White Chocolate and Custard Biscuits

I love white chocolate and the last couple of months it has been my go to sweet for dessert.  Recently though, I've been wanting biscuits too, so I went hunting for a recipe that had both biscuits and white chocolate in it.  And I found a couple of good looking ones, one for me and one for the fiancé.  Since I didn't have one of the key ingredients for the fiancé's biscuits and the local shop didn't have  either, I went ahead and made the ones for me (though there are plenty for him to eat too).

So these are essentially white chocolate chip cookies, but they have custard powder in them too, which adds an extra sweet taste to the biscuits.  In fact, both the fiancé and I thought they ended up tasting a lot like Millie's Cookies.  We thought that was rather splendid and the things are ridiculously moreish.  They are also really quick and easy to make, which is just a bonus really.

Recipe - adapted from BBC GoodFood
Makes about 36 biscuits 

• 140g/5oz butter
• 175g/6oz caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 225g/8oz self-raising flour
• 75g/2.5oz custard powder
• 100g/3.5oz white chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4 and line 3 baking trays with greaseproof paper.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl until pale and fluffy.
3. Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix well.
4. Sift together the flour and custard powder into the mixture and then fold in to get a soft but slightly sticky dough.
5. Add the chocolate chips and work through the dough with your hands until evenly spread.
6. Take walnut sized pieces of dough and roll into balls with your hands.  Place the balls on the tray, repeating until all the dough is used up.
7. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the edges are golden but the middle is still a little soft.
8. Use a spatula to transfer the biscuits to a wire rack to cool.

Cola Float Cupcakes

This bake was a flavour experiment.  The idea came from a recipe for cola cupcakes in  Hummingbird Bakery: Cake Days, though I didn't actually use that one for mine.  I just took the idea of using cola syrup for flavouring.  So yes, the original idea was for cola cupcakes.  I wanted to try and take it further though and make them cola float cupcakes.  Cola floats, for those who do not know, are a drink of coca-cola, with a scoop of ice cream on top, usually vanilla.  It can be strange but is also quite delicious.  Hence, cake versions.  The cola bit would be the cake obviously, but the 'ice cream' was really where my experimentation lie since I thought it up by myself, no inspiration from anywhere.

Having made ice cream, I know that one of the main ingredients is custard, as well as cream and your flavourings.  But how to make a custard flavoured cream that was nice and pipe-able.  Add too much of a wet something to whipped cream and it tends to collapse, at least in my experience anyway0.  Then it hit me: custard powder!  So that's basically what I went with: whipped double cream, with custard powder and vanilla extract.  It was surprisingly effective.  The fiancé and I think it tastes almost like a Mr. Whippey ice cream (a slightly firmer version of the ice cream you get from an ice cream van).

It took me a while to find cola syrup.  Later on I was browsing through a Nigella book and saw she also had a cola cake recipe, which used actual coke, but I had my syrup by then.  I admit I got it somewhere I would not have expected, and that was Argos.  After much searching, I concluded I was going to have to buy syrup meant for those Sodastream machines, the ones that make fizzy drinks at home.  But the bottles seemed to be at least £8 wherever I looked, which was a bit much for an experiment, and that's not even considering postage.  Then I found it on Argos, via Google.  Only £4 and was free delivery.  Well, I jumped on that offer and it arrived in time to make them for the fiancé to take to Dundee tonight.  Yay!

So what did my willing testers think?  Well, it was mixed results.  The fiancé and one of his friends liked them.  The fiancé also really enjoys the cream topping.  Someone didn't like the cream.  They didn't quite taste cola like though.  It was sort of there but not very obvious, which is weird because I used twice the amount the Hummingbird recipe did.  The icing was very cola-y though.  I figured this one would be an acquired taste though.  I don't like cola flavoured things (except actually Coke) and so I didn't want to try.  So that's fair enough.    

Recipe - Makes 12

Cakes:

• 140g/5oz butter
• 140g/5oz caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 170g/6oz self-raising flour
• 2 tbsp cola syrup

Cola icing:

• 55g/2oz icing sugar
• 1-2 tbsp coca-cola

Vanilla 'Ice Cream' Cream

• 284ml/10fl.oz double cream
• 1x 75g/2.6oz packet instant custard powder
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract 
• 12 cola bottle sweets to decorate

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line a 12 hole muffin tin with cases.   Use dark cases to look more like cola floats, or red for a striking contrast.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until pale and fluffy. 
3. Add the cola syrup and beat in. 
4. Add the eggs one at a time, and beat until fully incorporated after each addition. 
5. Sift in the flour and fold into the mixture.
6. Spoon into the cases, trying to distribute the mixture equally and making sure to fill the cases 2/3 of the way up.
   
7. Bake for about 20 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. 
8. Leave to cool on a cooling rack.
9. Make the cola icing, by mixing the coca-cola and icing sugar together.  Add the cola a little at a time to get the right consistency.  You don't want it too runny but you want to be able to spread it easily.
10. When the cakes are cool, top with a thin layer of cola icing.
11. Make the 'ice cream' by first whipping the double cream to stiff peaks.
12. Add the custard powder and vanilla extract and fold into the cream.  The custard powder will make the cream stiffen a bit more.
13. Put into a piping bag fitted with a large star nozzle and pipe a nice swirl on top of each cake.
14. Top with a cola bottle sweet.