Rose flavoured buttercream, that is. Add a bit of fondant, some food colouring and a few cutters and you have some cute cupcakes.

These were all made as part of the cupcake challenge on the Cakes and More forum. If you like to bake cakes, create beautiful things out of sugar and chat about it with other cakers, come along and play. If you join us, be sure to let us know you found the forum via my blog - I'd love to know who (if anyone) reads it.

Naughty blogger, being absent for so long without a crappy excuse. Whoops!

Since my last post, we have become parents to a 10 week-old Burmese kitten. We have named him Milo. This is partly because he's a chocolate Burmese and partly because B won't let me name my first-born son Milo (a long-time dream of mine).

Wanna meet him?

He's so much fun to have around and he's definitely good practice for parenthood - the early morning crying, the mess everywhere, the discipline when he goes where he shouldn't, the endless expenditure on food and toys and things to contain poo...we'll be fine when we do eventually have kids.

I have baked a few times but have struggled to find time with shifts at the moment. I made some fun cakes for my birthday party and was in so much of a rush to get the finished, I forgot to take pics. Cakes & More are holding a cupcake decorating challenge from 20th May to 20th June, so I plan to have a few good sessions with fondant, flowerpaste and my cutters. I'm planning to try out royal icing for the first time and also a few new types of frosting.

I'm here, honest! I've been baking plenty and making a bit of progress in my flower-making. Will be back later in the week to post photos of Easter cupcakes (yes, I know it's a month later now) and various other batches. Hopefully, I'll have some sugar flowers that actually look like flowers to show you!

Wish me luck and good sleep - I'm on night shifts for the rest of the week.  

I haven't been having a baking-free spell -- oh no, on the contrary. I've baked plenty and taken more than a couple of cupcake-centric photos, but I've been on holidays with B and haven't quite caught up with everything.

Cupcakeries have made their presence felt in Brisbane recently, including The Cupcake Company. I was happy to see that they bake from scratch and aren't afraid to shout it. After taste-testing a few cakes from another cupcake store recently only to find that their cakes were very obviously from a packet mix, it's great to know that some cupcakers earn their money by adding that extra touch.

I'd love to declare that I bake from scratch -- mostly I do -- but just tonight I picked up 2 packet mixes for my cupcake marathon session on Sunday. In my defence, they're gluten-free mixes that I'm trialling. I wanted to make GF cakes for work on Monday as I have a couple of gluten intolerant colleagues. While I know for sure that my Hummingbird cake recipe works just fine and dandy with GF flours, I can't afford for two whole batches of cupcakes to go wrong if the flour isn't right. So, I s'pose I bake from scratch unless I'm in a corner.

Just to get your juices flowing for the pictorial lushness to come, random pics of cakes I've made in the last few weeks and not blogged about:

Peanut Butter & Banana cake with Banana Buttercream

Vanilla cakes with Fresh Raspberry Buttercream....this pic makes me drool!

St Patrick's Day Mudcakes with Peppermint White Chocolate Ganache and Shamrocks

Lovely Easter cupcakey goodness coming soon!

No, I don't mean laughing at a sulking child tripping over the gutter, or having a secret snicker when someone you loathe makes a particularly stupid statement in front of many, many people (although these are both things I do at times). I mean laughing out loud at blogs written by others. Today I was reading Vanilla Garlic and found this little rant by Garrett. As most of you know, I do love a little rant. He also has a recipe for the most amazing cupcakes - Cardamom Pistachio with Rice Pudding. They look and sound so incredibly delicious. I can feel another baking session coming up very soon. If only all these late shifts would be over!

The pomegranate is a strange old bit of produce. It has dozens of beautiful jewel-like arils (the seeds, which are encased in pulp) inside a tough red skin. The white pith and membrane taste pretty awful, but the tiny amount of tart/sweet/tannin pulp from the arils make this fruit worth the effort required to eat it. My friends Richard and Ruth introduced me to the pomegranate last year, over a very relaxed Sunday breakfast. When I saw one at my local supermarket, I bought it without a thought to the ridiculous price ($3.98 each) or how I was going to use it.

The pomegranate has long been seen as a symbol of fertility and abundance, and Jewish households recite a special prayer over a pomegranate at Rosh Hashana:

"May it be Your will O Lord our God and the God of Our Fathers, that our good deeds will increase like the seeds of the pomegranate."

