Goodbye, MeowCakes- Hello, Little Bow Sweets!

The very first MeowCake!

Well, here it is...after a lot of thought and debate (and possibly a soul-searching move to the other side of the planet *ahem*) I've finally decided to take all the love and time I've put into MeowCakes over the last year and a half and turn it into something a little more sophisticated. This involved a little bit of an image overhaul, and a move towards a branding idea I've been working on for a while now. I love MeowCakes and its quirkiness, as well as the fact that a silly joke actually caught on as name, but just like the rest of us, MeowCakes had to grow up... so here we have it, Little Bow Sweets! I spent months thinking of names for my project, constantly trashing what I had come up with or finding that someone else had beaten me to the punch. As with most good ideas, this one came to me out of the blue- while I was in Brisbane a couple of months ago actually. I love the fact that it's cute and quirky, a play on words, and just a little more refined than its predecessor. I cant wait to unveil everything I have planned for this, honestly, I'm like a kid at Christmas right now. The full website is now up and running and I will be adding some freebies as well as a weekly recipe/tutorial very soon! I'm so excited for everything to come and will try and keep you all updated as much as possible throughout the next few weeks! xx

It's not all about the brand- check out today's dark chocolate cakes with
vanilla bean buttercream and crunchy honeycomb topping!

The New Look! 

Valentine's Adventures

This Valentine's Day, I'll be on my way to Vietnam for a two-week adventure! This means no frantic Valentine's cupcake-making for me this year, but I did manage to knock out a simple and adorable Valentine's Cake just to keep it a little bit festive! As I'm currently working on some wedding showpieces, I've been searching this tropical corner of the world for cake dummies and completely failing to find any. Basically even getting the supplies for this "cake" was a bit of a mission, but so worth all the cuteness!

All the tutorials I found online for  DIY cake dummies
looked so crafty and well-done, I was convinced I would
be creating my own perfect fake cakes in no time...

Instead it took four days three endless trips
around town and about fifteen phone calls
before I managed to get this nice man to cut
me a stack of cake-shaped foam...

But with that out of the way, I could focus on the fun stuff. Like these
Valentine Owls!

I love the simplicity of this cake.  I'm not into sappy
glamourous valentine stuff- cutesy is the way to go in
my opinion!

The heart on a spring makes the cake for me- just a touch
of whimsy!

The owls are dead simple to make- I think they also look a bit like
penguins, but who doesn't love Pingu?

Tea Party Table & Treat Tutorial!

As a grown-up adult female, there are a few acceptable ways to celebrate your birthday. If possible you should try to incorporate as many of them into the days surrounding your birthday as possible, in order to reap the maximum benefit of getting another year older. First and foremost, milk it with your family (unless you have one of those families where your mum or granny is going to pinch your fat and ask why you're still single, then skip this step). Secondly, pick any night of the week and get outrageously, embarrassingly drunk somewhere, preferably while wearing a party hat or tiara. Extra points if you fall off something, dance on a table, or dramatically throw a martini in someone's face. Extra extra points if you do one of those things and it's a Tuesday. Last and certainly not least, assert your grown-upness by having a super-cute tea party with all your friends, with as much frill and fancy as possible. Ideally, just send really obvious hints to a friend with good taste and have them set it all up for you. This tutorial is for that friend, complete with an easy-peasy tea party treat recipe... so here goes!

Tea Party Table Tutorial 

& Mini Chocolate Hazelnut Cheesecakes

Glass jar, marshmallows, ribbon,
doily = Perfect decoration.

What you'll need to decorate:

- a colour palette (we chose pastel blue, pink, & white with a tiny bit of purple accent)

- your chosen colours of ribbon

- one or two plastic tablecloths

- paper napkins

- several sizes of paper doilies

- a few empty glass jars or big drinking glasses

- candy that matches your theme (we used pink and white marshmallows and some pink candy canes)

- teacups & a teapot, as well as dishes for milk/sugar/lemon etc

- a tiered cake/dessert stand, preferably clear or white

- fairy lights and/or bunting

- optional: fresh or fake flowers of your choice

Decorate your dessert tier with ribbons or frills to your
heart's content. You can cut a doily to place around each
tier if you like, or place the whole thing on top of one.

