Raspberry swirl cupcakes

My buttercream piping skills are getting better! A batch of simple vanilla cupcakes with a little twist - marbled with a little swirl of raspberry jam. I have a slight confession to make - I forgot to add any vanilla extract to the actual cupcake mixture, but as I used butter and organic eggs in the mix, they tasted good anyway! I decided to colour my buttercream pink just for the sake of it really, to complement the cupcakes and continue the pink/red theme. It also covered up the very very slight brownish hue of the buttercream due to the added vanilla extract in it. Although I'm sure no-one would have noticed anyway. I found some pretty cupcake cases in Julian Graves and I also have to admit to buying disposable plastic piping bags from Lakeland limited. So so much easier than washing, drying and reusing the cloth type one that came with my piping nozzles, or attempting to use plastic food bags, as I did for the chocolate suprise cupcakes. (This is a big mistake - plastic food bags, even one inside each other, are not strong enough to hold the nozzle in place and I ended up with buttercream oozing all over the place as the plastic stretched and allowed the buttercream to escape.....) The disposable piping bags are great - you just chop the end off to allow the nozzle to poke out, fill the bag and away you go, piping with no fear that the buttercream will develop an adventurous mind of its own. So onto the recipe:

Raspberry swirl cupcakes

Ingredients

120g butter, softened

120g caster sugar

120g self raising flour

2 large eggs

4tsp raspberry jam (you can use seedless if you want, but I didn't)

For the buttercream icing

100g butter (very soft indeed)

225g icing sugar

1tsp vanilla extract

approximately 1/2 tsp red food colouring (optional, and to the colour you require - if you use paste colours you'll need a lot less!!!)

Method

-Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line a muffin tin with 12 papers

-Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

-Add eggs one at a time, beating well and adding a little flour if necessary to stop the mixture curdling. Add the vanilla extract.

-Add the remaining flour, fold in and spoon into the muffin cases.

-Blob a little jam onto the top of each cake mixture and swirl with a cocktail stick.

-Bake for 20-25 minutes until light golden brown and a cocktail stick inserted comes out clean.

-Remove to a wire rack and allow to cool.

-For the buttercream, start by mixing the (very very soft) butter with the icing sugar using a fork (if you use the electric mixer at this stage you will end up inhaling icing sugar - nice!!!) then once it starts to come together, switch to an electric mixer to avoid arm-ache. Beat very well until light and fluffy, adding the vanilla extract and red food colouring if desired.

-Spoon into a piping bag and swirl away. Generosity with the buttercream icing is always a good thing.

-Enjoy!!!

My cupcakes in the cases with jam blobbed on the top.
After swirling the jam. Mmmmm, swirly.
You'll have to use your imagination here regarding colours - what can I say, it got dark! You can probably just make out the raspberry swirl remaining after baking - if you look closely enough!
Yum yum, swirly buttercream on the cupcake. I was really proud of the way these turned out and they were extremely well received - gone in a matter of minutes (well, almost) and plenty of compliments!

Chocolate suprise cupcakes

I can't take any credit for the idea here, I saw these a while ago on Hannah's Country Kitchen and fancied giving them a go. I'm still trying to get my buttercream icing to look good and these provided an ideal opportunity to have another go at both buttercream and piping. There seemed to be a dearth of Rolos in my local supermarkets though, so I resorted to using chunks of Cadbury's Caramel instead. They were quite a bit bigger than Rolos though, although it's always nice to have a large chunk of caramel inside your cupcake. You can see from the picture that these didn't rise as much as I was hoping, and the cases seem a little empty, but at least there's plenty of buttercream to disguise this!

Unfortunately my mixture curdled while I was making them, I can only guess that it was due to having different ingredients at different temperatures and them not mixing properly. It came back when I added the flour though. I suppose this might have been why they didn't rise as much as Hannah's lovely cakes. (You can find the recipe on Hannah's blog). And although I'm quite proud of my buttercream, it isn't a patch on hers yet! More work yet to do there and more tasting, it's a hard life....

Cupcake half full of mixture with a big chunk of Cadbury's caramel sitting on top. When I was adding the remaining mixture to the cupcake cases I had to be quite careful to try and get the caramel covered - there didn't seem to be a lot of mixture, so perhaps I'd used too much on the base.

My best attempt yet at piping with buttercream. I've found that to get good buttercream it needs to be beaten for a very long time, therefore an electric whisk is preferable to doing it by hand. The icing just seemed to get paler and paler and fluffier as I beat it and I'm sure I would have given up much too early if I'd been doing it by hand.

