Banana Chocolate Chunk Muffins

I apologise for the delay in this post.  With the wedding being less than a week away now I've been caught up in all the last minute preparations, including baking 480 mini shortbread biscuits.  If you've seen the updates on twitter or facebook, you know I'm still not finished yet.  And of course there is still the cake to do as the absolute last minute thing to guarantee freshness on the day.  But there will be more about that in the wedding post when it comes.  For now, let's focus on delicious muffins!

As you may be aware I went to Glasgow a little over a week ago to see the lovely Rainbow Rowell.  All the gushing detail of said visit can be seen in the Pumpkin Mocha Brownie blog post.  I was not alone on said visit though.  I invited my very best friend Jess to accompany me.  Our last jaunt together had been just after I finished my final school placement back in May and just before the awful week I spent working on my e-portfolio.  She had then run off on holiday for 3 weeks so by the time the Rainbow Rowell trip rolled around we were well overdue for seeing one another.

Now that I am temporarily free of academic commitments I was actually able to find the time to bake her a gift, something I was unable to do last time and can feel awful about because she always gives me the cutest presents.  Last time it was a pig she had made and it is so adorable!  But I was devastated I had nothing to give in return.  I just had no time.  So this time around I was determined to bring something (other than that one birthday present that had escaped the package I sent).

The idea to use bananas is down to Facebook.  I'm still getting the hang of Facebook and have only recently started using my personal page (as opposed to the blog's page) for things.  Hence it needed some decoration and I used a picture of my banana cupcakes from last year for a header image, since it is nice and yellow.  Upon seeing it, Jess had remarked that she liked banana cake and thus I knew I would need to include it in whatever I chose to make.

I decided on muffins because it has been ages since I last attempted muffins, it was a bit different from making cakes and because I found a nice, easy looking recipe from Nigella to try out.  I added the chocolate chunks myself though to give it a little something extra.

Now, banana recipes often require really ripe bananas as they give a stronger flavour.  However, I don't keep bananas in my house because neither the fiancé or I eat them and I did not acquire bananas until the day I was needing them.  So of course they were not ripe enough.  So I ripened them myself!  A trick I learnt a while ago is that you can ripen bananas in the oven.  I put the oven on its lowest setting, put the bananas in a ceramic dish and 'cooked' them for about 20 minutes.  They turned completely black on the outside and beautifully soft inside, which made mashing them up very easy.  I would do this in advance of baking so they can cool down again before you use them.

And the final result? Delicious apparently!  They can be a little sticky around the edges after coming out the oven but all in all they are a good muffin.  Jess really liked them and so did the fiancé, and he's not really a fan of the chocolate and banana combination.

Recipe - adapted from How To Be A Domestic Goddess
Makes 12 

• 30g/1oz unsalted butter
• 60g/2oz honey
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 very ripe bananas 
• 150g/5oz plain flour
• 1 heaped tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• Pinch of salt
• 100g/3.5oz chocolate chunks

1. Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5 and line a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin cases.
2. Put the butter, honey and vanilla extract into a small pan and then place over a low heat to melt.
3. Stir together, remove from heat and set aside for a few minutes to cool slightly.
4. Mash the banana in a small bowl.
5. In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon and salt.
6. Mix the honey butter mixture into the mashed bananas and then add it to the dry ingredients.
7. Mix until just incorporated (try not to overmix). 
8. Reserve some of the chocolate chunks to sprinkle on top and then add the rest to the batter, folding in gently.
9. Distribute the batter between the cases, filling them about two thirds full.
10. Add a few of the saved chunks to the top of each muffin.
11. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
12. Allow to rest in the tin for 5 minutes before removing and transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies

So Christmas has come and gone.  It was a good one.  I got some fabulous things, including a number of new additions for my kitchen (which I now need to find space for) and some photo editing software that I have been coveting for a while.  There was also great food and lots of rushing about visiting people.  Admittedly I did end up feeling a bit homesick.  It's been three years since I was home for Christmas.  It is one of the downsides to living so far away with erratic circumstances: planning anything is nearly impossible.  But maybe I'll get to go down next year.

