The List

"The List", as I've started to ominously refer to it as, keeps on growing and I've had to implement a two out and one in approach to it so that it doesn't continue to grow at such an alarming rate!

That's what happens when you get two people who are passionate about food together!

So far we have managed to cross off Seventeen in Notting Hill Gate and by going to the Jamie Oliver 10 years at Fifteen street party we managed to knock off Barbecoa (until we can afford the real deal).

We are booked into Shrimpy's for dinner next Saturday and this Saturday considering our options. Lots of fun times to be had!

Photoshoot

Just a very small preview of the wonderful photo shoot I did with Joanne Corburn. Can't wait to show you more.

Belle... eats?

Hello lovely blog. It has once again been a very long time, even though I promised it wouldn't. I have had a very busy few months finishing up my college portfolio, working like a (slightly) busy beaver and enjoying living in London, which is so damn exciting right now. And I'm only talking about the food.


I think its easy to forget how lucky we are to live in such an amazingly diverse city where you can dine out every night on a completely different kind of cuisine and never get bored. Especially when you're constantly being bombarded by deals from boring, homogeneous chain restaurants begging for business. This year I've been trying to make more of an effort to get out of my comfort zone in all aspects of my life, including where I eat. I do understand that some times its all too easy to give in to another night at Nandos because at least you know what you're getting instead of spending money on food that could turn out to be worse but I am so bored to tears that my friend Harriet and I have come up with "The List". The list is essentially every place we want to go and eat in London but have either not gotten around to it or not been able to afford it. Its ever growing, it started off as being three or four restaurants a few weeks ago and this is it currently:


Arbutus - Frith Street, Soho
Ida - Kilburn Lane, Queens Park

Mishkins - Covent Garden

Dock kitchen - Ladbroke Grove, North Kensington

Polpetto - Soho

Dishoom - St Martins Lane

Meat Market - Covent Garden Piazza

La Gavroche - 

Barbecoa - New Change, St Pauls

Nobu - Park Lane

Burger and lobster - Mayfair

Big Easy - Kings Road

Pomelo- Kensal Rise

Cinnamon Soho - Kingly Street

Lucky Chip - Seabright Arms, off Hackney Road

Hawksmoor - Seven Dials

10 Greek St - Soho

Pitt cue - Newburgh Street, Carnaby

Ceviche - Frith St

Tramshed - Rivington St, Shoreditch

La Bodega Negra - Moor St, Soho

Slide Bar - lucky chip in soho - opening soon

Princi - Wardour St, Soho

Villaindry - Great Portland St

Santo - Portobello Road

Shrimpys - Kings Cross

Bistrotque - Bethnal Green

Ottolenghi - Notting Hill

Jamie Oliver's 15 - Old Street

Spit and Roast - Eat Street/Street Feast

Mother Flipper - East Street/Street Feast

I am going through a phase where I hear about a place I want to eat every day and don't do anything about it so the plan is that my friend and I try and eat at two of these places a month, or if its a particularly expensive place just once, and I'll write about them here. 

Neither of us are restaurant critics, we are just two women in our twenties who know what we like and want to experience new culinary marvels. As you can see from the list the places we want to visit are varied and in different areas of London, both street food and stuffy institutes that I've only ever dreamt of affording. I am by no means a food snob, some of the best food I've eaten recently has been while stood on the street with a beer in one hand and a slice of pizza or a burger in the other.

At the moment there are 31 places on this list, I have eaten at 1 of them already (The Big Easy), so this should take around 18 months! 

Here we go!

Birthday Cake!

Just a few things today!

A few months ago I made something I was pretty proud of and didn't blog about it at the time so here it is. Omar is pretty much my partner in crime when it comes to baking, there have been many days when we have been stuck in my kitchen for hours on end experimenting and he is usually the one that needs to talk me down off that ledge you often find yourself on when you've been baking for 8 hours straight and nothing is working as it should! Needless to say he has picked up some favourites over the years and I wanted to include some of them in his birthday cake and this was the result!

I used the amazing 'Say it with Cake' moulds from Silicone Moulds as the inspiration for this cake and to make the letters which are each made in a different kind of cake along with cupcakes in the same flavour!

