Cricket teas are here again

I posted last year about taking our turn on the tea rota for The Scientist's cricket club. This year we were picked for an early slot - in fact the first home match of the season (I think that the committee has noticed that I like baking :) ). I was really chuffed that an Australian lady left me a lovely comment saying how helpful my posts about making the teas had been last year, so I thought I'd do a quick update.


The Scientist was in charge of sandwiches again, following his production-line success last time. Luckily we read over my post again to remember what quantities of things we needed as we had completely forgotten that I'd noted that we'd only really needed three loaves of bread instead of four. Three turned out to be pretty much perfect. As far as the cakery went, we stuck with the scones, tray bake, cake formula. The Nigella scones I made last time are now are absolute stalwarts in our house, so I didn't hesitate to make a double quantity of those again. It made about 26 or 27 smallish but tall scones, and while there were some leftover when I left after tea, I'm sure they got snaffled after the match. We also did jam and whipped cream with them. Obviously. This is cricket after all.


The tray bake I did last time was a chocolate biscuit cake, and I actually didn't deviate too far from that either. I happened to have seen a souped-up malteser version on Ruth's kitchen experiments just a week or two ago, and liked the idea of the whole maltesers so much that I went for that. The chocolate melts off the maltesers so you're left with the crunchy middle bit, which looks rather good when cut, I think. The topping was white chocolate which I did find a bit sweet (also it went a bit gnarly as I melted it - I don't have a bowl suitable for a double-boiler, so I had to melt it in a pan). It did look good in cross-section and The Scientist gave it a thumbs up, but I think I'd probably just add maltesers to my regular recipe in future. Still, it was fun to try an alternative.


As to the cake, last time I made a big double-layer lemon drizzle. This time I gave The Scientist a shortlist and he picked a coconut lime cake (spot a citrus theme here?!). I was just a bit worried that a single loaf cake wouldn't feed as many as the big lemon one had, so since I had some coconut milk left over from making a curry, I also made a batch of the coconut lime cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The loaf cake (which I actually made in a square pan as my loaf tin is too small) was very good, and really easy to make - it didn't look the greatest but got a lot of good comments about its limeiness and moistness, but the cupcakes also had a good following too (I didn't mention the vegan bit - although I have to admit that the icing was a butter one). One person said they were the dampest cakes he'd ever had, and when I asked if that was good looked at me as though I was crazy. We got a lot of really nice comments about the whole tea, and The Scientist's egg sandwiches were particularly praised too :)

Coconut and lime cake

The whole process actually wasn't quite as fun as last year - we'd had to get up pretty early for a Sunday to get it all started, and since I was making an extra cake I wasn't able to help with the sandwich production line which had been the fun part last time. But it was still nice to try out a couple of new recipes, and I had a lovely cycle ride over to the ground to help out. Due to an unforeseen batting collapse I nearly arrived too late and the scones had to stay uncut - but I still got to hang around for the kudos :)

Coconut and lime cupcake. Apologies to the creators for their lack of style. I had two issues here: firstly the players were coming in for their tea as I iced; and secondly, the icing was very very sturdy and had to be dolloped on to the cake rather than piped nicely. Luckily cricketers are not fazed by these things (too busy eating)

Update on The Scientist's return: a narrow loss, but extra thanks for the tea!
Note to 2011 us: 600g of cheese is WAAAAAAAAY too much!

I don't like to post the recipe for the vegan coconut and lime cupcakes since the recipes from that book are all over the place. But if you google it you'll find it somewhere!

Coconut and lime cake - from Prima magazine
Serves 12
175g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
175g golden caster sugar
50g tenderised sweetened coconut [I used unsweetened dessicated]
3 eggs
150ml natural yogurt [I used low fat Greek]
finely grated zest and juice of two limes
175g butter, melted

To decorate:
1 lime
12g golden icing sugar [I used normal non-golden]
1 Tbsp tenderised sweetened coconut [or dessicated]

Preheat oven to Gas 4/180C. Grease and line a 2 lb loaf tin [I used a larger square one]. Put flour, baking powder, caster sugar and coconut into a processor. Pulse to combine.

Put eggs into a jug with yogurt, zest and juice from limes, and mix with a fork. Pour into dry ingredients with butter and pulse until just combined.

Pour into prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes until golden. Cool for 10 mins

To make icing: finely grate lime zest and peel away white pith [so you're left with a naked lime]. Put lime flesh into a mini processor and whizz till lump free. Add icing sugar. Pour over cake and sprinkle over finely grated lime zest and coconut.

Chinese new year cupcakes

We're not over the cupcake obsession round here yet. I don't know quite what's happened - it's not like cupcakes haven't been trendy for years. Anyway, these ones were for my craft group's first cooking meetup (we use 'craft' to mean anything we all like, from films to books to shopping to actual crafting :) ). Cie, of the famous blueberry nutella cake, was demonstrating how to make Chinese pork dumplings, and while I had to (unobtrusively, I hope) hold my nose while they were cooking, they were an amazing success. My lack of tolerance for the sight or smell of meat shouldn't detract from Cie and her production line's efforts anyway - a bit of pre-planning and work on her part and a choice of boiled or fried perfect little moon-shaped pillows of [skim over that part, la la la] were fairly rolling off the stove and into eager eaters' mouths.


My contribution to the feast was dessert. Naturally there is a back story to it, so you'd better get comfy - or skip straight to the recipe links. This back story starts in a Chinese restaurant in Pasadena, veers into a Chinese supermarket in Coventry, backtracks into a spring roll (sounds messy), and finally ended in cupcakes. The Pasadena part is from my visit to Tracy (who I am seeing tomorrow - yay!) a few years ago. She ordered us some bean paste dumplings for dessert at lunch on my last day and they were delicious (though we were probably too full to do them full justice!). The veer into Coventry happened a few months ago when we we there for some reason or other and stopped into a Chinese supermarket opportunistically for some shingshao wine. I spotted a tin of red bean paste, remembered those dumplings and picked it up. I regretted this somewhat after it had sat in the cupboard for quite a long time, but then I noticed a recipe for banana and red bean paste spring rolls in a cookbook I found in a charity shop. I'd thought about buying this book before so was very pleased to find it for 50p. I have to admit that I'm glad I didn't pay full price as there aren't too many veggie recipes and there's a limit to how many times you can sub more veggies or tofu for different types of meat. But this recipe was a winner and I made it to take to Vicki and Paul's house for dinner. You just get some filo (or spring roll wrappers), spray some oil over them, spread some paste over it, slice some banana over the top and fold up. They could be fried but we baked them because the oven was already on. They were amazing - the bean paste went all melty and nutella-like.

