Little Maple Banana Cakes

Each year at least one of the magazines that I subscribe to (yes, I subscribe because I'd only end up buying them each month, and so it works out much cheaper this way!) has a freebie calendar, which is usually really useful. I don't actually use a calendar on the wall that much any more, preferring an electronic means of keeping track of where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing, but I still like to have the calendar on the wall. (I think this harks back to my childhood, where all events were meticulously recorded on the calendar lest we forgot something...)

This year, the calendar is from the BBC Good Food magazine, and it's a good one. I have sometimes found that when the calendars are sponsored by certain companies every single recipe contains their ingredient. This is fine if they've got a reasonable range to choose from, but it gets a bit old to have 'X-brand' cheese in every single recipe. Anyway, this year the sponsor is Dr Oetker, but happily almost none of the recipes have a sponsored ingredient in them, they're just good BBC Good Food recipes.

Anyway, this is leading somewhere, I promise. I have spent most of the year walking past this calendar and seeing the recipes each month (January - Frosty yogurt orange cake, February - Passion fruit cupcakes, March - Sultana tea loaf) and haven't made any of them yet. Until now. Turning over the page just over a month ago I was greeted by Little banana cakes with maple pecan frosting. So far so unexciting. Not really a recipe for me as I can't eat pecans. But then I realised that adapting this recipe would be perfect for some of the ingredients I had around needing using up. Maple syrup and a very ripe banana (just the one lonely one - not helpful for the majority of recipes, which require many very ripe bananas; I'm sure I'm not the only one out there to only get one small ripe banana left over...) called my name.

An adapted recipe ensued:

Little Maple Banana Cakes
Ingredients
50g butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
80g light muscovado sugar
105g self raising flour
40g maple syrup
1 large egg
1 very overripe banana, mashed (mine weighed 70g after removing the skin)
30g raisins

Frosting

Usual method for making buttercream, if you want (i.e. about half butter to sugar - I'd be tempted to use about 40-50g butter for six cakes and therefore about 100-140g icing sugar)

Flavourings as desired (orange, lemon, maple syrup etc)

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease a 6 hole muffin tin well with butter (or, obviously, use 6 holes of a 12 hole tin...)

- Cream the butter and muscovado sugar (if you don't want to do this step separately then either use a hand mixer, NOT a stand mixer or make sure your butter is super, super soft - I thought mine was, but clearly not - the butter wouldn't mix into the rest of the ingredients using a stand mixer and I ended up decanting into a different bowl and blitzing with a hand mixer).

- Add the rest of the ingredients except the raisins and beat well until combined.

- Stir in the raisins and divide between the prepared tins.

- Bake for 20-25 minutes.

- Turn out onto a wire rack and allow to cool.

If topping with buttercream, make up as usual (beat butter until soft, add icing sugar in a couple of batches, beating until well combined, light and fluffy - I usually add a splash of water to make the mixture easier to beat) and add flavourings as desired. Maple syrup might be good here.

I love, love, loved these. They aren't too sweet, they aren't too banana-ry and the flavour of the maple syrup doesn't come through strongly. That makes them sound a failure doesn't it, none of the constituent flavours being readily identifiable. But in fact, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The cakes are moist and deliciously dense, sweet but not overly so, and the maple syrup adds undertones and is subtle. The raisins are plump and juicy and really add to the overall cake by providing a contrasting chewy texture. They develop a delicious sticky top after a day or so and soften slightly around the edges, really, really good. So successful in fact that I have made second and third batches for myself already. In the second batch I added about 50g dark chocolate, and this was one of those occasions were the chocolate was an intrusion, unwarranted and detracted from the deliciousness of the cakes as they were. Needless to say, the third batch didn't contain chocolate and was much the better for it.

Parsnip, Maple Syrup and Pear Cake

Well, this month is the first birthday of the Tea Time Treats challenge, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked. So to celebrate, Karen is hosting this month with the theme of Cake. What could be more appropriate for a birthday celebration than cake? I knew when she announced it exactly which cake I was going to make... 

