Sweet and Savoury.

On Saturday the house of MoshJohn had a joint birthday party. Because we are brilliant hosts John and I baked. John made lovely scones and I made cupcakes. I was initially going to make thirtysomething sweet cupcakes but because our lovely friend Elise made us a 5 TIER CHOCOLATE/PRALINE/ALMOND CAKE! I decided to try making savoury cupcakes to even out the sugar to savoury ratio. 


The results were as follows. 

The savoury cupcakes are pine nut and red pepper, I think they don't look very appetising but they tasted pretty good. Their texture is more bready than cakey, but that's fine with me. 


If you would like to make them. Here's how. 

• In butter gently fry for about 5 minutes, 2 finely chopped shallots, 2 diced red peppers and 2 cloves of garlic. Remove from pan and leave to cool. Gently toast 100g of pine nuts in the pan. 
• In a large bowl mix 125g of butter with 125g of plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 125g ground almonds, lots of pepper and 4 beaten eggs. 
• Add the red pepper mixture and pine nuts. Mix well. 
• Divide into cupcake cases and bake for 30 minutes at 180 Celsius. 

The recipe says it makes 12 but I think I got 17 in the end. If you wish you can pop a bay leaf in the top before baking for prettiness. 

Cup Cakes 2.0

I learnt from all my previous mistakes and this was the outcome. Pretty cupcakes on a cake stand made by yours truly. Here's hoping I can recreate them for Saturday's party. 

Pretty Cupcakes Test 1.

I have probably said before (at least in person if you have met me) that I am not creative or artistic. I have never been good at drawing, painting and all of my clay things at school just looked like lumps with holes prodded into it. I am trying however, to make my cakes look pretty and I think cupcakes are probably the best starting point for me because they don't have to have lots of intricate icing work to look great. 

Previous attempts at decorating my cupcakes have always ended pretty poorly and for this I have always blamed not having a wide enough nozzle to pipe with. 

You can see here that the lines are not defined and it's all a red splodgy mess. 

Today I tried once again to make my cupcakes look pretty and this time with my 1M star tipped piping nozzle. From what I could find out it seems to be the best one for getting the big swirly swirls to top delicious sponginess. This is what mine ended up like. 

I don't think they are a terrible first attempt, they certainly taste good. But I have learnt a few things. 

1. My butter cream was too wet. This led to gloopy peaks. 
2. I piped at an angle, I think you are supposed to hold the bag completely upright. 
3. Cake glitter needs to be in some kind of shaking device. It stains your fingers and does not give an even sparkle if you just pinch and scatter with your finger. 
4. Make double the amount of butter cream you usually would. What normally covers 12+ cupcakes only did 7 today. 
5. I started from the outside and worked my way in. I should of just watched this lady first. 

Baking backlog.

Honey Wholemeal Cake
I've wanted to make this cake for ages, but Josh has never seemed keen when i've suggested it in the past as he prefers the chocolatey variety, but when our lovely F1s (what the hell is one of them?) at work finished their stint with us, it was a great excuse to bake it for them to say goodbye and thanks for not being crap to work with. 

The recipe comes from Hugh's 'River Cottage Everday' (buy here) and is so simple to make and more importantly, delicious. 

• Line/grease a springform tin. Preheat oven to 170 Celsius.
• Beat 300g of butter with 250g of golden caster sugar until light and fluffy.
• Beat in 4 eggs (one at a time, adding a spoonful of flour with each). The flour should be wholemeal self raising flour and you need 150g in total.
• Fold in 150g of ground almonds and then sift in remaining flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder. Fold in gently. 
• Scrape mixture into the tin, sprinkle with flaked almonds.
• Bake for 45 mins.
• When done and still warm, drizzle over 4 tablespoons of runny honey. Leave to cool on a wire rack before turning out.

If you can't get wholemeal self raising flour, just use use ordinary wholemeal flour and double the amount of baking powder.

Christmas!

I really love Christmas and I am not ashamed to say it's mostly because I get presents and I can eat as much as I want, when I want. Admittedly, I do this for most of the year anyway, but at Christmas I can really go for it. Christmas in the MoshJohn household was just Josh and I eating loads, drinking and watching films. For Christmas day we decided we should try to bake an amazing gooey-on-the-inside-chocolate-pudding. This was the result.

Taken from The Great British Book of Baking it is surprisingly easy to make for a pretty impressive pudding. For 6 individual puddings (we used these moulds) simply...

• Heat oven to 200 Celsius and put a baking tray in to heat up.
• Melt 300g of really good dark chocolate. Leave to cool until you need it.
• Beat until creamy 75g of butter. Beat in 125g of caster sugar with 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence. Beat until light and fluffy.
• Beat in 4 eggs, one at a time.
• Sift in 50g of plain flour. Pour in melted chocolate. Mix in very gently. Finally, mix in 4 tablespoons of milk.
• Divide equally into the pots and bake for 10-11 minutes.
• Serve immediately. We found that Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough goes perfectly as a side to them. Nom.