Bean paste added, ready for more batter over the top. Note Chinese new year red cupcake liners

But that wasn't the end of the bean paste and so when the Chinese new year meetup was announced I knew exactly what I was making, and even what recipe. For the cakes I went to Chockylit, and for the frosting, to Cupcake Project - my two favourite cupcake blogs. The cakes were just vanilla with bean paste in the middle (mine sank to the bottom as I think my cakes were a bit larger but shallower than Chockylit's). I reduced the sugar quite a lot as well as my paste was from a tin, whereas Chockylit had made her own and made it less sweet. I went down to a bit over half what was in the recipe. The frosting Chockylit used was a cream cheese one though and I'm trying to avoid using dairy in my baking now too, so I went for Stef's red bean paste buttercream, using vegan margarine again. She has a Chinese new year cupcake to go with it, but it involved glutinous rice flour which I wasn't sure I could get without more advanced planning.

Finished cupcakes. Note not at all seasonal blue spotty liners

I almost forgot about the cupcakes as we were having such a good natter after the dumplings, but luckily I remembered in time to share them out. Everyone said nice things about them, though I thought they were a bit dense when I tried one later, and The Scientist, while liking the cake, said they could do without the bean paste. What does he know?? We've agreed that vegan marge is no less disgusting than ordinary marge now though, so he should be less traumatised than last time to realise that's what he was eating :)

Whew - long story, good cupcakes, happy Chinese New Year.

Chinese new year cupcake recipe here (I halved it and then almost halved the sugar as well)

Chinese new year cupcake frosting here

Banana custard cupcakes

Remember I said I'd made three types of cupcakes for Science Nephew's birthday party at the end of November? Well here, at last, is the third. I wanted something a bit special - a little pzazz, a little buffet-table presence, a little cry of 'photograph me' - so after the usual dithering, I selected a banana custard cupcake. After all, it was for a child's birthday party, and what child doesn't like bananas and custard? I even love the WORDS banana and custard.


I've made banana muffins before, but I wanted something more like a banana sponge this time. Handily, there was a recipe that looked just right on my cupcake calendar, so I used that as my base, and it did indeed turn out to be just as I'd hoped. In a perfect world of course I would have made my own custard but this didn't seem the time, so I scooped out a hollow in the middle of each cake, and spooned in some cooled instant custard. The scooped out bit was put back on top and the whole was adorned with squirty cream, and a cherry on the top. It looked just as fun as I'd hoped. As with the others, I took the components along to the party separately and assembled them there. I left the cream until the last minute, but it did still subside a bit, and was certainly pretty messy. In a misguided attempt at not weighing everyone down too much I'd gone for light cream, and I think it was just too light. Another time I'd whip some normal cream.


I think the scale of the cupcakes made them a bit daunting, but once people got stuck in I got some nice compliments (and Science Nephew's other grandma asked for the recipe :) ) The Scientist, however, came up with the best feedback: make bigger cupcakes, fill the middle with jelly AND custard, and make - a trifle cupcake! Inspired or what? Its time will come. It was the leftover squirty cream which made decorating his cupcake SO much fun for the Munchkin the next day. He truly couldn't believe he was allowed to do it and eat the results as well. It's fun being an aunt :)


Banana custard cupcakes

Cupcakes (recipe from my 2009 cupcake calendar - I imagine it has been superseded by this one)
1 cup (2 sticks, 240g) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup caster sugar
2 cups self raising flour
4 eggs
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 cup (about 2 large) mashed bananas

Preheat the oven to 175C. Prepare muffin liners or tins.

Combine the utter, sugar, flour, eggs and nutmeg in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer until smooth - about 2-3 minutes. Stir in the mashed bananas until well combined. Spoon the batter into the cupcake liners. Bake for 20 minutes. Cool on a rack

To assemble
Make up instant custard and leave it to cool
Scoop out a cone from the middle of each cupcake, using a knife
Pour or spoon some custard into each cake - I put in enough to make it level with the top of the cake
Gently place the removed bit of cake back on top
Go crazy with the squirty cream
Put a cherry on top

BIrthday cupcakes

I mainly write about my family on this blog, but The Scientist has a munchkin nephew of his own, too, and a couple of weekends ago we went to his first birthday party. His mum had asked if I'd do some baking (actually I think I'd asked her if I could do some baking!), so I went a little crazy with three types of cupcakes. I've noticed that even quite simple cupcakes are often the quickest things to disappear at party buffets, especially if they have pretty frosting, and I wanted to do my nephew proud.


These two types pictured here are both from the Magnolia Bakery vanilla cupcake recipe. I'm not much up on posh bakeries, but I think that this is the one popularised by Sex and the City. Hey, if it's good enough for Carrie it's good enough for Science Nephew. I found the recipe here, but added cocoa powder to half the batter to make half vanilla and half chocolate. The recipe was nice and easy, but I was interested to see that it uses both plain and self-raising flour. I don't know it that was the reason but the cupcakes were beautifully light and moist. I frosted them with a simple buttercream, again, half vanilla and half chocolate. And then I got a bit carried away and tinted half of the vanilla frosting pink just for the hell of it. A bit of sprinkling with hundreds and thousands finished them off.

We had to travel for a couple of hours to get to the party, so I took the cakes un-iced, and decanted the frostings into separate plastic containers, kept cool with an ice block. When we arrived I set up a little production line in the village hall kitchen, piping the icing onto some, and spreading it on to others. I did sustain a bit of a cartoon comedy cupcake injury half way through, when I stuck my finger into the plastic tip of the frosting bag to push out the last of the icing so I could wash it - and got my finger stuck! The little prongs on the tip jabbed into my finger so I couldn't pull it out again, and I had visions of having to go to hospital to have my domestic injury fixed. Luckily a bit of twisting and pulling, and running my finger under the cold tap so I couldn't feel it, and I got myself out again, and only a bandaged finger testified to my incompetence!


