Experimental fairy cakes

My house is filled with the lovely smell of triple chocolate cookies, I have a cup of tea in my hand and Mumford and Sons playing. What more could a girl want? Well, aside from a clean kitchen, which I shall go and do shortly ;)

Cookies are one of those strangely temperamental things in life. I'm happy with my choc chip recipe, but triple chocolate poses so many more problems. I now need to wait until the two halves of my batch are both cold and then test them - I made some very slight variations! They seem to come out differently every time, so I'm determined to make them work.

I've had a great weekend once more. Friday I decided to stay awake through the afternoon as I had Saturday off. In true Hannah-style I decided the best way to stay wakeful was to bake. I rang Hannah and so we decided to experiment - what different things can you put into the middle of a fairy cake and what would happen?! And this was the result.....

We just made a normal sponge:
6oz self raising flour
6oz white sugar
6oz marg
2 eggs and a splash of milk (cheapskate version, you can reduce to an egg to 3 oz instead of 2 oz - the cake will still taste great!)

1. Beat marg and sugar together until light and fluffy
2. Add eggs one at a time following each by a spoonful of flour
3. Sieve in rest of flour and fold it in.

For one batch, we took about half the sponge mix and added 50g melted dark chocolate.

We tried:
 - a spoonful of raspberry jam in the middle, with icing sugar sprinkled on top
 - lemon curd - with icing made just with icing sugar mixed with lemon juice
 - marshmallows - with normal glace icing (icing sugar and water)
 - smarties - covered with chocolate ganache I had left in my fridge!
 - kit kats, covered in melted dark chocolate with a little butter added to make it shiny!

We put a spoonful of cake mix in the bottom of the paper case, then added whatever else we were going to, and then put more cake on top (aside from the kit kats, which we just mixed in)

The jam worked well, as did the lemon curd. Though next time I'd probably only use a teaspoonful of lemon curd rather than the rather overloaded tea spoon I used that time!

Marshmallows were a comedic fail! We melted the marshmallows together which was fun, and put a spoonful in. The (slightly obvious ;)) result was that the marshmallow got absorbed into the cake mix and so once they came out of the oven they sank. They didn't taste much different to normal cupcakes either, but it was fun all the same! The smarties sank and the biscuit centre of the kit kats went rather odd. Still, it was a very fun afternoon, and the kit kat ones were the most well-behaved aesthetically speaking ;)

I also made the muffins I posted about last week but tried adding frozen raspberries too. The result was gorgeous, but wherever the raspberries ended up you ended up with major sinkage. Next time I'd break the raspberries up so that wouldn't happen!

I then went to watch the next episode of Doctor Who. Great episode. Very, very funny. The next episode looks terrifying though, and is a double parter - so I'll leave it at week and watch it at my brother's house by myself so I can fast forward through all the scary bits!

I have left over pan fried pizza in my fridge for tea, a recipe I should share soon as it's great, tasty, and very quick to make! I have a 5am start tomorrow morning due to the fact that I'm not sure if it's 5 or 6am. I went to check the board this afternoon and it said 6am, but now I'm worried I wasn't checking the right week. I just really don't want to get it wrong! Maybe I'll go for 5.30 and then it can't go too wrong either way?!

Thanks for reading. Hope your weekends have been good!