Food Friday: Raspberry and Rosewater Pink Velvet Marshmallow cupcake cake

For my birthday last week my mum got me a new cookbook. She told me she was going to get it for me, and I told her not to bother. I get most of my recipes on the internet now, and we have so many other cookbooks that it seems silly to buy more. She got it anyway, and I'm actually really happy with it! It's a cookbook called Indulgent Cakes by Women's Weekly, and it's full of so many awesome cake recipes. This is the first recipe I've tried, I've also made a lemon and blackberry cake (which I put blueberries in, because I read blueberries instead of blackberries, haha) and a cookies and cream cake. I only got to try the batter of both of those as I made them for my parents' work morning teas, but the batter tasted delicious!

This recipe caught my eye, marshmallow icing is something I've wanted to try for a while now. The cake recipe is also something different. The boy bought me this cake tin yesterday, and I thought this recipe would be perfect to try it out with. Nope. Wrong.

The cake tin is super difficult to use. It cooks the cake unevenly, the base took half an hour longer than the top to cook, meaning I had to awkwardly take the top out of the tin and leave the base in. It made a super dense cake too, I think because the outside of the cake was overcooked. I would seriously recommend using normal cake tins, or testing out your giant cupcake cake tin on a bog standard buttercake mix, or a packet mix. Knowing your oven is also important!!

Raspberry and Rosewater Pink Velvet Marshmallow Cake

What you need...

Cake

250g butter (room temp)

6 egg whites (room temp!)

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 cups sugar

2 1/2 cups self raising flour (recipe says plain, I used self raising without realising)

1 cup buttermilk (or a milk and yoghurt mix)

2 tsp bicarb soda 

2 tsp white vinegar

3 tsp rose pink food colouring (or less red food colouring)

Raspberry cream
1/2 cup raspberries

200ml whipping/thickened cream

Rosewater marshmallow

1/2 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 tsp glucose syrup

1 tbsp water

2 tsp rosewater
1 tsp red or pink food colouring

2 egg whites

How to...
Cake:
Step 1 // Preheat oven to 180˚c if you're using 2 round tins, 160˚c if you're using a cupcake cake tin (160˚c /140˚c fan forced. Line cake tins if you're using round tins, or grease cupcake tin. Seriously, even if the box says it wont need greasing. It will.)

Step 2 // Beat butter in a large bowl with hand or stand mixer until light and fluffy. Add egg whites, flour, vanilla, sugar and buttermilk and mix on low speed until combined. It's super important that the eggs and butter are at room temperature or the butter won't mix in properly, especially if you add cold egg whites. I added the egg whites first and beat them until they'd risen a bit, but the recipe doesn't say to do this.
Step 3 // In a small bowl, combine vinegar and pink food colouring. Add bicarb soda, stir, then add to cake batter. Beat on slow speed until combined, then beat on medium speed for up to 2 minutes, or until the mixture turns a paler colour. 

Step 4 // Divide the mix between 2 cake tins, or between the base and the top of the cupcake cake tin. Bake for 45 minutes if you're using 2 round cake tins. A giant cupcake cake tin will take longer, so check after 45 minutes and keep adding 5-10 minutes until cooked.

Raspberry Cream:
Add cream to small bowl and beat with hand beaters. Once thick enough, add raspberries. Place in fridge till needed.

Rosewater Marshmallow: Don't start this until the cake is ready to be iced. This icing needs to go on straight away.
Step 1 // Add sugar, glucose, water, rosewater essence, and dye into a small saucepan and heat on low until it reaches 115˚c on a sugar thermometer. They're pretty cheap, but if you don't have one, get a small bowl of cold water, and after about 3-4 minutes drop a small amount of the syrup in. Once it starts balling up, it's at soft ball stage and it's ready. Leave aside while it stops bubbling.
Step 2 // Whisk egg whites until they reach soft peaks. Then, SLOWLY pour in your sugar syrup. If you do it too fast, it won't work and will look like it's split. A stand mixer is the easiest way to do this, otherwise get a someone else to hold the mixer while you pour. Beware, it gets messy and it's a pain to clean up!
Step 3 // Ice the cake and serve! I wouldn't recommend piping it, it knocks a lot of the air out of the icing.

Top tips: Does the marshmallow icing sound too tricky? You could make a basic butter icing and add crushed meringue nests to it. Or melt marshmallows and drizzle them on top of the cake. Or if you can find it, buy some Fluff!!

Food Friday: Pumpkin and Ricotta Ravioli

One of my favourite foods in Autumn and Winter is pumpkin. I love when your garden gets overgrown with a huge pumpkin plant (unfortunately mine never has, but the boy's backyard did a few years ago and it was fantastic!). I find plain roast pumpkin to be pretty boring, I like to spice it up a bit! As well as making a pie from this pumpkin, I wanted to try making some pasta. Just having it in the sauce wasn't enough, so I gave ravioli a go for the first time. Not only was it my first time making ravioli, I've never made pasta without the help of someone else before, and it turned out perfect! Yay! This is a long recipe, but it's really delicious!

Food Friday: Not your average smoothies

It's been a while since I bought my blender, and I've been using it quite a lot. It's so easy to get stuck in a little bit of a rut with smoothies and to keep adding the same ingredients all the time. Then it gets boring and you loose the motivation to keep making them. My old blender has recently broken, but soon after I found a Cuisinart SmartPower Blender for $60 less than the RRP, score! It's shiny and new, and has given me the motivation to start getting more creative with my smoothies! Plus, it's way better at blending things more smoothly than my old blender. Coming up with recipes is hard when you're not keen on a lot of fruits - I hate banana and oranges. But, these are 4 recipes that are a bit more different to the usual berry, spinach, cucumber and water smoothies I've been stuck with.

Food Friday: Veggie Stir Fry

Stir fries are such a quick, easy and delicious way to get a load of vegetables into your diet. And you can really use whatever vegetables you want to. The most time consuming part of a stir fry is chopping all your vegetables. I find chopping everything into bowls before you start cooking the best way to keep organised when cooking. I like to use the huge amount of metal bowls we've got, but you can use whatever bowls you've got.

Food Friday: Pineapple Cupcakes

I love cupcakes, and I love trying to play around with recipes. While I have been trying to cook a lot of healthy food lately, you have to have some cake once in a while! I have a go to cupcake recipe, which is basically just the below recipe, but using milk instead of pineapple, and adding vanilla paste after step 2. It's so good I have it memorised, and I love to customise it by adding things like peanut butter, cocoa, different flavoured essences (like mint or coconut). This time I wanted to try making pineapple cupcakes, because I've been dreaming of a tropical holiday!