My first cupcakes

Finally the time was ripe for me to try my hand at cupcakes, I had all the ingredients and all the tools and spent a lovely Sunday afternoon making and decorating. I see the attraction and I can very easily see myself investing in a full kit of tools for sugarcraft. Must be careful.



I spotted the inspiration for these here. Sadly no recipes were provided, so I had to find these elsewhere.
For the basic muffins, I chose a recipe from the BBC.

Chocolate Muffins, 12-13 pcs
Ingredients

140 g plain flour
30 g unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
0.5 tsp salt
1 tsp instant coffee
2 tsp cold water
60 g unsalted butter at room temperature
225 g granulated sugar
2 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
160 ml semi-skimmed milk

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C and line a muffin tin with paper cases of 5 cm diameter at the bottom. Or a flat baking sheet, but place each paper case into 2 aluminium cases, to ensure they don't sprawl out sideways, but bake upwards.
2. 
   
3. Mix together flour, cocoa, bicarbonate of soda and salt well, then sift to get airy and remove lumps and set aside.


4. In a glass, mix together the instant coffee and water.


5. Whisk together the butter and sugar until well combined. Then add the eggs, one at a time and whisk in well.


6. Add the coffee, followed by the vanilla extract and half of the dry mixture.


7. Pour in the milk and incorporate and add the remainder of the dry mixture. The batter should be quite runny and feel and taste a bit like Angel Delight.


8. Pour into the paper cases, up to about 1 cm from the top edge.


9. Bake in the middle of the oven for 20 - 25 minutes, check with a toothpick after 20 minutes for readiness - the toothpick should come out clean.


10. Take out and let cool for 10 - 25 minutes, then remove to a wire rack and allow to cool completely. They will still remain fairly soft.

One thing I did decide to skimp on was the cookies themselves. I decided to buy ready ones and this proved to be difficult in Sweden, at least in the shops where I looked. I bought what seemed to come nearest, but as it turned out, it didn't work either.

Then the next new thing of the day - buttercream. Again I picked a BBC recipe for this and I made 2 batches, one on 140 g and one on 150 g (the remainder of the butter as it happened).

Buttercream
Ingredients

140 g/150 g unsalted butter at room temperature
280 g/300 g icing sugar
1 tbsp milk (both full and semi-skimmed work)
food colouring of choice

Ingredients

Carefully stir together butter and icing sugar with a fork/spoon/spatula.
Add the milk when almost all of the sugar has been incorporated and add the colouring until the right hue is achieved.
Keep covered if not using straight away and even refrigerate if not using on the same day. It will need to be brought up to room temperature and stirred to soften up again then.

Decorating

To achieve the muppet effect, piping tip #233 is required. Luckily my friend Patsy has recently fallen for the sugarcraft bug and purchased every tool under the sun and she was kind enough to lend it to me. It is normally used to create grass effects and this is what it looks like:



I had trouble finding white chocolate buttons for the eyes in the shops, so I got giant Milkybar buttons, but there are specialist shops that do sell these in Sweden.

For colour, I used 3 tiny tubes of liquid blue colour for egg painting. I think each was about 3 ml or so. I ended up with turquoise, so I also added a pill-sized capsule of powdered egg paint, which did the trick. All these purchased in Bulgaria and were so good, that I'll buy more at the next opportunity. I suspect regular food colour will do just as well. I coloured in the smaller of the two batches of buttercream. The bigger one, I left as was.

For the pupils, I used black icing from a tube left over from the gingersnap decorations a few weeks ago.

Starting with the cooled down muffins,

I first used about a tbsp of the uncoloured buttercream to create a mound on each muffin. Also I noticed that the buttercream wasn't too keen on sticking to the muffin surface, so this will help in getting the blue stuff to stick. Careful, though, it's tasty but very unhealthy, so don't overdo it!

Then, cut a slot for the cookie and stick it into the muffin.

No, no, no. This deformed the muffin. Way too big, way too thick. Anyway, on with the piping. Start at the outer edge and work around in a spiral into the middle, working around the cookie of course. Then, take two white chocolate buttons, squirt out two blobs for the pupils and stick the eyes into the muffin.

Gah, his jaw is about to fall out, no wonder he's cross-eyed!