A few years ago BBC Good Food magazine was celebrating its 20th birthday and ran a competition to create a recipe for a suitably celebratory cake. There were lots of entries and the winners and runners up in various categories were chosen (and all look delicious). This Parsnip and Maple Syrup Cake was in the magazine (November 2009) as a finalist but ended up as the winner, and deservedly so. The other two finalist's cakes were a Coffee Crunch Cake and a Salted Caramel Chocolate Cake. Yum!

I've actually made this cake before, a couple of years ago and never got round to blogging it, so this was a great excuse to make it again and remind myself of just how delicious it really is. My colleagues are generally open minded when it comes to trying the various different cakes that land on the tea-room table (they don't get a say - I bake what I want and they can choose to eat it if they want, or ignore it if they want) but I did wonder whether they would draw the line at parsnip in a cake. So it went on the tea-room table as 'Mystery Cake - can you guess the ingredients?'. It was good fun - all through the day I had people coming up to me with random suggestions of what was in the cake - some correct answers and some slightly wild suggestions which amused me greatly. 

I did change the recipe slightly. I can't use pecans so I omitted those, I used a small pear rather than an eating apple and I omitted the zest and juice of the orange specified. I'm struggling to remember whether I replaced it with lemon, but I don't think I did. This is a cake that is more than the sum of its parts - perfectly balanced in flavours. There isn't a parsnip taste at all (in the same way that carrot cake doesn't taste of carrot) but oddly, there isn't a maple syrup flavour either. Quite a bit of syrup is used in the cake, and I'm sure that it contributes to the overall effect but it is the one ingredient that none of my colleagues picked up (quite a few said cinnamon - which is in the mixed spice) and a number suggested citrus - lemon or lime (which I don't think I used) but perhaps they were foxed by the strips of grated pear skin which was green and after suggesting various vegetables (the texture gives it away) some people said parsnip. I used a vanilla buttercream for the centre of the cake (50g butter, about 150g icing sugar and a tsp vanilla extract, made in the usual way). The texture of the cake is outstanding though - really moist and quite close, yet light too. I think this is quite a common feature of vegetable cakes - the moistness but without accompanying heaviness. The cakes are quite delicate when baked, so be careful when turning them out.

Great minds think alike though, as Suelle at Mainly Baking has already blogged this cake as her entry to TTT. However, because I think it's such a lovely cake and definitely deserves to be promoted and made by more people I'm blogging it as my entry too. So I guess I could sum up this entire post in one short sentence: Make and eat this cake, you won't regret it!

Maple Syrup Butter Cookies

When Dom from Belleau Kitchen and Karen of Lavender and Lovage announced that this month, their two challenges; Random Recipes and Tea Time Treats were getting together I had mixed feelings. Not that this isn't a good pairing, but rather that my heart sort of sinks when I have no control over the recipe I have to make - I am a complete control freak and hate having decisions taken out of my hands. And this month this would apply to another of the challenges I like to enter, not just random recipes itself.

So I took a deep breath, opened one of my (many - what, are you surprised I have many) baking books. I chose 'Mix' which is one of my books containing recipes from the Australian Women's Weekly. I really like these recipe - there are often combinations that I haven't thought of, or different presentations that inspire me to bake. And my recipe was these rather cute little maple syrup butter cookies.

The chosen book - note all the stickers for recipes I want to make

Perfect - nothing says 'Teatime' to me more than biscuits. These were really quick and easy to put together. They're a melting-moment type biscuit. I tried to find the recipe online, but find the AWW website very hard to navigate so I had to give up. They consist of butter beaten with maple syrup and a tiny dash of vanilla. This was my only real problem making them - the butter and maple syrup is supposed to become light and fluffy but mine split and wouldn't do light and fluffy. Plain flour and cornflour is then added and they are piped onto prepared trays to be baked. They were fun to pipe (I like piping generally), if a little sticky.