I was really pleased with my pretty cupcakes and they disappeared very quickly. The impact on the kiddy guests was a bit of a shock - the volume and energy levels soared immediately and I may have to look into a 'come-down cupcake' in future! The Munchkin and the Munchkinette got to sample one each when they visited us the next day, and although the Munchkin seemed to get as much on his face as in his mouth, they both loved them, and especially helping to decorate their own. Kiwi Sis is bringing them up to be good little baker-helpers :)


Just by way of comparison, a week or two later I made some more cupcakes to send to a friend, and this time I tried the Hummingbird bakery's recipe. It was quite similar to the other one, but came out quite a bit denser. I don't know if it's because I halved it, and got the quantity of liquid a bit out, but the batter was definitely less runny. I liked the Magnolia ones better but my friend liked her gift very much, and The Scientist thought that they tasted like doughnut in cupcake form. I'm keen to make them again and put some jam in the middle to test this further! Oh, and in looking up how best to post the second batch, I came across this very funny post. Needless to say, I didn't send them off in a jiffy bag :)

Thank you for all the nice comments while I've been offline. Now that teaching is over for Christmas I hope to get back to the blog a bit more.

Magnolia bakery cupcake recipe here

Chocolate chilli cupcakes: unexpected star of English tea party

Chocolate chilli cupcakes, mystery treacle offering, jug of the Norse Goddess's sangria. The cupcakes are sitting on a cakestand I inherited from my Grandad.

We hosted a tea party yesterday, in honour of our visiting friends, the Norse God and Goddess. It was the fourth of July so it seemed like a fitting time to get some friends together - what with it being Alice in Wonderland Day and all :) This is a very well known English event, which I had been planning to celebrate for precisely two days, ever since I saw a poster advertising it in the Covered Market in Oxford. Oxford is, of course, the home of Alice, since C. S. Lewis was a don there, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, the site of the famous Treacle Well is near the city [interlude: Roger Federer has just won Wimbledon. During the course of the match I have moderated some essays, read a magazine, read the manual for my new camera, downloaded some pictures and made some bread. But winning Wimbledon sounds pretty good as well]. It was a coincidence that the (Canadian) Norse Goddess had come up with treacle as her first thought for an English tea party, but a happy one. She associated it with the Famous Five, so we were covering lots of children's literature bases.

The Norse Goddess gets creative (and personalised) with the cupcakes

I'll write more about how we turned the treacle theme into reality later, but this post is about the unexpected and not very English star of the tea party - the chocolate chilli cupcakes. This was inspired by the very first entry on my 2009 Cupcake Calendar, so I've been waiting a while to make it. My fellow dairy-reducing friend Vicki has shamed me into also reducing the amount of dairy products I use to bake for other people , so I didn't actually use the recipe from the calendar, but instead adapted the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World. The calendar recipe called for the addition of chipotle chilli powder to the batter; we didn't have that, so I used regular chilli powder, and some of the sauce from a jar of chipotle chillis in adobo in lieu of some of the vanilla extract. I did go with the orange frosting the calender suggested, just using vegan marge instead of butter.

The Norse Goddess's over-sized butterfly bun (verdict: nom nom - in a Canadian accent)

The cakes were a big hit. There was a good hit of chilli - everyone noticed it, but it wasn't enough to make your eyes water (I'd been a bit worried about this). Our poor friend Neil, who got ambushed by the salt on the margarita-ish cupcakes I made a few weeks ago was also surprised by the chilli, but it doesn't seem to have been enough to put him off my baking, fortunately. No one complained that they tasted of soya milk either, so thank you Vicki for inspiring me to ban the cow's milk and butter :) The Norse Goddess and I got creative with the icing, and when I realised that she'd never had a butterfly bun, I turned one of the extras into her own little English fusion treat.

Cupcake ready for nomming, modelled by Mike

Our Alice party was a lot of fun, and was only slighted marred by the odd raindrop, which just served to push us inside to watch the Wimbledon women's final. The Norse Goddess made us up some sangria, which I've just realised I was drinking without diluting with lemonade, and The Scientist repeated his sandwich-making triumph from the cricket tea. His egg mayonnaise got particular mention in dispatches. The Norse deities were able sandwich minions, and the Norse God made the decorative bunting (environmentally friendly - made from Sunday newspaper colour supplements). Everyone was happy apart from Bamber the dog, who was kept confined to the car to avoid cat spooking. He didn't get a cupcake (naturally - chocolate being very bad for dogs indeed), but he did get a walk once the tea had gone down a little.

Eco bunting (note Andy Murray on third flag from the right!)

Chocolate chilli cupcakes (adapted from Vegan Cupcakes...)
Made 12 fairy cakes and two big cupcakes with the leftovers

1 cup soya milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp adobo sauce from a jar of chipotle chillis
1 cup plain white flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp chilli powder

1. Preheat oven to 175 C and line a muffin tin with paper liners
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the soya milk and vinegar and set aside for a few minutes to curdle. Add the sugar, oil, vanilla and adobo sauce, and beat. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt. Add in two batches to the wet ingredients and beat until there are no large lumps. Add the chilli powder and stir to combine well.
3. Pour into the cupcake liners, filling three quarters of the way (this will create quite flat tops for icing. If you want to make butterfly buns, put a bit more in to get a domed top). Baking 18-20 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Transfer to a rack and allow to cool before frosting.

Chocolate orange frosting (from the 2009 Cupcake Calendar)
1 cup icing sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 Tbsp Grand Marnier (or Tia Maria)
1/3 cup butter or vegan margarine

Blend all of the ingredients together in a processor. The instructions said to sift the sugar but I didn't bother. Pipe the frosting onto the cooled cupcakes. Or, slice the top of the domed cupcakes and halve the cut-off top. Frost the top of the cupcake and then balance the two halves on top so that they look like wings (see photo)

Cocktail cupcakes

I'm starting to think that this blog really should be called 'Munchkin Messups'. I rarely seem to report on something without going into a digression about how I forgot this or failed to do that, or had to battle with an insubordinate oven. Well this time is no different, and on this occasion the problem was our drinks cabinet. Or, more precisely, the fact that our drinks cabinet is a small and extremely random collection of bottles which live on a wooden box in the living room, and which doesn't include tequila. You know how everyone has a spirit they can't touch because they had an unfortunate incident with it in their late teens? For The Scientist that spirit is tequila, which isn't normally a problem because we are no longer 19, but this weekend it was a problem.