Flowers add a little extra to the table, especially if they
are brighter shades of your colour scheme.

 

Fold the bottom corner of a paper napkin up an inch or
two, and wrap the two side ends in towards each other
to fill glasses for a table setting.

Tie a ribbon around everything. The more bows the better.
The more candy the better as well, if we're being honest.

Cupcakes that also match your theme are pretty much a given. These are
Raspberry Almond with Vanilla Buttercream Flowers & Swirls!

Use your dessert tier as the table centrepiece- not only
does it look adorable, everyone will be drooling over it
the entire time.

What you'll need for the Mini Cheesecakes: 

(recipe makes 8)

- cupcake liners that match your theme

- a muffin/cupcake tin

- 8 round chocolate cookies

- 12oz or 350g Cream Cheese, softened

- 2 large eggs

- 1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar

- 1 tsp vanilla

- 1/2 cup chocolate-hazelnut spread

- big pinch salt

1) Preheat your oven to 375F, or 190C. If your oven is fan-forced, drop the temperature to about 175C. Line your muffin tin with 8 papers, and place a cookie in the bottom of each paper. 

Something like this works perfectly- it doesn't matter that
the cookie is crunchy, as it bakes it absorbs moisture from
the cheesecake batter and turns into the perfect crust.

2) Now comes the tricky part.......are you ready? Put all the other ingredients in a big bowl and whip them with a mixer for three to five minutes. Yes, that really is it. Divide the mixture between your cupcake papers, tap the tin on the counter to release any air bubbles, and bake them for 17-20 minutes. 

Your batter should be smooth and silky,
and taste like heaven.

3) When they're puffy and not-quite dry-looking on top, take them out of the oven and cool for half an hour before refrigerating. They'll need 4-5 hours in the fridge before you serve them, but you can make them a day or two ahead if you need to as well! When you're ready to serve them, they can be topped with whipped cream, melted chocolate, or as I've done here, half a ferrero rocher.

 

Rustic Ruffles & A Photo Flashback!

October was a pretty busy month for me...finishing work, finishing cake orders, moving halfway around the world, you know- the usual. In all the excitement, it turns out I forgot all about my Thanksgiving Post! Since almost two months have gone by now, I'll spare you listing the things I'm thankful for- except that I want to say thank you to everyone who's been following and supporting this little venture over the past year or so! Today I decided simply to share the Thanksgiving treat I created for my family's festivities all those weeks ago, as well as some of my favourite MeowCakes moments from the last year!

Instead of a quirky thanksgiving themed cake or pumpkin cupcakes, this
year I decided to go for simple decadence:
Butter Pecan Dulce de Leche Cake with Whipped Vanilla Buttercream

Ruffles are a great way to decorate a cake when you don't want to cover
it in fondant. They still look luxurious, but it's 100% icing. Om.

To create this cake, I made a standard vanilla cake batter using brown sugar
instead of white. I baked a tray of butter pecans and added several handfuls
of them, finely chopped, to the batter. I then split a can of homemade dulce de
leche into thirds, mixed 1/3 into the batter and layered the rest with vanilla icing.
The result was a dense but fluffy cake with a rich nutty flavour and just the
right amount of caramel. Which is a lot. Success!

After-cake chats on the couch. My two fave little girls in the world! <3 

This baby shower tier picture is on my Pinterest page
and has something like 125 repins...while that's nothing
compared to the 70,000 repins of cheesecake-stuffed
strawberries, I'm pretty proud that something I've done
is making its way around the web :)

I always like to create flavours based on people's favourite desserts. When
I got 'bubblegum ice cream' as a request, these blue and pink marbled
beauties were the result, and they were a huge hit!
#becreative #hubbabubba

Smash cakes are becoming more and more popular these days- luckily
for the toddlers who get to smush and eat to their hearts' content when
they receive one!

