Cappuccino Eclairs

When you bake a lot it can be easy to get stuck in a flavour rut. Chocolate, it probably goes without saying is a flavour I return to again and again. It is never a very long period of time that passes in between my chocolate bakes. I think every blogger or baker also has certain fruit they always have in their house and therefore bake with – for me it is probably lemons and apples. However, particularly when it comes to summer and there is lots of seasonal fresh fruit to use, I love expanding my repertoire and using new flavours. Whilst there are sadly still a few months until summer gets into its stride I have still recently been enjoying other opportunities to bake with underused flavours in my kitchen.Of course coffee isn’t an unknown or unused ingredient – it is estimated that in the UK we drink 70 million cups a day, pretty remarkable for a country with a population of 62 million! Nevertheless, it is definitely one I forget to use in baking, probably because it is such a standby I forget it can shine on its own. I was thrilled when Whittard sent me a package of this Brazilian roast coffee, giving me a chance to experiment. This was shortly followed by shock when I realised I’ve only done 5 coffee recipes on here in nearly 5 years of blogging and not one of my 300 To Bake recipes had coffee in! This time I really wanted the coffee to shine and be the star of the show, something which surprisingly I found quite difficult to do. So many recipes combined coffee with something else – normally chocolate, making mocha dishes, but I also saw it paired with flavours as diverse as lime or coconut. I must have seen hundreds of coffee cake recipes and whilst they are delicious I wanted to try something a bit different. Coffee éclairs were my first thought and after looking at lots of different things I couldn’t get these out of my mind. I really enjoy making choux pastry and making éclairs gave me a chance to practice my dreaded piping skills. As you can see from the photo, I ended up with quite a motley crew of shapes but they still all tasted good! I chose this recipe by Simon Rimmer from the TV show Something for the Weekend (now Sunday Brunch, which I love) because it has a double hit – the coffee whipped cream filling and coffee fudge icing. My only note about this recipe is that I managed about 15 eclairs instead of the 6-8 the recipe suggests and some of mine were already pretty big! I found the whole process strangely therapeutic and I was really pleased with the strong coffee flavour that came through in the end. Often éclairs can be very sweet with lots of chocolate or rich vanilla pastry cream so I think the bitterness of coffee really helps balance this. I am definitely looking forward to adding to my coffee recipe collection here in the future – I’ve seen a very tempting cappuccino pavlova by Nigella and espresso granita by Jacob Kennedy I’d like to try. Until then, enjoy the éclairs! :)

Coffee Break Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for the people in my office on my last day of my internship at the start of August, as I had wanted to make something a little bit more special than muffins for my last bake. I had found these on the always perfect blog, raspberri cupcakes, a few weeks before and bookmarked them on the off chance I would find a situation where they would be suitable. With a few adaptations they became the perfect treat.Originally, I stayed pretty faithful to the recipe on raspberri cupcakes. I made both the condensed milk icing and the cookie dough…and used neither. The condensed milk icing was gorgeous, but insanely sweet. Properly sweet. I don’t normally find things too sweet, but even I could only manage a miniscule spoonful. It was probably as close to eating pure butter as you can get! It still tasted good, but I thought it would be pretty over powerful to pile it on top of a chocolate chip cupcake. Bearing this extreme sweetness in mind, I also chose not to stuff the middle with cookie dough and baked this into cookies another day instead. So in the end I had: coffee cupcakes with dark and milk chocolate chips, coffee buttercream, mini HobNobs and milk bottles. I couldn’t find mini chocolate chip cookies, and the HobNobs seemed appropriate after an embarrassing day at the office when the the rest of the team noticed how I ate a ridiculously large amount in one day… These are fun to personalise too: I swapped in cola bottle sweets on one cake for my boss with the Diet Coke habit, and added an extra shot of coffee to the cake of the boss who drank copious amounts of black coffee throughout the day. They went down a treat at the office – I hope you like them too :)

After 10 Chocolates

Doesn’t Christmas seem a whole world away now that spring is evidently on its way? Shortly before Christmas, Jamie Oliver had a festive special on television and one of his ideas, After 10 Chocolates, really stuck out to me. So often with cookery books or shows the same recipes keep appearing over and over again. Chocolate cookies, treacle tart, Victoria sponge, lemon cupcakes – there are endless recipes in nearly every recipe book you buy. The After 10 Chocolates were really refreshing because it was an idea I hadn’t seen before and hopefully its new to you to!

Flavoured sugar soaking before being arranged in stripes The idea is you roll out a long piece of parchment paper – over a metre. Then you get five or six (although you could do as many flavours as you wanted) bowls and add a small amount of demerara sugar to each. Then you flavour each sugar bowl differently with a few drops of extract – I used almond extract, orange blossom water, lemon extract, rose essence and vanilla extract. These form pastes, and you spread these in separate vertical strips down sections of the paper. You can add non sugar flavourings as well – I did a strip of coffee and a strip of salt. It helps to label the different strips before the best part: going crazy drizzling a whole lot of melted dark chocolate all over the sugars. Write your name, write a secret, draw a picture with the chocolate – it all merges together into one long, lacy piece of chocolate with all the different flavours hidden inside…You can either go Russian Roulette with your chocolate – break it all into shards and jumble them up so nobody knows what flavour they’ll get, or keep all your flavours separate. It is so much fun to make – especially when you’re mixing up the sugars and your kitchen suddenly feels like a science laboratory. Favourite flavours in my family were the rose (although be careful not to add too much as it can become overpowering and taste like strong Turkish delight) and the surprise hit – coffee granules. I think this would be a fun, different talking point at a dinner party instead of normal shop bought mints especially as its so easy to do. You can find Jamie’s proper recipe here, enjoy!

