Gluten free pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin frosting

It's that time of year again when we buy our pumpkins from the local store, spend an hour or so scraping away the inside and carving a face on it only to have to throw it all away a day later. How sad!

I can't say I am that fond of pumpkin. I always feel it is such a waste to throw the perfectly good flesh away but whenever I try to use it for some recipe or other it always comes out yuk! Pumpkin soup - not great (although the little snowballs liked it), roasted pumpkin - a sloppy mess ... so where am I going wrong?

I came to the conclusion that it is not me, it is the pumpkin's fault. I bought a can of pureed pumpkin just to prove to myself that it is the pumpkin and made a discovery. Pure pumpkin has a very specific taste - not one that I am keen on personally - but if you add lots (and I mean lots) of spices, especially cinnamon, it can be quite nice!

So yesterday, we were invited to a post Halloween party and I decided to make pumpkin cupcakes using the canned pumpkin. And as the cupcakes didn't use the whole can, I used the remaining pumpkin for the buttercream frosting. And they tasted GOOD. So good I might even have a go at pumpkin pie sometime (when I master gluten free pastry!). But I still need to figure out how to get the scooped remains from the Halloween pumpkin into a puree that I can cook with?

There's always next year ...

So here's the recipe for the pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin buttercream:

Pumpkin cupcakes

Ingredients
280g self-raising flour/gluten free flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
110g margarine
200g caster sugar
5 tbsp brown soft sugar
2 eggs (room temperature)
180ml milk
250g pureed pumpkin (canned is fine)


Preheat the oven to 190°C / Gas 5. Place 24 paper cases in muffin tins.

Mix together the flour, spices, salt, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda and set aside.

Beat the butter, caster sugar and brown sugar with an electric mixer in a large bowl until light and fluffy.  

Add the eggs one at a time, allowing each one to blend into the butter mixture before adding the next. 

Remove the bowl from the mixer then stir in the milk and pumpkin puree and then stir in the flour mixture, mixing until just incorporated. 

Pour the cupcake mixture into the prepared muffin cases.

Bake in the preheated oven until golden and the tops spring back when lightly pressed, about 25 minutes. Cool in the tins for 5 minutes before removing to cool completely on a wire rack.

While the cupcakes are cooling, make the icing (see below) then when cool pipe the pumpkin buttercream onto each cupcake and decorate with sprinkles or jelly worms or other suitable toppings.

Pumpkin buttercream

Ingredients
90g unsalted butter
 100% pumpkin puree
900g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg

Cream together the butter and the pumpkin puree in an electric mixer, until the butter is a light orange colour. The pumpkin won't totally combine at this stage so you won't be able to get a completely smooth mixture even after several minutes but don't worry about it, it will blend well once the icing sugar is added.

Beat in the vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

Add the icing sugar and mix well until smooth. I always add the icing sugar and mix by hand first to avoid clouds of icing sugar billowing out and settling across my whole kitchen. Once the icing sugar has started mixing in to the point that it doesn't fly everywhere, I then finish it off with the beater on my trusty Kitchen Aid until it's smooth and blended evenly.

Little Love Cakes creates high quality and bespoke cakes for any celebration in the Twickenham/ Teddington/ Richmond area. Visit us on Facebook at littlelovecakeslondon.

Each cake is baked and decorated using high quality ingredients and is decorated with care and great attention to detail - we know it's the little things that make a cake special and unique. 

© 2014 Nicola Noble & Little Love Cakes: 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. 

A day or two at the beach ...

Over the summer I had orders for two beach themed cakes. The first was for a lady's 50th birthday and the brief was a beach theme with beach huts and lots of pink. The second was for a man's 40th birthday and anything beachy was fine. The resulting cakes show how two similar sounding orders can turn out very differently with a little imagination ...

My initial idea for the beach hut cake was to have three huts side by side on the top of the cake but when it came to putting it all together, I soon realised that three huts just weren't going to work with the beach themed accessories that the customer also wanted - they would have all ended up being very small and hardly noticeable. So a redesign later and the three became one, incorporating lots of pink and some other bright colours to help stop it being too, too girly.

The accessories included a beach mat, a pair of flip flops, a beach towel, a beach bag, a beach ball, a sun hat and a bucket and spade.

The beach hut was also cake and I added a wood effect door and pink window shutters. I cut out the window shape and placed a piece of striped fondant inside to match the beach towel, then added window bars and some piping gel to give a glass-effect.

