Raspberry Blondies

I am a huge advocate of equality for everybody regardless of race, gender, sexuality, religion, class ... But *gulp*, I've realised I have my prejudices too. Here goes. *Deep breath* I. am. . . chocolatist. And no, I don't mean that some chocolate is superior to other chocolate - though that is certainly true. Lindt; good. Hershey's; Bad. Nope, what I am trying to say is that I have issues with white chocolate. It's white, chocolate is by definition brown. Issue number 1. It is not made of cocoa, it is made of cocoa butter. The fact that they can even get away with calling it chocolate is beyond me!


This prejudice extends to their use in a moist cakey goodness known as a brownie; or a 'Blondie' as they are known when they're made with white chocolate. However, though I LOVE brownies and don't think Blondies are comparable; I have to admit that when I consider them on their own, instead of comparing them to their darker, richer counterpart, they're actually pretty good. They are essentially dense, white chocolate cakes and although rich in flavour, not overly cloying. The raspberries and clotted cream make it a wonderful summer dessert. I made these as part of a tea-party spread.


I'm not sure what happened when I made this batch but the mixture seemed way too thick which is why I didn't take any photographs. However, the finished blondies were the perfect combination of crispy top layer, and moist, cakey inside. I'll have to make them again at some point and post pictures. In the meantime, give them a go yourself; they're very easy to make!


Ingredients
175g butter, softened
400g golden caster sugar
2 large eggs
pinch of salt
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
100g white chocolate, chopped
50g raspberries
clotted cream (To serve)


1 - Preheat your oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas mark 4
2 - Grease and flour a 23cm (9in) square cake tin
3 - In a large bowl, beat together the butter and caster sugar
4 - Beat in the eggs, one at a time
5 - Stir in the flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder and mix well until combined
6 - Stir in the white chocolate and spoon the mixture into the prepared tin
7 - Scatter over the raspberries and bake for 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean
8 - Leave to cool completely then cut into squares in the tin
9 - Serve with a dollop of clotted cream

Happy (and Healthy) New Year - Apple and Sunflower Seed Muffins

I'm not usually one for following the crowd. But this new year, I'm jumping on probably the biggest bandwagon there is. You know, that one that comes round once a year (maybe twice if you count pre-summer), right at the beginning of the year, straight on the heels of Christmas excesses. Yup, that's right, I am going on a diet! I have Christmas and two weeks in Lagos straight after, gorging on all the foods I love, to blame. 


My diet of choice is Weight Watchers, which I'm constantly touting as the best diet around. There's no self deprivation, or cutting out entire food groups. Instead, with a daily point value, it just teaches you how to make healthier food choices so you can get the most for your points. Don't worry, though, this does not mean I'm going to stop baking all the other fattening stuff! Thanks to the new WW ProPoints system, I have an extra allowance each week, which I'll spend some having a slice or portion of the stuff I bake! However, I'll also be experimenting with healthier recipes so bear with me my anti-diet readers, there will be plenty for you too!


First up are these muffins. I can't lie, these do taste like diet muffins but they're tasty, filling make a good and healthy substitute for a muffin breakfast or in place of your afternoon cake. I believe that there are low-fat muffin recipes out there that are tastier than this, but these were a good start. 


5 WW ProPoints per muffin
Makes 8


Ingredients


3 eggs
100ml skimmed milk
7 tsp artificial granulated sweetener
150g apples, grated
100g carrots, grated
2 tbsp sunflower oil
30g sultanas
10g sunflower seeds
300g plain flower
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch of salt


For the icing
1 - 2 tbsp lemon juice
40g icing sugar


1 - Preheat oven to Gas Mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C. 
2 - Line two muffin tins with 8 muffin cake cases
3 - Whisk together the eggs, milk, sweetener, apples, carrots, sunflower oil, sultanas and sunflower seeds

4 - In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, mixed spice, ground cinnamon and pinch of salt

5 - Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until just combined

6 - Spoon into the muffin cases and bake for 30 - 35 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack

7 - Mix the icing sugar with the lemon juice and drizzle over the muffins.

These are best eaten on the day they're made or the can be frozen. Defrost and warm through in a microwave (medium power) before eating.

Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies, Chocolate Chip Tea Cookies and Baking Resolutions

Happy New Year everyone!! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a slightly more eventful New Year’s Eve than I did. I fell asleep at 11pm on the 31^st so I slept right through the countdown and all the fireworks. As a result, the fact that it is a new year hasn’t hit me quite yet. I hope it hits soon!

