Mad Hatter´s Teashop & Patisserie

Another of the foodie places on my bucket list of places to visit while on my recent trip to the UK was Mad Hatter´s Teashop & Patisserie, a lovely café & teashop which I discovered on Facebook.
I booked a table ahead to avoid disappointment,which was lucky as it is a fairly small café and is pretty popular.

Mad Hatter´s is known for it´s afternoon teas and cakes but they also do hot lunches...I think hotpot was on the menu when we went! They also specialise in baby showers and are even expanding and taking over the shop next door in order to be able to cater better for special events, such as baby showers. The cafe is tastefully decorated in soft,pink pastel shades with their yummy cakes displayed on the counters, which you can´t help but drool over!!

 We ordered a savoury and a sweet afternoon tea and there was also the choice of a Christmas afternoon tea. The savoury  afternoon tea consisted of sandwiches with various fillings, soup of the day...which that day was leek & potato, pork pie and quiche and a giant scone with fresh cream & jam. The sweet afternoon tea came with sandwiches with a variety of fillings...cheese & Branston pickle, ham & piccalilli, tuna mayonnaise & Coronation chicken. As I am a bit fussy and don´t like tuna, they didn´t have any problems with changing the tuna mayo sandwiches for extra coronation chicken ones. We also got a vanilla slice,a coffee renoir...I changed my coffee renoir for carrot cake,brownies and  giant scone. The afternoon teas are for a minimum of two people but I think there is enough for 4 people...we couldn´t manage all of it as we were too full so they packed what we couldn´t eat into boxes for us to take with us. Although a little on the expensive side, it was well worth it as everything was delicious and you get your money´s worth...as I said we couldn´t eat it all!! The service was also good and they were very friendly. It definitely didn´t disappoint and I totally reccommend it as a special treat. I´d love to go back again sometime.

More Christening biscuits & Chloe´s Christening Cake

It´s quite difficult having a baby to find time to bake and furthermore blog about it, especially with Chloe´s Christening just around the corner I´d been busy organising it! As tradition states I had saved the top tier of my wedding cake-it´s a fruit cake so keeps very well particularly in the freezer-for the Christening cake. I took it out of the freezer to defrost 4 days before the Christening. I had planned to decorate it completely myself and had bought white and pink fondant, a smoother, edible glue, heart shape cutters and baby feet cutters. Unfortunately, it all went to pot...I did practice making the baby feet a couple of times and they turned out well, however my fondant had gone past it´s expiry date and was rock hard. Although I tried adding butter to it (I can´t buy shortening here!) and Glycerine, which helped it to become more supple and easier to work with, it was still very difficult to work with and cracked a lot. I also had a go at making some baby bootees which I think would´ve turned out if I hadn´t had the problems with the fondant/gumpaste mixture...they just collapsed and broke before I could stick them together. Luckily my mum had asked Amelia, who had made my wedding cake to make me a topper as a backup plan! She made me a beautiful ballerina teddy, a name plaque and some teddies for the side!

So in the end all I did was re-ice the cake with Royal Icing using the peak method (it´s easier than trying to get it completely smooth and time was of the essence!)with the help of my mum, then we stuck the teddies round the side of the cake and placed the teddy on top of the cake and the bootees and name plaque on the cake board and voíla!What do you think? Very cute,methinks! Will have to have some more attempts at the bootees and baby feet for the next one!!

I also wanted to make some decorated biscuits as favours for the guests even though I set myself up for a lot of work!! I made the biscuits on Thursday night, then using the leftover Royal Icing from the cake, I dyed a small quantity of it pink with red liquid food colouring. Using disposable icing bags and two Wilton no.2. nozzles I outlined the biscuits in white and filled in the bottles and the wheels of the prams. I then filled the prams in and the bottle teats with the pink icing, then on the bottles I piped Chloe´s name and simple designs such as lines for the measures and spots in pink and then on the pram spots and Chloe´s name in white. Practice definitely makes perfect as I think these are my best Christening biscuits to date and writing turned out much better than ever before.

To give my biscuits a more professional touch, my parents and I wrapped them in cellophane and tied them with pink ribbon curled at the end (I´m not really very good at doing these creative things so my parents helped me!!) and they turned out really well in the end! I was pretty impressed with myself! I definitely have to speed up though if I want to do this professionally some time!!

Baby Bottle and Pram Decorated Biscuits & the sad news that Fabricando Delicias is closing!