The sand was created by drying the cake off-cuts in the oven on a low temperature for about 30 minutes then blitzing them into crumbs. I then glued this onto a piece of fondant on top of the cake that I had mixed to a similar colour (pale yellow and teddy bear brown ready coloured fondant in about a 2:1 ratio). There was enough sand for my second beach cake the following week, which I stored in an air tight container until I need it.

The second cake was for a man's 40th birthday. The brief was to have number cakes and a beach theme. Knowing the birthday boy was an Australian, I decided to have a little fun with this cake ...

I created the numbers by baking a circle for the 0 and a rectangular cake for the 4, which I then cut into shape using a template I had made from greaseproof paper. The bottom of the cakes were decorated with a darker blue fondant "ribbon" with waves. I topped each cake with the sand coloured fondant and the cake crumbs.

The 0 was made by cutting a circle out of the middle of the top layer of the round cake which I then covered with the turquoise icing and filled with piping gel and a shark's fin. I also added a surf board (I was so pleased with my unique design and the birthday boy's name worked really well on it, don't you think?).

Other beach decorations included a beach towel, a pair of thongs (flip flops), a bucket and spade, some sandcastles and a selection of fondant shells.

I really like the way the beach towel rolled up and I added a couple of rows of stitching along the edge.

So each cake with a beach theme and some similar elements came out very differently and both recipients were very happy with their cakes.

I wonder what cakes Autumn will bring ...

Little Love Cakes creates high quality and bespoke cakes for any celebration in the Twickenham/ Teddington/ Richmond area. Visit us on Facebook at littlelovecakeslondon.

Each cake is baked and decorated using high quality ingredients and is decorated with care and great attention to detail - we know it's the little things that make a cake special and unique. 

© 2014 Nicola Noble & Little Love Cakes: 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. 

Let's get Minecrafting (cake) ...

I have had great fun making a couple of Minecraft cakes recently. Minecraft is a global phenomenon blocky freeform building game on the computer, Xbox and handheld devices.

The first cake was a Creeper face.

I baked a square cake and covered it in dark green fondant then created a mosaic of different coloured green squares for the Creeper face.

Creating the Creeper mouth involved folding some greaseproof paper into squares and marking the ones that needed to be cut out of black fondant. I found a Minecraft-esque font for the birthday boy's name and cut this out of grey fondant.

To finish the cake, I added some more green squares of fondant randomly around the sides of the cake...

The next cake included characters from the Minecraft game. The main character is called Steve. In addition, I included the iconic Creeper and, the birthday boy's favourite, a piggy.

I found some printable 3D paper characters (here) which, when made up, proved to be perfect proportions to copy for the cake. The characters were very detailed and took quite some time but were well worth the attention to detail. And no, I didn't get Steve's eyes wrong, he actually does look like that!

I made them ahead of the due date for the cake to allow them to harden and be able to stand on top of the cake and added some dried spaghetti to fix Steve's head to his body and to all the feet to help them stand on the top.

For fun I also added some detail to the inside of the cake. One aspect of the game is to go mining for ores and the ores can be found at diffent depths. So when the birthday boy cuts into the cake, he will find diamond, gold, redstone and iron ore. Lucky him ...

As with the Creeper face cake above, I also added the birthday boy's name in a Minecraft-esque font and attached it to the side of the cake.

I wonder what Minecraft cake I will get to do next ...

© 2014 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.

Feeling a little peachy ...

I've been busy creating lots of different cakes recently. One of these was a lady's bottom which was great fun to make.

I baked three 9" round sponges and then carved them into a peachy bottom shape. I have discovered that making two semicircles with my hands and joining the thumbs together makes a perfect template for a bottom - who'd have guessed!

Once the sponges were carved into shape, I buttercreamed the outside of the cake and added a little extra for good luck onto the top of each buttock. I then covered the whole thing in flesh coloured fondant and used my hands to smooth it all down. Not much cellulite on this one!

I then created a pair of black panties which I carefully placed over the bottom, embossed with a swirly embossing mat and added some stitch marks to the edges of the panties for extra realism. The lovely lady then had a tattoo added with the lucky birthday boy's initial and the finishing touch was some black lace around the cake board.

I'm glad to say that the birthday boy was very pleased with his cake!

© 2014 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.

I've finally gone and set up my own cake business ...