The recipe in the book says they can be kept chilled in the fridge for up to 4 hours if you want to prepare them in advance. We found (seeing as there was only 2 of us and 6 puddings) that they keep and bake perfectly well for 2 days in the fridge. Just bake for a minute longer if they have been chilled.

On a final Christmassy topic, I received these baking/cooking related pressies, so expect lots of chocolatey posts and veggie posts in the future (the Princess book was a jokey present from my Mum).

Eat my cakeing Birthday Cake!

On the 18th of November it was my lovely (but very hyper) friend's 23rd birthday. Seeing as she made me a delicious praline chocolate cake for my 23rd and a giant blue cookie, it seemed only right that i baked her a cake in return. 


I thought I would try to be a little more adventurous than my signature chocolate fudge cake and attempt a tiered cake. The recipe I found was this:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5819/white-and-dark-chocolate-cake


It seemed that it would be straight forward enough that an amateur like me could manage it but that it would be impressive enough for a birthday celebration.


Overall it was pretty simple to make, the only difficulty I found was in accurately halving my white chocolate sponge mixture to create the two white chocolate layers. Only one of my white chocolate sponges were usable, so my four tiered cake became a three tiered cake. 


Cake decorating is definitely not yet my strong point, but chocolate ganache can cover even the biggest cracks in badly cut sponge and after melted white chocolate is piped over, I don't think in the end that it looked too bad.

Taste wise, I prefer my signature chocolate fudge cake, it has a lighter sponge, whereas this one was quite dense and the amount of ganache made with plain chocolate meant it was quite bitter, which I guess it a subjective thing. I prefer sweeter chocolate. The important thing was that the birthday girl liked it and that it was not a complete disaster.


Next blog- samosas for a vegan bride and altering a dress that I bought from ebay that was no where like what the description said.

It's been so long...

since I posted on here that I thought it was about time I started it up again. 

My first excuse for the lack of posting was that at the end of September I moved house. 

There was a lot of stuff to unpack. After everything was put in its place I did nearly a month's worth of night shifts, so zero sewing was done. I did however bake a lot, but did not take any photos of what I baked. Mostly because it was nothing impressive. My attempt at brandy snaps, were in fact a complete and utter disaster. 

I've just had 10 days off work and did very little in that time apart from eat, get drunk and sleep. Once the ten days were up I felt quite guilty about spending my time in such a lazy and hungover state, so I have baked a couple of things and yesterday I got the sewing machine out. Here are my brownies (I didn't think to take a photo until The Boyfriend and The Housemate had eaten some) 

I got the recipe for these from Dr Vicky at work before she moved to New Zealand. I don't think my version are as good as hers, but they are still bloody tasty. To make chocolate gooey loveliness, first...

• Melt 200g of dark chocolate with 185g of unsalted butter. Leave to cool to room temperature.
• Sift 85g of plain flour with 40g of cocoa powder into a medium bowl.
• In a large bowl whisk 3 large eggs with 275g of caster sugar until it's like an eggy mousse. It needs to be really light, fluffy and doubled in size. I'd invest in an electric whisk for this. 
• Gently add the melty/buttery chocolate mixture into the egg mixture. Use a spatula and fold in very carefully until it's all brown. 
• Sift the flour/cocoa powder into the chocolate/egg mixture. Carefully fold in until it's all combined. 
• Add 50g of white chocolate that has been roughly chopped and 50g of milk chocolate that has also been roughly chopped. Gently mix in.
• Pour this into a greased/lined rectangular tray and bake in an oven preheated to 180 Celsius for 25-30 mins. 
• Leave to cool completely before removing from tin.

After these were finished, I got my sewing machine out. It's a temperamental bugger in that halfway through sewing a line the thread will come out of the needle, or thread from the bobbin will get tangled in the cog things. I don't know all the technical words. I am though an expert at taking the cog things apart and putting them together again. Anyway, after a lot of faffing, this is what I managed to produce. Block number two of the patchwork quilt. 

It looks neater than the blue patch because the squares were pre bought from eBay ages ago. I did have a little cock-up in my pattern as you can see in the middle, and I did run out of some squares in the pinks toward the end, so the far left looks a little odd. On the whole though, I like it. The next block will be yellow/purples and i'm going to use fabric from two tops that I really like but can't wear any more. Thrifty. 

Urrrr, why are you blogging?

Hello, I'm Mel and I'm probably the least creative person you will ever meet. Most of my free time is currently spent on the sofa, watching the telly, drinking tea, napping or cleaning my two up-two down like a mad woman. This blog is to give my some motivation to do more with my free time, be it documenting my new baking ventures, experimenting with cooking the boyfriend's tea, sewing something or even just my thoughts on a good book or film (ok, I know that's not very creative, but I really like films).

Feel free to comment and suggest new things to try out. Ta-ra.