Vanilla and Chocolate Marble Cupcakes

 

Not very seasonal for this Fall/Thanksgiving time of year, but I wanted to share these cupcakes I made a few weeks ago as it was a try at marble cupcakes that I had never made before.

 

I was SUPER excited to also first be using my new 24 cupcake baking pan that I got for my birthday this Summer.  So much easier to make lots of cupcakes, and bake them evenly and quickly.  We had the youth group over for a back-to-school but also housewarming event so I needed cupcakes for that, and then the following day my choir threw me a really nice 'baby day' celebrating together with cake and sunshine so this was my sweet treat that I took along for us to all share... especially as I'm not at choir rehearsals this semester so no snacks to take there each Tuesday!

 

 

I wanted to make cupcakes, and the marble idea just popped in my head!  I've never tried it but have seen it many times and thought it was time for me to try it too.  I had one other idea of cupcake flavour but thought I would wait until Autumn really hit to try that, so I went with basic vanilla and chocolate flavours but to make it more exciting it would be marbled.  I decorated it with a vanilla buttercream and milk chocolate curls. 

I whipped up two batches of cake batter... Here's the recipe...

Ingredients:

For the vanilla ~
4oz unsalted butter
4oz sugar
2 eggs
4oz self-raising flour
1 tsp vanilla essence

For the chocolate ~
4oz unsalted butter
4oz sugar
2 eggs
4oz self-raising flour (minus 2 tbsp)
2 tbsp cocoa powder

 

Method (for both batches):

1.  Preheat oven to 375°F. 
2.  Cream together the butter and sugar in mixer until light and fluffy.

 

3.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well between each addition.
4.  Add vanilla essence *if on the vanilla cake batch*
5.  Sift in self-raising flour *and if on the chocolate batch, take out 2tbsp flour and replace with cocoa powder)
6.  Mix well until all combined.
7.  When both batches are made, take a small cookie scoop and place one scoop of vanilla cake batter, and one scoop of chocolate cake batter into each cupcake liner.

 

8.  Using a cake tester/skewer, swirl the two scoops together to achieve the marble effect.

 

9.  Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes, until cooked through and spring back to the touch.

 

10.  Cool on a cooling rack and admire the marbled effect, and how cool and unique each cupcake looks!

 

11.  Using a 18oz icing sugar, 12oz unsalted butter, 1.5 tsp vanilla essence and 1.5 tbsp milk mixture, make buttercream to frost the cupcakes. 

 

12.  I used a large Wilton closed star tip to pipe the buttercream onto the cupcakes.  I was sad to be covering up the marble design of the cupcakes!

 

 

13.  Using a potato peeler, a few curls of chocolate later and these cupcakes were ready to be eaten!

 

 

Thanks Mum for this amazing new cake server you got me for my birthday in August, it's my new favourite!  I love it :-)

 

So next time I make cupcakes, I'll try the more Autumn-y recipe I had in mind, so watch this space for more baking soon!



Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Mmm I'm excited to be blogging about these cookies today.  I had forgotten how much I loved them, until I re-baked them last weekend and ate a few of them along the way! 

 

 

Do you remember last year, when our church youth group ran the first Fun(d) Fair in order to raise FUNDS while having FUN for World Vision!?  Check out all the games and exciting things we did, and what I baked for the bake sale in 2013 here.

 

This year, we wanted even more baked goods to sell, as they were a big hit last year and we ran out before the event was over.  So, with everyone baking the Friday before the event, I had to get my thinking cap on as well.  I wanted something small, and easy to buy one or two of, but also needing a recipe that made a LOT of whatever the bake was.

 

I couldn't think for a while what to make... I considered a rectangular cake cut into small squares, but I didn't want it to dry out.  I didn't have time to make all the components of the Cherry Bakewell traybake that I also love so much.  And I've made SO many cupcakes recently I didn't want to go down that path either.

 

Then I remembered these cookies I made from the Taste of Home 'Best Loved Cookies and Candy' 2010 magazine!  I made them for my piano students in 2010, in a Christmas treat bag full of various cookies and candy, and they were definitely my favourite out of the lot.
 





 

A deliciously soft and chewy inside, with a crinkle top, slightly crusty outside layer with a full on chocolate flavour.  Perfect with a glass of cold milk!

