The Great British Bake Off Technical Challenge: Hot Chocolate Souffle

 It´s been awhile since I´ve done a GBBO technical challenge and when trying to decide what to make for Valentine´s Day this year, I knew that this Hot Chocolate Souffle was the perfect dessert for this special day.

My husband isn´t a fan of fondant or buttercream and while I like to experiment and perfect different skills on Valentine´s bakes...it is pretty much wasted on him. However, he does love anything chocolately so thought I´d be onto a winner with this souffle.And this delectable, gooey,chocolately yet light souffle did not disappoint.Chocolate is always a necessity on Valentine´s Day!! I think both of us could even have gone back for seconds!!!

This is not the first souffle I´ve made as I´ve already made Mary Berry´s lemon souffle(here´s a link to my previous GBBO souffle challenge) also for a GBBO challenge, and they were also delicious if a little sunken.This is only the secod time I´ve made souffles and the first time being out of chocolate. The recipe(click here for the Queen of Baking Mary Berry´s recipe!) itself is actually fairly simple if you follow it closely although I think it´d be a whole lot more difficult under the time pressures and only the basic outlines of the recipe that the contestants had to face. The hardest part for me was adding the cooled cocoa milk to the eggs and whisking as I thought it hadn´t cooled enough so I thought the eggs had started cooking and then when I put it back on the heat , it didn´t appear to be thickening!I thought it was going to be a complete disaster!!
                                                  The only changes I made to the recipe were that I only made half the amount as the original recipe is enough for 8 people and as I don´t have a souffle dish big enough, I decided to make it in individual ramekins,which were pefect portion sizes. Half the recipe made 3 and 1/2 ramekins-thought the 1/2 portion would´ve been ideal for my toddler but he didn´t seem too keen and surprizingly (or maybe not!) my daughter wouldn´t even try it! Oh well,more for us...tomorrow´s dessert is sorted out too!! I also made a heart template and dusted the souffles with icing sugar to decorate it more for Valentine´s Day. Served warm with a nice dollop of cream or ice cream and you have the perfect Valentine´s dessert to dive into.This dessert has now become a new favourite of mine and one that I will be making again!                    

The Great British Bake Off Technical Challenge: Sachertorte

It´s been awhile since I did a Great British Bake Off technical challenge so it was about high time I did do one and with my husband´s Saint´s day and my birthday looming up, it was the perfect excuse to make this Sachertorte, particularly as my husband is somewhat of a chocoholic!

I have made a Sachertorte once before to a German recipe I´ve got so I wasn´t too fazed with this particular technical challenge as it is much easier than it actually appears. The thing I dreaded the most was piping the word Sacher across the cake as my piping skills are somewhat lacking to say the least!

Mary Berry´s Sachertorte recipe is easy to follow and results in a delicious and professional looking cake,which is lovely and moist.The cake is fairly straightforward to make. Things you have to watch out for is overmixing the flour,I think I did this but I´m not sure how as when I cut into the cake it had various air bubbles in the sponge which has never happened to me before with any cake.Also,the recipe tells you to whisk the egg whites till stiff but not dry so I was a little uncertain as to what this meant and whether I whipped the egg whites to the correct stiffness!

I practiced piping the word "Sacher" a couple of times onto greaseproof baking paper but a plastic wallet would be ideal too before finally piping it onto the cake when I was happy with it. As you can see, it´s not 100% perfect but I was quite pleased with the end result as it´s ain´t half bad for an amateur baker like myself!

Malteasers cake

My husband´s birthday was looming and I was searching for a cake that I could make him as he´s not keen on fondant or buttercream (I didn´t realise at first that this cake also has buttercream!!) so I usually make him a chocolate cake.Not really an easy feat to decorate as his birthday falls in July and it´s so hot that everything melts!! I had been wanting to make this cake ever since I first saw it on a fellow blogger´s blog, Baking Cakes Galore, so now was the perfect excuse.I want to dedicate this recipe to Rosie from Baking Cakes Galore as she was very inspiring and also very encouraging in the early days of this blog.

