Going into hybernation

 

Hello! I just wanted to drop by quickly to say hi and to apologise for my sporadic posting over the next few weeks. Yesterday was my last official day of contact time at uni, so now I've just got three weeks off in which to finish off my dissertation and other bits of coursework and then I'll be all done! How scary is that? Those three years have gone so quickly, yet it seems like I've been at uni forever.

 

I can however promise that, although I may be away from my blog a little more than usual, I'll still have lots to share when I get the time. For example these rather yummy biscuits which I'm in the process of perfecting. I'm also working on a 22 before 22 update which I'll hopefully put up over the weekend as I have a day off(!!!) booked into my study schedule on Sunday.

 

So bye for now and hope to see you soon,

 

 

PS You can still find me hanging around on twitter and instagram whilst I'm away. I find thy are great sources of procrastination!

 

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Recipe Review: Brazil & Banana Bread

We've had a couple of bananas which were past their best kicking round the kitchen for the last few days so I decided to put them out of their misery by making some kind of banana bread. There are loads of recipes on the BBC Good Food website but I went with the brazil & banana bread purely because it only required 2 bananas and that's all I had!

Pros

• Good for making with children - there's crumbling, mashing and easy mixing
• Easy to make, but make sure to read through the method carefully first or simplify it as per my suggestion
• The recipe says it can be frozen (everyone should have emergency cake!)
• The crumble topping is really yummy and a nice finishing touch
• Can easily be made dairy free as the recipe only calls for small quantities of butter and milk which could be easily substituted

Cons

• The method could have been written a bit clearer - I ended up making a mistake
• There was a little unnecessary faff in beating the egg white and sugar together first and then folding in. I slipped up here and just stirred the wet and dry ingredients together in separate bowls which turned out fine, so you can easily leave out this step
• A little too heavy on the brazil nuts for me making it quite crunchy
• Mine took a bit longer to bake than the recipe suggests - more like 50 than 40 mins in my fan oven, and a little longer wouldn't have hurt

Tips

• Keep and eye on the crumble topping as it browns easily and cover with foil towards the end to stop it getting too crispy - it will be much easier to cut
• You don't need to worry with the whisking of the egg white and sugar if you don't want to - I didn't! Plus not doing so means less washing up (oh, to own a dishwasher!)

What I thought...

Slight misunderstanding with the method aside, I really liked this cake - it's yummy and the fact that it's banana means you can pretend it's healthy. The banana and oil also keeps it's nice and moist. However, next time I think I'll use fewer brazil nuts and perhaps slightly more cinnamon as it didn't really come through. I loved the crumble topping though, especially the hint of coconut, so I think I may be recycling that idea in other loaf cakes I make!

Overall a good solid recipe and a nice starting point to play around with and tailor to your own tastes. I will definitely be baking this again, albeit with a few alterations.

Choral baking

Sorry this is a day later than expected - blogger wasn't being very cooperative last night! But as promised I'm back to share my most recent baking exploits.

As psychology students we have to run an empirical project in our third year, which is our version of a dissertation, and I was in need of participants. As it's all run online I asked if any of the members of my choir, Brighton Festival Chorus, would be willing to participate with the possible reward of cake on concert day. To my delight/slight trepidation 50 or so people signed up, so on Friday night I got my bake on!

It took me about 5 hours start to finish (with icing) and about a kilo of icing sugar, but I got there in the end  -70 cupcakes all boxed up and ready for choir. I used a couple of recipes from my trusty cupcake bible Cupcakes by Susannah Blake and improvised with the coffee ones. The ones above are all vanilla with plain icing.

And these ones are lemon, coffee and then rose water. I think the rose water ones could have done with a little more flavor as the rose water I used was fairly cheap and a bit more water than rose, but otherwise I was really pleased with myself!

I'm starting to think I should have done something baking related rather than a psychology degree as I enjoy it so much!

Have a great week,

Alex

A month in pictures: October and November

Now, don't judge me, but I am aware that I haven't actually posted last months Instagram mosaic yet, so here we have a two in one post - both October and November's month in pictures. So what did I get up to in October? Well...

