Bakeathon 2016, Day 5 

When I started baking, I used to try a bunch of different recipes. The concept was to make sure that the blog has multiple entries. With time, that just wasn’t working for me. The reason is that now when I bake, there are about 12-15 people waiting to eat the cake. “Oopsies, bad cake” comment is just not a good idea anymore. So I stopped minimizing the risk of a bad cake by sticking with my tried and tested ones. There are only a few cakes that I bake now. These are the base cakes for almost everything. Hot milk cake is one. Hershey’s perfectly chocolate cake is another.

Back in Chennai, I had the Hershey’s baking book with me and every single recipe from that book turned out to be a winner. Now a days, if I am trying a new recipe, I do a trial run. In the case of leap of faith cakes,  where a recipe looks promising enough to risk it for a major day, I taste test it somehow to ensure that its decent. Leveling is an excellent way of taste testing the cake. The excess dome in the middle of the cake won’t be a problem anymore and we can also be sure that the cake is a winner.

So the point of all the ‘blah blah’ above is that this cake or cupcakes here aren’t a brand new recipe. Its been here many many times before. Its the yellow cake from America’s test kitchen, another book I have found to be reliable. The tres leches syrup is also repeated here many times before. But still I thought the cupcakes look cute enough to appear on the blog.

Fr this cupcake, the design inspiration is from the internet. It was almost an year back and I have no clue how to find the source again. Sorry about that!

I made the cupcakes first, made the syrup and then with a fork poked the cakes and poured the syrup carefully. I had to add one more layer of aluminum baking cups to ensure that the syrup doesn’t leak. These need to be refrigerated until the time of serving.

I used a pattern roller to get the beautiful design on the white fondant. The faces were drawn with food color pens. These are minimal work, maximum effect kind :-). Enjoy!

This is part of the Bake-a-thon 2016