Tag: baking

Yelly Eats

Coffee and walnut brownies

Yelly

I am doing something yummy for money!

Our office is doing a week-long bake sale to raise money for Comic Relief.  Comic Relief is a charity based in the UK that was set up in 1985 that aims to raise money to tackle the root causes of poverty and social injustice.  The money that gets raised each year helps so many people and I enjoy doing my bit to contribute, albeit in a very small way.

I’m going to bring coffee and walnut brownies tomorrow.  It’s still chocolate but it’s got a distinct coffee taste that cuts through the chocolate quite nicely, or at least, I think so!  I love the recipe enough to share it.  I think this would be great with a cup of milky tea or, what else, coffee!  If you try the recipe, please tell me what you think!  I’d love the feedback.

Ingredients:Coffee and walnut brownies cooling
200g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
175g butter
25g instant coffee granules
200g caster sugar
125g brown sugar
150g plain flour
100g walnuts, roughly chopped
3 eggs

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 170°C.
  2. Prepare a baking tray by greasing and lining with parchment paper and set aside.  I learned that when you grease the baking tin that you plan to use, it’s a good thing to also grease the parchment paper you line the baking tin with.  It prevents the parchment from sticking to the cakes and makes for easy removal.
  3. In a bowl, mix flour and choppped walnuts together, making sure that the walnuts are completely coated in flour.
  4. Place chocolate, butter and instant coffee granules in a heat-proof bowl over a sauce pan of simmering water.  Leave until melted completely but making sure you stir once or twice to make sure that everything is combined properly.  Remove from the heat once everything is melted completely and well-incorporated.
  5. In a free-standing mixer (this can also be done by hand or a hand-held mixer), mix sugars and egg and beat until the mixture is smooth and fluffy-looking.  I read somewhere that this usually takes about 5 minutes, but what I look out for is a change in colour, the batter becomes a paler shade of what you when you started to cream the sugars.  Pour chocolate mixture slowly into egg and sugar mixture and mix until everything is well-combined.  Add the flour and walnut mixture and mix until the batter is thick and smooth.
  6. Spoon the mixture into the prepared baking tray and bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, until a skewer inserted comes out clean.  The top will look shiny and flaky.  Be careful not to over cook as the brownie can become hard and very chewy.
  7. This can make up to 24 squares, depending on how large your slices are.

Coffee and walnut brownies

Yelly Eats

Mango Love!

Yelly

Presenting (finally) the recipe for Mango Love!

I created this recipe to enter the Emerald Street Cupcake Challenge.  While I didn’t make the shortlist (I was disappointed, but I knew my recipe was more tropical than American), the whole process of creating and designing a cupcake was a very enjoyable and very delicious one!

This lovely golden cupcake is offers you a burst of tropical mango sunshine.  The twists of lime in the sponge, frosting and mango jelly are added to bring out the mango flavour.  The cupcake is moist and full of fruity mango sweetness.  The mango flavour theme continues in its golden yellow frosting.  It is topped with a heart-shaped mango jelly piece.  This luscious burst of tropical sunshine during the cold winter months that will have you reaching for another…and another!

Cupcake Sponge:P2100839
90g sugar
50g butter, unsalted
1 egg
180g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
200g mango pulp
2 tbsp lime juice

Frosting:
300g icing sugar
80g butter
1 1/2 tbps lime juice
40g mango pulp

Mango jelly (for decoration, optional):
50ml hot water
80g mango pulp
1 tbsp lime juice
15g granulated sugar
1 packet gelatin

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 180°C
  2. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt until well combined with a balloon whisk and set aside.  In a small bowl, mix together the mango pulp and lime juice.  Set aside.
  3. In a stand mixer, cream butter and sugar until this becomes fluffly and light yellow in colour.  About 5 minutes.  Add egg and mix until mixture is creamy.
  4. Add the flour mixture and mix until a heavy batter forms.  Add the mango pulp into the batter and mix for 5 minutes until the mango pulp is distributed well.  You may have to scrape the sides and the bottom of the bowl to make sure everything is well combined.
  5. Spoon into a lined muffin tin.  Makes 8 – 10 cupcakes.  Bake for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
  6. To make the frosting, cream butter and the icing sugar together.  Add mango pulp and lime juice until the mixture is creamy.  Pipe onto cooled cupcakes.
  7. To make mango jelly for decoration, mix hot water with 1 packet of gelatin until gelatin is dissolved, mix in the sugar, mango pulp and lime.  Allow to set (leave for about 4 hours for it to set properly) and cut into cubes or shapes and use to top frosted cupcake

This recipe makes 10-12 cup cakes.

Mango Love cupcakes

Yelly Eats

Love my Mango Love!

