Let's Go Back To Easter?

I know, I know. Easter has been and gone. But these cakes were my friend's request for me to make this weekend.

When the cakes (a standard 3 egg chocolate cake mix) came out the oven I was so pleased - the flattest tops I've ever produced!

Bizarrely, last time I made these (you know, for actual Easter) there was only just enough mix to make 12 cupcakes, whereas this time I easily had enough for 2 mini cakes as well. Ho hum, extra cake is never something to complain about! Despite my worries on Twitter...

...they iced up pretty well too...

Mini photo shoot to make out these cakes are more appropriate for Spring/Summer than they actually are...

However, despite their attractive qualities, these cakes have let me down. On the inside, where it counts. They are supposed to look like this...

but today, not so much. They were so disappointing in fact that I didn't even photograph them. I will do - my friend hasn't actually arrived yet so we've only tested one cake so far. I was hoping to get all the photos ready for this post before she arrived. No joy. I will try to update the post with a photo of the inside later on, whether successful or not!

I'm not really sure what's gone wrong with them today. I put some cake mix into the cases first before putting the mini creme eggs in, same as I did last time, but the eggs have sunk completely to the bottom. So much so that when I peeled the case away the, extremely flattened, egg came off with it! Gah. I was so unsure about how these would turn out when I first made them, but after previous success I was quietly confident this time. Oh well, you can't win them all. They still taste nice which is the main thing!

****

A bit later than promised, but this is what the inside of this weekend's batch of creme egg cupcakes looked like...

Not quite the same! The egg completely squished in on itself and sunk right to the bottom - you can see on the bottom of the cupcake the melted chocolate - it broke away from the cake so easily! I did think of the potential problem though. I tend to worry that my cakes aren't going to rise if they use self-raising flour rather than plain flour + baking powder, so as my bag of self-raising flour had been open a while, I also added a pinch of baking powder to the cake mix. Guess that made the mix too light so the heavy frozen creme eggs sank to the bottom. Annoying. Still delicious though - my friend said she too often doesn't like chocolate cake as it can be too dry/just taste of cocoa powder, whereas apparently these cakes were nice & chocolatey :)

Lots & Lots of Food!!

Evening! Hope you've all been enjoying Easter Sunday! I have eaten soooo much food today! After a big breakfast at the beach hut this morning, we went to Mum's house for a buffet lunch. We were trying out food that we had originally thought we'd have at the wedding, and in that respect the buffet wasn't successful - the portion sizes were not enough for the money, the vegetarian option wasn't impressive enough etc - so we will have to go back to the drawing board with regards to wedding food, eek! However the food itself was really delicious. I had decided that, despite not having eaten meat or fish since a meal out two months ago, I would try a little bit of the salmon...

there was also coronation chicken and ham which I didn't eat, as well as a rather ugly looking, but delicious tasting butternut squash "terrine"...

this was really tasty - it had butternut squash, lentils and other stuff (!) in it (I can't remember!!) and was great spread on bread. However it doesn't really look good enough to be the vegetarian option compared to poached salmon, ham, coronation chicken etc - I'd be a bit insulted if I was only given salads and a hunk of pate to eat! Will have to re-think. Some of Mum's friends have offered to make quiches so may go down that route, we'll see.

The above food was all from M&S, then we supplemented it with some salads from Waitrose...

some kind of bean salad (I avoided), roast veg couscous, coleslaw & pasta salad, plus lettuce, tomatoes, bread etc. All together...

and this was my plate (I gave the prawn to daughter as she loves them way more than I do!)...

I went back for seconds of the butternut squash pate, bread, coleslaw and couscous, yum.

Of course, the thing I was most looking forward to was the cakes...

I'd made the lemon poppy seed muffins with a lemon glaze between breakfast and lunch today...

again from the Muffins Fast and Fantastic book by Susan Reimer that I linked to yesterday. The creme egg cupcakes were an idea from My Baking Addiction and turned out really well - my icing normally lets my cakes down but I was quite impressed with these so excuse the excessive amount of photos!!

the moment of truth though came when I cut one open at Mum's...

and I'm pleased to report they were a success - the mini creme egg was still whole inside - freezing them before cooking worked!! :)

Yum, these tasted delicious too! I'm not normally a huge fan of chocolate cakes as they can be a bit dry, but between the creme egg inside and the huge amount of icing on top, these were really good!

I also ate a lemon poppy seed muffin...

these were good too, the muffins themselves weren't actually that lemony but the fresh lemon juice icing more than made up for that!

I have felt so full since lunch! I have managed to squeeze a couple of things in though - a mini chocolate flake...

and a Total Greek yoghurt pot with honey...

bizarre though, when I ate one of these 6 weeks ago, the honey was set (I even went back to an old blog post to check the photo here!!) but this time the honey was clear. I preferred the set one :( so think I'll be sticking to adding my own honey into plain Greek yoghurt in future!

I really should have something else to eat otherwise I'll be hungry in the middle of the night, but at the moment I still feel so full and bloated...way too many bread/cake products have been consumed by me today! Worth it as a one-off day, but definitely looking forward to having a smoothie for breakfast tomorrow! :) Hope everyone else has enjoyed the day too, I also managed to fit in a bit of sitting in my Mum's back garden after lunch - loving this sunshine!