Awaken from your sugar induced coma brought on by yesterday’s treats and hurry over here for further cake based revelry!

National Baking Week continues, and so we bring to you another set of baked goods to enjoy. Today’s treats, once again courtesy of our cake-mesiter Tess, are Coconut and Raspberry Cupcakes!

“These are so easy to make, and in my opinion, any cake that has fruit in it must be good for you…and the coconut makes me think of sandy beaches and holidays!” says Tess.

Ingredients

• 175g Self Raising Flour
• 140 Caster Sugar
• 50g Desiccated Coconut
• 140g softened unsalted organic butter
• ½ tsp Vanilla Extract (I use this one I think it’s one of the best!)
• 2 Large Free Range Organic eggs
• 4 tbsp organic milk
• 140g raspberries (can be fresh or frozen)
Frosting
• 280g Icing sugar
• 85g softened unsalted organic butter
• 4 tbsp raspberry coulis (sadly, I didn’t have any coulis L so I used a dash of food colouring to give the frosting a pink flush)
• A little desiccated coconut to decorate…or you could use a fresh raspberry

How to make them!

1. Heat oven to 190C/170C fan/gas 5.
2. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with deep paper cases or a 15-hole bun tin with cake cases.
3. Tip all the cake ingredients except the raspberries into a bowl (I recommend putting the flour in your bowl first, not last…otherwise POOF! Flour everywhere!!) and beat for 2 mins until light and fluffy.
4. Gently fold in the raspberries.
5. Divide the mixture between the cases and bake for 18-20 mins (add a couple of extra mins for deep cases, I baked mine for about 24 minutes), until golden brown and firm to the touch.
6. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes and then carefully remove them and pop them onto a wire rack to cool completely.
7. To make the frosting, beat together the icing sugar, butter and raspberry coulis to make a light, fluffy icing. Again, I recommend putting the icing sugar in the bowl before the butter and coulis, and gently mix with a spoon to avoid a cloud of icing sugar dust settling over you and the kitchen!
8. Once it’s all combined use your electric whisk to get it nice and smooth.
9. Spoon or pipe onto the cakes and sprinkle with coconut to finish.

Stop what you’re doing and listen up: It’s National Baking Week! A whole week to celebrate baking and the bakers behind the baked goods.

Our own talented in-house Baking specialist Tess, who regularly plies us with treats, has stepped up to the plate to provide us with baked yummies all week long, and we’ll be sharing the recipes with you at home.

It might only be a UK festival of baking we see no reason why other nations shouldn’t join in, so come on people, let’s get baking!

Today’s treats were described as a Rocky Road experiment: Belgian chocolate with Dutch spiced biscuits, marshmallows and Mars bars combine into sugary overload. Nom!

Ingredients

• 300g quality dark chocolate
• 100g Butter, cubed
• 3 Tbsp Golden Syrup
• 140g Dutch Spiced Biscuits, roughly crushed (the recipe said Rich tea but I used the spiced ones instead to add depth, perfect for the autumn weather :)
• 12 Pink Marshmallows, quartered using scissors (I had mini marshmallows and threw a large handful of those in)
• 4 x Mini Mars Bars, cubed (recipe is for 2 x 55g bars of Turkish delight, or you can use Crunchie, Milky Way, Maltesers or anything you like!)

How to make them!

1. Gently melt the butter, chocolate and syrup in a pan over a low heat, stirring frequently until smooth, then cool for about 10 mins. (I did this in the microwave, stopping it to check every 45 seconds or so until it was a lovely dark brown gloop)
2. Stir the biscuits and sweets into the pan until well mixed
3. Pour mixture into a 17cm square tin lined with foil and spread the mixture to roughly level it.
4. Chill until hard, then cut into fingers.

Oh ok, so it’s not exactly actually baking, more like reverse baking. Freeze Baking. Whatever!
Tomorrow Tess has promised us some kind of coconut based cupcakes, so tune in for another recipe then. Now go forth and (Freeze) Bake!

