Nutella, Kinder Bueno & white chocolate cupcakes

What do you do when you are given a ton of free chocolate at work that's literally about to hit it Best Before date? That's the dilemma I faced last week when my office received in the region of 60+ LARGE boxes of Kinder Bueno's from a left over promotion we had run previously. I know, I know, I can almost hear you crying "Oh no, poor poor Wonk!".

Now, we're a fairly big company but even for us that was no small challenge, especially when half of them are women on diets (Ha! Their loss is my hips gain). Fortunately I have no such burden and as a responsible adult I knew the seriousness of the situation - I mean, my god, we were faced with actually having to toss some of them away *panicks* - and so I bravely stepped forward and scooped up a whole bunch of the little buggers.

However, now that I had them, what was I to do with them all? Enter stage left - our old friend Mr Cupcake.

I used a basic sponge cake recipe for these, in fact, almost identical to the one I used for the Chocolate Orange Drizzle Cake. I then added the chopped up Bueno's and divided the mix in two before adding melted white chocolate to one half, and melted Nutella to the other portion.

While the name of the cupcakes might sound like a total choc-fest, the quantities of chocolate I used were fairly low as I don't really (very often at least) go for mass chocolate overload so if you want a more in your face chocolate experience you'll need to up the quantities because these babies are a more subtle prize.

I also didn't know how much of an effect the Bueno's would have on the mix. I have to be brutally honest here, if I hadn't seen them go in I'd have no idea they were present taste-wise - the hazelnut flavour just didn't survive the baking. I've left the recipe below exactly how I made it but it's either choc chips next time or maybe try 3 packets of Bueno's. They did add a nice speckle to the mix at least, haha!



Talking of which I am exceptionally chuffed with the effect these produce. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I'm a total sucker for novelty stuff and so this 2 tone effect pushes all my buttons. I just can't help but look at these and keep thinking about how cute they are.




What do you mean, a cupcake can't be cute? I beg to differ my friends, I beg to differ.



Nutella, Kinder Bueno & white chocolate cupcakes

175g caster sugar
175g butter or margarine
175g Self Raising Flour, sifted
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs, beaten
2 tablespoons of milk
1 teaspoon of Vanilla extract
2xpack (86g) Kinder Bueno's, chopped
75g white chocolate, melted
75g Nutella, slightly warmed


1 Cream butter & sugar together till pale and fluffy

2 Mix in the egg, milk and Vanilla

3 Add chopped Bueno's and stir well

4 Gently fold in the flour and baking powder

5 Split the mix in half and stir in the melted white chocolate into one, the warm Nutella into the other.

6 Using different spoons to keep the colours from mixing, pop small amounts of both mixes into the bottom of each side of your cupcake papers. The batter moves across the cases fairly quickly so I alternated loading each one up with small amounts rather than just 2 big single dollops of mix. ie. small spoon of dark, then white beside, then added more dark, then more white.

7 Place in a pre-heated oven on Gas mark 4/350 degrees for about 25-30 minutes until they spring back to the touch.

Fly me to the moon...

1969 was a monumental year for the world. I was born! Oh yeah, and I heard some guys landed on the moon or something too.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 first manned moon landing and NASA are doing a couple of cool things in honour of the occasion.

The most high profile thing they've done is re-release digitally enhanced film footage which is pretty nifty to watch. Unless you're a conspiracy theorist, then you're probably suffering from a frenzied bout of hypertension right now. Sucks to be you, huh?

Would be great to have seen new footage too...except some spoon in NASA managed to tape over it all. Seems the tapes were just considered a backup for the all important live broadcast and no one thought to love them and hug them for being something special. Come on guys, it's not exactly rocket science...oh, erm...

That's not all they've being doing though. NASA for the last few days have been tweeting live the entire mission & landing. Check out @apolloeleven on Twitter to join in on the action. Ok, maybe action isn't exactly the best word but it's good, clean geeky fun at any rate.