This is my favourite way to decorate a cupcake with just icing- these
colourful roses fed all my lovely friends back in June when they came
to hang out with me while I bartended on my birthday... I seriously doubt
 anyone has ever had such a good time working on their birthday. <3 

Another favourite munchkin, Mr.Owen. Even though he used
to be a shy little thing, somehow he always got over it in time to
wolf down a cupcake...funny that. :)

Kangaroos and Cupcakes

Not bad eh?

Well hello, cupcake kittens! It has been waaaaay too long since my last post, and I know I always say that (I also know it's wrong to use 'and' following a comma, so sue me) but I have been busy with a little bit of a relocation! In the last month I've packed my life into one suitcase and traveled to the city of Cairns in Queensland, Australia! There are countless reasons why I've done this, none of which I'm going to go into here, but just in case you were wondering: This is a temporary relocation and I will be back to supply MeowCakes soon enough! In the meantime, the cupcake craze has made it to Tropical North Queensland and I've already had a few fun(and not-so-fun) cake adventures here in the land down under. Since it seems that I can't escape baking for people, I decided to temporarily revamp MeowCakes and continue to update the Facebook page and blog from Australia. The only reason it has taken this long, is that I've only just moved into my new home and been able to hook my laptop up to an internet connection.

Since I've been in Cairns, I've done a little cupcaking here and there which has, eventually, worked out fine. I managed to tweak my secret recipe to work with a fan forced oven, 90% humidity, and slightly different ingredients...what I didn't bargain for was just how much of an effect the weather had on things. While my cupcakes worked out fine, a wedding cake project I over-optimistically took on was my first real cake disaster since starting MeowCakes. From start to finish, every single step of this cake went wrong- I cried five times while making it, finally got it all assembled, secured, and looking half decent, only to have it collapse in transit. Ideally, it would be assembled on-site obviously but that was impossible in this situation and just added to forces working against this cake. From having to hide cake layers in the freezer to escape the heat and the ants, to gumpaste flowers and beads that refused to harden in the humid air, to fondant that I could not keep from ripping as it covered the cakes and store-bought black detail icing that was in reality GREEN, this project was doomed from the get-go. The only saving grace was that the bride is a lovely gem of a woman who laughed off the complete shambles I had made of her wedding cake and had an amazing day anyway. In light of this traumatizing cake experience, I've decided that I'm strictly a cupcake girl while in Cairns, to avoid another humidity-fueled disaster and also to protect my own sanity.

I love bows on cupcakes probably more than any other topper.

This picture looks like it was taken in 1975, but really I just have an iPhone
3GS and the lighting was bad, which means retro quality photos. Sigh.

A gumpaste rose that hardened as it was supposed to, then RESOFTENED
in the humidity, which I have never seen or dealt with before. Eek!

Even after hours of stress, sweat, and tears this cake wasn't up to my
standard- but in the end there was so much moisture it collapsed anyway.
Moral of the story- don't bake in the tropics, get air conditioning.

Just to remind myself what my work is like in normal
weather conditions, I need to finish with this shot of
a purple wedding tier  of raspberry cheesecake cupcakes
that I squeezed in the day before my flight!

A Sticky 7th Birthday

Last week my babiest brother turned seven. His name is Nicholas, but for his entire life he's been called Sticky, and no one has any idea why. I'm pretty sure it was my Granddad who started calling him Sticky Nicky when he was just a wee baby, but unfortunately for the poor kid I think it's stuck for life. I'm sure he'll have fun explaining to future girlfriends that his entire family has abandoned his real name and unanimously refers to him as "Sticky". Just to protect his little first grade pride in front of his friends, I put 'Nicky' on his birthday cake, but sadly for him that didn't hold up during the Happy Birthday song. It's OK though, at the end of the day he's the youngest of five kids so having an embarrassing nickname is probably going to be the least of his worries as he grows up. So Happy Birthday Sticky, and good luck!

The perfect cake for a Moshi Monsters fan, complete
with a Katsuma Moshi on top.