Gypsy Creams

“I drizzled dark chocolate from a height so it set into crisp lines over the craggy surface. Behold, a biscuit of great, great joy!”
Nigel Slater

Ahh, the fabulous words of Nigel Slater! Since my post where I mentioned how I seemed to be baking through the biscuit tin, it has become my mini mission! I was going away for the weekend last weekend, and I wanted something simple which I could bake there as the kitchen is much smaller there. These little biscuits were in the latest Sainsbury's Magazine (so go along and get it!) and seemed just the ticket.
Before sandwiching, these are the humble gingernut. Afterwards, they are glorious crispy gypsy creams! The ginger biscuit itself has a lovely sandy texture, but still with a good crunch on the outside. Combined with the chocolate and coffee buttercream filling these were super! Sometimes buttercream is too sickly, but I think the coffee countered it well. In his article, Nigel Slater mentions how he tried dipping the whole biscuit in melted chocolate but that “good cooking is about knowing when to stop” and “it turned out to be too much of a good thing”. I can see why that would be, but totally agree that the sharp drizzle of dark chocolate over the top adds an extra something special (and it really should be dark chocolate, milk would be too sickly). One note: I chose not to level off the ginger, knowing I would want a stronger taste. However if you were going to do them minus the filling (which you could as they would be equally delicious) I would stump it up even more. Now, what next…chocolate bourbons? Enjoy!
Chocolate gypsy creams
Makes 12-14
For the Biscuits:
125g butter
125g golden caster sugar
1tbsp golden syrup
1 large egg yolk
175g plain flour
1tsp ground ginger
50g dark chocolate
Filling:

75g butter
100g icing sugar
1tbsp cocoa powder
1tbsp strong coffee
1. Preheat the oven to 160’C/Gas Mark 3. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the syrup and egg yolk.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and ginger together and stir gently into the butter and sugar. Bring together to form a dough.
3. Remove heaped teaspoons of the dough, roll them lightly into balls then put them on nonstick baking sheets. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden. Leave to cool slightly before transferring to a wire rack.
4. To make the filling, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the cocoa and coffee before using to sandwich the biscuits together.
5. Break the chocolate into small pieces and melt in a small bowl over a pan of simmering water. When the chocolate has melted, push all the filled biscuits up close together on the wire rack, then, using a teaspoon, drizzle the chocolate over them in thin lines. Leave until the chocolate has set.

The Ultimate Brownie!

As you read this I am in Spain and hopefully having a great time. As I write this, however, I am busy packing and getting ready for that holiday so this may be short and full of pictures!
Also as you read this on the 8th August - it is my Mum's birthday! I thought she definitely deserved a mention on here as she is fantastic! She does catering for parties and helping or watching her make huge batches of 150 canapes is truly amazing! She is my inspiration for cooking and I am extremely envious of her talent. Happy Birthday Mummy!
Now, before I get on to the brownies, here are the pictures of the Little Mocha Kisses sandwiched together with coffee icing. The recipe said chocolate but I was out of cocoa powder and didn’t want to get any, plus as I had been disappointed with the coffee flavour and my Dad likes coffee I thought the icing would be a good way to enhance it. And, for once, I was right!

I thought the icing made the cookies better and I think the coffee flavour worked better than the chocolate would have done. My icing was quite wet because I kept adding more coffee as I wanted that strong taste I have had in previous coffee cakes etc. Although I would say it made quite a lot of icing I think it might work well for the batch it is just lots had been eaten by the time I got round to sandwiching!

But enough of the kisses! Brownie time! As you can probably guess from the title I am a real fan of these brownies. They are perfect in my eyes – a nice crunchy topping, then getting softer and squidgier as you go down to the bottom. Beautifully chocolatey and rich. Fairly simple to make and – perhaps best of all, it makes a large pan full!

So here is the recipe:

Brownies, from How to Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson

Fills a 33 by 23 by 5 ½ cm tin, or Nigella says a maximum of 48 brownies. I say – a lot!

375g soft unsalted brownies
375g best-quality dark chocolate
6 large eggs
1tbsp vanilla extract
500g caster sugar
225g plain flour
1 tsp salt
300g chopped walnuts (because I hate nuts apart from almonds and my sis isn’t that keen, we never use these. I think it spoils the gooey texture as well.)

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/gas mark 4. Line your brownie pan – sides as well – with parchment.

2. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a large heavy based saucepan. In a bowl or large measuring jug, beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. Measure the flour into another bowl and add the salt.

