Red Velvet Joy

There are some cakes and bakes that feel a little bit like Holy Grails. Souffles, for example. Or Macarons. But when it comes to cakes, something that has been mocking me from the horizon is the Red Velvet Cake. I must explain for those of the American persuasion that Red Velvet is not a common cake over here in Blighty. I’d never even heard of it until about a year ago, when simultaneously my friend tried and failed to bake one, and a Buttercup cupcakery opened at my local shopping centre. But it looked so delicious! It tasted so delicious! It was gaudy and flouncy in all my favourite ways! I was desperate to try making some, but struggled to find certain ingredients, and was a little shy of trying it too.

However, the planets aligned. The stars spoke forth unto the sibyl, and I found myself with buttermilk, red food colouring, marscapone and whipping cream. It was time.

I found a recipe on Joyofbaking.com which I decided to try. The exact recipe I used (and then tweaked) has been changed on there, but as far as I can see it has mostly just been halfed. However, I have listed below the exact amounts I used, and the method.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

120g butter (I used stork)
300g golden caster sugar
2 free range eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g self raising flour
3 tbsp cocoa powder
240ml buttermilk
2 tbsp liquid red food colouring (N.B this is about 2 whole bottles.)
1 tsp distilled white vinegar
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

Preheat oven to 170 and prepare 15-20 cupcake tins/silicones, depending on the size of your moulds.

Cream together the butter and sugar. I actually ran out of golden caster sugar during this bake, so I used about 100g of soft brown sugar to compensate. This worked very well.

Add the eggs and vanilla to the butter mix, and beat until thoroughly combined.

Combine flour and cocoa in a separate mixing bowl.

In measuring jug, measure out your buttermilk (N.B even though the carton said more than that, mine measured out as this perfectly) and add the red food colouring. Whip together.

Reeeeeeeeed :D

Combine the three mixtures by adding the flour and buttermilk to the butter a bit at a time. Stir gently until fully combined.

In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine vinegar and bicarb. Allow to fizz, then combine quickly but gently with the cake mix.

Making haste, not speed, divide the mixture between your cases and put in the oven to bake for 15-18 minutes.


Perfect Cream Cheese Frosting
230g cream cheese
230g mascarpone
1 tsp vanilla extract
120g icing sugar
360ml whipping cream

Remove items from the fridge. It is not essential to let them warm up, as you are going to be whipping them thoroughly.

Beat together the marscapone and cream cheese until completely combined and fluffy.

Using an electric whisk, whip the cream until stiff.

Sift the icing sugar into the cream cheese mix, and then fold the cream in to combine gently but thoroughly.

Spread or pipe as you like.

I think these are probably the prettiest cakes I have ever made. Ever. In my life. I was a little overcome, actually. And they were almost unnervingly delicious. The cream frosting was so light and sweet and moreish, and the cakes had the smoky touch of cocoa, but were so moist and delicious. If I could change anything about the bake, it would be that mine weren’t quite as dayglo red as some examples I’ve seen. I will happily and hungrily work on that!

Bananarama: Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

Oh Dear Internet, how wonderful National Cupcake Week was! How much glee it brought me! How are did you celebrate National Cupcake Week? Me? By stuffing my face with frosted deliciousness, of course! Alas, I was unable to post at all this week due to time constraints and the dreaded 'Busy', but here I am, as promised, with a delicious recipe and bake to share!

Now, this post begins a theme; a series of recipe trials celebrating one of my favourite fruits; the humble banana. I’m currently looking for the perfect banoffee cupcake recipe to make it quadrilogy of deliciousness, but for now I have three fantabulous recipes that I will be sharing with you over the coming months.

To start us off, we have the Chocolate Banana Cupcake, with dark chocolate ganache frosting. The original recipe, pre my tweaks, is here.

Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

Makes about 24 good sized cupcakes

400g golden caster sugar
250g self-raising flour
75g cocoa powder
½ tsp baking powder
2 large free range eggs
3 small ripe bananas (or about 2 medium, or 1 very large)
240ml warm water
120ml milk
120g butter, melted
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180/160. Melt the butter in the microwave.

In one bowl, combine all dry ingredients (sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder)

In another bowl, mash the bananas. Then whisk in the wet ingredients (butter, water, milk, vanilla and eggs) fairly vigorously to incorporate air.

For reference: the size of bananas I used beside a teaspoon

Combine the two mixtures together, adding wet to dry until evenly mixed. You will have a very liquid, aerated batter. This is normal. Do not panic.

Ladle or pour the batter into either a pre-lined muffin pan or, like me, into your silicone moulds. A regular cupcake mould should be full up to about ½-1 cm below the rim.