Anyway, since me being at university means there is only one source of income at the moment, plus the fact that we are planning and paying for a wedding next year, funds are a bit low.  There was money for buying presents for immediate family but extended family that we would be seeing on Christmas and Boxing Day, not so much.  But I love giving presents to people so I decided I would make the presents!  Or bake as the case actually is.  So December 23rd and 24th were spent baking over 200 biscuits!  I've never made so many before.  It was exhausting but worth it!  The majority were my favourite chocolate dipped orange shortbread (cut into stars), which were for the grandparents, aunts, uncles and older cousins.  The younger cousins got chewy chocolate chip cookies.  I didn't think either of those would suit the last giftee though, since he is only 3.  So I made something new just for him: banana chocolate chip cookies.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide his verdict on the cookies.  However, the fiancé got to eat the spares and he says they are very banana-ry and there's lots of chocolate chips to compliment it.  They're also slightly crunchy.  Yum yum!

Recipe - adapted from Biscuit via Baking Heaven volume 2

Makes about 24

• 100g/3.5oz butter
• 100g/3.5oz golden caster sugar
• 100g/3.5oz banana (about 1 banana)
• 200g/7oz plain flour
• 100g/3.5oz milk chocolate chips

1. Mash the banana in a large bowl with a fork.
2. Add the butter and sugar and beat together until smooth and creamy.  If it starts to curdle, add a spoonful of the flour.
3. Add the remaining flour and the chocolate chips to the mixture.  Beat together until a soft, sticky dough forms.
4. Form dough into a rough ball and wrap in clingfilm.  Chill in the fridge for 2-3 hours.
5. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper.
6. Shape the dough into balls about the size of a walnut, place on the trays spaced about 3cm/1.5inches apart and then flatten them with a wet fork.
7. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until the edges of the biscuits are golden brown.  The centres will still be a little soft.
8. Allow to rest on the trays for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling. 

Lemon Sandwich Cookies

So baking has been quite lax of late due to being completely swamped with work from university.  There's barely time for anything other than work and if I'm not working, I'm crashed on the sofa from exhaustion.  Goodness knows what I'll be like when I'm on my first school placement in a couple of weeks.  Okay, there were some baking exploits over the last couple of weekends, but those are for the Dessert Challenge so you'll have to wait until Thursday for details on that.

Anyway, I came home on Friday, relieved that I now have a two week holiday (although there will still be lots of work to get done) and decided I needed to bake something quick and yummy.  Obviously it was going to be biscuits, because I love biscuits, and they would be lemon sandwich biscuits.  The original recipe is for vanilla and raspberry filled biscuits (which are quite fantastic) but I wanted to make them lemon because, as some of you may know by now, the fiancé and I love lemony things.

Well, they are certainly yummy but they took a little longer than planned to make.  My dough was not quite as soft as it should have been.  I didn't let my butter soften first and I burst three disposable bags in the process of piping them out onto trays.  Silly me.  Other than that though, they were very simple to do, and ended up being quite pretty.  Plus yummy.  Very yummy, even if they are a little delicate.  The biscuit and filling go really well together and they melt in your mouth.

