A newborn calls for a something sweet and something Chic

We have a new family member, my sister in law gave birth to a beautiful little princess yesterday noon. We went to visit them today and it never stops to amaze me how tiny, cute and fragile (well not really that fragile but they do feel like it) newborns are, and she´s no exception there. she´s got a full head of hair and just all together perfect :) a real princess. We brought them a little gift we made, a very simple thing to make but really cute I think, and of course something sweet, so I made chocolate toffee cup cakes (delishhh). I used the recipe on Cafe Fernando for Devils Food cake, edited it a little tiny bit and made half of the original recipe.

Devil´s cup cakes (this is half of the original recipe)

• 75 grams unsalted butter
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 25 grams Dutch-process cocoa powder
• 1/3 cup boiling water
• 1/6 cup whole milk, scalded
• 105 grams all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 tbsp cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 150 grams granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat the oven to 175°C (350°F) and line approx 16 cupcake tins.

bowl 1
sift cocoa powder into bowl 1 and poor boiling water along with scalded milk and whisk until smooth - allow to cool.

bowl 2 Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt

bowl 3 In an electric mixer, cream butter and oil until fluffy and pale, then add the sugar and beat until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time and finally add in the vanilla.

Combine all the ingredient from bowl 1 - 2 - 3, on low speed, by adding the flour and cocoa mixture little by little alternating between the cocoa mixture and flour.
Divide all the batter between 16 cupcakes.

All the ingredients ready

Beat the Butter, Oil & Sugar to this consistency

Eggs and Vanilla

Et Voila the batter is ready

I had some leftover (read: I failed at making toffee ) toffee that didn´t set the way i wanted it so I thought it would be perfect to pipe a little bit of it into the cupcakes - so I used a piping bag and spooned the very sticky toffee into it and just squeezed the tip into the cup cake while it was warm, it did run a little bit making this process kind of messy, but it worked (I didn´t manage to photograph this because of sticky fingers and toffee everywhere). Here is the original toffee recipe that I used from Joy of baking, http://www.joyofbaking.com/candy/Caramels.html
they are supposed to turn out chewy but mine turned out runny, but delicious so I froze them in case I could use them for something like these cup cakes.

This is what the caramel/toffee looked like, and that's almost straight out of the freezer

I chopped up some dark and light chocolate and put it on top of the cakes while they were still hot so it melted.

And here they are all yummy and cute

Every one loved them so i´ll definitely be making them again some day :)



The gift

We decided a few days ago that the present for them would somehow include both of the pregnancy shoots i´ve done for her, for her first child Emma which she had a little over a year ago and then this new baby girl that i shot only 3 days before she gave birth to her :). So somewhere while I was pondering the matter I came up with this super easy yet chic idea of finding some rough wood and glue-ing the two photos onto the plank. So we literally went to the docks and found a small plank that was perfect, just rough enough. I put it in the oven on the lowest setting available (170°F) to dry it, then I painted wood oil based varnish and let it dry. I positioned the photos and glued them on first with epoxy, which i should have skipped and gone straight to UHU stick glue, which worked like a charm. then I painted another coat of varnish on top of the whole thing incl. the pictures, with a coarse paintbrush. That took some time to dry and I probably did around 3 rounds with the varnish.
And this is the outcome.





My boyfriend sanded down the broken part of which it stands so that it would stand straight and also the top to avoid splinters and such, then we drilled in two screws in the back and strung a vinyl string between them to be able to hang it on a wall.

And finally here is a picture of the little thing :D

Happy Thursday everyone.