in the midst

So for my step mum’s 50th birthday, I baked. On day one, brownies, made with 20 ounces of chocolate. Day two brought fluffy white cupcakes, which were more like little pound cakes than the overly sugary cupcake. Though they weren’t quite a pound each. In day three came icing and sprinkles. Fit for any birthday party.

I love the colour of the icing.

Incredibly chocolatey.

The white bits are chunks of white chocolate. They were well taken at the party.

The recipes for these came from Nigella Lawson’s book, How to Be a Domestic Goddess. This book is fabulous. By far my favourite cooking book so far. The icing recipe, however, came from my father, which he learned to make from my great aunt. Bless her. I’m not sure he’d appreciate me posting his cupcakes but I want to anyway, his icing came out too thick and thus did not spread very well. These are not lemon cupcakes, just cupcakes with bright yellow icing.

They should be lemon, don’t you think?

His also had an issue with sprinkles. The icing dried too fast. Lesson learned. He made a good effort so let’s applaud him anyway.

Banana bread is so wonderful. Fluffy and banana-y, with the addition of walnuts and raisins, maybe a splash of rum. Yum. I love it. This time I made it in my mini bundt pan, and came out with six adorable mini bundt banana bread cakes.

Half a dozen mini bundt cakes.

Could you believe that bundt isn’t built into the dictionary in Firefox? Gosh, what has the world come to? Anyway, I thought it would add to the cuteness if I sliced up one of them like one would slice the normal size bundt cakes. So here is the outcome. Adorable, no? Or perhaps, I’m just one of those odd foodies. You can see the run soaked raisins in the cross section, and the fluffiness, and wonderful colour.

Mini bundt cakey goodness.

I feel like this post is lacking. So I have for you today, more fruit! I can here the shocked gasps already. What can I say? I love fruit. I have fruit and yoghurt for breakfast every day, so there’s always the opportunity for it to turnout beautifully and thus I want to take a photo.

Today I have for you a gala apple, green grapes, and pineapple slices.

As a side note, the recipe for the banana bread came from the book How to be a Domestic Goddess, by Nigella Lawson. I altered it slightly to suit what is in my pantry and dietary preference.

Banana Bread

(this recipe calls for using a 9 x 5 loaf pan, I used the mini bundt pan with no complications)

scant 1/2 cup raisins (original called for golden raisins)
3 ounces dark rum (or bourbon)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (10 ounces) whole wheat bread flour (original called for all purpose white flour)
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup natural cane sugar
2 large eggs
4 very ripe bananas, mashed
1/4 cup walnuts, chopped
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Put the raisins and rum in a smallish saucepan and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat, cover, and leave for at least an hour to allow the raisins to absorb as much liquid as possible. Then drain.
Preheat the oven to 325°F and get started on the rest. Put the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium-sized bowl and combine well. In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then the mashed bananas. Then, stir in the walnuts, drained raisins, and vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture, a third at a time, stirring well after each bit. Scrape into the loaf pan (or as I did, use a spring loaded ice cream scoop for the mini bundts) and bake in the middle of the oven for 1-1 1/4 hours (I cut the time to 40-50 minutes). When it’s ready, an inserted toothpick should come out cleanish. Leave in the panuntil cool to the touch, and then turn out onto a rack.

Makes 8-10 slices, or 6-10 mini bunt cakes. (I over filled my pan this time, next time I imagine to get 8-10 out of it.)

I need a new title for this, before it gets old and overexploited. Oh well. One thinly sliced granny smith apple; one cara cara navel orange (this is my favourite kind of orange, it totally wins for flavour and beauty); a nice bit of pineapple, in chunks; a quarter meyer lemon, cut into tiny wedges; and a quarter lime, minced.

Bright, colourful, beautiful, delicious. Though, the apple was too sweet.

I minced the lime in order to intersperse the strong flavour, rather than concentrate it, since concentrated it would be really overpowering I think. I liked the outcome, though I should have sliced the apple thicker.

Creative title, I know. Salads are fun, though. You can put any mix of things in them and they come out wonderfully every time. (as opposed to a cake or cookies or such, in which everything must be measured out precisely.) Nothing beats a salad for simplicity, well, aside from fresh vegetables alone, but what fun is that?

Julienning is an art to be mastered.

I still have yet to master it. Maybe in a few years. They’re still pretty little things, carrots, however they may be cut. And thus, my outcome.

Happily piled into a dish.

I had in this: one Asian pear, sliced into rectangularish pieces; a few leaves of red leaf lettuce, cut into square pieces; two carrots, julienned; a quarter tomato, cut into wedges; and a quarter cucumber, cut into long thin wedges, seeds removed. I topped it with balsamic vinaigrette, which I just love.

For my sister’s birthday, I made a cake, a chocolate cake because she loves them. Personally I don’t fancy them so much, I’d much rather indulge in a fruity cake. Chocolate is better suited in other applications, such as ganache, or hot cocoa. Or even, plain boring chocolate bars. Anyway, I followed orders of my father and created a chocolate cake (or two). The cake recipe is for a German chocolate cake, which somehow isn’t even German, but American. Who would’ve thought? I replaced the traditional coconut-pecan frosting with a mocha buttercream. The espresso was definitely overpowering, even with the pure cocoa bar I used, so if I was to make this again I would either up the chocolate, or lower the espresso content.

Four ounces baking chocolate, chopped.

There is a silicone spatula somewhere in there.

Combine beaten egg whites with the previous mixture.

Freshly baked, in five inch cake pans, yes.

Frost with mocha buttercream.

The buttercream recipe called for semisweet chocolate. I used100% cocoa and it still wasn’t very chocolatey. Oh well, I think it’s just me, I like my chocolate rich and very dark. The chocolate I snack on has a cocoa content of 85%. Compare that to the typical 10% in milk chocolate, or the 50% or so that is in so called dark chocolate. Yeah. I’m probably an extremist.

So immediately after I finished frosting, Liz was all ready to cut it. Like, I nearly didn’t get that last shot because of this. So I took the knife from her and got my photo. And then I proceeded to cut her a fairly large sized slice, and she cried out “that isn’t big enough” Yeah sure whatever, here, have a quarter of the cake. It’s what she wanted, and for her birthday, whatever floats her boat. =D So yeah, in the photo, that big missing part of the cake in the background was her “slice”.

And thus…

I also made a shorter two layer version, because I was concerned that this one would collapse with another two layers. And it very well could have considering after cutting away a good portion it was ready to topple over.

The recipes came from the book The Art of Chocolate, by Elaine González.