O - this is a chocolate cake, covered is decadent chocolate ganache and topped with fresh raspberries. I love this combination in cake and think raspberries make the best decorations. For the cupcakes I included a cream cheese frosting, topped with a raspberry and drizzled with the ganache.
M - this is pumpkin cake, which is definitely Omar's favourite! The recipe is adapted from one found a long time ago in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The cake is topped with a smooth and creamy Mascarpone frosting by Martha Stewart.
A - this is a cake I made because of "The Help", a book that makes you incredibly hungry throughout reading it and one that Omar and I both loved last year so this is based on Minnie's Caramel Cake. The recipe for which I took from Scrumpdillyicious and it worked really well. It is essentially a vanilla cake filled with pecans and topped with a sweet caramel frosting.
R - finally this is a regular vanilla cake topped with purple cream cheese frosting and rainbow sprinkles, because, well why not?

All in all I am really pleased with the way this looks! There was lots of work that went into the cake and I really like the mismatch look to it. The moulds had their moments of being really fiddly but I think practice is definitely the key to getting them right1.

Lastly a few blogs I love...

Firstly is my good friend Heidi's blog 'Lolita & Me'. Heidi is incredibly passionate about all things fashion and creative, with weekly "Craft Sundays" and "Fashion Friday's" the blog is varied and inspiring, especially if like me you're always looking for new projects to keep you busy! I really love where Heidi is going with this blog and always look forward to reading about what she's been up to. She also kindly wrote about Belle Bakes in her Craft Sunday a few weeks ago which was lovely of her.

The second is the Patchwork Cookbook which is an on going project by Jasmine Baba. I've known Jasmine for years and as the little sister to my best friend she has been a willing (or sometimes less than willing) Guinea pig for many of my baking adventures (and certainly someone of my misadventures) and its really nice to see her stretching her baking skill and writing about it. Using a mixture of recipes she's grown up with and new ones she's discovering all the time, the regularity of her baking is putting me to shame at the moment and I enjoy reading about all the new things she's discovering. So follow her on tumblr!

British Pie Week

Hello lovely people, this week is British Pie Week which coincides with me attempting to be a good little blogger and start writing in this wonderful little white box more often.

I have had a recipe for a chocolate pie in my head every since I read 'The Help' last October and even more so after seeing the film (no jokes about poo please!). The entire book/film makes you crave Southern food, I want some good fried chicken and caramel cake too!Anyway, back to my pie, I came across this recipe by Lee Ann Fleming and decided to try it for a friends birthday this weekend.

Its probably one of the easiest pies I've ever made and really cheap to put together if you want something quick and simple and don't have much time. There's no ridiculous chilling times over night and its turns out really well. Although I have to say, allowing the pie a night in the fridge does give the filling a chase to smooth out into a lovely rich custard.

I think the perfect topping for a pie like this isn't just boring old whipped cream but a fantastic Mascarpone Frosting like this one by Martha Stewart, maybe laced with some fresh raspberries?

Enjoy your pies this week! I think I'm going to try and head to The Lily Vanilli Bakery on Sunday and see what she has to offer to celebrate this week!

Oh dear, oh dear...

I have been very MIA when it comes to my blog, apologies to the two people who read this at the moment!

I have lots of plans for the next few months including a kitchen, new website, branding and generally getting my arse into gear and bringing cupcakes to the masses instead of just talking about it.

I haven't spent a lot of time trying new cupcakes this year, like many cupcake lovers I'm a little fed up of being fobbed off with bad cakes at extortionate prices. However I did manage to visit Hey Little Cupcake! in Manchester at the end of the summer. They have a lovely little shop in Spinningfields where they also hold cupcake decorating classes and serve up cups of Tea Pigs my favourite source of Peppermint Tea on a cold day. The cupcakes are all named after the city they're inspired by including "Manchester's Mint", a chocolate cupcake filled with After Eight mints and fresh mint buttercream. Although we loved the look of the shop the cupcakes were nothing to shout about, the vanilla being slightly too try and heavy for our tastes, but not by any means the worst cake I've tried in a long time.

Short but sweet but I promise to visit more often.

