Double Choc-Mint Christmas Cakes

Happy Christmas Eve to all those in blogasphere. An in honour of the date here are my third day of Christmas cakes.

Very handy, as these was also do as a Cupcake Hero entry. It's been ages since I've done the CCH thing, but this month it's white chocolate so these will work for that too.

The cakes themselves are from my mate JC and are one of the best cake mixes you can use (and I'm not really a chocolate fan)

100g dark cooking chocolate
100ml milk
1/4 cup cocoa powder
100g butter, softened
115g (1/2 cup) sugar
2 eggs
150g self raising flour, sifted

Put the chocolate, the milk and cocoa powder in a double boiler and slowly heat until the chocolate has melted. Then take off the heat and allow to cool a little.

Meanwhile cream the butter and sugar. Then add the eggs one at a time, combining each one well. Then mix in the chocolate mix and finally fold the flour through with a metal spoon.

Bake in lined cupcake trays for about 18-20 minutes in a 180 degree oven.

.... next I did a white chocolate and peppermint icing.

melt 160g white chocolate with 60g butter. Let it cool for a little then stir through 120g of sour cream, 260g of sifted icing sugar and a few drops of peppermint essence.

Luckily I had bought some bulls eyes for something else and they hadn't been eaten, so I smashed them up and sprinkled them on top. The photo above is taken in my carrier tray before I took them to work for consumption, but the broken lollies made them all sparkly and lovely.

So have a great day tomorrow, regardless of where you are, or what you happen to do on 25 December. Stay safe and eat too much.

tra la la la la

yes, i'm procrastinating. i have an essay to write. having an essay to write normally results in my having a very clean house. today mucking about on other people's blogs is filling my day. i've even volunteered to host cupcake hero one month.

AM I INSANE!!!

every one who reads this needs to go to quirky cupcake and volunteer too, so laurie has more people than she needs and overlooks me.

nah, it'd be fun i think.

.... right?

sleepy

a lot of my favourite bloggers have been really quiet recently. i have my own excuses: work's busy, uni's busy, it's starting to get cold and i'm getting decadently lazy (i assume some others are out and about enjoying an initial burst of spring). however i did take some lamb out of the freezer today that tomorrow will end up in my first casserole of the season and i'm really looking forward to that.

also this weekend i've been away on a camp for uni. we spent two days and one night in the murraylands region of south australia. i've not really seen much of australia, even less of south australia, and this is not a part of the world i've ever really been to before - although i have driven through it on the way to somewhere else.

and it was gorgeous. the murray river flows through the area (i was pleased to see it flowing. drought, climate changed and morons growing rice upstream have totally fucked the river. excuse language, but it makes me extraordinarily mad!). water levels were low, and some of the ferry crossings are shut because of this, but the area is totally beautiful. these photos don't even vaguely do it justice. you 'll need to come one day and see it for yourselves!
as a class of tourism students we went to many local sites and operators, including yabbie farms (yabbies a indigenous australian crustaceans. i used to catch them from the damn on my uncle brian's farm when i was little. apparently they're big news on the dinner plates of tokyo, but i've never eaten, or thought of eating, one), paddle steamers, ecotours, almond groves and museums. we also visited a fantastic sight called ngaut naguat, pronounced nought nought. sitting on the banks of the river it was a traditional camping and hunting sight for the local Nganguraku people and home of the black duck dreaming. non-australians probably don't know much about the dreamings, and as a white fella i'm in no place to give a decent lesson, but basically the dream time was the period in history when the land, its features and all its inhabitants were formed. so the black duck dreaming describes how the black duck came into being.

we were taken around the site by one of the local people (you can only get access with an aboriginal guide) who explained how to read some of the rock carvings, and showed where some early archaeological work had been done, and talked about the history of the site, from both a dreaming and geological perspective. the carving below is thought to show that the river sometimes housed estuary dolphins, before weirs were established by white people and the occasionally salinity of the river was stopped - the area is pretty far inland.

this was by far the highlight of the trip for me. unfortunately the STUPID and IGNORANT people in the group made great fun of the way the guide talked - which was pretty much like an aboriginal person would - and displayed no end of lack of cultural sensitivity or understanding. that night, pissed as farts on half a glass of apple cider, the also made horrible fun of the international students in the group, who had paid huge sums of money to come from japan, china, laos, india and papua new guinea to study in australia.

i tell you it made me so mad. the PNG lady told me there was no point being angry and if i didn't enjoy myself they'd win. i'm afraid to tell you they won and i spent the rest of the trip seething!

my plan now is to go back to the area one day really soon and enjoy myself thoroughly, just to stick it to these imbeciles. and these people are studying cultural tourism. i put it down to too much of daddy's money!

on a totally different note, once again i have failed to come up to standard for the cupcake hero challenge. no surprise, my marshmallow, and particular the icing, were a bit of a failure. but it was good fun and i've never cooked marshmallow before so i learnt something new.

this month's challenge is 'earth hour'. i was totally stumped, but have now come up with a killer idea, so expect news of that next weekend!

mallow madness

this month the gang-of-three chose marshmallow as the theme for cupcake hero (hereafter known as CCH). from what i can gather marshmallow is very much associated with easter in the states. there also appear to be something called peeps. they look very..errrrr... wholesome.

when i was growing up, my mum's best friend's daughter was lactose intolerant, so she got marshmallow at easter. i remember one easter camping trip at loxton where she got a enormous marshmallow rabbit.

