Happy Christmas!

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and it was filled with as many cupcake related prezzies as mine was! and filled with tasty treats! We had a rather unusual Christmas day and spent it at the beach...which was definitely a first! (note the sandballs instead of snowballs that we would have been playing with had we been back in the U.K)

As promised, here's a little snippet of some of our festive baking we've been upto!

These are a few of the 100 cupcakes we made for a church carol service on the Island.  

I know I know...candy canes and gingerbread you've seen it all before! but they really are such yummy festive flavours that they can't be beaten! 

Chocolate brownie cupcakes topped with peppermint buttercream and crushed candy canes.

Gingerbread cupcakes topped with cream cheese frosting, a little gingerbread cookie star, and my favourite part was the gingerbread crumb! thanks to my sister for that idea...I will sure miss my baking partner when she goes back to England on Tuesday! boooo

We rolled these larger gingerbread cupcakes in gingerbread crumb and topped with 3 stars.

These cuppies got flat frosted with some fun cookies as toppers.

These were chocolate brownie cupcakes topped with chocolate frosting, a mini marshmallow and a dusting of icing sugar - a basic version of hot chocolate cupcakes.  

On Christmas eve, we made these delicious cookies courtesy of our Martha Stewart holiday cookies magazine.

They were chocolate and peppermint cookies, dipped in melted white chocolate and then sprinkled with crushed candy cane.  We wrapped them in cellophane and gave them to our friends here as gifts.

We even made a few star shaped ones and Christmas tree ones too...just for fun! and oh my I just remembered we still have cake balls in the freezer too that haven't even made it to the photographing stage yet...which is probably for the best, I'm not the most attentive cake ball maker! which leads to some pretty messy looking cake balls! 

Finally for the 'Pièce de résistance' we made a Buche de Noel for our Christmas Day feast.  Man that thing was hard work! We slaved away at it for hours! We used a total of 17 eggs altogether to make that...17 eggs! it was crazy! There were two types of buttercream, a rich chocolate buttercream and a malted chocolate buttercream.  We got the recipe out of a snazzy baking magazine that Mara brought with her, the method is 2 pages long so I'm not even going to bother typing all that out! Whilst we were pleased with the end result appearance wise, it actually looks pretty identical to the picture straight out of the magazine! the overall taste left something to be desired, all the chocolate used in the recipe called for 70% cocoa solids and I'm not the biggest dark chocolate fan, so in the end it was a little too rich for our taste buds but it made a nice centre piece! Check out my gorgeous new cake stand that Byron got me! Happy blogging days...no more using the ugly plates from our rented apartment here!