I am no longer in my 'early twenties' and I'm pretty sure that I've gone up an age range in some of those surveys but haven't yet taken one so I don't know for sure. Anyway, I wanted to make a post about cupcakes as that is what I made. Some friends and I went to a Mexican restaurant (this was a bit of a hassle as they wanted a deposit and pre-order, but they cook everything fresh so it was worth it). For dessert I took two trays of cupcakes, as this avoids needing the chef to provide a knife/cut the cake. The first tray was chocolate with vanilla buttercream and the second was of vanilla cupcakes with a chocolate ganache frosting.
I took the cupcake recipes from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. I haven't used this recipe before as, frankly, it looks a bit strange. It does, however, work extremely well!
For vanilla cupcakes (as I made them, with slightly less sugar than the original recipe):
120g plain flour
120g unrefined sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
40g unsalted butter (room temp)
120ml skimmed milk
1 egg
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
The recipe suggests you need one of those fancy Kitchen Aid stand mixers. Sadly I do not have one of those, so I improvised and used my hands.
Pre-heat the oven to 170 C.
1. Rub the butter into the dry ingredients, similar to if you were making a crumble. The book recommends you achieve a 'sandy' consistency, think 'play sand' from school/nursery.
2. Add half the milk and mix until combined. This will form a fairly stiff paste.
3. Lightly beat the egg, and mix with the milk and vanilla extract.
4. Add the remaining wet ingredients and mix until a smooth batter is formed. The batter will be slightly wet, but take care not to over-mix.
5. Fill cake cases until 2/3 full and bake for 20-25 minutes, until sponge is springy and golden.
The chocolate cupcakes follow the same recipe, although 20g of flour is substituted with cocoa powder.
Vanilla buttercream:
250g icing sugar
80g unsalted butter
25ml milk (the recipe calls for whole but I used skimmed)
2-3 drops vanilla extract
Combine the butter and sugar, add the milk and vanilla extract and beat well. I used an electric hand whisk, and found that adding the sugar little by little would probably have created less waste.
Chocolate ganache frosting:
200ml single cream
200g dark chocolate (I used Bournville as it is nice to cook with in this recipe)
250-500g icing sugar (the recipe called for 250g but I used quite a bit more)
Heat the cream to just below boiling and pour onto the chopped chocolate. Stir until melted. Stir in 250g icing sugar and whisk well (again, I used an electric hand mixer). Place in the fridge and allow to cool for a couple of hours. After a couple of hours the frosting was still not firm enough to pipe, so I whisked in icing sugar until it held form on a spatula.
Pipe the frosting on to the cakes using a large 'star' nozzle and sprinkle with white chocolate stars (available in Sainsbury's). I find that disposable piping bags are the best as you can just put all of the mess in the bin. The 'swirl' seen on many cupcakes is achieved by piping in decreasing circles. To finish, stop squeezing the bag and depress the nozzle into the icing.
These cakes went down very well, and looked gorgeous. Sadly I didn't take pictures so might have to make them again sometime!
Tuesday 19 October 2010
Thursday 7 October 2010
Chick Chick Chicken
I am supposed to be writing my thesis, indeed I am and have made good progress today. The people across the way (I say way rather than road, because we live on a sort of little cul-de-sac, they are not far enough away to be across a road) have some kind of building going on today. I think it's temporary as it's quite a new house and there isn't any place for them to do serious remodelling. Anyway, they have some builders who are making the most profound racket and shouting all manner of indiscreet things at one another. It is quite tiresome.
This week's culinary experiences have been brought by roast chicken. We had Nigella's 'praised' chicken (which follows the basic boiling a whole chicken idea that you find in almost any recipe for 'Jewish Penicillin', is served with brown rice and is very tasty) and then leftover chicken in a thai soup. After that we had a wholesome broth of pearl barley and vegetables simmered in the leftover chicken stock. I have since developed an obsession with chicken stock, and as a result cooked my first ever proper roast dinner (chicken, obviously) for a friend who came over.
Here is what i did with the chicken:
Ingredients
1 chicken
1 lemon
1 bay leaf
Sprig each of rosemary and thyme
2 cloves garlic
Sumac (a middle eastern spice used to season meat, available from most International stores)
Seasoning
1. Cut lemon in half and roughly smash up the garlic cloves
2. Place all ingredients except sumac inside the cavity of the bird
3. Make a paste out of the sumac, some salt and pepper and olive oil and rub all over the skin of the chicken
4. Roast in the middle of a moderately hot oven (180 C). Correct cooking time for a chicken is 45 minutes/kg plus 20 minutes extra. My chicken came from Waitrose and helpfully had the cooking time on the pack.
5. Serve with roast potatoes and parsnips, steamed carrots and broccoli, and gravy.
The potatoes were par-boiled for 10 minutes, then shaken, sprinkled with polenta and tossed in a hot mixture of seasoned olive oil and butter. They were deliciously crispy, not as good as those cooked in duck fat but a bit lighter and more suited to those of us with delicate constitutions.
The gravy was made from the gooey bits at the bottom of the roasting tray. Flour was mixed into the fat to make a roux, and then a mixture of leftover potato water and chicken stock was added in. This was whisked briskly for a couple of minutes, then strained through a sieve and served.
For pudding I made a variation on Eve's pudding. This is a traditional english fruit pudding, similar to crumble but with a fat-free sponge mixture (basically identical to Jaffa cake sponge) on the top. I made mine with apple and fig because they were in my freezer.
For the sponge:
Ingredients
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 oz. sugar
2 oz. self-raising flour
pinch of salt
1 tbsp brown sugar
1. Beat eggs and vanilla essence until frothy.
2. Beat in sugar.
3. Fold in the flour and salt.
4. Place sponge mixture on top of fruit in an ovenproof dish.
5. Sprinkle with brown sugar.
6. Bake at 180 C for 30-40 minutes.
Note: I got this recipe from my dad, and it's an old family favourite. It's a nice dessert as it's much lighter than crumble or other alternatives, and is virtually fat-free, so you can have as much vanilla ice cream as you like. I thought he had messed it up and told me the wrong ingredients because I checked it a couple of times and it just was not cooked. Eventually (and I forgot to set the timer so I have no idea how long it was cooking for) it set all of a sudden, and was delicious. It does taste a little eggy, particularly if you use nice free-range eggs, a bit like a pancake I suppose, so beware if that's not your kind of thing.
Anyway, we now have more leftover chicken to make things out of. Probably something thai and curry-like as there is half a tin of coconut milk in the fridge.... and another carcass to put in the stock pot!
This week's culinary experiences have been brought by roast chicken. We had Nigella's 'praised' chicken (which follows the basic boiling a whole chicken idea that you find in almost any recipe for 'Jewish Penicillin', is served with brown rice and is very tasty) and then leftover chicken in a thai soup. After that we had a wholesome broth of pearl barley and vegetables simmered in the leftover chicken stock. I have since developed an obsession with chicken stock, and as a result cooked my first ever proper roast dinner (chicken, obviously) for a friend who came over.
Here is what i did with the chicken:
Ingredients
1 chicken
1 lemon
1 bay leaf
Sprig each of rosemary and thyme
2 cloves garlic
Sumac (a middle eastern spice used to season meat, available from most International stores)
Seasoning
1. Cut lemon in half and roughly smash up the garlic cloves
2. Place all ingredients except sumac inside the cavity of the bird
3. Make a paste out of the sumac, some salt and pepper and olive oil and rub all over the skin of the chicken
4. Roast in the middle of a moderately hot oven (180 C). Correct cooking time for a chicken is 45 minutes/kg plus 20 minutes extra. My chicken came from Waitrose and helpfully had the cooking time on the pack.
