Frozen cherry-berry cupcakes for Luke

Rightio folks, I know a lot of people have been getting their A level results lately. And I know this year is, like such a drag because bad grades now means big debts later, right? Bigger than now, I mean, which is still pretty big. 
But I digress because right now, I couldn't care less about people I don't know going to University this year and escaping the Big Bad £9000-a-year debt Wolf. I care about my lovely, talented, little brother. His name is Luke and he's still a whole year of school and exams off University, meaning that wolf is probably going to get him.

Yesterday was so definitely not about future worries and penny-pinching though, because yesterday he got his AS results, and they were goooood. Like, AAAA good. Clever boy. I doubt this is the last you'll hear about my multitalented little brother, I mean he can sing, dance AND score 100% in a politics module (the description of which makes my brain go sleepy). If I didn't love him so much I'd probably be fighting a wicked case of green-eyed monster. 

So, big grins on faces, me and his other doting sis, Amy (the rather fetching Blackberry Horse) set about making tasty cake. Nom nom nom. 

These are a topless (tee hee) incarnation of the 'strawberry cheesecake cupcake' from the Hummingbird Bakery Book. I've had issues with basically every recipe I've used from there, so I can't really recommend it, but I was confident that with some sibling tag team wizardry, nothing could go wrong!

Frozen Cherry-berry Cupcakes (a loose and free adaptation from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf) 

1. Dig out some berries. The recipe wanted fresh strawberries, we had a raspberry and stoned cherry mix from the depths of the freezer, we won. Put a healthy layer of frozen goodness ino each cupcake case. Preheat to 180 celsuis while you're there. 2. Cream 140g sugar, 40g butter til Kingdom come. 3. Add 120ml milk, an egg and some vanilla. Amy dug out some simply ah-(wait for it!) MAZE-ing vanilla syrup, but I'd have used plain ol' extract and stir in. 4. Add 120g plain flour, a teaspoon of baking powder and mix to combine. The recipe wanted all the flour in at the start, but I fear the gluten. It has powers, you know, and it's best not to let it get too strong. 5. The mixture is very wet here, so employ your best hand-eye coordination powers to get it into the cases. Fill to about two thirds full.  The ratio of fruit to mix was about 50:50. Alternatively, get someone else to do it while you phtograph.  

6. Bake for about 20 mins, then give them an eyeing and turn as needed to give the chilly ones at the front some oven-loving. 

 

"What to do when you run out of mix", asks the Blackberry Horse. (Ignore the attractive, though perplexed lady in the photo up top, it is in fact a horse. A blackberry one, in fact. The pretty lady is but a trick of the light)...
...Easy! Eat the delicious, red-jewel berries right from the case. Conundrum solved!

These end up looking more like a friand than a lovely, round topped cupcake. 
This may or may not be due to the cold berries affecting the bake, the baking powder (it might be a little old), or the fact we barely followed the recipe at all. They taste (and smell) good though, so who's complaining. 
Finally, no cream cheese frosting. There's a good reason I dropped the strawberry cheesecake cupcake title. The first, no strawbs, the second, no cheesecake icing. I did say the adaptation was 'loose and free'.
The cake is dense and springy, with lots of fruit juice soaked in. This is what breakfast looks like for the next few days. Coincedentally, it is also what mid-morning snack looks like. Even more coincedentally, afternoon snacks are looking pretty cherry-berry flavoured too. 

'Mind the Gap' with white chocolate and cranberry cupcakery

This is not the post that should be here. This is more of a stopgap, a little waystation, if you will, before I go off on one about 'my summer so far'. 

Summer, whichever way you look at it, is blooming amazing. We get sunshine, then just when the average Englishman is running out of weather based gripes, we have the sort of rain that not only soaks all the washing you optimistically put out to dry, but throws it around your garden too, such is the force of its fury. The weather, in Britain, in summer, isn't just unreliable, it's positively malevolent!