What to do, what to do? Try using some pink chocolate buttons?

Ha, they look a bit like Grover.

As my Mum was milling around trying to see if she could dig out some long forgotten biscuits of a suitable size and thickness, it struck me - wafers!

Mum quickly got out a small cookie cutter and went to work on the wafers and lo and behold, they were perfect - the diameter was about 3 cm and thickness was 3 mm.

Most of the 13 cupcakes ended up with a nice thin wafer in their mouth.

The buttercream hardened up pretty quickly. I had about 1 dl left over from the blue buttercream and about 0.5 dl of the uncoloured one. Around this point, my Dad asked if it would be possible to make Kermit, Statler & Waldorf, which are his favourites. Probably it is possible, they aren't as fuzzy, so I'd need to use a different technique for them. A project for the future for sure.

The Sunday finished rather late, but was extremely satisfying.

Footie cake for Falbala

It is once again time for Falbala's birthday party and this year she asked for a football themed cake. She does play football among other sports and supports ManU. This also has the added benefit of annoying most of the men in the family as they all like other teams.



For me, it was an opportunity to try out a principle that I'd thought out for the next time I was going to make Princess cake.

There is a hidden away little cookery shop in our village that has a rather good stock of sugarcraft supplies, among others ready to roll fondant icing in various colours, so I bought white, black, red and yellow. I also bought liquid yellow colouring too, without any definitive plan. I also spotted birthday candles in the shape of tiny footballs and bought them as well.

Well home, I made my way to the ManU website to look for a badge and found a decent one. I'd not realised that it is actually quite complicated and still didn't have a clue on how I would make it, but I printed it out to maybe trace it out somehow.

But back to the cake. For the base, I used the recipe from Lou's swimming pool cake. I wasn't entirely sure of how much I would need. I remember Lou's cake ended up massive, and here I would only need a small version of it, but I still ended up making a double batch, just to be on the safe side.

Since I have two springform cake tins, one 20 cm diameter, the other 25, I used both. The large one, I buttered and floured and then poured in a thin layer of cake mixture, as thin as I could make it. The idea was that it would be no more than 2 cm after baking.

The rest went into the small cake tin (also buttered and floured).

Luckily both tins fitted together into the oven, though of course the large thin one had to come out first. I did have some left over cake mixture, so I also made 7 cupcakes, but I over-baked them a bit.

In the mean time, I placed the white icing (500g) between two pieces of clingfilm and rolled it out to about 3 mm thickness and as circular as possible to about 30 cm diameter. No extra icing sugar needed for dusting. Unfortunately the clingfilm did end up with creases here and there, which transferred to the icing, but on the whole, I was pretty pleased.

I then carefully pushed the icing into my semi-spherical bowl (remember my Stoichkov cake?) and when it was in, I removed the top layer of clingfilm.

Next, I fitted in the large thin circle of cake. Unfortunately I should have timed things better so that the cake was still soft and pliable, but I didn't and so it was solid and cracked, so I ended up filling the gaps here and there.



As I was fitting the cake in, I cut off the edges as they were particularly hard. This was a good idea, and I even made sure that the cake ended a couple of cm inside the bowl so that when I'd put in the bottom of the cake, it would fit into the bowl.

Next I spread a thin layer of strawberry jam onto the cake and filled up with whipped cream, which I'd flavoured with a little vanilla and sugar, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

For the bottom of the cake, I cut one 2 cm thick layer from the smaller cake that I made. It fitted rather like a lid. I then wrapped with clingfilm and put in the fridge.

Back to the computer to look for pictures of footballs. Yes, the new ones are made up of various pieces of leather, the older ones were made up of white hexagons and black pentagons. How do you draw a regular pentagon? Google, google, corr, blimey, compass and whatnot. No, no, no. But the internal angle of a regular pentagon is 108 degrees, and luckily I managed to find a protractor and made myself a regular pentagon from a piece of paper, much easier. OK, maths lesson over.

The next day, on the actual birthday, I put the cake together. This means turning it over and out of the bowl, a very careful activity, but with a little patience the cake came out quite nicely.

There were some creases on it from the clingfilm, I tried to smooth them a bit with a dough scraper, but it didn't really work. I'll need to look into this further.