The Ruby Wedding Anniversary

Below are some pictures I got back from my friend Joanne, they are of the cakes I made for her parents' Ruby wedding anniversary. I'm really pleased with the way they turned out. Regualr size red velvet cupcakes with red heart shaped sprinkles and a super-duper giant vanilla cupcake. Super duper giant vanilla cupcake topped with three red heart shaped sugar cookies and heart shaped sprinkles.

I also made a giant chocolate cupcake decorated as requested with giant chocolate buttons, gold chocolate buttons and white and milk chocolate stars!

A Marathon of Cupcakes....

Apologies for my erratic posts and disappearing acts. I may have run off for a while but I've been eating a whole load of cupcakes!! I shall make a few posts about all the cupcakes I've tried and bakeries I've been too over the last few months

Cox Cookies & Cakes, Soho
I heard a lot about Cox Cookies & Cakes upon my return to the country and my good friend Lauren and I decided to head there after work on a rainy Monday evening. Arriving at the bakery I was really impressed with the concept, lots of black and neon to fit in with the sex shops on Brewer Street. I had high expectations seeing as both Patrick Cox and Eric Lanlard's reputations have been used to market the bakery.

The cakes all looked great although there was a distinct lack of cookies as the name of the bakery implied . Lauren and I bought 5 cakes to share with another friend, and because we couldn't resist the idea of a boobie cake! However when they rang up our purchase I wish we hadn't. Five cakes came to a whopping £20! Anyway, I handed the money over and we had planned to sit in and have some tea but the shop was essentially a black tiled box without even so much as a stool so we had no choice but to take our cake elsewhere.

Please excuse my phone's inability to take a focused picture, always blame your tools!

So the cakes were incredibly over priced but we had hoped the taste would be worth it. However we were all sorely disappointed. We were faced with cakes that were supposed to be filled with compote were instead cakes with holes and shrivelled up fruit. Cakes topped with chocolate skulls tasted as if they were made with Asda Smart Price cooking chocolate. There was nothing juicy, delicious, oozy, or sensuous about these cupcakes to quote just a few of Cox Cookies & Cakes own adjectives.

Definitely give this place a miss, your taste buds and wallet will thank you!

Betty Blythe, Shepherds Bush


I met my very good friend Becca for lunch on the Monday of National Cupcake Week with the intention of working in some cake to our lunch date. I had already read about Betty Blythe's seeing as they have donated a prize to Cupcake Camp London and was really pleased when Becca, who works around the corner, suggested we go there. Betty Blythe is a lovely vintage tea shop and although there was only one choice of cupcake it was gorgeously pink and tasted home made!

Hummingbird Bakery - Cola Cupcake!
I have to say when I heard that the Hummingbird Bakery were launching a range of cupcakes based on American Sodas I was more than a little dubious however I keeping an open mind I went to the Portobello Road branch on a bustling Friday morning to get try their new Cola cupcake. I have to say it was the best customer service I've ever had at any of their stores, having often found their staff to be rude and rushed. I was pleasantly surprised by the cupcake, I liked the playfulness of the popping candy was happy the cake itself wasn't overly sweet. All in all a success.

More to come!!!

Cupcake Experiment One

Lady Grey Tea Cupcakes with Orange Blossom Frosting

This is the first of many cupcake/baking experiments I shall be conducting over the next few months, having found I've become stuck in a vanilla-cupcake-cream-cheese-frosting rut recently I feel the need to expand my repertoire! Not to mention all the recipe books I seem to be collecting that have been merely glanced at!

I've made a pretty decent, and on-going, list of the flavours I want to try together and this has been floating about in my brain since my addiction to Lady Grey tea kicked in earlier this year at work and I had to limit myself to two cups a day.

Thankfully this also gave me the opportunity to try two more recipes from the Primrose Hill Bakery recipe book which I've enjoyed using in the past.

These cupcakes have a really British summer-time feel about them and I liked the idea of combining the orange blossom frosting and the subtle citrus flavours from the Lady Grey tea. To do this I adapted the Primrose Hill "Earl Grey Tea Cupcakes" recipe by infusing Lady Grey tea instead. The process of making the cupcakes was really easy, and they looked perfect when they came out of the oven.

