Week 17 – Birthday baking

Cookies & Cream Cupcakes

So, readers, let me let you into a little secret – today’s my birthday!  27.  I didn’t intend on baking today, but I have once again been disorganised with my days off, so here we are, the end of the week and I require a bake!  But I have done all my celebrating, so I can get stuck in.  I decided upon the Cookies and Cream cupcakes for this week as they sounded tasty, and they have quite a rustic look, as there are bits of cookie in the frosting!  Therefore they don’t need a delicate hand.

The bake

This time my amendments to the ingredients are limited to the type of milk – as usual, I have used skimmed instead of whole.  Also, the recipe says to use cookies such as Oreos or Maryland double choc chip.  One of my birthday presents was a big box of Oreos, so had I known I wouldn’t have bought any cookies.  As it happens I decided on using the Maryland cookies, as I thought they would be better in a bake.  Although the recipe is cookies and cream, and Oreos are really the only biscuit with cream!  But oh well.

Now, normally for sponge cakes the first step is to cream the butter and sugar.  However, for this the first step is to mix all the dry ingredients together, with the butter, until it reaches crumb consistency.  The mixture was still a bit dry for me to mix everything with the hand mixer without flour flying out of the mixing bowl, so I only roughly mixed it: 

I then added the milk and egg, which had been mixed in a jug.  Half of the mixture was added, then the mixture combined until smooth, and then the other half was added, leaving a smooth cake batter.  I then filled 12 cupcake cases with the batter, using an ice cream scoop for even, consistent cupcakes.  Before putting them into the oven, you put cookie quarters into each case, on top of the batter.  The recipe says to put 4 quarters in each, but I used 2-3 pieces. 

I used mostly large cases, and they are now baking, but they have spilled over the cases again, to form almost a super cupcake.  When this happened with the Salted Caramel cupcakes, I just chopped off the bits that had over spilled, but doing that will be more difficult with these, due to the bits of cookie on top!  They have now baked, and once cooled I did just break off the edges until they were more cupcake shaped.

While they were cooling, and the second batch (I stretched the mixture to an extra 4 little cupcake cases), I made the frosting.  Super simple butter icing.  I only had 200g of icing sugar left, rather than the 500g in the recipe, but as you know I normally halve the frosting quantities anyway.  So I only used 40% of the required quantities of the icing sugar, butter, milk and crushed leftover cookies.  Mix well, then top the cooled cupcakes!  It is a bit more difficult to spread the icing due to the cookie bits, but do as I did and just plonk some icing on top, and spread what you can!  Once they’re frosted, I sprinkled more cookie crumbs on top.  And voilà, cookies and cream cupcakes.  They do look a bit rustic, but in a good way I feel.

As it’s quite late I haven’t tasted one, but I’ve tasted the individual components, i.e. sponge and frosting, and it was all tasty!  But I’ll put a more detailed taste breakdown in next week’s bake blog.  Until then, happy baking!

Week 16 – Backdated Baking!

Cinnamon and Peanut Twists

First of all, so sorry the blog is so late readers!  My broadband went down on Sunday night!  So couldn’t upload this in time.  However pure laziness is the reason it’s only actually up on Tuesday night!  However, fear not, I’m still counting this entry as week 16, so there will be another bake for week 17, before the end of the week!  I had a super busy week last week, so only had a couple of hours on Sunday night to bake, and wanted something straightforward.  But I feel like I’m saying that almost every week!  But I found something that was really straightforward – Cinnamon and Pecan Twists.  However, as I didn’t have pecans, and did have peanuts that I didn’t use to decorate last week’s Candy Bar Pie, I decided to adapt the recipe to Peanut Twists.  The blurb at the top of the recipe says any nuts can be used, so I followed their advice!

The Bake

As already noted above, I adapted the recipe by using peanuts instead of pecans.  But that’s the only amendment I made.  And that’s mainly due to the fact the recipe uses shop-bought puff pastry.  That’s right, shop bought pastry!  For a lot of bakers buying any element of the bake is a cardinal baking sin, but if the recipe tells you, it must be ok!?!  And I even had puff pastry in the freezer already.  The first step is to roll out the pastry until it’s 5mm thick, however this pastry was even pre-rolled!  It was flat then rolled on a piece of parchment paper, so after defrosting it all I needed to do was unravel it.  This also meant I didn’t need to make a mess sprinkling flour on the work surface.

