Cupcake mania

A couple of weeks ago I thought that I would test out the new cupcake recipe that BakingN and I received from the cupcake class. It was fairly simple and I wanted to try some of the little tips that Brittany had passed on for myself.

Gather your ingredients. Make sure that you have everything that you need to cook.


Cream your butter and sugar. My butter had been out of the fridge for a couple of days and so was nice and softened by the time I was ready to bake! Start beating the butter first, then gradually add the sugar.


Mix in the vanilla extract and eggs. Add the eggs one at a time and incorporate each egg well before adding the next one. Brittany maintains that the reason why we do this is that it helps to prevent the mixture from splitting.


Mix in the sifted flours. Brittany's recommendation is to do it with a spatula, as beating it with the electric beaters can make the batter chewy.

Finally add in the wet ingredients and mix well with your trusty spatula.


The batter is now ready to either decant into cupcake liners or to add flavourings.


I was fairly conservative and made vanilla cupcakes and chai cupcakes. I wanted to see how the mixture went first before branching out!



If I make this recipe again before the lime season is over then I might just try the lime and coconut flavour.

The icing recipe was new for me, usually when I make buttercream icing I just use butter and icing sugar. This time around I added vanilla and milk as directed.

Beat your softened butter, then gradually add the sifted icing sugar. Add the vanilla and milk. Remove the beaters and mix further with your spatula.


I was a little more conservative with my icing and tried to pipe it flat onto the cakes, rather than swirling it to a peak. This meant that there was less icing and I found that the equivalent amount of butter (125g in the cupcakes and 125g in the icing) was the perfect proportion.

Berry and white chocolate muffins

Following my efforts with the baci semifreddo I found myself with a surplus of double cream and creme fraiche. I knew just the recipe and pulled out my Donna Hay simple essentials: chocolate cook book. Muffins are simple to make and easy to share with my work mates!

2 cups self-raising flour
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 cup sour cream
2 eggs
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon rind
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups raspberries
1 cup chopped white chocolate


Preheat the oven to 180C.

Place the flour and sugar into a bowl and mix to combine.

Combine the sour cream, eggs, lemon rind and oil and whisk together.


Stir the sour cream mixture into the flour mixture until just combined. Fold through the raspberries and chocolate. I do not think that I mixed well enough before I added the berries and chocolate, if you look closely you can see a fair amount of flour in the batter.



Spoon the mixture into 8 texas muffin tins lined with paper patty cases.
Bake for 25-30 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer.



Notes

• I made 12 muffins in cases in a 1/3 cup tray. Cook for approximately 20 minutes


• I made a few tweaks to the recipe, substituting wholemeal flour and using a combination of sour cream, creme fraiche and double cream, as well as lime rind instead of the lemon rind as we have an oversupply


• For vegetable oil I always use a light olive oil


• The berries that were in my freezer were mixed berries, and quite icy. I tried to pick out the ice as best I could


• For chocolate I had a combination of chocolate melts and white chocolate.

Queen of hearts at Koko Black

Last Sunday E and I topped off our exhausting shopping efforts at the Upmarket with a visit to the recently opened Koko Black in Claremont.

It was lunchtime and I was a little unsure as to whether we would be able to find anything savoury at a chocolate salon! They luckily had a couple of sandwiches on the menu and we combined those with a Queen of Hearts high tea.


We had a choice of drinks with our high tea. There were so many interesting options on the menu and E went for a chocolate chai. It needed to be strained and was so thick that she could not pass it through the strainer! I was concerned about a sugar overload - I had to run around later in the afternoon - and stayed conservative with a pot of English Breakfast Tea.


Our stack of loveliness had two tiers. The bottom, savoury tier included toasted sandwiches with fillings of roasted vegetable and also pastrami & gruyere, and mini tarts with fillings of tomato as well as leek. The top sweet tier had a selection of five of the sweet treats that tantalised us from the display cabinet. Our selection included a cream filled lamington, creme brulee, lemon tart, chocolate opera cake and an orange tart. My favourite was the creme brulee. It had a nice top that you cracked through to get to the runny vanilla centre. Bliss!