The last cookies I made on my cookie baking spree are these Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies and Chocolate Chip Tea Cookies. I'm not sure why they're called 'Tea' cookies but when they taste this good, who cares? And I can't believe it's taken me three whole posts to toot my own horn about how amazingly all my cookies turned out! Actually, I might have already hinted at how great I , ahem, I mean, they were, I can't remember ;) But considering that before that day, any thoughts of cookie dough (or any kind of dough for that matter) made me break out in a cold sweat, I was pretty impressed with my efforts! So impressed that I now want to take on the dough world! On that note, here are my baking resolutions for 2011:

 - Bake bread. Bake lots of bread. Bake lots of bread style stuff; cinnamon swirls, stollen, honey rolls, regular bread, bread, bread bread!

- Bake a pie. I have never baked a pie before but on my list are Pecan pie, Apple pie and Pumpkin pie.

- Bake more cookies

- Bake more cheesecakes

- Practice decorating layer cakes

Basically there's lots of dough in my future. I can't wait!

These recipes are both from Brown Eyed Baker. Learn her name as I'm going to try out a gazillion of her recipes next year! Till then, I leave you with these.

Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies

Oh, we don't have Hershey's kisses in England, which is what the original recipe calls for, so I used Lindt mini chocolate balls. I think they were the perfect size, and Lindt chocolate is far superior to Hersheys, so I was happy. But you can use either - or any other chocolate of around that size.

Ingredients
48 Lindt Chocolate Balls, unwrapped
½ cup shortening
¾ cup peanut butter
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
Sugar

1 - Preheat oven to 190° C / Gas Mark 5. Remove wrappers from chocolates and put the unwrapped chocolate in a plastic bag in the freezer.

2 - Beat shortening and peanut butter in a large bowl until well blended.

3 - Add the granulated sugar and brown sugar; beat until fluffy.

4 - Add egg, milk and vanilla; beat well.

5 - Stir together flour, baking soda and salt; gradually beat into peanut butter mixture.

6 - Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll in sugar; place on ungreased cookie sheet.

7 - Bake 8-10 minutes or until lightly browned. Immediately press a chocolate kiss into the centre of each cookie; cookie will crack around edges. Remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely.

Makes about 4 dozen.

Chocolate Chip Tea Cookies

Ingredients
2 cups plain flour
226g butter
½ cup icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-1/2 cups miniature chocolate chips, divided

1 – Preheat oven to 190°C / Gas Mark 5

2 – Beat butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add vanilla and mix well.

3 - Gradually add flour. Stir in 1 cup miniature chocolate chips.

4 - Shape into 1” balls and place 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes.

5 - Remove to wire rack to cool.

6 - Place ½ cup miniature chocolate chips in a sealed plastic bag and microwave until melted; about 30 seconds. 

7 - Snip off a small corner of the bag and drizzle chocolate on top of cold cookies. Chill for 5 minutes or until chocolate is set. 

Store at room temperature.

Christmas Cookies - Sugar Cookies

With these cookies intended as centrepiece of my cookie goody bags, I had grand plans and pipe dreams of decorating them magnificently. They would be so beautiful that people would refuse to eat them because they would be quite simply, miniature, edible, works of art greatness! Yup, when I dream, I dream big!

But by the time these cookies had cooled enough to be frosted; I had been baking for almost eight hours and was exhausted. So I resorted to part dipping them in coloured Royal Icing; which was so half heartedly put together that it was too watery.

Oh well, thanks to a great recipe (which I've adapted very slightly) from Annie's Eats, the cookies tasted so great that it didn't matter too much that they weren't perfectly decorated. They’re soft but biscuity with a delicate almond flavour that had a few of my friends describing them as marzipan cookies. Just so you're still slightly enthused by mine, please don't look too closely at hers, they're only, oh, about a hundred times better decorated than mine :)

I would suggest trying not rolling the dough as thin as the recipe requires. I've heard it said that slightly thicker cookies have a little something going for them. Note that if you make slightly thicker cookies, it will affect the yield slightly and perhaps also the baking time.

These don't have to be decorated. They're just as tasty plain. Or you could dust them with of icing sugar.

Yields 40 cookies

Ingredients

1 cup butter
1 cup icing sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 ½ teaspoons almond extract
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 teaspoon salt
2 ½ cups sifted flour

1 - Cream butter. 

