When you’re renovating, a trip to Ikea is one of those many things that you do quite often. So one afternoon while browsing light fittings there, we went downstairs to the Swedish food section after paying. We always stop and get a 50c ice cream cone which tastes like milk powder, something that I love the smell of as it reminds me of my late grandmother who would always mix up a drink each morning with powdered milk eschewing the fresh milk in the fridge. But I digress, what should I happen upon amongst the herrings, Daim bars and meatballs? Yellow string that looked like spaghetti! I grabbed it straight away and took it home, knowing that it’s future lay wound around the top of a cupcake.

A few days later, we were meant to do work on our new place but that morning, a bizarre thing happened to Sydney. It had turned red overnight. Thankfully I wasn’t awake at 6am when it was at its worst or I would have completely freaked out. My husband managed to take a couple of shots around 7.30am. Apparently the wind from Broken Hill (a mining area) had carried through to Sydney and blanketed us with this absolutely vivid red haze. We were warned to stay inside if we could so of course we gladly put off cleaning the new house in favour of staying home and baking.

The view when Mr NQN woke

Due to this happy state of house arrest, I managed to tick off three things that day as I took over the kitchen and this was one of them. There are several parts to make to this but it’s not impossible . I really liked the taste of the cupcakes-the cupcake is light and fluffy due to the carbonation from the creaming soda and the strawberry jam and buttercream give it an old world butterfly cupcake sort of taste. As for the spaghetti and meatballs, I ate those separately and they were both good.

By the end of the day the haze had died down and all returned to “normal” and I was left to ponder what a fantastic setting for a horror movie it would have been. And for my next trick Pizza cupcakes?

So tell me Dear Reader, were you or would you be scared to be woken up in a red haze?

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Whilst I’d love to say that “No koalas were harmed in the making of these cupcakes” I’m afraid I have to reveal the grisly truth. That in fact two of these furry creatures came crashing to the ground from the trees above when it came to capturing these images. This is possibly not what the RSPCA had in mind when they devised the RSPCA cupcake day

For those overseas readers, the RSPCA is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and they also have a television show which will make an animal lover out of the the most hardened individual. It even got me feeling warm and fuzzy towards a family of bats. Today is the RSPCA’s Cupcake Day where keen bakers all over Australia bake cupcakes and raise money for the RSPCA. I decided on koalas a while back and thought that instead of a plain vanilla cupcake I’d use Lemon Myrtle just to upp the Australian-ness of it. The idea for these came from Clare Crespo’s Hey There, Cupcake! from which I’ve used many of her decorating suggestions for example, the panda and bear cupcakes.

I was also give an Beaterblade to test out which is an attachment suitable for Tilt Head Kitchenaid mixers. It’s similar to a paddle attachment but in a plastic cast with rubber scrapers attached to the end to help scrape the bowl more effectively and to help lessen the amount of times you need to stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl. I figured this cupcake would be the ideal test and used it for both the cupcake batter and the buttercream. It did just as it was supposed to and I didn’t have to stop at all and scrape down the sides once and it was a dream to help beat the buttercream without having to stop, scrape and keep going again. I did think that it made the head of the Kitchenaid vibrate a bit more than a normal attachment so it would be interesting to see whether it has any long term effects on the Kitchenaid. Kim from Full Baked, the distributor of Beaterblade suggested adjusted the hinge pin like this.

Back to the Koalas. You’ll have to excuse the startled “Oh HAI!” expressions of the koalas. When sitting them up in the tree  I needed to press in the eyes, noses and ears deep to prevent them from falling off. The cupcakes themselves are deliciously lemony with that distinctly gorgeous lemon myrtle flavour to them. The buttercream is soft and if you wanted to, you could add lemon myrtle to the buttercream too. My koalas are admittedly not quite as grey as I wanted but the black food colouring is somewhere in a box packed away. And yes I’m completely aware that they’re not sitting in gum trees. Once I was ready to take the photos, I started frantically running around like a diva saying “Where are the damn gum trees people? Someone I need gum trees!” to an empty house.

So tell me Dear Reader, if you could save one animal from extinction, which would it be and why?

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If there’s one dessert that deserves to be made into a infinite variety of iterations it’s Baklava, the sticky, crispy nutty Lebanese pastry. I’d been well warned about Nigella’s Baklava muffin recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess – not that it was bad but that it wasn’t particularly baklava-ey. I made a batch and I had to agree so given that I’m an obsessive type coupled with an ardent baklava enthusiast, I made another batch straight away seeking to rectify this baklava-less-ness. The secret was of course with the filo. One absolutely needed to have crispiness via the filo. And not just one set of filo layers on the top but a set of filo layers in the middle too. Over the top, moi? Surely not. But I have to say that these do replicate the baklava experience if I may so humbly claim.

I wanted the top filo discs to be tilted for the photograph so I used a bit of buttercream I had leftover from another baking escapade. Of course you don’t need to do that – they are perfectly delicious without the dollop of buttercream or the tilting. You could also upp the amount of walnut filling and use that as a cushion for the filo particularly if you are not needing to transport these anywhere aside from the four walls of your own house. I should also add a special thanks to my friend The Second Wife for loaning me pieces of her amazing cutlery collection – aren’t those scalloped spoons to die for?

And if there’s one thing that I learnt from the preliminary results from my reader survey (please click to do it, you can win a Nigella Lawson apron ) it’s that you like the cupcake recipes and want to see more. So like the ham that is always looking for an audience, here is a cupcake recipe for all of you lovely readers that let me know that that was what you wanted. So tell me Dear Reader, is there a flavour of cupcake you’d like me to make? I’m stuck for cupcake inspiration so any suggestions are welcomed!

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