Meringues - the good, the bad and the ugly!

New Toy

Hello again! I know you probably thought I was dead, but I have just been very idle! There have been several changes in my life since I last posted on this blog (almost over a year ago now). I've moved flat and changed job! Now that things are a bit more stable, I thought it was time to start blogging again (I really just need an excuse to eat more baked goods).

In order for me to stay motivated and bring you new and exciting bakes, I have a new toy! This little mixer is called Betty! She's a great all round mixer and will be joining me on my baking adventures - look out for her appearances later on this year!

 Tricky Customers

So, its been a long while since I last made a meringue, and that was whisking by hand! So I thought what better way to break Betty in, then to use her to mix up some tasty meringues!

If you have ever made meringues then you will know that are very tricky to make! You need to be super careful on how much you whisk the egg whites and when you put the sugar in. The recipe I used can be found here:  Link 
It's a bit different because it uses light muscovado sugar, which gives them a golden brown colour.

My top tips for making meringues are (based on recent experience);

1. Make sure you use clean stainless steel or glass bowls and utensils for baking them. Plastic will hold in grease, and if there is a tiny weeny bit of fat in the egg white - the whites won't whisk up into peaks. You'll end up with a egg white soup.
2. Make sure you add the sugar into the egg whites at the right time - if you add the sugar in when the eggs are already in peaks - then you will be over mixing the egg whites once you add the sugar - again, nice egg white soup!
3. Make sure your oven temperature is really low - check the recipe, but use this as a guide only - you know your own oven! If you aren't sure, lower the temperature and leave them in for longer. Think of it as drying them out, rather than baking them. 

 Things don't always work out 

So you're on your third attempt and you still cant get the egg whites into peaks? Don't worry - blob that meringue onto a baking sheet and bang it in the oven! Its still fine to eat, even if it doesn't look too pretty.

Once it's out the oven - smash it up - pop it into a fancy glass and add your fave ice cream or fruit (if you are feeling healthy).

I used a few of the meringues to make the above - smashed up meringue, vanilla and chocolate ice cream, drizzled with dark chocolate. I think this is probably even better than the meringues on their own!!

 

Thanks for reading guys, I can promise you I will be blogging again very soon - Betty will make sure of that!

Thanks for Reading!

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes!

Adapting Recipes

Hello everyone! I hope you are all keeping your spirits up through the horrible weather! I have a spring recipe for you, which might just cheer you up!

I absolutely love lemon drizzle cake and I've been using the same recipe for years! I love adapting recipes to make new ones, so I decided to give this one a bit of a re-vamp. 

I used the BBC GoodFood lemon drizzle cake recipe (available online) but used it to make several cupcakes rather than one big cake. Essentially you can do this with any recipe, just remember that you will end up with more than 12 cupcakes at the end (never seems to be a problem in this house)! The recipe itself is really just a sponge recipe with added lemon zest, you can swap the lemon zest for orange or lime zest if you like, both work well with cakes!

Once baked, I made a small hole in each cupcake using a knife and filled this hole with a good quality lemon curd. This gives an extra hit of lemon goodness! Yum! I then placed the cut out piece of cake on top of the lemon curd filling to cover up the hole.

Instead of making a lemon drizzle icing, I made a lemon buttercream using the lemon curd, butter and icing sugar. The lemon curd gives a really good zingy taste and you get a really smooth finish on your buttercream! 

So lemon meringue cupcakes wouldn't be completely finished without the meringue right? I whipped three egg whites and caster sugar to create my meringues. I then pipped them onto a baking sheet and popped them in the oven on a really low temperature until they were dried out (usually takes about 2-3hours but you can leave them overnight). They will peal off the baking parchment easily when they are ready! I dusted mine with edible glitter (just because).

Meringues can be really tricky to make and I did need to try a few times before my egg whites thickened. The main thing is to make sure all your equipment is clean and free of fat, use a stainless steel or glass bowl as plastic holds in grease. Then its really about patience and knowing when to stop whipping. They say practice makes perfect (or near perfect at least)!

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the end result, they looked and tasted great! Lemon always reminds me of spring, so you could always make these as an alternative or addition to Chocolate Easter eggs!

 Thanks for reading!

Big Birthday Cakes on a Budget!

50th Birthday Surprise

Hello again everyone! I've been very busy over the past few weeks, planning and getting my bake on for my dad's 50th Birthday cake! My dad had a birthday meal and as a surprise my mum thought it would be nice to give him a cake at the end, I naturally obliged!

My dad is into everything musical, so the theme wasn't difficult to put together, however, this was to be my first ever large cake. At the moment, I am a bit short of the old dollar, so I had to be inventive. How could I make a large birthday cake, without buying new cake tins and splashing out on lots of fancy ingredients and decorations?