Possibly the simplest first step so far?!  The next step is to chop the nuts.  I wasn’t really sure how I’d go about chopping the nuts, knowing that by just using a knife it could be time-consuming, dangerous and messy.  However I was using my mother’s kitchen, and thus utensils, and she suggested using her herb chopper-contraption.  It was great for the task at hand, as I could just go back and forth along the nuts on a chopping board.  Once chopped, the nuts are added to a mixture of soft brown sugar and cinnamon, mixed, then spread evenly across the pastry which has had an egg-wash, pressing the mixture down.

And that’s it for the ingredients and assembling.  The final step is to make the twists themselves.  I put baking paper on two baking trays, and then made 20 strips from the pastry rectangle.  I tried to make them equal/straight, but it wasn’t a complete success, with some thinner than others.  I was then to twist the pastry into spirals, and put them onto the baking trays.  With the first spiral, I discovered it was too long for the baking tray!  So I had to fold each one in half.  Some I folded with the mixture on the inside, and the other half with the mix on the outside, which you can sort of tell from the baking trays on the picture below.  Then leave to bake for 20 minutes.

I was a little worried how they would look once cooked since I’d folded them over, and thought maybe the ends would look a bit strange, but they turned out perfectly.  Golden brown and flaky.  The blurb suggests drizzling maple syrup over them, and I didn’t need to be told twice!  They taste really good too - again, flaky, and the brown sugar caramelises the nuts.  The maple syrup is a great addition too.  I recommend a couple with a cup of milk.  Happy baking!

Week 15 – Father’s Day Bake

Candy Bar Pie

As you can maybe guess from the title, it’s Father’s Day today in the UK.  So, as I like to do, I wanted to combine this occasion with this week’s bake.  Now, the Hummingbird Bakery books do not look at all manly, with the pinks, flowers and hummingbirds gracing the cover and pages.  However, Inside Home Sweet Home there is a recipe for a Candy Bar Pie.  The candy bar in question is a Snickers, which is maybe the most manly chocolate bar?  So I thought this would do…

The Bake

This bake has 3 parts – the base, the filling, and the decoration.  This time I had a few amendments to the recipe: double choc Oreos (no particular reason, just they had been on offer) light cream cheese, no peanuts on top (more about that later), and melted chocolate chips for the chocolate drizzle decoration.  As I was using a smaller pie dish than the 9 inch one in the recipe, I took 10% off all measurements for the filling (I had already used the correct amounts of base ingredients when I realised there was too much for the pie dish, which is when I realised I should take a percentage away!).  To make the base, crush the Oreos and the digestives in a zip lock bag, then add melted butter, and press the combined onto the bottom and edges of the pie dish.  Refrigerate for an hour. 

While you’re waiting for that to chill, chop the Snickers’ into small slices.  I will admit, I used the supermarket own brand of ‘nutty bar’ rather than Snickers.  I think it was for the best, financially and cuisine-wise, as the peanuts in Snickers bars can be quite big!  You can also make the filling, by mixing the cream cheese and sugar, then adding sour cream, peanut butter, and the eggs.  Once the hour has passed, everything can come together, by adding the Snickers slices to the base, then coating with the filling mixture.  I made circles with my slices – I don’t think it matters, but it does look pretty and organised in the picture:

Now the pie is ready to go into the oven.  Even though I used 10% less of everything, I still had quite a bit of filling, and a few Snickers slices, left over.  So I filled 6 cupcake cases with left over mixture, and a slice of Snickers.  I realise there wasn’t a barrier between the filling and the base, like there is for the pie, but I couldn’t waste the mixture, or just consume it raw, myself.  So in it all went.

The recipe states it should be baked for 35-40 minutes, or until there’s only a bit of wobble to the filling in the middle.  I must say, even after 40 minutes, there was still a lot of wobblage (yes I just made that up).  I think it probably baked for closed to 50 minutes in the end.  But eventually it came out looking pretty good. 

