It feels like an eternity since I last wrote anything for this blog, but life has a great way of sidetracking you and pulling you in multiple directions away from here...
Today I decided to channel my inner Mary Berry and whip up a batch of the nest cakes using my recipe which used to make them for Easter last year. It's a fairly straightforward recipe, as my skills don't extend very far, but they (hopefully) look like effort was put in for their decoration. (Plus you can't go wrong with fuzzy Easter chicks on cakes...) This recipe makes 12 individual cakes, but doubling it to make more is fine :)
Ingredients:
Cakes:
100g self raising flour
100g caster sugar
100g butter or margarine
2 medium sized eggs
Icing:
2 tubes of green icing
Nests:
2 handfuls of shreddies
1 chocolate bar (75g) - (I used Cadbury's)
2 teaspoons of golden syrup
1 regular packet of mini eggs
*ingredient amounts for nests are an estimate, so you can add in more or less as you require
1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees. Add your sugar and butter to a large mixing bowl and mix until light and fluffy. You can use a wooden spoon or to speed things up use an electric whisk.
2. Add one of the eggs to the mix with a spoonful of the flour. Fold into the mix using a wooden spoon and repeat with the second egg. After you have mixed both eggs gently fold in the remanding flour.
(Tip: folding the mixture is a gentle process which allows oxygen into the batter, and will make your cakes light and fluffy.)
3. Scoop equal portions of the cake batter into cupcake cases, ideally on a muffin tray with indents to hold the cases. Put your cakes in the oven on the top shelf for around 20 minutes.
4. After 20 minutes open the oven and check your cakes have turned a golden brown colour. To check if they have been cooked all the way through, use a knife to poke through one cake, if the knife comes out clean, the cakes are cooked. If not, put back in the oven for a couple of minutes and keep checking until baked.
5. Allow the cakes to cool after you have taken them out of the oven, ideally for about 20 minutes/half an hour.
6. Once cooled, use the tubes of green icing to pipe on swirls of icing, starting from the outside and working up to the middle of the cake.
7. After you have iced your cakes, place a pan of boiling water on the gas and use a glass bowl over the top of the water (bain-marie) to melt your chocolate.
8. Once melted, add your shreddies and golden syrup to the chocolate and crush together using the wooden spoon. Make sure the shreddies are covered equally with the chocolate and golden syrup.
9. (This is the messy part!) Once you have your chocolately nest mixture, use a teaspoon to gentle place small amounts of the mix onto the cakes. You will have to use your fingers!
10. When all of the cakes have nests, simply add one or two mini eggs to the top, and finish off with an Easter chick.
And there you have it, cute little fairy cakes with a little extra chocolately goodness...
Hope you enjoy!
Josie x
