Tuesday 31 July 2012

Guess the breed?

We have guessed and guessed about what dog breeds are in Dizzy and have always though border collie and German shepherd but I got fed up of guessing so I have sent off for her DNA test. I am so excited, can't wait to see what she really is!!

Thursday 19 July 2012

Tricolour Cupcakes Attempt Two

So I decided that I would be using this method for the day and I didn’t have a practice first!

For the cupcakes:
150g (5oz) butter, softened
150g (5oz) caster sugar
100g (3½oz) self-raising flour
2 level tablespoons cocoa powder
3 medium eggs
2 tablespoons milk
Few drops of vanilla extract
For the frosting:
75g/3ox marg/butter
175g/7oz Icing sugar
good slug of Baileys
Oven - gas mark 5 or 190°C or 170°C fan.  15 – 18mins

I divided the frosting into three bowls and coloured then red and blue and left the other plain.  This method involves four piping bags!  Put each colour into separate piping bags without a tip attached.  Then flatten the icing in the bags so that they all fit in another piping bag with the tip attached.
It was tricky to keep an even pressure and not squeeze too much of the one colour so I just had to continuously push the icing down the bags.  Otherwise I didn't waste any icing like the last lot and I got the result I was looking for.  Am just dissappointed in the cases which have gone a bit floppy - need to stick with foil perhaps.


 

Saturday 14 July 2012

Tricolour Cupcakes

I have volunteered to do some cupcakes for an event at work celebrating the Olympics.  I saw some fantastic cupcakes with three colour icing and though that would look fab. http://thecupcakeblog.com/tag/jubilee-cupcake/
Today I tested one method of three colour icing to see what it looked like.  I used a standard vanilla cupcake and vanilla buttercream recipe.  For the cakes though I split the mix into three bowls and coloured them pink (didn’t have any red), white and baby blue.  They looked fab when cooked.
Onto the icing, the buttercream was split the same way and coloured as the cakes were.  This method I decided to put all three colours into the same piping bag, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be overly satisfied with the result but wanted to give it a go.
However I wasn’t too disappointed in the results, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for which I expected, although it looked quite nice.  I did find I would have wasted a lot of buttercream as you couldn’t get all the colours evenly into the bag, as it was a test I didn’t wait till I had got all three colours piping through and just piped the cakes right away (only for our consumption so it didn’t matter what they looked like).  If I had been doing them properly there would have been a fair bit of wasted icing.

Monday 2 July 2012

Agility Wins

At the UKA agility show yesterday my lovely Rum had four wins and a second! The naughty sheltie also had a win. I won't bore you with the details, if you want to know more go to discodogs.blogspot.com


I have been working hard on the cross trainer this week to increase my fitness and it's paid off!


Here is a video of all but one of the wins: