Souper Cupcakes

One of the lovely things about being a keen baker is that friends and family can be very keen to share recipes. This is particularly fun when the recipes are ones that are so kooky that the friend concerned hasn't taken the plunge and tried it out themself.

Several weeks ago, a very good friend said that she had lots of recipes that had been given to her in just this way and that she would e-mail one or two on.  Her first offering raised an eyebrow in our house as it was a cupcake recipe calling for a tin of tomato soup.  Not, I think you will agree, a conventional cupcake ingredient.  She had warned me she thought it was form the 70s and probably American.

It has taken a few weeks to pluck up the courage to try the recipe out, but what better excuse than a very wet weekend to give it a go?

The recipe starts conventionally enough with creamed butter and sugar and then the addition of eggs but then the flour and soup go in turning the mixture a slightly off putting orangey colour rather than the vibrant orangey red I was expecting.

Not one to be deterred, into the oven they went.  What came out was a bit of a disappointment.  I have never managed to produce lopsided cakes before.  Sunken, yes. Exploded, yes.  But lopsided?  No.

But how did they taste?  Well not bad.  They were not as sweet as normal cupcakes and had a texture that looked and felt similar to a malt-loaf just slightly dryer. An almost rubbery spongey texture but not at all unpleasant.  You could almost compare them to a cornbread in terms of sweet/savoury or even a bland savoury muffin.  However, they are definitely the ugly sister of the cupcake world and I am not sure I would make them again other than for the novelty factor of telling people what went into them.

Spot the Difference

Both my sister and my mum have recently started buying bread mix from Lidl and raving about the bread they have made.  Having tried the sunflower bread, a dark bread packed with sunflower seed flavour I could see their point.  Easy and really tasty.  They do four flavours in all but the one my sister was most positive about, the ciabatta mix, has never been in stock when I have popped in to try and get my hands of a bag.  Mum to the rescue and I am now in possession of this prized mix.  I wanted to see just how good it was so what else could I do but a taste test?

Armed with Paul Hollywood's "100 Great Breads" and an afternoon to myself, I shut myself in the kitchen. Home baked ciabatta is not a thing to be undertaken in a hurry.  You set off by making a "starter" of a very wet dough made with bread flour, yeast and water.  This has to be left for at least 4 hours and preferably over-night. At this point, you really get a feel for the liveliness of yeast.  The mix bubbles away and begins to look like a lunar landscape.  By now, I have mixed the Lidl mix and they were both sat happily proofing,

As you can see, they look dramatically different, with the home made starter on the left.

After this proving, the mix was slapped on to a baking tray and left or another 40 minutes before being baked in the oven for 25 minutes.  The home made version is mixed with  more flour, some olive oil an more water and whisked for 5 minutes.  When I say whisked, I mean stabbed, poked and pulled about with a whisk.  It was not exactly a whiskable texture!

The dough is then left to rise again before going through a similar process as the packet mix.  The finished products were both pretty decent but how did they compare?  Well, on a blind tasting, you could not tell any difference in taste at all.  The packet mix had a very slightly more open texture but they were both recognisably ciabatta.

The real difference is the time involved.  The packet mix took less than 2 hours from opening the packet to tucking into the warm bread.  Making a loaf from scratch was an eight hour task.  So, if you are in a hurry for some Italian bread, I would recommend the packet mix but it is still tremendously satisfying to know you can do it yourself.

Spring is sprung....

A beautiful Friday afternoon up North, Friends visiting this weekend and Mothering Sunday too.  What better excuse to bake some flowery cupcakes?

I was rather taken with some new silicone cupcake cases in Lakeland and they popped into my shopping basket almost without me thinking about it.  I'm not a big fan of silicone bakeware generally.  It doesn't seem to keep its shape while it cooks and I have had some almost rugby ball shaped loaf cakes with one piece I own.  However, these cases are shaped like flower pots so were just begging to be iced to within an inch of their lives!.

I used the usual chocolate cupcake recipe and a basic vanilla buttercream coloured with Wilton's Leaf Green food colour paste.  The bit that took most of the afternoon was cutting out the leaves and flowers to go on top.  I used a combination of stamp cutters and small flower and leaf cutters and coloured some ready to roll icing to make the shapes.  It doesn't dry quite as firm as sugarpaste but I find it much easier to work with as it doesn't stick to everything it touches.

I was really pleased with the result

It was also great to get out into the garden to take the photos.  Cakes always look better in daylight and this is a sure sign that spring is truly on the way.

Still Way Out West

Well the holiday plans are definitely taking a turn towards the South West so, thoughts still facing that way, it was time to try a home made Cornish Pasty.  Unlike the saffron buns, I have enjoyed many a pasty in Cornwall, many handmade and all heaven.  Goodness knows I can even enjoy a microwaved Ginsters on occasion!  Yes, I think I can say I love a pasty in almost any form.

These home efforts are not, technically,  real Cornish Pasties as apparently they have to be assembled in Cornwall to claim that name, but this is the closest I can get in South Yorkshire.

All the traditional ingredients are here - a puffish pastry with vegetable shortening as well as butter (should probably be lard but I didn't have any in), swede, potato, beef skirt and some onion - recipe courtesy of the Great British Book of Baking again.  I have never made these from scratch before and was not all convinced that all of those ingredients could possibly be cooked in the time it take to cook the pastry.  Some kind of magic happens though and what came out of the oven looked like the real deal and smelt fabulous.

They also tasted pretty good.  If improvements are to be made, I would put a bit more beef in next time and quite a bit more salt and pepper - the taste was not as bold as I would have liked.  I think my crimping could also do with some finesse but it got more handsome as it cooked so ended up looking decent.

Holiday Dreams

I think it must have been the grey skies on Sunday afternoon, coupled with the discovery of a packet of saffron whilst clearing out some spice jars,  that made think of holidays.  No, not so much the jetting off to sunnier climes, but the several family holidays we have had in Cornwall (beautiful place but very changeable weather!).

I have had saffron buns several times in Cornwall but wasn't bowled over.  I am pretty sure what I have eaten has been mass produced and may have had only a passing relationship with real saffron.  So I dug out my Great Book of British Baking and found a recipe for the real deal.  I confess that the only packet of mixed dried fruit I had at home was the exotic kind.  I was pretty sure that cherries and pineapple weren't original to the recipe so spent a happy few minutes picking them out of the mix.  Much more fun than trudging to the shop.

This recipe makes a very rich dough and you need to put aside an afternoon to make sure you have tine for the three hour proving that the book recommends.  I made the mistake of starting these a bit late in the day and they didn't hit the oven until 9.30 p.m.

The result was an almost cakey bread bun, quite dense and smelling musky and exotic with the saffron and a beautiful golden colour.  A world away from the commercial ones I had tasted before.  Well worth the effort.

caramel trials

I'm not scared of much, but caramel genuinely terrifies me. I have scars from molten sugar that seemed to leap out of the pan and take a couple of layers of epidermis down in the fight. But, not one to give in to a foe easily, I have had a go at a couple of recipes this week that have caramel as a foundation.

Firstly, a Burnt Sugar Bundt cake from "Baked Explorations", a book of sweet treat recipes form America by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, a couple of lovely looking boys who own the Baked store in NYC.   No, I have never been there but a girl can dream can't she?

This is a dense, close crumbed and frankly enormous cake.  As the base, it uses a burnt sugar caramel which is made into a sauce consistency by the addition of  cream and coconut milk.  This is added to a fairly standard cake mixture.  The sauce is also used in the icing which is buttercream with the added sauce and a healthy slug of dark rum.  The whole thing is topped with shards of broken hard caramel so another opportunity to injure myself.

Thankfully, it all passed uneventfully but I think I may have wussed out a bit.  The cake wasn't quite as dark as the one ion the picture but it still went down a treat with colleagues!.

The second, and much less conventional recipe was Yottam Otolengi's Surprise Tarte Tatin form his beautiful book Plenty.  The surprise it that it is a savoury tarte, using potato as the main ingredient rather than fruit.  When I saw the recipe for a pie using potato, tomato, onion and cheese, all topped (or bottomed) with puff pastry, I just had to make it.  It was the first thing form the book I made and this is my third attempt.  I have made sure it is on a weekend when there are no visitors though to ensure that I get a decent sized slice this time!

All of the ingredients are cooked separately so a caramel of sugar and a little butter goes in the base of the dish.  You have to be pretty quick spreading this on the dish as it hardens really quickly.  Then it is just a case of arranging the potatoes, tomatoes and onions, slicing on some cheese and tucking it all under a puff pastry sheet (shop made this time).

Once it is done, it looks pretty good before it is turned out...

but it is a thing of beauty when it is properly finished.

Even better, it can be assembled up to 24 hours before you bake it so perfect if you have people coming to eat but son't want to get too stressed about cooking.  Finally, although it comes from a vegetarian cookbook, I haven't found a carnivore yet who hasn't loved it.

And it was a scar free week of caramel - not bad.

Easy Chicken Pie

The best thing about a roast dinner is making an easy Monday dinner with the left overs.  In this case, roast chicken on Sunday means chicken pie on Monday.  The easy bit is a cheat with some ready made puff pastry.  Although I love making my own, a working week day is not the time to be trying to get puff made from scratch.

As I rarely manage to find the  motivation to make my own chicken stock, the sauce that goes in this pie is made from instant vegetable stock.  I use Marigold vegetable stock which has a great depth of flavour and the most funky bright yellow colouring thanks to the turmeric in it.  The sauce is a simple roux (40g of butter to 2 tablespoons of plain flour) cooked out to take the raw taste off the flour and then the stock is slowly added (about 450ml) until you get a thick consistency.  The low fat of this sauce is what soothes my conscience when using all-butter puff which is hardly health food.  Be warned though, salt is the highest ingredient on the list of contents for the stock powder so don't add any to the sauce!

It is then just a case of adding some softened shallot, the cooked chicken and a handfull of frozen peas to the sauce, pouring it into a suitable pie dish (mine is a 1 litre volume, 8.5 inch pie dish) and topping with the pastry.  Pop it in the oven at 200 degrees C and in  40mins or so it is all ready to be eaten.