I cannot take the credit for this recipe because as mentioned,I saw the recipe on Baking Cakes Galore and pretty much followed it to the letter.Two things to note when making this recipe, I´d never realized before how difficult it is to find and buy Malteasers where I live. My husband had to buy me two packets from a vending machine at the university because I couldn´t find them in any of the shops. Plus he could only get white whereas I had wanted to alternate white and milk chocolate Malteasers on top. Also, because it has been so hot lately I was worried about the Malteasers and the buttercream melting so put the cake in the fridge, which probably dried it out a little!On the whole though this cake was delicious and I shall be making it again in the future!

As I said, I hardly changed anything in the recipe although I couldn´t really taste the Horlicks in the cake itself so next time I might add extra Horlicks. Horlicks is a malted milk drink sold in the UK but Ovaltine is also very similar...unfortunately I don´t think there is a similar alternative in Spain! I´d be grateful to any Spanish readers to let me know if there is something similar. You can probably buy it online or in British food shops in Madrid or Barcelona or along the coast!!The recipe also states two 37g bags of Malteasers, I only used one of the bags as often I tend to think that less is more!

Stars & Moon Cupcakes

December has been a hectic month, what with preparations for Christmas etc,leaving me with little or no time to blog or even to make mince pies and my Christmas cake!!
I just about managed to squeeze in these cupcakes,which I made for a friend´s little boy´s first birthday. The cupcake was a raspberry jammy cupcake, a recipe taken from Hannah Miles´s Big Book of Cakes and Biscuits, with a chocolate buttercream which I found a little too sweet, maybe owing to having run out of Tate and Lyle icing sugar and having to buy a different brand that was actually flavoured with vanilla and not noticing till it was too late! I then coloured some left-over fondant from my cupcake course(this is an upcoming post!) yellow and using my star and moon biscuit cutters,cut out the fondant shapes and placed them on top of the cupcakes and ta-da!!! star and moon cupcakes....made fairly quickly and easily!

Apple & Pecan Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Glace Icing

I made this cake for my husband´s birthday even though it´s not a very birthdayish looking cake but he doesn´t really like buttercream or fondant and in this way, I can also practice my cake decorating skills with chocolate!

This cake is moist and not overly sweet so is great for those who haven´t got much of a sweet tooth. The recipe is taken from the book: Best Ever Chocolate Cakes & Slices by Konemann....however it´s not very 100 Mile!!Here´s the recipe:

Ingredients:
1 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder,sifted
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup oil (I used sunflower oil)
2 green apples, peeled and grated
1/3 cup of pecans,chopped

Method:
1.Preheat oven to 180ºC. Grease and line a 21x14x7cm loaf tin with baking parchment.
2. Mix flour, cocoa and sugar together, then add the combined eggs and oil and beat until ingredients are well mixed and there are no lumps and mixture has increased in volume.
3. Fold in pecans and grated apple.
4. Spoon into tin and bake for 45 mins or until toothpick comes out clean when inserted.

When cool, you can decorate the cake as desired. Instead of the decoration suggested in the recipe, I made a simple chocolate glace icing, using icing sugar, cocoa and water,which I made by guesstimation and iced the top of the cake with, then I decorated the cake with pecan nuts and Dr. Oetker´s Chocolate Hearts, which can be found in LeClerc.

Ladybird cake for my daughter´s first birthday & Annabel Karmel´s white and dark chocolate cupcakes

 I can´t believe my daughter has finally turned one!! The year has flown by and it´s been a busy but enriching one full of joy and happiness. My little baby is no longer a baby,now she´s a little girl! They grow up far too quickly in my opinion.

I was busy preparing her first birthday party,preparing and decorating the Annabel Karmel White & Dark Chocolate cupcakes and making and decorating her first birthday cake, a ladybird cake plus preparing two salads and other party food. Luckily, I had my parents´,my inlaws and my husband´s help but parties are definitely hard work....maybe next year we´ll have the party in a ball pool place so all I have to do is stick to making the cake!!!It also means that I´d actually get to spend more time with my daughter on her actual birthday!

