Chocolate Brownie, Cherry and Fresh Cream Cupcakes, Chocolate Peanut Butter Snickers topped cupcakes, Banana, Pecan and Chocolate Flapjack Splodges and Peanutbutter and Milk chocolate melts (Phew take a breath!!)

A typical afternoon's baking now seems to encompass several recipes in one go. I don't publish everything I make on here and normally just pick one cake recipe at a time to share with you all.

But I now seem to be lagging behind. I've got lots of cake creations still to share!

So this post is about the product of a typical afternoon's baking rather than one specific cake.

On this particular afternoon I decided I wanted cherry and chocolate and peanutbutter and flapjack and banana and biscuits and cake and cream.

In short, a spoilt greedy child was running around in my head making lots of cake based demands and I indulged that little child within and I'm VERY glad I did. I made FAR too much as usual and was able to spread a little cake karma around the city of Manchester once more. The results were splendid to behold...

Firstly I set about making the cakes. Lets get everywhere smelling of freshly baked chocolate cake as soon as possible!!

This should do the trick...

A trusted old Mary Berry chocolate cupcake recipe using real meted chocolate in the mixture to make it moist and melt in the mouth was used. Ah lovely! A thick aroma of moist chocolate cake ruled the house again!

I then set about making the peanutbutter melts whilst the cakes were cooling.

A simple recipe from Kate Shirazi's book 'cookie Magic'. Not a book I have often used as most of the time when it occurs to me that I would like to bake biscuits it also occurs to me how much nicer it would be to bake a cake. However, by baking both, there was, thankfully, no compromise made.

The thing with biscuits is, although they are truly splendid treats and I love the way they melt so quickly and luxuriously in your mouth, they just often seem like SO much more hard work to create than cakes are to bake and never quite as pretty. I spent my previous weekend making custard creams and chocolate bourbons. They were melt in the mouth wonderful. Here's a pic....

However, with biscuits, even if you set yourself out a nice pretty plate to eat them off and concoct a wonderfully fresh loose leaf cup of afternoon tea to accompany them, I find you still end up shoveling them in your mouth two at a time no matter how much you would like to savour them, then before you know it they've gone! Or perhaps that's just my way with biscuits? They are far too easily quaffed. And in the case of the custard creams and bourbons I had to spend quite some time cutting things up in nice neat rectangles and after a while that just becomes dull...

None the less. They were beautifully crumbly yet buttery biscuits. They just left me wondering when the cake course would arrive...

Mmmm... Buttery, crumbly, moist, creamy and rich home made custard creams...

I had to eat (at the very least) 7 of these to help get over the trauma of spending all afternoon baking them to discover the batch made just 8 chocolate bourbons and about 15 custard creams! 'IS THAT IT?' I angrily proclaimed when I set the tray out ready to go in the oven after laboriously mixing, chilling, rolling out and cutting up the little biscuits!! The biscuit mix did not answer. It was too ashamed.

Much more enjoyable to make were the big gooey chunky biscuits that I made on this afternoon in question. First were the peanutbutter melts. A simple shortbread recipe with added chocolate chips and peanut butter. When they had sat long enough to cool I brushed them with melted milk chocolate.

no cutting and measuring for these beauties! Just roll them up in balls, put them on a baking tray and if you're feeling particularly undainty about the whole thing punch them into disc shapes (then casually flatten them out so that they are even) definitely NO rulers and set squares used here!

Even less precise were the banana, pecan and milk chocolate flapjack biscuits. These were from the 'Eat Me' book I have referred to previously. A wonderful book for cupcakes but now I was testing biscuits! They were actually described as biscuits in the book but I would not class what resulted as a biscuit. They were so soft, gooey and crumbly. This is possibly because the original recipe had granola rather than oats in and no chocolate pieces. I think these additions may have added to the moist cakey/flapjack-like texture that resulted. With each oaty, pecany chocolate bite you craved more. I had to have these removed from the house approximately 12 hours after they were baked. They are DANGEROUS. I'd eaten 5 already and was fearful I would be unable to stop.

Such unassuming, humble looking things...

Don't be fooled!

They warmed your soul with their spiced bananary, pecany, oaty goodness and I felt my whole body relax even further as I bit into a still warm and gooey chunk of chocolate.

They were lots of fun to make. You literally slammed great walloping spoonfuls onto a tray and left them to sort themselves out for ten minutes in a hot oven!

In fact the only thing that stopped me eating all of these was the prospect of one of these...

A chocolate brownie cupcake with dark cherry jam and chocolate fudge frosting filling topped with freshly whipped cream, milk chocolate shavings and a glace cherry.

One member of the household was particularly keen on sampling one of these, with their fresh whipped cream topping...

Unfortunately for Edwin, these cakes were not for the consumption of little kittens. And so, placing the cake cover back over the remaining 5 cakes to protect them from greedy little kitten paws, I enjoyed one of these freshly baked cupcakes in the sunshine.

Then there was the matter of the chocolate peanutbutter cupcakes.

I filled the remaining freshly baked chocolate brownie cupcakes with a splodge of peanutbutter and a dollop of chocolate fudge frosting.

This concoction relaxed itself nicely into the little pores of the chocolaty sponge to permeate the already moist cupcake.

Then came the topping. I whipped up some fresh cream and added a dash of cocoa and a splodge of peanutbutter to create a creamy, peanutbutter topping with a just a hint of chocolate.

Then, I hacked up a snickers....

A few sprinkles of grated milk chocolate and voila! A peanutbutter, snickers, chocolate cream cupcake!

There is no cut in half view of this cake unfortunately, as is usually customary. This is because by the time I had taken one bite of this creamy cake, I had completely forgot about anything else.

Rich chocolate cake melts into a pocket of peanutbutter and chocolate fudge frosting in one mouthful and gives way to a creamy peanutbuttery milk chocolate topping in another mouthful. Add that together with a snickers slice and you're not far off my idea of heaven!

Then, before you know it, its gone. Ooops! 

I then set about packing all of this up into some boxes like so...

And because I am a geek and the recipients of each of the two boxes I made up are avid Harry Potter fans I gave each creation a Harry Potter themed name and wrapped up the boxes like this with an explanatory Hogwarts letter explaining what was contained within...

And so the Dark Cherry and Chocolate cakes from the Forbidden Forest, the Buttered Peanut and cream Pie Cupcakes from the Great Hall, the Smashed Banana, Pecan and Chocolate Flapjack Splodges from Hagrid's Hut and the Peanutbutter and Milk Chocolate Melts from the Hogwarts Express trolley made their way to their intended recipients.

And because cake karma is often such a wonderful thing. Upon delivering one box I was presented with one of these..

A strawberry champagne cocktail!

Now all I need to go with this is a bit of cake....

I wonder what I should make next time...