If you’ve ever made cupcakes, dreamt of making your own cupcakes or just enjoyed eating them, a shop like Iced Affair is like the cupcake version of landing at the Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo boutique. With cupcakes, you know that whilst it must taste good, the decoration is what you’re really after. I am not quite certain what makes decorating on a tiny round cake much more fun that a large cake but it’s something that draws me to make cupcakes again and again. And I find myself ferreting away decorations, sprinkles and decos to use in future cupcakes. I have an enormous box of cupcake decorations-that is, what I haven’t already fit in my bulging cupboards.

It’s a small lilac coloured shop on a side street of Camperdown stocked full of all manner of cake decorating supplies. On one wall is huge selection of sprinkles, cachous or non pareils as they’re called in the U.S. Small 120g packets of sprinkles range from $4.95 and above.

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At the risk of sounding like someone retelling a story that they heard from someone they knew who knew someone else who knew something from someone else, I first came across these gorgeous cupcakes via Vogue member and fellow food blogger Iron Chef Shellie who in turn saw these on flickr member’s hello naomi’s pictures.

I loved the idea of these pastel topped cupcakes with messages such as “Eat Me” and “Drink Me”. Who really ever needs prompting to try cupcakes? It was all very Alice in Wonderland, a children’s story with a distinctly surreal and dark side. So assembling my very best Alice themed china, the varied Wedgwood Harlequin set, I set about having my very own tea party, Alice in Wonderland style.

The cupcakes I made were vanilla cupcakes filled with strawberry jam and cream, pastel fondant icing, royal icing writing and patterns and silver cachous. Despite my somewhat fearful beginnings, I’m starting to really like using Royal Icing as I love the finish and consistency of it. I know that vanilla cupcakes with jam and cream filling sounds rather boring but this was the cupcakes that my girlhood fantasies were made of. I loved this combination and my favourite ever cakes when I was small were this. Yes, sadly, I do remember vividly one cake from my childhood with absolute clarity and some days, I can still taste it if I close my eyes and wish.

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I know that mixing a Japanese flavour like green tea with the animal symbol of China is a little like mixing metaphors but I couldn’t help myself after seeing a panda and bear cupcake in the Claire Crespo Hello Cupcakes book.

This is my entry for two competitions. I decided I would make two flavours of animals, both with a cupcake base of sesame and vanilla but I would make a Panda one filled with green tea creme patiserrie for La Petite Boulangette’s Sugar High Friday Asian sweet invasion challenge and a Bear one filled with vanilla creme patisserie for the Master Baker April Vanilla challenge.

What I sought to do was create something like a Beard Papa puff-slightly crunchy on the outside but filled with a voluptuous creme patisserie custard inner so that when you bit into it, the sensation of oozing custard was replicated. I used a reliably good Delia Smith recipe for creme patisserie custard.

I confess I’ve never eaten tahini by itself before. When we went to buy some, my husband screwed his nose up at it having been fed tahini all of his life by his alternative parents. When I tried it I gasped, it was awful and bitter. I asked him if it was off and offered him a spoonful. He declined the spoonful and only dipped his pinky in. “Yep, that’s right, that’s tahini and that’s why I can’t stand it”. I had to eat some passionfruit butter to get the awful bitter taste out of my mouth.

Given that one of my main flavouring ingredients was bitter, I needed a vanilla cupcake recipe that was sweet and one of the sweetest and best is the Magnolia Bakery’s vanilla cupcake recipe so I set about basing it on that.

I had a lot of highfalutin ideas for decoration involving shards of sesame toffee but once I saw the pictures of the panda, undoubtedly a symbol of China, and thus true to the theme, I was sold. The cupcake wasn’t particularly crunchy on the outside, if I were to do it again I’d add some sugar crystals and/or sesame seeds on the top before baking it. Still, my husband declared this his favourite cupcakes ever. Yes I know, he says this often but it’s the thought that counts.

Vanilla and Sesame Cupcake

Makes 12-14 full sized cupcakes. I made 8 large and 8 mini cupcakes from this batter.