Google are getting in on the act too. You've heard of Google Earth? Pah, that's nothing! Google Moon is the future. Find out just how small an area was actually explored by the Apollo missions. No wonder they want to go back.

The photo above is one of the Crew Earth Observations Team top ten pictures taken from the International Space Station (ISS). Just one of many free photo's available from the NASA website. Well worth checking out.

Fruit Scones

Baking is such fun. I mean, what else can you do that lets you play with soft squidgy dough, work with all sorts of different shapes and sizes and generally run riot with loads of flour and a rolling pin...and nobody raises so much as an eyebrow at you! How can anyone possibly resist that kind of simple, almost childlike liberation that making a bit of a mess gives you? Certainly not me at any rate.

Yesterday I made some scones. Scones are brilliant. No, they're better than brilliant. They taste good on their own, with butter, with jam, with clotted cream, warm or cold...and best of all, they're dead easy and quick to make. In fact the only real way to mess up scones is by trying too hard and over-working the dough. The lazier you are at combining the ingredients the better and lighter they are. Scones were put on this earth for people like me to make.

What makes these even more fun is that you don't need a mixer or anything to make these, but rather you mainly combine everything with your hands/fingertips. I'm not sure why it's such a joy sticking your mitts in a bowl and getting a bit gooey, but it is.

I had a little bit of buttermilk in the fridge and when poking around for ideas I found a Delia Smith recipe which I adapted.

I used soft light brown sugar instead of caster as in general I just prefer working with that, I love that things come out the oven with just a little bit of a deeper colour. I also slightly upped the amount of fruit used as when I made these before I thought it just needed a wee bit more. Finally, I dusted with a sprinkle of brown sugar before putting in the oven instead of flour.


Before.

Innocent, pale looking rounds sitting on a tray.









After.

Golden brown fluffy scones.










There is of course only one thing remaining to do...and that's to take one still warm from the oven and spread with a little butter.

Mmmmmmm, delicious. Nom nom nom!


Fruit Scones

225g self-raising flour
40g soft light or caster sugar
75g butter or margarine, soft and cubed
pinch of salt
60g mixed dried fruit
1 egg, beaten
3-4 tablespoons buttermilk (can use normal milk)
Sugar for dusting

1 Sift Flour, add salt and sugar and mix. Using your hands, rub the butter into the flour mix until it turns fine and crumbly.

2 Add dried fruit making sure there are no clumps all stuck together and stir.

3 Make a well in the middle of the mix and pour in the beaten egg and 3 tablespoons of buttermilk. Using a knife, 'drag' in the edges of the flour mix from around the outside of the bowl into the middle. Keep doing this until it starts to come together into a dough. Your dough should be moist but not sticking to the edge of the bowl anymore. If it's too sticky dust very small amounts of flour into the mix at a time, if it's too dry and not coming together, add the last spoon of buttermilk.

4 Take your dough ball and roll out into a circle on a floured surface to around an inch depth. Scones do rise in the oven but not by a crazy amount so if you like really fat ones then take this into account when rolling your dough.

5 Using 2 inch cutter, cut out scones as close as possible to each other as you can. You want to avoid re-rolling the dough too much from the scraps.

6 Put on a tray and sprinkle with brown sugar. If you prefer 'shiny' scones like you can get in supermarkets etc, brush with some beaten egg and they will come out glazed.

7 Place in a pre-heated oven on gas mark 7/425 degrees for 10-12 minutes or till brown.

8 Pinch one while still warm and gobble it up!

It's raining right now...

...and when I say it's raining, I mean it's really raining. By the bucket load. With forked lightning and everything.

Gotta love the British summer huh?

It's rare but occasionally I do manage to drag myself away from WDW when staying in Florida. A few years back we took a some days out mid-trip and just jumped in the car having a vague idea where we wanted to go (the Gulf Coast) but with no hotel booked - just drive and find a cheapy hotel when we saw a place we liked. For me, this is absolutely the height of recklessness so it was both a little scary but also quite exciting, never have I been anywhere when I didn't know where I'd be sleeping that night!