 

 

Ingredients (to make 3 1/2 dozen cookies):

 

2 cups (12 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

2 tablespoons butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 egg whites

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup water

1/2 cup icing sugar

 

Method:

 

1.  In a microwave, melt 1 cup cholate chips.  Stir until smooth, and set aside.

 

2.  In a small bowl, beat the butter and sugar until crumble - about 2 minutes.

 

3.  Add the egg whites and vanilla, and beat well.

 

4.  Stir in the melted chocolate.

 

5.  Combine the flour, baking powder and salt, and gradually add to the butter mixture, alternately with water.

 

6.  Stir in the remaining chocolate chips. 

 

7.  Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours, or until easy to handle.

 

8.  Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

 

9.  Shape the dough into 1-inch balls and roll in icing sugar.

 

10.  Place 2 inches apart on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray

 

11.  Bake for 10-12 minutes in pre-heated oven.

 

12.  Leave to cool on the tray for 5 minutes, and then move to the cooling rack to cool completely. 

 

And then, all that is left to do is enjoy these delicious cookies!... And if, like me, you're donating them to a good cause - try not to eat too many of them first!!

 

 

And in good news, despite the weather (the afternoon of the Fun(d) Fair was miserable and wet!) we still managed to raise $898, and then, along with some generous donations the next morning we actually BEAT our 2013 amount, raising over $1200 for World Vision :-D

Pumpkin Palooza!

Happy Halloween week everybody!

I'll be honest, this is probably the closest thing to a Halloween post you'll be getting from me!  I'm not the biggest Halloween fan, and really the thing I'm most excited for this week on Halloween is that it is going to be a DAY OFF work!  My piano students aren't having lessons so I'll be baking my Christmas cakes all day instead :-D  I'm just switching holidays that's all :)

But on Friday we ran a Pumpkin Palooza night for the youth group ... we carved pumpkins, made them a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte replica in the crockpot, ate pumpkin cookies, and played the most awesome pumpkin bowling game!  It was a really fun night, and I was excited to carve my PANDA PUMPKIN!!  

It makes me and my love for pandas happy this Halloween!  

So in addition to all the pumpkin adventures of Friday night I also got baking on Saturday inspired by leftover pumpkin puree.  I usually steer clear of pumpkin baking as it isn't something I have used a lot of before, and if I was choosing myself I'd go with a different flavour - probably lemon, let's be honest.  But the pumpkin puree was daring me to try using it so I thought a loaf cake would be perfect... Then my brain started whirring with ideas... What other flavour could I use?  How could I make this a fun bake?  What could I do to make it more pumpkin-y?  

The result, my chocolate pumpkin in a pumpkin loaf!  

This is the first time I have tried the 'surprise cake' idea... but I've seen the polka dot ones a lot, and then also some really fancy ones like owls and panda bears.  A bit too tricky to try the first time, and I have already hit some bumps in this first trial run.  Next time I know what to do better and what worked so that's good anyway, even if it wasn't perfect this time!

It was a late night bake in a very messy kitchen so I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of the baking process but I will tell you what I did and how I did it and hopefully you can visualise what went on, or just ask if you have any questions about it :)

First things first, choose two flavours and or colours for the two parts of the loaf.  I chose chocolate cake for the pumpkin which would be the hidden surprise inside the cake (in hindsight this could have been darker and denser) and the pumpkin flavour which gave a great yellowy-brown colour.  

To find out the ingredients and method for the bakes check out the recipes at the bottom of the post.

 

I baked the chocolate cake first in my loaf pan, and left it slightly underbaked so it wouldn't get too dry in the second bake.  Using my pumpkin cookie cutter I bought on a whim from Michaels I cut pieces from the loaf cake.  I cut off the bottom part of the pumpkin as the cutter was a bit too big for the chocolate cake I had.  One mistake here was that the pumpkin chocolate pieces were not all exactly equal which did mean that the pattern right through the cake wasn't completely equal, oopsie.  Next time I'll make sure to use the whole cookie cutter to avoid this inaccuracy happening again!