Bake for 15-20 mins. In my oven on 160-170, they took 18.

To ice and decorate:

230g very good quality dark chocolate
180ml double cream
14g unsalted butter

Break the chocolate into small pieces in a heatproof bowl.

Heat the cream and butter in a pan over a gentle heat, stirring until the butter has melted.

Bring the cream just the boil, then remove from the heat immediately and pour over the chocolate.

Leave for 3-5 minutes, then come back and stir to combine.

Stir/Beat vigorously for 2-5 minutes, then allow to cool and thicken until thick enough to pipe or spread.

Pipe/spread onto your cakes as you please. Decorate with sprinkles, foam bananas etc.

These cupcakes did not impress me one bit to begin with. There was something about the flavour combo that just didn’t work for me. It was only after the cake was aged for a day or two that I really began to appreciate the smoky chocolate and indulgent fruitiness of these cakes. I’m still not 100% convinced by the ganache/cake combo, since the ganache packs a real hefty wallop against the most subtle flavour of the cake. The ganache is incredible on its own if you use the right chocolate, and makes very good truffles in its own right. However, flavours aside, the cake is very light, fluffy and moist, and flavours more subtle. I think if I make these again I’ll just chocolate/royal ice them, and stick a foam banana on top! How wonderfully gaudy! Squee!

I gave a plate of these to Looby because she wasn't feeling well. They certainly perked her up!

Happy National Cupcake Week!

Salutations, Dear Internet, how be, how be? I’m very well; I’ve been flitting off to London every day for a week, and have one more week of fluttering to go! I feel so debonair, so chic, so utterly fabulous, wandering up and down the Strand or gazing over the ornate period rooftops from my office window. Oh, be still my shallow, cliched heart!

But I am very excited, Dear Internet. Have you heard? It’s National Cupcake Week! Happy National Cupcake Week, Dear Internet? Have I managed to convince you that it is National Cupcake Week yet? Ohoh! In celebration of our favourite confection, I plan to share with you a series of bakes this week, all wonderfully scrumptious and darling cupcakes! Hoorah! The itinerary may or may not include:

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Chocolate Banana Cupcakes
Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

My plan is to post up about 3-5 bakes between today and the nineteenth. This will depend, firstly, on my internet access- some horrible folk decided to cut my internet and phone lines on the 8th, and I have been without it ever since! Boohoo! Secondly, it will depend on time constraints. I may throw in a LFMF to fill in a gap!

Are you excited, Dear Internet? Possibly not. But do be excited, and ecstatic, and exultant, and express you sheer glee at the fact that it is National Cupcake Week, and you don’t need to find an excuse to enjoy pure deliciousness! Huzzah!

Bloodthirsty Bakerings

Did you go and see Eclipse in the cinema this summer, Dear Internet? Is Eclipse even your thing? Oh Internet, I know so little about you! *fans self with a lace handkerchief*

I don’t want to get into a debate about the merits (pah), lols (many) and brainaches (no comment) of the Twilol saga and its films. I will say that I am a writer, and yes, I do know that they are terribly written garbage books. But I will also tell you that I did read all the books, to the end, and I quite liked, for the most part, and at the very least, the first one. And I do like the films on the whole, because they are easy to make drinking games to and are generally full of giggles and abdominal muscles and I am weak, dear Internet, weak! I’m so sorry to let you down. Will some recipes and anecdotes cheer you up, my sweet, my love, my dearest darling?

My cousin got us tickets to the Eclipse midnight preview showings in Rochester. I was terribly excited to be going/getting out of the house/having a social life/abs, dear Internet, abs. My end of the bargain was to bake us some sugary treats for the film. My cousin was excited, being quite a fan of my oatmeal cookies (which I will share with you in due course), but she didn’t know whether to be thrilled or disappointed when I told her I was going to do something else.

I essentially made sugar cookies, though one recipe was not what you would really call a sugar cookie. I have to confess to finding sugar cookies a bit dull. I think I need to roll them thinner so I get more icing. I have a very sweet tooth, as I am sure I have mentioned. Overall, really, I’d rather have a lebkuchen underneath that frosting. Hmm. That’s an idea. I do make good lebkuchen, after all. But anyway, plain white biscuits… they were tasty, but I can think of more delicious things, though this was the best they‘ve tasted to me thus far. They also, to me, are a bit too dry… Convince me otherwise, great Internet! Perhaps I need to fiddle with the recipe, particularly the flour content.. *plots merrily*

For the first half of the recipe, I made regular sugar cookies with homemade royal icing. I have NEVER royal iced a cookie before. I’ve used tube icing from a shop, but never my own piping bags, never my own icing, and never in the trendy way all the cool bakers are doing it. So whilst they came out as typically rustic and unpolished as my usual work, I was very proud of them. There were a couple of designs I loved in particular, which I will share below.