Anyhow, as is usually the case when I find something to fret about, it was all absolutely fine. Not only did we find hotels easily, not only did we get ourselves some pretty good deals for being last minute, but we also had the advantage of knowing exactly what the hotel was like before checking in.

However, even knowing the location of our hotel we certainly couldn't have predicted this view of a private marina from our dirt cheap room when we stopped off in Naples. If this is life on the cheap, I'll have more of it, thanks!

What a view to wake up to (though sadly the sky is a little washed out as I was shooting into the early morning sun) and what I'd give to be there right now *sighs and watches the rain again*

Vanilla Crescents

Cakes...bring 'em on baby. Cookies...hmm, not quite so enthusiastic. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not anti them at all, indeed, I'm as happy to scoff a cookie with my tea as the next person if someone offers - but there are rarely cookies in the house and they're something I rarely feel inspired to bake.

However, for once I felt like making something a little different and these appealed because they don't require eggs which although I had some, they were earmarked for something else. I hate supermarkets so there was no way I was going to make a trip just for eggs so out came the trusty cookbooks for something egg-less and easy and they don't get much easier than this to make!

These are a really nice, light butter biscuit. Think Scottish Shortbread type of thing, good with a cuppa though a little messy with the icing sugar dusting, I might just sprinkle brown sugar on next time.

Check out this huge dough ball though, every time I looked at that I kept thinking of that bit in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind when Richard Dreyfuss keeps trying to building a mountain out of everything, LOL.

The dough was very soft when I put in the greaseproof paper but was better after it chilled in the fridge albeit still a little delicate when rolling into the sausage shapes.


Just one thing, unless you are a big cookie person or have lots of hungry people in the vicinity then you might want half or knock off a third of the recipe or something. I didn't notice till the mountain started to grow that this makes 36 cookies. On the flip side they do seem to keep for absolutely ages, they still tasted fine well in to their 2nd week. The Duracell bunny of the cookie world, they just seemed to go on and on ;)

This is adapted from Complete Baking cookbook by Martha Day. This is a great cookbook, I really don't give it anywhere near enough attention as I should!


Vanilla Crescents

110g ground almonds
120g plain flour, sifted
1/2 teaspoon salt
250g butter (don't use margarine here, like shortbread these are a butter biscuit you'll really notice if you use substitutes)
75g Granulated sugar (I used soft light brown sugar)
1tsp vanilla extract
Icing sugar for dusting

1 Cream butter and sugar together till it turns pale and fluffy

2 Add in the Almonds, vanilla, flour & salt, mix well.

3 Gather into a ball and wrap in wax or greaseproof paper. Place in the fridge for 30-60 mins to firm up.

4 Break off walnut sized pieces of dough and roll them into a 'sausage' shape, curve into crescents and place on a greased cookie sheet.

5 Place into a pre-heated oven on Gas mark 3/325 degrees for about 20 minutes until the cookies look dry. Do not wait for these to turn brown, they should remain pale and buttery yellow looking.

6 Allow to cool for just a couple of minutes on a rack then dust lightly with icing sugar while still warm.

Busy old week

Argggh, I'm still here but it's been a busy one for me at work during the day and I've either been busy or tired during the evening to blog at all this week. Boo, hiss.

Not sure if I'll manage today's Friday Flowers tonight but things are deffo quietening down a bit again so normal service of cakes, flowers and talking nonsense to be resumed imminently ;)

Snickerdoodle-doo!

Happy 4th of July (just!) to all my American buddies, even if you did beat the snot out of us in the war ;)

In honour of the occasion I wanted to make something at least a teensy bit American, but in light of last weekend's disaster-fest in the kitchen I also wanted it to be something easy! Snickerdoodles seemed to foot the bill in both respects and also conveniently is on my mini 'To Do' list as well.

I was originally going to adapt the recipe found on Cookies on Friday but then The Girl - one of my partners in crime on the Sweet and Simple monthly bake - mentioned making them and her adapted version from I believe Rachel Allen's 'Bake' was very obligingly in metric - result!

