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Chocolate Peanut butter cupcakes with candied Noisette / Decoration can be customised / €3 per cupcake / 12 order minimum

Pikelet layer cake

Chocolate Donut Cupcakes / €3 per cupcake, 12 order minimum

I was meant to make these for world nutella day last week, but since I missed that deadline I decided to make them anyway for a certain Frenchman who adores nutella and anything nutella related (like 90% of the French population).
I think however, this is going to be the beginning of a new obsession with choux pastry, so many possibilitys both sweet and savoury. I’ve even already come up with a name of my future cookbook on the subject…. ‘Tout en Choux’ (All in Choux). Best seller right there.
These also show the effect living in France is starting to have on my baking…you can see in my first blog posts very anglo traditional baking by way of strawberry and cream cupcakes and lamingtons…before moving to france you never would have seen me trying to candy hazelnuts to put on the top of each tiny bite sized choux, I can assure you, blow that for a game of soldiers!
However, im starting to see the inate beauty in a single bite, and the architectural quality in which the French instil in their pastrys…I feel its quite opportune that I am involved in one of the ‘highest branches’ of fine arts, namely architecture, and within that, its highest branch of Pastry, at least according to Parisian Antonin Carême, one of the first of the great chefs in France to be seen as artisans rather than servants…though given that information, I guess he would say that wouldnt he…
‘Les beaux arts sont au nombre de cinq, à savoir: la peinture, la sculpture, la poésie, la musique et l’architecture, laquelle a pour branche principale la patisserie.’
‘The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry.’
Either way, I think you can expect a few more choux dishes cropping up here, perhaps a cheese choux filled with gooey bechamel sauce….oh my let the obsession commence!

Strawberry cream cupcakes / Decoration can be customised / €3 per cupcake / 12 order minimum
Strawberry cream cakes are essentially a miniature version of the classic Victoria Sponge (named after Queen Victoria, it was rumoured to be her favourite cake). My Grandma used to make a Victoria sponge each time we visited as kids during the school holidays, and I always looked forward to it (well, the sponge cake, and the way she would cook us bacon and eggs in the morning by frying them in real animal fat, now those were the good old days!).
I found myself making these cakes quite often after I moved to Europe. Starved for any culinary joy during university in The Netherlands, myself and other international students, usually the Mediterranean Greeks and Italians, used to hold international pot luck dinners in order to kickstart our tastebuds. I did however always had a bit of a problem with what to take as there is arguably not anything completely New Zealand in terms of food (I only had a tiny dual microwave/convection oven so the COMPLETELY (aussies take note) Kiwi dessert Pavlova was not an option).
Luckily, I found that combining cream with strawberrys was pretty different for the people from Greece, Italy, Thailand etc, so I borrowed from our Motherland in this respect.
Long live The Commonwealth.

Recipe
Cake base:
125 grams butter at room temperature
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup of milk
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
Cream the butter in a bowl with an electric beater until light, then beat in the caster sugar until the grains are no longer visible.
Beat the eggs slightly then add gradually to the butter and sugar, mixing constantly.
Sift in the flour and baking powder into the butter mixture and fold in gently. After, add the milk and vanilla essence and fold to combine.
Pour the mixture into buttered and floured muffin forms with cupcake papers in, and cook at 180 deg Celsius for around 15 minutes, or until springy to the touch.
Icing:
12 strawberrys, washed but greenery left on.
250grams good quality milk chocolate
250 gram white chocolate
1/2 cup desiccated coconut
Melt the 2 chocolates separately, either using a saucepan of boiling water with another bowl fitted in with the chocolate in it, or if you are feeling lazy in the microwave
Dip half of each strawberry into the milk chocolate. Half of these then dip into the coconut, the other half use the white chocolate to drizzle over the white chocolate. Leave on a flat tray covered with baking paper in the fridge to set.
250ml cream
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 tblsp icing sugar
12 teaspoons strawberry jam
Whip together the first 3 ingredients to create your whipped cream.
After the cupcakes have cooled, using a small sharp knife (I used an ordinary steak knife, I think the cerated edge helps a lot), to cut small holes into the top of each cupcake, leave around 1 cm of space around the edge. The whole should go approximately half way into the cupcake. (See photo)
Place a teaspoon of jam in the bottom of each crevice, then pipe the whipped cream on top to achieve a nice cupcaky peak.
Finally, place one of the chocolate coated strawberrys on top of each cream peak et voila, c’est fini!
Delicieux!

