The Very Hungry Caterpillar biscuits

One of my very good friends is expecting a baby and so I offered to organise a baby shower for her. We decided to hold it at a café called Tart in Bristol, which offers a fantastic range of home-made cakes and tarts (and a lovely glass of sparkling rose wine!). As such, I couldn’t make any cakes etc to take along, but decided that I could get away with taking some iced biscuits along as favours.

My friend hasn’t found out whether she is expecting a boy or a girl so the theming for the party had to be gender-neutral. I decided to go for a bright and cheerful theme based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar book – which I loved as a child! I bought some spotty bunting and tablecloth, some Hungry Caterpillar napkins and made some bunting from pictures in the book printed onto photo paper. Inspired by ideas on Flickr, I decided to make these biscuits and package them up in little bags for the party guests.These would also make great biscuits for a child's birthday party.

These biscuits follow the same Biscuiteers’ recipe and method as I used for my Easter spiced biscuits earlier in the year, simply leaving out the orange zest and spices, and adding extra lemon zest. This recipe makes great biscuits and so I always come back to it when I need to make cookie-cutter biscuits.

Be warned though - these look fab but did take a loooong time to decorate! 

Lemon cookie-cutter biscuits

Ingredients (makes approx. 24 biscuits)

1. 350g plain flour
2. 100g self-raising flour
3. Zest of 2 lemons (save juice for the icing)
4. 125g granulated sugar
5. 125g salted butter, diced (at room temp)
6. 125g golden syrup
7. 1 large egg, lightly beaten

Method

1. Sift the flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl.
2. Add the sugar and stir well.
3. Rub in the butter, using just the tips of your fingers, until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
4. Make a well in the centre of your mix and add the golden syrup, egg and zest.
5. Use a knife to stir the mixture until it begins to come together as a dough.
6. Use your hands to bring the dough together.
7. Divide the dough into two and shape into two flat disks.
8. Place the first piece of dough between two sheets of baking parchments. (This means that you do not have to add extra flour when rolling.)
9. Roll the dough out evenly until it is approximately 5-6mm thick all over (you can buy rolling guides, but I have this rolling pin, which is brilliant!). If the top or bottom sheets of parchment crinkle at any time, peel it off and smooth out.
10. When rolled to the correct thickness, move the dough (still sandwiched between parchment) onto a baking tray and then into the fridge to chill for at least 20-30 minutes.
11. Pre-heat oven to 170C.
12. After chilling, use a square cutter to cut out the biscuits, cutting each one as close to the last as possible, in order to use the dough efficiently. Re-roll the dough as necessary, but try to work the dough as little as possible. 
13. Place each biscuit onto a lined baking tray, allowing space between as the biscuits will spread a little.
14. Bake the biscuits for 14 – 18 minutes. When cooked, the biscuits will be very lightly golden, firm around the edges but still slightly soft on top.
15. Remove the baking trays from the oven and carefully remove each biscuit from the tray, placing them gently onto a wire cooling rack. The biscuits will still be very delicate at this stage. 
16. Allow biscuits to cool totally before storing or icing.

To decorate

These biscuits were covered with rolled fondant and then decorated with royal icing, which dries to a very hard surface – making it easy to wrap these biscuits as presents or transport them. The easiest way to work with royal icing is to start with a ready-made royal icing mix. 

Ingredients

1. 250g fondant icing
2. 1 tblsp lemon juice for brushing
3. 500g royal icing sugar
4. 75ml lemon juice
5. Paste food colours - red, green, yellow, blue
6. Food colour pens

Method

1. Roll out the fondant icing to approximately 2mm thick.
2. Cut out using a square cutter (slightly smaller than the one used to cut out the biscuits).
3. Brush each biscuit with a little lemon juice before topping with a square of icing.
4. Add the 75ml juice to the royal icing sugar in a large bowl.
5. Use an electric mixer to beat the mix (starting on low and increasing to high speed) for about 5 minutes. You are looking for the mix to be bright white and a toothpaste-like consistency (this is “line icing”).
6. Divide the line icing between 3 smaller bowls.
7. Use a skewer to add small amounts of the red, green and yellow paste colours to the bowls of icing, adding a little at a time until you reach the desired colour. 
8. Spoon some of the icing into a piping bag with a very small round tip.
9. Pipe the outlines of the caterpillar body with the green icing, the head with the red icing and the sun with the yellow icing. Set aside some of the red and green line icing to add details to the iced biscuits.
10. Add water to the icing left in the bowls until you reach a pouring consistency (this is called “flooding icing”).
11. Spoon into a piping bag or piping bottle.
12. Pipe the red flooding icing onto the biscuits to fill the head areas outlined on the biscuits.
13. Pipe some of the green flooding icing into sections of the body.
14. Add a little blue or more green paste colour to the remaining green icing to vary the colour and pipe into further sections of the caterpillar body. Repeat for further sections of the caterpillar body.
15. Pipe the yellow flooding icing into the piped sun, adding a little orange or red paste colour to add depth.  
16. Allow iced biscuits to set. 
17. Add details like hairs, feet and antennae using the food colour pens. 
18. Use remaining red and green line icing to pipe tint caterpillars around the edge of the white fondant.  
19. Leave to dry for at least 24 hours.

