The Tempter, Or The Tempted, Who Sins Most...?

I know I'm late for St. George's day, but these cupcakes are actually from yesterday - I wasn't able to post as in the evening I went with school to see Measure For Measure (our A-Level text) in the theatre - and on Shakespeare's birthday, too! (It's a bit of a British-birthday themed week; if there are any other British icons with a birthday this week you probably shouldn't tell me, or my mother will be putting me on flour rations).

Yesterday's display of patriotism reached its crux just before the performance, when my friends ran up to me wearing party hats at jaunty angles, asking me for Measure For Measure quotes (they then wrote quotes all over the hats). This is apparently how Shakespeare's birthday is celebrated in the more elite circles.


It worked out quite well actually, when I was able to reel off a load of quotes -'ever till now, when men were fond, I smiled and wondered how'- in class today.

'Wow, have you been revising?'

'...Actually, I have it written on a party hat.'

These are just vanilla cupcakes with Union Jack and St George's Flag designs in fondant icing over blue buttercream, but I liked how they turned out. The two flags were so people could decide what they were celebrating - the St George fans went for the red crosses, and the more literate picked the Union Jacks.

I didn't tell them that was how I was categorising them at the time, of course.

Vanilla cupcake recipe
Adapted from 'Cupcakes' by Elinor Klivans
Makes 12 cupcakes

180g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg
1 egg yolk
200g caster sugar
120g butter
1 tsp vanilla essence
120ml sour cream

Preheat oven to 180C and line 12 muffin tin cups with paper liners.

1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a mixer on medium speed until pale and fluffy. Add the egg & yolk, stopping the mixer and scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. On low speed, mix in the vanilla and sour cream until no white streaks remain.

2. Sift (ha!) the flour, baking powder, bicarb & salt together and mix into the batter slowly until it is incorporated and the batter is smooth and pale. Bake at 180C for about 20mins, until a toothpick stuck into the centre comes out clean.

Happy Birthday, Your Majesty!

Picture the scene. The Queen walks into her drawing room early tomorrow morning (does she have a drawing room? Don't spoil the magic with particulars) and sits down, picking up her china teapot to pour herself a nice cup of earl grey. She pulls her favourite teacup towards her (she definitely has a favourite teacup. The Queen and I, we're like this), glances down - and instead of a cup of tea, she sees .... a muffin of tea?

Don't panic, Ma'am! This isn't any old commoner muffin - this is an earl grey and white chocolate muffin, especially for your birthday!

In fact, the Queen should probably panic anyway, because for me to do this I'd have to break into Buckingham Palace some time tonight, probably hotly pursued by the Royal guards, all shooting to kill - but for the Queen's (unofficial) birthday, I think it's worth it. And I think she'd appreciate it (like this, remember?), if her love for tea/cake/royalty is anything approaching mine.

So rather than a birthday cake, a muffin that could just fit in a teacup seemed perfectly fitting.

I'm taking this into school tomorrow, as my friends love the Queen almost as much as I do (almost. I think I'm a very infectious sort of person?), so we'll probably eat them with our cups of (liquid) tea in our free periods tomorrow, while cheerfully discussing how great the Queen is. Man, she is so great. I wish I was the Queen. All it needs is a birthday candle stuck in the middle of one, and things would be perfect.

Actually, I might do the candle thing. Worst case scenario is that the fire alarms go off and I miss History. Sorry, did I say worst?

I found the recipe for these on Eat Me, Delicious - my muffins look pretty different, but I think that's cause I didn't really have enough Earl Grey - I only drink proper, manly tea, so I had to flutter my eyelashes at my previously mentioned friend Alex a bit to scrounge an Earl Grey teabag off her. It seemed a bit cheeky to ask for two - not that that usually stops me - particularly as I spend a large proportion of my time mocking her for drinking flowery, girly tea. You see; the Queen's influence has me being all polite, and civilised! The woman deserves more than a muffin.

Earl Grey White Chocolate Chunk Muffins
American measurements here on Eat Me, Delicious.
Metric conversion by me.
Adapted from Baking From My Home To Yours

Makes 12 (so enough for all the corgis)

120g sugar
280g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground Earl Grey tea (or more)
360ml sour cream
2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
115g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
100g white chocolate chunks (I used 150g, because you can't have too much chocolate when it comes to royalty)

1. Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 190C. Butter or spray the 12 molds in a regular-size muffin pan or fit the molds with paper muffin cups.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and ground Earl Grey tea. In a large glass measuring cup or another bowl, whisk the sour cream, eggs, vanilla, and melted butter together until well blended. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and, with the whisk or a rubber spatula, gently but quickly stir to blend. Don't worry about being thorough - a few lumps are better than over mixing the batter. Stir in the white chocolate chunks. Divide the batter evenly among the muffins cups.

3. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes, or until the tops are golden and a thin knife inserted into the center of the muffins comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing each muffin from its mold.

Happy Unofficial Birthday to the Queen for tomorrow!

Spectacular, Spectacular!

There is a certain baking etiquette for most situations. Birthdays require cake, book groups or sleepovers call for brownies or slices, afternoon tea (because obviously I have that so often) needs biscuits, presents should always involve cookies.

Okay, yes I did make up half of that. Feel free to use it as your staple baking etiquette guide from now on. I live to serve.

You may remember my unfortunate tendency to come up with bizarre ideas. I'm insanely lucky that in my friend group, when I send an email round saying 'WE SHOULD BUILD A TREE FORT!!' I get a load of replies emailed back - not saying, 'er, what have you been smoking?' or even, 'haha, that would be mildly amusing', but saying 'sure, let's do it on ____ at ____'s house!!' XD.

The point is, my amazingly definitive baking ettiquette guide doesn't cover tree-fort building.

Addendum #1: If in doubt, make cupcakes.

When I think of cupcakes, I always turn to this book, and the first thing that caught my eye was lemon coconut snowballs. Everything was merry and bright (I sometimes like to throw in phrases like this when people aren't expecting this; I'm just adding a bit of Julie Andrews to my corner of the blogging world) until I realised that when I added the frosting we were talking about at least nine egg whites here. Bollocks to that, I thought (sorry Julie). Nine egg whites is nine egg whites. What the buggery am I going to do with nine egg yolks? (that is a hypothetical question, by the way, before you all start shouting 'ICE CREAM' at me XD)

Anyway, I flicked through the book a bit more and came across another white cupcake recipe that was almost exactly the same but with just three egg whites in the cake. I also couldn't be doing with the 'let's-make-lemon-filling-even-though-you-could-just-use-lemon-curd-but-shush' malarky that the filling is all about, so (unsuprisingly) I just used lemon curd. To summarize; I've bastardised this recipe to the nth degree (and that's not even including my dodgy conversion). But God, it tastes good.

I seem to be effing and blinding all over the place now (if by 'effing and blinding' you mean 'using three very mild swearwords', which I do). Over-compensating for the Julie Andrews moment, I think. I'm very insecure.

These are pure white cupcakes with a chilled lemon filling, covered in the mystery that is seven-minute-frosting (the first time I've had it - it's not buttercream, it's not whipped cream, it's not meringue... what is it?! Crazy, that's what it is. Crazy good) and sprinkled with tons of coconut flakes. One of my friends described it as 'more or less the best thing in the world', which I think says it all and then some. ('And then some' being that I have the greatest friends XD)

Snowball Cupcakes

adapted to save egg whites from Cupcakes by Elinor Klivans

Makes 12 regular cupcakes (I had enough left over to make a couple of mini ones too, but that was cause I didn't fill my case enough D=)

White cupcake recipe:

175g plain flour

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp salt

180ml milk (it says whole milk, but obviously if you're making these cupcakes you're crazy-healthy and only have semi-skimmed in the house. Right? Yeah, me too)

1 tsp vanilla extract

85g butter

180g caster sugar

3 large egg whites

Filling:

Jar of lemon curd

Seven Minute Frosting:

150g icing sugar

80ml water

3 large egg whites

1/4 cream of tartar (I lived without)

1 tsp vanilla extract

Looads of dessicated coconut to sprinkle ^__^

1. Oven to 180C. Line 12 muffin tin cups with paper liners. 'Sift' (ha! I do not sift) the flours, baking powder & salt into a bowl and set aside. In a separate small bowl, stir the milk & vanilla together.

2. In a large bowl (get your kitchen mixer out) beat the butter and sugar until smooth and light, until it's sugary and in large clumps. Sounds attractive, hnn. On low speed, add the flour mixture in 3 additions and the milk in 2 additions, alternating between the two - so you start and end with the flour. Mix just until the flour is incorporated and the batter is smooth. Set aside.

3. In another large bowl, beat the egg whites nice and fast with clean beaters until they look shiny and smooth, and the beaters form lines in the egg whites. If you stop mixing and lift up the beaters, the whites should cling to them. Stir about 1/3 of the beaten whites into the reserved batter, and use a rubber spatula to fold in the remaining white until just blended.

4. Fill each paper liner with however much mixture it takes to fill all twelve. We go in for accuracy, round here. Hint, you shouldn't have enough to make mini ones as well X__X. Bake for about 20 minutes until the tops feel firm and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean and leave to cool.

5. To make the seven minute frosting, put the sugar, water, egg whites and cream of tartar in a heatproof bowl and beat with a handheld electric mixer (I don't have one, so used one of the handheld mixers that you beat by hand. I fail at terminology. It was bloody hard, is the point) until opaque, white and foamy (about 1 minute).

