Chocolate cupcakes

I think I’ve found the perfect cupcake recipe. Since they became so fashionable a few years ago I’ve tried quite a few ways of making cupcakes with variable results: usually the problem is that they’re too dry or too heavy. But this time, I think I’ve got the recipe just right.

A couple of my friends gave me a cupcake-making kit for my birthday, which contained some pretty cases, a piping bag and selection of nozzles and a recipe book. The book had a few basic recipes and then lots of ideas and suggestions for how you could adapt these to make lots of different kinds of cupcakes. Now I know that the recipe works so well, I’ll definitely be giving a few of the variations a go! The recipes are in American measures i.e. cups and sticks. This is a bit of a foreign language to me: my mother and grandmother, who taught me to cook, taught me using Imperial measures, and my teachers taught me metric measures, so I can work happily in either of those, but the concept of measuring by volume is a bit of a new one on me. I converted the quantities given in the book to Imperial weights and used those, and it seemed to work. I’ve given the American measures below as I’m aware I’m in the minority on the Internet in being unfamiliar with them!

What You Need:

For the cakes (makes 12):

• 1cup / 8oz plain flour
• ¼ cup / 2oz cocoa powder
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ stick / 2oz unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup / 8oz granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2/3 cup / 6fl oz buttermilk*

For the frosting:

• 1oz dark chocolate**
• 1cup / 8oz icing sugar
• 1tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1stick / 4oz unsalted butter
• few drops vanilla essence
• ¼ cup / 2fl oz double cream

What to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F / 200°C and place 12 paper cases into a tray***
2. Beat the butter and sugar in a large bowl using an electric mixer, until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time and beat those in too, with the vanilla essence.
3. On a low speed, add half of the flour and beat to incorporate. Add the buttermilk then mix that in too.
4. Add the rest of the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and beat on a low speed until everything is mixed together evenly.
5. Divide the mixture between the 12 paper cases and bake in the centre of the oven for 25-30 minutes. I took them out after 25, did the clean-skewer test and they were perfect.
6. Transfer onto a wire rack to cool.
7. Break up the dark chocolate and place into a heatproof bowl, over a pan of simmering water. Stir until it is melted.
8. Sift the icing sugar and cocoa powder into a large bowl. Add the butter and beat until combined with an electric mixer. It will look pretty crumbly to begin with but will eventually form a smooth mixture.
9. Add the melted chocolate and beat in, then add the cream and vanilla essence and beat until everything is evenly combined.
10. Use the frosting to decorate the cupcakes. I also added small chocolate stars to the top, which I’ve seen in lots of supermarkets.

Not only is the cupcake recipe very good, the frosting was great too. My usual method of making butter icing is to pretty much take butter and icing sugar then add whatever colour or flavour I want. The addition of the cream gave a lighter consistency than you normally get from butter icing – a little bit like foamy whipped cream, which probably isn’t that surprising!

Since making these cupcakes I’ve gone and invested in a proper volume measurer. I keep finding so many recipes on the Internet which use quantities given only in cups, so thought this might be useful. It also looks kind of cool in a retro 1950s way:

* I find buttermilk really hard to get hold of. What I do when making a recipe that requires it is: measure slightly less than the quantity required of milk, then add a bit of white wine vinegar and leave it to stand for a few minutes.
** No cups value for this given. Which struck me as odd until I realised you can’t really measure blocks of chocolate in a cup and get a level surface!
***In the UK, get muffin cases and a muffin tin. Our fairy cake type cases and tins will be too small!

Tags: cake, chocolate, cupcakes, frosting, recipes

101 in 1001 – #66: Watch / listen to something performed live in the open air

When I added this item to my list, I had a very specific mental image of what I wanted to do. I can remember being taken to outdoor plays when I was a teenager and loving it. There was a stately home near where we used to live and every Summer they would put on a selection of plays: usually a couple of Shakespeare plays and one or two others. You could take your own food and drink and it was really good fun. So, when a couple of my friends asked me a few weeks ago if I wanted to go and see As You Like It at the nearby Rococo Gardens, of course I said yes.