Yelly

Over a month ago, I saw an advert on The Stylist magazine about a cupcake competition.  The instructions were to create a cupcake made of a sponge cake base, frosting and decoration.  The prize was what attracted me the most: if you were in the top 5 finalists, you won a Kitchenaid artisan mixer, a copy of the new Hummingbird Bakery cookbook and the chance to attend a baking masterclass.  If you won, your cupcake would be sold in all the Hummingbird Bakery branches for 2 whole months.  To be honest, it was mostly the masterclass that I wanted to attend.  I wanted to attend classes so that I could improve my cupcake decorating skills.  They also said that you would learn baking skills at the masterclass and I was definitely up for that!  Any chance at increasing what I know about baking was a chance worth taking.  I already have a Kenwood chef so getting a Kitchenaid mixer would have been a wonderful bonus.

It was a cupcake challenge and I was definitely challenged!

I sat down and started reading up on flavours and looked at recipes.  I checked my baking notes and set about improving a cupcake recipe I already had.  I also knew that I had to create a flavour profile that was consistent with every bake.  So I tested and retested the recipe I had in my head and when I was happy with how the sponge tasted, I set about creating the frosting.  And slowly but surely, the cupcake that I imagined became not only an idea but a real, live cupcake!

I suppose I couldn’t have won the cupcake challenge because the brief was for the cupcake to embody Hummingbird Bakery’s American roots.  I think I was missing the Philippines and missing Philippine mangoes too much that it came out in the cupcake I created!  I called my cupcake Mango Love.  I said that the cupcake gave you a burst of tropical mango sunshine.  And it did!

I’m grateful for the experience, because it’s made me trust my baking instincts more.  I’m more confident about my baking and I know that my goal is now to constantly improve my baking.  This whole experience of putting together recipes and making sure the flavours were sound has encouraged me even more to bake and create.  I’m thankful to Hummingbird Bakery and to Emerald Street for issuing the challenge.  Even thought I didn’t win, when I look at the pictures I took of the cupcakes that I made, I still feel like, somehow, I won a prize.

The recipe will be up on the blog in the next few days! 🙂

Mango Love cupcakes

Yelly Eats

Easy-peasy cornbread V2!

Yelly

I did a slow-cooked joint of pork on the weekend.  I haven’t used my dry rub recipe in ages and I thought it was time I did.  I dusted off the dry rub recipe and had a critical look at ingredients.  I did a little tweaking and the pork turned out even better than I remembered.  The barbecue sauce that was made out of the leftover barbecue rub tasted even better as well.

But the dry rub recipe wasn’t the only recipe that experienced a few tweaks.  When one does a slow roast with barbecue sauce, the best accompaniment is cornbread.  I looked at my original cornbread recipe and I thought the flavours needed enhancing.  The new recipe has a better sweet-salty balance and I love my cornbread slightly crumbly and this new tweak added the right amount of crumble to my cornbread.

Here’s the tweaked recipe:

Ingredients:Cornbread

  • 200g polenta (fine ground)
  • 150g all-purpose flour
  • 120g sugar
  • 2 teaspoons  baking powder
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 280ml buttermilk
  • 80ml vegetable oil
  • 1 large egg

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 200C.
  2. Prepare 12 x 7.5 pan by lining with baking paper and greasing with butter and set aside.
  3. Mix polenta, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl with a balloon whisk until well-combined.  Set aside.
  4. Beat egg, milk and vegetable oil together until well-combined.  Add to polenta mixture in 3 parts.  Once liquid mixture and dry mixture has been mixed together completely, allow to sit for 30 minutes so that polenta can absorb the liquid.
  5. Place in oven and cook for 20-22 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
  6. This recipe makes 18-20 squares.
Yelly Eats

Ube!

Yelly

I’m working on an ube sponge cake recipe because I miss ube cake from the Philippines.  I particularly love the ube cake from Red Ribbon.  But because Red Ribbon hasn’t made it to this side of the Atlantic, I will just have to learn to make the cake myself.  I’ve always said that necessity is the mother of invention and it is absolutely necessary for me to have my ube cake fix!  I haven’t had a slice of ube cake since…I can’t remember.  It must have been over 5 years!

My first attempt seemed to go down pretty well.  The colour was great and the flavour was absolutely there.  The cake was spongy and light.

purple yam cake batter

I will have to make it again maybe next week (after the cake that’s currently residing in my cake box has been consumed).  I’ve got recipe improvements in my head already.  I’m sure the oriental store in Chelmsford will enjoy the fact that I’ll be buying another jar of ube jam next week!  Watch this space for the recipe soon!

Ube cake at last!

 

Yelly Eats

Spinach and bacon quiche

Yelly

It’s quite the wintry day today and I couldn’t really be bothered to cook anything too complicated for lunch.  Hence the quiche.  I could, in theory, make my own puff pastry.  But the whole point of making a quiche this afternoon was that it was going to be quick and comforting.