I celebrated my 21st birthday, bought bread from the Lewes farmer's market, did a bit of autumnal cooking with a mushroom risotto, had a little package through the post from my Mum, made a Monday morning much more bearable with a Cath Kidston mug and moomin spoon, got going on a new cross stitch project for someone's Christmas present, baked a chocolate and banana loaf...

...and then wrapped it up in brown paper and string (whilst loudly singing songs from the sound of music), ate said chocolate-banan loaf in the staffroom at work, did yet more cross stitch preparation and watched the stormy skies from my bedroom window.

And in November...

I went to london with Mum and had the long anticipated paella in Covent Garden, we started singing new Christmas music at choir, Mum bought me a marzipan piglet from Harrods, I had my first gingerbread latte of the year, did a bit of christmas cross stitch on the train, practically lived in this lecture theatre for a day, burnt the first christmas scented candle of he year, did more chrstmas singing at choir, had an extended weekend in Dorset to celebrate Mum's birthday and had snuggles with this dozy lump of fluff...

...made marble cupcakes for Mum's birthday (and then forgot to take photos of the finished product), had more snuggles with Hector, saw the Christmas tree go up on campus and finally treated myself to a couple of cute Christmas decorations.

Sorry for such a long, picture laden post. I had a feeling that if I didn't do it now I never would and we most certainly can't have a gap in the month in pictures series now can we?

Happy Friday,

aLittleBlonde xx

PS You can find me on instagram as @aLittleBlonde or you can see my online profile here

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A Spot of Olympic Baking

Thursday saw the olympic torch making it's journey through Dorchester before heading to Weymouth to stop over night, so Southampton-Girl and I decided to go along and watch the torch as it passed through our little part of the country and then head back to mine, to be joined by Durham-Girl for a good old bake-off.

It was originally intended to be summery affair, with us stood at the side of the road in the sunshine waiting to see the torch before baking cakes and consuming them in the garden. In reality we got somewhat drenched (some more than others!) whilst watching the torchbearer paddle past through Poundbury. But we went, and we have the photos to prove it!

Thinking about it I suppose it's quite impressive when you stop to think that we're only 20 years old and we've lived through 3 decades, 2 milleniums and seen the Olympic torch in our home town. Not to mention the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. I wonder what other major events like that will occur in our lifetimes?

So, on the way back from our swim to see the torch we went to not one, but two convenience stores in search of ingredients, followed by a trip to the specialist cake decorating shop the Angel Cake Company up at Poundbury and then the obligatory stop off at the House of Dorchester factory shop to get some supplies to keep up our strength whilst baking. If you live in the area both the cake and chocolate shops are really worth a visit. This certainly wasn't the last time I'll be visiting either of them this summer!

We used the buttercream mountain recipe from Baking Magic to make the cupcakes. Normally when I'm baking on my own I tend to go for particular flavours like these Coffee Praline ones I made or the Spiced Carrot and Cardamon ones that I love making (both modified from Cupcake Heaven), but this time we decided that it was about the decorating - bright butter cream icing, sprinkles, the works! So much so that we even put sprinkles into the batter in the hope that the sponge would come out multicoloured as it does when you use sugar strands, but sadly they seem to have dissolved in the cooking process.

The sponge worked and tasted great and I'll definitely be using the recipe again as a good basic cupcake base. It's supposed to make 12, but we ended up with 19 cupcakes! Whether we used slightly smaller, cupcake cases, filled them with less batter or what I don't know, but it definitely seemed to work. I love the idea that this book tells you how to make the basic bases of all the cakes and biscuits and then states which base you need to use and in what quantities for each recipe. It's such a great idea and saves a lot of repetition, plus I think it encourages you to experiment with mixing and matching ideas, flavours and decoration ideas a bit more as well.

Sadly the first batch of butter cream we made following the recipe didnt seem to work quite as well. Maybe it was because we used a particular brand of butter rather than bog-standard unsalted butter or maybe it's because we were lazy and decided to use a blender rather than beating it by hand. Either way it didn't look right and it didn't taste right, so we ditched it and ventured out again to get mre supplies to make a second batch, this time working by look and feel rather than following a recipe and I'm very happy to tell you that it worked!

We decided to split the buttercream to make 5 different coloured toppings, but Durham-Girls's attempt at making purple icing using blue and red food colouring went a little awry, so we ended up ditching that one. Our combined efforts at making pink or even red butter cream using red food colouring eventually turned out a rather nice shade of orange instead (don't ask me what happened there!).