Again, using to pieces of clingfilm, I rolled out some of the black fondant icing and using my paper regular pentagon, I cut out 6 and pressed them carefully against the white icing on the cake, one on top and 5 around the side.



At this point I had come to realise that I would not be able to create a ManU badge in sugar, so cut out the one I had printed out and placed on the top of the cake as well. Very lame, I know, but I'd just run out of ideas.

But it turned out rather nice on the whole. And proved that my idea of constructing a cake upside-down in a mould works. I also ended up with two more layers from the smaller cake I baked. They are now in the freezer for emergency situations. A thing to keep in mind - coloured icing bleeds through paper and towards the end of the birthday party, the ManU badge was barely visible. Must remember to put greaseproof paper inbetween.



HAPPY BIRTHDAY FALBALA!

Helmer/Helmina

My friend Patsy has a sister who has a boyfriend who is a hobby farmer of sorts. Not sure exactly how that works, but they have about a dozen lambs every year, which they kindly distribute amongst friends and this year, I was one of the very lucky ones to receive the mail about the lambs.

This is a first for me and in the excitement I have been spamming Patsy with e-mails about when the lambs would arrive. It felt like the waiting was forever, but they did arrive in the end and I got myself one and filled up both my parents' and my Sister's freezers with the thing. Everything was quite civilized and the lamb arrived cut up into pieces or minced and in bags and frozen. What I couldn't find out is if it was a boy or a girl, but apparently they are all called Helmer or Helmina respectively. Perhaps for the best.

So on Lundulph's first visit after this marvellous event, I took out a bag of beautiful chops and my Mum dug out a new recipe book, which she believes to be Greek, but which actually just has a collection of fairly simple and rather tasty sounding recipes. The one I selected was called Lamb Cutlets with Rosemary. But my personal opinion is that if you are putting lamb and rosemary together, then there is no way you can skip the garlic. So I added that too.

Ingredients

2 chops per person
garlic - about 1 tsp pressed garlic per chop
olive oil for frying
fresh coarsely chopped rosemary leaves, about 2 tsp per chop
salt, pepper
dry white wine
squeeze of lemon

Method

1. Turn on the oven to around 80 degrees C and place an oven-proof dish with a lid to warm up.


2. Place the chops on a plate and rub with garlic and press in the rosemary, 1 tsp per chop per side, and let stand for 15 - 20 minutes.


3. Heat up a little olive oil on high in a pan and put the chops in, but don't crowd them.


4. Turn the chops over when they have a bit of colour and season with salt and pepper. Depending on how thick they are and how done you want them, you may need to turn them a few more times.


5. Moments before removing the chops from the pan, pour a little white wine over each, perhaps about a tbsp or so.


6. Remove the chops and put in the oven-proof dish to keep warm while you do the next batch. Squeeze a little lemon before putting the dish back in the oven.


7. When all the chops are done, pour some more white wine to deglaze the pan, and bring to the boil to reduce the liquid and concentrate the flavours. If too thin, stir a tsp of cornflour in cold water and add to the gravy, it should thicken up pretty quickly.

With these wonderful chops, we had baked potatoes and salad.

I was intending to take a photo, believe me, I had my camera ready and everything, but it smelt so nice, once everything was served we all just tucked in.

The Lussekatt of the Year

This was the title in my Mum's weekly magazine a few weeks back. These are the famous Swedish saffron buns. I've made these before on several occasions

But this recipe was well intriguing - combining the traditional ginger snap with the traditional saffron bun. So very appealing in my buzzword driven world at work - streamline Christmas into one easily manageable thing to eat.

Reading the details, it's actually not a straight forward combo of the two types of dough, but the ginger snappy bit is actually ground almonds mixed with the traditional spice mixture used for ginger snaps, orange zest and lots of sugar. However, as Doctor Cutie and Bip were invited and are allergic to nuts, I opted to leave out nuts completely and used sesame seeds instead. It worked a treat last year for my macaroons.