To back up a step, we had been invited to a BBQ party at the house of some very good friends from our university days and I had offered to take some cupcakes. I selected the Mucho Margarita cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, thinking that it would be fun to take a cocktail in cake form. The trouble was that given The Scientist's issues with tequila (the base alcohol for the Margarita cocktail) there was no point investing in a whole bottle, and I just couldn't find a miniature bottle anywhere. Eventually, with no more time for searching, I just used what we had on hand, which in our case, is ALWAYS Tenerifian honey rum, which The Scientist brought back in perhaps unwise quantities after a long research trip out there. I decided that as long as you could taste the alcohol and included a lot of lime, people wouldn't notice the difference. I am sorry to say that I also de-veganised the cupcakes as I was worried that our friends would pick up the distinctive note of soya milk, and so used regular milk and marge [sorry].


The cupcakes were really good - both limey and light, and you could definitely taste that there was alcohol present. The decoration was supposed to be coloured sugar crystals and kosher salt but since I'm trying to get through some of my excessive pantry store of baking goods I used the coloured sprinkles I had on hand, plus the salt. Not quite as authentic, but then I think I threw authenticity out of the window as soon as I opened the rum bottle. I liked the fact that you got the odd tang of salt, although our host did look a little surprised when he got his first salty taste. The cupcakes also travelled well even in a hot car, and just had a brief chill in the fridge when we arrived to firm up the icing again. They disappeared very fast and helped to fuel an exhausting afternoon of sitting on our friends' patio, admiring their vegetable plants (I came home with two more tomato plants so I consider the cupcakes a good investment), laughing at how melty a big black dog can go in the sun, and chatting about all manner of arcane topics.

[Note: In fairness to The Scientist I should probably admit that I couldn't face Baileys for my entire twenties :) ]

Ambiguous Cocktail Cupcakes: based on Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World's Mucho Margarita cupcakes. Cupcake Project's take on the recipe is here. I used a simplified buttercream icing with lime juice.

Fixing a brownie problem

I noticed to my surprise the other day that I only have one entry on this blog tagged as 'brownies'. It's possible I made a couple in the early days before I started tagging my posts, but still - that must be at least ten months with no blog-worthy brownies. Surely this is impossible - some brownie-hating little blog fiend must have been swallowing up my posts. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that blogging has made me want to try out new things every time I bake, and the old tried and trusteds have fallen by the wayside. When those tried and trusteds are brownies this is surely a travesty of the highest order which must be rectified immediately.


Luckily, I had an excuse. When we were in Leeds visiting Munchkin Gramps and family a few weeks ago we went into a posh little bakery in the Corn Exchange. It was a Sunday and very quiet, and the young man in there - who also did all the baking - let us taste lots of things. While the others were making appreciative noises about the very non-veggie-friendly lime jelly covered cheesecake, I was looking around, and noticed some manger-shaped brownie cakes filled with some sort of luscious chocolate ganache. When I pointed them out to The Scientist (once the distraction of the cheesecake had been dispatched) he looked very interested and suggested that they could be a good offering for a gaming night.


This weekend was the one. I knew I wanted to make little cakes with proper finished edges rather than slices from a big cake, and so I chose a recipe I'd cut out from a magazine for a brownie cake. It differed from other brownies I'd made because you separate the eggs, whisk the whites and fold them into the mixture at the final stage. Does that make it a cake and not a brownie? Who knows. As a joky nod to the fact that The Scientist has gone gaming over Valentine's Day (not a problem AND he sent me flowers as a surprise before he went), I baked them in heart-shaped moulds, and they looked pretty cute. I must admit that I never got as far as the ganache. I was going to make chocolate buttercream which is The Scientist's favourite, but I was just too tired in the end after a busy week, and we decided there was enough chocolate involved. But if I were making them to woo my beloved at a homey Valentine's supper, I might go the extra hog (sugar-induced coma - always a romantic end to a night).

When I thought more about it I did remember a few more brownies which have graced our oven in the last year. There was Dogophile Vegan Nurse's vegan brownies for one. And the golden syrup-based ones which Noodle helped me make. And I tried some black-beany ones which I rediscovered in the freezer the other day and which are a little odd (I am forced to concede that beans don't improve *everything*). And there was another more recent batch which had Celebrations chocolates baked into it which I planned to post about but which didn't photograph too well. I was relieved to think that the dearth hasn't been quite as bad as I'd feared, but it's good to put a conclusive stamp on it by selecting 'brownie' as I tag this post.

Mini chocolate brownie cakes (from ?? - oh dear, I must start labelling where the recipes in my folder came from. I suspect the Sainsbury's Magazine)

Serves 10

175g unsalted butter plus extra for greasing
225g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
200g caster sugar
3 medium eggs, separated
65g plain flour
50g chopped pecan nuts [I left these out; one of The Scientist's gamer friends has a nut allergy]

Heat oven to 180C/Fan 160C/Gas 4. Butter a 20-25 cm cake tin and line with greaseproof paper. Or, do as I did and use a silicon muffin pan.

Place 175g of the chocolate, plus the butter and sugar in a saucepan and heat gently until melted, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool [I wouldn't skip this - the eggs might scramble and that wouldn't be pretty]

Whisk the egg yolks into the chocolate mixture, then add the flour, nuts and the remaining chocolate.

Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks, then gently, but thoroughly, fold into the chocolate mixture.

Pour into the prepared tin(s) and bake in the centre of the oven for about 35-40 minutes, until crusty on top. I set the timer for 20 minutes for my little muffins and then started checking on them at 5 minute intervals. They probably still took close on to half an hour but everything takes a long time in our oven. Leave to cool, then turn out. The recipe suggests dusting with icing sugar and serving warm with custard or cold with cream.

Festive bakes: Nigella cakes

December has started and the run-up to the festive season has begun in earnest. I have to admit that I've been doing a little seasonal baking already though: there is a large jar of mince-pie filling in the fridge (I hate calling it 'mince meat' - bleurgh) and a Solstice cake maturing in a tin on top of the kitchen cupboards. These little gems are, however, probably The Scientist's favourite seasonal treat. Well, apart from Christmas pudding. And roast potatoes. And the pigs in blanket travesty I already mentioned. But these are right up there.