I wasn’t familiar with the plot of As You Like it, but it’s a fairly simple story so had no difficulty with it (is it just me or are some Shakespeare plays a bit hard to follow?). The only thing I found confusing is that there’s a lot of cross-dressing in the story: girls dressing up as boys with other girls then falling in love with them thinking they’re men and so on. What confused me is that some of the male parts were played by women, and so I wasn’t sure if they were really women in disguise or male characters not in disguise but being played by women. Confused yet? I think I got there in the end but had to think about it!

Several of my other friends were also there so we had a nice picnic first then sat and enjoyed the play. This being Britain, of course we had some rain, but it was only a tiny bit and didn’t spoil the evening. The audience seating was undercover anyway, which did make me wonder: what if it rained really heavily? Would the poor actors have to carry on in the rain while we sat and watched? Fortunately the rain was light and very brief!

The only thing I was disappointed about was that we didn’t get chance to see the gardens themselves. I’ve seen lots of photos on the Internet and they look stunning, but we didn’t get the chance to have a walk round. It’s not that far away, so I’m going to try and make the effort to go back during the daytime and have a proper look round.

Ooh, and look what I made for the picnic:

Aren’t they cute? I think I may have found the perfect cupcake recipe, which really deserves its own post, so I’ll save that for next time!

Items completed: 5 out of 101
Days remaining: 930

Tags: as you like it, rococo gardens, shakespeare, theatre

Goat’s cheese, pea and bacon risotto

One of the many things I love about my husband is his natural ability to cook. I think I can cook, but when I want to make something the first thing I do is try and find a recipe for it, or at least a recipe I can adapt. For me to cook something off the top of my head with no reference to anything is really scary, but he does it naturally. When I first met him he was working as a chef, and whilst he isn’t a chef any more, he hasn’t lost the gift of being able to come up with ideas for meals really easily.

We went up to the allotment yesterday to water it and we realised the first pea pods really needed picking and eating as they had got really fat! We gathered loads but I wasn’t sure what to do with them, and had the vague idea of making a risotto with them. My lovely man was hit with inspiration when he looked in the fridge and spotted both goat’s cheese and bacon, as he thought this would make a great risotto. And it really did. The peas, being fresh, had quite a strong flavour, which went really well with the cheese and with the saltiness of the bacon.

What You Need:

• 250g risotto rice
• 4 rashers bacon*, rinds removed and chopped up small
• 100g goat’s cheese, rind removed
• 1 big handful of peas**
• 1 vegetable stock cube made up with a pint of boiling water
• Black pepper
• Olive oil

What to do

1. Heat a small amount of olive oil in a pan, then add the rice and fry gently until the rice is slightly translucent. You need to keep stirring the rice to evenly coat it with the oil.
2. Add the bacon and peas with some of the stock. Keep adding more stock as what’s there is absorbed by the rice. Then simmer until everything is cooked
3. When to add the cheese depends how ripe it is. Ours was pretty ripe and soft, so he added it right at the last minute – he’ actually turned the heat off before adding it, and all he did was stir it through.
4. Add black pepper to taste (lots in our case!) and serve.

This was absolutely fantastic, and one we’ll definitely be making again. You could use other things – leave out the bacon for a veggie option, add wine, or onions, or swap the peas for asparagus. The above quantities were perfect for two of us as our main evening meal.

The pea plants don’t appear to be quite as productive as the mange tout, so I’m not sure if there’ll be enough to freeze or not. In a way I don’t mind as these were so lovely fresh I’m happy just to eat them that way.

* He’s asked me to suggest that this should probably be made with ham or pancetta, but he used bacon as it’s what we had in the fridge.

**My husband really doesn’t do measuring. The only way I know it was 250g risotto rice is because he used half of a 500g box. This lack of measuring is why, despite his years of professional experience, he can’t bake cakes or pastry as well as I can. In our kitchen we each play to our strengths!

Tags: bacon, beardy man, goats cheese, peas, recipes, risotto

Independence Day

image from westseattleblog.com

Firstly, let me wish any American readers a slightly belated Happy 4th of July! You all got today as a day off work though, right? So I’m not *too* late to say it! I’ve been catching up on blogs I follow this evening and, as I follow quite a few bloggers who are American, the subject has come up quite a lot, and it’s got me thinking about the idea of celebrating your nationality.