First batch - nicely cooked

After the first batch came out of the oven I decided to refrigerate the rest and see if they would keep their shape better - they didn't so I wouldn't bother wasting time refrigerating them again. The first batch were baked while I had something else in the oven underneath them, the second batch were alone in the oven and have consequently coloured more on the base. I am still trying to learn the foibles of my new oven.

Second batch - overbaked

The house smelled particularly delicious while these were baking - what's not to like about warm maple syrup and butter - utterly divine! I would try these again - I wanted to see if I can get them to keep their shape a little better and I might try using the fan oven instead of the conventional setting.They were very buttery and quite crisp at first with a melt in the mouth texture that comes from the use of cornflour as part of the flour. The maple syrup flavour was unfortunately not to my taste at all. I don't know why, but they really didn't appeal to me at all. The texture was great - melting and delicate, but the flavour was just so wrong. I haven't baked a lot with maple syrup before, but these were not pleasant. And I also found that as the only sweetening agent was the syrup they weren't quite sweet enough for my taste in biscuits either. A bit of a disappointment and a definite don't make again.

I can't decide what to do with them now, whether to give up on them as a bad job (made about a week ago now) or whether to whip up a batch of buttercream and sandwich them together - this would counteract the problem of them not being sweet enough but might make them soggy. Hmm, what would you do? Or can you recommend good baking recipes using maple syrup please?

Edited to add: I am also submitting these into Jac's Bookmarked Recipes feature, since they are also something in this recipe book that I have been meaning to make for ages.

Blueberry Yogurt Cheesecake

And now for something a little different from the usual baking you see on my blog. I was contacted a while ago and asked if I would like to look at the recipes that have recently been added to the Total Greek Yogurt website so I agreed to take a look, Total yogurt is definitely one of my favourites. I am a big fan of plain yogurt over flavoured, finding most flavoured yogurt too sweet or with an odd thickened texture (Longley Farm is my exception - utterly delicious, properly tangy yogurt, but sadly not too widely available).

My first port of call in the 1000 recently published recipes was naturally the baking ones. I had a good long browse through before deciding that sadly there wasn't anything that took my fancy at all. I had hoped for a delicious cake using yogurt as an ingredient (like this Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake by Dan Lepard that I have made numerous times) but instead there were quite a lot of recipes with a yogurt frosting (all very well, but should really be kept in the fridge I think, so no good for sharing with colleagues).

So I ended up choosing this blueberry yogurt cheesecake. After having agreed to receive ingredients to make the cheesecake I learned that this is part of Total's campaign to spread the word about their delicious natural yogurt. Other points the lovely people at Total would like you to know include:

- They are running a competition to celebrate the launch of their 1000 ways to use Total Yogurt. This recipe is one of 30 you can find across various blogs. The more you find, the more chance you have of winning the grand prize.

- These are also available in a brand new Facebook app, so you don’t even have to leave Facebook to get inspiration for dinner. (I'm a facebook newbie - find Cake, Crumbs and Cooking here - so I don't really know if this is a good thing, but I guess it is)

- Total yoghurt is the only authentic Greek yoghurt on sale in the UK. Because it is made in Greece in the traditional way it is much thicker and more robust than Greek‐styled yoghurt. As such it is much better to use in cooking and is still just as good for you. Total Greek Yoghurt is 100% natural.

- Speaking of the prize, top chef Paul Merrett has put together his list of essential kitchen equipment. The lucky winner will get this amazing wish list including the very best cookware worth more than  £800.

Here is the competition:

There are 30 TOTAL recipes on 30 different food blogs across the web. Can you find them? If so, you are in with the chance of winning Paul Merrett's Ultimate Chef's Kit, worth over £800. On the tab you'll find clues leading to 10 of the hidden recipe and over the next few weeks, additional clues will be posted on the timeline to help you find the final 20. The more recipes you find, the more times you name goes into the draw and the more chances you have to win. The recipes are part of the brand new recipe collection 1000 Ways to Love your TOTAL.

The link to the facebook tab is: http://www.facebook.com/TotalGreekYoghurt/app_270613416296446

Ingredients for yummy cheesecake - including 'maple' syrup

This recipe is quick and easy to pull together, which is just what is needed when you're short of time. I halved the recipe, not needing extra cheesecake hanging around.

