Monday 6 August 2012

Cupcake Cavorting with My Chocolate and my wife



I have a confession to make. I am a bigamist. As well as being recently wed to my boy, I have had a wife for the past few years. She's the other "b" in my band, The bb Collective, and we have been each other's work wives since we started singing together. Alright, so it's not strictly a legal marriage, but thought it best to get my secret out in the open.

Good wife that I am, I had bought her a Cupcake Course for her birthday. With a lack of dates and then a couple of very annoying last minute cancellations by Cake Boy, who we originally booked with, I changed the plan and we went to My Chocolate, in Farringdon, for their Chocolate Martinis, Whoopie Pies and Cupcake afternoon.





The building that My Chocolate lives in isn't the most glamourous place to unlock your inner domestic goddess being housed in the basement of a business centre. But once you get down to the rooms themselves they are a bit kitsch and full of lovely smells and sweet paraphernalia so you soon forget your weird entrance.
After some very serious chocolate tasting, we kicked off with decorating our martini glasses with melted chocolate. Flicking chocolate around safe in the knowledge that someone else will be cleaning up is pretty ace. We then made up the chocolate martinis, recipe coming up now...

1. Warm a glass of whipping cream on the hob until it is hot but not yet boiling.
2. Add a large handful of chocolate buttons and stir them into the cream to melt.
3. In a cocktail shaker (or jug if, like me, you're not fancy enough to own a cocktail shaker) put a handful of ice cubes, then pour your chocolate cream over the top. Add 2 shots of vodka and 2 shots of chocolate liqueur - we may have upped this a bit...
4. Mix together and strain into your chocolate decorated glass. Drink and feel instantly like an 80s bunny girl.

We went on to drizzle our whoopie pies with melted white chocolate - this is a great way to make anything chocolate look designer. The trick is to get the drizzle running of the spoon in a thin strand before you flick it over the pie so it's nice and delicate. We then filled them with a ludicrously sticky mixture of molten marshmallow and white chocolate - this could seriously be used to put pictures on the walls!
We finished off by decorating 6 cupcakes each with the various buttercreams, food colouring, decorations and, of course, chocolate toppings.

Overall we had a great afternoon of creating sweet treats in a fun, well set up location. I wouldn't say we left with any new skills as far as cupcake decoration goes but the martini and whoopie pies were a nice addition to the course and the cupcake part would suit a beginner well. My Chocolate run courses for hen dos and corporate team building and I think the set up would be ideally suited to groups who know each other well.


Here are my finished cakes - with a bit of patriotic Olympic spirit thrown in for good measure!

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