The frosting was also adapted from a Primrose Hill recipe, and adapted simply because I used clementine juice instead of orange, having forgotten to grab them during my supermarket run! I also added a little yellow and red food colouring at the end to create a lovely warm orange colour. The frosting was really easy to pipe and icing swirls stayed in place!

My cupcake Guinea Pigs aka my family all really enjoyed these cupcakes though found the frosting a little too sweet and the cake more crumbly than moist. Which I agreed with. This isn't necessarily a flavour combination I would try again as the citrus flavours became overpowering and sickly. I couldn't finish my cake!

So here are my ratings. 1 = very difficult/bad and 5=very easy/good

Recipe Difficulty - 4/5
Look - 4/5
Taste -3/5

London Cupcake Camp

On October 31st I will be taking part in the London Cupcake Camp at the Proud Galleries in Camden. The put it in their own words the Cupcake Camp is a "gathering of cupcake lovers to raise money for a good cause. They have taken place all over the world and raised thousands of pounds for charity." I'm really excited to be taking part by donating cupcakes and hopefully helping out on the day to raise money for the North London Hospice.

I'll be donating Pumpkin and Vanilla cupcakes!

Go over to the website and check out what they're doing, I think it'll be much fun!

No Longer MIA

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated - I have been away for the summer living it up in American suburbia doing a quite impressive impression of a "Soccer Mom" with the seven seater mini-van and everything. The nightmares will continue for a while I'm sure. Anyway! I was lucky enough to have tried some amazing cupcakes while I was away so here are some reviews!

The Cupcake Brake, Hartford Connecticut (various locations)
As you might have guessed from the title this is a cupcake truck! The Cupcake Brake is a yellow truck which parks up in a different location in downtown Hartford on most weekdays. You can find the address on their twitter and their website where you can also find a list of that days available cake, frosting and fillings. The Cupcake Brake is a pretty popular bakery in Hartford judging by the queue upon arrival just 15 minutes after the trucks arrival. The cake available to us that day were:

CUPCAKES:
Charter Oak Chocolate
Mohegan Mocha
Colony Carrot
FROSTINGS:
Vanilla Buttercream
Chocolate Buttercream
White Chocolate Cream Cheese
Brown Sugar Buttercream
FILLINGS:
Marshmallow
Boston Creme
Peanut Butter
Chocolate Ganache

My favourite combination of the above was the Charter Oak Chocolate filled with Peanut Butter and topped with Vanilla buttercream, the perfect balance between sweet and salty. We ate these cupcakes several hours after buying them and they were still perfectly moist and light, by far the best cupcakes I encountered in America - including Magnolia.

Sugarbelle, Glastonbury Connecticut 
I heard the name of this bakery all summer, from a lot of different people. It was in the next town from where I was staying on my last day I got the GPS together and went to find these cakes I'd been hearing so much about! Glastonbury is a cute family friendly New England town, and hidden away among the Starbucks and Whole Foods store is Sugarbelle. Its a small place, obviously still finding its feet if the empty cabinets and website "under construction" but they had a very good selection of flavours and friendly staff so me and my two cousin's (Drew aged 5 and Delaney aged 7) were happy with our visit. We got a dozen cakes for my "farewell" party.

Flavours are: Peanut Butter Chocolate Ganache, Cookie Dough, Vanilla Bean, Red Velvet, Chocolate Raspberry and Key Lime Pie. All the cupcakes were gorgeously presented, topped with fluffy icing and filled with gooeyness but definitely not the best cupcakes I've ever tasted, in all the cakes there was an underlying taste of Crisco/shortening which made the cakes taste overly processed. A little disappointing.

I have a lot more to talk about but I'll save it for another day! Enjoy!

Cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes.

I realise I haven't posted here in a long while so here is a bit of a round of up of the last few months.

I have spent a lot of time baking recently. I think I have the vanilla cupcake down to a fine art but I feel like I have a long way to go! So there will be continuous batches of cupcakes lurking around my house and office for the foreseeable future.

I have also tried lots of cupcakes etc recently so here we go!


