In this episode, I bake! (what a surprise, I know). And Anne talks to me about preserving in a whole lot of ways for a whole lot of reasons with a whole lot of food.
Birthday cupcakes over the year.
Cheese scones and banana caramel cake.
The kimchi recipe Anne talks about: from Maangchi
Email me: acts of kitchen @ gmail dot com; leave a review on iTunes to share the lurve!
In the cupcake book, these are dark chocolate wedding cupcakes. And they’re good, ok, but I don’t think they’re quite that good. Now maybe that’s my fault because I didn’t use Grand Marnier – I used orange blossom water instead – and I used Greek yoghurt instead of creme fraiche – but whatever. I also didn’t make the very rich chocolate icing, which in the recipe included double cream; icing sugar, milk and cocoa seemed to me to do the job.
More birthday cupcakes! I’d been eyeing these off for a while but the ingredient ‘creamed coconut’ put me off because I had no idea what it was. I finally googled it and it’s just coconut butter/ oil – which I have, so that was easy. Interestingly, although they have both coconut butter and desiccated coconut, they ended up tasting more lime-y than coconut-y to me. They have lime zest in them, and I had a nicely sized kaffir lime on the tree so I used that. I’m not complaining about the taste – in fact I thought they were quite lovely (yes I make more than I give. Of course). I’ll be making these again – when I have limes to use, anyway.
The full recipe makes 12, you say? I say your cupcakes must be a lot smaller than mine, because this is a half batch and as you can see, they are hardly overflowing.
Gluten free cupcakes! I had no potato flour as the recipe required and little likely use for it in future. So I consulted my Gluten Free Guru (my sister) and she told me to substitute in rice flour, which I had because shortbread. So I did. Not sure what it will have done to the texture because as you can see, Bob, there were NO EXTRAS for taste testing. The batter seemed ok.
Also they’re not quite as pretty as the cookbook illustration because I had no slivered almonds so I chopped up some dry-roasted whole almonds. Taste should make up for ordinariness of appearance, I hope.
These were meant to be maple pecan cupcakes.
But I didn’t have any pecans (that’s PEEcans, as far as I am concerned), so I decided to substitute walnuts.
I didn’t have as many walnuts as I thought (uh… hardly any), so I mostly used almonds.
The icing was also meant to have candied pecans on top but sadly for their recipient I lost my desire to candy nuts somewhere and I haven’t found it again.
The icing does have butter, icing sugar, and maple syrup – and it has a wonderfully smoky sweet flavour as a consequence. The cupcakes themselves did not have the greatest texture; they really stuck to the paper, which made me a bit sad. Still, tasty enough.
Previously on cupcakes: apple, and pistachio.
Yup, more cupcakes. These are appropriately carrot-y, and I like the walnuts. But there wasn’t enough cardamom – definitely increase that next time, or swap out for cinnamon and nutmeg?
Iced with double cream that I’d whipped too much of, for the sponge cake, and blurrily photographed as such below.
Further to my plans to celebrate birthdays this year, these are apple and cinnamon cupcakes. They were supposed to have sour cream icing but I ran out, so I just made lemon and icing sugar icing; they were also meant to have berries on top but a) too hard and b) don’t keep as well.
I’m having fun with these.
I was given a book of cupcake recipes some time ago, but I’ve never made many. Thought I’d rectify that this year. These are pistachio ones – with ground pistachios in them and all.
Icing these involved making two batches of icing, because in making the first one I discovered that my class old-school sieve whose handle I’ve needed to fix for years was rusty when I noticed black spots all through my nice pristinely white icing. Sad.
They’re the beginning of a year of birthday cupcakes. Well, that’s the intention anyway.
Acts of Kitchen 