Chocolate meringue muffins
So, chocolate muffins, then. I make them more times than I care to admit to and, as a dabbler, tend to add at least one extra little something: some chopped white chocolate, maybe, or some orange zest… dried cherries are surprisingly nice… sometimes I’ll decorate them with ganache, or just melted chocolate, and sometimes I just leave them alone and unadorned. This version came about after making muffins and wishing there was something else I could pipe onto them apart from buttercream, which I love, but Hubby detests. So first up for the muffins, you’ll need:
170g butter, softened
170g caster sugar
3 eggs
115g self raising flour
55g cocoa powder
So preheat the oven to 180/gas 4 and beat together the butter and sugar until they’re really light and fluffy. Add in the eggs one at a time, beating really well after each addition, then sieve the flour and cocoa into the bowl and fold them in gently. If the mixture’s a bit thick, add a slosh of milk.
Put paper muffin cups into the holes of a muffin tray and put a tablespoon of the mixture into each one (it should make about 12). Bake them for about 15/20 minutes until the centre springs back up when you push it with your finger. Leave them to cool on a wire rack:
Now, get cracking on the meringue:
Take a really clean bowl and whisk up two egg whites until they’re really stiff (yes, yes, you can do the ‘holding the bowl over someone’s head’ thing if you like). Now whisk in 115g of caster sugar one tablespoon at a time, whisking really well between each spoonful until the meringue is thick and glossy.
Now comes the fun bit. Preheat the grill to medium and then you can just dollop the meringue on top of the muffins, or you can crack open the piping kit (yay!) and pipe little swirls of meringue over the muffins. Once they’ve been piped, it’s your prerogative as Head Chef to pipe the rest of the meringue straight into your mouth. Now just let them heat gently under the grill until they’re kind of golden with a few darker tips – watch them carefully as they burn really easily. BTW: If you’re worried about eating raw eggs, you could always pipe them onto greaseproof paper on a baking tray, then bake them in a really low oven, and just stick them on top of the muffins with a spoonful of whipped cream. Yum. I was also thinking these would be lovely made without the cocoa (make up the difference with flour) and with a tsp or two of vanilla extract, then you could even add a hint of pink food colouring into the meringue – fab for a girly party.
And there you have it. Gorgeous, gooey meringue and rich chocolate cake. A mixture, I think you’ll agree, made in heaven. As I always say, there aren’t many things in this life that can’t be improved with a big dollop of meringue.
Mr Lovely’s 100 cupcake birthday
So this week, Mr Lovely (D next door’s brother in law – it’s all so incestuous round these parts) turned 40. Mrs L has been, somewhat reluctantly it has to be said, planning a big party and we had a little brainstorming evening to sort out the finer details. Seeing as Mr L is a fireman, it made sense for someone to bake a fire engine cake. Mrs Lovely didn’t volunteer. Neither did I. It turned into a bit of a staring contest and then we decided that we’d pursue other avenues – both of us being severely cack-handed in the cake decorating department. We were chatting about cupcake towers and the like and looking on the internerd when it dawned: cupcakes…loads and loads of little cupcakes each decorated with a teeny fire engine. Mrs Lovely vowed to have a crack at a fire engine cake too. The nutter.
Saturday morning dawned, then, and I started on the cupcakes. While I baked batches of 24, passing children were enlisted to help melt chocolate and whisk ganache and stick on the little rice paper/icing cake-toppers that Mrs L ordered and had delivered to her sister in the UK, along with a big list of other baking stuff that’s hard to find here (she got stopped coming through customs with a big block of royal icing – ‘no officer, it’s not semtex – honest’). We decided to stick to vanilla cupcakes with white chocolate ganache, and chocolate cupcakes with dark chocolate. But honestly, after a while, it all kind of got a bit confused and anyone that happened to have made a bowl of ganache dolloped it on the nearest available cakes.
