Win a Giant Christmas Cupcake

We decided that we wanted to make our Christmas competition just a little bit different this year. We are going to give away a giant Christmas tree cupcake which will be delivered on Christmas eve anywhere in Auckland! This will serve up to 12 people....or 4 if you are really hungry :)

To enter what we would like you to do is take a photo of your Christmas tree once it is up and send it to us. Don't worry if you don't have one, just take a photo of a friends or even one at the mall!!! Email us the photo plus your name and a contact phone number, we will announce the winner 5pm Thursday 23rd December.

Don't forget that our full Christmas range is now available on our website so check them out!

Milkmans Mission

Our very own milkman from Northern Milk Distributors, Haydn, is a new cupcake fan - and we are always feeding him up with new cupcake flavours we are trialing, or roping him into helping if we are insanely busy and he pops by after his shift - the poor thing was made to put his muscles to use for something other than hauling milk the other day, and had to chop 4kgs of chocolate for a batch of chocolate ganache - what a legend!

Haydn has quite the sweet tooth, and is quietly confident, that he could chomp his way through one of our Giant Cupcakes on his own - hmmm....we have pointed out that there is the equivelent of 2 dozen cupcakes in each of those Giant Cupcakes, but he is confident he can do it!

This man means business - he can fit a WHOLE cupcake (with frosting) in his mouth at once...as per the evidence below....

So - we are putting him to the challenge - he informs us that this will be the first in a series of challenges that he undertakes - so watch this space!

To add to the fun - we'd like to involve you guys - and get your input for a bit of a competition - so please pop by the store, and place your 'Guess' in our glass 'Milk Bottle'

We are wanting you to guess if he can actually do it - and if so - what time frame will he do it in.

Each 'Guess' will cost you a Gold Coin donation - and all funds collected will go to the charity of Haydn's choosing which is Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust. The person who has the closest time will win a 6 pack of mixed cupcakes!

We are quietly concerned that this could end up quite messy - but Haydn likes to remind us that he can pack it away - this is a man that can demolish 3 Burger Fuel Burgers and 2 serves of chips in one sitting...so anything is possible!

Join us in store this Friday 3rd September at 3.30pm!! Ladies and Gentlemen - place your bets!

Well, how exciting! It all came together in the end - after a lot of stress, last minute hold ups and

exhibiting at the Food Show amongst it all - we pulled it off - our store is open for business!

And business it has been - we thought we'd ease ourselves into it, by having a 'soft opening' so opened the doors to

supportive neighbours and locals who kindly let us practice our coffee making skills out on them - and we have been busy girls since!

The Grand Opening was loads of fun with awesome face painting for the littlies by Fab Faces - I wish we had taken pics of all the kids faces that she did, as they were amazing, but here are a couple of cuties that we managed to snap

We have really settled into our new kitchen and space. It feels like we've been there forever.

Attached are pics of the shop in case you havent had a chance to pop in yourself yet.

Oh - how can we forget - we should give you an update on The Food Show -

what a fantastic response we had, lots of keen cupcake taste-testers and many people interested in our towers for events such as birthdays and weddings.

We even sold out of cupcakes a couple of the days which really surprised us as we had been baking dozens and dozens!

Our new Shop

Well you have all heard us talk lots about our shop so I thought I would post a couple of pics of it's journey so far. We are hoping to open for business second week in August but we will keep you posted!!!

Best Ever Choc Chip Cookies

I wanted to share this recipe with you from one of my favourite blogs: http://skinnylattestrikesback.blogspot.com/

"Best Ever Choc Chip Cookies

2 and 1/4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt (note: I love salt in sweet things. I up this to 2-3 teaspoons, but that's just me. And I use Maldon sea salt)
1 cup butter or dairy free spread
3/4 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 large eggs
2 cups chocolate chips
1 cup oatmeal or porridge oats
Preheat the oven to 190 C (350 F). Line several baking trays with baking paper.

Put the butter, vanilla and sugars in a bowl and beat until creamy. Add the eggs, one at a time, until creamy and fluffy.