When I received my ingredients I realised I'd need to amend the recipe slightly - the recipe specifies two 'cookie type biscuits' and I had been given digestives and butter. What to do, except make a digestive base?! There was also no clue given as to the size of mould/pastry ring/pastry cutter needed so I had to guess. I used a 7cm diameter ring. I guessed slightly wrongly and ended up with too much cheesecake mixture for my ring. I also guessed the amount of biscuit mix I'd need wrongly too. I decided two digestives (weighing 30g) bashed up and mixed with 15g melted butter would be plenty, and it was; plenty and too much. I used about half of it, which corresponds to one biscuit and about 8g butter.

I was saddened that the 'maple syrup' provided was only 35% maple syrup, so I decided that in order to make the best of the other ingredients I had been given I would use some of my own 100% maple syrup - it seemed silly not to. Well, I do not profess to be a cheesecake afficionado, but I really, really liked this and will definitely, definitely be making it again. The beautiful creamy richness of the yogurt-cheese mixture, the popping of the blueberries as you ate them (can you tell I was generous with my blueberries - pile them high) and the buttery sweet base and smoky sweet maple syrup. Wow, it was lovely. I was worried that the yogurt-cheese mix would be too tart but it wasn't at all.

I would recommend making and eating them the same day though because my method of making the base meant that the yogurt-cheese mixture made it go slightly soggy by the next day which was a bit of a shame. The other thing I would recommend is drizzling with maple syrup just before you eat them because again, this made the base a little soft too. However, the taste was just fabulous. My final point is that I needed a chef's blowtorch to get the cheesecake out of the ring. I was honestly dubious as to whether this would work, but just trying to pull the ring off the cheesecase wasn't working so I used the blowtorch (first time use!) and it worked really, really well (just as well as when fancy-pants chefs use it in television programmes). I really don't know how I would have managed to release it otherwise. I was really pleased with how this looked - very smart and definitely suitable for a dinner party. 

So what do I think of the recipes overall? Well, there are a lot of them. I didn't have a thorough look through all of them (not surprising given there are 1000) but I was disappointed to see that the majority of the baking recipes were 'serve with greek yogurt' rather than actually using it as an ingredient. This is why I picked this recipe - the yogurt is actually used as an ingredient rather than just a garnish or serving suggestion. From the savoury recipes I looked at this appears to be the case too - garnishes rather than ingredients for many recipes.

This particular recipe lacked certain necessary details (such as the size of the ring to be used) and that it would be difficult to subsequently remove the ring without a blowtorch (though if you can think of an alternative method please leave a comment!). I made a different base simply due to the ingredients I was given, but the specified cookie would probably work well. But as mentioned before it was delicious and I'll make it again. I was thinking that a 'deconstructed' version would be easier too - just mix the cream cheese and yogurt in a bowl and add the fruit, buttery biscuit crumbs and then pour over a generous slosh of maple syrup - not as pretty but just as tasty!

Overall, the recipes lack a little detail in how to actually make some of them, which has made me appreciate the work recipe writers put in to their jobs. I think there are some excellent ideas there for inspiration but perhaps not for complex recipes. My love for Total yogurt remains undimmed - it's still utterly delicious.

Disclaimer: I received the groceries pictured above to make this recipe and have included relevant links to Total's website for their campaign. I have not otherwise received any payment and all opinions expressed are my own.

Oat and maple syrup scones

I love scones, they make a great snack - not too heavy but substantial enough to fill a gap. And even better when topped with butter (preferably melted) and jam. So when I saw this recipe at Smitten Kitchen I couldn't wait to try it. I loved the idea of including oats and a proportion of wholemeal flour in the recipe, and having enjoyed these maple syrup cupcakes, I wanted to see how the maple syrup flavour worked with the scones.

I didn't want too many scones, so halved the recipe and made them slightly smaller than specified.