2 - Add powdered sugar. 

3 - Blend in egg, almond extract, vanilla, salt and flour. 

4 - Chill dough until firm. 

5 - Roll to ¼ inch thickness on well-floured surface. 

6 - Cut with cookie cutters. 

7 - Place on baking trays lined with grease proof paper. Bake at 190° C / Gas Mark 5for 8-10 min. Cookies should not brown. 

8 - Frost and decorate when cool.

My cookie goody-bags

Christmas Cookies : Salted Chocolate Shortbread Cookies

Every year I say I'll celebrate Thanksgiving. Every year, that last week in November rolls round (very quickly!) and I think of all the cooking it will involve and I think to myself, "Next year. Definitely".
Every year, I say I'll run a marathon. The last couple of years I've run a half marathon and as I cross the finish line and I feel like I've literally run every single step my body is capable of running, it hits me that a marathon would mean doing that 2 hours 21 minutes all over again (but slower) and I think to myself, "Next year. Definitely".
Every year I think to myself that I'll be little miss domestic goddess and make home-made Christmas treats and deliver them round all my friends enjoying the oohing and aaahing that would inevitably follow (They definitely ooh and ahh when I imagine it). Chunks of Christmas cake, pretty bags of white chocolate fudge, intricately decorated sugar cookies; there is no end to the goodies I’ll make in these fantasies.


This year, Christmas has come around really quickly! I would put money on the fact that somebody is playing games with a ginormous calendar up in the sky! I thought about my Christmas goodie bag fantasy, and I thought ... Bring it on!! Yup, I actually did it! I decided to make a variety of Christmas cookies; which is either really brave or really foolish considering I think I might be genetically incapable of baking a good cookie. I'm going with brave! But I did it. It did take up my entire Saturday, and I was only able to listen to X-Factor, but I ended up with 4 different types of perfectly edible, no, make that friggin’ amazing cookies! Even if I do say so myself.


Please note that I haven't delivered said cookie goodie bags yet so if you haven't received yours yet, don't shower my blog with abuse, just be patient, it’s probably winging its way to you right now. Unless of course I don't know you and then it’s safe to say it is never coming ;p


Thanks to Brown Eyed Baker from whom I nicked 3 of the 4 recipes.
First up are Salted Chocolate Shortbread Cookies which were my absolute favourite of the bunch. I LOVE the salty chocolate taste!


Makes about 30 cookies
Prep: 10 minutes | Chill Time: 3 hours | Bake Time: 12 minutes


Ingredients
1¼ cups flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
11 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup light brown sugar
¼ granulated sugar
½ teaspoon fleur de sel or ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1 teaspoon vanilla extract


1 - Whisk together the flour, cocoa and baking soda in a small bowl; set aside.

2 -  Beat the butter on medium speed until soft and creamy. Add both sugars, the salt and vanilla extract and beat for 2 minutes more.

3 - With the mixer off, add the dry ingredients. Turn the mixer on and off low speed (pulse) for a second or two about 5 times so that the flour mixture gets incorporated. Then mix on low speed for about 30 seconds, just until the flour disappears into the dough (the dough will look crumbly).

4 - Turn the dough out onto a work surface and divide it in two. Shape each half into a 9-inch log. Wrap the logs in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. (The dough can be refrigerated up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. If you’ve frozen the dough, you don’t need to defrost before baking – just slice the logs into cookies and baking the cookies 1 minute longer.)
5 - Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 170 degrees C/ Gas Mark 3. Line two baking trays with grease proof paper.
6 - Using a sharp thin knife, slice the logs into rounds that are ½-inch thick. Arrange the rounds on the baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch between them. Sprinkle a small amount of extra salt on top of each round.

7 - Bake the cookies one sheet at a time for 12 minutes – they won’t look done, and won’t be firm, but that’s how they should be. Transfer the baking sheet to a cooling rack and let the cookies rest until they are only just warm, at which point you can serve them or let them reach room temperature.
Store the cookies in an airtight container at room temperature.

Guinness Chocolate Cake

Confession time! I confess so much on this blog perhaps I should have named it 'Confessions of a cake-aholic'? Ah well, as usual, I come up with my best ideas (and comebacks) much too late.