This has been quite successful so I’m quite happy to share it.

Spinach and bacon

Ingredients:

  • 320g shop bought puff pastry sheet
  • 260g spinach
  • 250g bacon (about 6-8 rashers)
  • 1 medium sized onion, minced
  • 2 cloves garlic crushed and minced finely
  • 150ml single cream
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil (or 10g butter)
  • 100g grated mature cheddar (or Monterey Jack)

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 180°C.
  2. Unroll pastry and lay over a 25cm loosed based round flan tin.  Once the flan tin is lined, put back in the fridge while you prepare the filling.
  3. In a sautee pan, heat up olive oil and add minced onions and sautee.  Once onions turn transluscent, add garlic.  Stirfry the garlic and add the bacon. Once bacon is golden brown, add the spinach and cover to wilt the spinach.  This should take about 2 minutes.  Once spinach is wilted, give the mixture a gentle stir.  Put the lid back, take of the hob and set aside.
  4. In a mixing bowl beat eggs well and add single cream. Spoon 1/3 of the spinach and bacon mixture into the cream and egg mixture to temper the eggs.  Mix well and then add the rest of the spinach mixture.
  5. Bring out the pastry-lined flan tin and fill the pastry with the spinach-milk and egg mixture.  Top with the grated cheese.
  6. Bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes or until the cheese is golden brown.
  7. TIP:  To avoid the now infamous “soggy bottom” and because you are putting in quite a liquid mixture and a soggy bottom is almost inevitable, I find that putting in a baking sheet in the oven while it’s preheating will help the soggy bottom from not being too soggy.  Once you’re ready to bake the quiche, just slight the flan tin onto the baking sheet.
Yelly Eats

The taro project!

Yelly

I went through a phase of craving bubble tea.  Bubble tea is a tea-based drink very popular in Taiwan and its Asian neighbours (there is a milk tea/bubble tea revolution in the Philippines, if my friends’ Facebook and Twitter photos are to be believed!).  If you’ve never had bubble tea (where have you been?), think your typical cup of tea mixed with a milk shake (it’s served cold) with tapioca pearls sucked through a big, fat straw.  There is a myriad of flavours but my favourite is the taro milk tea (in the Philippines, I used to have mine with taro pudding which is basically taro jelly).   And since most of the bubble tea bars are in London, I had to find a way to satisfy my craving.  It wouldn’t have been financially responsible to run down to London everytime I had a bubble tea craving.  So I bought taro milk tea powder, the straws, oolong tea and the tapioca pearls.

The taro milk tea powder comes in 1kg bags so after a few sessions of taro milk tea indulging, I still had more than half a bag of the taro powder!  So I had the brainwave of making a taro-flavoured chiffon cake.  It was all an experiment so I wasn’t sure it would work.  After the mixture was put together and I put it in the angel food cake pan, I looked at it with a lot of trepidation!  The colour wasn’t as deep as I wanted it to be so I was VERY worried!

taro chiffon1

But after the baking time, it came out and it was quite the yummy and light little thing.  It’s still a bit unstable (probably owing to underbeating the egg whites!) and I want a deeper taro flavour, but it was a good start.  What surprised me most is how the colour deepened as the cake baked!  I’m looking forward to tweaking the recipe and having it come out all lovely and lilac!

Watch this space!

taro chiffon2

Yelly Eats

Tea loaf!

Yelly

I’ve been meaning to make a tea loaf for ages.  I fell in love with the Yorkshire Tea Loaf that used to be available in the supermarkets (there are other tea loaf brands but I did love the Yorkshire Tea loaf the best).  Apparently, it was no longer cost effective to produce the cake.  I think I’m not the only person who was absolutely gutted to no longer find this particular cake brand on the supermarket shelves.  They had a very good thing going and it’s very sad that they chose to pull the product instead of resize it.  Resizing the loaf would have been more acceptable to consumers like me who loved their cakes!

I have been getting over a lingering bout with a certain nasty virus but today has been a really good day (albeit the cotton-woolly head still).  It’s quite a good thing because I do want to go back to work and I’ve taken too much time off work for my peace of mind!  I thought I’d try my hand at a new recipe today.  Mind you, I did bake custard creams yesterday for the first time and they turned out great.  As a personal rule, I don’t necessarily bake when I’m not 100% because I kind of feel like your food reflects your well-being so I think that if I’m not in the best of moods or health, my food reflects it.

