A weekend of good food and good company

Well the name says it all! It was a weekend filled with good food and good company!

We started off the weekend with Kota Joe's on Friday followed by a Doctor Who mini-marathon.
Doctor Who...the latest tv show addiction of ours while we wait for our other faves to start again!

On Saturday I was up early to bake my famous chocolate cake for a friend's baby shower (Bragging Rights...It really is famous, it's won an award and been in the Sunday Times!! Awesome right!?! I know! LOL) Then we hurried off to the Futura Craft Market where craft beer, gourmet burgers,  pancakes, vetkoek and mince and day-drinking awaited us. (Day drinking is so much fun, seriously!!)

We met up with Cindy and Marcelle who were early and eager (as usual), they got us the perfect spot - right in the middle of the food and drinks! The boys went off to get some craft beers and Cin and I got wine, we lounged in the sun sipping on our drinks, catching up and waiting for the rest of our friends to arrive. Cindy and I spent a while wandering around the craft market, wine in hand and eventually found our way back to where the guys were sitting. 

Riaan & Melanie - Selfie with a twist!

Melanie and I - Another selfie with a twist!

Riaan & I - Love this man!!

Cindy and I

Melanie and I

Selfie time!!

Some of the friends, the others must have been getting more beer!

Cindy's gifts for her mom-in-law - supporting the cause!

After a couple of hours, burgers, pancakes and a few drinks, the London style telephone booth inevitably became a prop for our photos - some admittedly lame ones too!

 

As the sun started to set the groups of people started to disappear, and we all said our good byes....until next weekend! All in all I think it's safe to say that everyone had a good time, all while raising money for a good cause!

Sunday saw me up bright and early to decorate the chocolate cake, after we dropped it off at the baby shower we were on our way to the good food and wine show, all in the hope of meeting Cake Boss - Buddy Valastro! Unfortunately he wasn't at the show on Sunday = very sad Simone. But we did see what was left of his giant Rhino cake as well as a few awesome cakes at the cake boss stand.

Cake Boss Cake

Frozen Theme Cake - Amazing!!

Frozen theme cake from the back.

Buddy's life size rhino cake

A life size Peugeot cake

Beautiful wedding dress cake

Cake Boss Circus Cake

The show was packed, people shuffling around through the food stalls stuffing their faces with different foods and drinks from around the globe.

Riaan and I had a taste of the five roses buttercream tea, its a blend of rooibos and vanilla in a silk tea bag, it was delicious! We didn't buy much when it came to food because the stalls were so busy, a friend of mine stood in a queue for 45 minutes to get a chicken kebab!! Cray cray!!!

We wandered through the maze of stalls admiring the beautiful cakes on display and marvelling at all the interesting dishes on offer. We had some frozen yogurt from the smooch van, one of the toppings they had for the fro-yo was popping bobas, they are very interesting little translucent balls that are made of seaweed and are filled with a fruit juice goo that pop in your mouth when you eventually manage to bite them. I had apple bobas, they were very sweet and had a weird texture but tasty either way! 

Strawberry frozen yogurt with speckled eggs and popping bobas

So that concludes this weekend's adventures, until next weekend...We will be going on the Vaal Wine Route...Again! I can't wait, we have some pretty high expectations for this year's wine route!!

Kota Joe's

On Friday after work Riaan and I headed off for a bit of a different kind of dinner, something we had never done before...Roadhouse burgers...Destination - Kota Joe's in Edenvale!

Riaan has been talking about this place for a while now, he went there with a few colleagues for lunch a couple of weeks ago and has been dying to go back since.

We arrived, parked right in the front of our lane and ordered our meals from the huge menu displayed above the kitchen. The vibe was awesome, a retro feel with 80's music playing from huge speakers. As we sat in the car waiting for our food to arrive we chatted about our childhoods and how, when we were little we used to go to the roadhouse with our parents. It was a regular thing. Now days there are hardly any decent roadhouses around. So few, that this was actually the first time (in 8 and a half years) that Riaan and I had been to a roadhouse for a meal together.

While we waited for I food we reminisced about drive-in movies and playing on the jungle gyms in our pyjamas.
I don't think this is a purely South African thing, if you have watched the movie Grease (I have about 100 times at least), then you'll be familiar with this drive-in scene!

