Taste & Create: Mango Cakes

Today the kids helped me make Mango Cakes from Foodelicious, whom I was partnered with for this month's Taste & Create. The recipe is here - we followed it exactly only substituting orange essence for mango essence, because I could not for the life of me find mango essence anywhere. I should have known better than to buy a mango in Victoria in October, and I probably should have learnt from my last taste & create effort. Cupcake recipes containing real fruit don't work as cakes. I made 5 cupcakes, before running out of patty cases, so I put the rest of the batter into a large cake tin. Despite the massive amount of baking powder in this recipe, that didn't rise. The cupcakes did well though.

I really wish I'd been able to find mango essence, or at least a riper mango, because the flavour was not very pronounced at all. I found them kind of bland and gluggy, but the kids liked them. I think when summer hits full force here, and the fruit departments of the supermarket are heady with the aroma of mangos, then I'll revisit this recipe, and see if I can''t make it work. After all, they sound so heavenly on Foodelicous.

And while they were baking, we tried our hands at making chocolate! From scratch no less!

Looks great, but it never set. Even after a few hours in the freezer it had a consistency of sticky fudge, which deteriorated into sticky mess once warmed to room temp. I bundled some of it up into small squares of puff pastry, to bake up for Miss Three's birthday, and the rest is sitting in the freezer waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. A filling for bread rolls perhaps? I have no idea what went wrong though. Perhaps I should just stick to buying the stuff.