Cream Cakes

It was my last dinner at Grandma’s this week, as on Sunday, in a whirlwind of books, bags and baking equipment, I return to university.  I wanted to go out with a flourish, but I couldn’t think what to make.  For days I wavered between an enormous mouth-watering chocolate cake, strawberries and cream pie and a brownie with a layer of cheesecake topped with some kind of yummy raspberry goo.  Sitting in Tom’s kitchen with a mountain of his mum’s recipe books, it came to me: Cream Cakes.  The kind of cakes coated in chocolate which ooze cream in a way that say ‘You know you can’t resist...’  And for this I would need to apply my deeply amateur hand to the dreaded Choux Pastry.

 

I decided to make two batches of these, as the recipe only served eight to ten.  Also this meant I got two chances to get it right.  I put the latest episode of The Great British Bake Off on in the background for a bit of moral support; the remaining fabulous baker girls were each creating a breath-taking croquembouche.  It might have worked because the first batch of pastry turned out to be a surprising success.  My little cakes rose; they were brown, but not burnt; they were not too dry or too wet on the inside; they didn’t sink when I cut into them.  The second batch, it has to be said, were less enthusiastic risers.  They tried valiantly but remained disappointingly flat.  I think the curse of the Spreading, so often seen in my cookies, had struck again because they were suspiciously wide.  Overall, the pastry actually worked.

The delight of success did not last very long, however, as next came the Great Cream Catastrophe.  I was using quite an old recipe which demanded a filling made of double cream, egg whites and sugar.  I had never whipped egg whites before, so in my sad little world that was quite fun.  I folded them into the cream and sugar and waited patiently for the magic to happen.  It didn’t.  The cream would not thicken up and I was left with a delicious disastrous mess to fill the cakes with.  And time was running out.  Luckily, as often happens, Mum came to the rescue.  We grabbed the cakes, chocolate, and Plastic Icing Thing which Tom bought me in Corfu and drove to Grandma’s by way of Sainsbury’s, where we bought emergency whipping cream.

Once disaster had been averted, everyone seemed quite impressed with the little cream cakes.  Hopefully the success was a sign of progress rather beginner’s luck; I suppose the only way to find out is to make them again, although next time I will try to make them look a little less like Elvis...

Mish Mash Cookies

No dessert last week; I was getting my recommended yearly allowance of sun in baking Corfu.  I landed at five in the morning, after a sleepless flight through a lightning storm, arrived home at six and promised my dad that I would make him cookies to take to Cirencester.  After a shower, I watched The Great British Bake Off for a bit of inspiration, and then searched through a couple of recipe books.  I soon realised, however, that there was a problem, and it was a truly severe one.  I had no energy to put on shoes, open the door, lock it, walk for five minutes and actually read food labels, so whatever I used had to be in the house.  Armed with a basic chocolate cookie recipe from Next’s Simply Chocolate recipe book, I hunted through the cupboards and produced: some shrivelled raisins, quite a few slightly dry mini marshmallows, a half-full bag of white chocolate chips and a handful of milk chocolate chips.  I made the mixture and impulsively chucked the lot in and cooked them.

 I don’t have much luck with cookies.  They always seem to spread out into a monster cookie, determined to engulf the baking tray and then The World, or they go crunchy, as in overcooked, and these were no exception.  Luckily they didn’t try for world domination, but unless the photographer was setting them next to a small bucket of coffee, they were definitely bigger than the ones in the book .  When I gave them a prod (with my squeaky clean hands), they were very soft so I put them back in the oven for a bit, until they were firm, and left them to cool, during which time they went very crunchy.  Despite these slight hiccups, the mish mash of ingredients tasted pretty good together; the marshmallows returned to a tasty gooey state, the raisins loosened up a bit, and chocolate chips in chocolate cookies cannot go wrong, even when left in the hands of a sleep-deprived amateur.

Besides all this, Dad liked them; I asked him how they went down and was informed that “I scoffed the lot”.  It seems, therefore, that much like ketchup on toast (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) and Captain America, this was one experiment that worked out well in the end.

Clown Cake

Originally this was supposed to be Brooklyn Blackout Cake.  You know, that chocolate cake coated in crumbs with the dark, seductive chocolate custard peeking through?  Clearly I was aiming for a broody classic; also quite clearly, it didn’t quite end up like that.  A brief warning: if this is the first post you’ve seen, I would just like to apologise for the poor welcome, and promise that this is the messiest cake on the site (even including the Mississippi Mud Pie.  No, that was definitely worse.)

