Strawberry cupcakes

Here’s a recipe I actually made a very long time ago. It’s with a lot of strawberry jam and lovely sweet! I picked out all of the red cupcake wrappers to fit with them and added icing (basic, from a shop) and confetti to give them a festive look. I added some presents I got in the background: a little chest and a steampunk helmet. The helmet looked quite ridiculous on me, but the goggles are definitely mine! I’ll be using them as soon as I find a good way of completing my steampunk outfit.



Ingredients:
4 tablespoons strawberry jam
8 tablespoons butter
115 grams white caster sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
115 grams self-rising flour

1. Mix the sugar and the butter together with a mixer until light and fluffy.
2. Beat the eggs lightly and add them to the butter in a few additions, mix thoroughly in between.
3. Add the vanilla extract to the mixture and mix again.
4. Sift the flour over the batter and fold or mix it in.
5. Fill a cupcake tray with baking cups. Put around two teaspoons jam at the bottom of every baking up then add batter to fill the baking up to 3/4th. Alternatively, fill the baking cup halfway with batter, then add the strawberry jam and finish with a bit more batter on top.
6. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Leave the cupcakes in the oven for about 20 minutes until they are golden brown and a skewer comes out clean.

The recipe I took this one requires you use stone teacups and bake them in cute little cupcakes. It’s very cute to see and I can imagine it’d be quite a surprise when you eat the cupcake to find a bit of jam at the bottom. I don’t think I have any cups or mugs that could go in the oven. At least I was afraid to try.
If you don't like a blob of jam in your cupcake, I'm sure a bit of jam on top and then making a swirl into the cupcake would be really nice. And you can always substitute vanilla extract for a strawberry one. It would make the cupcakes nice and pink too!
Hope you enjoy!

Chocolate cake

I decided you cannot be a proper baker or kitchen wife (men included) without ever having made a real chocolate cake. This is definitely a real chocolate cake. A really delicious one at least. I’ve made chocolate cakes like Sacher Torte before, but I can’t really remember ever making a plain chocolate cake. So that’s what I did this time. Cherries were added in the middle to make it a bit more special and because cherries and chocolate cakes go together brilliantly. I made chocolate icing to go with it and added nougatine to cover up the fact that I forgot to sift the powdered sugar. And here’s what I ended up with. A proper mud bath. I added the sign and rubber duck for the effect.
For a cake which had a few mistakes from my part, quite a few, it didn’t look bad at all. It didn’t taste bad at all either. It tasted unexpectedly good actually!



Ingredients:
115 grams (unsalted) butter
115 grams plain flour
50 grams cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 eggs
200 grams sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. Melt the butter and set aside.
2. Mix the eggs and add the sugar spoon by spoon until you get a thick mixture that leaves a trail behind when you pull a spoon through it.
3. Add the vanilla and mix again.
4. Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder together and add it to the egg-mixture. Fold it in carefully.
5. Sprinkle the melted butter over the mixture and fold it in as well.
6. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a cake tin with grease-proof paper or butter it. Once the oven is preheated leave the cake in the oven for about 20-25 minutes.

For the chocolate icing, just melt around 2-3 chocolate bars and add 4-6 spoons of butter and 250 grams of powdered sugar. Make sure to SIFT the flour, unless of course you want the same effect as I had, after which I’d add something like nougatine or sprinkles as well.
Baking something that seems to be failing can be very frustrating, but as this cake proves: it doesn’t have to go wrong. With a bit of creativity you can turn anything in to a perfect cake!



Note: I realise I have a post on Chocolate cherry cake with fudge frosting, which is basically the same as this one. The cake however, is from a Sacher Torte recipe. Which still makes this the very first actual chocolate cake, I decided.

Lemon jam

This is something I’ve been wanting and promising to post for ages now, but just haven’t done at all. While organising my massive folder of pictures I realised I still had pictures of the lemon jam I made in a ‘Not Posted’ file. After I looked into it I found that I indeed hadn’t posted anything about lemon jam yet. I did mention it in my post about Lemon & cream filled cake, because I used it there. Shame on me! So finally here I go! One of the most delicious jams in the world that is especially nice to use on desserts, buns and cakes, but even brightens up your daily bread at lunch. I managed to put some in real cute little jars and put ribbons around them. Like this, it’s actually perfect to give away for mothers’ day or some other event.



