La la la la, Elmo's World

La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's wooooooooorld...

I made these Elmo Cupcakes for a 3 year-old's birthday.

Recipe Source: Nigella Lawson's 'How to be a Domestic Goddess'
Ingredients - Cupcakes
125g butter
125g caster sugar
2 large eggs
125g self raising flour
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 - 3 tbsp milk


Method
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.
2. Blend all ingredients except for milk in a food processor.
3. Add milk while pulsing to combine.
4. Add cocoa or other flavouring/colour if desired.
5. Line a 12 space muffin/cupcake tin with patty pans.
6. Spoon batter into the patty pans, make sure there is an even amount in each.
7. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.

After baking the cupcakes, I whipped up some simple buttercream - a pleasant change from the more complex French version I've been making recently.

Ingredients - Buttercream

125g butter/margarine

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

2 tbsp milk

Method

1. Beat butter until soft and white.

2. Add icing sugar and beat.

3. Add milk and beat until a spreadable consistency.  If needed, add more milk.

4. Add food colouring and combine.

Mum and I spread red buttercream onto the cupcakes, making sure that the icing looked fluffy and Elmo-like.

We then tinted some fondant black, and rolled it out thinly.  Using a circular cookie cutter, we cut out big circles from the fondant then cut them in half for Elmo's mouth.

Two other portions of fondant were left white and tinted orange respectively for Elmo's eyes and nose.  We rolled them into balls, making the orange ones a bit more oval-shaped.

Using my fantastic edible ink marker, Mum drew dots onto the white balls for Elmo's eyes.

We placed the eyes near the top of the cupcake, the nose partly overlapping onto them.  The mouth was placed below.  Here is our first Elmo with his face put together:

He's a bit cute, huh?  Mum tweaked the rest of the black semicircles up at the corners so Elmo would look more smiley.

[Insert frenzied fondanting here]

Hooray, it's...many Elmos!

After admiring them for a bit and snapping some photos, I loaded them into a big box and stuffed them in the fridge.  It was pretty difficult to put them all in the box without getting red-coloured sugary goodness all over my fingers, because the buttercream went right over the edge of the cupcake; difficult to grab.


That aside - apparently everyone liked the cupcakes at the birthday girl's party, and they were recognisable as Elmo.  (Phew!)

The Elusive Macaron

Ahhh, the elusive macaron.  Frustrating, temperamental, inconsistent, and oh so delicious.
Macarons seem to be the latest 'in' sweet after cupcakes, and have caused me much grief.  These French egg white based biscuits are crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, with a shiny shell and 'foot' below it.  They are traditionally sandwiched together with a filling such as jam, buttercream or ganache.


I've made macarons what seems like a hundred times and have had many fails - but the scrumptious, sugar enhanced glow of success that comes with the perfect batches makes up for it all.


Now, after many a test and trial, I think I've got it right.
But now, the recipe.  Follow it to the letter and you have a much better chance of success.


Recipe Source: David Lebovitz
Ingredients
Macaron Batter
1 cup powdered (icing) sugar
1/2 cup powdered almonds or hazelnuts (almond/hazelnut meal)

2 large egg whites, at room temperature
5 tbsp white sugar

Method

1. Using a food processor, process the icing sugar and almonds/hazelnuts until combined and well pulverised.  For this batch, I'm using almond meal.

Before pulverisation

2. Separate the eggs.  It's important to bring the eggs to room temperature before using, it makes them easier to separate and apparently it's better for the baked good.

Using an electric mixer, beat the egg whites until they begin to rise and hold their shape (soft peaks).  Add the white sugar 1 or 2 tbsp at a time and beat in well.  Be careful not to overbeat your eggs!

3. Fold the dry ingredients, in two batches, into the beaten egg whites with a rubber spatula.  (If you don't know what folding is, click here to view a helpful video).  You don't need to be too gentle (but don't be too rough!) - in fact, there is a technique called 'macaronnage' that calls for the mixture to be smeared across the side of the bowl with the spatula.  I do it, and it doesn't seem to harm the macarons.

If you are adding food colouring, do so now and combine well.  For this batch, a bit of orange colouring was added.


4. When the mixture is smooth and there are no streaks of egg whites, scrape the batter into a pastry bag fitted with a small circular piping tip.

5. Pipe small rounds of mixture onto a baking tray covered with baking paper.  Make sure you leave quite a bit of room in between them because they spread.

If there is a blob of un-combined nut mixture stuck in your piping tip, remove it with a toothpick.  Do not just squeeze harder.  If you're using a piping bag that isn't super strength, the bag will be in danger of bursting.  Bursting is messy and a severe blow to your baking ego, trust me.

6. Leave them out so their surface begins to harden up.  This will help the macarons form their shiny shell and 'foot'.  Rest them for as long as it takes to heat up the oven to 180 degrees C.  You can leave it on fan forced as it heats, but when you put the macarons in turn it off fan.

After the oven is heated, place the macarons into the oven.  If your non fan forced oven element is at the bottom, don't put the macarons in the bottom rack as it is too hot and they crack.

7. Bake the macarons for 10 - 15 minutes.  Remove them from the oven then let them cool completely before peeling them gently off the baking paper.  (When they are warm, they stick).
Here's where you get that glow of success I was talking about.