I made the cupcakes on the Friday two days before the party and froze them,then took them out to defrost early on the morning of the party. I made the white chocolate buttercream and decorated them with red heart sprinkles and yellow and white star sprinkles.

The ladybird cake was a Hot Milk Sponge cake made the day before the party. I found this link about a ladybird cake, which helped me a lot. I covered the cake with red and black fondant and cut black fondant circles out for the ladybird´s spots using a bottletop (a great tip from the link I found)! Who says you need fancy equipment to decorate cakes? The leftover white fondant I had was rock hard but as I had a bit of white chocolate buttercream left I used that for the whites of the ladybird´s eyes but unfortunately it wasn´t quite as neat and round as I´d have liked and two more black fondant circles for the pupils. I was going to use pipe cleaners for the antennae but couldn´t find any so used the bendy part of two straws instead. I covered them in black fondant and then made two small balls for the feelers of the antennae. I was pretty pleased with the end result!

White Chocolate Chip Cupcakes for Valentine´s Day

I´ve been dying to try out my Sugarcraft heart plungers from China,which I bought for Chloe´s Christening cake then never used, so with Valentine´s Day looming up, I thought it was the perfect opportunity! I also had some white chocolate chips from Asda(ordered and brought to me by my mum as you can´t get them here)so thought I´d try out the following White Chocolate Chip cupcakes based on a recipe from my cupcake calender.

I decorated the cupcakes with a simple & quick Glace icing, then coloured some fondant red and set to with the heart plungers,cutting out small,medium and larger hearts,which I stuck on overlapping one another.Once again,very simple but this was more about trying the plungers out etc and I was hoping it would be more striking than it actually turned out! All in all, I was very pleased with the plungers, they were very cheap but did take awhile to arrive, they are very easy to use.My one complaint is that they didn´t always cut the fondant hearts out completely(but then that could just be me!) but I found that if you held the plunger down for a few seconds,you got a neater cut.

Here´s the recipe for the white chocolate chip cupcakes:
Ingredients: (makes about 18 cupcakes)
1 cup butter at room temperature
1 cup caster (superfine)sugar
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup (about 100g) white chocolate chips
1/2 tsp bicarbonade of soda (baking soda)

Method
1.Preheat oven to 175ºc (350ºF) and place 18 cupcake cases (I used cases with red love hearts on to ooze more Valentine Day love) in a muffin tray.
2.Stir all cupcake ingredients together except the chocolate chips for 2-3mins.
3.Stir in chocolate chips.
4. Spoon mixture into cupcake cases and bake for 20mins until toothpick comes out clean when inserted.
5. Leave to cool and then decorate.

Easter Egg Nest Cupcakes & feeling hot, hot,hot!

As Easter is rapidly approaching, there are plenty of Easter bakes I´ve been wanting to try out so hence the following recipe. We were also off to a friend´s house for dinner and I always like to take something and what could be better than cupcakes?

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day with temperatures of about 30ºC.....it seems more like summer than spring! The only thing is, I don´t feel like baking as much, what with the heat of the oven combined with the sweltering heat of the summer-I think I´ll have to start making cold desserts soon! Plus in our block of flats they are still turning on the central heating....which is a complete waste of energy and money as at 30º C, we definitely don´t need it!

This is another recipe from my cupcake calendar but is maybe not the best thing to make on a hot day as all the chocolate kept melting and ended up everywhere!

Ingredients (makes 16-18)

1 cup butter at room temperature

1 cup caster sugar

2 cups self-raising flour

4 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

decoration

2 tbsp cream

4 1/2 oz chocolate, chopped

grated chocolate (a Flake would be great for this)

Cadbury´s Mini Eggs/chocolate eggs or other candy eggs (As I can´t get Mini Eggs here, I used some chocolate eggs from Lidl)

Method

1.Line 2 muffin tins with cake cases and preheat oven to 175ºC (350ºF)

2. Place all cupcake ingredients in a large mixing bowl and using an electric hand whisk, beat for about 2-3 mins.

3. Bake for 20 mins.

4. While cupcakes are cooling, place chopped chocolate and cream in a bowl in a pan of boiling water and stir till all the chocolate has melted.

