Spiced Chocolate Cupcakes

So I planned to hit the diet hard this week. Second day into it, I got the urge to bake cupcakes. Eat one and donate the other eleven to various local cupcake loving friends is the plan. Only there's still four left on the counter. That diet can start again tomorrow.

I experimented with these cakes. I have a recipe for a mexican chocolate cake that I wanted to try but I couldn't find it. I wanted something a little different that the usual. I went to Cupcake Bakeshop because that girl seriously has the best cupcake ideas, ever. Her chai cakes sounded good and made me think of the spiced hot chocolate we make at work. Bingo. Spiced chocolate cupcakes it is. It's not an over-powering flavour but it really works well with the dark chocolate cake.

Recipe?

for the spice mix: in a coffee grinder whizz up two cinnamon sticks, one dried red chilli, one star anise, four cardamom pods and three cloves.

for the cake:

115g butter
60g dark chocolate
1/2 cup cocoa

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla

3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp spice mix

1/2 cup yoghurt

melt together the chocolate, butter and cocoa, whisking well to combine. Set aside to cool.

meanwhile, whisk the eggs together, then whisk in the sugar and vanilla essence. Add to the chocolate mixture once it's cool.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and soda.

Add one third of the flour to the chocolate and egg mixture then half the yoghurt, another third of flour, the rest of the yoghurt and the rest of the flour, mixing well between additions.

Fill yer cupcake cases and bake in a 180 C oven for 18 minutes.

Spiced buttercream:

125g unsalted butter
500g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/2 tsp spice mixture
1 - 2 TBS milk

beat the butter and vanilla essence with an electric mixer until creamy. Add the icing sugar and spice mixture and 1 TBS of milk. Beat until well combined. You might need another TBS of milk, depends on what kind of texture you like in your frosting. That's it!

Old Work in New Ways

Years ago, around 1998-1999, I used to make fonts. I snagged a copy of Fontographer from somewhere and I set about producing a rag tag bunch of mostly hand drawn fonts. I distributed them for free and they floated around the net for a while until I lost my website a few years ago (long story). I don't even have copies of most of them anymore, I made them on a PC which died and now I have a Mac and there's the aforementioned lost website. So today I recieved a lovely package in the mail today from a designer that works for the French kid's magazine Pirouette.

Turns out they used one of my fonts in their current issue and sent me a couple of issues so I could see it for myself. How cute is that? Here's a close-up:

I'm really quite proud!

Gramma's Date Loaf

So my stupid computer broke not once but twice in the last month and it spent a lot of time at the pretty Apple store. It was hard at first, no email, no blogs to check every day. But then I suddenly exploded in a burst of creativity. I sewed, I knit, I baked, I drew, I read and I even cleaned, decluttered and purged a heap of crap from my home. It was great to have a break from the internet but it's good to have it back too! I am trying to maintain a good balance with my free time now. So far this morning I have done all my internet screwing around, baked a date loaf (recipe to follow), started prepping for the picnic-style dinner I have to take out tonight and started making a new black skirt for work. It's not even noon.

The date loaf. It's good. I always have a lot of dates around, I eat a lot of multigrain porridge for breakfast, with chopped dates cooked in it so I don't need to add sugar. Sounds boring and uber-healthy, but dammit, it's so delicious. So a big tub of dates. The need (desire, really) for a portable sweet thing struck me as I was assembling a picnic dinner to take with us to a football game tonight. And my sister loves date loaf. And I have dates. And date loaf is pretty low fat and added sugar. Perfect for my current attempt to eat less of both of those things.

My grandma has a great recipe, but as I am physically unable not to tinker, I added a few more spices. And some pecans. Here it is:

225g/8 oz chopped dates
1 tsp bicarb soda
1 cup boiling water

Combine these ingredients and let it sit until the water is cold

In a mixing bowl, add 225g/8oz self raising flour, 1 TBS brown sugar, ground cinnamon, ginger, cardamon, cloves and nutmeg to taste (about 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, nutmeg and 1/4 tsp cardamom and a pinch or two of cloves), a couple of handfuls (1/2 a cup) of chopped pecans, or walnuts or whatever nut you like)

add the cooled date mixture (including all the liquid) to the dry mix and add one egg. Mix it up, whack it in a loaf tin and bake in a moderate oven (180 C) until it's cooked. I cooked mine in two mini tins and it took 30 mins. I would think a normal loaf would take 45 or so.

Red Bird Blue Bird

How awesome is Gocco? I mean, really! You draw a bit, flash a screen, ink it up and start churning out the awesomeness. Easy as pie. Just how easy is pie anyway? Since when did pie get a reputation as being a hussy?

I digress.

I wanted some new stationery, couldn't find anything I liked during the fifteen nano seconds I could be bothered shopping and in the spirit of the crafty chick I can sometimes be, I just whipped some up myself. Well after a quick trip to Office Works for some blank stuff to work with.

I am so into red and pale blue right now, as evidenced by the quilt I'm working on and the colour scheme for the shop. I only used one screen for both prints, I just scraped off the red ink at the end of that run and then re-inked with blue for the envelopes. Messy yes, but it worked just fine, thankyouverymuch.

Shop Talk

So something I haven't really talked about on this blog yet is the fact that I am opening a clothing store with my sister. Six months ago we made a snap decision to do this, we had a weekend to decide whether or not we would place an order with a particular label and start this whole ball rolling. We decided it was all go, we rounded up our assets and a loan and here we are today, about four weeks away from opening our doors to the world.

Part of our decision to this involved starting our own label too. We thought we'd just start out with tee shirts, as many people do. We're revising that idea now as we really can't find cool menswear that we really love, so we're toying with the idea of getting some samples made up and seeing if we go forward with a full menswear range. To the right over there are our very own personal woven fabric labels for our own clothing. Woah.

A year ago, I never would have thunk it.

I am not a fashion girl. I am not obsessed with clothes. How did I end up here? Why am I loving this?

Quilting progress report

Ok, so there are many things wrong my work on this cushion, but you know what? I don't care one bit. I unashamedly love this thing. There's the colour pooling of the dark red stripe across it (because of the way I assembled the stripes, I didn't notice until it was too late), there are wonky seams galore but so what? It's the first time I've quilted any damn thing!

My concerns about the fabric combination (see my last post) were completely unfounded, I love the way they go together (or don't go together as the case may be). As a getting-used-to-the-big-quilt project, it worked just great. Now I just have to start slicing up eleventy squillion more strips and start sewing.

Gocco v.4 and the rumblings of a quilt

See that? That is the start of my quilt I've been planning for eons. I've pictured a red and blue string quilt, I've collected the fabrics and now I'm ready to go.

Or am I?

I'm underwhelmed right now. I'm not in love with a few of the fabrics and it just doesn't look as great as I thought it would.

The plan: start it anyway. Make a few blocks of the strips and make them into a pillow cover to get a feel for what I'm doing. If I hate it, those fabrics can go back in the stash. Surely I'll find a use for it!

Project two: Gocco again!

My latest gocco print is more art, less useful. But I still love it. I have numbered a print run of just 12.



that's Dick's Drive-In in Seattle. I photocopied a photo of mine and then photocopied the photocopy to drop out as much tone as possible. I love the result!

Some Gocco notes. When you use a photocopy, everyone says to either iron or use the clean-up paper or use the blue screen. I did none of those things and it worked perfectly. Am I really, really lucky or are those things just not necessary?