This recipe is very easy and quick to make though of course that doesn't mean I didn't find a way to mess up (a little bit!) - for once I was following the recipe to the letter but missed that I was supposed to flatten them on the cookie sheet with my hand before putting in the oven. Woops! Just meant my first batch were a little plumper than they should be - much like their creator ;)

Pro-tip - your Snickerdoodles should look more like fat, flat cookies when going in the oven...


...and not like truffles!!!

Yes folks, you heard it here first ;)


Snickerdoodles

125g Butter or margarine
110g Caster Sugar + 1 tablespoon for coating
1 egg (beaten)
1 teaspoon Vanilla extract
250g Plain Flour (sifted)
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/3 teaspoon Baking Powder
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon Cinnamon


1 Cream butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy

2 Add egg and vanilla extract and mix well

3 Combine flour, nutmeg, baking powder and salt, then fold into batter until combined.

4 Take walnut sized pieces of dough (a teaspoon helps measure this more easily) and roll into balls. Mix together in a bowl the remaining sugar and cinnamon and roll the dough pieces in the coating.

5 Place on a tray with a few cms space around each and gently flatten the balls slightly with your hand. Place in a pre-heated oven on Gas Mark 4/350 degrees for around 15 minutes or until the edge of the cookie firms up.

Friday Flowers

This last week or so has seen us in the midst of a heat wave, even reaching over 30+ degree's in some places...can you say sizzle? Great for people who want to get a little pink in the park so in a tribute to sunbathers everywhere Friday Flowers today is thoroughly 'in the pink'.




These crinkly little flowers just make me think of pink crepe paper. No, I don't know why either, strange little brain I have some days.














Had enough yet? Oh no, you don't get off that lightly. More pink!






Oh alright, just one more then, a bed of Petunias to finish us off then. Happy Friday everyone.

Chocolate Orange Drizzle Loaf Cake

Hurrah, this is my first ever creation made especially for the Sweet and Simple monthly baking event and let me just say straight from the start, this cake is every bit as moist and delicious as it sounds - it had such a great texture too! Click on any of my pictures for a larger, clearer version and you'll see what I mean.
I did make a few wonk-style tweaks to this but nothing major. The recipe including my changes appears below but I recommend that if you want to make this cake in it's original form or want more detailed information on preparing it then do check out the 'real deal' here.

This recipe is for a 2lb loaf however as there's just the 2 of us at home we'd struggle to get through that by ourselves. I could of made mini-loaves but I wanted to try and keep things as close in spirit as possible therefore despite already owning both a mini-loaf and a 2lb pan I bought a 1lb one especially so I could make 2 - one for home, one for work. By the way, this size loaf is so cute and dinky - they're great!

Much as I love to bake them I also love to eat them. Unfortunately I'm way too 'cuddly' as it is so if I'm to have fun and enjoy my own creations it does mean that on occasion compromises need to be made. Today I did this by going half and half with sugar and sweetener for the cake portion. So ironically, considering I spend most of my time converting cups to metric, I converted the 175g sugar into cups as sweetener is feather light in comparison to normal sugar and measuring by weight wouldn't work. Yay for my Culiverter widget (Pssst! It's over there, just on the left...yeah, there...see it?) which made it child's play for me to make the conversion.

Obviously I've not tasted the original to compare it with but it tasted perfectly 'normal' to me so I would have absolutely no problem making this with part sweetener again in future.

For the syrup I reduced the sugar to 75g as 100g seemed quite a lot in comparison to how much juice I had. Talking of the syrup just look at how this cake positively glistens once it's been poured over the top. When I saw that I almost didn't add the topping because I thought it looked gorgeous as it was!

Last but not least I switched to white chocolate for the topping. To be honest I'd forgotten what a nightmare white chocolate is to work with and for a moment my luscious cake looked like it had turned into a disaster. It kind of separates and turns globby when melted (though if you add more Mascarpone it would turn into a normal frosting). When trying to spread it on the cake I had a fleeting image of cheese on toast - not good!