6. Put the bowl over (but not so the bottom's touching) a pan of barely simmering water. Beat on high speed until the frosting forms a soft peak that stands straight up if you stop the beaters and lift them; about 7 minutes, hence the name. Remove the bowl of frosting from the water, add the vanilla extract, and continue beating for 2 mins more to further thicken the frosting.

7. To fill the cupcakes, cut a cone-shaped piece (about 1 inch across & 1 inch deep) out of the middle of the top of each cake, and keep them aside. Put a spoonful of lemon curd into each hole and replace the cake pieces. Immediately frost the cupcakes (you might need another quick beat of your frosting if you've left it while you filled, here. This is where another person would be good).

8. Put a plate underneath to catch falling coconut before you start frosting. Holding a cupcake in the palm of your hand, dollop a thick layer of frosting over the top and sides of each cupcake. Sprinkle coconut generously over the frosting, letting any extra fall onto the plate to be recycled for another cupcake XD.

The cupcakes can be refridgerated for up to 2 days. If you're spending one of these days tying pirate flags to trees in the freezing cold, they should pretty much survive.

I'm entering these in Cupcakes Spectacular , just because I can. ^__^

The Cookie Dough Cupcake Bake Off

Rather than dedicate another full-size post to cupcakes... find my latest experiment here.

The Great British Blogger

The whole principle of an introductory post is horribly embarassing to me, so I'm going to start off as briskly as possible and hope people just don't notice. I'm Indy. I'm English. I'm sixteen... until, like, tomorrow. I could just wait to post tomorrow and declare myself seventeen, but this way I get to look back on what I do now and if it's crap I can just say, 'ahh, yes, that was back when I was only sixteen... oh, those heady, carefree days!'

I will probably end up saying this a lot.

At the moment I'm swamped in the food I've been making for my birthday tomorrow so that should turn up quite a bit in the next few days/posts. The theme is a vintage-style tea party (British people do this all the time. Really, they do) so unfortunately I can't tell you how this first recipe actually tastes yet as we can't eat it till tomorrow. But I'm sure that when we do eat them, my friends will exclaim 'glorious!' and 'how charming!' through their moustaches, while presenting me with bouquets of roses and suchlike.

If you make them, you get to do this too.

As food blogs seem to have spread to every corner of the world but Britain, I've decided to start off by flying the flag for something I've scoured the internet for - a fail-safe cupcake recipe with metric measurements. None of your cups of sugar or sticks of butter for me, oh no!

The basic cupcake recipe used here is from the June edition of Good Food magazine (where I get practically all my recipes. This blog may just develop into an ode to Good Food magazine after a few weeks) and the filling is one of their suggestions. I didn't say I was going to start off being original.

I have renamed it though (for the reasons below), so I now present...

The Great British Cupcake.

Basic cupcake recipe:

Serves 12 (in a muffin tray)
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

150ml pot natural yoghurt
3 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
175g caster sugar
140g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds
165g butter, melted

1. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases and heat oven to 190C. In a jug, mix the yoghurt, eggs and vanilla. Put the dry ingredients (and a pinch of salt) in a large bowl and make a well in the middle. I didn't really have enough to make a well in the middle, but whatever. Improvise.

2. Add the yoghurty mix and melted butter, and fold in with a metal spoon. Whack it into the cases (about three quarters full) and bake for about twenty minutes (I needed a couple of minutes more) until golden and springy. Cool for a few minutes, then lift them onto a wire rack and leave them to cool completely.

For the filling:
Same cupcake recipe.

Raspberry jam
550g tub of clotted cream (or really heavy double cream will do)
225g punnet of raspberries
Icing sugar

Once the cupcakes are cool, cut the tops off each one and set them aside. Spoon a dollop of jam over each one, then add a couple of raspberries and a generous teaspoon of cream. Put the tops back on, then sieve icing sugar over the top (I don't usually hold with this sieving nonsense, but in this case, go for it).

Marvel at the fresh, English raspberries!
Ooh and ahh at the Cornish clotted cream!
Be impressed at how utterly fail-safe this recipe truly is!

...You want proof about how utterly fail-safe it is?

I wasn't going to publicise this, but when I was making it, I stirred up all the ingredients, put them into cupcake cases, popped them into the oven, licked my spatula with a triumphant flourish... considered how foul the mixture tasted... and realised I'd forgotten to add the sugar.
So I had to whip them out of the oven again, scrape the semi-baked mixture out of their cases and back into my bowl, add sugar, stir like the devil had posessed me, blob them back into cases and bung them in the oven again.

And still, they worked!

See, even if I fail at cooking, this recipe doesn't. Great and British all over the place.

The same cannot be said for me.