These were very well received indeed - very sweet, but my colleagues didn't seem to mind that. There were a number of guesses as to the surprise inside ranging from toffee to mars bar and correctly caramel!

Plum gorgeous

Apricot and plum cake.... well, I suppose that unless you're greedy enough to eat two pieces at once, that should really be 'apricot OR plum cake'. I had a few apricots left over and one of J's friends had given me some plums from the tree in her garden. She grows so much fruit it's unbelievable - gooseberries, plums, apricots (though mine were supermarket ones), apples and whenever we visit, we leave loaded with fruit from the garden, which is really lovely!

So I decided a fitting end to these lovely plums was to be baked and found a recipe in one of my old Delicious magazines. It's a really lovely way to eat more fruit, the cake itself is utterly gorgeous, soft and moist and sweet and perfectly offsets the slightly tart plums (and apricots). Good with a breaktime cuppa (as my colleagues found) or drizzled with a little cream as a lovely pudding. Yum, and I'll be making this again.

Apricot/Plum cake
Makes 12 squares (though if you have smaller fruit, you could easily make 15 squares, as they were generous squares)
180g unsalted butter, softened plus extra for greasing
160g golden caster sugar
4 medium eggs
225g plain flour, sifted
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
6 small, ripe apricots, halved and stoned (or a mixture of apricots, plums, small nectarines, peach slices - you'll need 8 pieces of fruit to make 15 squares.....obviously!)
Icing sugar, for dusting

Method

-Preheat oven to 180C/gas 4. Grease and line a 28x20cm rectangular cake tin (a fairly deep one, not a swiss roll tin).

-In a large bowl, beat together the butter and sugar with an electric hand whisk until light and creamy.

-Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after you add each one and adding in a tbsp of the measured flour to prevent curdling. Stir in the vanilla extract.

-Fold in the remaining flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt (not if using salted butter) until combined.

-Spoon into tin and level off - more important than usual because you want each piece of fruit to have an even layer of cake under it. Place the fruit halves onto the mixture pushing down slightly, guesstimating where you'll be cutting later, so there's a piece of fruit in the middle of each piece of cake.

-Bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden and a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then carefully remove and transfer to a wire rack.

-Allow to cool completely, cut into squares and dust with icing sugar. (Will keep for up to 3 days in an airtight container, but be careful in hot weather as the fruit will start to go mouldy)

-Enjoy!!!

Naked apricot and plum after the cake is baked - this one really benefits from having a little dusting of icing sugar on it.

Mmmmmm, gorgeous buttery dense yet light texture.

Things I learnt while making this cake:

Well, not really while I was making it, but after it was done and taken into work there was one piece left and I decided to refrigerate it. This was a BAD move - the cake went really firm and lost all the pleasing softness. It did eventually go soft again when I left it out, but I definitely don't recommend refrigerating it!

Easy chocolate brownie cookies

I've been baking a fair bit recently, but haven't got round to blogging most of it, so hopefully there'll be a little rash of posts soonish! So here we go with the first (and quickest) one:

Yum! Sticky, chewy brownie-ish cookies. These were really quick and easy to make and got rave reviews at work (well, lots of people liked them and one comment was 'They're just like something you'd buy at Millies Cookies' - this was meant as a compliment so I'm taking it as one!). I spotted the recipe over at Apple and Spice, so thank you very much Katie, these were a hit and so much easier and quicker than making brownies. I made a couple of changes to Katie's recipe - I only had 40g white chocolate, so that's all I put in, and I cooked them for a little longer, probably about 13 or 14 minutes as they looked very squishy and wobbly at 9 minutes.

Chocolate Brownie Cookies
Ingredients
60g butter
50g dark chocolate
70g caster sugar
70g light muscovado sugar
1 egg
125g plain flour
15g cocoa powder
¼ tsp baking powder
40g white chocolate, chopped

Method

Preheat the oven to 175C/Gas 5 and line a baking tray with parchment paper - these are very sticky cookies as you can see from the picture below. Melt the butter and dark chocolate together in a saucepan until smooth and then remove from the heat. Stir in the caster sugar and brown sugar and beat until the crystals have dissolved (except my crystals didn't dissolve - don't make my mistake and overheat the whole mixture - it turned a bit grainy and separated, but I don't think the end result was affected). Then beat in the egg and vanilla extract. Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder and beat until all combined. The mixture will turn very stiff at this stage but this is what you want. Finally chop the white chocolate into chunks and stir through the chocolate batter.