These cupcakes are actually just Nigella's Easy-action Christmas cake baked small. She calls the little versions 'jewelled cupcakes' but to us they are 'Nigella cakes', and I generally end up making lots around this time of year and stashing them in the freezer for when a whim for festiveness strikes. They're easy action because all the ingredients are just melted and stirred up together and then baked. They are the reason why I occasionally have chestnut puree around (though thank you so much, Johanna, for reminding me about the chestnut mousse cake I made a while back - I made a delicious improvised version with a lot less butter after reading your post on chestnut puree!). They're one of the easiest recipes for Christmas cake I've seen and, like all others, make the kitchen smell amazing. Plus, since the cakes are small they don't take too long to cook. I left these ones plain so they don't look too enticingly shiny, but Nigella suggests glazing them with some sieved jam and decorating with glace fruits and nuts. I sometimes do that too and it does make them look very jolly :)


This first batch of Nigella cakes of the year have disappeared already - they were for The Scientist's gaming weekend last week (where they were actually upstaged by another batch of the ginger parkin cookies, but that's just a sign of how good the cookies are. I think that The Scientist undersold them so as to leave more for himself :) )

Nigella Cakes (aka jewelled cupcakes, from Feast)
This is the full quantity recipe, but I often halve it to make about 12 fairy-cake-sized cupcakes. The full recipe is for a 20cm cake, or 24 small cupcakes

775g best-quality mixed dried fruit
175g unsalted butter
250g dark muscovado sugar
1 x 250g tin sweetened chestnut puree or spread (I use unsweetened and add sugar - the proportions are given on the tin)
125ml dark rum
juice and zest of 1 orange
zest of 1 lemon
3 large eggs, beaten
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

to decorate: 4 tbsp smooth jam, approx 150g assorted glace fruits and blanched nuts

Preheat the oven to Gas 2/150C (though you might hold off doing this until after the fruits etc have been set bubbling). Line the sides and bottom of a deep 20cm round cake tin with a double layer of greaseproof paper, leaving a cuff higher than the sides of the tin. Wrap a double layer of brown paper around the outside of the tin leaving a cuff double the height of the tin, tying with string. This gives some extra insulation to make the cake cook slowly. If making cupcakes try to use the foil liners which are thicker than the regular sort.

Put the dried fruit, butter, sugar, chestnut puree/spread, rum and orange juice and zests into a large wide saucepan and bring to the boil gently, stirring as the butter melts. Simmer the mixture for 10 minutes and then take it off the heat and leave to stand for 30 minutes, by which time the fruits will have been soused and the mixture cooled slightly. Now, add the beaten eggs, flour, baking powder and spices and stir to combine.

Pour the fruit cake mixture very carefully into the cake tin/s. Place in the oven and bake for 1 3/4 - 2 hours for the cake, or 35-40 minutes for the cupcakes.. The top of the cake/s should be firm and dry and will have cracked a little. A cake tester will still be sticky.

Put the cake on a cooling rack and take off the brown paper from around the outside of the tin. It will hold its heat and take a long while to cool, but once it has cooled completely unmould it from the tin and wrap in a layer of greaseproof paper and then foil until you want to decorate it. I just store the little cakes in a tin, or freeze them once they're cooled.

To decorate: warm the jam in a pan with 1 tbsp water. Cool. Paint the top of the cake/s with the cooled jam and then decorate with the fruits and nuts. Paint another layer of jam over the top to give a glossy finish.

A munchkin birthday

It's the munchkin's second birthday today! Happy birthday little man! We're sad not to be with you to celebrate, but we did make you a little cake which we enjoyed in honour of your birthday. It's a chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream icing, and it was decorated by a very charming young three-year-old friend of mine who was visiting with his mum and dad last weekend. He said it tasted very nice indeed.

Intercontinental blog challenge: the cake that almost wasn’t

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks, and so I thought it would be fun to select ‘birthday cakes’ as the theme for my next intercontinental blog challenge with Lisa from Unique Little Bits.

It wasn’t until I started reading American blogs and recipe books that I realised how many cakes there are which are unique to the other side of the Pond. I’m sure some of them have close cousins over here, but I was astonished to read about chiffon, yellow, devil, angel, sheet, and hummingbird cakes. A sandwiched layer cake seemed to be the order of the day for a celebration, and I was seduced by the description of a Devil’s Food cake with chocolate custard baked into it in a book I borrowed from the university library called The Little Red Barn Baking Book. I was all ready to come up with some lame excuse as to why I was borrowing a recipe book along with my reading on early modern Europe, but it was the only one which got any reaction out of the librarian at all, so I thought I’d allow it to get me some kudos (maybe I’ll be let off a fine some time in the future).

There seems to some confusion over the name ‘devil’s food’. I read one description which referred to other devilled foods like our devilled eggs - as in spicy, but another (and more plausible to me at least) explanation is that it’s just devilishly tempting. Mine had an extra component than a usual chocolate cake because of the chocolate custard but the batter tasted amazing. You may think that the devilishness of the batter is why my cake is Munchkin sized? Well, not quite. The truth is that my cake just wouldn’t cook through and this was a tiny side one I’d made for me to taste while the rest went off gaming with The Scientist. You may remember an earlier near-disaster I had with a Delia carrot cake not baking? Well this was an exact re-run, and I think it may be no coincidence that I was using the same tin. The cake went back into the oven several times until we really had to go to bed, and then it completely fell apart in an uncooked mockery of a tasty cake. Grrrr. In the morning I crammed the mess into one of my more trusted cake tins and stuck it back in the oven for another blast before we headed off to the university. Alas, it still wasn’t really cooked when we examined it later in the day, and it ended up being carved up into brownies and frosted like that. It was really a case of ‘shut your eyes and dive in with a spoon’ as it was still really tasty – but a complete mess. I was so relieved I’d made the munchkin one too, which I duly iced with chocolate cream cheese frosting and enjoyed on my own. It was divine – though that is perhaps not the right word to use for a devil’s food cake – very moist and chocolatey, but not too dark or bitter. I have since decided to outlaw my devilish cake tin, but look forward to trying the cake again in my smaller tin. I also had a ton of icing left over, so I added an egg to it, whisked it up, and baked it on a biscuit crumb base like a cheesecake. I took it to the Ecos at the weekend, and got a text last night to say that it was lovely. At least there was one intact winner from the devil’s challenge!

I was very amused to see in Lisa’s write-up of her cake that she also had a disintegration problem – the pressure to represent their country must have got to our cakes! At least they both tasted good despite their aesthetic problems.