Slashfood has this to say about the pomegranate:

"In Judaism, the first book of the Torah argues that the forbidden fruit was not an apple, but a pomegranate. In other texts, pomegranates were one of the signals that the Hebrews had, indeed, reached the promised land. But best of all is the tradition in Islam. "According to the Quran, the gardens of paradise include pomegranates. It is important, tradition says, to eat every seed of a pomegranate because one can't be sure which aril came from paradise." And pomegranates protect the eater from envy and hatred. Sounds good! I vote that pomegranates be adopted as the totem fruit of bloggers. Anyone with me?"

B's squash team were playing at home on Monday night and it was their turn to provide supper, so I had a chance to try out a couple of new recipes and use my perfect pom. I ended up with coconut cakes with passionfruit butter filling, coconut frosting and pomegranate decoration. I had dreams of a generous swirl of frosting with a big dip in the middle, filled to the brim with pomegranate arils, but the frosting argued with me and won, so the arils ended up forming the petals of flowers.

Coconut Cake

• 125g butter at room temperature, chopped
• 1 1/4 cups caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup plain flour, sifted
• 1/2 cup self-raising flour, sifted
• 1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda - sift in with flours
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup dessicated coconut

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Place cupcake cases in pans - I got 15 large and 12 small (not mini) cupcakes out of the batter.
2. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add vanilla and beat well.
3. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each one. Fold in the sifted flours and bicarb 1/3 at a time, adding the milk between flour additions (begin and end with the flours). Once combined, fold in coconut.
4. Two-thirds fill cases using your preferred method. Bake for 20 mins or until cooked when tested with a skewer. **20 mins is far too long for small cupcakes (standard Australian case size) - 14-16 mins should be plenty** Cool on wire rack before filling and frosting.

Coconut Frosting

• 125g (half a tub) cream cheese, softened
• 125g unsalted butter, softened (half a block in Australia & UK, 1 stick in US)
• 2 cups icing/confectioners sugar
• 3 tablespoons coconut cream (*not* coconut milk)
• 1 teaspoon dark rum (optional - I prefer Bundaberg Rum)
• 1/2 cup sweetened flaked coconut (I used the same unsweeetened dessicated coconut as I used in the cakes and it was plenty sweet)

1. Beat together all ingredients except coconut until well combined, then stir in coconut.
2. Keep beating until a spreadable consistency is reached. You may need to add more icing sugar is it's too runny.

I used my filling tip and a disposable piping bag to fill the cupcakes with passionfruit butter (available from Coles supermarkets or your local fete/craft market). You could use lemon cutter/curd or even pineapple butter. Aim for tropical fruits and you'll get a great flavour combination. Spread on frosting, then place the pomegranate arils on top in a 5-petal daisy formation. I then used icing tubes (commercially available pre-made runny icing for writing etc) to add centres and stems to my flowers. While I was happy with the flavour of the icing, I think I'll go with a coconut buttercream next time. The cake texture was fairly dense but tasted wonderful and not too sweet. The sharpness of the passionfruit butter complemented the cake and frosting beautifully - very happy with that! These sweet little friends were well-received by B's squash team and the visiting players.

A work colleague asked me (at very short notice) to make some cupcakes for her sister and her fiance to taste, with a view to maybe providing the cupcakes for her wedding brunch in April. So, on Sunday afternoon, I baked Hummingbird, Devil's Food and Scouts cupcakes. About 150 in all. I probably should have halved or even quartered the recipes for smaller batches but I knew the leftovers would be gratefully devoured by my colleagues. I had great fun pract-ICING* with the frostings and tried some techniques and sugary bits I hadn't played with before. The Hummingbird cakes were frosted with citrus cream cheese frosting, the Scouts in vanilla buttercream (pale green and pale blue) or raspberry buttercream (baby pink, of course). For the DF cakes, I went mad with peanut butter frosting and the buttercreams.

* Did you see what I did there? Icing? Hahahaa! Amusing myself is always so much easier than trying to amuse others.

After working at the hospital from 0640-1510hrs, I started working in the kitchen at 1630hrs and finished up at 0030hrs with a boatload of cakes, only 20 of them iced (couldn't cope with doing more than was absolutely necessary by that point) and barely enough room in the fridge for the rest. I was very proud of the looks I managed to master, even if they're not terribly original. I just hope the bride-to-be likes them. Her groom is a very accomplished home baker and quite particular about what he'll let his bride pick for the brunch. I hope I pass muster.

