back to back baking :: part 1

Over the last two years I have been fortunate enough to have three kitchens to bake in. Not just one, but three. One at home, one at childminding (brilliant industrial super-powerful oven, I love it) and one at school. Well, technically speaking, there's two at school & I have baked in both of them, but let's just call it one for now.

Anyhow, for some slightly crazy reason I managed to end up baking in all three of these places on Thursday. Yep, a serious amount of baking occurred & I had plenty of little helping hands to assist me & to teach.

The morning was spent in the school kitchen baking banana muffins with my 3 & 4 year old Nursery Class children. They were brilliant bakers. They cracked eggs like pro's, mashed banana to the absolute perfect consistency, washed up like they do it every day & said things like, 'I'm having so much fun!


Banana Muffins makes 12 - 14

ingredients

3 very ripe bananas
1 egg
50ml semi-skimmed milk
75g / 20z butter, melted
125g / 5.5oz caster sugar
275g / 5.5oz self raising flour
70g white or dark chocolate, cut into rough chunks


1) Pre heat the oven to 180C / Gas Mark 4 & line a 12-hole muffin tray with paper cases.

2) In a large mixing bowl, mash up the bananas.


3) Melt the butter & stir into the banana mixture, along with the egg, sugar & milk


4) Stir together the flour, chocolate & bi-carbonate of soda in a separate mixing bowl.


5) Combine the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients and stir very gently together with a wooden spoon until only just combined - the key to soft springy muffins is to do as little stirring as is required to combine the wet & dry ingredients.


6) Spoon heaped dessertspoons of mixture into the muffin cases and bake for 20 - 25 minutes until well risen & golden.


Cake Count :: 930

keep watching to find out what happened next in my day of back to back baking.

lemon buttercream frosting

This frosting goes perfectly with the lemon cupcakes listed below. It's lovely and quick to make, which is often a bonus if you haven't got hours to spend baking.


Ingredients enough to frost 15 large cupcakes


zest of 1 lemon
300g icing sugar
50g unsalted butter at room temperature
125g cream cheese

1) Beat the icing sugar and butter together until well mixed.

2) Add the cream cheese & lemon zest and beat for a few minutes until your mixture is lovely and fluffy.


If you find the frosting too sweet, just add a bit more cream cheese, or vice versa if it's too cream-cheesy! 

3) Fill a piping bad fitted with your nozzle of choice and pipe away, starting at the outer edge of the cake & swirling inwards. Or, spread onto the cake using a small pallette knife.

This basic cream cheese frosting is pretty forgiving in terms of quanitites - you can add a bit of this and a bit of that without it going too wrong.

lemon cupcakes

These little zesty bites made up the other half of the cupcake team for the wedding that I baked for last weekend.

They are incredibly simple - essentially a basic sponge recipe with some lemon zest & juice.

Here we go...

Lemon Cupcakes makes 12 large cupcakes, 24 small

ingredients  

225g / 8oz butter at room temp
225g / 8oz caster sugar
225g self raising flour
3 eggs
zest of 1 lemon (if you like super-lemony, use 2!)
a squeeze of lemon juice

1) Pre-heat the oven to 180C / Gas mark 4 & line muffin trays with paper cases.

2) In a large mixing bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy.


3) Beat in the eggs, one at a time, adding a little flour (sieved) after each addition.

4) Fold in the remaining flour & lemon zest.

5) Stir in the lemon juice.

6) Spoon a heaped dessertspoon of mixture into each case, being careful not to overfill to allow space for the frosting.


7) Bake in the pre-heated oven for 15 - 20mins until going ever so slightly golden around the edges.


8) Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack, ready for frosting.

Cake Count :: 800

Blue.Berries.

After baking up a storm for my Church event, I had a few left over ingredients.

The possibilities of what to do with them were endless, but I settled with Blueberry Cake.

I didn't have the right tin for baking in so I compromised which meant a massively increased baking time, but I'm pretty sure it tasted the same as it would have, had I had a beautiful bundt tin, as specified.

The end result was a cake about 10cm tall with lots of sunken blueberries...

Blueberry Cake :: adapted from The Hummingbird Bakery

Ingredients
350g unsalted butter, at room temperature
350g caster sugar
6 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract 450g plain flour
2 tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder (yep, you read that right)
280ml creme fraiche
250g blueberries

1 :: Preheat the oven to 170C / Gas mark 3 / 325F. Grease and line a 9 " round tin, or a
10" / 25cm bundt tin

2 :: In a large mixing bowl (or freestanding mixture if you are blessed with one of these beauties), beat the butter and sugar until creamy, light & fluffy

3 :: Add the eggs, 1 at a time, mixing well after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl when necessary.

4 :: Beat in the vanilla extract, flour and baking powder until it's all mixed together.

5 :: Stir in the creme fraiche by hand until combined.

6 :: Gently stir in the blueberries by hand (so they don't get crushed) until they've spread evenly througout the mixture.

7 :: Scrape the mixture into your prepared tin and bake for 1hr 40mins if using a 9" round tin.
If using a bundt tin, bake for 40 mins.

Tip: If using a 9" round tin, cover the cake with greaseproof paper after 40 mins to prevent the top from browning too much.

8 :: Remove the cake from the oven once it's baked, and leave to cool slightly before removing it from the tin. Turn out onto a wire cooling rack and leave until completely cooled before icing.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients
300g icing sugar, sifted
50g unsalted butter, at room temperature
125g cream cheese at room temperature

It's very important to have the butter and cream cheese at room temperature if you want to avoid lumpy frosting / icing.

It takes roughly an hour for them to come up to room temperature.

Alternatively, if you haven't got an hour, you can put them in the microwave on a low power setting and blast for a few seconds.

1 :: Beat the icing sugar into the butter, adding a little sugar at a time to avoid create a huge sugar cloud and covering yourself in the sweet dust.

2 :: Beat in the cream cheese until everything's combined. Keep beating for another 5 mins to make it light and fluffy.

3 :: Cover your cake in the frosting / icing, adding little flicks here and there if you so which to add a bit of character.

4 :: Eat Cake.

Side note
Frosting or Icing?
Well, the thing is, I've grown up calling the sweet stuff on top of cakes 'icing'. However, a lot of recipes call it 'frosting.' I like the sound of frosting more than icing - it suggests something a little bit more. With this recipe, the creators of it call it frosting, so I wouldn't want to take that away from them, but thought I should include the word 'icing' too, to save confusion, and to pacify my wonderful boyfriend who's slightly concerned about me using Americanisms, what with me being British, and all.

Cake Count :: 455

Baking in miniature {revisited}

As it happens, my plans to bake 2010 cakes managed to take a hurtle forward towards looking slighttly more achieveable than when the idea was first conceived, when I got a call from a friend asking me to bake for an event our church was holding.

It also happens that I have done a fair bit of baking since then, so to save repeating myself, and to try and get up to speed on this little blog before I do any more baking, I'm afraid I'm going to cheat and give you a link back to my initial post over on my other blog to give you a bit more of a review of what I baked.

(The brownies featured at the top are the miniature version of the brownies I presented in the last post.)

Cake count :: 454