Butterbeer cupcakes

This was something I baked ages ago and wanted to update it to the blog but have been unable to so far. It has been busy busy few months! I started off with trying to make different adaptations of Harry Potter inspired baked goodies. So butterbeer cupcakes is the one of the first ones.(Adapted from pastryaffair.com)

My first Potter book is a very battered copy which I have read too many times to count. Over the years I have read the whole series several times and enjoyed it each and every time. J.K.Rowling’s creative imagination never ceases to amaze me!

For about 16-18 cupcakes you will need:

280 g plain flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
113 g butter at room temperature
200 g light brown sugar
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp browned butter
½ cup buttermilk (to substitute: take ½ cup of milk and add a tsp of lemon juice to it and let stand for a few minutes).
½ cup cream soda

1. Line a cupcake tin. This recipe makes about 16 cupcakes. Pre-heat oven at 175˚C(fan).
2. Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
3. In another bowl, beat butter and sugar till they are light and fluffy.
4. Add eggs one at a time to the butter-sugar mixture and incorporate it in. Beat in vanilla extract and browned butter.
5. Fold in 1/3 rd of the flour mixture, then the buttermilk, another third of flour, cream soda and then the remaining flour.
6. Fill the cupcake tins ¾th full. Bake in pre-heated oven for 15-18 mins. Cool on the wire rack.

Browned butter, butterscotch buttercream (that does sound like a lot of butter. It’s a light caramel-y butterscotch frosting- absolutely scrumptious!!)

150 g unsalted butter, softened
60 g browned butter (put the butter in a saucepan and let it turn deep brown in colour but do not let it burn)
3 tbsp butterscotch sauce
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp sea salt
200 g icing sugar, sifted
a splash of double cream

Beat the softened butter till it is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla extract, browned butter, butterscotch sauce and salt. Beat it in to incorporate. Add the icing sugar and beat it in for 2-3 minutes till the frosting is smooth. Add the cream if necessary.

Once the cupcakes are cooled, frost with the buttercream and drizzle some more butterscotch sauce on top of it. Enjoy with a butterbeer 😉

Pound Note Cake

There was a certain zone of baking I was in recently, somehow things were not working the way I wanted which left me much frustrated but pushed me to bake even more. Finally out of the doomed zone of baking mishaps, I think I am happy with what I made today. A friend had recently got me a musical note shaped cookie cutter from Vienna, a very beautiful delicate thing. I had made cookies using it but really wanted to try a ‘surprise inside a cake’ cake . So, here it is a basic pound cake with musical note shapes inside it, hence -a ‘pound note’ cake. I am giggling inside at the un-funny joke but hey, it is an (un)cool play of words!

The recipe is for a basic pound cake. For the note shaped cake I replaced a tablespoon of flour with cocoa powder and added black gel food colour to the batter. Once baked, I cooled the cake and cut it into slices about half an inch thick. These were then cut out into the shapes with the cookie cutter.

Then I made second batch of the pound cake batter, this time without any additional flavour or colour. I layered a thin layer of the batter in the loaf tin and then set the cut outs into the batter. Once all the cut outs were lines, I poured in the basic cake batter in the loaf tin.

Since I have never found cake flour in UK, I make my own by replacing 2 tablespoon of plain flour in a cup of plain flour with 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. I sift the flour+cornstarch mixture twice to make sure the cornstarch is well mixed.

Ingredients for one loaf of pound cake, (you will need twice as much to make a second cake for the cut outs)

190 g cake flour
1/8^th tsp baking soda
¼ tsp of salt
113 g butter, softened
250 g granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup sour cream