Royal Iced Sugar Cookies

Sugar Cookies:
175g unsalted butter, softened/room temperature
230g golden caster sugar
2 eggs
575g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract

In your processor/mixer, or by hand, cream the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs and vanilla.

Combine the wet ingredients with the dry until an even pale dough is formed. Chill for at least one hour.

Preheat oven to 170/160. Roll out the dough to approx 1/4 inch thickness, and cut out the desired shapes. Bake for 6-8 minutes for a medium sized cookie. You will need to adjust the time (and possibly heat) if your cookies are smaller or larger, or thicker.

I've adjusted the cook times from what I did; as you see mine were a little overdone!

Royal Icing:
2 Free range eggwhites
1tsp lemon juice
approx 600g Icing sugar

While the cookies are cooling, you can make your icing. Bear in mind that royal icing needs about 12-24 hours to set well, though we ate our cookies after about 6 hours. A crust had formed, but the icing was liquid underneath. The icing will preserve the cookie, so it won't go stale under that icing if you leave it out on a cooling rack to set overnight.

Put your eggwhites and lemon juice in your processor/mixer with a whisk attachment. You can do this manually, but you will need to patiently sift your icing sugar every time you add some, and be prepared to work those arms!

Add some of the icing sugar (about 50-100g) and start the motor. Add icing sugar as you go, until you have stiff peaks. Depending on your eggwhites, this might be less or more than the icing sugar allowed.

This stiff icing is perfect for outlining. For the flood icing, you will need to add a little water, drop by drop, back to the mixture and keep whisking until you have a sticky liquid that flows back steadily when you pass a spoon through it. For a coloured icing, if, like me, you only have liquid colour, don't use water, and use the food colouring to provide the liquid instead. If you have the gel food colourings (which are wonderful and are on my christmas list) you will just need a couple of drops for vivid colour, so will need to add a little water as per the above method.

Outlined cookies. I need more practise and a narrower pipe nozzle!

To ice your cookies, first outline them with the stiff icing. This will mean that the runnier flood icing will not just run over the sides willy nilly. Leave your lines to dry for a few minutes so you don't damage them by mistake while flooding.

Next, flood the cookies with your runny flood icing. Fill the cookies up well to give them a good finish.

With regards to how I decorated them, you can just drop the other colour of flood icing onto the other to make dots, fang marks (I liked these sooo much), paw prints, spider webs or... Toothless! Anything, really. It will melt into the others to give a smooth finish. Light colours on top of dark are less likely to bleed, but none of mine bled that badly anyway.

Aren't they totally ugly? For serious! But I had so much fun making them!

These people are far more experienced, talented and worldly in the art of royal icing sugar cookies. Between them and many, many others, I worked out how to make royal icing.

http://www.universityofcookie.com

http://iammommy.typepad.com/i_am_baker/

http://chiccookiekits.blogspot.com/

http://sweetopia.net/2009/06/cookie-decorating-tutorial-general-tips-butterfly-cookies/

My second recipe was based on something I had seen on the internet (though I can‘t remember where), tried, failed horribly at, and had never touched again. It was the first time I had tried a ‘cup’ measured recipe, and I haven’t bothered since. I think I would need a course in American baking before I would put myself through the humiliation again. If someone knows a cup calculator that is trust worthy, go ahead and forward to me, but I’ve had my fingers burned, and I haven’t forgotten.

These are ‘Vampire Bites’. They are glam jammy dodgers underneath their gory exterior. They were almost too much fun to make, and inspired some of my icing on the royal iced cookies. If I did it again, I would be tempted to try shortbread for the cookie mix. I’m sure I will regale you with that when the DVD comes out…

Vampire Bites

Sugar cookies as above.

Red jam (Strawberry or raspberry)

Cut out an equal number of cookies.

Place half the cookies on a parchment lined baking sheet. Place about 1/2 heaped teaspoon of jam in the middle.

Place a second cookie on top of the jammed one and gentle press around the outside, joining them and making a sealed pocket of jam inside.

Next, take a toothpick, and gently poke in your teeth marks, gently swivelling to widen the fang holes.

Finally, dip your toothpick in the jam, and make dribbles of gore down from the bite marks. Tasty!

Bake as with the regular sugar cookies.

Aren't they cute! Great for any vampire themed event, or Hallowe'en! And super tasty! The jammy cookies were so yummy. A perfect compliment to chiselled abs and teenage angst at midnight. And this is definately true: Sugar highs improve Twilight no end.

Adieu, Dear Internet. Until next time!