We, by which I mean my country Britain (or indeed, England) don’t really have an equivalent to the American Independence Day. A lot of countries do, such as the French Bastille Day. Maybe it’s because our revolutionary attempt to overthrow our monarchy failed, and we never gained independence from anyone (presumably because we were too busy conquering everywhere else!), but it feels like we’re missing a chance to celebrate our cultural identity and be proud of ourselves as a nation. We have November 5th, Guy Fawkes’ Night, in which we celebrate another failed attempt at revolution. We all enjoy the fireworks and bonfires, but I don’t think we really think about what we’re celebrating in the way Americans do when they celebrate Independence Day. We also don’t get a public holiday for it. We do get a whole load of public holidays scattered through the year, some for religious occasions such as Good Friday or Christmas Day, others for no real reason that I can see, unless there’s something of religious significance about the last weekend in August that I don’t know about. So, although we all enjoy our bank holidays, I don’t think we feel the same way about them as Americans do about July 4th.

It’s an interesting question: should we have a day more dedicated to celebrating ourselves as a country? There is a movement to make Saint George’s Day a public holiday in England with similar holidays for Saints Andrew and David in Scotland and Wales respectively. I quite like this idea, although I doubt the powers that be would give us an additional day off per year in the current economic climate*. I’m not sure that we have such a strong feeling of national identity as Americans do anyway, but maybe that might be partly because we don’t celebrate it in the way that they appear to. A bad case of chicken and egg, perhaps?

Maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to watch fireworks, have a BBQ and get the day off work, but I’d definitely like to have this kind of celebratory day in our calendar. Does that sound good to anyone else?

* I can’t believe I just wrote a blog post in which I used the phrase ‘the current economic climate’ in a serious way. I’ll try not to let it happen again!

Tags: 4th july, britishness, independence day, public holidays, st georges day

Mange tout harvest

Yes, ANOTHER allotment post. No apologies – it feels a bit like it’s taking over my life at the moment so of course my blog is going to reflect that. It’s not just that I’m going up there and watering and weeding and trimming; I’ve now got to the point where things need to be harvested.

I’ve been picking and eating Swiss chard for the past few weeks, but I don’t really feel like I’ve been harvesting it as such: it’s been more of a ‘pick a bit while I’m there’ situation. However, the mange tout plants have produced such a glut of pods that I needed to not only harvest them, but also store them. I love mange tout but I don’t think I want to eat them twice a day for the next two weeks!

When I first took on the allotment, I optimistically bought a book called How to Store Your Garden Produce, which had a section on peas in which it says that you can freeze not only peas but also mange tout, sugar snaps etc. It looks like in a few weeks I’ll have another glut of sugar snap peas so this is good news for me! I like the idea of being able to eat the things I’ve grown a few months later. Anyway, the process of storing the mange tout turns out to be very simple: pick, wash, blanch, chill then freeze.

I froze my mange tout in two batches. First I washed them:

Then I trimmed the ends, removing all the flowers and stalks:

While I was trimming the pods I put a huge pan of water on to boil. When it reached the boil I added the mange tout, and boiled them for 2 minutes, before draining and then dumping them into the sink, which I’d filled with water and ice cubes.

Key tip from my ex-chef husband here: don’t add the boiling water from the pan into the sink! The first time he ever blanched and stored anything he did this and ruined the whole lot. The idea is to kill any bacteria with the hot water but not actually cook the mange tout, hence plunging them into water that is as close to freezing as you can get. Once the pods are cold, I put them into freezer bags and put them into the freezer. I haven’t defrosted any yet as there are still pods on the plants and I want to keep eating them fresh while we can, but the frozen bags are looking good. From my plot I’ve got 10 frozen portions (a portion being enough to use in a meal for 2 of us), as well as three meals we’ve already had and I estimate another two still on the plants. The sugar snaps are looking good so hopefully I’ll be able to freeze some of them in a few weeks too, and have home-grown pods (I use sugar snaps and mange tout interchangeably) for the next few months.