A week or so ago was the Mid-Autumn Festival in China and Vietnam, which also happened to correspond quite closely to the launch of LittleBigPlanet PS Vita. The Sony teams in that part of the world took the opportunity to combine both occasions, and created these rather special mooncakes, a cake traditionally eaten during the festival.

We missed eating them at the right time, but we nommed them up nonetheless! Happy belated Moon Festival people!

Media Molecule is a hive of creative minds and they need an IT infrastructure that nurtures and doesn’t block their creative juices from flowing.
The IT Team is only small and as such we need someone who has a can do attitude and is willing to be hands on.  Being part of a small team means you will be exposed from the mundane (mouse is broken) to the exciting (VMware, active directory, networking)

The person we’re looking for will have had experience in doing IT support for a company at the desktop level but also have experience in dealing with server side management as well.  They must have mad skillz in Windows 7, understand basic networking and also have knowledge about hardware components. In return we promise to expose the right person to everything an enterprise IT infrastructure includes.

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It’s interesting what you come across when wandering around the office sometimes.

Apologies for the sideways video mode, you know how it is.

The wonderful folks at Rocket Cheetah recorded an interview with Tearaway designer, Meda Molecule Tech Director, and crochet master extreme, David Smith.

Marvel as Dave talks about all kinds of wonderful Tearaway secrets! Gasp as he reveals his innermost fears! Laugh with relief when he gets the girl in the end!

After a bit of a break to get Tearaway ready for announce, we squeezed back into Kenny’s recording studio for a new episode of the Mm Podcast! This episode allows us to finally talk about our new game Tearaway, and we’ve invited lead designers Dave and Rex to join us for some Tearaway Chat. Huzzizzles!

If you want to send us in some Tearaway questions for the next episode, just drop us an email here: podcast@mediamolecule.com

Here are the episode links

Tearaway
http://tearaway.mediamolecule.com
http://www.twitter.com/tearawaygame
http://www.facebook.com/tearawaygame

Jobs
http://www.mediamolecule.com/jobs/

Elks
http://www.mediamolecule.com/blog/article/elk_roundup/

Geoff Keighley’s photo of our papercraft landscape
http://instagram.com/p/OqxtdrIsGJ/

30 flights of loving
http://blendogames.com/thirtyflightsofloving/

Dear Esther
http://dear-esther.com/

Soundshapes
http://www.soundshapesgame.com/home/public.html

Lollipop Chainsaw Massacre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRfroCeDk2E

View this podcast on SoundCloud

You can subscribe to our podcast via RSS feed or the power of iTunes

Say Hello to Lluís, the latest molecule to join the gang, starting here this week as a 3D Animator on our recently announced Vita project Tearaway.

I play: Old school fighting videogames I love: Traveling and reading scifi literature I cry when: I see an old Neo Geo in a second hand shop I eat: Japanese food I drink: Gin & Tonic I watch: Anime movies, science documentaries and Stanley Kubrick films (again and again) Favourite cheese: Blue cheese

Lluís hails from Barcelona making him the first spanish Molecule to join the team, and has spent the last few years working in showbusiness, animating characters for movies and TV shows such as Transformers: Prime and Tron Uprsing. Check out some of his work on his blog, or by watching this handily embedded show reel video!

We’re looking for more Molecules! There aren’t many of us, so each missing Molecule is an extremely important part of the team that we need to find!
Why not browse our full list of available positions, and see if any fit your skillset!

Last week we announced our new game Tearaway) and alongside it we gave out the plans to make your very own papercraft Elk friend, as seen in the trailer.

We knew you were a creative bunch, but it’s really rather wonderful to see how many of you decided to take on the challenge. We’ve been sent so many pictures of your Elks and pieces of fan art in such a short space of time, that we’re rather overwhelmed! I mean, just look at all these Elks, so colourful and friendly…

We love them so much we’ve printed them out to put on the wall here at Mm Towers, but there’s still plenty of room to fill up, so how about getting the scissors and glue out and giving it a whirl? It’s much easier than it looks!

If you do make one, or if you’ve made an elk and you don’t see it above, please send (or resend) it to us on twitter (@tearawaygame) so we can add it to our virtual and real life galleries.  Next challenge: someone make a giant one please!