But I don't want to talk about the weather. I want to talk about food. And there lies my problem. 

I've been around lately. Not in a crude way (I know how your mind works), but to Italy and London, as well as back to the good old Midlands to visit my family. I want to make the sort of food I ate in these places, as much as an evocative travel memento for me as a way to challenge myself to something more exotic than blackberry and apple crumble. 

(Which I made last week, incidentally and it was lush. But I digress).

It hasn't happened yet, and in some ways that's a good thing. Writing about my take on wartime London grub seems a little off beat with all the troubles lately, and at my parents house is so definitely not the place to tackle my first Italian pud, which will almost certainly be tiramisu- all over my face, the worktops, the walls and my face again. So, eventually, I reach the point. This is a quick stop, so please mind the gap between the train and the platform when alighting. 

If you've stuck with me this far, thank you, you shall be rewarded with cupcakes. 

This is a cupcake with inner beauty. Not  ugly of course, but if she was a girl at school, probably not a looker. Never mind though, because this is one tasty lady. 
I'd also like the record to show that, for once, I got my food in focus.
White chocolate and cranberry cupcakes could not be simpler. Make cupcake batter, add cranberries and white chocolate chunks (remember, chunks>chips) and bake. Melt white chocolate, add a little milk and drizzle on cold cakes. And I mean only 'a little milk', and I mean 'cold cakes'. I will not be held responsible for sloppy drizzles.


Creamy, dreamy 'I'm not really chocolate' white chocolate and sharp dried cranberries.These two ingredients love each other, so please, be nice and keep them together. Sour cherries would work too though. We'll call it an illicit affair. I still believe cranberry is the white stuff's first love. You need something a little sharp anyway, so don't you dare try and use raisins or anything. Your white chocolate deserves better.

If you need a little help with the part where I said 'make cupcake batter', Google can always help. But here's a quick and easy fix for anyone who owns a set of scales. 
1. Weigh two eggs. Or three, for more batter, or one for not very much batter.
2. Remember how much the eggs weighed. We'll call this the magic weight.
3. Add that magic weight of butter + magic weight of sugar to a bowl and cream together until pale
4. Add eggs, mix a little after each one. Add a little vanilla extract.
5. Add the magic weight of flour. Mix until combined.
6. Chunk up some chocolate.  I like about the same ratio of chunks:cranberries but for actual quantities, go nuts until you're happy. 
7. Bake at 180 celsius for about 20-25 mins, or until done. 

To this day, this is the only recipe I have actually managed to commit to memory. Don't worry, I am ashamed.

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries

It is a strange world indeed when strawberries and blackberries come out at once, and yet last weekend I found myself blackberrying in England in mid-July. I was visiting Tom for the week and we set off Saturday morning, Tupperware in hand, to see if the roadsides of Warwickshire were going to be as obliging as our one, thumb-thick branch at home, a welcome trespasser from next door’s garden (from which all our good plants come; sadly green fingers still elude me). 

 

  We didn’t have to walk far, a spring of faintly bipolar weather, with rainstorms following on from heatwaves, had so badly confused the hedgerows that they were already bowed with ripe and swollen fruit as well as plenty of juicy looking red berries, as a promise of even better foraging not too far in the future. Blackberries amounting to maybe four supermarket punnets, and all for the price of a bit of nettle sting and a few scratches from the brambles!

my lovely hoard from Coventry

my garden's offerings!

It’s been years since I last looked at this poem, or the Sylvia Plath one I borrowed for the title, but my activities over the last few days have dug it out from some dusty Filofax in my memory;

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. The red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet gras bleached our boots. 
Round hayfiends, cornfields and potato drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full 
Until the tinklist bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned 
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. 
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

(Blackberry picking, Seamus Heaney)

Having no byre or bathtub to store my berries in, and definitely not wanting any mould, I gifted my loot to Tom's mum, who's frozen them and promised a pie next time I visit.
I still had plenty (alright, some) left from my own garden to make a few friands though. Or financiers, depending on where in the world you heard of them first.

blackberry...