Anyways...after about 20 minutes of reminiscing and coming to the joint agreement that drive-in's and roadhouses's are something that EVERY child should experience in their lives, our food arrived. And boy did it look good!!

We had chocolate milkshakes (I cannot recommend the Kota Joe Chocolate Shake enough, it was the BEST shake I have had in ages! Hands down!)

I had a Cheese Burger and chips, it was big in size and big on taste!

Riaan had a Dagwood Kota, it was HUGE! So big that it filled both hands when he picked it up to eat it!
It's basically a dagwood and chips in a huge kota roll, it looked so tasty!

And so we sat in the car in near silence, the only sounds to be heard being the occasional "mmmm" and the slurping of milkshake.

We left with very full, but happy tummies and the promise that we would return to try out some of the other  more interesting items on the menu, and of course have another delicious chocolate milkshake!

If you know of any other awesome road-houses in and around JHB please let me know, would love to try them out!!!

Cream Cheese Craziness

I love cream cheese!
I love it on crackers with sweet chilli sauce, I love it in my sushi, I love it on toast with smoked salmon, I love raw carrots dipped in it (especially if it's the smoked salmon flavoured cream cheese), but mostly I love cream cheese in frosting on cake!

This week was my boss's birthday and since I'm the resident baker in our office I was happily recruited to bake the cakes! Yip CAKES, not one, but two delicious cakes with cream cheese frosting! (Seems to me that we have more than just crunching numbers in common!)

The choices were Red Velvet and Carrot Cake - both tried and tested favourites! :)

So there I am on Thursday night, in my element, baking away!

Red velvet cake in the making.

A couple hours and quite a few dirty dishes later I was done...Happy with my nights work, and off to bed with the house smelling like a bakery!

Delicious Red Velvet Cake

Mouthwatering Carrot Cake

Don't mind if I do!

For some unknown reason, my first batch of delicious cream cheese frosting came out a little lumpy, I think my butter wasn't soft enough, so I whipped up some more for the cakes and popped the "flop" into the fridge. I plan on finding a new recipe to try that needs cream cheese frosting this weekend because the lumps seem to have sorted themselves out!

If I had to choose a favourite it would be...the carrot cake! I love it, the nuts and cinnamon combine so well with the frosting, I'm sure that it is one of the few things that heaven might taste like!

I find it quite crazy to think that before Riaan and I met I had never eaten carrot cake, the thought of vegetables in cake grossed me out completely, I mean who does that?? I can't remember who baked this cake the first time I ate it, it's a family recipe from my mom-in-law's family, but they convinced me to try it nonetheless and I was blown away! Who knew vegetables could be so...."un-diet-friendly" and tasty??

Now I am always sceptical to order/try carrot cake, I'm always like "Will it be as good as ours?"
I must say though that I DID find another great carrot cake, recently my Aunt Mandy came to visit us all the way from Scotland and she made a delicious carrot cake for our family get together. Her blog Mandys Oven Lovin has been quite quiet lately but if you are looking for recipes she has a few goodies up on there!

If you have any interesting recipes that involve cream cheese and licking the bowl once you're done, please send them my way!!

Blue Velvet Oreo Cupcakes

A new twist on red velvet cupcakes? Not really, it's really just a different food colourant!
Having said that, I decided that my first batch of blue velvet cupcakes needed to be unique, I mean a blue velvet cupcake is really just a different colour red velvet cupcake (which I have baked a dozen times before!)...My blue velvet cupcakes had to have a real twist to them!! Oreos!! The original twist, lick, dunk cookie!! :)

As promised in my previous post, here it is, the recipe for my blue velvet cake/cupcakes.
This is the exact recipe that I use when making my red velvet cakes and cupcakes, the only difference being the colour of the food colourant. This recipe makes 30 cupcakes or 2 22cm cake layers! When I made the cookie monster cake and these cupcakes I got 24 cupcakes and the 20cm cake, I'm quite sure that the yield was so high because the cookies took up quite a bit of the batters place!