5. Decorate cupcakes with ganache, grate chocolate over the top (for the "nest") and place 2-3 mini eggs on top (I only put one egg on top as they were quite big and it looked silly with more than one egg)

Valentine´s Surprise Cupcakes/Fairy Cakes

I decided to make these cupcakes/fairy cakes to enter in a Valentine´s Day competition held by Dulce Kitz & in conjunction with Fabricando Delicias.... so wish me luck! I saw the recipe in my Big Book of Cakes & Cookies by Hannah Miles and had been wanting to try it out. As I copied the recipe exactly and didn´t change anything, I´m not going to blog the recipe but I´ll just tell you that the cupcakes contain cocoa and natural yoghurt.

The surprise element is that you place a chocolate-covered sweet or candy in the middle of the cake, which I suppose is supposed to melt,leaving a gooey, sticky centre when you bite into it. I wasn´t sure what kind of chocolate-covered sweets to use(seeing as my book is in Spanish and I wasn´t very sure of the translation). In the end, I found some white chocolate skulls (not really very romantic!) with a strawberry filling which I used. The sweet didn´t melt as I expected it to but still tasted ok in the cake!

I bought some Wilson heart cupcake cases and some heart sprinkles from Fabricando Delicias. After the cakes had cooled, I covered the cake with a chocolate ganache and decorated it with silver balls and the heart sprinkles. Just one idea of what you can make or give to your sweetheart this Valentine´s Day!

Easy Chocolate Refrigerator Cake otherwise known as Tiffin

I felt like cooking this the other day as it was one of my favourite treats when I was a child that my Gran made me...In fact, this is actually her recipe. It´s also a treat which is great to make with children due to its easy preparation and it is also very safe as it doesn´t entail too much work with hot ovens or sharp utensils such as knives. Choc-a -block with hazelnuts, raisins,biscuits and chocolate, it´s perfect to drive away those sugar cravings.

Ingredients

6oz (about 170g) crushed digestive biscuits

2oz (about 56g)hazelnuts, chopped

2oz (about 56g) seedless raisins

2oz (about 56g) plain chocolate

2tbsp golden syrup

3oz (about 85g) butter

Method

1. Melt chocolate, syrup and butter in pan over a low heat as shown in the photo:

2. Take off heat, add biscuits, nuts and raisins and stir till combined.

3.Press into a square 7 inch tin, cut into squares, place in fridge and leave to harden.

I think you could maybe try using different types of nuts, dried fruit eg cranberries and different biscuits as variations of this recipe.

Cake Decorating-Marbled Honey & Chocolate Cake

I´ve always loved baking ever since I used to help my Gran, who´s a great cook, when I was a little girl. Although my passion for baking has increased, I still have a lot to learn especially when it comes to the decorating part!! I usually make cakes for my boyfriend´s birthday and my friend´s birthday but usually either I haven´t made enough icing or it doesn´t turn out very smooth so I am particularly proud of my latest cake as it´s the prettiest cake I´ve ever decorated!

I chose to make a Marbled Honey & Chocolate cake but I haven´t included the recipe as it was from one of my recipe books "Chocolate Cakes & Slices" and I followed the recipe to the letter. The resulting cake though was very tasty and really moist. Armed with my new gigantic sized spatula, I set to work icing the cake with a chocolate honey flavoured icing, which as you can see turned out pretty smooth for once!

This is the before picture. I found some sugar stars and a pink icing pen (I think I would rethink the pink icing on chocolate next time-alhough the icing pens only came in the choice of two colours: pink or chocolate!)in the supermarket, which I thought would jazz up the cake and make it look prettier. I placed the stars around the outer edge of the cake alternately, white, yellow, white, yellow, then using the icing pen wrote the message, which was a little splotchy but not too bad for a beginner!Here´s the cake after I´d finished decorating it! It was a belated cake for my friend´s 30th birthday!