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If you like Grappa, you will love this!

Cuisine, Daily photo, family, Food, Parties Comments Off on If you like Grappa, you will love this!

I’ve been thinking about making this for ages and today I woke up and told myself: ” Today is the day! I’ll attempt to make Grappa cupcakes!”

If you are not familiar with it, Grappa is a kind of brandy distilled from the fermented residue of grapes after they have been pressed in winemaking. While the south of Italy is famous for its Limoncello, in the north we breath, live, drink Grappa! Ever since I can remember, we always had bottles of Grappa in the house, actually we always had at least 5 different flavours of Grappa in our home! Liquorice grappa, herb grappa, honey grappa, blueberry grappa etc.

Grappa is not something you would get drunk on as usually you’d drink just a small glass as a digestif after a meal or you’d add it to the expresso coffee, the so-called “Caffe corretto”.

Just recently when my mom came to visit us, she brought a bottle of Honey Grappa! Delicious, I call it the Ladies Grappa as normal Grappa is incredibly strong but this one has a hint of honey and it’s delicious!

So I thought, why not Honey Grappa cupcakes!?! At the beginning I baked a batch using honey as one of the ingredients but I didn’t quite like the taste, maybe because I used a citrus kind of honey,  so I decided to make another batch without the honey.

AND I LOVED IT!  Here is what I did.

Ingredients:

For the cupcakes:

110gr of caster sugar

2 free range eggs

110 gr of butter softened at room temperature

1 tbs of vanilla extract

110gr of self raising flour

1-2 tbsp of milk

1 small glass of grappa (around 4tbsp or 30ml)

For the buttercream icing:

140 gr of butter

200gr of icing sugar

1 small glass of grappa (again around 4tbsp or 30ml – even more if you prefer a stronger taste)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 170 degrees (mine it’s fan one so if you have a conventional oven preheat to 190). Line a cupcake pan with paper liners.
In a bowl or in a stand mixer, beat together the sugar and butter until combined. Add eggs one at a time. Then add the vanilla and Grappa.  Gradually add the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the milk in two additions, ending with the flour mixture.
Spoon the mixture into the paper cases until they are half full.

Bake for 15/18 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of a cupcakes comes out clean.  Cool cupcakes completely on a wire rack before frosting.

To prepare the buttercream icing, beat the butter until soft. Add half the icing sugar and beat until smooth. Then add the remaining icing sugar with one tablespoon of milk, then add grappa and more milk if necessary, until the mixture is smooth and creamy.

Spoon the icing into a piping bag with the chosen nozzle and pipe the icing on the cupcakes. FAB!

I really hope you are going to try these Grappa cupcakes and becauese I loved them so much I’m thinking to make them again but this time they will have a heart filled with Grappa sauce! Cannot wait!

Cin cin!

p.s.  This post was made possible by my son who decided to have a 2+hours nap today!!! Yeaah!!

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Work(s) in progress…

family Comments Off on Work(s) in progress…

I’m working on a GREAT project! Actually I have more than one, I JUST need to find the time to create them all.

At the end of November it will be my sister’s 40th birthday ( I am sure she doesn’t mind me saying her age as she looks GREAT!) and I’m planning to create a special dessert table for her. Although she won’t be able to be here and celebrate it with us, I’m sure she’ll enjoy the surprise as the theme will be something that she reaaaaaaaaallly love!

Cannot wait to start baking, in the meantime I’m spending every spare minute  planning and getting ideas from Pinterest and various party blogs. This time everything will be black and white.

This is a peek…

 

 

 

Ghostly Halloween

Daily photo, Dessert table, family Comments Off on Ghostly Halloween

I’m getting ridicously addicted to Pinterest and more I look at the fab dessert tables more I want to create them myself.

When I was living in Italy we never really celebrated Halloween and to be honest I’m still not 100% comfortable seeing coffins and skeletons on my table. Therefore I decided to chose a less scary theme and celebrate a black and white Halloween adding only a touch of autumn colours.

 

The centrepiece had to be this cake. You cannot imagine the amount of black gel colour I had to use to make it so dark to create the dramatic look.

 

For these milk bottles I used free printables from Catchmyparty.com

To make these ghostly cupcakes I made simple chocolate cupcakes and covered them in buttercream. To make the ghosts stand up I used mini cola lollipops.

Ghostly vanilla cookies covered with royal icing.

Bats and black cats vanilla cookies covered in black royal icing with silver edible pearls.

I just loved the idea of painting  the pumpkins white although it took me a while to do it and ages to dry them (Scottish weather obviously didn’t help!)

Happy Halloween!

BOOOO!

I had my bit of fun, now I can go back and be a mamma 🙂

 

 

 

 

Italy vs Scotland – My birthday celebration

Dessert table, family Comments Off on Italy vs Scotland – My birthday celebration

Happy birthday to meee!!

Few weeks ago it was my birthday and since I was little I’ve always loved to celebrate it with my family and friends, having cake, balloons and obviously presents!

This time I had the idea to create a dessert table which represented my life since I moved from Italy to Scotland. For the last 12 years in fact I’ve been travelling between these two countries and enjoying their diversities.

One of the biggest diversity is the cuisine therefore I divided my dessert table in typical Italian food on the right and Scottish favourite food on the left.

 

 

 

Cupcakes covered with Scottish Tartan and Scottish breakfast: egg, sausage and black pudding.

Scottish breakfast tea

Pizza and spaghetti cupcakes

Potatoes, crisps, porridge, every Scot eats them daily!

Illy coffee! One of the best coffees you can find in Italy. And the caffettiera, Bialetti obviously!

Scottish flag biscuit

Scots love it, I can hardly have a sip of it: Irn Bru

Plane butter cookies

Spaghetti bolognese cupcake (this is the correct spelling!)

Plenty of these men in Scotland (ehm not quite) but plenty of porridge

Grappa! My favourite!

 

Birthday cake:  Madeira base with a Nutella and cream filling