Yin-yang marble cake

Today, we're just going to start out with the dinner And Gwans family. Gwan does not like me taking pictures.
This time we had Pasta Alfredo and not the Mushroom Risotto I had planned. Oh well...
Since it did not turn out quite well I will not post the recipe, but I just had to put up a picture of a family, enjoying a meal I cooked. Yay me!


But... The cake. This time we decided to try out some yin-yang cake since we had just bought some marzipan that could be used as a cover. The actual cake was a very delicious marble cake.
It was really great and spongy (which was very good, since it was a sponge cake after all)
We do not have many pictures of the making of the cake, but it looked like this when it came out of the oven

That is one hell of a cake right there!

The recipe for the cake: (24 persons)

• 600 g sugar
• 675 g butter
• 6 teaspoons vanilla sugar
• 9 eggs
• 750 g flour
• 4 tablespoons baking soda (the recipe said 6 and we did that, but afterwards we decided that 4 ought to be enough)
• 1 1/5 cups milk
• 6 tablespoons cocoa

Mix the sugar and butter in a bowl and add the vanilla sugar and eggs one at a time. Mix the flour and soda in another bowl and pour it into the dough along with the milk.
Then take out 1/3 of the dough and mix it with the cocoa.
Put half of the light dough in a form, then the dark and in the end the rest of the light. Mix it gently for that marble look.
Now, the recipe said to bake it at 175 degrees celsius for an hour, but we had to give it at least 30-45 minutes extra. That was the cake.

While it was in the oven we took half a kilo of marzipan and dyed half of it black.
We then rolled it out as thinly as possible and after the cake had cooled off, we cut it out in yin and yang shapes and put them on the cake. It was pretty awesome, look:

After that we cut out some pieces to put on the side of the cake to get it completely covered.
So our cake ended up looking like this:

Which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.

Of course we did a kiss-shot at the end. We always do that. (And thanks to Helene for bothering to take that picture)

Response of the yin-yang marble cake:
People really enjoyed it and gave a lot of complements, though a few were not so crazy about the marzipan - luckily they could just peel it off. We got a lot of questions on what 'the black stuff was' and people were quite impressed with what we had made. As one girl got to take an extra piece after everyone had gotten some it was suddenly very crowded in the kitchen as people were rushing to get one of the last pieces. So, it is easy to say that this cake was a complete succes.

On another account Gwan got her hands on some really interesting books that we are going to take a closer look at. There was a book entirely about cupcakes and it gave us a lot of inspiration. Another on was about decorating wedding cakes and I must say that we are going to try this as soon as we can. It simply looked so beautiful that it was impossible to resist. So (maybe) you will soon see a post of our first attempts in making wedding cakes! Yay us, we are like an old married couple! x'D See you until next time!

Cuffins/Mupcakes and Spaghetti Carbonara

so, this week it was cupcakes. Or muffins. Actually, we can't seem to agree on which one it was, so we call them cuffins or mupcakes. You decide, both names are psychadelic. The actual cake was a delicious recipe for muffins, but since you put that stuff on top, we're not sure if it is a cupcake. We have seen several ways of trying to define the difference of a muffin and a cupcake, but we are still not entirely sure that we did it the right way.
Either way, then they turned out rather great, cute and well-tasting.

Army of mupcakes!

The recipe:

(danish recipe is here)

• 180 g dark chocolate


• 500 g flour


• 2 teaspoons soda


• 450 g sugar


• 100 g cocoa


• 2 teaspoons vanilla sugar


• 1 cup milk


• 1 cup butter


• 2 cups natural yoghurt


• 2 eggs

This is for something around 24 muffins, but we tried to make 36 and ended up with 53. Maybe our forms were just smaller than the usual, but we think that you should count on getting a couple of more cuffins than what it reads. If you just leave out the chocolate and cocoa, it becomes normal muffins, and then you can add whatever you want to make your mupcakes just as you love them.

chop 3/4 of the chocolate, and then mix all of the dry ingredients with the chopped chocolate. Then mix the rest of the ingredients (remember to melt the butter) in a separate bowl, and whip it up. Now mix it all together gently by hans - no machines! Now you ought to have something like this:

Then put it in your form ~ and bake it at 200 degrees celcius for about 15 minutes. If they are still liquid in the middle (check with a stick), they should have a couple more minutes.

and after 15-17 minutes:

Cuffins. A lot of them.

now for the interesting part. The topping.