What I love about these cupcakes is that they are moist and not too sweet, perfect with a cup of tea or coffee if you're into that - I am more of a cuppa tea kinda girl!! I didn't tell everyone that there was an Oreo at the bottom of the cupcake. SURPRISE!!! Much to everyone's delight!!

So this is how it goes:

What you're gonna need:

Cupcakes
2 1/2 Cups of Flour
30 ml Cocoa
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda (Baking soda)
1/2 tsp Salt
1 Cup Butter (Unsalted, Softened)
1/3 Cup Cooking Oil
2 Cups of Sugar
4 Large Eggs
1 Cup Sour Cream
1/2 Cup Milk
30 ml Red Food Colouring (for blue you could use less, my cupcakes came out really dark when I used 30mls)
2 tsp Vanilla Essence

Cream Cheese Vanilla Frosting
250 grams Plain Cream Cheese
1/4 Cup Butter/White Margarine
2 tbsp Sour Cream
+/- 600 grams Icing Sugar (Sifted)
1 tsp Vanilla Essence

How you're gonna do it:

Cupcakes/Cake

1. Preheat the oven to 180° C. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt in a medium sized bowl, set aside.
2. Beat the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs 1 at a time. Mix in the sour cream, milk, oil, food colouring and vanilla essence until well blended.
3. Gradually beat in the flour mixture on a low speed until just blended. Do not over blend.
4. Line your cupcake pans with paper cupcake cups, place one oreo cookie in each cup, spoon the batter into the cups filling each one 2/3rds full. If you're baking a cake, spray your cake pans generously with spray and cook before splitting the batter between the two pans.
5. Bake the cupcakes for 20 minutes/until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. If you're baking a cake, bake for 30 - 40 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool before icing.

Cream Cheese Vanilla Frosting
Beat the cream cheese, butter, sour cream and vanilla in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the sifted icing sugar until smooth. Decorate cupcakes/cake as desired. I used a Wilton 1M tip to pipe my icing onto the cupcakes.

So that's that! It's almost as easy as it is delicious!! I'd love to hear what you think so please feel free to give me your thoughts and feedback on this recipe!

So, I can't bake this weekend...

Hi Everyone!!

Deciding what my first post would be about was quite a process, I couldn't decide whether to tell you whats going on in my life right now or to start at the beginning.
I then decided that since I gave a bit of an insight in our about us page that present beats past, and I will tell our story as we go along!

As you have probably read . . . or know, I love baking, I like to try out new recipes every now and again, or to challenge myself to a new cake decorating session. This weekend's request, put in by my dear mom-in-law (Mama Vos), was "Chewy rolo cookies", from a recipe she found in a food magazine. I was so excited to try them, they looked divine!! But mother nature had other plans for me this weekend...Bed rest!

After a week of fighting what I thought was the flu, I visited my Doctor on Friday (thank goodness I'm not a Doctor because my diagnosis was WAY off!)... Bronchitis, so it was either a course of antibiotics AND two injections on Friday AND ANOTHER two on Saturday or off to hospital. I opted for the painful but much preferred injections and bed rest in the comfort of my own home!

Hopefully I'll hit the ground running again on Monday morning, but for now I will share last weekend's request from my little brother-in-law (Hanroux), A cookie monster cake!

This cake really was a pleasure to bake, and was easily one of the easiest decorations I have done!
I made a blue velvet sponge cake in a 20 cm round cake pan. (I promise to share the recipes ASAP!!)
I then went on to make the perfect frosting for a velvet cake - Cream Cheese Vanilla Frosting!YUM!!
I got Riaan to roll out some white fondant and some black fondant and cut out the eyes and mouth while I started to pipe the frosting onto the cake - Shame I really do ALWAYS manage to rope him in on the decorating front!
We placed the mouth first and cut a slit for the cookie, I then piped the entire cake using a Wilton 233 Grass/Hair Piping Nozzle, squeezing and releasing on the piping bag for each tuft of hair, we then positioned his eyes, I piped a few final tufts of hair, we broke the perfect cookie and stuffed it into his mouth and VOILA! A really cool cookie monster cake - All in less than an hour and a half!!

So that's it from me for now, as promised I will be posting this recipe as soon as possible the recipe is up ;) and I hope you enjoyed the post!