Carrot-cake mini cupcakes with maple cream cheese frosting

Hello my dear Readers, I know I was lazy again, but finally here I am with a recipe.
I should write this much earlier as I have so many new recipes to share, but don't want to miss any of the cakes I tried.

Carrot-Cake Mini Cupcakes

1 cup sugar

2 large eggs, room temperature

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1/4 cup buttermilk

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups grated carrots

1/2 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 42 mini muffin cups with mini cupcake liners; set aside.

Beat sugar, eggs, oil, vanilla, and buttermilk together in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment until well combined.

In a large bowl, sift together flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Slowly add three-quarters of the flour mixture to the sugar mixture; mix until well combined. Add carrots and raisins to remaining flour mixture; toss to combine. Stir into batter until well combined.

Fill each muffin cup with about 2 teaspoons batter. Bake until a cake tester inserted into the center of cupcakes comes out clean, 10 to 12 minutes. Transfer cupcakes to wire rack to cool. Let cool completely before frosting with cream cheese frosting.

Maple Cream Cheese frosting:

1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 tablespoon pure maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 cups confectioners' sugar

 In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat cream cheese and butter together until smooth. Add maple syrup, vanilla, and confectioners' sugar; continue beating until well combined and smooth.

This recipe is not my own. It's from Martha Stewart's website. (but of course the photos are mine!!:))
I found her site very useful and there are still so many sweets that I want to try.
But I have a few comments about this recipe. Just my own experience.

1. The carrot-cake batter seemed a bit too liquid to me. When I used a little more flour it seemed better and also they got ready easier. Otherwise it took ages to bake them. 10-12 minutes is way too short I think.. but that's only my experience.

2. The same problem with the frosting. I think it should be denser / thicker. Anyway it was ok, and very-very tasty, just it wasn't easy to make precise, nice decoration on the top of the cakes. But it's easier to work with it if you put it into the freezer for an hour.

In general I can say, I recommend this recipe and I'll definitely prepare it again!
Try to listen to your own common sense, sometimes you don't have to make everything exactly like the recipe says. ;)

And of course it's easy-peasy to make the healthier version, just use wholemeal flour instead of white flour (or replace at least the half of it) and instead of simple sugar you can always use fructose and milk sugar. I like to mix both fructose and milk sugar at the same time because they are prefect combination. Fructose is more, while milk sugar is less sweet than real sugar.

If you have any questions, let me know! And sorry for this veeery long post!:)

Raspberry cheesecake without baking

As I promised before, I post the recipes of my previous party. Let's start with the raspberry cheesecake.

100g wholemeal biscuit
30g butter
250g mascarpone
150g yogurt
200 ml cream
4 tbs fructose
2 tbs milk sugar

raspberry souce:

200g raspberry
1 tbs milk sugar
2 tbs agave syrup (or replace with honey)

At first, crumble the biscuits, than add the melted butter, mix it, than push the mixture into the bottom of a pot or baking tin.
Than put it into the fridge for 15 minutes.

In an other bowl beat all the other ingredients together until smooth, except the cream, that you have to beat separeted. When the whipped cream is ready, add it carefully into the mixture.

The raspberry sauce is very easy.
Add the milk sugar and agave syrup to the raspberry and start heating it on medium temperature, just for a few minutes, when it starts to leak juice and looks like a nice sauce, it's ready.

Start layer the mascarpone mixture and the raspberry sause on the biscuit base.
The top layer will be raspberry sauce with some whole raspberries as decoration.

Put the cake into the fridge for at least 5 hours or shorten the time and put it into the freezer.

Enjoy!! That's something I can't stop eating... it's never enough!;)

You can vary the decoration. As you could see in my previous post, I made a "love" cheescake for my hippie party.

Hippie party! Hippie friends! Hippie cakes!?

I organzied a little party on Saturday with the topic of "Hippies".
I think it's so much fun to dress up and February is the right time to do this, isn't it?!
Let me show you some cakes I prepared for the party. Not all of them was 100% healthy, but in a party I think that's allowed!;) But anyway I was really trying as I didn't want to fail in the eyes of my guests & readers!:))

On the menu: raspberry cheesecake, carrot-cake mini cupcakes & ham and gruyere thumbprints.

Recipes are coming soon!;)
Love & Peace

Here again

Hello my dear Readers, I hope you didn't forget me totally ,I know I've disappeared a little bit, but I had some busy, complicated weeks, full of thoughts and to be honest, the last thing on my mind was to write into my blog. But didn't forget baking, I was baking a LOT of things, but it's a bit weird, I won't be able to blog about all of them as I didn't write down the recipes.That's an old same mistake. Do you know what I mean? When you find out something very good and delicious and you think, ahh, of course I will remember for this.. yeah.. somehow I always believe in that. But I never remember!:P
But I'll try to do my best..:)

Anyway. I would like to share a good news with you.
I applied for a few Scottish hotel jobs and one of my favorites answered me and wanted to have a phone interview. It went really well, but than I didn't hear back about them and after a week I was absolutely sad and depressive as I wanted this so much. AND than yesterday I got a mail and their offered me the job!
I can't find the right words to show you how happy I'm!! I was jumping and smiling like crazy in the rest of the day!:)
So, from the 16th of May, I'll be a general assistant in Kylesku hotel, far far far away in North Scotland.
That will be a perfect place to get some more hotel experience and this is very inportant to me as I have some serious plans for the future and one day, hopefully I can drive my own little castle hotel. That's my dream, that's the goal and I'll do my best to realise it!