• 3/4 cup self-rising flour
• 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup/125g unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I used Queen’s vanilla bean paste)
• 2 teaspoons of tahini
• 1 tablespoon white sesame seeds

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F/180c.

2. Line a (1/2 cup-12 capacity) muffin tins with cupcake papers.

3. In a small bowl, combine the flours. Set aside.

4. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add tahini and beat until just combined.

5. Add the dry ingredients in 3 parts, alternating with the milk and vanilla. With each addition, beat until the ingredients are incorporated but do not over beat. Add sesame seeds. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the batter in the bowl to make sure the ingredients are well blended.

6. Pour batter into measuring jug and pour into liners, filling them about 3/4 full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of the cupcake comes out clean.

7. Cool the cupcakes in tins for 15 minutes. Remove from the tins and cool completely on a wire rack before icing.

Cupcake recipe adapted from Magnolia Cupcake bakery

Green tea and vanilla creme patisserie

• 1 large egg, plus 1 egg yolk
• 1 oz (25 g) caster sugar
• 7 fl oz (200 ml) whole milk
• ¾ oz (20 g) plain flour
• ¾ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. To make the pastry cream, break the egg into a medium-sized mixing bowl, then add the egg yolk and sugar. Next, put the milk on to warm over a gentle heat while you whisk the eggs and sugar together until the mixture becomes thickened and creamy – about 1 minute with an electric hand whisk on the first speed. Then sift in the flour and whisk that in.

2. Now turn the heat up to bring the milk to boiling point and then whisk the milk into the egg mixture. After that return the whole lot to the pan and continue to whisk, this time with a balloon whisk, over a medium heat until the mixture becomes very thick – keep the whisk going all the time because the mixture can catch very easily if you don’t. As soon as a bubble on the surface bursts, remove the sauce from the heat and quickly pour it into a bowl, then stir in the vanilla extract.

3. Divide the pastry into two bowls and add 1/2 teaspoon of green tea powder to one bowl and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste to the other and mix well to incorporate. Cover the pastry cream with clingfilm to prevent a skin forming, and leave it to get completely cold.

Creme patisserie recipe from Delia Smith’s Summer Collection.

To decorate both pandas and bears:

• 1/3 packet of Chocolate fondant
• 1/3 packet White fondant
• Cutters (large and small, I used regular round cutter and also the end of an apple corer for the smaller ears)
• icing sugar or cornflour and vegetable oil to prevent fondant sticking
• Pink decorations for mouth (I used small pink hearts)

1. Make the white fondant pieces first. Rill out fondant dusting surface with cornflour or icing sugar to prevent fondant sticking to surface or rolling pin. Use biscuit cutter roughly the same size as surface of the cupcake to make the “face” of the Panda cupcake. Then make eyes for the pandas and the bears as pictured.

2. Lightly grease a new chopping board and use biscuit cutter roughly the same size as surface of the cupcake to make the “face” of the bear cupcake, ears for the bear and ears for the pandas and also pupils for the eyes of the pandas and bears.

Assembly

1. To assemble, cut out deep cone of cake from the centre using a sharp knife. As I wanted these to be like the custard filled Beard Papa Chouxs I dug quite deeply and almost towards the edge. You may have to “Dig” twice to get it as cavernous as possible. Be careful not to hit the edge. Keep a thin “top” of the cupcake to replace back onto the cupcake.

2. Fill with custard and replace with cupcake top. Then add ears, faces and eyes onto the pandas and bears. For Bears see story here

I have no link to the South of America, however I’ve always felt an affinity for their cakes such as the Hummingbird and Red Velvet. I even loved the Red Velvet cake so much as we had it as our wedding cake. It was a really toilsome task to find as most cake makers in Sydney had never even heard of it and there was only one cakemaker that was prepared to make it for me. She even gave us a sample of it and whilst it was lovely tasting, it wasn’t quite red enough. She asked me how much redder I wanted it almost disbelievingly, until I told her that I wanted blood red. Thankfully we got our luridly lovely red velvet in the end with striking white icing.