Ingredients:
3 lemons
200 grams granulated sugar
115 grams butter
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks

1. Wash the lemons and grate the peel. Squeeze out the lemon juice and add the peel and juice into a pan.
2. Dubbleboil the peel and juice with the sugar and butter. Stir until the butter has melted and the sugar is dissolved.
3. Put the eggs and egg yolks in a small bowl and mix them together. Add them to the lemon-mixture and beat everything until you have an even mixture.
4. Keep stirring until the mixture turns thicker. Then turn off the fire, poor the jam into jars and seal them.



The jam is nice and sweet, very fresh and has a bit of a lemon taste too it. It doesn’t taste that much like lemon that you start making odd faces after tasting it. I figured it was also really nice to serve over apple slices. The jam is supposed to last about 3 months and I'd definitely keep it in the fridge. I'd also definitely make it again. Perhaps for the dessert table I'm planning to make.

Banana teabread

Today was a totally lazy day and I decided to bake something. It started with wanting to make something with cranberries, as I have cranberries. I looked online and found a lot of recipes with cranberries which all looked just as delicious but I didn’t have an ingredient or two in the house or they just didn’t cut it. It ended up in me looking through my cooking books until I spotted banana teabread. So, I discarded the cranberries and went for banana bread in stead. We had enough banana’s anyway. What we didn’t have was pecans. I understand bananas and pecans tend to go together very well, but I never liked them anyway. We did have pine nuts in the house. I was considering scratching nuts altogether and going for double the raisins, but I just went for the pine nuts instead!
I have to say it turned out pretty good! When I took the pictures, which was when I had taken them directly out of the oven, I was afraid the banana bread wasn’t firm enough. After the bread had cooled down though, I realised I was completely wrong. It’s exactly what a banana bread should look like. Eating this bread was like one of those times when you sit down to eat something and you think "Damn, I’m awesome!". I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.



Ingredients:
6 tablespoons butter
150 grams caster sugar
2 eggs
150 grams bananas (without peel)
70 ml buttermilk
175 grams self-rising flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
100 grams sultanas
50 grams pine nuts

1. Mix the butter and caster sugar together in a bowl until it becomes light, fluffy and creamy.
2. Beat the eggs in one by one. (You can lightly beat the eggs before mixing them in.)
3. In a separate bowl mash the bananas using a fork or a food processor. Add the buttermilk and mix it together.
4. Combine both mixtures and mix until you have an even batter.
5. Sift the flour with the baking powder and nutmeg together. Add it to the batter in a few additions (like 3-5 spoons at a time).
6. Add the sultanas and pine nuts and mix them in.
7. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a cake-pan or line it with grease-proof paper. Leave the cake in the oven for about 20-25 minutes.

Note: I ate the cranberries.

Tuna salad

I’ve spent about a week in Greece and I doubt I could go anywhere without wanting to cooking or baking something for myself. Despite not having all the time in the world and eating out a lot, I managed to make something overly delicious I’ve been wanting to try for a little while now: tuna salad! Tuna is one of the only fish I really enjoy. I especially love tuna salad. I’d use to eat it every week at school whenever the lunch menu offered it and now at home I keep asking for tuna salad weeks on end and eat only that on my bread before I take a little break from it again. I’ve never actually thought of making it myself until I randomly found a recipe about it. I scrolled through more recipes and found that basically they’re all the same. So here goes my version!



Ingredients:
1 can tuna (preferably in oil)
3-4 spoons mayonnaise
1-2 cloves of garlic
1 spoon herbs (parsley, basil or oregano, etc.)
salt & pepper

1. Drain the water or oil from the tuna. Mash the tuna in a small bowl.
2. Add the mayonnaise and mix it thoroughly. (And now you have your basic tuna salad)
3. Crush or chop the garlic and mix it through the tuna salad.
4. Add herbs, salt & pepper to taste.