Once the chocolate pumpkins were all laid out I arranged them a line through the loaf pan (boo I didn't quite have enough good sized ones to fill it, but 3/4 of the cake was filled!) and poured the pumpkin cake batter over the top making sure they were all covered.  I think the pumpkin batter was heavier than the chocolate cake batter, so next time perhaps I'll switch it around to stop the pumpkins getting squashed down by the pumpkin!

Back into the oven it went, and a while later I had my first surprise cake!  A pumpkin sitting in pumpkin :)  I'm pleased with most of it, and I definitely know more about this kind of baking for next time.  I can't wait to try some other designs.

I tried adding some more pumpkins to the equation with some chocolate pumpkins using a silicone pumpkin mold.  I think I hadn't left it to dry for long enough after pre-washing it as some of the chocolate had a funny coating on it - still edible but they look like those fancy white pumpkins instead of the brown ones I was going for ... oh well!

So before we ate this I cut into the cake to check out what it looked like on the inside.  Kind of cool but maybe needed more colour contrast?

The chocolate cake was yummy and the pumpkin cake was so moist and delicious (I'm not even a huge pumpkin fan!) but I did like this! 

So, however you're celebrating this week - whether it's lots of costumes and parties with the kids, or a night at home giving out candy, or maybe if you're like me - enjoying some time off away from Halloween thinking and planning for the next (and best!) holiday of CHRISTMAS, have a good one :)

Recipe time now!  Firstly, for the chocolate cake (adapted now so that it will be enough to fill the loaf pan and get better cut outs)...

Ingredients:

5oz self-raising flour

1oz cocoa powder

6oz sugar

6oz unsalted butter

3 eggs

Method:

1.  Pre-heat the oven to 375°F/ 190°C and grease and line a loaf pan with parchment paper.

2.  Cream together the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl.

3.  When the mixture is light and fluffy, beat in the eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl as you go.

4.  Sieve in the flour and mix together.

5.  Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes until the cake is no longer liquidy and a cake tester comes out almost clean!

6.  Turn the cake out onto a cooling rack, and once it is cooled down slice cake and cut out each slice with a cookie cutter.

7.  Stand up each piece of cake, line up through the loaf pan and pour pumpkin batter over the top.

... For the pumpkin cake (which can be made while the chocolate cake is baking, or cooling!).  Recipe adapted from this recipe - thanks Summerhill Market (coincidentally in Toronto!!).

Ingredients:

1.5 cups all purpose flour

2/3 cups sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground allspice

1/4 tsp salt

2 large eggs

1 cup canned pumpkin puree (not the pumpkin pie filling)

1/3 cup vegetable oil

Method:

1.  Pre-heat the oven to 350­°F/ 175°C (and re-grease and re-line your loaf pan with parchment paper placing the chocolate pumpkin cake cut outs along the bottom middle of the pan.)

2.  Mix together the pumpkin puree, eggs and oil.

3.  Add the sugar to the mixture.

4.  Sieve the flour, baking powder, soda and salt into the pumpkin and sugar mixture.  Beat until all incorporated.

5.  Pour the batter over the chocolate cake pumpkins and around the edges making sure that the chocolate pumpkins are covered.

6.  Bake in the oven for around 50 minutes or until a cake tested comes out clean.  Let it cool in the pan and then turn out onto a wire rack.

Thanks for reading!  

* Happy Halloween and Happy Baking! *

Happy Birthday to Me ~ from my Husband!

Today is the day you see the first ever guest post featured on Sew Lah Tea Dough!  I stayed close to home for the first one, and well, I'm a little biased after all.  Today you get to meet my amazing husband and see the incredible and delicious birthday cake he made for me :-)  I'm the baker in the house, but since we were married I've been lucky enough to have a birthday cake surprise each year!  This year was particularly yummy, and inventive.  I came home from work, not being able to look in the kitchen but smelling some tasty flavours in the air, before being let in on the secret on my birthday-eve.  He even said he had been taking photos as he went along - just like I do when I'm making or baking something I know I will blog about... sooo yes, after all that hard work - he definitely gets to write the blog post for me this week and I'll be back next week!  Ciao for now, and may I introduce the baking version of my husband Jonathan ♥

Hello.  I am Jonathan.  I am usually not a baker - at all!  I love to get in the kitchen and cook, but usually that is freestyling, and I'm pretty sure freestyling a cake would basically result in either a puddle of goo or a large hockey puck.  But for Hannah's birthday, I thought it wouldn't really be fair to make her bake her own cake, so I tried to find a recipe and whip something up.

