Ms. Cupcake Cookbook Review (and Giveaway!)

London based purveyor of sweet treats, Ms. Cupcake, has written a cookbook and I'm super excited about it! For anyone who's tried, or wanted to try, Ms Cupcake's delicious creations it's great news. If you haven't heard of Ms Cupcake yet lemme tell you a little bit about her.

Long time readers of the blog will know that I've always been a huge fan and supporter of Ms. Cupcake. From the days when I'd get a boat along the thames to get to Greenwich Market for her cupcakes...

...to the opening day of the store, to working behind the stall at VegFest, I've been there!

As well as creating wonderful sweet treats Mellissa, the woman beneath the hat, is sweet, funny and inspiring and I'm excited to be able to call her a friend. I'm SO happy for her right now because this book is awesome.

It's beautiful, it's hard-backed, and it's full of artistic colour photographs of gorgeous baked goods and the store's colourful staff. More importantly it's jammed full of recipes for everything sweet, from cupcakes to deep fried cookie balls.

Of course I've taken the cookbook for a little spin around the kitchen! 

I started with the Jaffa Cake recipe. I was super excited to see this childhood favourite in the book but if you aren't British you may not have heard of this delicious cross between a biscuit and a cake. The soft cookie comes covered in chocolate and an orange jelly hides inside. This recipe is super simple as it calls for orange marmalade rather than a complicated home-made agar based jelly. I was super sceptical about this idea at first but I have faith in Ms. Cupcake so I picked up a no-peel version from Waitrose and ran with it.

Aside from the marmalade I had everything else I needed to bake these in the house already. Awesome!

They were ridiculously quick and easy to throw together, as I was making them I remember thinking "Even Nick could bake these" and he is definitely not a baker (he does make a mean tofu scramble though)! Due to my baking these at night time I didn't really get a good picture but here they are chilling in the fridge.

The picture really doesn't do these justice, they were AMAZING! Seriously, so good. I planned to just eat one or two and then send the rest to work with Nick but, nuh-uh, that didn't happen. I ate more than my half and I can't wait to make them again. The recipe says that these can make 12 or 15 and I would suggest making 15 (rather than the 12 I made) for a more accurate Jaffa Cake.

Yesterday I made my second recipe from the book, the Chocolate Chip Cookies. I always grab a cookie when I visit Ms Cupcake in her shop or on one of her many stalls and I was super excited about being able to recreate these at home.

These cookies are huge, chewy, bakery-style cookies and they're perfect. They were ready just as Nick got back from work and we both loved them, I ate two as soon as they were cool enough to handle and they were almost exactly the same as the cookies from the bakery itself. I loved finding a new-to-me technique within the recipe which helps to flatten them out and to give them the desired chewy texture and this will definitely become a go-to recipe in our house.

The book actually doesn't come out until May 9th but a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to receive a review copy from publishers Random House. I had already pre-ordered myself a copy of the book so I'll be passing the review copy on to one lucky reader! Don't worry I've been super careful with it so it still looks shiny and new - no chocolate splatters or rouge bits of marmalade!

To enter the competition I need you to find me an adorable picture of a bunny, post it on Facebook, tweet about it with the hashtag #jojoisawesome and....hahaha, no. You just need to leave a comment on this blog post!

The competition is open to anyone, anywhere in the world and I will be announcing the winner on Friday May 3rd 2013. I have to post the book on May 8th before I leave on my epic Seattle / Portland / Vida Vegan Con trip (OMG! So excited!!) so please make sure that there's a way for me to contact you if you win and that you're paying attention to your e-mails so that I can get your address in time. 

Good luck!

We have a winner! The random number generator has picked Mihl from Seitan Is My Motor! Congratulations Mihl, Jaffa Cakes will soon be yours!

The competition is now closed!