The cake is essentially two square sponge cakes stuck together. I only have a sponge recipe for a round sandwich cake, so I used a very handy app called the CakeOMeter made by the lovely people at CakeBaker (you can find these guys on Facebook and the app is on the apple store). This app takes your old recipe with the old sized cake tin and calculates how much of the recipe you will need for the cake to be baked in a different tin. I've never been great with maths, and I needed a fairly quick solution, so this app was perfect to give me the right sponge mixture for my square cakes. 

Several hours later, I ended up with four individually baked square sponge layers! Once sandwiched together with vanilla buttercream and raspberry jam, they formed a lovely large birthday cake! After this, I covered the whole cake in another thin layer of buttercream, to keep the cake moist and to make sure the sugarpaste stuck to the whole cake. 

I covered the whole cake in white sugarpaste (I buy mine from Sweet Success, a fab cake decorating shop in Nottingham, you can make your own, but I'm not that skilled yet!). After this stage, I added the white keyboard keys all the way round the edge of the cake.

I then added the small black keys using black fondant. You can colour your own black fondant, but I bought mine, as (speaking from experience) it takes forever to mix a really good black colour! At this stage I also decided to add a black ribbon around the edge of the top of the keys (to smarten up the edge of the cake). We took this off before cutting the cake, but you can also use black fondant to get that clear edge.

The next stage was to add the black royal icing ontop. For this particular design, I printed out a nice font from the computer at the scale I wanted it to be for the cake. I then copied the design onto greaseproof paper and 'pinpricked' the design onto the cake. This gives you a guide to go by, making it a lot easier to pipe on your fancy lettering! I then added the 50 and a few black musical 'features' made from my own molds and freehand (by cutting out templates).

The last stage was to add some gold touches! I used edible lustre dust, which you can buy in many

cake decorating stores or even Lakeland or supermarkets! Mix a tiny bit of the dust with a strong alcohol (I used Jack Daniels, which worked well as its a gold colour, but use Vodka or Rum for a clear finish if using another lustre dust). This creates a good paste that you can paint with! It needs a couple of coats, so wait for it to dry inbetween (difficult when your on a time constraint, but it is worth it!).

 

So how did I keep the cost down? I used the CakeOMeter to allow me to use the same cake tin four times, saving me money on buying several new cake tins. I kept the design simple, sticking to three colours only, avoiding the need to buy lots of sugarpaste, only to use tiny amounts. I only bought the ingredients that I needed, I worked out exactly how much I needed before I baked (good planning goes a long way).

I'm very please with how it turned out, it took a lot of time, effort and at some times stress to make! I wanted it to be the best I could achieve as it was for my dad and he deserves the best!

Stay tuned for more delicious bakes!

  

  Thanks for reading!

Christmas Party Treats

Gingerbread

Hello again everyone! I hope you are all getting into the Christmas spirit! Not long to go now until the big day. For those of you who don't know, my contract at the Science Museum ended a month ago :( 

Thankfully I was invited to the Christmas party! The beautiful people I used to work with always appreciated my baked goods, so I thought I would bake some Christmas treats to bring along to the party. 

Gingerbread is so easy to make and has such a lovely winter warmth to it! You can find plenty of recipes online for gingerbread. These gingerbread biscuits have ground cloves and ground ginger in them, but you can also use cinnamon or nutmeg. I also used light brown sugar, but if you prefer your gingerbread a darker colour then you can use dark brown sugar. 

I decorated these with some royal icing using a very fine writing nozzle, perfect for little details and writing.

Ginger and Salted Caramel Cupcakes

I also wanted to bake some cupcakes for everyone and I always struggle to find a Christmas cupcake recipe that really works. I've made chocolate and orange cupcakes before which also remind me of Christmas, but I wanted to try something different.

The cupcake batter contains two whole eggs and two egg yolks. I've never used a recipe like this before, but it made the ginger cake itself really soft and moist! Delicious!

The salted caramel icing is a bit tricky to make if you haven't made a caramel sauce before. But basically its a normal buttercream but using salted butter and mixing in homemade caramel sauce.

I decorated my cupcakes using edible glitter (I cant live without it!) and a small gingerbread biscuit decorated with royal icing. I love adding small biscuits to cupcakes, it makes you feel like you are getting two treats in one!

Overall I'm really happy with how they turned out and everyone seemed to enjoy eating them!

 Thanks for reading!

Mini Cakes and Cake International

Mini Cakes

Hello everyone! Its good to be blogging again! 

So, I'm starting to branch out into different cake and baking techniques now. I've wanted to try covering cakes in sugarpaste for a while, but I'm not confident enough to cover a large cake yet. So I decided to bake a large square victoria sandwich cake and cut it up to make some smaller mini cakes! These seem to be coming into 'fashion' at the moment, and they are ideal as birthday gifts! 

