Honeycomb cupcakes

I am running a half marathon in October for charity Parkinsons UK and I need to raise £400 for the place. To kick start my fundraising I decided to bake and sell cakes at our annual Street Party on Saturday.

I made a delicious lemon tray bake (recipe courtesy of Mary Berry) and various cupcakes. As well as my normal "pretty" cupcakes, I also made some simple vanilla ones topped with homemade honeycomb. WOW! Overnight, the honeycomb almost melted into the vanilla buttercream and became all caramelly with a slight honeycomb crunch. Yum yum yum. It was very hard to keep the cakes for the sale!

I will definitely be doing these again and next time I might even put some honeycomb into the cupcakes and see how that turns out!

Baking and selling the cakes turned out be be harder work than I thought it would be when I came up with the brainwave but as I raised £81 it proved worth while. If you would like to sponsor me and help Parkinsons UK click here. 

© 2012 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

Glorious golden honeycomb

I was very surprised watching The Great British Bake Off earlier in the year at how simple it appeared to be to make honeycomb and decided it had to go on my list of things to try. I had the motivation to have a go last Friday and I was amazed at how easy it actually was!

I searched around for a recipe and chose a very simple one - just four ingredients: sugar, golden syrup/honey, water and the magic ingredient bicarbonate of soda.

The resulting honeycomb was so yummy that 20 minutes later none of it was left (mostly consumed by Mr Snowball).

So here is how to make it:

Ingredients

6 tablespoons white sugar
2 tablespoons golden syrup or honey
2 teaspoons water
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Method

Put the sugar, syrup/honey and water into a saucepan and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved. 

Bring to the boil and boil for several minutes or until all the grains of sugar have disappeared (this should be around 150C). Be careful not to burn it.

Remove the pan from the heat and add the bicarbonate of soda, which will make the mixture froth. Stir quickly but thoroughly and then pour onto a lined baking sheet.

When the honeycomb has cooled slightly, it can be marked into pieces. These are useful for breaking into regular sized pieces when it is totally cold. Alternatively, leave it unmarked and break into random shaped/size pieces.

Be careful not to add too much bicarbonate of soda. I doubled up on everything for a second batch and added two teaspoons which was not good - that was the overriding taste of the finished product which unsurprisingly got thrown out. I will be experimenting with quantities when I made this again and will let you know how I get on ...

I have read elsewhere that food colouring can be added at the last minute to the syrup mixture which could be fun. Something to try next time.

I made another batch on Saturday which I have managed to hide from Mr Snowball as I plan to use it as sprinkles on cupcakes that I am selling for charity at our street party this weekend. Let's hope it doesn't rain and people come and buy them.

© 2012 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.