Ingredients

Main dough
150 g unsalted butter at room temperature
1.5 dl light syrup
5 dl full milk
50 g fresh yeast for sweet doughs
1 g ground saffron
0.5 tsp salt
1 medium egg
14 - 15 dl strong white flour

Filling
1 orange
1 dl raisins
200 g peeled sesame seeds
100 g butter
1 medium egg
1 dl granulated sugar
2 ml vanilla extract
1.5 tsp ground cardamom
0.5 tsp ground cinnamon
0.25 tsp ground cloves

Finishing touch
1 egg lightly whisked with a pinch of salt to use as egg wash.

Method

1. Make the egg wash first and let stand in room temperature until needed.


2. Whisk together the butter and syrup until fluffy.


3. Warm up the milk to 40 degrees C (warm to the touch).


4. Crumble up the yeast in the bowl of your mixer, then pour the milk over it and stir to dissolve completely.


5. Add the saffron to the yeast mixture, then follow with the egg and a couple of tablespoons of the butter mixture.


6. Add 11 dl (that's eleven!) of the flour and mix quickly to a smooth and very soft dough.


7. Cover the bowl and set aside to rest for about 40 minutes.


8. Zest the orange and press out as much of the juice as possible afterwards.


9. Place the orange juice in a small pot together with the raisins and bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and let cool down, then blend to a smooth paste.


10. Grind the sesame seeds as finely as possible.


11. Combine all the filling ingredients to a paste.


12. Go back to the resting main dough and add the remainder of the butter mixture and the rest of the flour and work to a smooth and elastic dough.


13. Take out of the mixing bowl onto a floured surface and divide in two equal parts.


14. Roll each half to a square of about 40 x 40 cm and spread out half of the filling over half of the square surface.


15. Fold the dough over so that the filling ends up in the middle, then cut strips of about 2 cm width.
    
    


16. Line 3 large sheets with baking paper. Form S shapes from the strips by standing them on one of the long cut edges, so that the layers are visible. Place on the sheets, but not too close together.
    
    


17. Once a sheet is full, brush with the egg wash, cover with cling film and set aside to proof until double in size, about 30 minutes.


18. Pre-heat the oven to 225 degrees C and bake in the middle until golden brown, about 10 - 13 minutes.


19. When done, remove from the oven and let cool on a rack.

These are best served on the same day as they are made. They ended up fairly big, which my Dad liked, as they were closer to the size of the ones you get in the shops, rather than the tiny ones my Mum normally makes. Another benefit was that the technique of rolling out the dough made the process of shaping so much faster than the normal one, where the dough needs to be rolled into strips, cut to a good length and then shaped.

I served these at my glögg party, but along everything else that was very sweet, I don't think I did any one any favours. I haven't adjusted the amounts above. Also a word of warning on the light syrup. This is the stuff that is sold in Swedish shops and can be replaced by liquid glucose I guess. In the UK I would have used golden syrup, but that is very much sweeter than the Swedish stuff, so I would have reduced the amount by quite a bit.

For some reason my Dad didn't like the final result, he thought it tasted funny. But it seems he is alone in this, I thought they were lovely and it seems that others thought so too. Though they did end up rather sweet and next time I should reduce the amount of sugar in both the paste and the main dough. I did take some to work along with brioches and the lussekatter disappeared a lot quicker than the brioches, despite my boss' heroic work on the brioches. I think he put away 3 with clotted cream and jam.

Melty Snowmen

Although the global warming thing seems more obvious than ever at the moment, with birds singing and nesting in the UK and daisies and roses blossoming in my parents' garden in Stockholm, I thought it would be a good way to start the festive season, by making melted snowmen cupcakes.



These were submitted by a fellow contestant during my brief stint on Art You Eat a couple of years back and they went straight on my to-bake-list.

It is also the reason why I raided Lakeland the other week-end, when I was in the UK - I needed silver cup cakes. Needless to say I bought a lot more things than planned.

I also was wondering where I could get hold of cranberries for the recipe - I've not made any muffins in maybe 20 years or so. And then I've only used Doctor Cutie's recipe, which is brilliant, by the way.

Mum suggested I use the frozen lingonberries she keeps in the freezer. Why not? It's actually better, because cranberries come all the way from America and the lingonberries are pretty much the European version of them.

Another curious thing was the use of clementine zest. It's not at all as easy to make as from lemon, lime or orange. And after zesting one, I had so little to show for it, I zested two more. But it was very nice to smell - different and slightly sweeter than orange.

I doubled the recipe from the original and it resulted in 18 slightly over-filled muffins:

Ingredients

200 g unsalted butter at room temperature
200 g granulated sugar
2 ml vanilla extract
200 g plain flour
2,5 tsp baking powder
5 medium eggs
200 g frozen lingonberries
finely grated zest of 3 clementines

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C.


2. Cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla, then cover and set aside.


3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour and baking powder well.


4. Add the eggs to the sugar/butter mixture, one at a time and with a tablespoon of the flour mixture and incorporate well, before adding the next one.


5. Finally stir in the frozen lingonberries and the zest carefully, just enough to distribute them evenly in the mixture. It will go a bit stiff, as the berries will cool it down.


6. Place paper cupcake cases on a baking sheet and spoon or pipe in the mixture, careful not to overfill, which is what I did. I think about two-thirds should do it.


7. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 20 minutes, keep an eye on them, so they don't go too dark on top.


8. Take out and let cool completely.

At this point they are ready to eat, but the decorating part is just as fun to do, so why stop here?

This particular decoration requires two types of icing - a fondant, which is malleable and can be shaped. I bought this ready made. It also came in different colours, I bought a white one and an orange one.



For the hats, I used red Non-Stop buttons - they are the Swedish version of Smarties.



The second type of icing is a liquid one for pouring, but should be made very thick by mixing small amounts of water into icing sugar. The idea is to scoop this over a cup cake and let it run down towards the edges, but it should be so thick that it dries as it is about to run over the edges. That will give the illusion of a melted snowman.

Here is where I made a mistake and gave in to the pleas from my Mum and Bip - to use up the icing we had made for the gingersnaps, where icing sugar is mixed together with egg white. This had to be spread with a spatula and didn't run at all. Only the last two muffins got the proper icing, as the egg white based one ran out. Once again I need to learn to stand my ground when someone tries to persuade me to do something I know is wrong.

Glögg Party

December is the time of parties in Sweden - everyone does "Julbord" and "Glöggfest", so why should I be different?

So I sent out an invite to my dear friends and started planning on what to do.

Needless to say, I have been busy at work and had absolutely no inspiration whatsoever as to gingerbread houses and so did not do anything for the competition held every year by the Architecture Museum. Such a pity, this year the theme was actually a good one, "Pride and Prejudice".

But flicking through my notebook, I came across a recipe I must have found last year. For Mulled Wine with chocolate and chilli. Unfortunately I had not written down where I saw it, so I can't provide the source, sorry.

Ingredients
750 ml red wine
1 10 cm stick of cinnamon
1 large dried chilli
1 tsp ground allspice
5 whole cloves
100 g granulated sugar
50 g finely ground cocoa powder

Method

1. Heat up the wine with all the spices on low heat and allow the flavours to develop.


2. Add the sugar and let it dissolve.


3. Finally stir in the cocoa.


4. Sieve away all spices before serving

Unfortunately I had written down the recipe in Swedish and I don't know if it was my translation sloppiness, or just not thinking things through properly, but I interpreted the cocoa part as chocolate. This resulted in me grating finely 50 g of 86% dark chocolate, which took a while, as I didn't want to get it melting on my hands or everywhere in the kitchen for that matter. It also meant that it didn't dissolve properly in the mulled wine and I ended up with some sort of sludge, which I personally quite liked, but which no one else seemed to enjoy as much.

Bip bought a ready made version of this and said it had cocoa powder in it and had tasted very nice. So this recipe is one where I need to keep working on.

Besides, the chilli was barely noticeable, even if I used one of the ones we grow in our kitchen, which are very hot.

Just to be on the safe side, I also made traditional mulled wine, with a packet of spices. That was a lot more popular.

No photos unfortunately, I did take some, but they didn't look pretty at all.

Christmas Preparations

This year, we started early on the Christmas baking, mainly because I made yet another visit to my local Lakeland shop and couldn't resist a new gadget - a set of 12 star shaped cookie cutters which make it possible to create a Christmas tree.

In addition, I managed to dig up my Mum's old cookie spritzer and after some googling, I decided to merge the spritzer cookie experiment with the gingerbread making.

