Happy First Canadian Thanksgiving

So we finally made it to Canada. For the first time ever, I got to experience a Thanksgiving (we know of them in the UK, but we just take the ‘shopping sales’ aspect of it and leave the giving of the thanks to the Canadians and Americans – in November-), so did what I know best: got in the kitchen and baked.

These little delights are chocolate, with an orange buttercream ‘fire’, mini salted pretzel sticks and mini mallows – yes, a Pinterest inspired treat. I used Chipits (this was a risk, I’ve never used anything but Tesco chocolate for melting and baking before!) and melted them in a pan, but just enough to add some moisture to the cake and left little chunks in the mix. Was a nice little surprise biting in and finding a Chipit chunk in my cupcake! Something I will definitely do again.

They took some attempts to get right though. I started by ‘twirling’ (not a clue what the technical term would be!) the buttercream and placing the pretzel sticks against it. But this didn’t give the desired ‘fire’ effect at all! So I tried again. This time, I still ‘twirled’ the buttercream in the centre of the cake and used it as a base to ‘brush’ the buttercream up against it to give an almost ‘flame-like’ look. This seemed to work much better!

Next time, I need to get my food colouring ratio right, as I wanted a mix of colours for the flames, but for a first-timer, they weren’t that bad! Tasted scrummy too! Especially with the mix of sweet from the chocolate and salty from the pretzel.

We’re Off To The Alps, Better Get Our Game On

This ‘ere subtle looking thing, is basically #diabetesinacake. We’ve got a chocolate base, with a salted caramel chocolate frosting, mini marshmallows and chocolate shavings.

I’ve always been nervous about making chocolate cake, whether I’ve used the wrong powder, it won’t be (and let’s just get past this word without cringing) ‘moist’ enough, or somehow it’ll transform in the oven to a crisp chocolate biscuit. But this one turned out so well, it travelled all the way from Margate to Cambridge and got devoured by a house of hungry  students.

The only thing I would have done differently, was mix the salted caramel with the cake mix, rather than add it to the chocolate butter cream frosting as it was a little over-powering.