I offered to make some decorated biscuits for my friend´s baby's Christening for her to give as favours so this was my second practice attempt. The first attempt the biscuits turned out fine and were really tasty but the decorating was a little ham-fisted to say the least. I didn´t have proper icing bags and although I had a go at trying to make them out of baking parchment, they weren´t very successful so the icing was running out very quickly and I couldn´t really control it and they were decorated a bit messily. Last time I used this ready-made royal icing that you have to melt in boiling water but it´s quite difficult to get the right consistency plus when you are piping you burn your hands (unless I just need more practice with this frosting!). I used the biscuit recipe that we were given on the Christmas biscuit decorating course at Fabricando Delicias and in no time, whipped up the biscuits. This time I was armed with disposable icing bags and I decided to use a traditional royal icing recipe, which is made with raw egg whites. I found this much easier to use and handle and although it was a bit thick for flooding, I added a little water to get a thinner consistency, perfect to fill in the biscuits. I tried a couple of different designs for the biscuits to see which design my friend preferred. I had wanted to decorate the prams more elaborately but as it was pretty late by that time and I had run out of icing, I left them quite plain. I think they turned out quite well for a beginner and my friend seemed to like them. I´m a little confused though. Can anyone tell me if it´s ok to use royal icing with egg whites to decorate biscuits if you´re going to eat them? I saw on some British websites that this is the type of royal icing usually used, however some American websites claimed you shouldn´t use this kind of royal icing if you are going to eat it because of the risks of salmonella. Is this just Americans being overcautious? I think if I do end up making these biscuits for my friend´s baby´s Christening, I´ll just use the meringue powder recipe to be on the safe side! Unfortunately, I found out that Fabricando Delicias, the shop where I bought many of my cake decorating products and where I enjoyed and learnt a lot about cake/biscuit decorating in the three or four courses I took, are going to close their doors soon, due to lack of time and illness. This is a great shame as it means I´ll have to try and teach myself or attend courses in Madrid and it won´t be as handy as I will have to plan ahead if I want to make any fondant cakes etc as I´ll have to order the fondant or equipment online! I´d take over the shop myself if I knew anything about running a shop or a business!

Baby Feet Cupcakes & my own Kitchen Nightmares!

One of my closest friends gave birth to her first child last week and I´ve been wanting to make some cupcakes to mark the special occasion so out came the apron and the electric whisk today. Unfortunately, like Alma from the blog Objectivo Cupcake I went to my cupboard only to find it bare, like Old Mother Hubbard....well, not exactly bare but I hadn´t realised that I´d run out of icing sugar. Don´t you just hate it when that happens? As it is a Sunday and all the shops are shut apart from a few little shops that sell basic food stuffs such as the imaginatively named Open Shop (which in desperation I tried but to no avail) there was no getting hold of icing sugar!

In the end I ended up having to improvise and this was the start of my Kitchen Nightmare! First of all I whipped up these basic vanilla sponge cupcakes/fairy cakes from Hannah Miles´s book Big Book of Cakes and Cookies, which is why again I haven´t included the recipe. The cakes seem really airy and light. I really love this book and up to now every recipe I´ve tried has turned out perfectly! So far,so good!

I decided to use some leftover Ballena fondant/royal icing from my Christmas Biscuit decorating course so set about melting it in a glass bowl placed inside a pan of boiling water (somehow the water always ends up boiling over and spilling everywhere). I then filled a disposable piping bag with a nozzle but the icing was so hot it was burning my hands. Plus the icing wasn´t coming out of the nozzle so quickly (I think I used too small a nozzle) plus maybe I made the consistency of the icing too thick and it soon started to set. I scrapped that idea and cut the icing bag and then tried to ice the cakes with a knife but as the cakes are so light and spongy, they started to crumble and break.

I then decided on option c....leftover fondant. As it had been stored in the fridge, it was rock hard and took a lot of working and kneading with my hands until it was workable. I then rolled it out finely and cut circles out to cover the top of the cupcakes, using apricot jam to stick it on. Using a decorating brush I applied some water to the pink baby footprints that my Mum had got me from Whittinghams in the UK to stick them onto the fondant. I tried to use my pink icing witing pen to write Congrats but didn´t like how it turned out so ended up leaving them as they were. Sometimes simple is the best anyway! I think I need a lot more cake decorating practice! It´s a good job I enjoy baking/ cake decorating as I spent almost the whole morning making them! The main thing is that hopefully my friend and her husband will appreciate them!

Baby Cupcakes & Glace icing

I´m on a baking roll at the mo!! I saw these cute baby shower cupcakes on the Internet and thought they didn´t look too difficult to make so I thought I´d have a bash at making them for some friends, who´ve just had their second baby, a baby boy. I found some blue paper cupcake cases in the Chinese shops and made a simple vanilla cupcake (if you want I can post the recipe). I was a little disappointed as the cupcakes didn´t have as strong a vanilla flavour as I was expecting them to have, maybe it has something to do with using aroma de vanilla (I´m not sure if it´s exactly the same thing as vanilla essence or extract but it´s the closest I can get where I live!) I´ve come to the conclusion that I need some a muffin pan as the one I have is better for fairy cakes.

Glace icing is one of the easiest frosting for cakes however I´ve only made glace icing a few times and usually I´ve never had enough to cover the whole cake/s. So, this time I referred to the Internet but my icing turned out too thin so I added more icing sugar and a little water until it had the perfect consistency. This is my recipe for glace icing:

200g icing sugar
2tbsp and 1/4tsp water
Mix until it reaches right consistency and spreadability.

After consulting the Internet once again about how to obtain a skin-coloured icing, I added one drop of red food colouring and two drops of yellow food colouring (which you can now also find in the supermarket Eroski!!).I think my skin tone colour turned out pretty realistic even if I do say so myself. Using the chocolate icing pen, I drew a little curl for the hair, the eyes and mouth. For the dummy, I used gummy sweets. I used red euro style gummy coins although I had wanted something with a more oblong shape but couldn´t find exactly what I was looking for! On the website where I first saw these baby cupcakes they used Lifesavers or you could also use fruit Polos but seeing as I couldn´t get either of these in Spain, I saw some gummy sweets with a plastic dummy holder, which were perfect. I pulled off the gummy sweets and made a slit in the gummy coins and inserted the plastic dummy holders into the gummy coin, then stuck it into the cupcakes and vóila, you have some easy and really cute baby shower or christening cupcakes!