Stalk-Eye for a Saturday

I cannot express how very excited I am about this movie...

It'll keep me going until the Avengers comes out on DVD!

Tickled Pink!

There's been no baking this week; it's far too hot!!

So here's one I made earlier.

This one is putting the cupcake stand to good use... and getting to play with the sprinkles...

I do love my sprinkle collection. And I quite like pink as well. You might not have noticed.

 Chocolate hoops! Sugar pearls!

Chocolate flakes! Sugar glitter!

Hundreds and Thousands!  Silver balls! 

Chocolate rice balls! More Chocolate Sprinkles!

 As you can see the icing was applied with a trowel!

I do however have a new icing bag.... soon... soon!

Stalk-Eye for a Saturday

Never forget!

Double Oscar Nominated!!

Chocolate Crackle Cookies

Now these are magic!!

This recipe came from the magnificent Bakerella website. (looking back now, mine are some what larger than hers... and her photos may be a smidgen better. I suppose.) Her recipe came from a Martha Stewart webby. I have made some adjustments...

Since this was an American website, and I'm far too lazy to convert the cup measurements into useful weights, I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to use yet another Christmas present from another brother... This time the cup cake measuring cups.

 Pink and Shiny!

Right... On we go:

Chocolate Crackle Cookies

• 8 oz Dark Chocolate
• 1 1/4 cups Self-Raising flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 4 oz softened butter
• 1 1/3 cups light-brown sugar, firmly packed
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup milk
•  icing sugar
• granulated sugar

(as you can see, I've changed some of the amounts from the original American recipe. What's a stick of butter when it's at home? Well, it's about 4 oz, as it turns out.  And I've removed the amounts of icing and granulated sugar. I just poured the sugars into two saucers, and put more there as required.)

Now... Martha starts her recipe by suggesting you pre-heat the oven to 180oC.
Woah there, Skippy. There's two hours of refrigerating to be done before you bake them!

I would recommend using a stand mixer with a nice big bowl - I had to do mine by hand, as the mixer's still packed away somewhere... It just made it much more fiddly!

• Start by chopping up the chocolate, and melting it over a bowl of simmering water. Allow it to cool slightly.

• Sift the flour, cocoa powder and salt into a large bowl
• In a mixer bowl beat together the butter and light-brown sugar until fluffy and light.
• Add the eggs and vanilla and continue to beat
• Pour in the melted chocolate - reducing the mixer speed to low
• Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the milk until combined (here's where the original recipe used 1/3 cup of milk, but I  found that made for a very wet, slightly unmanageable mix, so suggest reducing the initial amount of milk, and adding more if required)
• here's where I stopped reading the instructions....
• Chill the mix in the bowl (in the fridge... or in the freezer for speed

• And this is where you should heat the oven!
• Use the patented scooping with a pair of tea-spoons method to scoop out small lumps of dough 
• Drop each into the saucer of granulated sugar and roll them until completely coated

• Drop the sugared balls into the saucer of icing sugar, and roll them around again.

• Place the balls onto lined baking trays, about two inches apart, and place them into the oven.
• Bake for 12-15 minutes

When they're cooked they'll have flattened and have a magically crackled sugar coating!

• Leave the biscuits on the tray for 5 minutes, to allow them to firm up.

• When firm, remove the biscuits, and cool on a wire rack

Extermi-cake

This is a bit of an old one...

A themed cake for a Dr Who obsessed friend. A rather simplistic representation of a terrifying classic!


The Chocolate Dalek Cake

This started life as two 9inch square chocolate cakes, with a basic sponge recipe with the following ratios -
4 marg: 4 sugar: 2 egg: 3.5 SR flour: 0.5 cocoa powder

So, to start you need to form the base - this was made with a jigsaw of pieces: a semi circle, a square, two triangles and two rectangles, assembled on the tray.

Make up some chocolate flavoured butter cream icing and begin the plaster work!
Start with the "skirt" of the dalek:

Vertical(ish) strips for the skirt, horizontal for the head.

 
Position chocolate fingers on the skirt, and fill in the vertical sections with giant chocolate buttons.
I needed to break some of the biscuits to fill in some of the gaps...

 

Mmmm - look at all that chocolatey goodness!



I've even decorated the sides of this one. I'm nothing if not a stickler for details!

 For the plunger part of the dalek I coated a silicon cup cake mould with several layers of melted chocolate, dip the case in the chocolate, or brush melted chocolate on to it. Allow to cool, and repeat at least 4 times until you have a nice thick coating.

This is roughly what it should look like!

 
Look... there are the markings from the bottom of the case! (I melted those out before handing the cake over!)

