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!