Baby Shower Cupcakes

As mentioned in my previous post on Chocolate and Cherry Cupcakes, I’d been asked by a colleague to make 12 cupcakes for her daughter-in-law’s baby shower.  A quick consultation with my colleague confirmed that the baby’s gender wasn’t yet known, so the cakes needed to be gender-neutral, and the theming of the baby shower was fairly bright pastels.  I spent lots of time on Flickr doing searches for baby cupcakes, christening cupcakes, baby shower cakes, etc, created a Flickr gallery of my favourites and then, after lots of inspiration, sketched out a design for the 12 cupcakes.  

First, I made the lemon cupcakes – using my usual recipe. Except, annoyingly, I forgot to fill them with curd! I was so worried about getting the decoration right that I completely forgot the filling stage and by the time I remembered, it was too late! Never mind – I’m sure they’ll taste ok anyway. 

Having had a practise at making chocolate cupcakes last week, it was finally time to make them. After deliberating, I decided to just make plain chocolate rather than chocolate and cherry. My preference would be the chocolate and cherry, however, I was asked for chocolate and decided to stick with that. Batch One was a disaster! Why do things always go wrong when you are baking for something special?! Everything went fine until I was measuring out the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Having done all the measuring and mixed it all together, I realised that I had grabbed my half tablespoon measuring spoon instead of my teaspoon measuring spoon.  Stupidly, I decided to carry on anyway – deciding it wouldn’t make too much difference! Big mistake! Don’t know what I was thinking – the raising agent put into a mixture is vital and too much results in the cakes rising spectacularly and then sinking once taken out of the oven. And this is exactly what happened! 

So, Batch One will be heading to EHH’s work – edible but definitely not pretty! On to Batch Two. Careful measuring out this time, with the correct spoon! The recipe says that it makes 14 but I made 16 and they still ended up spilling out of their cases slightly – so be careful how much mixture goes into each case – don’t fill much beyond half-full.  Batch Two didn’t work out quite as well as last’s week’s and sunk slightly again – not sure why – could be that doing all milk rather than a mix of milk and cherry brandy made the difference, or it could be that I didn’t quite combine the egg white with the rest of the mixture enough. I’m not sure.  I managed to find 6 respectable looking ones – which was all that I needed for the order – so that was ok.

Decorating the cakes:

 

I bought this little set of cutters online earlier this week and it has been invaluable for decorating these cakes. I have rather a huge collection of fondant cutters but I think that this set of basic shapes could be the most useful! 

I started by colouring the icing. I mixed some plain white ready-to-roll icing with small amounts of red, blue, yellow and green Renshaw icing to create some pretty bright pastel colours. (I’m not at all keen on the taste of the Renshaw icing but it is the most commonly available icing – apparently because it is the best for modelling – and it comes in a wide variety of colours.) You could just add food colouring but I find that starting with a ready coloured icing is much less messy.

To create buttons:

Roll out coloured icing to approx. 5mm thick. Use a round cutter to cut out small circles. Use a round flat item (I used the top of a plunger cutter) to push down into the circles – so creating the rim of the button. Use a skewer to create four small holes in the centre of the button.

To create the patchwork effect cupcakes:

 Roll out some white icing to form a rectangle about A5 size, approx. 2 mm thick. Roll out small amounts of each colour of icing to approximately 2 mm thick. Use a square cutter to cut out squares of each colour. Use a clean paintbrush to lightly brush over the white icing with a small amount of water. Stick the squares of coloured icing onto the white icing in a random pattern – so that they are all touching and no white can be seen (you may also want to add in some squares of white icing). 

Once the white icing has been covered, use a rolling pin to lightly and gently roll the icing again. Use a round cookie cutter (I used one with a diameter of 7.5cm) to stamp out circles. Use a suitable tool to create a stitching effect along the seams (I used the comb end of a scallop and comb tool, but you can also get a quilting tool). 

Place a large round piping tip into a piping bag and fill the bag with buttercream. Pipe onto the cupcake to create a neatly domed mound. Gently lift a patchwork circle onto the cake. Top with a icing flower and button.

To create the button cupcakes:

Roll out some coloured icing to approximately 3 mm thick. Place over an embossing mat (I used one from this set) and roll over again with a rolling pin. Gently remove from the embossing plate and use a round cookie cutter to cut out circles of embossed icing. 

Place a large round piping tip into a piping bag and fill the bag with buttercream. Pipe onto the cupcake to create a neatly domed mound. Gently lift an embossed icing circle onto the cake. Top with three buttons.

To create the baby bunting cupcakes:

Roll out some coloured icing to approximately 3 mm thick. Place over an embossing mat (I used one from this set) and roll over again with a rolling pin. Gently remove from the embossing plate and use a round cookie cutter to cut out circles of embossed icing. 

 

Place a large round piping tip into a piping bag and fill the bag with buttercream. Pipe onto the cupcake to create a neatly domed mound. Gently lift an embossed icing circle onto the cake. 

Roll out some coloured icing to approx. 2mm thick. Use a large and a small triangle cutter to cut out triangles of icing. Roll out some white icing to approx. 2mm thick. Use alphabet cutters to stamp out letters to spell “baby”. Use a little water to attach the letters to the big triangles of icing. Use a little more water to attach the big triangles to the icing-topped cupcakes. Attach little triangles onto each side of the large triangles. Roll a thin strip of white icing into a string and attach gently across the  top of the triangles.