After ten hours of solid baking and nearly five hours of frosting, I had 10 dozen large and 200 baby cupcakes ready to be sold. My friend Lisa and I schlepped around the hospital we work in, doing the hard sell while wearing RSPCA Cupcake Cook sticker-badges. It took us four hours but we sold every last cupcake and raised over $350 in the process. It would have been closer to $500 if my vanilla cupcakes had been less dodgy - the batter looked wrong somehow and they weren't as light or soft as I would have like them to be, so I sold them at half price. That'll teach me to try a new recipe under pressure to perform. I got to make my delicious peanut butter frosting again, one of my favourite flavours (and when I make it, my friends colleagues always ask for the recipe).

Once I've found my media card reader, I'll upload a couple of pics from the day. There were only a few taken because it was such a mad rush to get them out the door and on sale. I'll have to tantalise with a list of flavours.

Cakes

• Vanilla buttercake
• Devil's Food chocolate
• Hummingbird

Frosting

• Raspberry Buttercream
• Chocolate Fudge
• Peppermint
• Peanut Butter
• Cream Cheese

Our kitten, Milo, is addicted to Whiskas Cravers. He's putty in my hands whenever I bribe him with them. I accidentally left a bag of them on the coffee table one night and awoke to find it punctured all over by tooth and claw holes where Milo had tried to get into the bag. He also does this adorable meowing-while-munching thing that always makes me laugh. I liken it to a premenstrual chocolate addict chowing down on a slab of mudcake, exclaiming how delicious it is with every bite and groaning with pleasure throughout each chew. Seriously - if you have cats, get your butt to the supermarket and get some Cravers as a treat for your feline friend.

Monday 18th August is RSPCA's Cupcake Day, a great fundraising challenge. Basically, I'm going to make a truckload of cupcakes in various cute forms (mostly animal) and sell them at work to raise funds for the RSPCA. If you're cupcake-obsessed like me, why not sign up as a cupcake chef? If not, keep your eyes open for a cupcake sale near you on the 18th. If you'd rather buy something a bit longer lasting, check out the great cupcake teatowels and other Cupcake Day merchandise here. If you're in Brisbane, I'll be selling my cupcakes at the Mater Private Hospital in South Brisbane. Leave me a comment or email me if you'd like more info or if you want to pre-order some cuppies!

• Baking - honey and nutmeg cupcakes and mini-tortes from a recipe in the local newspaper; orange & poppy seed cuppies with mango/passionfruit buttercream and chocolate mud cakes. 
• Laundry - B & I have been pretty slack at household chores lately and the washing had piled up around us. It's now washed, dried and put away. Hurrah!
• Gardening - the bulbs I planted some months ago have promising leaves and will hopefully flower soonish. Our phaelanopsis orchid is in bud and the first petals are just starting to open. Will post pics when it's at its peak or gorgeousness. I've also got some rosemary and lavender to plant out into the garden and some mint to be put into a larger pot. The bromeliads that we'd almost resigned to the bin but at the last moment decided to repot have rewarded us by recovering and developing beautiful coloured flower spikes. Taureans are meant to have green thumbs, it just took me a bit longer to discover mine than most.
• Playing with Milo and watching him grow day by day. Our kitty has had his babybollocks cut out and a microchip put in, hardly a fair trade-off!
• Fishing - B & I have been out in the boat just about every weekend lately, despite it being colder than a cold thing out on the water. We've competed in a couple of bream tournaments with no success (unless you count catching our full complement of fish but still coming >2kg  behind the winners a success). I had my first ever meal of freshly caught fish, which was a wonderful thing. B caught a squire (baby snapper) that was on our plates less than 4 hours later, baked with fennel, butter and lemon. Talk about the hunter-gatherer instinct - he caught our dinner and cooked it too. Keeper or what?

Pics coming soon of the Cakes & More forum Royal Icing Theme Challenge. Having never used RI before, it really is a challenge!

As I was working myself up to get ready for work this afternoon, the phone rang. It was one of my work friends, wanting to know if I'd like to take an annual leave day as the ward was way overstaffed for the late shift. Hmmm, let me think on that for just a second..... see you Monday!

Hi to Coby and Ruth - thanks for reading and for commenting

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.