Chocolate cake, buttercream icing and chocolate ganache / €40 for a 3-layer cake / decoration can be customised
My lovely friend Marie (from Marie-Camille’s Tiramisu Cake fame), got quite involved with the cake choosing/designing process here. She ‘ordered’ this birthday cake from me, for one of her friends, and she was quite a demanding client (as are all clients, in architecture, and apparently cake-making) …but after she sourced me the chronically out of season strawberrys needed for this cake, and I found an alternative to using whipped cream (which is approximatly 10 times more rare than hens teeth in Paris), I was pretty excited to give this cake a go.
It turned out fantastically, I was a little skeptical of the dripping ability of the chocolate, in order for it to look beautiful down the sides, but I needn’t have worried.
In addition, I have chosen the Chocolate Tuxedo Cake to be my first submission into the Sweet New Zealand monthly blog roundup, which is a fantastic initiative to showcase whats been baking in the Kiwi food blogisphere (or expat Kiwi in Paris!)…partly because this cake is so striking, and also because I think it is rather christmassy with the white icing and red and green of the strawberrys. I will be making it again as a contemporary take on the christmas cake (I hate traditional fruitcakes!), with fantastic New Zealand strawberrys from Kanes Orchard in Cambridge, when I head back to New Zealand for Christmas, complete with the Frenchman in tow…
…wish him luck for his first time in New Zealand!
My inspiration for this cake came from a mix of two blog posts, Annie’s Eats andChocolate and Carrots.
The cake mixture: (for 3 layers)
3/4 cup water
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
90 grams butter
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups caster sugar (sucre semoule)
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup milk
Place the water, butter and cocoa powder into a saucepan and heat until the butter has melted.
In a bowl put the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Add the water/cocoa mixture and stir.
Add the milk, eggs and vanilla essence to the mix and mix to combine.
In a buttered and floured cake tin, pour 1/3 of the mixture (this will be equivilant to around 1 1/4 cups of mixture, and bake at 160 deg celcius until cooked through, and springy to the touch. Repeat with the remaining 2 layers, mixing an extra 1/2 tsp baking powder to each 1/3 as you re-buttering and flouring the cake tin each time.
Buttercream icing:
420 grams softened butter
4 cups icing sugar
2 tsp vanilla essence
4 tablespoons cream
Put the butter in a bowl and beat with an electric hand beater, or stand mixer, until light a fluffy, around 2 minutes. Add the icing sugar and beat in slowly, then add the cream and vanilla. Beat for a further 4-5 minutes.
Chocolate Ganache:
100grams dark chocolate
1/2 cup cream
1/4 cup golden syrup
Place a saucepan on the stove 1/4 filled with water, then place a heat proof bowl on top. Bring the water to a boil, and place into the top bowl the cream. Heat the cream until its hot, but not boiling.
Add the chocolate (broken into smallish pieces), then take of heat. Mix the cream and chocolate until the chocolate is melted, then add the golden syrup, stir, then leave aside for 15 minutes for it too cool down and thicken a bit.
To Assemble:
Place the layers of cake on top of each other, using 1/4 of the buttercream icing mixture between each of the layers.
Once all 3 layers of cake are stacked, use the remaining mixture to cover the rest of the cake. Once covered, use a knife or baking pallet knife, and dip it in hot water, to smooth out the icing. Try to make the top as flat as possible.
Place the iced cake in the fridge for an hour to allow the icing to set.
Place the chocolate ganache into a pouring jug, and gradually pour the chocolate over the cake. Do it slowly, so you can gauge how quickly/far the icing will drop down the sides of the cake, resulting in controlled drips!
Leave to set in fridge a further hour.
Garnish with some chocolate covered strawberrys, or some raspberrys, and serve.

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