If you like baking or just like eating home baked goodies, then World Baking Day is for you. This year it falls on Sunday the 19th of May. As a World Baking Day ambassador, I was sent a pretty pastel Cath Kidston cake stand and cupcake case set to showcase a recipe or two. I already had a cake planned for Mother’s Day, but still wanted to bake something pretty, floral and spring like to grace my new cake stand.
A while ago, I won a bottle of violet & rose liqueur at a raffle and I’ve been waiting for just such an occasion as this to do something with it. To be honest, it tastes a bit like medicine on its own, but added to a cake it gives an exotic perfumed flavour of Parma violets and rose.
This is how I made:
Violet and Rose White Chocolate Fairy Cakes
- Melted 60g good quality white chocolate with vanilla over a pan of hot water and left to cool slightly.
- Creamed 150g Stork margarine with 150g caster sugar until light and fluffy.
- Added the white chocolate and creamed some more.
- Beat in two duck eggs one at a time (large hens eggs would be fine).
- Sifted in 150g plain flour with 1 teaspoon of baking powder and stirred gently in.
- Added 2 tbsp violet and rose liqueur and stirred gently until just combined.
- Spooned into 12 fairy cakes cases and six mini cases, filling to about 3/4 of the way up.
- Baked at 180C for 20 minutes, then left on a wire rack to cool.
- Melted 40g good quality white chocolate with vanilla over a pan of hot water and left to cool slightly.
- Creamed 50g Stork margarine with 130g icing sugar.
- Beat in the chocolate.
- Beat in 2 tbsp violet and rose liqueur.
- Spread over the cooled cakes and topped with crystallised violets.
The sponge was perfect – light, fluffy and tasty. This may be due to the margarine I used, I normally use butter. The buttercream was rather good too. The flavour of both rose and violets was easily detected, but neither was overpowering.
These fairy cakes would be perfect for Easter or any other spring gathering. Don’t worry if you don’t happen to have any violet and rose liqueur in your drinks cabinet. You mean you don’t? Nor did I until I won it in a raffle. Violet or rose syrup would work well or you could use some watered down rose and/or violet extract instead. You can find a recipe for rose syrup on my blog and a recipe for violet syrup at Lavender and Lovage.
So get your aprons on, your wooden spoons out. and bake for fun, bake with friends and Bake Brave for World Baking Day on Sunday 19th May. You can tweet your progress and pictures @WorldBakingDay using the hashtag #BakeBrave or post on Facebook.
Really great fairy cake recipe, thank you for your lovely ideas:) Suzie~
Wow these fairy cakes sound amazing, I love Violet & Rose – I bet they taste gorgeous!
I used a simple vanilla butter cream on half of them and a devil’s food frosting on the other half and they both tasted fantastic.
Some very pretty little cakes! Looking forward to World Baking Day!
Thanks Lottie – World Baking Day will be here before we know it, I’m sure 🙂
Yum yum, those cakes look delightful. Thanks for sharing Choelette
Thank you Tom, you are most welcome 🙂
They’re very pretty indeed, the flavours sound lovely, and the texture looks perfect. What a great recipe!
Thanks C – anything to make me think spring is here!
What a lovely post and such LOVELY cakes too! I am also a Baking Ambassador, have not done my post yet, and I am inspired by your fairy cakes, which as you know, I love MUCH more than their brash American cupcake cousins! THANKS so much for the link to my violet syrup, I am about to launch into Violet mode this weekend, now Malcolm is much better! I am making sugar, crystallised violets, syrup and some violet chocolates…..:-)
I LOVE your cakes and I was so pleased with my cake stand too!
Karen
Karen, I was very much thinking of you when I wrote this post. Not only your wonderful syrup which I’m desperate to make, but your passion for fairy cakes over cupcakes 😉
I’m glad Malcolm is on the mend. I expect you will be putting your cake stand to very good use and look forward to seeing the photos.
If the liqueur tasted like medicine and you added it to the cakes you can pretend you are having something healthy. Anyway, I’m sure chocolate contains vital vitamins …
Chris, my blog is a healthy blog, didn’t you know? 😉
I’m up for trying them, especially that frosting with the liquer in it!
The liqueur was really quite weird Jac, but it tasted great in the icing.
These look and sound so lovely. I do use Stork marge in my sponges and I was impressed by a taste test on Food & Drink whre the Stork sponge won. Voted for by Michel Roux! So I am happy to use it even more so now and I think the rose and violet syrup is something I could happily use on a regular basis. I love my floral essences 🙂
Hmmm, Stork does produce a lovely light sponge and is easy to use, but I’m not convinced by the taste test. My next challenge is to find a mass of sweet violets so I can make some violet syrup – I’m already addicted to the rose.
May I please come to tea at your house ? These little fairy cakes look so light and lovely! I’m sure a pot of Earl Grey would go so well with them!
Susan, you are very welcome to come to tea and I have some very nice Early Grey to accompany it.
This is a nice for Mother’s day or any occasion. I love cakes stand, it’s beautiful! 🙂
Thanks Vanessa – it is rather grand isn’t it 🙂
Love the cake stand.
Thanks May, me too 🙂
So delicate. For that really special occasion.
Thank you Jayne – delicate is another adjective that is rarely applied to me 🙂
So pretty! Definitely deserving of the name “fairy cake”!
Thanks Foodycat – it has to be fairy cakes where flowers and spring are concerned.
So pretty and such elegant flavours – thanks for the information about world baking day too, I’ve put it in the diary!
These sound beautiful. Baking with flower flavours makes me think of Victorian garden parties. Thank you for a romantic, elegant idea.
Thank you Debs, I just love it when anyone describes anything I do as elegant – it doesn’t happen very often.