Tags: blanching, freezing, mange tout, storing produce

101 in 1001 – #36: Give Blood

image from bloodbanker.com

I put this on my 101 things in 1001 days list because it’s technically something I’ve never done, but something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I say ‘technically’ because I have given blood before, just not to the blood transfusion service. My first job when I got my degree (in biology, kind of) was working in a biochemistry research lab, on a team of cardiologists. We were trying to create a drug that would solve problems in cancer patients whereby the chemotherapy treatment causes their blood to stop clotting properly when they cut themselves. So we could test our product, we needed a supply of blood and we all chipped in: generally I was donating a few tubes’ worth from each arm per week – much less than when you donate for use in transfusions. Anyway, giving this blood meant that the NHS wouldn’t also take my blood – the same as if you have acupuncture or a tattoo, they consider it a risk.

I left that job a few years ago, and have periodically since asked about giving blood. This time, I got told I was OK to do so, so I made an appointment, made sure I had a good breakfast and went along today.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much it didn’t hurt. My parents are regular blood donators and have told me stories about how the needle is MUCH bigger and you can feel the blood being sucked out of your arm – which I couldn’t (although I agree the needle was bigger than the ones I’ve ever seen before, it was still a small needle!) It only took about 5 minutes to take a pint from my arm: apparently I have healthy blood flow, good veins and my anaemia test showed good iron levels. Nice to know I’m healthy! They also said they’d send me a donor card and a letter telling me my blood type, which I’ve always wanted to know.

So, now I feel good about myself, like I’ve given something back. I’ve never had a blood transfusion but I know plenty of people who have, so I’m definitely feeling a bit of an inner glow – although that could be due to the loss of blood! I’ll certainly go again next time I see a donation session advertised locally. Obviously everyone’s experience is different but I found the whole thing much less scary than I thought it would be, and I’d definitely recommend anyone thinking about donating to go for it – you get free biscuits! All I have to do now is psych myself up to ripping the plaster off my arm. Somehow I know it’s going to hurt a LOT more than the needle earlier!

Items completed: 4 out of 101
Days remaining: 939

Tags: blood, career, giving blood, NHS, past life, phlebotomy

Allotment Day

I spent as much of today as I could at the allotment. I had ambitious plans to spend the whole day there, got up early and had started weeding by 8am. I’m glad I got there early because it got really warm really quickly, and at half past eleven I had to stop. I did come back later in the afternoon to finish off, take some pictures and water everything. I don’t like to water in the middle of the day, and can remember being told as a child that this was a bad thing to do, but can’t really remember why. Possibly something to do with the water magnifying the sun and scorching the plants? My plot is positioned such that by 5 o’clock it’s in shadow, so that tends to be the time I water it. For the past week or so I’ve been watering most days.

Anyway, today I had a very productive day. I did a lot of weeding, and trimming the grass around the edge of the plot. I didn’t take any photos before because it was rather shameful how messy it had become! The sweetcorn, beans, sugar snap peas, courgettes and pumpkin are now weed-free. The sweetcorn is doing very well, and has ears on the top of most of the stalks:

I’m slightly concerned about this as the stalks are still less than 2 feet tall, but I assume they’ll keep growing taller over the Summer. I suppose the height isn’t as important as getting something edible from them anyway.

I’m trying to convince myself that this growth at the base of one of my pumpkin flowers is the beginning of a fruit and that I’ll have at least one pumpkin later this year:

There are lots of flower buds still to come, as you can see, so hopefully I’ll have more than one. The courgettes are also in flower, though there’s no sign of any courgettes yet. Sadly, the butternut squash have died. I’m not sure what went wrong but they withered and died – which I don’t understand as I watered them the same as the courgettes and pumpkin, as they’re the same kind of viney plant. I shall try again next year though.

To make up for the death of the butternut squash, my mange tout have gone into overdrive. We picked the first bunch today and had them in a stirfry. They were really good: I know it sounds clichéd but they really do taste better than the ones you buy in the shops.

It looks like we’re going to be eating a lot of mange tout over the next few weeks, but that’s OK. I’ve also read that you can freeze them so I’ll probably bag a load up so we can enjoy them later in the year.

As well as weeding, we also built a mesh cage for the sugar snap peas. Can you tell we really like peas in this household? We did it in the same way as for the mange tout and peas – using chicken wire and sticks.

I think my unplanned planting is actually going to work really well: hopefully these will be ready just as we’re finishing the mange tout, and then the beans will be ready later than that. The peas are coming along nicely, you can see the pods starting to get fat, so I imagine we’ll start eating those in the next week or so too.