1. Pre-heat the oven at 170 ˚C fan oven. Line a loaf tin with baking parchment or grease with butter.
2. For the cut out cake, I replaced one tbsp of flour with cocoa powder.
3. Sift the cake flour, baking soda and salt into a bowl and keep aside.
4. In another bowl, cream softened butter and sugar. Keep scraping the sides while mixing.
5. Break the eggs into another bowl and add the vanilla extract and mix.
6. Add the egg mixture to the butter-sugar mixture slowly while beating. The mixture might look as if curdled but do not worry, once you add flour the batter will become smooth again. Make sure you keep scraping the mixture from the sides.
7. Now add half of the flour mix into the egg-butter mixture and gently stir it in. Then add the sour cream and mix it in. Add rest of the flour and mix well till all the ingredients are fully incorporated. For the cut out cake, I added black gel food colouring at this stage and incorporated it into the batter.
8. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf tin and bake for about 40 minutes or till a skewer come out clean.
9. For the cut out cake, cool the cake properly before making sliced and cutting out the ‘note’ shapes.
10. For the second bake, prepare the batter as above without cocoa added to the flour or the colour to the batter. In the prepared tin, first layer a small amount of the plain cake batter, then set the cutouts in a tight fit, and pour rest of the cake batter. Bake as usual till the cake is well risen and a skewer tested on the cake side comes out clean.
11. Cool the cake on a wire rack. If you want, you can dust with icing sugar.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chai Shortbread

Chai-biskut or chai-biskit! The all essential Indian snack, perfect for anytime, any guest and any mood! A good strong ginger flavoured tea preparation, laced with fragrant cardamoms and cloves, milky yet strong, chai is an all time Indian drink you can get in any road-side street shop and the first thing you are offered in anyone’s home, usually accompanied with biskit/biskut (that is how biscuit is pronounced in India). And of course you don’t refuse, why would you! So here I did a take on chai-biskit… a Scottish shortbread with Indian chai flavour. Shortbreads are butter biscuits, crumbly and a Scottish speciality and are perfect accompaniments to tea.

For the chai shortbreads, you will need:
200 g unsalted butter at room temperature
80 g icing sugar
200 g plain flour
100 g rice flour (you can substitute with semolina or plain flour)
¼ tsp salt
2 tbsp caster sugar
for the chai mixture:
6 cardamom, take out the seeds and powder them, I use mortar pestle to do this.
6 cloves, powdered
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ginger powder
½ tsp ground tea- open a tea bag and grind the tea from it into a fine powder
1. In a food processor, cream the butter for 1 minute, add sugar and mix for another minute. You do not want to whip for too long otherwise the butter will become too soft and the biscuits will spread. You can do this by hand as well.
2. Sieve flour, salt and chai mixture.
3. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in the food processor and whizz till it comes together into rough dough- just about a minute or so. you do not want to mix too much, else the butter will become too soft, which will make your cookies puffy and cause it to spread, they will still taste great but will not hold their shape.Take it out on your kitchen work surface and bind the dough by hand. Wrap it up in cling film and put in the fridge for about 30 minutes.

4. After 30 minutes, take the biscuit dough out of the fridge, roll out the dough, about a half a cm thick, and cut into circles using a cookie cutter. Put the cut shapes onto a lined baking tray.

Put the tray in fridge for about 10 minutes while you pre heat the oven at 160˚C (fan). Bake the shortbread biscuits for 10 minutes or till they are lightly browned on top.

5. Cool the shortbreads on wire rack. You can dust them with icing sugar or a mixture of icing sugar and chai mixture. I also melted some plain chocolate in the microwave and dipped one-half of each shortbread in the melted chocolate.

Enjoy!

Cinnamon Rolls

Oooo this is a fabulously fantastic recipe! A cinnamon roll topped with cream cheese frosting-muffin style! Delicious breakfast on the go! Not my idea (oh how wish it was) but adapted from the very creative fauxmartha blog.

Breakfast on the go had never been the way of life growing up. Breakfast was as main a meal as was lunch or dinner. Now to think of it, it is really not a good idea- the big breakfast I mean. And that too it used to be something fried or lathered in butter at least, but oh so good it was and it still is to indulge in some warm stuffed paratha on weekends or deep fried puris with spicy curries. So a breakfast, a small few bite sized bread, on the go is a far cry from a hot sit down breakfast and a comparatively healthier alternative.

These cinnamon rolls look really impressive once baked and so delicious to eat. The whole lot of it disappeared in my house within 24 hours- not even crumbs remained to tell the tale!

So for these fantabulous bready-cakey delights, you need..