After years of people telling me that I should set up a cake business, the time is finally right and I have taken the plunge - woo hoo!

We live in a relatively long road which has a fantastic Facebook group and after mentioning the idea of setting up my own cake business, I got two orders straight away and I now have one to two cakes ordered for every week until the summer holidays and orders are beginning to come in for September.

I needed to come up with a name for my little cake business and I turned to Sophie for inspiration. After years of seeing me putting my Snowballs brand on the back of my greetings cards, she came up with branding for her own cards and draws a heart balloon with "Little Love" inside on the back of all her cards she makes for her friends. I loved it and so Little Love Cakes was born.

For the branding, I used an image of a cupcake that I painted onto an apron for Sophie's cupcake party last year (see here).

I am so excited about all the fun cakes I am going to get to make. Take a look at my Little Love Cakes Facebook page and watch out for the website which will be following soon. I am very happy to take order from September so e-mail me at littlelovecakeslondon@gmail.com if you would like a quote.

© 2014 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.

Afternoon tea anyone?

It was my niece's 20th birthday this month and I got to make her cake. She wanted a proper tea service for her present and an afternoon tea party celebration, so the cake of course had to follow the theme.

I had lots of fun making a miniature tea service out of fondant and once the pieces had dried, painting them with gold edging and little roses. I was really pleased with the finished cake and my niece loved it. 

I found a really helpful tutorial on how to make the tea set (take a look here) which I followed to make the tea pot and handles on the tea cups. I made the tea cups by rolling out the fondant reasonably thinly and cutting a circle and a rectangle and then forming the rectangle into a tube and fixing it to the circle before adding the handle. 

I filled each of the tea cups with some piping gel that I coloured brown which made it look like black tea/coffee. If I do a similar cake again, I would try to make the tea look milky and to fill the milk jug with "milk" - but that's something to figure out next time. I also filled the sugar bowl with real sugar on the day which worked well.

The finishing touches were a vase with roses in, a celebration cake for the middle of the table and some "jam" sandwiches on each of the plates.

© 2014 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.

Chocolate party - Alpine village cake

Sophie's 8th birthday party was all about chocolate (see my previous post here). The obvious choice for a cake was an all out choco-tastic creation but no cakes I found online inspired me. I have learnt from previous years that if the cake isn't particularly creative I feel cheated and disassisfied with the end product so I needed to come up with something I could really get my creative teeth in to. Cue Alpine village cake.

I don't know where this idea sprang from and I couldn't find any similar cakes to what was in my head so I had to build it as I went along. First piece of inspiration came from the Lakeland's fairy tale village moulds and I used this to make chocolate houses. Using milk, dark and white chocolate, I poured melted chocolate into each part of the moulds for mix and match houses. Sadly I didn't do a very good job of tempering the chocolate and all but the dark chocolate rooves bloomed, but actually it didn't notice once all the other decorations were on and the chocolate still tasted good!

I had also collected a selection of chocolate sprinkles, hearts, jazzies, pebbles and other bits along the way which all got put to good use. I ended up baking one rectangular sponge and two 9" circular ones (chocolate sponges of course) and layering them for a staggered mountain slope sort of effect.

I knew I wanted to a stream across the cake and that idea developed into a babbling mountain stream ending in a lake. I mixed two colours of blue fondant together, but didn't totally mix them so there was some marbling still. This ended up looking fab and I finished off the stream with some sugar sprinkles I had left over from the Octonauts cake I made earlier this year.

I had the mountain stream coming out of a chocolate pebble and I edged the mountain lake with some more of the chocolate pebbles and some of the small chocolate sprinkles. The finishing touch for the lake was some piping gel (something new for me to play with) which I spread across the lake for a water effect. This worked fantastically and I will definitely be playing with this again another time.

The strange indentations on the picture of the plain green covered cake above were deliberate! They turned into a footpath from the top house, linking it to the house on the mid-levels and I added some orange chocolate Matchmakers to provide some steps for the little chocolate people I added right at the end (sadly no photos of the cake with these little guys on) to get down to the lake and their friends in the bottom house!  

The finishing touch was to add literally a hundred plus fondant flowers in lots of bright colours, Sophie's name and a number eight candle placed behind the silver Happy Birthday.

For the first time Sophie had very definite ideas as to how she wanted the cake but I couldn't really understand or translate some of these into reality. Thankfully, she was very happy with the finished cake so all was good in the Snowballs house.

© 2014 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.