The recipe for the icing used corn flour, and as this was a spontaneous outburst of cake making I thought that running out to Tesco would ruin my creative flow.  In other words, I didn’t fancy going out in the rain.  Besides this was the first time in a while that I was making a cake that had no specific recipients; I only had to please myself, and that meant that Mum wasn’t there to protest against bright colours.  As such I turned into a child and covered the whole thing with yellow vanilla icing and pink stripes.  I made the vanilla icing with the Hummingbird recipe, but I have to confess that I cheated with the pink.  Tom’s mum, knowing that I love pink and I love baking, bought me some pink ready-made icing.  And I hadn’t used it: until today.  Gone was my enticing chocolate vision, replaced with a colourful, fun-filled mess.  I based the colours on those Party Ring biscuits that appeared at every party you went to when you were about seven, the ones that scream ‘EAT ME BECAUSE I’M FUN!’  It looks like a seven year old decorated it; I’m willing to claim that this was the intention.

The layers of chocolate cake came out moist and crumbly, and they tasted better than I had thought they would with the vanilla icing.  There are supposed to be three layers to this cake; I was using 21cm tins instead of the recipe’s 20cm, and the mixture didn’t spread as far as I thought it would.  This didn’t make too much difference, although it would have looked cooler.

So the piping needs work and the yellow is a bit anaemic; it tasted good and my inner child was delighted.

Maltesers Cupcakes

As I mentioned in my previous post, I made two lots of cakes this week.  Coconut is a rather divisive subject in my family; much like marzipan, carrots and those little green gherkins in McDonald’s burgers, everyone has strong views on it.  In order to please everyone, I decided to give them two options.  I had been itching to try the coconut cakes, but I didn’t want the poor, deluded coconut haters to feel neglected.  With this in mind, I decided to take something tasty – the classic chocolate cupcake – and mix it with another treat; the long-term snack-time favourites that are the mighty Maltesers

In truth, I was in a bit of puzzle over which flavour base would fully show off that taste which is unique to Maltesers.  I initially thought of vanilla, which would give them a chance to show off their chocolate malty flavour, but in the end I decided that the only flavour which can truly support chocolate is chocolate.  With this in mind, I used the Hummingbird bakery’s Hazelnut and Chocolate Cupcakes recipe to create the chocolate base, but instead of adding Nutella to the middle, I blended about 110g of Maltesers until they were roughly the size of chocolate chips and folded them in just before spooning the mixture into cases.  I also mixed half a teaspoon of vanilla essence with the milk, just for a bit of extra Maltesers flavour.

The results were interesting.  I was imagining crunchy little lumps of Maltesers.  In reality, the chocolate and malt melted in the mixture.  While this was not quite what I was aiming for, it did give them quite a unique taste.  The icing, again from the every trustworthy Hummingbird bakery, was just more chocolate, which my inner child tells me can only be a good thing.  Next time I would probably add a white chocolate swirl to the top of the icing, just for a contrast, but I think these successfully promise the Maltesers feast they were created to be.  

Don't like coconut?  It's not your fault.  These chocolate treats will unite both nutters and notters; just don't let us eat them all.

Coconutters Cupcakes

As everyone is uncomfortably aware, September has well and truly shoved what is known as summer out of the way in order to drench us all with rain, chill us to the bone and then promptly blow us away.  In order to inject some last summer joy into proceedings, I went with the Hummingbird bakery’s coconut-flavoured cupcakes this week.  It perhaps says something about the English summer that to remind everyone of sunshine, I chose a fruit which cannot grow in England.

This week, Tom and I decided to be adventurous; rather than use coconut milk from a tin, we bought two real live furry coconuts and proceeded to dismantle them with nothing but our determination, wits and bare hands.  Well, sort of.  We had to use YouTube to look up the proper way to make holes in the coconut and how to break it in two (see the links at the bottom of the post), which is actually disappointingly simple.  The recipe called for 120ml of coconut milk, which we got out of one coconut, with a little extra left over.  The other one is sitting rather nervously by the sink, having watched its friend being stabbed through the eyes with a screwdriver, drained of its milk and then hammered until it split into two and had its innards gouged out.  I ended up using all the milk, as the mixture didn’t really taste particularly coconutty, but even this didn’t give it much flavour.  Elsewhere in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook there is a recipe for a large coconut cake, which explains how to grate coconut.  I cooked the two halves at 170 degrees for fifteen minutes, then spent ages attempting to grate the flesh.  In the end I gave up on the adventurous way, and used desiccated coconut from a bag.  The cakes didn’t taste overwhelmingly of coconut, but at least the desiccated coconut gave it the familiar texture.