(makes 12 massive cinnamon rolls)
3/4^th cup (177 ml) buttermilk, slightly warmed
2 ½ tsp instant yeast
80 g (6 tbsp) melted butter, cooled
3 eggs at room temperature
4 ½ cups (595 g) plain flour
4 tbsp granulated sugar
1 ½ tsp salt

For the filling-
¾ cup packed brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
pinch salt
2 tbsp melted butter, cooled

1. Line a muffin tin. I used grease proof paper square pushed into the muffin tin, they make really good muffin cases!
2. Add a pinch of sugar to the warmed buttermilk. Add in the yeast to the buttermilk, give it a stir and let it sit for 5 minutes. You should see it frothing up.
3. Whisk the eggs with the cooled melted butter.
4. In a bowl, combine the plain flour (keeping aside ¼th cup), with sugar and salt. Add the yeast-buttermilk and egg mixture to the flour and mix together with a spatula till the dough comes together. This will take 2-5 minutes.
5. Knead the dough, either in the bowl or on lightly floured surface, till the dough is smooth and elastic. Only if required, add the reserved plain flour.
6. Place the dough in an oiled bowl and cover with cling film. Keep the bowl in a warm place, or if you are in Scotland and have no warm place within miles, a pre heated and then switched off oven would work great as well. Leave the dough to rise for couple of hours till it is doubled in size.
7. Lightly flour the work surface and turn out the dough on it. Roll out a rectangle about 16” x 12”.
8. Brush the dough with melted butter and sprinkle the filling mixture. At this point , if you like to add any raisins or other dried fruits, you can sprinkle them as well.
9. Now roll it along the short edge so that you have a 16” long log.
10. Slice 12 equal sized rolls and lay them in the prepared tin with swirl side up.
11. Cover the tray loosely with cling film or a tea towel and leave the swirls to rise for an hour and a half.
12. Bake in the middle of the oven at 180˚ C for 15- 20 minutes till they are golden brown.
13. Cool on the wire rack till the rolls are just about warm.

To glaze, in a bowl add 1 ½ cup cream cheese frosting, 1 ½ cup icing sugar and ½ tsp vanilla extract and whip to mix. If you want it a little runny, add couple of tbsp of milk to it. Just layer about 2 tbsp of the glaze on warm rolls.

Thank you for stopping by!

Flourless chocolate cake

I have been looking for a mousse like, flourless chocolate cake recipe for ages now, basically a French chocolate cake. But nothing has come close to the one I had in Paris which was more like a mousse still holding its shape and was easily lost in the mouth. Quite a few recipes are no-bake set chocolate cakes with raw egg white. Now I am not really comfortable with using raw egg whites. I have tried a few baked flourless chocolate cake recipes, none with any impressive result other than the one below. This cake comes out really moist and dense and is a fantastic dessert.

(Adapted from travelerslunchbox.com)
Ingredients

150 g chocolate with at least 60-70 % cocoa solids
100 g granulated sugar
3 eggs at room temperature, separated
63 g unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp instant coffee
1/8^th tsp salt
50 g ground almond or ground roasted hazelnuts (I used almonds)
a splash of brandy (I used kirsch because that was the only thing I had at hand)

1. Grease a 9 inch cake tin with melted butter and dust it with flour.
2. Melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave and add the instant coffee to it and mix so that it dissolves in the hot melted butter-choc mix. Let it cool down.
3. Stir in the vanilla extract in the choc mix.
4. In another bowl beat half of the sugar and the egg yolks till they are pale and thick.
5. Beat in warm chocolate mix into the yolk mix and add the ground almonds and brandy.
6. In another bowl, which is clean and dry, beat the egg whites with sugar and pinch of salt till you get soft meringue peaks.
7. Stir in ¼th of the egg white into the chocolate mix. Then fold in the remainder of the egg whites only till there are no egg white streaks visible.
8. Pour in the prepared cake tin. Bake in the preheated oven at 180˚C for 20-25, check at 20 mins, what you are looking for is that the center would be slightly puffed but it should not be jiggling. A little under baked is better than over baked which would make the cake very dry.
9. Cool the cake in the pan over wire rack. When completely cooled, dust with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream.

So, if you have suggestions on any tried and tested glorious chocolate mousse like cakes- please share! and thanks for stopping by.