3. When the chocolate mixture has melted, let it cool for a bit before beating in the eggs and sugar, then the nuts (if using) and flour. Beat to combine smoothly and then scrape out of the saucepan into the lined pan.

4. Bake for about 25 minutes. When its ready, the top should be dried to a paler brown speckle but the middle still dark and dense and gooey. Even with such a big batch, keep alert, keep checking, the difference between gungy brownies and dry brownies is only a few minutes! Also, they will continue to cook as they cool.

Yum!

Give me a kiss!

I wanted my next bake to be something a bit different that could hopefully result looking more professional! My Mum thought about it overnight and in the morning she gave me two recipes: one for Little Mocha Kisses and one for Oaty Biscuits. I made oat biscuits a couple of months ago and they went horribly wrong so I picked the mocha kisses! They were from Rachel Allen’s Food for Living and I enjoy her programmes (am excited about the latest series due out all about baking!) so they sounded promising. The basic idea was that you made 50-60 little heart shaped coffee biscuits which you then sandwiched together with chocolate buttercream. Hmm...that’s not quite what happened here!

The dough was simple to make especially as I picked the option of whizzing it all in the magimix. You effectively just make an outblanced crumble mixture and add coffee and an egg! Rachel Allen added as a P.S. at the bottom of the recipe that the dough may be soft and could be frozen for 10 minutes to make it easier to handle. A strong understatement? Or perhaps just the fact it was very hot and muggy yesterday but my dough was extremely soft and definitely could not be rolled out. I doubted there would be room in my freezer so popped the mixture in the fridge and left it for 2 hours! I thought this would be enough but every time I tried to take it out it was completely sticky again in a minute! Eventually I gave up dealing with the sticky goop and shoved everything out the way in my freezer, split the dough into 2, wrapped each in baking parchment and left them in the freezer for 10 minutes. Sure enough it worked a treat! Should have followed the recipe from the start.

My rolling pin seems to still be in hiding and this really did cause problems. I tried dusting my water bottle but it just got stuck to the dough. I was really getting sick of this dough now so I just banged it out with my fist and got cutting! The hearts looked very sweet all lined up on their trays (lined with paper – I wasn’t taking any chances after my cookies!) but sometimes they tended to stretch out of shape on the journey from cutter to tray! I didn’t make 60 – probably about 25-30 but that may be because of my love of raw cookie dough :D

Although they may not look it, the ones above were cooked for 10 minutes! My Mum and I were wary of over cooking them so I took them out after the suggested 10 minutes. However it was soon clear they were nowhere near done so they went back in and finished cooking so by the end they had been done for the maximum 15 minutes suggested.

I haven’t yet sandwiched them together with the buttercream as it was late and just as hot by the time I finished them yesterday and to be honest I doubt I will as I’m busy today and off to Spain tomorrow! They are pleasant on their own but I was disappointed with the coffee taste. When I had eaten the raw dough the coffee taste had been perfect and distinct. I was fully expecting a strong coffee cookie but during cooking the coffee seemed to have completely cooked out! Is this possible? So, in the end I ended up with some rather plain shortbready-cookies, quite sweet looking and nice tasting but not exactly what I had intended!

Little Mocha Kisses

Makes about 25 kisses (I got 25-30 biscuits just before sandwiching together!)

175g (6oz) self raising flour
75g (3oz) caster sugar
75g (3oz) butter
2tsp instant coffee powder or granules (could be increased but don’t be put off by the strong raw dough!)
1tsp hot water (I used 2tbsp)
1 egg
For the chocolate icing: 50g (2oz) softened butter
100g (4oz) icing sugar
3tsp cocoa powder

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F/Gas Mark 4.

2. Place the flour, butter and sugar in a food processor and whiz until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

3. In a cup of small bowl, mix the coffee with hot water, then add the egg and whisk to break up. Add this into the food processor and process until the dough comes together.

4. Freeze dough for 10 minutes.

5. Dust the work surface with icing sugar and then roll out the dough until it is 5mm (1/4 inch) thick and, using a small 4cm (1 ½ inch) long heart-shaped cutter, cut out 50-60 heart shapes.

6. Place them slightly apart on 2 baking trays (no need to grease) and bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown and slightly firm at the edges. Remove from the oven and carefully lift off the tray with a metal slice while they are still very hot to prevent them sticking. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

7. To make the chocolate icing – in a bowl using a wooden spoon (or in the food processor again) mix the soft butter, icing sugar an cocoa powder until it comes together. Use the icing to sandwich the cookies together. If you dip a table knife into hot water as you work, it helps the icing spread. Store in a box for 2-3 days.

Tomorrow morning I am going to Andalucia in Spain for 2 weeks so I wont be able to post. However, provided it works, I have scheduled a post for the Serious Ultimate Amazing Chocolate Brownies (my name!) so do check back! Hopefully when I get back I will be full of Spanish food and have lots of lovely pictures to share.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

I gave in and made the icing!! But blogger is being funny so the pictures will be with the brownie post which hopefully will post itself (it is scheduled I am not just crazy!) on the 7th August!