In the end I gave up trying to spread with a spoon and just worked it over with my fingertips. I wasn't overly impressed with the look though and it even seemed to be a little oily...and therein lay my salvation. Bearing in mind the chocolate was still warm I'm sure the oil would have been reabsorbed back in to it when it cooled again but I wasn't going to take the chance so I grabbed a piece of kitchen towel and gently dabbed up the excess oil...and to my happy surprise it also had the effect of smoothing over the topping much better than my previous efforts had managed. Phew! Not perfect but disaster averted.

Oh and yes, don't be a dipsy like me if you go for 2 loaves, you'll need to add more chocolate to the topping. It didn't occur to me till way too late that with 2 cakes there was more surface area to cover than with the single 2lb loaf (well duh!), hence coverage was a little patchy.

So, the topping worked quite well in the end, it tastes good and looks pretty with the cocoa dusted over the top - and no, believe it or not I didn't notice that HUGE gap along the edge that I'd missed with chocolate until I saw the photo! However, if you want an easy life or get phased by things looking scarily bad until you've put some work in to fixing it (which sadly is pretty normal for me as I mess with recipes so much they nearly always don't go to plan, hehe) then I'd stick with normal milk or dark chocolate which is easier to work with.

One last thing. My loaves both rose in the middle and cracked open a bit, while the original Sweet & Simple picture shows a nice level loaf. I'm not sure if the lighter sweetener meant it rose more but feh, I think they look nice and rustic and as I mentioned before, I nearly left the topping off entirely because I thought they looked so nice.

This isn't a hard recipe however it does have several stages so it's not a particularly quick affair to make (and oh boy am I glad I have a dishwasher). It's definitely a keeper and very yummy (both 'him indoors' and my work mates all made comment unprompted about how good it was) - I'm looking forward to making it again, I bet it would be divine with hot custard as a desert too :)

Anyhow without further ado, here's the recipe.

Chocolate Orange Drizzle Loaf Cake

175g butter or margarine (cubed)
175g caster sugar (I switched to half and half sugar & sweetner (ie Splenda or similar), this measures as just under a cup, 0.921 to be precise or weighed around 120g)
3 large eggs, beaten
Zest of 2 Oranges
175g self raising flour
2 Tablespoons of milk


1 Beat the butter and sugar together until it turns pale & creamy

2 Add in the egg a bit at a time, mixing well.

3 Stir in milk and zest then gently fold in sifted flour.

4 Split batter in to 2x1lb greased or lined loaf pans (I use silicon paper liners, they're brilliant!) and place in a pre-heated oven on Gas Mark 4/350 degree's for about 35 minutes or until it passes the toothpick test.

5 Leave to cool in pans or papers. When cooled use a toothpick or skewer to make little holes in the cake surface. This is to allow the syrup to soak through the crust.


Orange Syrup

Juice of 1 orange (I used closer to 2 as they are needed for the zest anyhow).
100g granulated sugar (I just went for 75g as it seemed plenty)

1 Place orange juice and sugar in a pan and gently heat until sugar dissolves. Stirring constantly bring to the boil for a couple of minutes for it to reduce a bit. It's frothy man! (Oh boy, really showing my age there, haha!)

2 Spoon over cake(s) immediately before it cools and thickens and once it's finished soaking through you can remove from pans/papers.


Chocolate topping

50g dark or milk chocolate (I used white)
(10g Mascarpone to make it more spreadable, needed more though!)
Sprinkles of choice - optional (I dusted with cocoa powder)

1 Melt the chocolate and Mascarpone and mix well. Be careful when doing this - white chocolate goes a very strange texture at the best of times when melted but is more prone to over-heating than regular chocolate.

2 Using a spatula or spoon, spread the chocolate evenly over the top of the cake. As I was working with white chocolate I also had to pat it down after with a kitchen towel to take out some of the excess oil and help smooth it further.

3 Dip a dry pastry brush into the cocoa, hold a few inches above the cake and lightly tap, dusting the powder lightly over the top.