Muffin update

I did it: my muffins have muffin tops, albeit slightly small ones. To a mix of 6 ounces each of fat, self-raising flour and sugar with 3 eggs, I added one heaped teaspoon of baking powder. Also, the muffin tops are stable.

I think I'm going to e-mail my friend now.

Bakemaster and the Cookie Crew

No cookies were baked any time immediately before or after this post. This is just a reference to a late 80s house track.

I am keen on using up leftovers, and there was a half a jar of black cherries in their own juice just waiting to go all green-white and fluffy. Something needed to be done. So I threw some fat, self-raising flour and sugar together, along with a stray egg, some baking power and vanilla essence and stirred the cherries in. I contemplated adding almond essence but then decided it was too overpowering and I just wanted the sour taste of the cherries to shine through. I tried to make a strudel topping for my pudding, but having failed to consult any resource ended up with a sweet crumble topping and something which looked like this after 45-60 minutes on Gas Mark 4 in the oven:




It was designed to be eaten warm with custard or ice cream or cream. And it was. And, boy was it good! I recommend any glut of tart fruit be used up like this.

The excess crumble topping I tried to make into muffins by adding more fat, more flour and a bit of milk to wetten it. Wetten isn't a word is it? Well, it is now. I didn't think much about flavouring, and chucked in a bit of cinnamon powder as an afterthought, forgetting we had apples in the fruit bowl. I also added baking powder and filled the cake cases liberally to see if I could pull the "spilling -over-the-top" thing which I mentioned in my last post. Lo and behold, I did:

The muffin top was not very stable. It fell off as soon as I touched it. I need a more stable muffin top. This isn't over yet folks...



I seem to be reporting the a lot of sweet cookery here. This is something I want to change. I mean last night I made a spinach potato and pea curry but it wasn't very good. It tasted all right, but I could not abide what I consider to be a lack of salt and oil. I'm such a trashy eater.

I've recently become an omnivore after being pescetarian for about 9 years. This has been a bit of a problem when eating out. Yesterday, I went out for breakfast and ordered a vegetarian one because the thought of all that meat on my plate was too much. Not a big problem: I could just ask for a hybrid breakfast next time.

However, I am concerned about the welfare of the animals before they get brutally butchered for my plate, but I am as yet too self-conscious to ask, in fear that I might sound dreadfully wanky. I really shouldn't care about the staff at the cafe / restaurant think, surely it's up to me to make them aware that I care and that they should switch to more humanely treated animals. And it's not that I am scared of how I will sound to the people in my company. It's just that I know with some places I have set foot in and ordered food, it will be a really stupid thing to ask because it's highly probable that they won't have thought about it. Maybe I should just bite the bullet with this one.

Muffin Mysteries

About nine years ago, I got an email from an old school friend. It only said one thing, which was something like:
"How do you make muffins do the spilling-over-the-top thing?"

I still don't know. Any cupcakes I make are flat at the top. I did once get the desired effect when I used bicarbonate of soda instead of baking powder. They looked fantastic but tasted disgusting. I've just looked on the internet and one suggestion is to use more baking powder. I might try that next time.

My next question is: how do you keep chocolate chips on the top from burning? And how do you help chocolate chunks which are slightly cuboid keep their shape?

Today I made some chocolate fairy cakes which had chocolate chips and a bit of a gooey toffee centre. I was inspired by a muffin I bought in a theatre cafe on Thursday evening. It was chocolate batter with chocolate chips and had little squidges of toffee inside. It was lovely.

I did buy milk chocolate to break into bits and pop into the cake mix, but then I was struck with an idea which would use up some leftovers, thus creating more space in the fridge.
I had some chocolate sauce in the fridge which had been made for the ice-cream cake I made recently. The cake had long since gone, and I was left with the chocolate sauce made of chocolate and double cream which, as you might expect, had the hardness of truffles. I chopped it up into little chunks and shoved bits into the cake mix. I half-filled the cake cases, then dribbled in some toffee sauce which I had also made to accompany the long-gone ice-cream cake. I made sure the toffee got covered with cake mix.

I got a pretty good result. The toffee sauce didn't go hard (good). The exposed bits of chocolate chunk did not burn (good) but spread a little and did not keep their shape (disappointing).

They taste very nice, by the way, but I would still like your hints for spilling-over-the-top chunky choc chip muffin success.

Cake-o-rama / a tardy rice dream

I have recently made two of these thingummies. Here is a fine coconut cake:



The cake itself was a very basic cake sponge with added desiccated coconut. What really makes it is the frosting, an indulgent mix of cream cheese, icing sugar, more desiccated coconut, a wee bit of fat and do you know what the magic ingredient is? The real kick? It's a dash of zingy lemon juice which cuts through the sweet fat rather nicely.

This is very late, but here are my pretty spring rolls from my rice paper / homemade seitan phase. Which may return. I don't know yet. The colour you see in the rolls is provided by nasturtium flowers and leaves, of which there was a sizeable glut last month.



The second cake, in case you were wondering, is lying dormant in a dark very cool place, waiting to be decorated. Picture soon.

And here it is:



I saw it once on a Nigella Lawson cookery programme, got very excited by the idea and thought that would be a good dessert for a special occasion. One makes it by mixing crushed biscuit, crushed cinder toffee, honey roast peanuts and chocolate / peanut butter chips with ice cream and freezing it in a spring form cake tin lined with clingfilm. You take it out, serve with warm chocolate sauce, and warm butterscotch sauce and what do you know? It's not unlike eating an ice-cream Snickers. I can't believe I made this for someone's birthday. The only thing I am proud of is that I honey roasted my own peanuts and made my own chocolate / peanut swirled chips because I couldn't find any.

I could probably make a much better ice cream cake, less chaotic, more structured and meaningful. You watch this space.

Feast!

There has been some good eating this weekend.

I made scones. Without a doubt one of the finest simple pleasures, eating one with jam and cream. Or with cream and lemon curd which also works very well.

Yesterday I went to a barbeque / bonfire in Todmorden. Hywel had brought skewered pepper and haddock pieces. The fish had been brushed with lemon juice, olive oil and crushed coriander seeds. How deliciously simple. Amy had brought some of her home-made haw blossom wine, which was a delicate pale pink and tasted a bit like rose. That was a joyful sip or two. I had brought some halloumi cheese as my contribution and then I wondered how well paneer- which holds its shape quite well- would take to being barbequed. It would have to be marinaded first of course. Amy said she had made her own paneer. We talked about making our own tofu. I omitted to tell her what a disaster mine had turned out, but failed to tell her that I tried to make it from scratch i.e. from soya bean. It was so laborious that by the time I had soya milk I was fed up.

Then today there was a feast to close the Manchester International Festival 2009. Five mini-courses all under one tent. Course 1 was a cold almond and garlic soup, a bit like a white gazpacho. Course 2 was some Rogan Chicken - basically a curry. Course 2 was Szechuan boiled pork dumplings, which, the programme said, had been boiled thrice. I speculated it might be to get as much of the starch out of the covering as possible, leaving it with a springy chewy texture. They came with a lovely dipping sauce of soy, garlic, chilli with sesame seeds floating in it. This was easily the tastiest thing, or maybe because it was what I was least likely to have tasted. Course 4 was Reggae Reggae Chicken, and I was surprised to find cardomom and rotli with what was supposed to be a Caribbean dish. Then my accomplice suggested that courses 2 and 4 got swapped round. Course 5 was a summer pudding with Chantilly cream. I know they used brown bread in the pudding because its bran content makes it sweeter than white bread, but I didn't really like that.

Anyway, it's given me some ideas, that's the main thing.