10 Things and Cupcakes

  

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22.

Birthdays always feel like starting anew for me, I’m not huge on new years resolutions, but I do love making a list of things I hope to accomplish in the next year of my life. Plus birthdays are always more fun than the hungover mess that is new years day.

Instead of making of list of things to accomplish this year I though it’d be fun to make a list of things I’ve accomplished by being quite lazy. By accomplished I mean learned.

1. If you eat a bit of cake, you’re a fatty, if you eat a whole cake, you’re a hero.
2. A sob story won’t win you a reality TV competition, but it’ll make you look like a dick (every reality TV show EVER).
3. You can find earrings at the bottom of the ocean
4. “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
5. I’ve had better luck than Taylor Swift when it comes to love.
6. Enjoy your body
7. She doesn’t even go here
8. Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant. And die.
9. It doesn’t matter what you look like as a teenager – you’ll be a hot adult.
10. Snitches make excellent cupcakes

Does anyone even care that there are two mean girls quotes in there. Because I don’t.

Anyway, these cupcakes can be made into snitches by attaching wings! I used white paper, but you could use feathers, gum paste, white chocolate with gold glitter. Anything. Run wild!

Onwards

Hazelnut Sponge – from Azelia’s Kitchen

75 grams  skinned and toasted  ground hazelnuts
100 grams of soft butter (left at warm room temperature).
75 grams brown sugar
2 eggs separated
80 grams of plain flour (Sifted)
Pinch of Salt
1/4 teaspoon of baking powder
2 tablespoons of milk (room temperature)

Preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

Grind up the toasted hazelnuts until they resemble chunky breadcrumbs (don’t over grind as they will turn to butter) short pulses work best.

Whip the butter slightly and slowly add the brown sugar, whipping until creamy and without lumps. Add the yolks one at a time, reserving the whites. Add the hazelnut meal and fold the two mixtures together by hand.

Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt. So your flour will now be double sifted. Perfect!

Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks – do the bowl over head thing. Just cause you can. Now ditch all electronic and mechanical devices. In fact maybe quickly bung it all in the sink and get some water running. And wipe down those surfaces!

Cool, we good? Add the flour mixture and milk to the butter mix, one at a time. So flour. Then milk. Fold in.

Now fold in the whites mix. Slowly!

Spoon the mixture into patty pans and bake for 20 minutes or until they spring back.

Cool and then frost. I used a 3m star tip.

For the buttercream use Sweetapolitas vanilla SMB recipe (use real vanilla bean or vanilla paste instead of vanilla essence) and then refrigerate for 24 hours. Leave out overnight, then heat up a quarter of the mixture in the microwave for 20-40 seconds until soft. Add this back into the rest of the mixture and whip in. Add 150 grams of melted and slightly cooled white chocolate. Don’t ask me why this works, but I always get far better results this way than any other method.
Of course chocolate will save any buttercream recipe so go mad really, also I feel like the vanilla bean flavour really sinks into the buttercream with this method.

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