Using my usual recipe, but with 11 dl of plain flour, rather than 13, Bip and I made enough starts for the Christmas tree and also 3 big trays of spritzer cookies. It was tricky at first, but once we worked out the technique, we just kept stamping away. Sadly I forgot to take photos, but on the whole, spritzing worked pretty well. One thing to keep in mind is not to put any raising agent in the dough if using the spritzer. Since I had prepared the dough before I read this instruction, it was a bit late and the cookies lost some of their shape in baking.

This also goes for the stars for the Christmas tree.

My Sister Bip made the icing and she's got a pretty good hang of this. As we were decorating biscuits, i e hard and crunchy things, the icing needs to be made with egg white. We also established that it takes quite a lot of green food colouring too, we decided to stop at pale green this time. I should maybe try some green gel colouring from the sugar craft shop, that might give a stronger colour.



My original plan to first coat each star and then stack would have taken too long, so I did it on the fly. I also decided not to coat in the middle, to save on icing. It still ran out and Bip had to make a second batch, but clever as she is, she managed to get the exact same shade!

And when you have all these different sizes of cutters, it was not possible to resist experimenting a bit with them.



On the whole, a very pleasant way to spend the evening.

Cake Pops with Bip

Last week-end, Bip and I had decided to finally try our hand at cake pops. I know they were the thing to do in 2010, but sadly I missed that boat.



We were both quite busy and didn't get much of a chance to do research. And I decided to buy a ready made sponge cake, rather than bake one first. As it turned out, this was mistake number 1. We made quite a few ones on the way and I must say, neither of us expected that it would be such hard work.



First things first - shopping. Never having purchased such an item as a sponge cake, we had to search through several of the food shops and venture to isles we had not been to before. The choice was underwhelming - one shop didn't have any sponge cakes, the other one had 3 types, two of which were basic sponge of different brands and one was gingersnap flavoured. So we purchased two of the lightest regular sponges we could find and two gingersnap ones. The idea was to dip the light pops in dark chocolate and the dark gingersnap pops into white chocolate or something like that.



We bought some food colouring - Bip wanted to do bumblebees and piggies. We bought white ready to roll icing. Then on the off chance, we wandered in to the craft shop and found that they have increased their assortment to include coloured fondant and in suitable colours too. The only thing we didn't get was black icing - after the recent Halloween, they were fresh out. But they did have lolly pop sticks.

I was also not familiar with the concept of frosting in tins, which seems to be the binding substance of choice in many of the American recipes and videos. A UK recipe called for Philadelphia cheese, but Bip wrinkled her nose at that, so I suggested mascarpone. Only one of the shops had that, puh, lucky. We also picked up some white and dark chocolate for cooking - I had a vague idea of using food colouring on the white chocolate.



Thus here are our

Ingredients

2 x 220 g regular white sponge cake
2 x 230 g gingersnap sponge cake
250 g mascarpone
200 g white chocolate
200 g dark chocolate (46% cocoa solids)
liquid yellow food colouring
pink ready to roll icing
thin wafers
leftover decorating icing in tubes from last year
big box of sprinkles (found in a cupboard)
daim sprinkles (also in the cupboard)
lolly pop sticks made of wood
icing sugar
water

Method

1. Crumble up the sponge cake - light one in one bowl, dark in another bowl.
   
2. Divide the mascarpone equally between the two bowls and stir together until the crumbles come together and form a sort of dough.
3. Scoop out walnut sized chunks and roll to round balls, then place on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper.
   
4. Place in the fridge for 15 - 30 minutes to firm up.
5. In the mean time, prepare the pop sticks - a piece of polystyrene is good here, we didn't have any, so resorted to using shots glasses.
   
   It sort of worked, once there were two pops in a glass to balance each other out.
6. Melt some of the chocolate, preferably of the same/similar colour to the one that will be used for the pop dipping. Take the tray with the cake balls out, dip a pop stick into the chocolate, about a cm. Then push into a cake ball, about half way in.
   
   
7. Once they are all done, place in the freezer for an hour.
8. Prepare the decorations - piggy noses and ears took time to make.
   