The Queen of Hearts was $37 for two people, including the drinks. We were very impressed with the spread and I thought it was great value for money. It was all very tasty and so well presented. We made sure to bring a few sweet treats home for C! I got in trouble for not bringing him anything home from E's and my visit to the Sherbert Cafe.

Revisiting the lime curd tart

C came home from work on Saturday and asked if I would make a lime tart for him to share with his workmates. There was nothing on television so I was happy to get creative in the kitchen! He gave me a hand making the pastry and the curd, then went to bed and left it to me to roll and blind bake the pastry!

I used the lime curd tart recipe that I had made last year for Mother's Day.

I am not sure why but this time around I really struggled to get my pastry into the tart shell. Initially it was too soft, even after an hour or so in the fridge, and when I tried to put it into the tart shell it just fell apart. After pulling it back into a ball I rolled it out and put it back into the fridge for some more chilling. I then tried to put the chilled pastry into the tart. It was too rigid and I ended up slicing off the edges of the pastry on the top of the tart.

It's terribly sad but on Sunday night I stayed awake for a little while trying to figure out how to best get the pastry into the tart shell. The best I could come up with was to have two tart tins of the same size, and to first shape the pastry over an upside down tart tin before I put the tart tin that I am using upside down onto the pastry and inverting. It sounds complicated when I try to explain but I might give it a try next time I pull out the pastry.

Even though my efforts in putting the pastry into the tin ended up a shambles, the pastry still baked well and I had no shrinkage at all. At least I have some positives!

Another positive from the tart this time around is that my new Kitchenaid Food Processor was quite happy in making the pastry. I am so glad that I spent the bucks last year to buy it, and it might be the last treat I give myself for some time!

A class of cupcakes!

On Wednesday night BakingN and I made our way to The Home Provedore in Fremantle to take part in their Cupcake Class! We were not sure what exactly to expect. We have made the odd cupcake or two before but thought that it would be fun to see another perspective.

We were running a little late (damn traffic!) and so the class had started as we came in. Chef Brittany Kemp talked us through the steps of her Vanilla Cupcake recipe, and we were able to see the batter through its various stages. Once the batter was made, she split it into four and added flavourings so that we could sample more than just Vanilla.

Whilst the cupcakes were baking Brittany showed us how to make buttercream icing and demonstrated some basics with the piping bags. It was then our turn to swirl small blobs of icing and try and master the technique. BakingN showed her perfect skills off, whereas my blogs looked, well, blobby!

We were able to sample all of the cake flavours fresh from the oven. It was difficult to stop but I remembered that I had to share.

The (pleasant) surprise for me was that we all got to take four cupcakes home, one of each flavour. They had been previously baked and hidden from in boxes at the back of the room. Brittany had piped icing on two of them and we got to practice our skills again on our own cakes.

If you look closely at this photo of my cakes you can quite easily tell the two cupcakes that were piped by the experienced professional. The flavours were vanilla, coconut & lime, pear & white chocolate and chai. I was impressed by the chai flavoured cupcakes, and next time I go to a supermarket I am going to look for the chai powder.

Things that I learned
I cannot speak for BakingN, but I did learn a few things from the class. For starters, I have a new cupcake recipe using natural yoghurt, and I cannot wait to try it! I already have my unsalted butter out of the fridge to soften in anticipation of making them tomorrow or Sunday.

One of the things that impressed me about the class was that Brittany showed us how easy it was to flavour the cakes. I have never really experimented with my cupcake recipes and follow them fairly closely. I can see the advantage of making a batch of batter and then mixing different flavours into it, and plan to do just that when I make my first batch.

My piping skills were shown to be lacking, and I will try to apply the advice that we were given. Essentially, squeeze the piping bag from the top, hold the bag vertically and keep the nozzle at the correct distance away from the icing swirl.

If you are a beginner cupcake baker, or looking to improve your cupcake skills, then this could be the class for you! As for me, I am looking forward to eating more chai flavoured cupcakes as well as experimenting a bit more with flavours. Yum!