Add 1 cup of the flour and fold in. Then add the rest of the flour, the baking soda and salt. It will look very thick and you'll think you need to add water or something, but don't! It will all be fine! Keep stirring!
Once all the flour is mixed in, add the oats and choc chips, again a bit at a time. Stir through thoroughly.


Use two teaspoons to spoon the mixture into small dollops on to the baking trays. You'll probably be able to get 12 on a normal baking sheet. Make sure you leave lots of room in between them, as they spread out when baking.
When your trays are all loaded, put them in the oven and bake for 10-11 minutes or until they look golden on top. An oven timer is my lifesaver here. I can't tell you how many biscuits I burned over the years because I got distracted while they were in the oven!
Remove from the oven and cool slightly before removing from trays. Then spoon remaining mixture back on to the trays as before, put back in the oven, etc. Until all the mixture is gone!
It takes me about 7 trays to use all the mixture.
Depending on the size of your dollops, you can get up to 80 cookies from this - I usually average around 65."

I made mine twice the size as i like bigger cookies, I got maybe 30 large cookies. I also added 2 tablespoons of peanut butter. yum!!

Win tickets to the Auckland Food Show

It's that time of year again and we are off to the food show in less than a week!! Come and visit us at stand 250. You can sample some of our products and purchase a yummy cupcake for the special price of only $4.

We can also fill you in on the details of our store which is only a few weeks away now. We are beyond excited about this!!!! We can't wait to be able to have pick up options available and spend more time talking to you all face to face. We will have different flavours available daily so keep a look out for us on facebook and twitter and we will let you know what we have in store.

We will also be stocking Atomic Coffee and a range of Phoenix drinks. YUM!!

Now to our competition. We are giving away a double pass to the Auckland Food Show preview day which is Thursday 29th July. "A premium experience - limited tickets, no crowds, ticket includes live cooking demonstrations with local and international culinary stars."

All you need to do is email us your name and email address to go in the draw to win these.

Entries must be received by 5.00pm Monday 26 July 2010 and the winner will be notified shortly after that.

Auckland Food Show
29 July – 1 August 2010
ASB Showgrounds

Ticket Information

We are naughty bloggers

It has been such a long time since we last blogged. It's not like we have nothing exciting to blog about we just have too much to do!! :)

We have had fun doing lots of custom orders. We ended up doing 3 SATC2 themed orders. We are still yet to see the movie ourselves darn it!! One of them we chose to do a mocha and white themed tower, Colleen outdid herself with the beautiful fondant creations, they are my all time favourite.

We also got asked to do cupcakes for the wonderful Mr Colin Mathura-Jeffree. Someone sent a pic on twitter of some awesome muppet themed cupcakes, he had said how much he liked them. That was it for us and we decided to go for the Muppet theme. They looked so adorable.

Today we are off to the Fine Food Show, it will be great to catch up with suppliers and hopefully find some new contacts. I'm also hoping for some yummy treats to sample!!

The other week we attended the gluten free show. Amazing how far gluten free products have come. There were some yummy creations that's for sure. I'm so re-inspired to try more gluten free baking. I've mastered chocolate but I'm going to trial vanilla. To complicate matters I'm also going to make it dairy free/vegan so vanilla with vegan lemon curd and vegan meringue....I didn't even know that you could get dairy free meringue mix! I had a chat to the Angel Food lady at the show and sampled them, just like the real thing!

The next couple of months is going to be really busy for us. We are moving to a new location and also we have the Food Show coming up. I can't believe it has been almost one year since the last one. That is by far our favourite show of the year. We get to meet some many people and it is just so full on. Last year they had 41,548 people through the doors!! I think most of them passed by our stand for a sample, every stand was just swamped with people.

Have a look at some of our pictures on our flickr galleries and don't forget to visit us on facebook or tweet us...we are getting a bit better with twitter LOL.

Catch you soon

Kathryn and Colleen

x

Variety Club Bash

We are very excited to be sponsoring a team as part of the Variety Club Bash.
Variety provides support to New Zealand children who are sick, disabled or disadvantaged through a range of programmes and individual grants.

