Easter! Simnel Muffins and Brownies

Dieting over Easter is tricky. So instead of baking a large simnel cake as I have done in previous years, I made a few simnel muffins to share around my family. I've got several books with recipes for simnel muffins/cupcakes but I settled on the recipe from the Crabapple Cupcake Cookbook and tweaked it slightly to suit my own tastes, mostly removing about 100g of the dried mixed fruit and replacing it with glace cherries ad secondly using marzipan and sugarflowers to decorate the top instead of icing and a chocolate mini egg as I loathe the combination of dried fruit with chocolate. Ergh. These muffins were wonderfully moist, no doubt due a ball of marzipan in the centre of each cake. Just a note on the recipe, it says it makes 11 but I managed to get 12 very generous muffins out of this with plenty of batter left in the bowl to eat raw. It's important to point out that this is no bad thing.

Makes 11 cakes.

Ingredients:

100g shop bought marzipan, plus extra for decorating (I used M&S's as its all natural etc)

1.5 cups plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 teaspoon mixed spice

pinch of salt

200g softened butter

1 cup soft brown sugar

3 eggs

425g mixed fruit (or in my case 325g mixed fruit plus 100g glace cherries, syrup rinsed off)

2 tbsp milk

Method:

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with 11(or 12) papercases.

Roll the marzipan into 11 small balls a set aside.

Sift together the flour baking powder, mixed spice and salt.

In a separate bowl, cream the butter and the sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, ensuring each is well mixed in before adding the next, but do not overmix.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet and beat on a low speed until just combined the add the fruit and the milk.

Put a tablespoon of the mixture into each of the muffin cases and then place a marzipan ball in the centre and then add enough of the mixture to cover the marzipan.

Bake for 25-30 minutes (although some of mine needed about 35/40 minutes). Leave to cool before decorating.

To decorate:

The marzipan I used was sticky enough to adhere to the top of the muffins without any aid, but you may need to use apricot jam if this isn't the case. Roll the marzipan out to thickness of the £1 coin and use a scone cutter to cut out. Place on top of the cooled muffins. To ensure the sugar flowers stayed in place I used a little bit of liquid icing, such as writing icing. Just dot a little on the top and press the sugar flower on. Mine turned out like this:

And for those in my family who don't like simnel cakes, I made chocolate brownies. I shan't reproduce the recipe as everyone has a recipe for chocolate brownies, indeed, I have at least 15, but the standard one I use is a recipe I clipped out of a copy of Olive. Its meant to have nuts in it, but just as dried fruit is a ruination of chocolate, so is the inclusion of crunchy nuts in the middle of smooth, gooey chocolate brownie. Such pleasure should not be interrupted by a lowly nut. There's plenty of that nonsense already.

I did cut this into squares and pressed solid mini chocolate eggs into each one but I failed to capture the beauty of them before they were all gone. Always a good sign.

My Birthday Cake

I'm no party girl but my best friend came to visit to celebrate my birthday with me and my boyfriend. I decided to have a go at a chocolate and vanilla marble cake with the intention of then also marbling the icing too. The cake was beautiful and I piped icing on with the original idea of swirling the icing to give a marbling effect. However, as with so many things in life, some things are just best left as they are, so this was the finished cake:

Mother's Day Baking

Seeing as birthday cards to me arrived late and my sister's never even turned up, I've decided the (Royal mail, of course) post is too unreliable to send anything of monetary value through it. With that in mind, I decided to send some baked goods instead. I was lucky enough to be given loads of lovely cook books for my birthday so I took this recipe for Lemon and Poppyseed cupcakes from Cupcakes! and they turned out absolutely beautifully and were incredibly moist. To make them a bit more gift like looking I decorated them with vanilla buttercream and added a lemon swirl made with the Lemon Sauce recipe in the same book and finished them with some sugar flowers I bought from ebay.


And here they are finished:











Here's the recipe. It's in American units which I've always found incredibly infuriating, especially when recipes call for sticks of butter. So a while ago I invested in a set of the Nigella Lawson measuring cups which helps alot, but I still feel out of my comfort zone. I need proper units of measurement! The upside of this book is that while it doesn't give proper units of measurement, at least it converts sticks of things into cups of things. Half a stick of butter is equivalent to a quarter cup apparently.

For 12 cupcakes:

1 cup plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp grated lemon zest
1 tbsp poppy seeds
1/2 cup buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (About 190 degrees C, I think). Line the cupcake tin.

Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl ad set aside. In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat the butter and sugar until blended and light in colour. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until each is totally incorporated and the batter is creamy. Add the poppyseeds, lemon zest and vanilla. On a low speed add half of the flour mixture and mix until just incorporated. Add the buttermilk and mix and then the last of the flour until the batter is smooth.

Fill each paper case with a 1/4 cup of the mixture and bake until the top feels firm, which should take about 18 minutes. Leave to cool for a few minutes in the tin before transferring to a cooling rack.

As for the buttercream I never use a recipe for it and I tend to mix it by eye (and taste of course), but if pushed I'd say I used 1/2 a pack of butter (125g) and a half to 2/3s pack of icing sugar (so, 250g-300g) and a tsp vanilla extract.

For 1 cup of the lemon sauce:

1/4 cup unsalted butter
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks (I save the whites in a freezer bag for later use in healthy scrambled eggs or unhealthy meringue)
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp cornflour dissolved in 1/4 cup water
1 tsp grated lemon zest

In a medium saucepan, heat the butter and lemon juice until the butter melts and the mixture is hot. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks, eggs and sugar to blend them and then whisk in the dissolved cornflour. Slowly pour in the hot butter and lemon juice, whisking constantly. Return the mixture to the saucepan and cook over a medium heat, stirring constantly, until it just boils and thickens, about 6 minutes. When thickened, the sauce will leave a path on the back of the spoon when you draw a finger across it. (The sauce will thicken further as it cools). Strain through a sieve to remove any lumps and then add the lemon zest. Transfer to a bowl. To store cover with clingfilm, pressing the film against the sauce so it doesn't develop a skin. It can be refrigerated for up to 3 days, or stored in the freezer in an appropriate container and kept for up to 3 months.

Smooth the buttercream with a spreading/palette knife onto the cupcakes. Using a piping bag with a small nozzle, pipe the lemon sauce in a swirl onto the icing and top with a sugarflower/decoration of your choice. Yummy!

The book is wonderful and I can't wait to bake every recipe in it. Unfortunately I'm on a bit of a lull from baking as I'm trying to lose weight. But Easter only comes once a year and what better way to celebrate resurrection than with cake, I ask you?

The Idea

After much contemplation, I've reached the conclusion that I will not survive in the average workplace for any extended period of time. So I've decided instead to actually pursue a small dream of mine, that being to open a patisserie sometime in the future. Not being in any position to make any real advances towards attaining that just yet, I thought a food blog where I could record and work on my culinary ideas would be a nice little project to help ensure I don't give up.

That and so I can show off my awesome cooking skillz, of course.