  Miniature Blackberry Friands

   (adapted from Tartelette)

   Makes about 30 in a mini cupcake pan
   115g butter
  100g caster sugar
  60g ground almonds
  30 plain flour
  ~30 berries

  I'm not home for very long, so I  substituted whole eggs for the usual whites, as I didn't feel like making emergency custard, or throwing out good yolks. I also switched the rice flour, as I don't need to bake gluten free, and obviously subbed fresh berries for Tartelette's jam. 

I love my sister's mini cupcake pans. A bite sized cake with a whole berry nearly filling the middle just explodes with juice between your teeth.

...and raspberry!

 1. Melt 115g of butter in a pan (I use salted and just don't add any more later). Heat until brown flecks appear and the kitchen smells hazelnutty and warm. DO NOT leave this butter browning alone. Keep it compant, otherwise it has the habit of burning as soon as your back is turned.
2. Mix all the dry ingredients, add the eggs, mixing a little after each one. 
3. Add the butter. Only after it has cooled a little though, you do not want to scramble your eggs. Mix.
4. Plop a little mixture into your cases, only filling halfway up. Muffin tops are like, so totally out this summer. Pop a berry into the centre of each one and push down a bit. Archimedes' Law is another good reason not to overfill before you do this. 
5. Bake in 180C for 12-14 mins, but keep an eye on the first batch because these teeny cakes burn in a flash. For 'normal' one, bake 15-20 mins
6. Eat! Delicious warm with the blackberry still hot and jammy, or cool with a cuppa and maybe the smallest bit of thick cream.

Who needs a BlackBerry?

Rhubarb and Custard cupcakes

Sometimes, good things go hand in hand. Like discovering your new favourite café just doors up from where you live, then realising that is doubles as a chocolatier and old fashioned sweet shop at the front. I swear this isn’t a hallucination brought on by excessive cheesecake consumption, although if any cheesecake could bring on mass hysteria and visual disturbance, the brownie-and-blondie layered cheesecake is probably the one to do it. Especially after a thick wedge of goats cheese and prosciutto sandwich. Plus, you can choose your tea from a wall full of glass jars of leaves blended with flowers, dried fruit and a smorgasbord of other treats. Like the ‘Bounty’, a rich tea blend with coconut and hibiscus. Even reading that makes me want a cup. 

 

Its the place I go when I need a treat, and luckily Tom is as big a fan of real tea brewed in individual pots as I am, so we go plenty.

I have no idea how it took me this long to try out the sweet shop, but the urge finally caught up with me when someone I barely know brought lemon sherbets into placement to share out. And ohmygoodness andgoodgrief why don't I eat proper boiled sweets anymore? So much better than haribo, fruit pastilles, whatever your particular sugar rush is, these are just the real thing. And they last for AGES, which can only be a good thing when your mouth is filled with sweet lemony fizz.

So, to bring a long anecdote to its natural end, I dutifully went out and bought a nice big bag of rhubarb and custards.

Surely I can't be the only one who hears this when I say 'Rhubarb and custard'?

And I was very happy for as long as it took the rest of the bag to lose its crusty sugar coating and get really quite sticky in its paper bag- I told you it was a nice big bag; even my obsessive nibbling couldn't cut it. And as I was peeling the paper off (alright, sucking the paper off, you got me), I got to wondering why I hadn't tried a rhubarb and custard cake. 

 

That's when the next really good thing happened, in the shape of rhubarb appearing in the fruit and veg stall. This is a big deal when you're a student, as buying luxury fruits (ie, not apples) can get pretty pricey in the supermarkets. So I bought some of the start of the season rhubarb and it was tough at the ends, and I had to peel long strips of pink and green, which promptly flew all over my kitchen floor. But it was hard to keep the smile off my face as I roasted chunks with sugar (golden caster), ginger (ground) and lemon zest until gooey. I was still smiling when the fibrous rhubarb goo clogged my cheap piping nozzles and I had to change and clean after every single piping.