Recipe:

• 500 g. sugar


• 3/4 cup whipping cream


• 200 g butter


• 1 small orange


• ½ lemon

This will turn out white, so if you want some colour into it, you have to add food colouring. We used red and blue, because we wanted it to be purple.

This is developed most by Gwan. I was awfully tired and fell asleep, so she did most of it. Yay her!

First, you melt the butter in a pot, and then mix the butter and half of the whipping cream. squeeze the orange and lemon, and put the juice in the pot. Put it all in the fridge (or if it is as cold as it is here, you can just put it outside covered in some snow for an hour) until it has stiffened. This can take a couple of hours, so you should maybe actually start with making this.

After it has cooled down, you whip it with an electrical whisker. This might be a little hard, but as you do it, you put in the rest of the whipping cream. You can just continue to put in more if it does not get as stiff as you want it to be. Now add some colouring if you like to, and then put it on your mupcakes. Remember the 1/4 of chocolate you haven't used yet? If you want, you can shred it up and crumple it on the top. Gives it a great and delicious look, and is just the dot over the i (which is, by the way, called a tittle)

Here we have the beautiful result!

Response of the cuffins:

Very good! They got a lot of "mmmh! Can I has more?" and a hell lot of "Omg, wth is that on the top, gimme the recipe!". As there was more left after everybody got 1 cuffin, I said that the fast people could get another one, so they of course ran as fast as they could over to the cakes n_n; Another victory, a lot said that they were

"the best cupcakes I have ever tasted,,

__________________________________________

Since I (Thi-chan) spend so much time in Gwans kitchen I decided to start making dinner for her family every Tuesday so that I would contribute a little to the home, too.
This time I decided to cook what have been my very favorite dish for years; Spaghetti carbonara. I must say it was great to finally work in a proper kitchen again and the cooking was made extremely fun and easy by this.
Here is the recipe for 4 persons:

• 500 g fresh pasta (I used fettucine)

• about 250 g bacon
  
• 1 cup cream
• 4 eggs
• 50 g granted parmesan cheese
• Some salt and pepper

First you fry the bacon and leave the fat to drip off on a papertowel.
Then boil the pasta with some salt and olive oil. While the pasta is on the stove mix the cream, eggs and parmesan cheese together. Add the bacon and when the pasta is done, pour off the water, put it back into the pot and mix it with the sauce. You can leave it on the stove for about a minute for the sauce to be just right. Now it is supposed to look like this:

You then arrange it on four plates with fresh-grounded pepper on top et voila! It's ready to be served.Gwans family really seemed to like my cooking, asking me how I had made it and how long it had taken me. It was also eaten quite fast, so I am left to believe that maybe I created a new favourite in the family. Next week I plan to make a good mushroom risotto. See ya until then!

bloopers:

CAKESMOOTHIE!

that one, you know..

So. Today we have been baking "that one, you know....". Seriously, that's what it's called ô_O now you can be perveted and think wrong, or be very confused. Most people gets confused when you tell them that you are baking "that one, you know". Including me (Gwan), when thi-chan first told me what we were going to bake. She must have laughed a whole lot, like I did too when we told it to my sister.
Anywho, it somehow should've looked like this:

a very simple square cake that reminds me a whole lot of a chocolate version of a danish cake called "dream cake". It didn't contain chocolate untill we made our own version ;3 just a simple simple cake with some nasty stuff on top of it.