I may have overbeaten the batter a bit too much which might explain why the cake is a bit too crumbly.  But the taste is wonderful.  I may have to tweak the recipe according to my preference because I do love a dense tea loaf.  I got the fruity tea loaf recipe from the Good Food website.  They call it a tea cake, but I’ve always thought a teacake is a marshmallow on a biscuit covered with chocolate!  I’ve always trusted the recipes on there, I’m sure a few tweaks to fit personal taste is welcomed!  After all, we’re all allowed to make food our own as we are going to eat it! 🙂

As exercise go, I think my first tea loaf went well.  I think it might work with my no-fail loaf base.  I will probably work on the tea loaf recipe again soon.  Which is good because I’ve still got dried fruit and mixed peel left!

My first ever tea loaf!

Yelly Eats

Custard creams!

Yelly

Cooking and baking has become a way for me to reconnect with the food that I loved to eat in the Philippines.  Since moving to the UK, I’ve had to rely on my food prep skills instead of having my mum cook my favourite dishes for me.  I’ve always loved it and cooking and baking were my creative outlets.  It always made me smile when people said that something I made was really good.  But when I was in the Philippines, cooking and baking the dishes I wanted to prepare was more frustrating than relaxing because I couldn’t get a lot of the ingredients that I needed.

Things have changed though since I moved to England.  I can now attempt most of the recipes that I’ve been wanting to try because the ingredients are more accessible (it’s the Southeast Asian ingredients that are now not as accessible as they were in the Philippines! Ha!).  As a result, my cookbook collection has grown to a 32-strong contingent!

This year, the resolve is to actually USE my cookbooks and cook or bake 1 recipe a weekend.  A Passion For Baking by Jo Wheatley

I decided to start with a custard cream recipe from Jo Wheatley’s book A Passion For Baking.   I’ve been reading a lot of good things on Twitter and Facebook about Jo’s recipes.  Jo Wheatley was the winner of the second season of the Great British Bake Off.  I must admit that it was because of the GBBO shows that I took up baking again.  Before that I would just bake the occasional cake or cupcake but now I’ve been reading up on baking techniques and expanding my baking repertoire.

Jo’s custard cream recipe is great.  She breaks the down in stages and the preparation instructions are easy to follow.  I had to chill my cookie dough though for about 30 minutes instead of the suggested 20.  As each oven is different, I baked my biscuits for 15 minutes instead of the prescribed 10-12.  They weren’t golden enough.  But once out of the oven, they smelled heavenly and the biscuits were lovely and short!  What I loved the most is that the recipe page is laid out in two columns.  One column has ingredients and the suggested equipment that lets you prepare them before you start baking.  The other column has the preparation directions.  It was so lovely and organised!  I try to be organised in the kitchen becaused I think the trick to cooking and baking well is being organised.

My cookies are lovely and golden and what I appreciate most is that it doesn’t have as much sugar as I thought it would.  Being a diabetic means that I have to limit my sweet treat moments and unfortunately for me, custard creams are a guilty pleasure.  Maybe now I can develop a custard cream recipe that is more diabetic-friendly!  But the best bit of the recipe is that it makes about 20 biscuits which makes 10 custard creams.  They are moreish but at least there isn’t a lot scoff down!  Ha!

Custard creams

Yelly Eats

Stollen from scratch!

Yelly

So the goal for the holidays, really, was to make stollen from scratch.  I made stollen once before, but it was from a Mary Berry mix.  Everything was prepped for me so all I had to do was mix everything up.  I was determined to find a recipe I could follow that was as close to Mary Berry’s as possible.  I searched for a stollen recipe but suprisingly couldn’t find one in my numerous books (to be completely honest, I didn’t really look very far!  Ha!).  But as luck would have it, Edd Kimber’s book Say It With Cake has a wonderful recipe for stollen.

Stollen proofing

I added a little tidbit:  I soaked the dried fruits in brandy overnight.  Makes for an interesting taste.  It called for nuts in the recipe, but I didn’t have any to put in so I did without that.  And because I like my marzipan spread through out the bread instead of in a big lump in the middle, I rolled my marzipan flat so that it would be distributed throughout the loaf.

Stollen baked

I was quite surprised at the size of the stollen though.  It came out bigger than I thought!  But it did look so pretty when it was dusted with icing sugar!

Stollen dusted

I was quite pleased with how it’s turned out.  The stollen came out beautifully!  Am now not too afraid to make breads, aided of course by my Kenwood chef (obviously not paid advertisement, although, I would love it if Kenwood took notice and gave me free stuff!  Ha!).   I wanted to learn how to make stollen mostly because of my dad.  He talks about the time when his entire family lived in Vienna and stollen eventually filters into the conversation.  It has always been a dream to bake something that reminded my father of happy times with his parents and siblings.  A few more practice sessions so that I can develop my own take on stollen!  But until then, Edd Kimber’s recipe with my own tweaks to it will do me just fine!

Stollen