An australian team called 'The Cupcake Girls' are currently driving a Mini with a Giant Cupcake on the roof from Christchurch all the way up the country selling cupcakes to raise funds for the Variety Club. They have been participating in the bash for years and have traveled all over Australia raising funds with cupcakes, and we're chuffed they asked us to help.

Our lovely friends at the Cupcake Parlour in Christchurch www.cupcakeparlour.co.nz donated Cupcakes for their southern end of the journey, and the wonderful peeps at Bill Chill Distribution www.bigchill.co.nz have helped us out with being able to get our cupcakes distributed at other centres throughout NZ so the girls can sell them to raise funds for the bash.

Look out for the green mini with cupcake on the roof and our logo as part of the Variety Club drive. The convoy will finish at MOTAT in Auckland at Western Springs on Sunday 15th March at approx 4.30pm, where there will be more of our cupcakes around to be sold for charity.

We will be sure to get pictures up on our blog incase you dont manage to spot the adorable mini for yourself.

For details: http://www.variety.org.nz/2010-variety-bash-xidc56003.html or http://www.facebook.com/pages/Variety-Bash-2010/276227316840?ref=ts

Feb - the month of love - and the month of Madness -

Well, we cant believe its nearly the END of February - we barely have a moment to sleep. The quiet breather of New Years is a distant memory now! - We have been very busy girls this month and were so chuffed with all the thoughtful guys and girls out there who treated their valentine with a cupcake...we didnt even have time to go shopping for our partners...so 3 guesses as to what they got for Valentines??....yep...a cupcake!

We hope that you went to grab a funky T-Shirt from our friends at Mr Vintage over Valentines Week - we did a special range of Valentines cupcakes just for them, and hear that they were well received.

If you happened to miss out, never mind...head along and check out their awesome store and t-shirts...they're good sorts.

We were very excited about our Valentines range, and LOVED our Lemon/Raspberry cupcake, we may just have to add it to the menu all the time...then hope that people order it so we can enjoy any left overs! hehe.

Wedding season is in full force, and we're having fun finalising designs for brides and cant wait for their big days - I think sometimes we look forward to their weddings as much as them! - we feel lucky to liaise with people during such a special time in their lives, and we are still touched that they want our cupcakes to feature. The feedback that we get from our clients and their guests after the big day certainly gives us the warm fuzzies.

Below is the gallery of our valentines bake - it was quite a mammoth effort, having other orders, the awesome Mr Vintage promotion and also a wedding thrown in the mix. It was a White & Gold Creation - we LOVED the personalised initials, they really added a touch of Elegance.

Finally - stay tuned for some new flavours - eeeeeee....exciting...there are many happy tummies from our taste testing trials...hehe.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year fellow Cupcake lovers - we hope that you've been enjoying the lovely summer weather and have been eating too much like us!

Weddings
We were such busy girls in the lead up to xmas, we nearly collapsed over the new year period! We're already back into the full swing of things this new year with Wedding season upon us.
Its been fun working with couples to help them achieve their favourite look for their cupcakes and getting such lovely feedback from them and their guests.
Check out our wedding gallery on our facebook fanpage to see some of our recent work.

Design a Delish Pack
Loads of fun was had the other day by some wee girls who turned into budding cupcake decorators at a birthday party. Their clever mum bought one of our 'Design a Delish' packs, and the girls unleashed their decorating powers on the cupcakes.
Here is a pic of the wee girls chuffed with their creations.
Keep your eye on our website as details of the pack will be on there soon. But in the meantime discuss your requirements with us.

Valentines Day
Excitement is building with Valentines Day approaching, and lots of people are keen to send a cupcake this V-Day instead of a traditional rose - we're constantly blown away by the many thoughtful kiwi blokes who approach us to help us surprise their loved ones...arrr....warm fuzzies.
Get your Valentines orders in now via our website.
Attach Pic of the Valentines set .
We're equally excited by a new cupcake we developed for Valentines - its a delicious fluffy lemon cupcake and is filled with Lemon/Raspberry curd and topped with an adorable Pink Meringue. we think its going to be a firm favourite, and may add it to our range soon.

Will look forward to our next update...we are already dreaming up our Easter range - jeepers this year is already flying!!!