Tear Drop Hearts

  Raspberry puree hearts in my baked mini Sweet Heart Cheesecakes.

Valentines Day countdown continues with quick & easy tear drop hearts. 

 Ice your cupcakes or cookies in a base colour, whilst it's still wet apply dots of icing in a secondary colour.

Armed with a toothpick, drag the toothpick lightly through a dot to create a heart shape.

This works with glacé icing, royal icing, frosting (try white frosting with a red piping gel), chocolate, and baking.

It is so, so, humid here; plans of sugar work hearts, chocolate heart shapes, meringues and decorated cookies all had to be scrapped because of the weather. For those in the blizzards on the other side of the world, keep safe, warm & roll on next season!!

Iced

                                    Vanilla Glacé Icing shines

In Australia we tend to ice cakes with simple icing rather than use frosting. Sure cake shops carry the range of American style swirled & twirled frosted cupcakes and I do love them, but there is something about seeing a simple iced cupcake that evokes childhood memories & is so Australian.

Glacé Icing straight from the source I grew up with 'The Australian's Women's Weekly'.

Ingredients
2 cups (320g) pure icing sugar sifted
1 teaspoon of butter or oil
2 tablespoons of hot water

Method
In a heatproof bowl stir icing sugar, butter and water together to make a thick paste. Place bowl over a small saucepan of simmering water; stir until icing is spreadable. The icing will "just warm", you don't want it to be hot or sugar will crystallise.

Flavour with 1 teaspoon of vanilla and spread onto cupcakes.

Variants
Coffee flavour; dissolve 1 teaspoon of instant coffee into the hot water before adding it to icing sugar
Chocolate; sift 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder with sugar.

You can also use your favourite citrus by adding zest to the icing sugar after sifting and replacing some of the water with citrus juice.