Recipe - Makes about 15

Biscuits - adapted from The Great British Bake Off: How to Bake:

• 250g/8oz softened butter (very important for getting a soft dough)
• 60g/2oz icing sugar
• 1 tsp lemon extract
• 200g/7oz plain flour
• 60g/2oz cornflour

1. Line 2-3 baking trays with greaseproof paper.
2. Sift the icing sugar into a large bowl and beat in the butter until smooth and creamy.
3. Add the lemon extract and mix.
4. Sift the plain flour and cornflour together into the bowl and beat the mixture until it is smooth and of a pipe-able consistency.
5. Fit a strong piping bag with a large, closed star nozzle and spoon in the dough.
6. Pipe spirals onto the prepared trays, starting in the middle of the spiral and working outwards until it is 5cm/2inches in diameter.
7. Chill in the fridge for 15-20 minutes to firm up and in the mean time, preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4.
8. Bake the cookies for about 12 minutes or until the edges just start to brown. 
9. Let the sit on the tray for about 3 minutes before carefully transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Filling: 

• 115g/4oz butter
• 250g/8oz icing sugar, plus extra for dusting
• 1 tsp lemon extract
• 1 tsp milk

1. Put all the ingredients into a bowl and beat until smooth and creamy.
2. Transfer into a piping bag fitted with a large, open star nozzle.
3. Pipe swirls of buttercream onto the underside of half the biscuits.
4. Top each frosted biscuit with another, unfrosted biscuit to create a sandwich.
5. Dust with icing sugar.

Banoffee Biscuits

Why yes, this is another banana based bake.  I have bananas left over from last week that need to be used up.  This recipe used one banana so I still need to find something to do with the other two.  Hmmm....

Anyway, I saw this really simple recipe in my 2012 summer issue of Baking Heaven.  I find a lot of things I want to try in that particular issue, though I rather enjoy flicking through the five other ones I own.  I wish I could afford to buy more issues but since I'll be off to university again after the summer I really need to reserve my money for important things like food and electricity.  And train fare.  So much train fare... 

I should stop side tracking.  Biscuits!  Right, so the recipe was for either banana biscuits or strawberry ones.  Obviously, since I had bananas I wanted to make the banana ones.  I decided to add to them though by including toffee chunks since banana and toffee is a common and much loved combination.  Plus it would make them a little more interesting.

I had to modify the recipe slightly because I used too much banana.  I didn't want to use just some of the banana because then what would I do with the other bit?  So I put it all in and of course the dough ended up very sticky.  It is meant to be sticky but not that much.  Hence I compensated by adding some extra flour.  It doesn't seem to have had any sort of negative effect.

These were fun to watch in the oven as all the toffee starts bubbling when it gets hot and it's like mini volcanoes.  You do get a fair amount of toffee spilling out of the cookies as they bake, which I removed after they were finish to keep the nice, rounded finish.  Plus the toffee that spilled cooked a lot faster and therefore burnt slightly and I'm sure most people wouldn't like burnt toffee.

The end result is a slightly soft biscuit.  The edges are crunchy, as is the toffee.  The fiancé isn't that keen on soft biscuits but he said the crunchy toffee makes up for the bits that are soft and so texture wise it is really nice.  You can taste the banana throughout and it goes well with the toffee.  He does recommend taking your time with them though and not trying to eat the whole thing in one mouthful or you'll end up gumming your mouth together.

Recipe - adapted from Biscuit via Baking Heaven volume 2

Makes about 20

• 100g/3.5oz butter
• 100g/3.5oz golden caster sugar
• 150g/5.5oz banana (about 1 banana)
• 240g/8.5oz plain flour
• 75g/2.5oz hard toffee sweets

1. Mash the banana in a large bowl with a fork.
2. Add the butter and sugar and beat together until smooth and creamy.  If it starts to curdle, add a spoonful of the flour.
3. Crush the toffees into small pieces and add them and the remaining flour to the mixture.  Beat together until a soft, sticky dough forms.
4. Form dough into a rough ball and wrap in clingfilm.  Chill in the fridge for about an hour.
5. Preheat the oven to180C/350F/Gas Mark 4 and line 2-4 baking trays (I only own 2 but ended up doing 4 batches) with greaseproof paper.
6. Shape the dough into balls about the size of a walnut and then squash the balls flat so they are about 5mm/0.25inches thick.  Place on the trays spaced about 3cm/1.5inches apart.
7. Bake for about 15 minutes or until the edges of the biscuits are golden brown.  The centres will still be a little soft.
8. Allow to rest on the trays for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.  (Once mine had cooled I broke off any hanging bits of toffee that spilt out during baking).