Devil's Food cake (from The Little Red Barn Baking Book)

Cake
280g plain flour
1 tsp bicarb of soda
1/2 tsp salt
110g unsalted butter
195g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
225 ml whole milk [I used semi-skimmed]

Custard
1 egg
110ml whole milk
130g caster sugar
110g good quality plain chocolate (min 70 % cocoa solids), chopped into small pieces

For the custard: lightly whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Add the milk and sugar and whisk until smooth. Pour mixture into a small pan and stir over a medium heat with a wooden spoon until it thickens (up to 15 mins) and just coats the back of the spoon. Remove from the heat. Add the chocolate chunks and stir gently until melted. [Marvel at the pretty swirly pattern it makes on the way, if you're me]. Continue stirring over the heat until the custard thickens slightly. Remove from heat and leave to cool

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Butter and flour a 23 cm round 5cm deep cake tin. Chill in the fridge.

Sift flour, bicarn of soda and salt into a bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter with the sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the vanilla essence adn eggs, one by one, beating after each one. Add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, Mix gently until just combined. Fold in chocolate custard.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake 20-25 mins or until the cake springs back slightly when gently pressed in the centre. Leave to cool in the pan for 10-15 mins before turning out onto a wire rack. Allow to cool completely before frosting. Slice into three layers. Sandwich layers together with icing and cover top and sides with icing as well. Leave to set for one hour before serving.

Chocolate cream cheese icing [note that the recipe recommends chocolate buttercream but I didn't have any cream, and The Scientist picked this one instead. The recipe is based one from the same book and we thought it was very fine with the cake, but it's not the combination the author had in mind. Disclaimer over!]
225g cream cheese [I used low fat]
225g unsalted butter
200-300g icing sugar, sifted
2 tsp vanilla essence
cocoa, to taste, or to reach desired colour [I started with about 1 tbp]

Beat cream cheese and butter together thoroughly, using an electric mixture. Add the sugar in thirds, mixing well after each addition. Test for sweetness. Add vanilla essence. Chill for 1 hour before using. Makes enough for one large cake.

Cupcakes and pizza for a Norse God

Last week The Scientist and I had one of our very best friends staying with us and we were very happy. He emigrated to Canada eighteen months ago and this is the first time we've seen him since. He was one of The Scientist's housemates many moons ago, and they bounce off each other in some sort of geek nirvana (their first conversation started with 'so, what do you think of optical interferometers?' or some such craziness). Fortunately that's not his only charm and so I love him too. I was pondering what to call him on my blog when he mentioned that one of his Canadian friends calls him 'Skyhammer' on her blog, and I thought I couldn't really improve on that. It sounds like some sort of Norse god, doesn't it?

We were wondering what to eat for dinner while the Norse God was with us when he told us about his housewarming party in Canada at which he'd just provided a load of pizza and cupcakes for his guests to eat. We were all immediately taken with that idea, and so while The Scientist dug out a takeaway menu, I got going on the cupcakes. The Norse God picked mint chocolate flavour, and I found a great recipe in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for chocolate cupcakes with minty frosting and a chocolate ganache. But I had just run out of soya milk and it seemed like an ethical travesty of the highest order to de-veganize a vegan cupcake. So I turned to Cupcake Project, thinking if anyone knew a good chocolate cupcake, it would be Stef. Stef hasn't made mint cupcakes herself as they're one of the banned flavours in her quest for the perfect wedding cupcakes for her friends. But her chocolate cupcake of choice is from Chockylit's Cupcake Bakeshop - in fact it's the basis for her Better than Sex cupcakes which I won't comment on as my little sister sometimes reads this blog. Having tasted the cupcakes I can see where she was going with the general idea though... I added a teaspoon of peppermint essence to the batter, and halved the recipe as there were only three of us, but it still made 11 British fairycake-sized cakes. For the minty frosting I did follow the vegan recipe although used regular butter (sorry), and finally turned to Nigella for a chocolate ganache.


The cupcakes themselves were beautiful (and Chockylit gives some satisfyingly good scientific reasons for her method). Weirdly though, my frosting and ganache had borrowed each other's qualities: the frosting was runny and the ganache was as thick as anything, so I spread the former and piped the latter instead of the other way round. The boys didn't mind this at all, although it meant that my cupcakes were not quite the picture of perfection I had hoped (I'm competing with professional Canadian bakery cakes, after all). The Norse God sweetly said he didn't compare like that and The Scientist was too busy eating the leftover 'ganache' with a spoon to comment. Both dispatched the cakes pretty quickly after their pizzas anyway, while discussing one-dimensional profiles or something. I found the mint frosting far too sweet for my own taste, but it was really minty (in a good way), and the cakes were minty yum. I'd definitely make them again.


The Norse God has gone back to Canada now and we're very sad, but we had a brilliant time with him and hope to visit him and his cupcake suppliers in the not too distant future.

Mint chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache

Chocolate cupcake recipe from Cupcake Bakeshop, here

Mint frosting (with apologies to Vegan Cupcakes) [I halved this quantity and it still made at least twice what I needed - but then I found it was too runny to be piped nicely so used less per cake than intended. I'm not sure why mine was so runny - perhaps using milk instead of soy creamer?]
1/4 shortening
3 cups icing sugar, sifted
1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
small drop green food colouring

Mash shortening with a fork to soften. Add1 cup icing sugar and a tbsp of milk and mix. Alternately add sugar and milk, mixing after each addition, until all the ingredients are used, and the icing is smooth and creamy. Add the extracts and mix. Pipe on top of cooled cupcakes

Chocolate ganache
I used a recipe from How to Eat, but that was a book I'd been looking after for the Norse God, and he took it away with him. Here's a link to a Nigella ganache on her website

Beauty and the beast cupcakes

Do you ever find that buying an ingredient for one baking project then necessitates thinking of another to use the rest of it up, which demands that you buy something else, which…. Perhaps it’s just me. I had that this week though, and the above little numbers were the products. The ‘beastie’ one on the right (did you ever see such an unprettified cupcake?) is an apple, raisin and oat number, which I made to use up the last of my jar of applesauce. I found the recipe on Starting from Scratch (recipe here) and picked it because Mary said that it had a nice level of spice. I’m pleased to say that I agree – a pleasing tang of nutmeg and cinnamon, and very nice warm (and no eggs, so easily veganised by using soya milk). I’d meant to halve the recipe, but then realised that the whole batch would use up almost all of my apple puree - but then my cupcake liners are smaller than American ones, and before I knew it I had 15 of the little blighters jostling for space in the freezer (well, 14 – I ate one with my cup of tea today). I didn’t bother levelling them out as I assumed they would go melty in the initial heat of the oven and redistribute. Today’s science lesson is that it apparently doesn’t work like that.

