Gloverly Cupcakes

 When I was little, every night before bed I would ask to be read the same book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar. For some reason it was my favourite book – maybe because it was all about food!   Becky and I have spent the week together doing the second part of our intensive cake decorating course. We decided that spending every day cake decorating wasn’t enough so we decided to bake and decorate some biscuits to take in for the last day of the course. Everything we’ve made this week has been quite serious so we wanted to make something a bit more fun!     We used the flooding technique to decorate them – pipe an outline round each shape using soft peak royal icing and a number 1 nozzle. Once dry, pipe much thinner icing into the shapes – allow each colour to dry before doing the next so that they don’t mix with each other. For the faces we piped yellow dots topped with dark green dots, while the red icing was stil wet i.e. as soon as it had been piped.    We chose to make chocolate almond biscuits – here’s the recipe:

Chocolate Almond Bicuits 

Makes 25 caterpillars and 25 apples

340g plain flour

60g cocoa powder

50g ground almonds

125g granulated sugar

125g salted butter

125g golden syrup

3/4 tsp almond essence

1 egg, beaten

Pre heat the oven to 170 C and line several baking sheets with greaseproof paper.

Mix the flour and cocoa powder together in a bowl and rub in the butter. Stir in the sugar and almonds. Make a well in the middle and add the egg, golden syrup and almond essence and then bring together. Knead until it forms a dough.

Place the dough in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes. Take it out, knead briefly and then roll out between 2 sheets of greaseproof. We used marzipan/icing spacers to ensure that it was an even depth throughout. Cut out the shakes you want and place on the baking tray, making sure there is space in between them. Place in the fridge to chill again – this helps the keep their shape whilst they bake.

Bake for 14-18 minutes depending on thesize of the cookies. Once cool, decorate as you want!