I know Hannah likes chocolate, so I wanted to make a chocolate cake.  Not only that, I wanted to make a cake that has actual real chocolate in the mixture.  You'd think the internet would be full of recipes like this, but if you thought that (like I did), you would be wrong.  Almost all the chocolate cake recipes I found use cocoa powder to chocolatify their batter, so I had to keep searching.  I knew I wanted to use Dairy Milk bars, because Hannah likes it, and because we had a bunch of it left over sitting in a baggie on the counter.  Even the Cadbury website didn't have a recipe I could use.  Finally I found one - on the Hershey chocolate website and decided to use it, but substitute one brand for the other!

Ingredients (Serves 12-16):

1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
4 eggs
6 (1.55 oz each) Hershey's Milk Chocolate, melted (I used Dairy Milk here instead)
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Dash salt
1 cup buttermilk or sour milk (I did the add-a-teaspoon-of-vinegar trick because I forgot to buy buttermilk)
1/2 cup Hershey's Syrup (I used Nesquik, because that's what we had)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350°F.  Grease and flour 10-inch tube pan or 12-cup fluted tube pan. (Make sure you get every inch of the pan greased and floured.  Missing a spot is bad, as we will see later.)
2. Beat butter in large bowl until creamy.  Gradually add granulated sugar, beating on medium speed of mixer until well blended.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add melted chocolate; beat until blended.
3. Stir together flour, baking soda, and salt.  Add to chocolate mixture alternately with buttermilk, beating until blended.  Add syrup and vanilla, beat until blended.  Pour batter into prepared pan.
4. Bake 1 hour and 15 minutes (mine was in for an hour and a half, when I thought it was done, but in the end it was still maybe just under being well done), or until wooden pick inserted in the centre of cake comes out clean.  Cool 10 minutes, remove from pan to wire rack.  Cool completely.  Sift powdered sugar over top (OR make a glaze, like I did!)

So yes.  That is what I did, with the few changes I made annotated in the recipe.  As I mentioned at the end, I wanted to make some kind of glaze/icing for the cake.  It was already a Bundt cake - not a traditional birthday cake - and I wanted to make it a bit more celebratory.  One of Hannah's favourite things to do with chocolate is to dip it in her tea.  Her best thing is getting a large chocolate Easter egg, breaking it into pieces, an using them to scoop up the tea, letting it melt a bit, and then drinking it.  So what better icing for her chocolate flavoured cake than a tea flavoured glaze!

Again, it was off to google I went.  After looking through a number of different recipes, I ended up finding one for Chocolate Chip Shortbread with Earl Grey Tea Glaze at Good Cooks.  I used this as my jumping off point, but I wanted to make it a 'normal' tea glaze, using Tetley tea bags.  Here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup boiling water
3 bags of tea
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon butter, softened

Directions:

1. Pour boiling water over tea bags, allow to steep 3-5 minutes.  Remove tea bags.

2. In a small bowl, stir together powdered sugar and butter.  Gradually stir in enough tea to make glaze thin enough to drizzle. (DON'T MAKE IT THIN!  I guess this is meant for drizzling over cupcakes, but in this case I wanted it to be poured over and to ooze down the sides of the cake.  I was actually afraid I was leaving it too thick, but it did dribble down nicely.  But you want it quite thick - kind of like molasses.)

And that's all she wrote... or in my case, 'he wrote'.   Baked the cake, had the heart-stopping experience of trying to turn it out of the pan, had a little bit stick to the pan (grease and flour properly please!), and had a nice gooey glaze drip down the sides.  I think the cake is delicious - I think Hannah does too - and we shared a bit with my two grandmothers who both said it was moist and good.  They kind of didn't believe I had baked it :(  But here's the proof, real life photos!  ... Happy Birthday Hannah!

Right - gotta go - time to eat some cake!

~ ~ ~ So there it is!  My first featured guest on the blog... something I'd like to start doing more in this coming year (...yeh, I run on school years still).  Hope you liked it!  It really was a good cake, and he's done a good job right?!  #BestHusband ♥