The 5th Annual Signature Dish Night was held last night. Run by a couple of Andrew’s friends, the basic concept of the night is to bring your own “Signature Dish” to share, eat until you pass out, and have a merry ol’ time.
All of the proceeds from the raffles and games, plus any donations made on the night are contributed to the MS Society.

Eating for a good cause: my kind of night.

This year, I went with the dessert I make the most, Red Velvet Cupcakes.
Super easy, but time consuming!

Mix 60g room temperature butter, 150g caster sugar and 1 egg in a mixing bowl

In a separate bowl, combine 10g cocoa, 10ml red food colouring and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Then add to the sugary, buttery mixture.

Warning: your hands will look like this. It washes off quickly, but it can be fun to run around pretending that you’re bleeding. I tried to scare Mum, she didn’t care.

Measure out 120ml buttermilk, and (roughly) 150g of flour. Combine half the buttermilk to your red mixture, then half the flour (along with 1 teaspoon baking powder).

I love how it looks at this stage! Combine the remaining buttermilk, and then the remaining flour.

In a smaller bowl, combine 1/2 teaspoon of bicarb soda, 1/2 salt and 1 1/2 teaspoon white wine vinegar.
Add this to the big bowl and give it a damn good stir – this needs to combine evenly.

Spoon into cupcake patties, pop into the oven at 180 degrees for around 20 mins.

The trick with baking, is that it will be ready when a skewer or knife “goes in clean, comes out clean”.

While they are cooling, combine 300g icing sugar and 50g butter. Once fluffy, add in 125g cream cheese to make the most delicious icing! (The leftover icing was my breakfast, no regrets!)

Pipe the icing on top, throw half of a cupcake (sans icing) into a food processor to crumble, and decorate the top!

Hey presto! Delicious, sugary treats!

I have to admit, for the rest of the night my focus was just on eating the food, not photographing it, woops!

Mains, round 1.

Andrew tucking into my dessert. The Pan cake-cake was sensational!

But nothing looked as impressive as the hamburger cupcakes!

It was a fantasic night, eating and drinking with some of my favourite people. The lads always put on a good show, and hopefully raised a bit of money for a great cause.