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Fourth Of July Cupcakes

We were invited to a family BBQ this weekend, so I decided to make some Fourth of July cupcakes. They are just plain vanilla cupcakes, but I decided to revisit a technique I used when I made my wife’s unicorn birthday cake a few years back and color swirl the frosting and the cake.

I followed this recipe from Life, Love, and Sugar. I didn’t actually need the instructions for doing the color swirling, but I hardly ever make cupcakes and didn’t have a go-to recipe of my own. The TL;DR is that you simply split the batter and the frosting into thirds and color them separately. I dropped a few tablespoons of each colored batter into cupcake cups and swirled them with a toothpick. This is probably the scariest part because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until it’s baked, and really, bitten into. You need to swirl it enough to get the effect, but not so much that you mix the colors up and end up with grey cupcakes.

Swirled Batter

The trick for the frosting is to lay out plastic wrap and make stripes of your colors on it. You then roll that up and put it into a piping bag. Then, when you pipe it out, ta-da, it’s a multicolored swirl. Obviously, I went with red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July Cupcakes.

Frosting Stripes

I had some consistency issues. The frosting was too warm after the time spent dividing and mixing it, so I refrigerated it. Then it got too solid, so I had to warm it again.. etc, etc. So the piping came out pretty messy, but the effect still worked well.

Finished Cupcake

The swirl effect in the cupcakes actually worked really well!

It Swirled!

Nom Nom

July 7, 2025
Espresso Martini Trifle

I made an Espresso Martini Trifle for my wife birthday this year. For some reason, she decided she wanted a trifle, something I’d not only never made, but quite possibly never even eaten before. We are on a bit of an espresso martini kick, so that seemed like the perfect flavor.

A trifle is often positioned as a fairly easy no-bake recipe, and it was hard to find a recipe for actually making everything from scratch, so I had to improvise and combine assorted recipes.

Espresso Martini Trifle

So what’s a trifle?

A trifle is a (mostly British/UK) layered dessert. The bottom layer is a coffee “jelly”, which is basically jello but as trifles are British recipes always call it jelly. So what do they call what we call jelly? I have no idea. This is basically just sugar water gelatin and some espresso powder. My wife isn’t big on things with odd consistencies so I was a little worried she wouldn’t like the jelly, but it actually turned out to be one of her favorite parts.

Decorations

On top of that was a layer of chocolate cake. For the cake layers I just made a nice moist sheet-cake. Something like this, but to be honest I don’t remember what recipe I actually followed. The cake layers are all brushed with a 50/50 mixture of Stoli Vanilla and Mr. Black liqueur. Most recipes for something espresso martini flavored call for Baileys, but we find it cloyingly sweet and prefer Mr. Black for the coffee flavor. The next layer was chocolate custard. A lot of recipes say to buy custard, but of course, I wasn’t about to do that. Trusty Bird’s Custard Powder to the rescue. Then I just repeated the cake layer and another custard layer. Some fresh whipped cream on top finished it off.

Once served there’s kind of no way round it looking pretty messy.

Because my wife likes over the top when it comes to her birthday cakes I went with a bunch of gold and silver leaf to decorate, along with some edible shimmer powder, sprinkles, and some fun balloon candles.

It was a big hit, even the parts I wasn’t so sure about, basically the jelly and the custard. I was pretty surprised everyone liked the jelly, it actually turned out to be me that thought it was weird and didn’t like it that much.

I think this is a great bake to try. It really allows you to put differing levels of effort in depending on how much time and motivation you have. You can find recipes where everything is store bought and you basically just assemble and chill, or you can go all out like I did and make every element from scratch.

After serving the Espresso Martini Trifle

February 15, 2025
I Met Kim-Joy!

I Met Kim-Joy! That’s it. That’s the post.

Ok, a little more.. In a case of worlds colliding, she was at New York Comic Con which I attend every year. Along with, of course, baking, she also published a graphic novel last year. She had the graphic novel, which I’ll admit I didn’t buy, along with all her cookbooks at her table. I got a copy of ‘Celebrate with Kim-Joy‘ which she autographed and inscribed for me.

I’m planning to make a Halloween themed recipe out of it this weekend, so expect a follow up post soon!

October 21, 2024
Tudor Strawberry Tart

What the heck is a Tudor Strawberry Tart? Well, it’s a strawberry tart made from a Tudor-era recipe. But why? I’ve recently become obsessed with a new youtube channel called ‘Tasting History‘ Every episode the host, Max, re-creates some recipe from the past and gives a history lesson related to the food and the period it’s from.

I decided to try a recipe from an episode, and the Tudor Strawberry Tart episode seemed perfect.

Along with making the tart, Max tells the story of how the modern strawberry we all know and love accidentally evolved from the wild strawberry. It’s surprisingly interesting.

Let’s address the elephant in the room.. What are those.. things.. on the surface? They are little pockets of melted butter. The recipe for the tart calls for 2 Tbsp of butter to be added as the last ingredient. He said not to worry about mixing the butter in too much because it would just melt in. Well, I think my butter (out of the fridge) was a combination of too cold and not cut up small enough, so I ended up with little pools of butter instead of the butter getting fully incorporated. The good news is, other than looking a little ugly it didn’t seem to affect the tart at all.

The filling is made from very simple ingredients – Strawberries, egg yolks, sugar, butter and bread crumbs. Yes, bread crumbs seem odd, but I imagine it was a combination of strawberries being very expensive and luxurious, and a need for something to bind and thicken the filling that led to using them. I happened to have some stale bread in my freezer, so I used that to make my own bread crumbs in the food processor.

I was concerned that the texture of the Tudor strawberry tart would be weird given the breadcrumbs, but it was pretty nice. It looks gritty/lumpy-er than it actually was when you ate it. The flavor was nice too. It sounds silly to say, but it was really strawberry forward, tasting more strawberry-ey than your average strawberry pastry. I guess the complete simplicity of the recipe really allows the flavor of the actual berries to shine. I’d probably make this again, and I will definitely be trying more recipes from the series.

August 5, 2024
Easter Bakes

Moving house along with assorted other life events have stopped me from posting much, but I wanted to put up a quick post from my Easter Bakes.

The pièce de résistance was Guiseppe’s pastiera. According to Guiseppe, it’s the most traditional easter back in the Campania region of Italy. It uses a very unusual ingredient, Grano Cotto, aka ‘cooked wheat grain’ which I had never heard of. It seems to only exist for making this pie. The brand I got, D’Amico, literally says it’s for pastiera on the jar. I found it at a local fancy Italian market. I also got some really got ricotta there for the filling.

It was tasty, but I have to say, the texture of the wheat grains in the filling is a little offputting and takes some getting used to. Honestly don’t think I would make this again, but I’m glad I tried it and I think it came out decently. The decoration on top didn’t work so well, but a coating of powdered sugar fixes anything.

I also made my signature overnight white to go easter lunch..

And of course, my Easter bakes wouldn’t be complete without some fun Easter cookies. The eggs turned into a bit of a runny mess, but I think the bunnies turned out really cute.

May 21, 2024