So here we are, the finished articles. Aren't they pretty?

Of course the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that there are only 15 cakes here - we decided to make the ones that should have had the failed purple icing look somewhat special with the leftovers...

And of course one poor cupcake had to be consumed pretty much as soon as it came out of the oven. You know, just to make sure it wasn't poisonous. We take quality control very seriously here ;)

Of course the whole decorating experience would not have been possible had it not been for this impulse purchase up at Angel Cakes yesterday. We only went in for sprinkles, but I just could not resist this piping gun. It's easily the best £8-something I've spend in a long time and it was so eay to use!

No more plain shiny or spread on icing for me! Next time I think we're planning our first foray into edible glitter, or maybe something chocolately? I hope it's not too long before we repeat the experience.

Happy Sunday, aLittleBlonde xx

A Lesson in Coffee Cupcakes

To celebrate my new-found summer freedom from all things uni (well nearly), I decided it was about time to do a bit of baking! I love cooking and baking in particular, but never seem to have the time to really indulge myself, instead opting for quick fail-safe recipes for every day and completely neglecting home-made treats. However, as I finally had a little time to spare I decided I would make some cup cakes to take with me to work on Friday morning.

Every time I decide to bake something the process of deciding exactly what seems to take longer and longer as my 'must bake' list continues to lengthen, so this time I decided to take requests. Coffee and walnut or lemon drizzle. Sorted. I sifted through my favourite cupcake book, Cupcake Heaven and decided to go for the posh coffee praline ones with the cool topping. Not quite coffee and walnut I know, but I was feeling adventurous.

Much to my dismay it wasn't until I read through the recipe as I was getting everything ready that I realised I would be needing a fairly hefty blender. Bummer. Lacking the time or the energy to change my plans and go and get more ingredients to make something different, I decided to make do and mend and made the cake base of the low-fat coffee and walnut cupcakes with the topping of the coffee praline ones. Ta Dah!

I have to admit it wasn't my most successful baking attempt so far due to somewhat overcooking the actual cakes. As my colleague put it, they tasted really good, but had a consistency a bit like compacted sand. It appears my usual method of judging when a cake is done by touch, colour and the trusty skewer test doesn't really work when the cake in question is butter free and therefore doesn't go golden brown no matter how long you cook them! On the plus side the topping and decoration went brilliantly, making up for the somewhat heavy foam, I mean sponge, that was the base.

My first attempt at the shards of hazelnut encrusted sugar didn't go quite as planned when following the book. It mostly seems to be a timing thing and I wasn't overly sure about the proportions described in the book, so I took the idea and ran with it, keeping the hazelnuts whole and adding ingredients until it looked 'right', whatever that is. It seemed to be a hit with everyone at work and the bag of leftover shards I took in got eaten pretty quickly. Needless to say I will definitely be playing with this idea some more and refining it further in the future! The failed batch, although turning out completely differently in taste and texture was also rather nice, so I think I'll have a go at recreating that in it's own right as well when I next get the opportunity. I had intended to take a photo of the failed batch, but, well, it never quite made it before getting eaten...

The topping was a bit of a revelation as well. It's the first time I've used a mascarpone based topping and I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not usually a fan of mascarpone, but the combination of the bitter coffee with the icing sugar and then the creamy texture really worked and provided much more scope for spreading than my usual coffee icing combo. Plus I love the gentle ripple effect you can get if you spread it on right.

I had a bit of the topping left over which I put in the fridge and tasted great eaten neat the next day. And yes, I did go there, but I was going away and the fridge needed emptying. What's a girl to do? Either way I'm definitely going to do a bit of experimentation to create my own goop pots as a posh and entirely evil pudding.

So it appears these little cakes have taught me a lot -
1. Always read the recipe through before even considering making anything new
2. Butter-free sponge doesn't go golden brown, just condenses.
3. Whatever the difference between blanched and roasted hazelnuts is, it doesn't make much difference when they're coated in sugar
And finally...
4. Molten sugar is extremely hot, stays so for quite some time after you take it off the heat and is very sharp when you snap it. And when I say it burns, I mean really, really burns. And sticks to you.