So for the vanilla cupcakes, then, you need
125g butter
125g caster sugar (vanilla sugar if you have it)
1 tsp vanilla extract (leave out for the chocolate ones)
2 large eggs
125g self raising flour (replace a heaped tbsp with cocoa for chocolate ones)
Couple of tbsp milk
Firstly, try to make sure everything is at room temperature. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, add the vanilla extract and then the eggs, beating well after each addition. Don’t worry if it curdles – that’s such an old wives tale – just add some of the flour and carry on. Then gently fold in the flour (if you beat the hell out of it you won’t get a lovely light sponge) and lastly the milk – just enough to make the batter plop softly off a tablespoon into the cupcake paper. Bake at 180/gas 4 for about 18 minutes until golden – they should spring back when lightly pressed. Cool on a wire rack. This amount will make about 12 cupcakes. Remember you don’t want them too high, or the ganache won’t completely cover them.
For the ganache:
200g bar white chocolate
2 tbsp icing sugar
About 100ml double cream
Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water (don’t let it spit everywhere as you risk getting water in the chocolate, in fact, once it’s boiled just turn it off – the chocolate will still melt). When just melted, take it off the heat and sieve in the icing sugar. Gently start to whisk that in, then while you’re whisking, pour in the cream until you have a thick, glossy bowlful – about the same consistency as melted chocolate. Pour a generous tablespoon of it over each cupcake – ideally so that it just about reaches the top of the paper case. Then just leave them naked or decorate with whatever you like: mad, printed cake toppers…grated chocolate… a big swirl of whipped cream… jelly beans… whatever.
Multiply that recipe by about 8, blow up your food mixer, scoff any disasters, make a few more and there you have it. A 100 cupcake birthday extravaganza. Happy birthday, Mr Lovely! Oh, and she never did make that fire engine cake, y’know. Great party though.
Bounty Cake: a coconut cake with chocolate buttermilk icing
So you’ll like this. For my new job, I do all sorts of bonkers things (like cooking Christmas dinner in October, but that’s another story), but it does give you lots of new ideas. I’ve been working on cupcakes recently, and this is how I started with the Bounty cake idea. I was trying to think of a nice icing to go with a coconut cupcake. I have a really nice lemon cream cheese icing recipe, which would be fab with ginger or carrot cupcakes but somehow it just didn’t seem right with the coconut. And then it hit me: what better combination is there than coconut and chocolate? And so the Bounty cupcake was born. This is its older brother: just as nice, you just get to have bigger portions. Result.
For the coconut cake:
150g soft butter
250g caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
300g self-raising flour
40g desiccated coconut
250ml buttermilk (if you can’t find it, make your own by squeezing the juice of half a lemon into 250ml milk)
For the ganache:
175g bar dark chocolate (or white would be lovely)
Leftover buttermilk (or cream)
So preheat your oven to 180/gas 4 and line a baking tin with greaseproof paper (one with a removable bottom – ooer – is good here). Give it a brush round with some soft butter too, just to make doubly sure it won’t stick. Whack it in the mixer, or just beat the butter and sugar until they’re light and fluffy, then add in the vanilla and the eggs, beating well after each addition. Then just bung in all the dry ingredients, pour over the buttermilk and stir gently until just combined. Pour the mixture into the buttered tin and bake for about 40 minutes until the top is golden and a knife poked into the centre comes out clean. Mine was going a bit too brown on top, so I covered it with foil for the last 5 or 10 minutes. (Obviously if you’d prefer, you can spoon the mixture into about 12 cupcake papers. They’ll only take about 20 minutes to cook.)
Take the cake out and leave it somewhere to cool. Then make your ganache. Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of hot water (turn the heat out once the water is bubbling otherwise it will spit boiling water at you). As soon as the chocolate’s about there, take it off the heat and let it cool a bit, before whisking in a splosh of buttermilk, then another, until the mixture gets to a spreadable consistency. Put the icing in the fridge. You’ll get the same result if you use cream, but somehow the buttermilk gives it a more ‘grown up’ tang which works well with the dark chocolate.
When the cake is cool, take the icing out of the fridge and whisk it, preferably with an electric whisk. This will incorporate a bit of air and make it fluffier and paler. Don’t worry if you whisk too far and it goes grainy and solid – splosh a bit more buttermilk in, whisk it a bit more and it’ll recover. Spread all over the cake, sprinkle on some desiccated coconut and stuff into face, preferably with a latte, a roaring fire and a very fat, spoilt greyhound for company.
