Lamington cupcakes

Lamingtons are amazing. Just saying. 

Vanilla sponge fingers dipped in chocolate and then rolled in coconut. The larger ones have a jam center and some have a strawberry icing instead of chocolate. They played a strong part of my lunchbox during school. 

My version of these is a coconut cake base, raspberry jam center and chocolate ganache on top. I've made them before using a different coconut cake base. That one involved coconut milk and you can find it here. This was a new recipe. Apparently it is a Womens Weekly classic. The coconut flavour comes from desiccated coconut and coconut essence. Mostly the essence I think. the desiccated coconut adds to the texture. 

The recipe calls for a full cake, I found it made 18 cupcakes. The downside to 18 is that I could only half fill a tray. Partially full trays don't bake as evenly as full trays. To fix this I partly fill the empty cups with water. This helps with the even heat distribution. They took around 20-25 minutes in total. I preheated using fan forced and then switched into conventional for the baking. This mean that they rose properly. A final blast in fan forced finished off the colour on the half full tray. 

Whilst these babies cooled I started on the ganache. 300g dark chocolate broken into a bowl and 300ml of hot cream poured over. Wait about 5 minutes and give it a stir. Let it cool until thick. I then whipped it a little with the hand blender. This is when I realised that the ratio of chocolate to cream was off if I wanted silky smooth and pipable icing. Next time more cream or less chocolate. Potentially a different type of chocolate too.

The assembly is the messy part. I recommend having a sink of hot soapy water ready to go.

Cut a hole in the top of the cupcake and trim of the excess cake. You need to create a lid as well as leaving room for the jam center. 

I mix the jam up a little so that it flows into the hole better then pop the lid back on.

Once they are all done it's time to put the ganache on. Originally the plan was to pipe the ganache on. In the end it was dollop time. Once every cupcake had a suitably large dollop, I used a clean knife to smooth the tops. By then my husband and father in law had finished changing the locks on the front door. Someone broke into the house yesterday. We are missing small things like jewelry, cameras and some booze. The biggest annoyance is dealing with lock changes and a broken window. 

So once that was done, husband took over the final step with these puppies. Dipping them in coconut. They've been safely packaged to be taken to a party this evening with my father in law. Some of his friends are celebrating becoming Australian Citizens. 

The recipe for the coconut cake base is below. I used about 250g of raspberry jam. 

INGREDIENTS

• 125g butter, softened
• ½ teaspoon coconut essence
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup (40g) desiccated coconut
• 1½ cups self-raising flour
• 250g extra-light sour cream
• ⅓ cup (80ml) milk

Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fan-forced). Line 2 cupcake trays with 18 wrappers. 

Beat butter, essence and sugar in a small bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time.

Transfer mixture to a large bowl. Stir in half the coconut and half the sifted flour, half the sour cream and half the milk, then add remaining coconut, flour, sour cream and milk; stir until smooth.

Divide evenly into the cup cake tins and bake until cooked when tested. Stand cup cakes in pan for 10 minutes before turning onto wire rack, top-side up, to cool. 

God and Chocolate

So apparently yesterday was Shrove Tuesday. This means that today is Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. A few months ago I was thinking about how I could reaffirm my faith. The general overview is that I believe that there is a God, I just have issues with some of the things that the Catholic Church teaches. Anyway, so my thoughts went along the lines of starting with Lent and doing it properly with the whole fasting thing. After some research, I remembered that the fasting part of Lent is essentially no meat or dairy until Easter Sunday. This would be fine except that I'm a shift worker as well as a student and if I don't eat properly, things just don't happen. Part of me eating properly is eating a balance of protein, calcium and vegies so no vegetarian diet for me.

I then thought about doing something along the lines of no chocolate or no takeaway. Until I was sitting in the car park at McDonald's with my dinner and remembered all this. I thought that I could just start it a day late and see if I could go the 40 days with no take away and then thought of something better.

Instead of improving myself by giving up something, I am going to make myself do something instead.

My aim is to do some form of exercise at least 3 times a week. It started with a Pilates class this evening and will end with a 5 day, 4 night hike over the Easter long weekend at Wilson's Promontory. It also includes the Herald Sun Run for the Kids in 4 weeks. If my heel is up for it then I'm going to walk the long course, otherwise I'm walking the short course.

Now onto the chocolate, I made a half batch of brownie biscuits (recipe on hteac) and only baked a dozen or so. the rest has been sitting in the fridge being snacked on as the week goes by.... Now I need to bake a batch of my special brownies for the open rehearsal tomorrow, sit and watch whip it as I make more sugar roses for a birthday cake.

Risotto again.......

For the past month I've been experimenting with different types of risotto and I think I've found my go to base recipe. White wine, chicken stock, rice, onion (depending on who I'm feeding) and garlic. Lots of garlic.

I've been wanting to experiment with dessert risotto for a while now and I made an awesome one tonight. Instead of a savoury stock I used hot mi

lk with a little sugar and a stick of cinnamon as my spic

e. Served with some fresh raspberries to cut through the richness and it was amazing. And the thing that made it so rich.....CHOCOLATE!!!!

So here it is.

Chocolate risotto

serves 2

Stock

2 cups milk

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup cocoa, sifted

1 stick of cinnamon

In a saucepan combine sugar, milk, cinnamon and cocoa. Stir over medium heat until combined, then bring to a simmer and leave for 5 minutes.

Keep stirring occasionally so the sugar doesn't

burn. Turn the heat off and cover for about 20 minutes to let the heat infuse.