As you can see I went for the most basic tuna salad there is. I’ve seen a some recipes using unions, olives, relish, wasabi and even apples. In stead of the mayonnaise I’ve also seen a lot of recipes use salad dressing. The idea of salad dressing however absolutely doesn’t appeal to me, perhaps we keep to many special flavoured salad dressings that in my idea this would never work. Adding things like onions, different kinds of (or preferably fresh) herbs and maybe even relish or so does sound very nice. Even adding apple sounds funky at this point. When I made this though, I had a minimum of ingredients and just had to do with what I had at home. I did pretty well I think, and I'll definitely be making this again. Enjoy!

Lemonade, sweets & chocolate!

I think I was randomly browsing some recipes again when I found this one. I’ve never actually had real lemonade myself. I mean, I’ve had the syrup to which you add water and such, in quite a lot of different tastes as well, but never actually had the lemon lemonade you see in movies. It was totally worth a try. I sent my dad out to buy me 6 lemons, which I hoped was enough. It was exactly enough! At least enough according to the recipe. I added less water (around 2 cups!) because I thought it was completely destroying the lemon taste and didn’t want to end up with water with a hint of lemon. But because I did I ended up with something way too sweet. Although I thought it was good, I could add a little less sugar next time.



Ingredients:
6 lemons
1 1/2 cup sugar
6 cups water
Ice cubes

1. Put 1,5 cup of water and the sugar in a pan and put it on medium heat. Stir until the sugar has dissolved then set aside and eave to cool.
2. Squeeze out the lemon juice and leave the pulp.
3. Put the lemon juice, sugar-water and the rest of the water in a big bowl and stir. Add the ice cubes and serve!



Note: I found out that for 1 lemon, 3-5 spoons of sugar and 1-2 cups of water will do.

You could always add some mint too. Or limes. Perhaps oranges would work?
The day I decide to make this me and my mom also decided to go to town, where I had to show her a few cute shops. In one of them (obviously filled with sweets) we bought two kinds of soft Italian nougat (strawberry and lemon), fudge (tiramisu and lemon flavour) and lavender chocolate. The latter I bought because obviously you need to try something like that and the package was so cute.



Look!



It reminds me of tobacco packages, which somehow just makes this chocolate extra cute and special (even though I am very much against smoking). I served all of this, with the lemonade at the jacuzzi we recently got, in the garden, in the sun, and we all just relaxed and enjoyed the sweets. It was great!

Orange cream cheese frosting

I have invented yet another wonderful frosting! This time I used one on a carrot cake I made. The carrot cake, though lovely, isn’t really worth mentioning as it came from a ‘just add water and bake’-package. I wondered what kind of frosting would go nicely with it, since the last carrot cake I actually did make from scratch didn’t have any frosting on it, I felt obliged to make some frosting on this one. I decided on lemon or orange, because I felt it would fit the taste of the carrot cake. And it did quite perfectly! The night I made the cake and the frosting I got showered with a rain of compliments with the people my parents invited over for dinner. I didn’t actually know we were inviting anyone and unfortunately it left me with a lot less cake for me.
Also this time I decided to put the frosting in a jar while the cake was baking and cooling and decorate it in some funny way. I was quite proud of it for as long as it lasted. I still have a jar filled with frosting till halfway (-what cake should I make next?-), but the awesome fabric around the top only lasts until you open it, after that it’s just a pain to put back on every time.
Anyway, enjoy! Note: the frosting will be enough for two small cakes.



Ingredients:
300 grams cream cheese
1/2 spoon grated orange
2-3 spoons orange juice
250 grams powdered sugar

1. Mix the cream cheese, grated orange and orange juice together.
2. Mix in the powdered sugar until you decide it is sweet enough or you have the right consistency.



You could use the exact same recipe for a lemon cream cheese frosting. I’d use less of the juice in that case, as lemon can be quite a lot stronger than orange. Apart from lemon and orange I guess you could also use this recipe for grapefruit (that sounds kind of odd), mandarins or any other citrus fruits. Actually, we could generalise this to all kinds of fruits, only I’d skip the grating for quite a lot of the fruits I can think of (grated kiwi for example does NOT sound right).