Chocolate Cake with Nutella Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting

If you like Ferrero Rocher, then you will definately like Nutella as well. My friend’s birthday party is coming up so what better way is there to celebrate her birthday than with a Nutella-centered cake?

Earl Grey Tea Cupcakes

I am not a big fan of earl grey tea and I am not much of a cupcake kind of girl. However, having recently tried the cream of earl grey tea I could see that the fragrance would work extremely well into a plain cupcake – after all there’s more to a cupcake than just the butter-cream frosting and I believe that people would enjoy the ‘cake’ of the cupcake a lot more this way!

I have attempted to make cupcakes using vegetable oil-based recipes instead of butter-based in the past but they did not taste right. In my opinion, the non-butter recipes works for muffins due to its construction. There is no butter-cream frosting on muffins thus making the cake itself taking all of the spotlight. Muffins usually have other ingredients being mixed into the batter such as carrots and apples, their flavours usually takes over the majority of the muffin. Whereas cupcakes are not so forgiving. It is also weird to add complex consistencies into a cupcake as the butter-cream frosting is usually the spotlight of the dessert. Therefore, cupcakes should always be butter based and adding solid components to the cake portion should be avoided.

Swan Cream Puffs

Cream puffs are perfect for any occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and the list goes on.

I decided to make cream puffs for the past Mother’s Day. I have browsed many recipes to see which filling recipe sounds the most appealing. The amount of options were quite overwhelming for my tiny brain. Cream puffs can be filled with but not limited to whipped cream, chocolate ganache, and a variety of flavoured cream.

I’ve noticed that all of the recipe’s batches are quite small, so for my first attempt, I decided to double the batch to double the quantity. Brilliant idea right? If you guessed right, it was a complete disaster.

The temperature was too hot when I was adding the flour. That, or I decided to sift the flour slowly into the hot butter batter. The flour would not mix in smoothly, leading to many lumps and bumps in the batter.

Scrap that, start again. Followed the recipe thoroughly and ta-da!