but really i don't think marshmallow is as popular in australia. i've certainly never even thought about making it before! so when marshmallow was announced i had a lot of trouble trying to come up with an idea. as you'll see below i had more than one shot at making the marshmallow, with varying degrees of success. my original idea was to do basically what i've done, but then make mini marshmallow balls to go on top and glue them together with dulce de leche. however i didn't cook the milk for long enough and it didn't thicken properly, and then my first batch of marshmallow didn't set properly and i threw my hands in the air.

these are actually better than i thought they would be. the gooiness of the marshmallow in the centre is a nice counter to these cakes which are quite rich. the cake recipe came from my own cupcake hero JC, who assures me that anyone who uses only cocoa in their cake batter, without actual chocolate, has no idea what they're talking about. JC is haigh's best customer and when she talks chocolate i listen, so i can but assume this advice is sound.

anyway, here is my entry, along with quite a few photos. i'm trying to get better at the picture taking, which i'm not that great at right now, compounded by the fact i have the darkest kitchen this side of hades. but i'm learning a few tricks.

i got the marshmallow recipe from the fantastic clotilde at chocolate and zucchini. clotilde posts in both french and english, because she is european and generally smarter than us anglophones. i try to read her posts in french as much as i can. i made the marshmallow (guimauve) according to her recipe last weekend and had a play around with it. the rose water once is very very nice, and i will be using it for something, somewhere, but it didn't have the right flavour for these cakes. the chocolate one was very nice too, but didn't quite set properly. maybe i used too much water. it'd be interesting to try this in vanilla cakes (maybe next weekend). today, this is how i did

guimauve a la clotilde
14g sheet gelatin
40g glucose or corn syrup
230g caster sugar
3 egg whites.

mix the syrup and sugar with about 90ml of water and put on the heat. once just boiled, reduce to a simmer and cook for about 8 minutes. while the sugars are cooking soak the gelatin in cold water. after the 8 minutes, remove the gelatin from the water, squeeze the suckers as dry as you can and stir into the hot sugar mix.


while all of this is cooling a little, whisk the egg whites to form soft peaks.

make sure that the sugar syrup has cooled a little, and slowly pour into the eggs in a constant stream, whilst whisking, and continue until the mix has cooled to about room temperature. i must admit i've never been very good at this kind of thing. i'm just not coordinated enough to pour and whisk at the same time, i just do as well as i can and hope for the best.

it looks very glossy and smooth at the end, but if you stick your finger in it to taste, which i would neeeeeever do, it's got the fluffy consistency of marshmallow.
i just left this in the bowl to cool. it started to set remarkably quickly (i have the air conditioning on high at the moment). so about 30 minutes after i started on the cakes.

chocolate cupcakes
100g dark chocolate
100ml milk
30g cocoa powder
100g butter at room temp
115g caster sugar
2 eggs
150g self raising flour

over a double boiler, heat the dark chocolate (i got some extra scrummy belgian chocolate from goodies and grains), cocoa powder and milk, not letting the top pan touch the water - i just use a pyrex jug over a saucepan. sir occasionally until the chocolate is completely melted.

now, this is a very important bit. without this the whole cake mixture will be a failure: do not eat the melted chocolate straight out of the jug. it is for the cake, not you! let it cool a little while you get on with the rest.

in a large mixing bowl cream the butter and the sugar. in a pique of disorganisation i failed to take the butter out of the fridge. luckily the extreme heat we've been experiencing recently made it soften easily when left on the outdoor table for 15 minutes. then add the eggs one at a time, combine each one as you go. add the chocolate mix and combine well before folding in the flour in two batches, using a metal spoon.


spoon the mix into a 12 hole cake tin lined with large papers. cook at 180 degrees for 15-20 mins, or until a skewer comes out clean. cool the cakes in the tray.

once they've cooled a little, cut a hole in the top of each cake, scoop out some of the cake and spoon in some of the marhsmallow mix. if you make the cake and the marshmallow all in one go, the marshmallow should be just the right consistency to spoon in. piping it would probably give a better result, but if you're like me you're too lazy to clean the bag twice in one day!
icing
200g icing sugar
100g cream cheese

no rocket science here folks, simply mix the sugar and the fat. i added a splash of vanilla essence to help it along.

needless to say there is a huge amount of sugar here, so one cake at a time is plenty. i unfortunately put the wrong nozzle in my piping bag and didn't realise until i'd filled it, so the icing looks a bit patchy.

overall i will forgive you ladies if i don't get the tshirt this month. but one day it will be mine, all mine (insert evil laugh here)

cupcake hero, february 08

these photos are from my first ever cupcake hero entry. this month's theme is liquor. i'm not sure, but i think american's use the term liquor the way us australian's would use the term spirits. normally i'm a coopers pale ale, or a gin and tonic person. neither of these really lend themselves to the cupcake realm.

my next favourite drink is a cosmopolitan (although unfortunatley they're so delicious i drink them too quickly and become quickly very, very messy). So i decided to soak some dried cranberries in vodka to make cosmopolitan cupcakes. then i thought about affogato, and thought i could do a vanilla cupcake with a coffee and frangelico icing (i always have a shot of frangelico on the side when i order affogato). in the end i did a whole freakin' cocktail party - i just got carried away. i did screwdrivers, and daiquiris (mango and strawberry) and mojitos and blue hawaiians and margaritas and B52s and cowboy cocksuckers. These photos are of the cosmopolitan, the mango daiquiri and the margarita. the margarita was acutally really nice - who would have though of putting tequilla in a cake??

of course i had to flavour both the cakes and the icing individually, which meant using a million little chinese bowls, which created a hell of a lot of washing up, and also gave me lots of bowls to lick (any adult who says they no longer lick the bowl is likely to be lying). so i'm feeling a little sugar'd (and vodka'd) out at the moment. i can see something very savoury in my future for dinner....