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Tagged: Cake

Earl Grey and Lavender Moomin Birthday Cake!

Hi folks!

So it’s been a month plus since I’ve updated, and about two months since my last recipe post.

Huge apologies for the delay but I’ve been just so caught up with school that I haven’t had time to bake & blog about it. The real reason why I was so busy throughout the month of October was the Citibank International Case Competition. I had been chosen to represent NUS in Hong Kong and just needed to catch up on all my work before I left (just so that I would hand in all my assignments on time) and when I got back.

We did clinch second place so it really paid off! Since then, I’ve been catching up on work and am in the midst of starting a business thing with Jancy (my Le Cordon Bleu buddy). I’ll keep you guys posted on the status of things but you can look forward to local flavoured as well as unique macarons.

Just last week, I also went for a food styling workshop at The Kitchen Society with Elodie B. It was a really good hands-on lesson so hopefully my pictures for 2015 will show an inkling of improvement. Fingers crossed for that.

Since I haven’t had time to update, I’m going to share a cake that I did back in August for a birthday order. The birthday girl really likes Moomin (a Japanese character) so that was the design behind the cake.

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I paired an Earl Grey cake with my all time favourite Swiss Meringue Buttercream, but this time, lavender flavoured.

The cake and the buttercream are both easy to make. Piping the characters in SMBC, though, definitely proved to be much harder than I expected.

The birthday girl really liked the cake & I heard that the whole 8″ cake was finished by the end of the night 🙂

I made the same cake for my good friend Gen when she was back for her birthday this year & everyone enjoyed the cake too!

DSC_1021 Well, without further ado, here’s the recipe for you to try:

Earl Grey Tea Cake with Lavender Buttercream
Makes one 8″ cake, roughly 2-3 inches high

Earl Grey Tea Cake

Ingredients:

  • 6 Earl Grey teabags
  • 160g unsalted butter, softened
  • 500g caster sugar
  • 480g plain flour
  • 2tbsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 400ml whole milk
  • 4 large eggs

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius. Grease two 8″ round tins and line with baking paper.
  2. Heat the milk gently over stove (but not to a boil) and place earl grey tea bags in to seep. Leave aside to cool (with bags still seeping)
  3. Place flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cubed butter in mixer until a sandy mixer is attained. Stop mixer.
  4. Cut the tea bags open (I cut about four, depending on whether you’re fine with the tea leaves in your cake – I personally think it looks quite nice) into the milk and then whisk the four eggs inside.
  5. Turn the mixer on to slow, and slowly add in the milk, scraping the sides of the bowl. Stop beating when mixture is smooth.
  6. Pour half the mixture into one tin and the other half in the other.
  7. Place into oven to bake for 25 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.

Lavender Buttercream

Ingredients:

  • 2 egg whites (~60-70g)
  • 100g sugar
  • 150g unsalted butter
  • 2 tsp dried edible lavender

Directions:

  1. Prepare dried edible lavender in an empty tea bag
  2. Put egg whites & sugar & edible lavender in a metal bowl & cook in a bain marie until sugar is totally dissolved and mixture is hot to touch
  3. Ensure that you whisk it continuously so that your egg whites do not become scrambled egg whites
  4. Once that is done, whip mixture up to soft peaks (I do this with my KitchenAid)
  5. Add the butter in in pieces
  6. Continue whisking until you get a nice buttercream

Well that’s it 🙂 A simple and yummy earl grey and lavender cake!

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to comment below.

Till my next update,

Eugenia <3

 

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Orange Sponge

DSC_9375 Hi everyone!

So I feel extremely terrible for not having updated this space. However, due to the crazy workload I have in school, updating the blog has kinda taken a backseat 🙁

Last month, I celebrated my 21st birthday. It was a really great one, with two birthday parties & a nice 2nd runner-up in an internal case competition. Although I aged 10 years within two weekends (of not sleeping for about 30 hours each time), I gotta say that I learnt a lot and that it was a very fulfilling experience.

Since then, I’ve had to submit assignments, catch up with tons of work & I’m probably currently going a little bit crazy haha. Recess week is next week but even then, I won’t be having much of a holiday 🙁

So here’s the cake I’ll be talking about today – Orange Sponge with decadent cream cheese frosting. So what happened for my birthday was that my mom baked the cake and I did the frosting + decorating. I didn’t want to stress myself to make my own birthday cake and since my mommy bakes so well (Y)

The first one was rectangle shaped with three layers. I had so little time so I just sprinkled coconut on the sides to cover up anything haha. The second was meant to be a tall cake. I had great ideas for the cake but the heat of Singapore just made my fondant flowers slide off. The worst part was that when we reached the restaurant, the whole cake had lopsided to one side and it was as though my entire birthday cake had just been destroyed :'( Thankfully, my brilliant sissy and mom managed to fix it (I think it still looks decent, yea?) (more…)

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Green Tea Chiffon Cake

Hi guys!

If you follow me on Instagram (@eugenialexis), you’d know that I made a green tea cake for a dear friend’s birthday celebration. It was just a small 6″ cake that I decorated lightly with macarons (stay tuned for pictures!).

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Because the cake tin was small, I ended up having some leftover batter that I decided to distribute into proper chiffon cake tins. I bought these adorable cake tins from Phoon Huat last year and I just love using them every single time I make a chiffon cake because the end result is just too cute.

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I’ve made this green tea/matcha chiffon cake before at the start of the year (Jo’s Birthday). This time, however, the quality of the green tea that I used (Phoon Huat’s bakeable green tea powder) wasn’t as good as the previous time. As such, the green tea taste wasn’t as strong as I’d have liked.

(more…)

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