CC's Queens Park - 19 Lonsdale Road, Queens Park
I read about this place on another blog, the blogger had travelled a long way to try out this bakery and I was a little ashamed that I'd passed it by hidden away just off of Salusbury Road in Queens Park on a regular basis never knowing it was there. With a giant cupcake sign outside I had high expectations as I stumbled down Lonsdale Road on a rainy Sunday afternoon. CC's is a lovely open planned cafe with a really homely feel about it. It only sells two flavours of cupcakes, chocolate and vanilla, of which I bought both. I really liked the vanilla it was moist candy coloured however I wasn't as pleased with my chocolate which was crumbly and tasted oddly of honey. Really nice place to spend a rainy afternoon though.

A few Saturday's ago I ventured to lovely South West London to check out Partridges food market mostly due to this post by I Heart Cupcakes in which she basically raves about the stalls there.
The

In particular she talks about Yummy Boutique and their amazing Whoopie Pies.  Because I'm still somewhat a whoopie skeptic I wanted to go and try them. I had a regular chocolate pie with marshmallow filling which was delicious, light and fluffy filling and really cakey pie. I really should never have eaten those Marks and Spencer monstrosities. Since then my love for all things whoopie has been reaffirmed by the pumpkin whoopies at The Hummingbird Bakery.

Whoopie Pies were not the only delight at Partridges I also discovered Peggy's Cupcakes who's beautiful cupcakes in wonderfully imaginative flavours sucked me in, even if I did promise my bank balance and my weighing scales I wouldn't. I had a raspberry cupcake which was soft and tangy with wonderful meringue  icing with a hint of rosewater all topped with a raspberry. I wish I had taken pictures but stupidly forgot my camera.

I'll definitely be heading back to Partridges at the end of the summer. For now though I'm heading to American for the summer, hopefully to spend it teaching my 7 year-old cousin to bake. Fingers crossed.

Enjoy x

New York - Sweet Revenge

I got home from a short but sweet trip to New York yesterday. I dashed around the city like a crazy person with four of my closest friends, making them all take part in my mini cupcake pilgrimage!

I didn't get to as many bakeries as I had planned or would have liked to but I did come across some great concepts. So Instead of talking about how mediocre Crumbs was or declaring my love for Magnolia bakery's Peanut Butter Pie I am going to talk about Sweet Revenge.

Sweet Revenge is a blink and you miss it bar on Carmine Street in the West Village, possibly my favourite area of the city, just off Bleeker Street. The bar itself is nice enough; small but with large windows opened onto the street, gorgeous artwork on the ceiling but the best thing about this bar was the cabinet filled with different cupcakes that can be paired with their perfect beer or wine partner!

I'm sure I'm not alone in associating cupcake bakeries with boutique coffee shops or tea rooms, so being able to have a beer with my cake after a long day of shopping was a nice change of pace!

I managed to convince all my friends, without much difficulty, to come with me and the five of us piled up our shopping bags and took up the seats at the bar for cake and alcohol, just what we needed.

Between us we tried three of the flavours:

Sweet Revenge – Peanut Butter Cake, Ganache Center, Peanut Butter Fudge Frosting

Pure – Mexican Vanilla Cake and Mexican Vanilla Buttercream

Dirty – Valrhona Cake with Dark Chocolate Truffle

I personally had the Pure with a glass of Frulli (strawberry beer), and although the cake was slightly dense and the vanilla flavouring a little overpowering it went down smoothly with my beer!

I think more than anything I loved the concept and atmosphere of the place, with really friendly informative staff, and if there was somewhere similar in London I could find myself spending many lazy Sunday afternoons drinking and trying different cake combinations. 

Lots of inspiration to be found.

New York, New York

I am going to New York this coming weekend. I am so excited. I have been to New York plenty of times before but this time I am going as a sort of cupcake research trip. New York is, in my opinion, the cupcake capital of the world and I am hoping for plenty of inspiration as I seem to have fallen into a vanilla cupcake rut recently.

I am hoping to find plenty of places to fall in love with that aren't the Magnolia Bakery.

Wish me luck!

Happy Birthday to me Cupcakes..

 

Lilac vanilla cream cheese frosting piping into a rose shape. Decorated with white sprinkles. Vanilla cake. A classic.