And if I may draw your attention to the top of the dalek...? Look little fruit pastille lights! Two orange fruit pastilles skewered onto a cocktail stick. Magic!

Sunday's Sweets - Rum Truffles

Rum Truffles 

200g Dark Chocolate
60ml Single Cream
30g Butter
1tsp Rum Flavouring (adjust to taste!)
Pot of chocolate sprinkles

-Chop the chocolate into small pieces, and place in a large heat proof bowl.

-Heat the cream and butter together in a small saucepan and stir regularly. The mixture should be very hot, but don't let it boil!

-Pour the hot liquid over the chocolate. The heat from the cream will melt the chocolate

-Stir together gently until smooth and glossy. Add the rum flavouring and stir again.

-Leave the mixture to cool slightly before refrigerating for at least two hours.

-Remove from the fridge for about 30minutes - just to soften slightly; it's too hard to work straight off.

-Pour the chocolate sprinkles into a saucer

-Using a pair of teaspoons scoop out dollops of mixture, and form into balls with your hands.

-Roll the balls in the sprinkles until they're well coated. (it helps if the ball is freshly rolled when you do this part - They're stickier then!)

- Pat the sprinkles into the surface, and place the truffle into a petit fours case

This recipe makes between 20 and 30 truffles, obviously depending on how big you make them...

If (for some bizarre reason) you're not going to eat them immediately keep them refrigerated, but for no longer than a week.

The recipe book suggested using 1 tsp of rum, but I found that didn't taste very rummy!  So I either use more rum, which risks making a very wet mix, or using the rum flavouring, which is more intense.

• It's easy to make other varieties of truffle. Orange flavoured ones are always lovely.
• Try some mint, that would work well with dark chocolate
• White chocolate and brandy was very popular, but be warned! White chocolate cannot be substituted in place of the dark. Since it has less cocoa solids (no cocoa solids?) it reacts very differently. You need far more chocolate, and less cream.

Stalk-Eye for a Saturday!

Renner is moving... He's setting up here. How very exciting!

Lovely lovely Jeremy Renner!
And some mighty fine Oscar-worthy acting.
mmm.

White Chocolate and Cherry Cookies

White chocolate and cherry cookies:
200g softened butter
85g light muscavado sugar
85g golden caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
225g self raising flour
100 g chopped white chocolate
85g glace cherries

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C.


Cream the butter and sugars together -

cream them!!!

Add the vanilla extract and mix again, then add the egg and beat thoroughly.
Sift the flour into the bowl and partially combine the ingredients.

Add the chocolate and the cherries, and mix until just combined. Try not to over work the mixture.

Using a pair of teaspoons scoop dollops of the cookie dough...

onto greased, lined baking trays...

 Don't put too many cookies on the tray, as they do expand during baking. They pretty well double in size.
Look at that cookie-doughy goodness!  

Bake for approximately 15 minutes (or until golden)

Remove from the oven, but leave on the trays for about 5 minutes to firm up, before putting them on wire racks to cool.
(or, if you're anything like me, take the photo and eat them while they're deliciously warm!)

Little Lemon Cup Cakes

I thought I might avoid some tidying today by doing a spot of baking. And I also thought I'd give the cup-cake-baker another try...

This was a Christmas present from my brother:

I've used it once before with slightly dubious results. It makes a very funny smell, and it's been hidden away for months since.

Little Lemon Cup Cakes (in a little cup cake cooker)
Makes 7 cakes -

2oz Marg
2oz Caster Sugar
1 egg
2oz Self-raising Flour
zest of half a lemon
juice of quarter of a lemon
Icing sugar (sorry... I never weigh icing sugar!!)

Switch on the device to bring it up to temperature.

Cream the marg and sugar together until light and fluffy.

Beat in the egg

Sift the flour and fold in thoroughly

Add the zest of the lemon, and half the lemon juice, and mix.

Fill cake cases with the mixture, and place in the baker  (that's the cup cake baker... not the cook...)

This is what they looked like after about 10 minutes, they were going brown, but were still soggy, so they had another few minutes of cooking.

 mmm. Toasty! Leave to cool slightly on a wire rack.

Mix up the icing using the icing sugar, the remainder of the lemon juice and a splash of water.
Drizzle the icing on the cakes, and finish with a pretty little jelly lemon slice!

So, what was the result? Well... the funny smell is still there, don't know what that is! It doesn't seem to cook the cakes very evenly. They were cooked all the way through, certainly, but the cakes browned at different rates, and all of them had a slighty black patch on the bottom from the heating element.

But they do taste quite lovely!!