It was then meant to cool, before being put into the fridge.  Unfortunately it hadn’t cooled for long enough before I had to go to work for a few hours, and then went for a Father’s Day meal, so it got to set at room temperature.  Once I returned from the meal, I made the decoration for the top.  Now, in the recipe the pie is topped with melted chocolate drizzle, and chopped peanuts.  I had a bag of peanuts all ready to go, however when my father saw that inside the pie was peanut butter and Snickers, retorted “you know nuts aren’t good for my asthma, right?”  So on his request, I omitted the peanuts from the decoration.  I put some leftover chocolate chips in a sturdy plastic container, before melting gradually in the microwave.  I then attempted to drizzle, but it was more glooping, and here’s the end result:

Looks quite impressive, and tasted good too!  Especially the filling, it’s creamy and smooth but some of the peanuts from the peanut butter give it a crunch, thus providing a texture contrast.  Dad enjoyed too.  I will say though, it’s basically a cheesecake, so not sure why it’s sold as a pie, but no matter, it’s all baking!  I think the addition of salted peanuts would’ve been good on top, as a further contrast – pairing the sweet with the salty.  But who am I to argue with my father’s health!  Until next time, happy baking!

Week 14 – If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

Chocolate Truffle Cookies

The sun is still shining here in south Wales.  Shining hard, it’s been hot all week!  My poor pasty skin can’t handle it.  So I can’t stand the heat, but I won’t get out of the kitchen!  Although I didn’t want to spend too much time in the kitchen, so that I could enjoy the nice weather.  As much as you can enjoy it while plastering yourself with SPF 50.  So a super simple recipe this week – the method only takes up half a page in the book!  For those of you that don’t have the book, if you look at the cover on Amazon, or any other retailer, these cookies are in the jar on the top left of the cover.  Don’t they look like chocolate biscotti?!

The Bake

As I just mentioned, this bake is simples!  The only area I strayed from ingredients-wise was the alcohol.  That’s right, they’re alcoholic cookies!  The recipe asks for amaretto, however the only thing similar I could find in my own alcohol stash was a small bottle of liqueur called ‘nutcracker’ that I’d been given a couple of Christmases ago.  But it would have to do, as an alcohol that I assume has nuts in, from its title.

The first step is to combine the dry ingredients, so flour, cocoa and baking powder, and sugar, then rub in the butter until it’s a sandy consistency.  You can’t really get a sandy colour with cocoa powder in the mix, so I basically rubbed the ingredients together until the butter was properly incorporated.  The egg and alcohol is mixed separately in a jug, before adding to the bowl, and mixing.  The recipe says that although it might seem dry at first, it will come together after proper mixing.  And they were right!

Too right if anything, I felt my mixture was a bit too wet, even after chilling in the fridge for half an hour.  This opinion was vindicated when it came to forming the individual cookies, coating them in icing sugar and putting them on a baking tray.  It was difficult to get them into a round shape, and to not get bits of dough stuck in the bowl of icing sugar.  It was a messy conveyor belt, let me tell you.  However in the end I made around 22 little dough balls, before putting them into the oven for 12 minutes.

They look quite nifty, although it’s a shame I couldn’t get them in a more uniform ball-shape.  Now, as I said above, these biscuits look like biscotti to me, and as they contained amaretto (or were meant to), I thought they’d taste like biscotti.  So imagine my surprise when they were soft!  When it comes to large cookies, I do prefer soft and squigy-ness, however I think as they’re quite small it would’ve been better to be crunchy.  However they are truffle cookies, and you don’t tend to get crunchy truffles… You can’t really taste the alcohol, or nut, but it does add a bit of another taste dimension.  They taste good with a cup of coffee anyway, and as they’re so small it’s fine to take two!

Next week will be a Father’s Day special, but until then, happy baking!

Week 13 – It’s all Peachy!

Peach Pie

So summer is finally on is way here in south Wales, with warm weather, long nights and actual sun!  So as tempting as it was to spend all my time outside, I returned to the kitchen to complete this week’s bake.  I chose this initially due to, as is often the case with me baking with fruit, I bought peaches from the reduced section in the supermarket.  There are two peach recipes in the book, Peach Cobbler and Peach Pie.  I decided to make the pie as I’ve already made a cobbler, and I need to make pastry more often; it, like bread, scares me.  However, after deciding I was going to make a Peach Pie, I read the ingredients,  weighed my punnet of fresh peaches, and realised I was going to need a lot of fresh peaches to make up the 700 grams required for the filling, so I went out and bought 2 tins of sliced peaches.  And at 32 pence each, it was probably less than I paid for the fresh peaches!

