Kids steam cakeII

I simply love the pastel shades of this little cakes. They are really sweet. This recipe is adapted from the recipe "Sweet Potato Buns" in the book "Cooking for Kids", by Seashore Publishing.

Ingredients

1/2      tablespoon salt
1         egg
100g   cake flour
3         tablespoon fresh milk
1/2      tablespoon double action baking powder
100g   superfine castor sugar

Method

1. Add cake flour and double action baking powder and mix together and sift.
2. Beat the egg with a whisk, and add milk, salt and sugar until combined.
3. Add flour to the egg mixture until combined.
4. Spoon into cups and add a little colouring if desired.


I love the gentle well-rounded curve the cupcake tops are. I have used double action baking powder instead of the normal baking powder stated in the original recipe. I have adapted it to make it rise faster and better.

This was my little girl's idea of adding colouring. It apparently amused her very much as I know how much she enjoys her art lessons. This is yet another opportunity for her to play with colour.

 

There are many types of food colours available in the market. I have a collection of these simply because my girl likes colours in her cakes very much. They come in liquid or gel form. A small toothpick can be used to pick up a small amount of colouring. I would say that gel form comes in many precise shades and are slightly easier to control the amount of colouring and result you see in your final product. My girl had fun adding a different colour to each cupcake. A little goes a long way and its much easier to add a bit more of the colouring then try to remove it when its too dark!

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I happen to have both baking powder and double action baking powder. The difference between the two, is that double action baking powder has twice the rising effect then the double action baking powder.

 

 

 

Having different sizes of muffin cups presents a happy problem to think over. For this recipe, the bigger soufflé size yielded only 2 muffins, while the smaller cupcake size yielded 5 cupcakes. I managed to get a nice rounded cupcake by filling up to 80% of the cupcake. Using the smaller cupcakes papers as they tend to cook faster in the steamer and there is less likely to be uncooked bits at the bottom. The soufflé cups that I tried to make the other time just simply opened up in the steamer and looked very out of shape. 

 

At first, the word "cake flour" seemed quite innocuous. However having picked up different type of flour than the one in the recipe, I have since developed an awareness to the different types of flour and what types of baked goods are can be made from them. 

Then there is yet another type of flour called the "cake mix". Using a cake mix, we can get a cake with finer texture.



This is another example of premix, which will get a very fine texture cake.

Let me know if you enjoy the cupcakes! Will do some frosting on it next time, maybe in the form of a cute animal!