Food News: Amelie's House

Amelie's House

Recently I stumbled across this lady when trawling the web, and her work completely puts mine to shame!
Using her skills as a textile designer, she makes the most beautiful illustrated creative cakes.
As well as serious cake eye candy, her beautifully presented blog is full of little scraps of textile design (if you pardon the pun, aha.) and seasonal baking for every holiday and festivity. I particularly like A Christmas Hooty Tale...
So if you're into super cute and aesthetic conscious baking, check her out.

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Chocolate Week: Chocolate Cupcakes

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Here are a range of chocolate cupcakes I was comissioned to make in celebration of Chocolate Week... Om nom.

Banana and chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and a topping inspired by Cupcake Junkie.

Double chocolate chip, with chocolate buttercream and hot chocolate drizzle

Double chocolate chip with caramel shapes

Chocolate Irish Cream with white chocolate spiders web- design taken from BBC Good Food

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Cupcakes of the Week...

I've been a busy girl- and I'll be a master baker in no time!
Check out http://www.blogger.com/www.chez-nu.blogspot.com for the whole of yesterday's baking collection. All of the sugar paste decorations are made by me. I love the bear! Not really my style, but I really enjoyed modelling with the fondant...
Go take a look- I hope you like them!
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Eye Candy!

'Somewhere in a secret kitchen, new forms of confectionary are being brought to life. Armed with a dizzying array of edible glitters, powder pigments and a host of magical ingredients, the Curious Confectioner’s creations disregard the traditional confectionary forms in a bid to entertain new possibilities of both form and function. Employing a hand and eye for artistry, a healthy dose of humour and a desire to innovate and subvert, this Confectionery wizard is on a mission to take the artistry of sweet delights where it has never been before and to share his adventures with the world'.

When I first set up LouLovesFood, I introduced you to Cupcake Junkie, the photostream of pretty and inspired cupcake porn. After attending the Experimental Food Society, I am now a regular lurker of my new favourite food crush- The Curious Confectioner.

These cakes don't just look good enough to eat. His chocolate bird-topped creations are filled with pomegranate, violet and rose fondant filling.

Other cakes include Burger and Fries muffins and a dead rodent cake. Obviously.
(Actually, I wish I had the thought of that. It's not something you would really expect to have an obvious target audience but I'm sure it would send my sister into a paroxism of joyful squeels...)

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The Experimental Food Society

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http://www.lovetocake.co.uk/

The Experimental Food Society


Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that food isn't just something we consume to survive. It goes beyond sandwiches from Pret or getting the right nutritional fat-to-mineral-to-protien ratio on a plate. As as artist as well as a cook, it's fascinating to see food and art come together. It's refreshing to be shown that food isn't just art when it comes on an oversized plate with a Michelin star (or three...) and that you don't need to have attended Leith's and spent twenty years in a kitchen to make an impact on the food industry. And I can't think of a more exciting way to be reminded of this than by The Experimental Food Society.

Last week The Experimental Food Society 'The UK's most talented culinary creatives' held their annual edible exhibition, to showcase the new ways in which the gourmet artist's blend food with art, entertainment and science.

I booked my tickets weeks ago and ticked off the days to this year's event held in the Brick House on Brick Lane- and on Saturday I trotted down, camera in hand...

Bompass and Parr Ether Jelly

Feasts of the senses included a life sized suckling pig cake, a sculpted fondant gorilla and Paul A Young's Burning Ember Truffle -filled with black cardamom, tobacco and chilli.

Simon Smith at work, carving sculptures out of margerine.

I chatted with Paul Wayne Gregory, who proved chocolatiers are some of the most passionate members of the food world, whilst rolling out his champagne and white rum truffles.
I also enjoyed Ginger's icecream; 'This Monkey's Gone to Heaven' was a gorgeous mix of Banana, peanut and bitter chocolate - served out of an old school icecream van.

Its Paul O'Grady- A portrait comissioned by Jelly Belly and made of Jelly Beans. I do not know why. Impressive. Bemusing... But impressive.


A Carl Warner food landscape.

... Till next year! xxx !


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Lavender Cupcakes

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Today's Daily cupcake offering- Lavender cupcakes.

Simple replace caster sugar in your average vanilla cupcake recipe with lavender sugar, and use lavender infused icing sugar instead of plain in your lavender frosting. Et voila! I used lavender sugar for the entire measure of sugar so they had a nice, distinct flavour.

To decorate, I frosted with the lavender buttercream icing and added a tiny hint of blue and red food colouring to the fondant to give it a slight purply colour, then topped with a lavender sprig.
If you don't like to use food colouring, you can also use a tiny drop of beetroot juice for a cute baby pink cupcake.

How to make Lavender Sugar:

Seperate the lavender flowers from their stem by running your fingers from tip to root, or picking off. Tip your sugar into a food processor and add the flowers, discarding the stem and blitz using the pulse button until well mixed. Tip through a sieve so the sugar is seperated from the flowers. Anything left in the sieve can be put into a muslin bag and left in with the sugar, which should be stored in a sealed container to infuse. You now have lavender sugar!
It's too easy.

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Let Them Eat Cake!

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'National Cupcake Week' may have drawn unwillingly to a sticky end- but fortunately it's always cupcake week in the house of LouLovesFood!
I spent the morning practising my butter-cream frosting (I think I can be bold enough to say I have that down...) and made a mismatched batch of cupcakes to experiment with all the new edible glitters and sparkly girly things I had ordered in that fell on my doorstep this morning (to my great excitement).
Expect plenty more cakes and bakes in the next few weeks..!

Chocolate-cherry brandy with chocolate cream. The best. The best thing ever.

The appropriately titled 'Little Louise' - Vanilla with a layer of strawberry jam!

Raspberry ripple with vanilla butter-cream frosting

Coconut cream muffin with sparkling coconut frosting
I love the topping on this- the mixture of desiccated coconut with shimmering white and baby pink...

... And last but not least, a simple vanilla cupcake!
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