 

The Bake

For this recipe, I stuck to all the ingredients as listed, except I used margarine/vegetable spread instead of butter in the pastry.  Which leads me to the first step, making the sweet pastry.  First the flour and butter is combined to make a crumb consistency, before adding caster sugar and eggs.  Even after adding the eggs, the mixture seemed really dry, and wasn’t combining to make dough, so I added some water a dessert spoon at a time, until I was happy with the dough.  I think I may have added a little too much water though, as when I put it in cling film to rest in the fridge, it seemed a bit wet.  Handy tip, the recipe says to tip the dough onto a floured surface, before making a big dough ball, then wrapping it in cling film.  I pre- rolled out some cling film onto the worktop, then tipped the dough directly onto it, thus saving the worktop getting covered in flour before you need to roll out the pastry.

 

After the dough has rested in the fridge, you need to roll out the pastry.  This is where I encountered some problems, so it was handy my mother was around, to basically show me the correct pastry prepping ways.  The ball of dough was way too big to roll in one, so I split it in half, before rolling it until it was thin enough to receive my mother’s approval.  After putting the pastry in the pie dish, I sliced off the edges, keeping the offcuts for the top, then gave the whole case an egg wash (i.e. brush it with egg), and put it in the fridge, while turning to the filling.

 

The filling is actually really simple – drain the peaches, then mix them in the bowl along with cornflour, caster sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon and nutmeg.  I’m not really sure why cornflour is needed, but it’s so rare that I need to use my cornflour, I’m grateful to see it in a recipe.  As I’d only used half the pastry, I wondered if I would only need half the filling, but the whole 700g of peaches fit into my Le Creuset pie dish. 

 

After filling the pie dish with the, well, filling, gather the offcuts from the pie base, and re-roll to make the crust.  Ease it over the top of the pie, brush with egg wash, sprinkle with caster sugar and put into the fridge (again) for a bit, before putting into the oven for an hour.  Oh, after cutting 3 slits into the pie.  This is where it’s sometimes nice to add some decoration with extra pastry, however my attempt at making a peach out of pastry looked silly, so I went for a simple cross on top.

 

One hour later, a perfectly cooked peach pie emerged from the oven.  I think it may have had more of an all-over golden look if I’d put more egg wash on the top of the pie.  However this didn’t affect the taste at all, the pastry was soft and moist, but not soggy, and the peaches were sweet with the spice a subtle addition.  It isn’t a showstopping bake, however it did taste like a well-cooked, homely fruit pie.  My main recommendation is to lessen the quantities of the pastry by around a third.  I could’ve used half as much, but I used a smaller pie dish, around 6 inches rather than the 9 inch pie dish the recipe says to use.  I had so much pastry leftover I made a whole other pie!  Well, an egg custard tart.  And there was still enough left over to make 12 small tarts, with egg custard and lemon curd filling. 

 

Everything did turn out well and tasted good, however with all the extra baking, and the resting of the dough and the pie, making the pie was quite time-consuming.  Luckily it was a leisurely Sunday afternoon!  Until next time, happy baking!

Week 12, item 2 - The Main Event

Chocolate Shortcakes with a Peanut Butter Filling

Hmm, bit of a mouthful that title.  However the actual recipe was a lot less complex.  I looked through the cookbook a couple of times before deciding on this recipe – I wanted something that wasn’t a cupcake, a cookie, and not too intricate.  You may remember that I made the basic shortcake in the very first week of this adventure, and the result was ok, but I learnt to make the dough a lot thicker.  I already had most of the ingredients, which resulted in a quick and cheap trip to the supermarket, and it combined many delicious elements, mainly chocolate and peanut butter!

The bake

Incredibly, once again, I had all the main ingredients, except for using vegetable spread instead of butter, dark chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate chips (that’s what I had in the house), and I used light double cream (if such a thing really exists.  It seems like an oxymoron).  As I said above, the recipe was very simple.  All the dry ingredients are mixed together in a bowl, followed by the wet ingredients put together, then added to the dry ingredients, to make a rough dough.  The recipe says that there would still be some dry bits, but my mixture didn’t seem to be combining at all, so I did add a little bit of water to the mixture, just to make sure nothing flew across the room as I put the dough ball onto the kitchen surface, in order to mould into a flatter dough, to make six shortcakes.