Oat and Maple Syrup Scones (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

Ingredients

130g plain white flour

40g wholemeal flour

20g oats

2 level tsp baking powder

55g butter

40g maple syrup

90ml milk

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas 6/200C. Put a piece of parchment paper onto a baking tray.

- Rub the butter into the flours, baking powder and oats.

- Add the maple syrup and milk and bring together to a dough.

- Pat out on a floured work surface and then cut out your scones (my cutter was 5cm/2" diameter and I got 8 scones I think). Place on baking tray and brush with milk to glaze.

- Bake for around 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

- Remove to a wire rack to cool.


I added more milk to my adaptation because otherwise I can't imagine them coming together as a dough at all, these weren't particularly sticky to work with and I added quite a bit more milk than specified. I also forgot to add sugar, relying solely on the maple syrup for sweetness.

I'm afraid these really didn't work for me at all. They rose fine and were fairly attractive and I could appreciate the oats had added a nice chewy texture. Sadly the amount of baking powder used was sufficient to give that horrible 'behind the teeth' feeling that I hate - I don't know why it seems to happen if I use plain flour + baking powder, but not with just self raising flour (which after all is just plain flour and a raising agent...) but it was nasty. I couldn't taste maple syrup at all, and found the scones quite dry, perhaps I overbaked them. Anyway, I wouldn't bother with this recipe again, although if you want to try sticking more closely to the Smitten Kitchen recipe perhaps it would work better. Disappointing.

Maple, Apple and Cranberry Cupcakes with Maple Buttercream Icing

T was lucky enough to visit Canada recently. Canada is on my list of 'all time top places to visit just as soon as I can afford it....'. I'm not sure how near to the top of this list it is, but pretty close. Although I've never visited my mental picture of Canada is an absolutely stunning country - beautiful green, lush scenery, fantastic rocky mountains covered with snow and shimmering in the sunlight, vast plains stretching for miles... as far as the eye can see. I'd love to visit the bustling cities and experience the cultural side of the country as well as the scenic, outdoorsy side (although I'd absolutely love to ski in Canada - I've never skiied before in my life, well, not on real, proper snow - that brief flirtation in Scotland at the turn of the Millenium on melting slush doesn't count...). Where is all this picture painting leading, you wonder? Having established that I've never been to Canada and know little of it, the thing that I do associate most strongly with the country (aside from polar bears and grizzly bears) is maple syrup.

Rather embarrasingly, I'd not tried maple syrup until recently, so I didn't even know if I liked it when I asked T to bring me some back from his jaunt abroad. Don't misunderstand me, I had a strong suspicion that I would like it.... and I'm right! Yum, delicious. The sweet, smoky flavour really appeals to me, which is great because T brought back a rather large container of maple syrup for me, just as requested. He's a star! (N.B. The bottle pictured here came from Canada via Waitrose, rather than via T, but I already had it and thought I'd better use it first!)



To start my adventures with maple syrup I decided to make something with a definite flavour of the syrup, but without using too much of the precious liquid. After flicking through various baking books (oh how I love doing this!) I settled on a recipe for Maple, Pecan and Apple cakes with Maple Frosting. The recipe is one from the Australian Women's Weekly baking books, and can be found here. I followed the recipe as stated apart from substituting 40g dried cranberries for the pecans. I chopped the cranberries finely with scissors, which helped them to stay suspended in the cake mixture. I opted not to make the caramel shards but simply to pipe the buttercream in an elegant swirl.

The recipe worked really well, and although a little on the small side, these were delicious. The apple made the cupcakes moist and the cranberries stayed suspended in the mixture, adding chewiness and texture (although in honesty I think that they would have been better with the crunch of the originally specified pecan nuts - somehow the chewiness of the cranberries wasn't quite right) which was pleasing. I used light muscovado sugar, which in combination with the maple syrup, lent a lovely musky, smoky flavour to the cupcakes and a darker crumb. This was complemented perfectly by the sweet buttercream which had just a hint of smokiness from the maple syrup in it - you could definitely taste it, but it wasn't overwhelming.

I'm looking forward to using maple syrup more in my baking and cooking - have you got any favourite recipes to recommend?