My icing is custard powder, icing sugar, butter and vanilla essence. I'm glossing over it a little because it wasn't all that good and I'm still thinking of a substitute. But it looked very fetching in its sunny yellow glossiness. Lastly, I woke all my housemates smashing up some of the leftover sweets in a pestle and mortar to top.

I got this pink cupcake stand for my birthday and I just had to show it off somehow. Who'd have thought pink and yellow look so happy together?

This cake, not unlike my photography effort, needs some serious work. The topping is much too sweet, and the filling was disappointingly unfilled. I think next time splitting the cakes to fill like miniature Victoria sponges might give a better rhubarb to cake ratio, and I suppose I might just have to make my own custard to top.

Or fill with custard, doughnut style, and top with rhubarb chunks? 
 

But as a first effort it's not so bad, and every time I passes these little beauties in my kitchen, they put that big smile right back on my face. And I can't think of a single better reason to get the mixing bowl back out. 

 

Earl Grey cupcakes!

Right. First post’s the hardest I guess, and the last one hardly counted.

So, to get me over this mental, not to mention linguistic, hurdle, what could be better than one of my favourite cupcake recipes.

I’ll admit that part of the cupcake’s charm is in their laughable ease; barely 10 minutes of grabbing, mixing and preheating and you can have them away in the oven. This takes a little longer and so a few people, quite understandably, won’t be interested at all. But bear with me, they’re blooming lovely.

I owe this particular treat to my talented little sis (the mini zenzeroni). Her versions no doubt cooked more evenly, rose more uniformly and were capped with a billow of bright pink icing made with fresh raspberries. Yum. But my paler versions went down perfectly well, and here they are:

Earl Grey Cupcakes

You will need:

125ml semi-skimmed milk
4 earl grey teabags
110g unsalted butter
225g granualted sugar
2 large eggs
125g self raising flour, sifted
120g plain flour, sifted

plus a muffin tin, some cases, an oven, etc…

I actually ended up using 3 teabags, because partly because I’m a cheapskate and partly because I got four out, then decided I fancied a cuppa too, 3 medium eggs (not 2 large) and I didn’t bother sifting the flour or really measuring things too closely at all, and still everything turned out alright. Plus, it gives me a great excuse for when my cupcakes don’t look quite as good.

1. Preheat the oven to 180 and heat milk on the hob until its just off boiling, then add the teabags, cover and leave for up to 30 mins (or leave for 5 but bash the teabags around a bit to colour the milk up nicely)

2. Cream butter and sugar together. Preferably with an electric whisk if, like me, you lack in the ‘upper arm strength’ department’. Add eggs one at a time, whisking a bit after each one.

3. Mix the flours in a separate bowl then add some to the buttery-sugary bowl. Whisk some more.

4. Add some teamilk. Whisk again.

5. Keep going until you’ve run out of flour and teamilk. Then grin because you took my advice and saved yourself a lot of arm-ache.

6. Fill cases about 2/3 full, and pop in the oven for about 25mins, when they should look golden and feel bouncy on top.

I covered my cupcakes in the poor man’s version of this delicious icing, leaving out the fresh raspberries and substituting vanilla extract. You just beat all the ingredients apart from the raspberries until it is very smooth and creamy, you will need either a whisk or a bloke with bulging biceps for this part. Luckily, my whisk was close to hand.

When its smooth and grain-free, or you’re bored, crush the raspberries and fold in. The quantity for the berries is a total guess, just keep going until the icing is tasty and pink. Then smother all over your cooled cakes.

Raspberry icing

110g unsalted butter

60ml semi skimmed milk

500g icing sugar

10 raspberries