The prettier little ‘beauty’ on the left is a vanilla cupcake from Vegan cupcakes take over the world, with added chestnut puree left over from the Passover chestnut orange chocolate mousse cake. I’d already used some of the leftovers in a small batch of Nigella’s jewelled Christmas cupcakes for The Scientist (they got snaffled before I’d organised myself to photograph them, but I’m sure I’ll be making them again). I’d found other recipes for chestnut cupcakes but we didn’t have much margarine, so I went down the vegan route as it used oil instead. Initially I found the texture of oil-based cupcakes a bit weird – not necessarily bad, but uncomfortably different for a comforting treat. They're growing on me though, and the workmates I took them in for gave them the thumbs up. They’re frosted with a simple chocolate buttercream – which I then had too much of, so some of that went on the chocolate Afghans I posted about yesterday.

So, in a strange form of ‘pay it forward’, we all got chestnut dessert for Passover, The Scientist got some Nigella cakes, my workmates got chestnut cupcakes, I got (a lot of) apple cupcakes, Kiwi Sis vicariously got some chocolate Afghans, and I still have a bit of chestnut puree and some chocolate frosting. Enough is enough though: the freezer is full, and I’m only allowing myself to bake when I have an immediate audience to eat the results for the foreseeable future. It’s going to be hard as I just bought a new muffin book. I’ll have to schedule some more work meetings soon – the semester is over now, and my homey workmates only eat catfood.

In a late addition to the cupcake oddity collection, here is the closest The Scientist has come to making one in the whole time I’ve known him. It was part of a ‘Ready Steady Cook’ style dinner which turned into a ‘Here’s the random contents of the veggie basket which need eating up before we go away for the weekend’ dinner. They’re mini potato rosti with cabbage and blue cheese, and he very sweetly made them this size so as not to intimidate me with their heaviness. What a sweetheart. They were really nice, and went alongside sautéed leeks and some leftover quinoa and aubergine chilli which I accidentally made with so much chilli powder that I couldn’t eat it without slathering it in yogurt!

Recycled cupcake for Earth Day

The theme of Cupcake Hero this month is Earth Day, which was on April 22nd. I decided to produce a cupcake which had as small an energy footprint as possible. Perhaps I should have looked into building a fire from locally foraged wood; or powering the oven with the random walk of a cat (too random), but instead I opened the freezer and ferreted about until I found one of my favourite cupcakes – a jam and cinnamon number which I had stashed away after some earlier baking adventure. I left it to defrost on its own overnight, and then I decorated it with ingredients I already had – namely, sliced British strawberries, and applesauce bought from the local health food shop (not home-made, unfortunately – I did make some the other day, but we ate it all up on pancakes :) ).

Is that cheating? Well, perhaps, but I think that the thought behind it is sound. Firstly, I haven’t made something new that I didn’t really need when I had something perfectly good already. Secondly, I didn’t heat the oven unnecessarily and so saved energy. Thirdly, I have demonstrated my dislike of supporting green causes by buying extra stuff. Fourthly, I’ve used in-season products (the jam in the cupcakes was home-made using locally grown berries). And fifthly – well, who needs a fifthly when they’ve just produced one of the most yummy cupcakes on the Earth with minimal energy usage?

The original recipe was from Cooking Light, although I used blackberry jam instead of strawberry this time. Either is wonderful.

A miscellany of girliness

This is going to be a post about cakes and dresses. I don't feel bad about that: they are two great interests of mine, and they make me happy. But they do make me want to pause to reflect on how far our society has developed, that it is ok for an educated girl to choose to spend her free time making and selecting dresses and cakes. I think that it's the word 'choose' which is critical here. If I thought that it was expected of me to make dresses and cakes and maintain some feminine ideal which at the same time shut me out of doing other things I might like, I would feel very differently. No, it is the fact that I could join the TA, go for a run, take a radio apart or bake a cake which makes me embrace this inner girliness. We are lucky to live in a time when feminism has almost become irrelevant. To me it really just stands for gender equality, although I know that there was very much more to it than that when that was absent. I have never knowingly been discriminated against because of my sex, and I would be pretty outraged to find that I had. Of course, I work in a fairly gender-neutral area, but still, there are more men than women in professorships in British universities (61% of faculty were men in 1994, although this was narrowing). This is particularly skewed in the sciences and technology. In my (arts) department, there are 12 men and 11 women on the permanent staff, and of the 7 professors, 4 are men, and 3 are women. In The Scientist's research centre there are only 4 women out of 13 faculty, and only 1 of the 7 profs are female. In other professions it's much worse. And in higher education women tend to put off having children until well into their 30s. Only one of my female colleagues has a young child, although others do have grown-up offspring. As the (unpopular but sadly realistic) saying goes 'it's a book or a baby'. But how long do you wait to secure the book contract or the permanent job, and do you sacrifice the chance of being taken seriously at the round of conferences, evening seminars and self-imposed long hours by having a sproglet in tow?

That went on for rather longer than I had planned, but I think it does serve to show how while some inequality for women remains structural (not to say biological) in the developed world we do live in an era when baking and sewing can be undertaken purely for enjoyment. I'm not going to get into how far other parts of the world still need to go on this, but will pause to link to these websites.

I'm almost wishing I hadn't got into this now, as all the degrees in the world won't stop me looking a trifle shallow when I return to my cupcake story (ooh, trifle). So I will just plunge straight in.

As may have become apparent, I have got into making and decorating cupcakes recently. I think it's a contagious blog meme type of thing. I have also been looking out for foodie blogs from New Zealand in an attempt to feel closer to the sort of food and culture Kiwi Family are immersed in (still without furniture, though it is now waiting to pass through customs in New Zealand at last). One I found was hosting an event called Cupcake Spectacular, which seemed like something to aim high for. Any sort of cupcakes were acceptable, as long as they looked spectacular (that is a very hard word to spell without thinking carefully, so I may avoid writing it again). I don't have a large repertoire of cupcakes to choose from yet, so I decided to pursue the Kiwi theme and make a cupcake which was in honour of Kiwi Family. After a little internet research, I came up with three options:

Anzac Cupcake (based on the biscuits made to commemorate Aussie and Kiwi servicemen for Anzac Day)
Afghan Cupcake (based on a biscuit which I hadn't heard of, but which sounded nice)
Kiwi Cupcakes (obvious, really)

The kiwi fruit in Sainsbury's were from Italy and so were acceptable on my Europe-only produce regime (though if I hadn't had this particular theme in mind it would have been locally-sourced English fruit all the way. I will do that next time). And so the idea of Kiwi Cupcake was born. For the actual recipe I turned to some of my favourite cupcakey blogs, since I wasn't confident about the effect adding fruit would have on a standard batter. Fortunately, Chockylit at Cupcake Bakeshop had made some melon cupcakes (melon in the batter AND a melon puree in the centre), so I eagerly copied that down to adapt for my little green hairy friends who were by this time sitting in the fruit bowl.