I made these two for my parents (as a thank you for taking me to Cake International). 

Once I had cut up the cake's, I then covered them in a thin coating of buttercream, so the sugarpaste would stick to the cake. I then rolled out enough sugarpaste to cover the whole cake and placed it over it, tucking in the corners and smoothing it down with my hands.

You can buy cake equipment called cake smoothers. These are extremely useful for smoothing the sugarpaste and creating a really good finish. I've never seen much point in buying them...untill now! My cakes turned out a little rustic and lumpy as they were very difficult to smooth over with my hands. Needless to say, my next purchase will be two cake smoothers!

I then decorated each cake using more sugarpaste, but coloured it pink and blue. The present cake is made by rolling out a ball of sugarpaste into a sausage and flattening it/rolling it out, so you've got a long piece of sugarpaste of which you can cut strips out. 

The rose is made from 10 or so small circles of sugarpaste. I cut these out using a large icing nozzle (I don't have any fancy cutters). You then take either a toothpick or a small ball tool (a plastic tool with a ball at the end of it) and roll the edges of the circles so they are flattened out. This gives a more authentic petal look, rather than a clean cut edge. 

It's difficult to explain in words how you make a sugarpaste rose, but it basically involves wrapping each petal around, building up layers, to create a rose. You can find lots of helpful clips on YouTube on how to do this! I'm very pleased with how they turned out!

Cake International

Now all my waffling is over, here are some beautiful cakes from the Cake International show at Birmingham NEC. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do!

This cake is stunning! The basket looks incredibly real!

The tiny details in this beach hut are amazing! It must have taken ages to do, but it was clearly worth it!

 This cake was my favourite, its extremely colourful and really detailed!

Another beautiful cake, taking inspiration from paper quilling! Very effective.

 

Thanks for reading!

Baking Challenges

Eight-Stranded, Plaited Loaf!

 

Recently I've had some time off from work and it's given me a chance to bake some different things. I've never tried bread before, so I thought I would attempt the famous Paul Hollywood, Great British Bake Off, Eight-Stranded, Plaited Loaf!

I'm not going to lie, this was extremely difficult to make! The actual bread wasn't that difficult to make, kneading the dough was extremely fun!

The plait is pretty complicated and the dough was pretty sticky, so every time I went wrong I had to start right from the beginning as the strands were impossible to untangle!

In the end, it wasn't too bad for a first attempt! Next time I might try some seeded bread rolls.

Chocolate Macarons

 

I attempted to make Macarons twice, the above is my second, much better attempt! I used a really basic recipe from BBC Good Food, unfortunately it left a lot of the finer details out! It felt a little bit like the Great British Bake Off technical challenge to be honest! 

So these turned out a lot better because I blitzed the dry mixture in a food processor to make it finer (A mixture of plain flour, ground almonds, coco powder and sugar). Without doing this, you get a really lumpy texture to the macaron! 

I also left them to 'dry out' before putting them in the oven, this let them form a crust on top (they should be dry to the touch) and this stops them from cracking in the oven.

Finally, I baked them on a really low temperature (140 degrees C) for a longer time, so that they dried out slowly (as the wet part of the mixture is egg white) and didn't burn!

I filled these with chocolate ganche, but the flavour combinations for these little treats are endless!

Thanks for reading!

Homemade Afternoon Tea

Afternoon Tea on a budget

I've always wanted to have a good afternoon tea in a posh hotel, but never been able to afford it! So I figured I would try and make my own homemade Afternoon Tea for my other half and I.

My ideal Afternoon Tea, has to include the classic and delicious Victoria Sandwich Cake! This one is made from a really basic vanilla sponge recipe and filled to the brim with strawberry jam and vanilla buttercream...YUM!

 

 Tasty Finger Sandwiches

 

The next essential food item, must be the finger sandwiches! I'm afraid to say I didn't make the bread for these (stay tuned to see my first attempt at bread), but the egg mayonnaise inside is definitely

homemade! Cress was the perfect match for the egg, but you could also use Rocket leaves.

Heavenly Scones!

Surely the best part of an Afternoon Tea is the scones with lots of jam and clotted cream! I've never made scones before, and never eaten the plain variety (I tried the ones with 'dead flies' in when I was younger and hated them!). These are so easy to make, they only take about 20 minutes to prepare and bake! I used a basic recipe from BBC Good Food (excellent online resource for quick recipes).

So two very big (and happy) bellies later...

It took a fair amount of time to make all the elements for the Afternoon Tea, but it was well worth the wait! If your super hungry, you could always just make scones and have them with a big pot of tea.

The great thing about making your own Afternoon Tea is that you make what you like. You could make a more refined version by making Macarons or Iced fancies!

Thanks for reading!