As much as I love to bake for my man, he's hopeless when it comes to taste-testing new recipes. His words were, "A cupcake is a cupcake is a cupcake. They're all the same - little cakes with icing."

What, you can't taste the difference between the coffee frosting and the peanut butter?

"Nope. They taste the same."

Riiiiiight. So, I still happily provide B with delectable morsels of cakey goodness, but when it comes to getting feedback, I now seek it from my colleagues who are more than happy to participate in the quality control process. My latest trials were Devil's Food Cake made to Chockylit's recipe, Coffee Buttercream from the Daring Bakers' Yule Log recipe and Fluffy Peanut Butter Frosting.

The cakes fell as soon as they left the oven, but I figured I could make up for it with a wee bit more frosting. Now was my chance to play with my filling tip - the first 2 dozen cakes were filled with PB frosting before being iced. I wouldn't say the PB frosting was fluffy, but it was salty and sweet and a real hit with the girls at work. Aussies love peanut butter (or peanut paste, as it's know by the old skool hard-core) but it's not used in confectionery as much as it is in the USA. Here, you have it on toast or in a lazy sandwich. The coffee/chocolate pairing was a more expected combo but just as welcome. One of the girls was so impressed with my cakes, she's asked me if I'll do the cupcakes for her sister's bridal brunch in April. The colours are red and white and she having a proper girly brunch with tiny ribbon sandwiches, scones and cupcakes. Excited much? Oh, the opportunities for gorgeousness!

After a tumultuous month, I made an incident-free return to work yesterday. By some small miracle, I managed a whole 8-hour shift without getting sick, injuring myself or pissing anyone off. Praise be! I now have 2 days off in which to bake and grocery shop. I'm playing with a few new recipes so I fully expect as many failures as successes. Mum has challenged me to create a cupcake with a couple of challenging ingredients (not telling just yet!) but I'm going to wait til I've got a few more recipes perfected before trying that one for her.

So much time off work let me concentrate on sorting out a few long-avoided chores. The one I procrastinated over most was the sewing on of buttons on B's work shirts. His company were recently outfitted with new shirts. Unfortunately, just about every original button snapped off every shirt. Not due to poor stitching or low quality thread - nope, the centres of the buttons just popped right out. Thank God they're all done now. Well, they were. He managed to pop another one off this morning, getting dressed for work. My sleepy response from bed was, "You've got to be #&*king kidding!".

I also got to sort out the pantry. This was a mammoth task, especially since I started baking frequently.

B put up plenty of handy racks for herbs, spices, flavourings, essences, seasonings and stocks:

See the lovely tidy baking stash? The green lunch bag contains my cutters, piping bags and tips and flower-making tools. I can highly recommend Decor brand storage boxes, especially their spice storer (bottom right of pic) - 10 teeny boxes with a 1/4 teaspoon measure, just perfect for cachous/dragees/sprinkles/hundreds & thousands/coloured sugars. If you're curious about the brown stuff in the clear plastic box on the bottom left, it's 2 different brands of brown sugar. I didn't realise til I got the 2nd bag home that they were so very different!

Here are the new Ikea cupboards B installed while I was in hospital:

And just for giggles, this photo was taken at the Logan Hyperdome. The sign reads, "Non-Potable Water. Do Not Drink." Yes, that is a toilet flush.

I had a call from work this morning - they were overstaffed for the late shift and would I like the day? Uh, yes please! Since I've used all my annual leave in lieu of sick leave, I opted for a leave-without-pay day. This turned out to be the perfect opportunity to try out Carousels Cupcakes & Coffee in Chermside (on the north side of Brisbane). I rang my Mum and invited her along, so she drove to my place and we set out across town through driving rain.

We'd both had breakfast a lot earlier and wanted 'real food' before caking it, so we were very happy to see that Carousels offered a limited snack menu. Mum and I shared a toasted ham/sun-dried tomato/cream cheese panini and drank excellent coffees while we decided which cakes to have. In the end, neither of us could decide so we ordered 4 cupcakes to start with. We halved each of them and stuffed our faces in a very scientific way. We initially tried Strawberry Fields, the Gidget, the Marilyn and Very Cherry.