5. Serve with roast potatoes and parsnips, steamed carrots and broccoli, and gravy.
The potatoes were par-boiled for 10 minutes, then shaken, sprinkled with polenta and tossed in a hot mixture of seasoned olive oil and butter. They were deliciously crispy, not as good as those cooked in duck fat but a bit lighter and more suited to those of us with delicate constitutions.
The gravy was made from the gooey bits at the bottom of the roasting tray. Flour was mixed into the fat to make a roux, and then a mixture of leftover potato water and chicken stock was added in. This was whisked briskly for a couple of minutes, then strained through a sieve and served.
For pudding I made a variation on Eve's pudding. This is a traditional english fruit pudding, similar to crumble but with a fat-free sponge mixture (basically identical to Jaffa cake sponge) on the top. I made mine with apple and fig because they were in my freezer.
For the sponge:
Ingredients
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 oz. sugar
2 oz. self-raising flour
pinch of salt
1 tbsp brown sugar
1. Beat eggs and vanilla essence until frothy.
2. Beat in sugar.
3. Fold in the flour and salt.
4. Place sponge mixture on top of fruit in an ovenproof dish.
5. Sprinkle with brown sugar.
6. Bake at 180 C for 30-40 minutes.
Note: I got this recipe from my dad, and it's an old family favourite. It's a nice dessert as it's much lighter than crumble or other alternatives, and is virtually fat-free, so you can have as much vanilla ice cream as you like. I thought he had messed it up and told me the wrong ingredients because I checked it a couple of times and it just was not cooked. Eventually (and I forgot to set the timer so I have no idea how long it was cooking for) it set all of a sudden, and was delicious. It does taste a little eggy, particularly if you use nice free-range eggs, a bit like a pancake I suppose, so beware if that's not your kind of thing.
Anyway, we now have more leftover chicken to make things out of. Probably something thai and curry-like as there is half a tin of coconut milk in the fridge.... and another carcass to put in the stock pot!
Monday 4 October 2010
Introduction
I have been thinking about setting up a blog for a while now. I've had blogs in the past, and one through my Ph.D. but I've not been a regular updater at any point in the past three years, and the previous incarnation of my blog has long been deleted. I don't want to blog about life specifics, but I am a follower of a growing number of food-related blogs and have decided to keep a record of my own culinary pursuits.
I am a keen cook and baker - I separate these out as they are very different things. For me, cooking is an art, and baking is a science. When cooking you can think 'oh stuff it' and do your own thing, you can leave things out or add things in, or just get busy with the spice rack and you should end up with something edible. To play around with baking is much more fiddly; each ingredient in a baked recipe has a distinct purpose, and while substitutions can be made it is best to plan these before you start. That said, I am terrible at following a recipe and have to keep myself on a tight rein while baking.
This morning I have taken delivery of some early birthday presents from Amazon. This time next week I will be celebrating the last day of my first quarter century. I picked up the Great British Book of Baking (companion to the recent Great British Bake Off series on the Beeb) in Waitrose last week and was pleasantly surprised by the content. It will join my other baking books, and may even surpass the Hummingbird Bakery book as my favourite. The Super Jam Cookbook is something that I've had my eye on for a while, since making my first batches of jam this summer. I live with someone who is scared of the sugar content of jam, and we get through a large amount of 'Super Jam' so I'm keen to make my own.
Being a scientist, there will possibly be some scientific content to the cookery stuff here. I can't help it, cooking interests me for several reasons. One being that I love food and most importantly, eating, the next being that I love science. Everything you cook is a form of scientific reaction and at times I am likely to discuss this. If me embracing my inner geek is too much, feel free to skim these parts.
I am a lover of kitsch kitchen equipment and in the picture of my Amazon order you can see a fluted pie dish and some coloured measuring spoons. I don't own an actual pie dish (I have casseroles that I put pastry on sometimes) and saw this and it appealed to me. I would very much have like a Le Creuset one, but this was 1/6 of the price, and I *am* still a student after all. The measuring spoons just made me smile!
I don't know if anyone will read this, or indeed if I will update, but here goes...
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