BUT!

That was only untill WE decided to make it, and of course we weren't satisfied with something that simple and easygoing :b So therefore, we decided to make it a chocolate-lemon-layered cake instead:

What we did, was that we baked it in two smaller red forms, the one a little smaller than the other. Just the normal cake there, nothing extra. Then we wanted to put some chocolate in it. So we made some chocolate ganaché (to make that, you take ½ ltr. of non-whipped whipped-cream and 200 g. dark chocolate and melt it in a pot. Then you put it in the fridge to make it cool of and stiffen. From there, you can either just use it as glazing on top of your cake, which tastes like god and make a smooth beautiful surface. Or you can do as we did, whip it up after it has been stiffened, so it becomes like a hard whip-cream. But beware, it takes lots of hours to cool of! we puttet it in the freezer for 3-4 hours). And because we still thought it was boring and kind of heavy, we put lemon juice of half a lemon in the ganaché. It tastes awesome, I tell you. I am personally a sucker for lemon-chocolate :b A shame that it costs so much here in Denmark to buy...
Anygay, then we put on the ganaché on the biggest cake (the bottom - and there were a lot of ganaché!), and on with the smaller cake (the top, if anyone is wondering). We then made the glazing, which contains coconut, butter, sugar and coco. We decided to rake the shell of our half lemon and put that in too, to make a fresh taste. Then it cooled for some time, until it was ferm enough to put on, without it just dripping off the sides. And on with it!
Here is the done result:

ingredients:

for the actual cake:

• 500 g sugar
• 4 eggs
• 4 dl milk
• 450 g flour
• 4 tea spoons of vanilla-sugar
• 3 table spoons of raw coco
• 4 tea spoons of baking powder
• 300 g butter (melted)

for the ganaché:

• 200 g. dark chocolate
• ½ ltr non-whipped whipcream (?)
• the juice of half a lemon

for the glazing (just melt everything together in a pot):

• 200 g butter (melted)
• 7 table spoons of done coffee
• 2½ table spoons of raw coco
• 3 tea spoons of vanilla sugar
• 100 g coconut flour
• 375 g crushed sugar (I do not know the english word for it)

To the taste and response of the cake:

It was fan-fucking-tastic. I brought it up to a lot of friends to make them happy and jolly, and to make them out judges and try-out animals. They loved it. seriously, when I tasted the cake myself, I was all like "omg, we ARE good! the chocolate in the middle with lemon goes perfect with the original cake, and you can't eat very much of it 'cause of the heavy-ness, so there will be enough for everybody! WE RULE!". People agreed. Thi-chan is first going to have a taste tomorrow with the piece I saved for her. She'll love it too.

Also, we got a deal with the roleplaying-club (that's where I took it to), that they will finance it with a symbol amount of money every week :3 I got 115 dkr today, so there will be enough to buy us ingediens for next week <3 We are going to make cupcakes.
have fun, until next time ~

Go, shadowninjavampireskypirates, go!

So, here we go! We have been talking about our baking blog for months and now it s finally up and running! We plan to make a new entry at least once a week with new ideas, thoughts and creations. Some may just be everyday cooking and baking while some are things we have really spend a lot of time and money on, for some special occasions.
First of we would like to introduce ourselves.
We are Gwan and Thi-chan, 16 and 18, and have a serious obsession with cooking and baking, especially stuff that involves chocolate. A lot of people have so far asked for pictures or recipes of what we make, so we decided to make this blog of our creations.
We both have separate blogs too, for our everyday life - but in Danish.
Gwan: www.emmagwan.blogspot.com
Thi-chan: www.almighty-thi-chan.blogspot.com

Now we have a few photos of some of the stuff we have been doing so far:





But, course the prettiest pictures are yet to come. We have really NO idea why we do not have any pictures of all of the prettiest creations x'D You know, the really big ones covered in chocolate and pretty decorations. So for now, we will see you!