Miscellaneous Baking Adventures

These are a few of my baking adventures before I started this blog. They are a few different cupcakes I have made semi-recently.

The first is a S'mores cupcake. Just like a s'more you eat while sitting around the campfire on a summers evening, burning your eyes with smoke, but never the less loving the s'more. I have tried this recipe a few times, and I have had different results. Because I live in NZ it is hard to buy graham crackers (VERY AMERICAN) and so I had to use malt biscuits instead, which wasn't quite the same. It is a chocolate buttermilk cake, with malt biscuit crust, covered in chocolate ganache and italian meringue.

The second cupcake is my take on a salted caramel cake. It is one of my staples and a go-to recipe for me. So many people are always amazed with this cupcake--a showstopper for sure. This is my signature cupcake. It is a brown sugar cake, filled with salted caramel, vanilla bean buttercream, drizzled with salted caramel and chocolate ganache, sprinkled with fleur de sel and hard-crack sugar.  

Gluten Free Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes

This week was my boyfriends moms birthday, so I decided it would be nice to bring her some cupcakes. She is gluten free, so she often can only have a bite (or two) of whatever I bake, so I decided to branch out of my mould and make some gluten free cupcakes. After much research, I came across a chocolate cake recipe that apparently didn't taste gluten free at all! So I got gluten free flour and made the recipe. I was very skeptical at first, however I was so thrilled at how they turned out. My personal taste-tester (Mom) was a bit skeptical as well, however she said they were delicious and tasted great...such a relief!

So it is a gluten free chocolate cupcake, filled with raspberry jam and pink vanilla buttercream. 

Salted Caramel Cake

So I was told about a cake competition that required me to make a celebration cake and take a picture of it. Easy enough, right? So I thought, well I might as well give it a shot as I have nothing to lose. After much contemplation about what kind of cake I should make that would be the most visually appealing considering it was a photo competition only. I came to the conclusion that I should turn my signature salted caramel cupcake into a full sized cake. So I did...

It is a brown sugar cake, filled with salted caramel and chocolate ganache, vanilla bean buttercream and smothered in salted caramel sauce and fleur de sel. Oh and did I mention it is 100% homemade?

This was the end result...

Hi!

My name is Liv and I am a teenager who has found a love for baking over the years. None of my family members, such as my Nana or my Mom, have ever found a real passion for baking, so I guess I can accredit my love for baking (and cooking, I guess) to watching the Food Network when I was younger in the US. I used to get up on Saturday morning and have to wait until the real food shows would come on at 7am. I would watch the steaming soups, bubbling sauces, and endless knife techniques, dutifully studying what ingredients went together and what did not. 

From a young age, my friends and I would make chocolate chip cookies from pre made dough (eating half of it as we went) to learning to make the dough ourselves and realising they were SO much better when they were home made. When I was about 5, I remember going over to my friends house and having a cook off, creating something that consisted of butter, sugar and cinnamon--lets just say we weren't aware of the sugar high that was about to overcome us. Then we realised on another playdate, that if you put lettuce in a pan with butter, salt and pepper, the lettuce will wilt down to nothing, which completely fascinated us. 

Over time I started creating cookies with the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag, cupcakes/cake with store-bought icing, and pies. However as the years went by, my addiction to baking grew and grew. I started making everything from scratch and found the best recipes that I could count on. Soon I started baking every chance I got, being inspired by Cupcake Wars and trying different cupcake flavour combinations. By the time I was 13, I started making cakes for friends birthdays trying to out-do myself at every opportunity. I swear I used to get more excited for my family and friends birthdays then themselves, just because it was an excuse to bake a cake or cupcakes. When I was 15, I decided to take the Wilton Cake Decorating course that really helped me to improve my basic understanding and knowledge of cake decorating. 

I had dreams of going to culinary school and becoming a professional cake decorator/baker however I soon realised these dreams would be very hard to achieve and still make a profit, so I made it my hobby to bake for the people around me. To be quite honest, I don't even really like the taste of cake, which everyone always questions, however it is the reaction of people trying my baking that makes me so happy and makes me want to work harder at it. So for now, I am forced to just baking in my spare time as I am in my final year at high school in New Zealand now and focusing on applying for University. 

I am genuinely so proud of my creations and there is nothing more rewarding than a room full of people devouring my work and having grins from ear to ear. I still have the desire to do something involving baking in my life, what that is, only the future knows. 

So this is going to be a blog about my baking adventures and everything that goes with them. Please enjoy! 

Liv xx