Back to my confession. While I LOVE chocolate, I'm not that keen on chocolate cake - it's just too chocolatey. If my mum is reading this, I know she's shouting at the computer screen 'There's no such thing as too chocolatey!'. Well mum, I think there is - chocolate is nice in small amounts but chocolate cake is just too much, too intense ... too everything.

So when I arranged to have friends round for a tea party - Whoever invented afternoon tea by the way is a complete genius! An entire eating occasion based on baked wonderfulness and where the closest thing resembling food is a sandwich ... that right there is my idea of heaven - it seemed like the perfect occasion to try out a new, somewhat unusual recipe and as the resulting cake would be chocolate, it also meant I could have one small piece and get rid of the rest of it. 

Luckily for my friends, this cake was good. Actually, that is a gross understatement; it was incredible!  It's my new favourite chocolate cake ever and probably the only chocolate cake I'll ever make after this. And best of all, it's pretty easy to make! 

Mini confession: once the batter has been transferred to the cake tin, I use my fingers in the only way God could possibly have intended them to be used to lick the bowl clean. At this point, I could taste the Guinness slightly but once it was baked, you couldn't taste the Guinness at all. What it did was intensify the chocolate flavour and make the cake really moist. Did I mention it was amazing??

My cake is a bit flat as I used a bigger cake tin that was recommended. And the frosting doesn't need to be piped on; I just got a bit excited with my new piping bags and nozzle :D

This recipe is by Gizzi Erskine

Makes: 12 slices
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cooling time: 3 hours

Ingredients

250ml Guinness
250g unsalted butter, sliced
100g good quality plain chocolate (70%)
35g cocoa
400g caster sugar
1 x 142ml pot plain yoghurt
2 free range eggs
1 tablespoon real vanilla extract
275g plain flour
2 ½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

For the Frosting
300g Philadelphia cream cheese
150g icing sugar
125ml double or whipping cream

1 - Preheat the oven to 180°C. Butter and line a 23cm spring form tin.
2 - Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, and heat until the butter has melted, at which time you should stir in the chocolate, cocoa and sugar.

3 - Beat the yoghurt with the eggs and vanilla and then pour into the chocolatey, beery pan.
4 - Finally whisk in the flour and bicarbonate of soda.
5 - Pour the cake batter into the greased and lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour.
Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack, as it is quite a damp cake.

6 - To make the frosting lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and then beat them both together.
7 - Separately whip the cream until it just begins to thicken but still holds it shape.
8 - Pour the cream to the cream cheese mix and beat again until combined and reaches a spreadable consistency.
9 - Frost the top of the Guinness cake. 

Cupcake decorating course!

On Saturday morning I went for a cupcake decorating class at The Make Lounge. It was a two and a half hour class and apart from the fact that I was excited about cake decorating, it just felt really good to be doing something creative! I have recently had the same conversation with different friends about the fact that we use our creativity so rarely that it feels like that part of brain is dead. It made me realise that what I love so much about baking and decorating cakes; and particularly cupcakes, is that I can be creative.

 That evening I went over to a friend's house for the first in our series (friendly; not the TV show) of 'Come Dine with Me' - all in all, it was a pretty perfect day :D

Anyway, back to the cupcake decorating course! It was in a nice bright studio, and I think there were 10 people on the course that morning. The room was set up like so...

And each seat around the table had a set of equipment; piping bags, spatulas, rolling pin, nozzles and most importantly 14 cupcakes between two people! I know you can do the math (and it's pretty simple math so if you can't do it, we, I mean you, have a problem :p) but I'll help out anyway. That's 7 each! At the end, we got a 6-cupcake box to take our cupcakes home, (again more math) leaving 1 for us to eat! Yipppee!

Our instructor Louise makes huge cake sculptures - anyone watch 'Cake Boss' or 'Ace of Cakes’? Yup those kinds of cakes. Through a couple of group demonstrations followed up by her walking round and helping, I learnt how to make this messy swirl that I've always admired in some cupcake chains. I also learnt to make marzipan roses!!! Apologies for the blurry photos but you have to admit; my roses are pretty amazing huh? And to think they began life as a slab of off-white marzipan!

We learnt to pipe roses (again something I have admired on other cupcakes and never realised how easy they were to do), pipe using two different colours simultaneously ...

and finally, we got to play around with glitter and these stamp thingies to turn our cupcakes from merely pretty to these-are-so-beautiful-I-can't-bear-for-them-to-be-eaten :D

I would totally recommend this course to anyone who is interested in cupcake decorating!