Drop rounded tablespoons of the chocolate mixture onto the baking tray as best you can, it's very sticky, leaving a gap between each one (mine didn't spread too much as they cooked). Flatten slightly. Bake in the oven for 9 minutes only (but mine took 13-14 as mentioned above) before removing and leaving for 2 minutes to firm up before transferring to a wire rack to cool. Do not over bake or they will become crispy when cool.

Makes around 14 cookies

Sticky baking parchment after the cookies were cooked.

Yummy cookies - J also added her seal of approval to these!

Plain white rolls

Sometimes I just want a plain ordinary (though delicious all the same) white roll to use for making sandwiches to take into work. This is just such a roll. I'd like to say that I bake all my own bread, but sadly I'm just a little too disorganised to make that claim. I tend to run out and need some sooner than I can make it. I have thus far resisted (and this is difficult for a gadget loving girl) buying a breadmaker on the grounds that I won't use it enough - although I have sandwiches pretty much every day, there's still just the one of me eating the bread, so the machine would get used once a week max. Anyway, I digress. So, back to the bread.

One of my favourite bakers is Dan Lepard. I'm not sure where I was introduced to his recipes, but I guess it was probably via the 'How to Bake' column that he writes each Saturday in the Guardian Weekend magazine section. From there I followed his recipes onto the internet, to his extremely helpful forum and discovered that not only does he make (excellent) cakes, he actually specialises in bread and yeast bakery. I've learnt (and am still learning) lots from reading the forums, especially as he often replies personally to people's problems and will explain recipes and techniques in detail, and the forum also inspired me to buy his book, The Handmade Loaf. More to come on that hopefully, but I need to get a sourdough starter going yet......

He has lots of different bread recipes, some of them using different techniques, like this one. I adapted this recipe from one he originally published for red onion and green olive rolls. I made them once in the original format, and they were really good, but this time I wanted something plain for lunches.

Dan's kneading techinque is different from the 'old school' mix ingredients together and knead for ten minutes way. He advocates three short kneads (and they really are short - about 30 seconds each) with 10 minutes resting time inbetween each knead. This initially sounds like a complete faff, with all that hanging around, but I tend to be making something else at the same time, and so the time passes quickly enough, in fact I often stretch ten minutes to fifteen or even twenty on occasion. The idea of kneading on an oiled surface is a revelation as well - no more throwing flour all over everything to stop the dough sticking and ending up in a sticky floury mess. I take this a step further and knead on a wooden chopping board, which means that if anything does happen to stick I can just pick up the board and easily wash/scrape it off.

The difference in this roll is that it incorporates cooked flour. Dan says that this helps to keep the roll moister for longer. (I haven't done any experiments on this, but see no reason to disbelieve him, and it is a lovely, close textured yet light roll).

Plain white rolls (makes 9)

Ingredients

400ml water

2 tsp easy-blend yeast

500g strong white flour

2 level tsp salt

Polenta or cornmeal for dusting

Method
Weigh 50g flour into a saucepan then add 400ml cold water and whisk. Bring to the boil, whisking furiously then spoon the mixture into a large mixing bowl and leave until warm. Beat in the yeast, add the remaining flour and salt, and work to a smooth dough. Cover and leave 10 minutes, then knead on a lightly oiled worktop for about 10 seconds then cover and leave 10 minutes. Repeat this knead-and-rest sequence twice more at 10 minute intervals then leave covered for 30 min. Roll the dough on a floured surface to about 20cm by 25cm, brush with water and sprinkle with polenta. Cut into 9 pieces, lay these spaced apart on 1 or 2 trays (lined with paper if you want although I didn't bother), cover and leave 1 1/2 hours. Heat the oven to 220C (220C fan-assisted) and bake for 20-25 minutes.

The cooked flour and water mixture. It looks like wallpaper paste, but have faith!!!

The brand of yeast I used. I used a scant two teaspoons of yeast and a scant two teaspoons of salt. It was quite warm the day I made them so I could possibly have used less yeast.

Come on, hurry up and cool down!!! I think I waited until it was about 40C before adding the yeast etc.

Mixing the rest of the ingredients in. It looks far too dry, but don't give up, just keep going.

Magic - after the first kneading the dough somehow miraculously comes together!

After the third kneading and ready to be shaped.

To show the fermentation and crumb structure.

Risen and ready for the oven. I dusted mine with flour, perhaps a little too generously.

Delicious crumb structure of the inside of one of the bread rolls. And below, the final product. Really tasty bread, very much recommended.