvested from the vine and dried to reduce the moisture content, thereby producing the distinct vanilla aroma we all know and love. I never stopped to question where vanilla came from before. Yet li

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!

One of the main items I keep in my pantry is the full range of essences and colourings made by Queen Fine Foods. If you live in Australia you probably know them really well yourself - they are famours for their Natural Vanilla Essence, and in more recent years, their range has expanded to include flavourings like Almond Essence, Orange Essence, Rose Water Essence and so on. I recently went to my local Food For Less store, which is owned by Woolworths, to stock up on vanilla. I looked up and down the baking aisle for the vanilla essence and strawberry flavouring but never found it. I thought nothing of it until I mentioned it to my neighbour who told me Woolworths had removed the essences because of the recent scare mongering in the media over kids buying the stuff instead of booze. What???? I thought the exact same thing. So the next time I was at the supermarket I asked the checkout guy whether they were now keeping the vanilla essence and pink food colouring behind the counter

When I was 11 years old my family moved from Newcastle to Penrith to try to pursue all the opportunities we might find in the ‘big smoke’. Not that Penrith was the big smoke, but it was a damn sight nearer to Sydney than Newcastle ever was. It was tough for me leaving the only school friends I'd ever had, but the change was made a lot easier by a girl called Nicole who lived around the corner from our new house. Even though Nicole has just completed sixth grade, she was repeating – I think it was because she was too young to go to high school. What ever the reason, I was lucky to have a neighbourhood friend who was in the same class as me at school. Nicole and her little sister were what you call ‘latch key kids’ - their parents worked during the day, and weren’t there when Nicole and her sister arrived home from school. Eventually my sister and I would also end up as latch key kids – much to the detriment of our burgeoning predilection for squabbling (we weren't nice to e

My sister was in the Brownies when she was a kid. She put on her uniform every week and went off somewhere mysterious to me, taking pledges, doing things to win badges... she even went off on a camp (which made me interminably envious because it required she be bought a pair of bedsocks). She made Brownies look like it was fun. As soon as I was old enough, I begged my mother to let me join. The problem was, my sister's Brownie pack was too big. So they formed a new pack which it was determined would meet in the new hall. Now the new hall wasn't like the old hall - it had been brought to town on the back of a truck and had been plonked down next to the old hall on ugly, exposed brick stilts. It had none of the dignity of the old hall - it was garish and offensive. To make matters worse, the new pack would have a new Brown Owl. She took forever to turn up, and when she did, she didn't seem to know what she was doing. Her tongue was sharp, her tone snappish; she seemed more th