Patisse chess cutters

I bought the little chess cutters at the Peters of Kensington sale. I was delighted to see them reduced from $14 to $4 and when the cashier rang them up they came to a princely sum of $2. It was surely meant to be. So I set about a task of baking a red velvet cake and measuring the squares for the fondant as precisely as possible. It didn’t turn out as red as I wanted as I used colouring gel for this, perhaps its best to use liquid as I’ve certainly had a redder than red velvet cake before and the liquid versus gel was the only difference. From looking at the raw cake batter, there was certainly enough red in it.

Red velvet cake

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 60ml red food coloring or food colouring gel (I used Wilton’s Red sans flavour)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 1/2 cups flour-sifted 2-3 times with cocoa below
• 2 tablespoons cocoa
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon bi carb soda
• 1 tablespoons vinegar

Method

1. Cream butter; beat in sugar gradually. Add eggs, one at a time; beat well after each addition. Add food colouring

2. Add salt, flour and cocoa and vanilla alternately with buttermilk, beating well after each addition. Sprinkle soda over vinegar and dissolve throughly; pour vinegar over batter. Stir until thoroughly mixed.

The vividly hued red cake batter-unfortunately it didn’t stay that red!

3. Bake in a large square cake pan for 45 minutes at 175 degrees Celsius. Cool for 10 mins and then turn out onto cooling tray

Decoration:

• 1/2 packet Ready made fondant
• Icing sugar and cocoa
• Brown colouring gel (or you’d do better to buy chocolate fondant)
• smooth Jam (not lumpy fruit filled jam)

Halve fondant and add set aside one quarter of the white fondant to colour with brown colouring later. Take white fondant and roll thinly and then measure your tin. If you want to be precise, Chess boards have 64 squares so divide the dimensions into 8 and make ribbons in the correct measurements and from the ribbons, cut squares. I made a 6×6 chess board and only made

Make chess pieces using remaining 1/3 fondant in brown and white. Try and get them as 3-D as possible

Spread jam onto cake surface to adhere fondant and carefully place square and then place chess pieces on top.

I admit to a minor unhealthy obsession with butterflies, they popped up on our wedding invitations and often pop up on my clothes (well the fabric print anyway). When I found a butterfly cutter in Plenty at Bondi Junction ($2.95) I grabbed it straight away. I had been looking on ebay US for some butterfly cutters but didn’t realise that Bondi Junction had what I needed.

These were from the green tea cupcakes that I made for my husband’s birthday. I simply added some green tea powder which I bought in Tokyo (this can be found in Japanese/Asian grocery stores here) to a regular vanilla buttercake recipe.

I made these for a group of friends from High School who are all now pregnant/with babies. To my horror, the morning of the afternoon tea, I googled green tea and saw that pregnant women aren’t supposed to have a lot of green tea. I brought them not wanting to arrive empty handed and the mums to be weren’t too worried as we did the calculations and figured that there was less green tea per cupcake than in a cup of green tea!

Green tea cupcakes with mascarpone frosting

Green tea Buttercake

• 90g butter softened
• 1/2 t vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup (110g) caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup (150g) Self Raising flour
• 1/2 to 1 tablespoon green tea powder (depending on how strong you like it, taste)
• 2 tbs milk

1. Preheat oven to moderate 180degrees/160 fan forced. Line 6 hole texas or 12 hole standard muffin pan with paper cases

2. beat butter, extract, sugar, eggs, flour and milk in small bowl with electric mixer on low until ingredients are just combined. Increase speed to medium, beat until mixture has changed to a paler colour.

3. Divide mixture among cases, smooth surface

4. Bake large cakes about 25 minutes, small cakes about 20 minutes. Turn cakes onto wire rack to cool.

Mascarpone frosting

• 60g butter softened
• 160g mascarpone
• 3 cups (480g) icing sugar

Beat butter and mascarpone in small bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy, gradually beat in sifted icing sugar.

Decorate with fondant butterflies.