8. Sandwich the macarons together with ganache, jam, buttercream or whatever you've got sitting around.  For these macarons, Mum and I put orange flavoured buttercream in them.

The alternative is leaving them separate, then smearing filling onto an individual macaron and eating it straight away.  This works well too.

We made some hazelnut meal macarons too.  These have a stronger nutty taste than the almond ones.  They turned out to be very crunchy and cracked, without a foot; we suspect because the oven was too hot.  However, when sandwiched with coffee buttercream, they still taste fantastic.

Tips and Suggestions
 - Bring the eggs to room temperature before using

 - When transferring the batter to the piping bag, attach some sort of clip just above the piping tip to make sure the batter doesn't drip out the end.  Then stand the bag in a measuring jug or water glass so it stands up, and off you go scraping!
 - When using hazelnut meal, turn oven heat down to 165 - 170 degrees C
 - Heat oven on fan then turn to normal.  (Quicker this way)
 - Don't use the oven rack right next to your heating element
 - If you want to make many macarons, just do one batch at a time.  It works better, believe me.
Edit: I have found that the best base for baking the macarons is a silicon mat with baking paper on top.

Easter Chick Biscuits

Happy Easter!

Make sure you get your dose of Easter eggs and perhaps some biscuits as well.

*Chomps away*

What's in the box?

What's in the box?

Well, cookies of course.  Chocolate Oat Cookies to be precise.  From one of my newest cookbooks, The Golden Book of Chocolate, and for one of my friend's birthdays.

Recipe Source: The Golden Book of Chocolate

Ingredients

330g (2 1/4 cups) old-fashioned rolled oats

200g (1 cup) firmly packed dark brown sugar

100g (1/2 cup) white sugar

2 tbsp flour - I used much more.

1/4 tsp salt

330g (1 1/3 cups) butter, melted

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla essence/extract

90g (1/2 cup) dark chocolate chips - me, being myself, used more.

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350 F)

2. Stir together oats, brown and white sugar, flour and salt in a large bowl.

3. Melt the butter.  I used margarine this time.

4. Stir the melted butter, egg and vanilla into the oat mixture.  Make sure it's all combined and there aren't any places with dry oats; everything should be coated in butter.

5. Stir in the chocolate chips.

6. Drop tablespoons of the mixture onto baking trays covered with baking paper or a silicon sheet.

7. Bake for 8 -10 minutes, or until lightly browned.

The first tray came out of the oven like this:

They were too wet, with buttery sugary caramelised crunchiness seeping out from the sides.  Hmm.  I added much more flour and the next tray came out like this:

Much better, yes?  And they tasted so yummy too - full of melty chocolate goodness and some semblance of healthiness in the oats.

Tips and Suggestions

 - Use more flour!

Happy birthday, Maxine!

Cupcakes of the Sophisticated Kind

These super sophisticated cupcakes were created for a birthday. I made some plain vanilla cupcakes, and some chocolate ones (just added cocoa until they were suitably chocolaty).  The recipe can be found here - just ignore the orange.  Again, I made big cupcakes and small; but most big.

The whizzed-up batter; it tastes delicious.  Believe me.

The cupcakes rose quite a bit in the oven, and unevenly too, to my aggravation.

So, I had to take action.  With a knife.

What a shame, all those scraps...

To top the cupcakes, I whipped up some buttercream then tinted it caramel-brown, and left some ganache I'd prepared earlier out to return to room temperature.

I piped on the buttercream studded it with silver cachous.  These cupcakes made me laugh.

As for the ganache...while I was piping, Mum took up a spatula and ganachified the other cupcakes.  I really like how she did them.  I dipped some of the mini cupcakes in 100s and 1000s...

 ...and Mum insisted on popping some sugar flowers on the big cupcakes.

Which, I must admit, look gorgeous.

It was late, and a school night, so of course I had to snap a couple more photos.

Enjoy!

Banana Bread with Choc Chips

This is a fantastic recipe from my Auntie in Sydney - it's quick, easy, conveniently uses up bananas you've forgotten about and tastes delicious.  Especially with choc chips all through it.

Recipe Source: The 1997 Joy of Cooking

Ingredients - 11 x 21 cm (4 x 8 inch) loaf

185g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
75g unsalted butter
65g sugar
2 eggs
2 ripe bananas (best if they're all squishy)
50g walnuts or pecans
Optional: you can use chocolate chips instead of nuts, or just add the chocolate to the mix.

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Combine butter and sugar.

3. Sift the flour with the bicarb and baking powder, then beat into the butter and sugar mix.

5. Gradually beat in the eggs, one at a time.


4. Roughly chop the bananas and mash them.

5. Fold the banana, nuts and chocolate into the main mixture.

6. Line a loaf pan with baking paper and spread the batter into it.  Try to get the batter as flat as you can.

7. Bake the loaf for 45 - 60 minutes.  When baked, it should be brown and well risen.
Let the loaf cool in the tin for 5 - 10 minutes, then lift it out using the baking paper.

Slice, and eat.  Mmmm.  Look at all that melty chocolate goodness.  And hey, it's got fruit in it, so it's healthy too!