• Strawberry Fields - sweet, moist vanilla cake with a gorgeous texture. Not much strawberry flavour in the cake, although there was a very welcome "strawberry surprise" in the bottom. The frosting was sweet and pink with a good crust, and although the chunks of fruit could be seen, it didn't taste much of berry. Both Mum and I really enjoyed this one.
• Very Cherry - This was a vanilla cake with chunks of cherry and dark chocolate through the batter, iced with chocolate frosting and a pink fondant heart. This one had a good overall flavour but was disappointingly dry. The frosting tasted like cheap compound chocolate.
• Gidget - I *loved* this cupcake! Light, moist cake with banana, pineapple and coconut topped with cream cheese frosting, dipped in plenty of scrummy coconut. Tasted home-made, a definite plus.
• Marilyn - White chocolate mud cake iced with white chocolate ganache and topped with a perfect glace cherry. We made the mistake of having this straight after the boldly-flavoured Gidget and initially, the white chocolate flavour didn't make itself known. After a good swig of coffee, we tried again and were pleasantly surprised with the subtle flavour and dense texture. The last few bites were a delight. Because I am such a good and loving daughter, I let Mama Bear have the cherry.

From left to right, the Gidget, the Marilyn and Very Cherry. Strawberry Fields was already in our bellies before I remembered to take a photo!

When we'd sampled the above cupcakes, Mum confessed she'd like to try a couple more flavours. In the name of research, we forced ourselves to try the Wascally Wabbit and The Fonz.

• Wascally Wabbit - moist, dense, not-too-sweet carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and finished with a tiny fondant carrot. 'Nuff said. Mum loved that it wasn't too dry, a problem she's had before with carrot cupcakes.
• The Fonz - chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream swirl. A fairly average cake with a generous swirl of very sweet chocolate buttercream. Sweet and chocolatey, great for kids and those who don't like their cupcakes too rich. I prefer a richer choc cake but can't really fault this one. I loved the tiny stripe of white in the brown of the frosting.

By this point we were both cupcaked out. Mum and I were feeling ever so slightly guilty until I thought it through and decided we'd only had 3 cupcakes each, which is about how many we would have eaten had we baked them ourselves. Our server checked on us a couple of times to make sure we were enjoying our cakes and asked for comments. We told her all the things we loved, then she said, "We welcome crtiticism too". We told her about the dryness of Very Cherry and she took it on board very pleasantly. We also suggested a guided cupcake experience - one where cupcakes are suggested in a certain order to avoid missing the more subtle flavours by eating a delicately-flavoured cake after a more robust one. A cupcake degustation menu, if you will, each cupcake paired with its perfectly-suited beverage (Earl Grey tea, espresso, lemonade etc). Our server seemed to like this idea. When we told her how far we'd come just to sample their cupcakes, she asked if we minded having our photos taken for the Carousels website "Wall of Fame". Being attention whores, of course we said yes. Keep your eyes peeled for two fat ladies without makeup and with chocolate cake crumbs in their teeth!

 The service was excellent, with the cakes presented on a large plate and both of us given our own plate, knife and cake fork. When I explained that Mum and I would be having lunch first then sharing many cupcakes, our server immediately offered to open a tab so we wouldn't have to make multiple debit card payments. The coffee was  delicious and judging by other customers' reactions, the tea was pretty good too. The shop is a sugar-sweet pink experience with plastic-fantastic multicoloured chandeliers and 50s retro vibe. Carousels sell books and cute photo frames as well as coffee and cakes, many of which I would have loved to take home. Speaking of taking things home, Mum and I both chose Ava cupcakes to take home. I got one for B (who honestly believes that all cupcakes are made from the same batter and are therefore indistinguishable from each other) and Mum got one for Eamonn. I would have loved to take Eamonn with us, being the little cupcake fiend he is, but Mum felt he'd be "beastly" if given cake in public. The total cost for our indulgent lunch and take-homes (1 panini, 2 coffees and 8 cupcakes) was $44. Not bad, considering the ridiculous amount of food involved.

As we were leaving, about 15 women entered the shop, eyes glittering at the sight of so much cake in such a pretty venue. Word seems to be spreading fast about this wonderful new business. I can highly recommend the Carousels experience to any in the Brisbane area. I'll be dragging my friends there as soon as humanly possible.