I am going to New York in two weeks. Please expect many reviews of their famed bakeries upon my return.

Happy Chocolate Egg Eating Day!

An excuse to bake as well as show off my gorgeous Laura Ashley cake stand.

Simple and perfect vanilla cake with pale green cream cheese frosting topped with Cadbury's class Mini Eggs.

Iron Cupcake - March 2010

Read the amazing Caked Crusader's review of Monday's Iron Cupcake London challenge. The challenge was "The Perfect Pair" so only two flavours were supposed to be used in one cupcake, some people obviously bent these rules but who cares as long as there are plenty of tasty cupcakes to eat!

I had two entries.

 

My first entry was Mint Chocolate, a dark chocolate cake topped with a layer of mint chocolate ganache, amazing mint green peppermint frosting, and an After Eight mint! I was really impressed with the look of this cake and pretty confident about it really.

My second entry was Strawberry Vanilla, a safer option, vanilla bean sponge topped with vanilla and strawberry swirl frosting and a whole strawberry. I was really unhappy with these cupcakes when I made them, the consistancy of the frosting didn't work well for me but they still turned out to be quite pretty.

All in all I had a really fun night, its so much fun just to be in a room with so many people who share the same obsession and the quality of the entries was so outstanding that I was unbelievably shocked to have come SECOND PLACE!!

I won a lovely cake stand and of course the all important IC shopper!!

Next month's challenge is "fruit" so I am already mentally planning what to make!

Inspiration For Monday.

 

Job One Done

So here's the story, my good friend Harriet (aka my agent/pimp) had a friend who was getting married, someone who needed cake! And after much research, and some negotiation I got my first comission! Not a long story but definitely important.

Jim had tried my cupcakes before and was having a small child orientated family wedding and thought of me! This make me happy because he wasn't a friend doing me a favour, he tried my cakes and liked them, he was the one who needed the favour and I was in need of a challenge.

The entire experience was a wonderful learning curve for me and enabled me to start doing some really exciting things, like thinking about doing this on a more permanent basis, creating a brand and experimenting with new decorating ideas.

I attended a fun decorating course run by Cookie Girl which gave me a more confident approach to some basic piping techniques, though I wish it'd been a bit more challenging, especially after talking to a friend who went on a similar course last week and learnt more for less money. Not a waste of money just definitely not for people already confident holding a pallet knife.

My good friend Laura Webster has created me a fabulous website based on the new 'brand' designed for me by Dan Kimmens! So Belle Bakes has been born! My blog will be updated to include many things including this amazing new logo! So many, many thanks to them both!

Back to the wedding...

I was commisioned to make 60 cupcakes made up of five flavours and a large cupcake on top, the wedding's theme was blue. Trying to include the five flavours and keep a running theme to tie them all together wasn't as easy as it first seemed but I think we need a good job of it. I chose four colours red, white, brown and blue to keep the cupcakes together.

 Peanut Butter - Peanut butter cake and chocolate cream cheese frosting with blue sprinkles.






 


Red Velvet - Red velvet cake with white cream cheese frosting, red and heart shaped sprinkles

Chocolate - Chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting, topped with a strawberry.

Vanilla - Vanilla cake with blue vanilla cream cheese frosting and white "hundreds and thousands."

Rainbow - Blue/yellow/green/pink vanilla cake with white cream cheese frosting and confetti sprinkles.

I am mostly pleased with how the cakes turned out, if I try not to be overly critical!

Harriet and I delivered the cakes on saturday morning, and set them up with the stand which was kindly lent to me by a colleague.

The finished result:

Red velvet/chocolatey cake to top, white frosting and blue sprinkles. Bride and groom topped it, climbing the mountain of cream cheese!

The cakes actually tied in together really well I am please with the balance between light and dark, and they looked great into the reception room.

All in all I'm really pleased!  Here's to the next one!

Thanks to Harriet and Omar for helping me bake/decorate/run around like a headless chicken/get snappy without saying a single word. Love.

Next week I am entering the Iron Cupcake competition for the first time. Excited!!

Rainbow Cupcakes Make Everyone Happy...