I patted down the mixture until I felt it was flat enough.  And I actually had enough to cut out 9 shortcakes!  After keeping in the fridge for a bit for the dough to firm (the recipe states freezer but I didn’t have enough flat space), you brush the top with beaten egg, sprinkle it with demerera (or golden granulated as I did), then pop in the oven for 20 minutes.  As I needed a larger surface area I was using my mother’s kitchen, and she has a fan oven, so rather than having to add 10 minutes to the cooking time as I normally do, the cakes had cooked in the lower range of the recipe guidelines.  They looked good, although once again a bit thinner than I’d hoped, especially as they’ll be cut in half.

While they cooled, I made the filling.  With Hummingbird recipes I tend to halve the quantity needed for frosting, however as cream cheese was on offer anyway, I decided to go by the required quantities of cream cheese, peanut butter and icing sugar.

You may remember me saying that my sister has a nut allergy.  So this would be another thing that she would not be able to eat.  So in order for her to share in the shortcake consumption, before adding the peanut butter to the cream cheese and icing sugar, I halved two shortcakes and put in some filling sans peanut butter.  I did add more icing sugar than required to make it sweeter.  Once I’d split and filled those two, I added the peanut butter to the remaining cream cheese mixture.  You might have seen chocolate flavoured cream cheese, and this mixture is how peanut butter cream cheese would taste.

Once the shortcakes had cooled, I cut them all in half, and added probably two heaped teaspoons of mixture to half of the halves, as it were, before sandwiching them together. 

They’re basically chocolate scones, aesthetically and by taste.  That is, the cakes themselves are a little dry on their own, but with the filling there’s a nice texture contrast, and added moisture and sweetness.  The chocolate chips are a nice addition too, as they’re slightly melted from cooking.  So more of a success this time I feel.  Hopefully that will continue onto next week’s bake, but until then, Happy Baking!

Week 12, item 1 - Cake Pop disaster!

Leftover Cake Pops

Hmm, unfortunately the title of this blog post reveals how my cake pops turned out!  But I’ll still explain how I got there.  Now then, I had leftover chocolate sponge and buttercream from the Salted Caramel cupcakes I made last week, which, by the way, tasted amazing!  Maybe my most successful bake thus far from Home Sweet Home.  The icing had just a hint of the salt, so complemented rather than overpowered, and the caramel in the middle of the cupcake made the cake so moist.  I will however add the disclaimer that eating one did make my teeth hurt.  So be warned, it contains a lot of sugar.  But back to the leftovers. 

In the past I may have just eaten the offcuts and buttercream leftover separately (but eaten them nonetheless).  However, in the past year or so, the new baking trend, along with whoopee pies, seems to be cake pops.  You can even buy a cake pop maker.  However I don’t feel that they’re the proper cake pops – they’re just balls of sponge.  Whereas I first heard of cake pops being made by crumbling sponge that you’d made.  Which seems wasteful, but quite handy really if you have leftovers.  Due to my piqued interest in cake pops, for Christmas last year, Santa brought me a cake pop stand, sticks, and glitter/decoration for cake pops.  So I’ve really needed an opportunity to make them to be honest!  Firstly I crumbled the sponge, then just added it to the buttercream, and mixed.  I then made the mixture into little chocolatey balls (insert joke here), and put a stick in the middle (again, insert joke…).  I managed to make 6 from the mixture.  I put them in the freezer for a bit so that they would firm up, and be easier to coat.  While they were firming up, I turned to make the topping, which is where disaster struck…

Rather than use royal or fondant icing for decoration, as this was just an experimental first foray into cake popping, I wasn’t that worried about the coating.  I used another present from Santa, a bag of Renshaw’s toffee melts.  I didn’t intend on using the whole bag as I only had 6 pops, so I just put some melts into a small ceramic bowl, and blasted them in the microwave in 30 second bursts.  Being melts I assumed that they would, well, melt, but they took ages!  And once they had melted, they seemed to have burnt.  As a result the melt goo didn’t stretch very far, and made the cake pops look really sloppy.  Sad times.  However the taste wasn’t half bad, with or without the coating.  Although, again, sugar packed and therefore super sweet, so brush your teeth afterwards!  I will definitely make cake pops again, but maybe with a little more thought behind them next time.