I halved the recipe, and exactly substituted kiwi fruit for melon. It worked a treat! The batter had a nice sharp-yet-sweet fruit taste (the batter is the best bit about cakes as far as I'm concerned, which is why I always need someone else around to eat the the finished products!). The cakes themselves rose nicely, though didn't look particularly attractive on their own - I was hoping for a nice green hue, but I think I left them in the oven for a couple of minutes too long, so the tops had darkened quite a bit. I cut little cones out of the centre as directed, filled the hole with kiwi puree, and popped the cones back in again, and then frosted the tops. Chockylit had made a very sophisticated white chocolate and cardomom buttercream for her melon cupcakes, but I used a simple vanilla buttercream with some flaked almonds scattered on the top.


So here we are: my Kiwi Cupcake Spectacular for HomeMadeS Spectacular event. I was quite pleased with how they looked, and I got very nice comments about them from my colleagues when I took them to an Away Day the next day (subject benchmarking? undergraduate curriculum development? Pah - I am going to make a staff development fund bid for hundreds and thousands, piping attachments and general cupcakery. It raises morale and departmental cohesion you know).

So, that's the cake part of this post (recipe is below). I'd like to note in passing that I also tried making French bread at the weekend. This was a shameless copy cat after reading about ten blog posts from Daring Bakers, who were all at it, following the same recipe. I was intrigued that some people said they found it easy, while others said they wouldn't try again. It was clear that it was a recipe which took a little time (7-9 hours!!), so with a nice lazy Sunday in prospect, I felt like jumping on the bandwagon. I won't describe it at length as blogworld is probably full enough of accounts of this bread from actual Daring Bakers, so suffice to say, it did take all day, but most of this was spent being anxious that the dough was sitting at the right temperature to rise. It did form nice long sausages, though propping them up was a bit of a faff, and then they were too long to go on the baking tray (can't blame the recipe for that though).

My French sticks propped in place as they went through their third rising. Note star placing of Kiwi Vegemite

They were worth the wait as they did taste really nice and light (we ate them with a French stew), and The Scientist was particularly enthusiastic about them. It's a shame they took too long to do for him regularly! I'm always interested in a good bread challenge, so it was definitely worth it.


My completed bread worm


Bread really shouldn't do this, but I love it that it did!

So finally, the dresses. I have to choose a posh dress to wear to go out for dinner with Dogophile Vegan Nurse tomorrow night. This was all brought on by her impulse buy of a very posh dress in the post-Christmas sales (she had worked so many extra shifts that she felt she deserved it!), and then a need for an event to wear it. I was going to go to Leeds to visit her at some stage anyway, so we decided to build the weekend around our dresses. I'm going up tomorrow, and am looking forward to meeting her dogs, doing some vegan baking, and of course, seeing The Dress, but in the meantime I have to select my own wardrobe. It's down to a blue silky prom dress with a ribbon sash (I do like a good sash), a black and white silky hmm, prom dress with a hmm, nice silky sash, and a floaty black dress with big white polka dots...and a sash. What is it with the sashes now I come to think of it? Was I deprived of sashes as a child? Am I trying to recreate some long-lost sash dream? Perhaps Munchkin Granny can help clarify. I'm veering towards the blue one as I've only worn it once and it makes me feel very posh and partyish. It's definitely one of my happy dresses (I was wearing another one today and felt all spring-like all day. That had a sash too. One of my happy skirts had the same effect last Friday until it wound itself into my bike wheel. Fortunately it had a pattern on it and you couldn't tell where that left off and the bike grease began). So, to return to my starting theme, cakes and dresses make me happy, and I would like to think that feeling happy and attractive make me nicer and more thoughtful to people around me. It's not all about being a downtrodden wife, you know. I like baking; I don't like dusting - ergo my house is full of nice smells, and you wouldn't want to run your finger along the mantelpiece. I think that's some victory for feminism.


Kiwi Cupcakes (adapted from Chockylit's honeydew and cantaloupe cupcakes)

20 cupcakes / 350 degree oven [I halved this, but am giving the full amount here]

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups sugar
3 large eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
8 ounces kiwi fruit, pureed
1 1/2 cup kiwi fruit, diced

1. Whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt in a large sized bowl. Add sugar and mix to combine.
2. In a separate small bowl, beat eggs to break up.
3. Add the oil and vanilla to the eggs and mix to combine.
4. Add the wet to the dry ingredients, mix to combine.
5. Add the kiwi fruit. Mix to combine.
7. Scoop into cupcake papers with an ice cream scooper about 3/4 full.
8. Bake at 350 degree oven for ~30 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Note: These cupcakes are moist. Be sure that they are fully baked before removing them from the oven. The cake tester (or toothpick) must come out clean.

Filling

1 cup fresh cantaloupe, diced
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch

1. Add the cantaloupe and water to a pot. Cook for 5 minutes over medium-high heat.
2. Stir together sugar and cornstarch then stir into the cantaloupe.
3. Cook until thick, about 5-7 minutes.

Kiwi Filling

1 cup fresh kiwi fruit diced
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch

1. Add the kiwi fruit and water to a pot. Cook for 5 minutes over medium-high heat.
2. Stir together sugar and cornstarch then stir into the kiwi.
3. Cook until thick, about 5-7 minutes.

Assembly

When cupcakes are cooled, cut out and remove a cone from the middle. Fill space with kiwi filling. Replace cone.

Happy Mother's Day!

I'm not one for schmaltz (or not much, anyway) but I feel sad that Munchkin Granny isn't with any of her children on Mother's Day, so this post is for her. And for Kiwi Sis who is having her second mother's day today, but whose munchkin is probably too small to bring her flowers yet. Happy Mother's Day both of you!


I also have a Mother's Day present for you, Munchkin Granny. It's so you can have proper coffee when you visit us, despite our woeful lack of equipment. Just bring some coffee powder with you next time you come!

More on The Scientist's Masterchef Challenge to follow....