   Then melt the chocolate. White chocolate can be coloured a bit - a drop of red food colouring made it pink, but thickened it as well. Yellow food colouring was not as strong and by the time we had the right saturation, the whole thing had seized up, as chocolate does when it comes in contact with water. So careful.
9. Then out with the frozen cake pops, quick and careful dip into the melted chocolate and then on with the decorations.
10. Finally back in the fridge to make things set.

Now this took most of the Saturday.

The treasure and wonderful surprise was the Swedish meatball maker - this is an item that has been in one of the kitchen drawers in Sweden since as long as I can remember, a whim purchase from a second hand shop, I suspect. I also can not remember that this item has ever been used and so, I had started campaigning to get rid of it. The shame, oh the shame!

As it turned out, it was perfect for scooping a good amount of cake mixture and getting it ready shaped into a ball. OK, so I rolled each as well, but more out of principle, than anything else.

We chilled them and I melted chocolate in the microwave for the very first time - it's actually not at all bad, I always feared that I'd burn it. Cool.

We dipped the pop sticks and pushed them in. Bip pushed one all the way through a cake ball and I think I pushed most sticks in too far too. Anyway, we put them in the freezer for only 15 minutes and that was a mistake too. Should have let them freeze completely.

Some of the other mistakes we made were to push the piggy ears into the cake pops - this further weakened the pop, so that it sort of collapsed off the stick. And they were way too big and made the cake pop top heavy, another reason for falling off the stick.

And as the yellow food colouring caused the white chocolate to seize up, I mixed up some icing sugar with water and yellow food colouring, to a fairly thick paste and used that as coating for the bumble bees. It took longer to set of course, but worked pretty well on the whole. We weren't able to find white chocolate chips to use as wings, so I used a small flower shaped cookie cutter to cut out flowers from a thin wafer. I then cut the flower in two halves, which we pushed into the cake pop as wings for the bumble bees.

We used the daim sprinkles for eyes and once we ran out of chocolate, we used up some of the other colourful icing from the tubes to decorate straight on, that was the easiest and most fun I think, but it fell off very easily too, once it had set.

So to conclude - these need definitely to be made once more, but with home baked cake, careful on the chocolate, make sure there is polystyrene for the cake pops to set and not to push any of the decorations into the cake pops, but just glue them on. And let them freeze fully before dipping.

Birthday Cake for Lou

When I asked my older niece Lou if she fancied a themed cake, she said she didn't mind. And having followed the second season of the Great British Bake Off, I decided to go straight for the most fantastic thing I saw there - the Chocolate and Orange Mousse cake! This was such a beautiful and original piece of edible art work and such an interesting method of making, I felt no hesitation at having a go at it.



The basic idea is to make two thin rectangular sponges from joconde. From these two rounds and two strips are cut out and put together to form a circular box. The middle is filled with the chocolate mousse. The interesting part is that a joconde paste is first made and coloured. It is then piped in swirls onto paper lined baking trays and these are put in the freezer until the paste has frozen solid. This ensures that the pattern remains when the main sponge mixture is poured over it.

Joconde Paste Ingredients

50 g unsalted soft butter, and some melted butter for brushing the baking sheets, about 15 g

50 g sifted icing sugar

50 g egg whites (about 2) at room temperature

55 g sifted plain flour
food colouring

Method

1. Cream the butter, icing sugar until fluffy.
2. Add the egg whites slowly, while still whisking.
3. Fold carefully in the flour.
4. Add food colouring as desired.
5. Brush melted butter onto two shallow baking tins (45 x 30 cm with an edge!).
6. Place baking paper on top and make sure there are no air bubbles or folds on it.
7. Pipe the paste in swirls and place in the freezer for about 1 h.

Joconde Sponge Ingredients

180 g egg whites at room temperature (about 6)
25 g granulated sugar

225 g ground almonds

225 g sifted icing sugar

6 eggs at room temperature

40 g sifted plain flour

40 g sifted cocoa powder for baking

85 g melted and clarified butter

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees C.
2. Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks stage, then add the granulated sugar and whisk further until stiff peaks form. Cover with cling film to prevent it collapsing and set aside.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk almonds, icing sugar and eggs until pale and fluffy. Then add the flour and the cocoa powder while still whisking.
4. Carefully fold in the meringue into the mixture.
5. Mix about a cup of the sponge mixture into the clarified butter, then add the butter mixture into the sponge.
6. Remove the baking trays with the joconde paste from the freezer and pour the sponge over the swirls in a thin layer, about 1 cm thick, level carefully and bake for 5 - 7 minutes until the sponges have coloured lightly (will be difficult to see, since they are chocolate coloured to begin with).
   