Finally, I had a check on my carrots and parsnips. I’m going to have to thin them out at some point, so thought I’d check how they were looking under the ground:

I think I’ll give it a bit longer before I thin them: I’d quite like to eat the baby carrots at least – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen baby parsnips but I’d probably give them a try before I throw them away!

I think the allotmenting bug is spreading. I’ve been coming up most days to water the plot, and I’ve found my husband has been coming with me more and more. Today, when I came back in the afternoon I still had the sugar snap frame to build and the mange tout to pick as well as watering, but he came along and helped with all these tasks. I’m quite impressed as his interest so far has been fairly minimal. I’ve thought of the allotment as my project, and something to do while he sleeps after working his late nights, but it is nice having him there with me – especially building the pea frame, where an extra pair of hands turned out very useful!

Tags: carrots, mange tout, parsnips, pumpkins, sugar snaps, sweetcorn

The giant purple chocolate cupcake of fabulousness

The above sentence contains three of of my favourite things: purple, chocolate and cupcakes. I’m quite impressed with myself, as this weekend I managed to combine them into one amazing whole: a giant purple-frosted chocolate cupcake.

Some time ago, I saw a giant cupcake tin in a local cookware shop. As these things are American and therefore imported, it wasn’t cheap (somewhere in the region of £45, I don’t recall the exact amount). This is more than I want to spend on a cake tin, so I didn’t buy it, but harboured a secret desire to do so ever since. When we went to Las Vegas last month I saw the exact same tin in a store there for $19, which seemed a bargain, so I bought one. Yes, I was in a bakeware shop while I was on holiday. There’s nothing wrong with that!

I decided this weekend was the perfect opportunity to have a first attempt at making a giant cupcake. I mentioned last week that I had plans on Saturday to go to a local food festival with my friends – we did indeed go (and had a lovely time), and afterwards some of my friends came back and had some cake (and Pimm’s, because it was a perfect Pimmsy Summer evening). I thought I’d share my thoughts on baking the cake firstly because I’m rather proud of myself for baking it but secondly in case there are other people out there doing what I was doing on Friday night – looking at the tin rather anxiously and Googling tips and suggestions. So, if you’re the proud owner of a Wilton Giant Cupcake Pan, here are my tips:

• The recipe given on the wrapper is in American measures i.e. cups. I made it to the stated quantities, using 1cup = 8oz. This made way too much cake – I filled both sides of the pan to the top which meant my cake rose way too much, stuck to the top of the oven and produced a lovely burnt cake smell. Next time I make this I’m going to scale it to use 3 eggs instead of 4, and three quarters of all the other ingredients. I didn’t add the sour cream as I couldn’t see the point, or the coffee as my husband doesn’t like the taste of it.
• The recipe given is for a pound cake type cake. This means the cake should be quite dense and heavy. if you like your cakes fluffy and spongey, you will need to adapt this – something else I want to try.
• The ‘bottom’ half of the pan is bigger than the ‘top’ half. I found some sites suggesting you put some of the batter in the bottom half, bake it for 10-15minutes, then put the rest of the batter in top half, as obviously the bigger half is going to need more cooking. I didn’t do this, as I didn’t want to open the door on a partly-baked cake. I lowered the temperature of the oven and cooked the whole thing for longer than the 60-70minutes stated. This seemed OK but the cake was in there for the best part of 2hours, and I think was probably a bit dry because of this. You could put the top half into a bowl of water to stop it cooking too quickly, and this is probably what I will try next time.
• Put the tin as low in the oven as you can, as this cake will rise up a lot! This means you will have to slice the top off each side before you can sandwich the two halves together.

I think it was a success, but I think there’s definitely room for improvement. When I get to the point where I have a recipe that I think really works well, I’ll post it. I couldn’t find any recipes for this tin on the Internet, which rather surprised me, but maybe people tend to be more bothered about the decoration than the cake underneath! There are certainly LOTS of photos of gorgeous cakes people have made using these tins, so I’m not short of inspiration for decorations, but I really want to get the cake right too!