Risotto

2 knobs of butter

3/4-1 cup risotto rice

1/4 cup rum

cinnamon stick ( I just fished out the one in the stock and threw it in)

2 cups stock

1 punnet raspberries

Melt 1 knob of butter in a saucepan over medium heat, when melted throw in rice.

Let it get nice and toasty, then stand back and throw in the rum.

Notice the smudgy fingerprints on the side of this bottle? It's from all the cake decorating I've been doing. Soaking fruit cakes in rum so that they stay happy and fresh. mmmm rum.

When that's evapourated, add the hot stock in 3-4 batches and lower the heat slightly. Keep adding the stock gradually whilst stirring until all the stock is absorbed and the rice is cooked.

If you run out of stock, either add more hot milk or some hot water in small amounts until the rice is cooked. It should be soft with a little bite. Stir through the second knob of butter.

Divide amongst 2 plates and serve with 1/4 punnet raspberries on top of each. I'm assuming that you ate the other half punnet whilst you were cooking.

Enjoy

Biscuit disaster averted!

I almost had a biscuit disaster yesterday. Every season so far this year, I do the supper for the Monucs concert. Last season involved 2 days of making cakes, macaroons and choc chip bikkies. This season is just choc chip bikkies, some with nuts and some without.

The disaster began when I realised that I couldn't find my recipe. It's one I stole of a friend and tweaked slightly. Last season I ended up with flat, chewy biscuits of awesome addictiveness. When I couldn't find it, I started the search for another recipe. The only thing I had an issue remembering was how much flour was needed. So I turned to Baked. The differences between the Baked choc chip cookies and mine is in the flour and sugar content. They use 2 cups, I use 3.5 of flour, sugar they use 1 cup brown, 1/2 white, I use 2 cups dark brown.

Then resulting cookies were cakey. I really don't like cakey cookies. So I ended up on the internet trawling through facebook trying to find the recipe again and success!

For future reference
(double batch)

3.5 cups plain flour
1 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
vanilla
250g choc chips
2tsp baking powder

Can you say allergy friendly???

I discovered when I baked birthday cupcakes to take to band on monday night, that if I want to make them edible for everyone then things have to be gluten free, lactose free and vegan. Occasionally fructose free as well. The last batch I took were chocolate brownies. They didn't turn out exactly how I'd planned but they still tasted fantastic 4 days after baking.

Gluten Free, Vegan, Chocolate Brownies.

125ml olive oil
200g dark eating chocolate, coarsely chopped
½ cup (110g) caster sugar
3 Tb no egg replacer
6 Tb water
1 ¼ cup (185g) plain flour
200g chocolate, chopped coarsely

1. Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan-forced. Grease deep 19cm square cake pan, line with baking paper, extending paper 2cm over side.
2. Stir butter and dark chocolate in a medium saucepan over low heat until smooth. Cool 10min.
3. Stir sugar into chocolate mixture, then flour, no egg replacer, water and chopped chocolate. Spread mixture into pan.
4. Bake brownies about 35 min. Cool in pan before cutting

Uber Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding

At long last, what everyone has been asking for, my recipe for the amazing pudding from a few weeks ago. It started out as an ordinary self saucing pudding, but I had some strawberries that needed to be eaten and then there was the half packet of frozen raspberries and the balsamic vinegar and you get the drift of what happened. Needless to say it was very rich and very yum. My housemate and I were the only ones who couldn't finish it. This is meant to serve four.

Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding

60g butter
½ cup (125ml) milk
½ tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup (165g) caster sugar
1 cup (150g) self raising flour
1Tbsp cocoa powder
¾ cup (165g) firmly packed brown sugar
1Tbsp cocoa powder, extra
2 cups (500ml) boiling water
extras*

1. Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan-forced. Grease 1.5litre (6 cup) ovenproof dish.
2. Melt butter with milk in a medium saucepan. Remove from heat; stir in extract and caster sugar, then sifted flour, cocoa and extras. Spread mixture into dish.
3. Sift brown sugar and extra cocoa over mixture. Spread mixture into dish.
4. Bake pudding about 40 min or until centre is firm. Stand for 5 min before serving.

· The extras are a couple of handfuls of frozen raspberries (fresh are acceptable also, we just didn't have any on hand) and a handful or so of chopped chocolate.

· We served it with a raspberry and strawberry coulis. Just stick berries in a pot with sugar, balsamic vinegar and a bit of water. Cook down until a thick sauce, squishing the berries as you go.

No photos this time, we devoured them before it was even cooled. That whole stand for 5 minute thing we ignored and burnt ourselves as a result.

So, rehearsals officially start on Sunday for the orchestra. Whilst I'm excited about rehearsing at last there is also some worry. I've worked with most of them before so I'm not worried about that. Just the usual, 'This is going to be a disaster' feeling I get before every show.

I think this time I'm going to stick to my usual method of dealing by baking for rehearsal. Currently of the opinion that Chocolate Balls is the best option.

1 cup desiccated coconut
2 -3tbs cocoa powder
1 pack Marie Biscuits
375mls condensed milk (about a can)
Extra coconut for dusting

Essentially combine everything except the extra coconut in a bowl and combine. Then roll into balls, dust with coconut and stick in the fridge until set. I recommend using wet hands to do teh rolling otherwise you will end up covered in the mix.


A variation on this is Apricot balls
replace the cocoa powder with chopped dried apricots.