   
7. Once out of the oven, place a sheet of grease proof paper over each baking tray, then turn over the tray to release the sponge. Remove the grease proof paper the sponge was baked in. This reveals the pattern. Let the sponges cool a bit.
   
   

Chocolate Orange Mousse Ingredients

zest and juice of one orange

2 tbsp powdered gelatine

175 g melted plain chocolate

2 eggs separated

300 ml whipped double cream

Final Decoration Ingredients

300 ml whipped double cream

strips of orange zest

Method

1. Strain the orange juice, then dissolve the gelatine in it, using the instructions on the packet.
2. In a separate bowl, mix the zest and chocolate with the egg yolks.
3. Add the orange juice with the gelatine.
4. Whip the whites to stiff peaks and fold gently into the chocolate mixture.
5. Whip the cream to soft peaks and fold into the chocolate mixture.
6. Cut out two circles and two or three narrow strips from the sponges. The cake needs to be built inside a round cake tin - the circles should be a couple of cm smaller in diameter than the cake tin.
   
   
7. Place one circle at the bottom of the round tin, fit the strips around the sides, making sure there are no gaps anywhere.
8. Pour in the chocolate orange mousse, then cover with the second circle. Cover and refrigerate until required.
9. Just before serving, decorate by piping whipped cream and cut out twirls of orange zest.

Now for some reason, the recipe published on the BBC web site was missing the instruction to place the swirl patterns in the freezer. But I'd seen the show, so I know that this needed to be done.

What was a more unpleasant surprise was that the orange joconde paste resulted in some 4 - 5 times more than I actually needed. I have adjusted the recipe above accordingly, but I also have three more batches of orange joconde paste in the freezer for future practice.

I also gravely mis-judged the sponge and opted for making a slightly smaller, but taller cake. Unfortunately the amount of mousse I ended up with was far from enough and you can see the 3 cm of edge I had to cut off because of this. I don't see how this amount would fit in the larger cake described on the BBC web site. Having said that, the double cream exhibited some massively unexpected behaviour. I have whipped double cream in the past and it has worked fine, I just would get slightly less volume. But this time, within seconds it almost turned to butter. So the mousse didn't perhaps get the volume it was supposed to have. At serving time the next day, Lundulph had to whip the remaining cream by hand and again after a few beats with a balloon whisk, the thing had gone to stiff peaks. Really not sure what happened there, it wasn't out of date, I checked!

There was also the issue of baking: 5 - 7 minutes just didn't seem enough and I ended up baking for almost 15 minutes. This was a mistake, as it resulted in a drier sponge, which cracked at the patterns, when I fitted it into the cake tin. Could also have been that I made a smaller diameter cake of course. So don't get tempted to leave it baking for longer!

I also decided to skip one part of the decoration - a layer of gelatine made with orange juice. On the show, it was yellow, not orange and I didn't think it added any value to this otherwise so very impressive cake.

As always, I do not use enough gelatine to make things firm up and so, after Lou cut the first piece, the mousse just poured out like some sort of goo. I have tried to adjust the recipe above for that as well.

On the whole it was a very tasty cake actually and disappeared in the usual manner when we celebrate a family birthday.

Lundulph had some good ideas - he thought this would be really great to do with green swirls and chocolate mint ice cream as filling. I concur and so I will make a second attempt in a couple of weeks when he comes over to visit.

An idea that occurred to me is that you could plan ahead and draw specific patterns on the greaseproof paper that lines the baking tin and even write words on it. But you must do that in mirror writing. Then when you turn it out, the writing will be incorporated into the sponge. So I might try that as well. There seem so many possibilities on this technique.

The many off-cuts from the sponge went into a big box in the fridge for snacking purposes and lasted well over two weeks after the initial baking and very little staleness was noticeable. What I didn't do was to try and freeze some of it, to see how it reacts to that. So that I know if I need to take out a cake with ice cream filling early or at last minute before serving. Well, I'll find out soon enough.