Tags: baking, cake, cupcakes

How old do you have to be…

…for birthdays NOT to be exciting? At some point, I might cross that line and dread getting another year older as so many people do, but I don’t think I’m there yet! I turned 28 today and find that having a birthday still makes me feel like a child inside – I want balloons and jelly and ice cream and pass the parcel. But I’m more than happy to have had a lovely day with my beardy man, with another hopefully lovely day tomorrow with some of our friends to look forward to.

If I can, I always book the day off work for my birthday. Although beardy man is at work as I write this, we had a nice day together – breakfast and presents in bed, then he took me out shopping and bought me lunch, then we chilled out at home until he had to go to work. Tomorrow we’re going to be a bit more sociable and meet up with some of our friends at a local food festival and eat and drink and listen to some music, which I think will be a lovely day. Fingers crossed for sunshine!

I got some great presents. My parents gave me a picnic hamper (or, as we keep calling it, a pick-a-nic basket) which is very cute and something we’ve wanted for a while. The glasses are actually glass not plastic and the little compartment on the left is insulated. We’ve tested it and can confirm it’s just big enough to get a bottle of wine in. I can’t wait to take it on some picnics!

My parents-in-law sent me some money, which I used to buy myself a new dress. That was, I think, my mother-in-law’s intention, as we were discussing dresses (specifically, how many really nice pretty ones there seem to be in the shops at the moment) recently. As she sent me more money than the dress I bought cost, I also bought a couple of books, because you can never have too many. This is the dress anyway:

My husband and I had agreed not to give each other big presents this year. There are several things we’re supposed to be saving for, and we’ve got a trip away planned for later in the Summer that we’re giving each other as a late present. However, he said he couldn’t not get me anything, so he got me a big Lush gift box full of bath goodies. I love their bath bombs and bubble bars, and he’s got me a lovely selection.

He also got me a book, and a bottle of Pimm’s which I suspect won’t last very long! I’ve just enjoyed one of the bath bombs – I picked the Supernova, which smelt lovely and filled the bath with pink fluffiness. My sister gave me a play.com voucher which I’m going to try and decide what to spend it on before I got to bed, then I think I shall sleep well in that lovely post-bath warm feeling. Perfect.

Tags: bath, beardy man, birthday, Lush, presents

Smoothie time

A few years ago, we bought a smoothie maker. For most of the year it sits unused, and several times I’ve thought ‘do we really need this cluttering up the place?’. However, at this time of year, it more than justifies itself. I’ve been making loads of smoothies over the past week or so, and have been moving away from the perennial favourite of strawberry and banana (to which I sometimes add ice cream. Don’t be fooled into thinking smoothies have to be healthy!). Inspired partly by my allotment and partly by a copy of a book called Super Juice which I picked up in a charity shop a few weeks ago for the bargain price of 50p, I’ve been experimenting with weird and wonderful combinations of ingredients.

I have an abundance of Swiss chard at the moment so I’ve been using that quite a bit. Green smoothies are supposed to be very good for you, so I’ve been having one most days, made with various fruits including pears, apples, bananas, cucumber, mango, kiwi, beetroot, cherries and pineapple. One of the ingredients really needs to be juice i.e. apple juice, pineapple juice etc, otherwise the smoothies tend to be too thick to drink. Obviously some of these ingredients won’t make a smoothie that’s actually green when blended together! My first attempts were green. This was Swiss chard, pear, banana and apple juice:

This was today’s effort, which contained Swiss chard, apple juice, beetroot and cherries and was absolutely gorgeous:

The wonderful thing about the chard is that it doesn’t really taste of anything, so the smoothies tend to taste of whatever is the most strongly-flavoured of the other ingredients. I can’t comment on whether they’re making me healthier or not – although more fresh fruit and vegetables has to be a good thing, right? However, I do know these are lot more pleasant to drink than a lot of other things that are supposed to be really healthy. I tried wheatgrass juice once and just couldn’t drink it. I’m all for eating and drinking things that are good for you, but I think they do have to taste nice as well! I haven’t made a smoothie yet that hasn’t so I think I’m onto a winner.

I’ve never seen chard, Swiss or otherwise, in a supermarket or greengrocer. If you want to make green smoothies, you could use spinach which seems to be more widely available.

Tags: green smoothies, recipes, smoothies, Swiss chard