For the topping I used, predictably, the Hummingbird bakery’s chocolate icing and more desiccated coconut.  When I had thought about which flavour to go for, I remembered Bounty bars, which was probably the first food I ate which contained coconut, and opted for chocolate.  The recipe calls for a lot of icing sugar; 300g for one batch of twelve cakes.  As I was making two loads of cakes (see the Maltesers Cupcakes) I thought I would be stingy and make one and three quarters worth of the icing to divide between both.  I started with three quarters of the original recipe, and this spread to enough for both batches of cakes.  I love their icings; this one had a lip-lickingly delicious chocolate taste, which worked well with the understated sweetness of the cakes. 

These cakes turned out to be somewhat lacking in the summery coconut punch I wanted, a bit like the weather.  Next time I will leave the coconut, screwdriver and hammer to one side, and use tinned coconut milk instead.  (Tin openers are quite adventurous, aren’t they?  The way you pull them apart, that confident, scissor-action, could almost be reminiscent of a Swiss Army knife, plus you have to avoid cutting your fingers on the edge of the lid when you throw it away.)  The desiccated coconut did give the cakes texture, and they were nice and light.  The chocolate worked well with the flavouring, and I quite like the colours together.  The original recipe used pineapple rings, which maybe would have given it more flavour, but that’s an exotic twist for another time.

If you fancy a glimpse of summer, these cakes will add a ray of sunshine to a gloomy day; just don’t get too adventurous.

If you still want to live on the edge and use milk straight from the coconut, find out how to drain a coconut here, on a website with the most self-explanatory domain name ever.

If having drained the coconut you want to break it in half and eat its insides (or clap the two halves together to make horse sounds), find out how to do this here.

I Love Pecan Pie

After the Mississippi Mud Pie mayhem, I was determined not to give up on my vision of presenting a perfectly turned out, mouth-wateringly delicious, dive-right-into it pie.  With this goal in mind, I embarked on another of the Hummingbird recipes: the mighty Pecan Pie.

The course of true pie love never did run smooth, and neither would the first batch of pastry.  Once that had been thrown (with feeling) into the bin, the next batch came out fine.  The recipe tells you to use a blender to mix the pastry, but as I don’t have one, I used a combination of a handheld blender and a handheld mixer.  For the first pastry, I used my hands to mix it together, which it didn’t like; it went very crumbly and wouldn’t stay in one piece long enough to roll.  I also put it to rest in the fridge, which the recipe didn’t mention specifically.  The second batch, treated with more patience, worked a lot better, although it still refused to roll out far enough to properly cover the (now correctly sized) pie dish.  Saying that, I did have enough left to offer some decoration, as primitive as this was.  I wanted to do a Stars and Stripes design, but there wasn’t enough, so instead I thought I would go for simplicity and give it a heart.  It also reminds me of The Pie Song from the film Waitress (if you love pie, this film was made for you), which mentions ‘a pie with a heart in the middle’.

After the trauma of the pastry, the filling felt pretty easy, although I would offer this advice; do not check if recently boiled sugar and syrup is hot or warm by tasting a teaspoon of it.  It will hurt your tongue.  And you will feel very stupid.  Another problem I had with the filling was that my endlessly helpful boyfriend, Tom, and I searched high and low for corn syrup, including a Tesco so large it was frightening, and we couldn’t find any.  OK, so not high and low – we didn’t go to America – but in the end we just used golden syrup, and it worked fine.

While I was rolling the second lot of pastry, Tom, who has helped me through many dessert catastrophes, looked at it and promptly reminded me of the pie in the Lurpak advert; the man makes a really ugly but tasty-looking pie.  I was offended, initially.  I had high hopes for this pie – it would look exactly like the picture (well, except for the decorative pecan halves), it would unleash a taste of the divine, and would generally be considered to be The Father Of All Pies.  Having rolled, filled, cooked and eaten it, I have concluded that this was, perhaps, optimistic, particularly in light of the aforementioned Great Mississippi Mud Pie Mayhem.  Instead, I have decided now, that the homemade quality is its appealing feature.  It may not look piefect, but it tasted pietty good on the inside, and that is what counts.

Listen to 'Baby Don't You Cry (The Pie Song)' by Quincy Coleman and Andrew Hollander here.

Watch the Lurpak advert here.