Chocolate and Avocado Cake

I admit,  I was sceptical.  I am completely well aware that you can use fruit and vegetables in cake batter.  Carrot cake is a thing after all, and I've read banana is a great substitute for...well, most things actually.  But this is my first time seeing avocado.  Especially as from what I understand it's not usually considered a 'dessert' fruit.  I've seen it used in savoury dinners and salads and as a dip.  It's not exactly sweet (I figured I'd try some whilst working with it. Decided I didn't like it) so would it really hold up in a cake?  Particularly in the buttercream since that's where it's flavour is going to be detected.  Well, I like trying new things so I figured why not?

So how did this come about?  Well, today is the fiancé's Mum's birthday and so obviously that's an excuse to make a cake.  Question was, what kind of cake?  When I asked the fiancé, his response was that she liked the angel food cake I made her last year.  I hate repeating myself though, even if that's partly because I want something I can post about on this blog.  So I was still lacking inspiration by the time Friday last week rolled around and I needed to know so I could make sure I had all the ingredients before I ordered my groceries.  Now Friday I was doing the fiancé's Mum a favour and sitting in her house waiting for people to come and pick up a giant parcel.  I ended up waiting on them for a total of 6 hours, which is really quite boring.  To amuse myself I borrowed her laptop and did what I usually do when I can't think of anything better to do (or don't feel like doing any of the things I actually brought with me), which was browse around on Pinterest.  Recently I've been trying to expand what I make for my dinner so I've been hanging around the food section a lot.  It was there I stumbled across a pin about a chocolate and beets cake.  The cake itself wasn't what got me though, it was the accompanying comment, which mentioned chocolate and avocado cake and it being really good.  Now, I know the fiancé's Mum likes avocados so thought this could be a bizarre yet interesting thing to try and make.  It helped that there seemed to be a lot of positive feedback for the cake from followers of the blog. 

And that's how I ended up with this cake recipe.  As for the buttons for decoration, I knew I was going to be doing that regardless since she loves buttons and I have a button mould, albeit it a tiny one that only makes three buttons at a time.  There are 42 buttons in total.  They also were originally standing up in the middle but then they wouldn't fit in my carry container so I had to smoosh them down a bit.  Ah well.

I've never worked with avocados before.  They are such a weird fruit!  I was having a good giggle as I peeled them and scooped out the inside.  I have no idea if mine were ripe enough but they were a bit of a pain to mash up.  I probably could have done with putting them in a proper blend rather than using a stick one, but alas my one broke.

I was really nervous about this cake since it was a bit of a wild card.  I was dreading it being awful, despite all the good reviews on Joy's blog.  I shouldn't have worried though.  It went down really well.  The fiancé's Mum thought the buttercream tasted like a strange, cherry marzipan.  Her Mum, who was there too, did not agree.  They both ate their slices though and the chocolate cake got lots of compliments.  Very moist and you wouldn't know it was made with avocado.  Personally I think the aesthetic left a little to be desired.  The buttercream did spill over edges slightly and in an uneven manner so it looked a bit messy.  The buttons were also a bit dulled because I did that awful thing of putting them in the fridge to set but that's because I had so many to do and no patience at all.  Even with putting them in the fridge it took me three hours to do them all.  I will say though, I love the wonderful, bright green colour of the buttercream.  I think it looks amazing against the chocolate cake.

Recipe - adapted from Joy the Baker

Makes 2 x 20cm/8inch round cake layers

Cake:

• 400g/14oz plain flour (I used gluten free)
• 60g/2oz cocoa powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 400g/14oz granulated sugar
• 60ml/2fl.oz vegetable oil (I used sunflower)
• 70g/2.5oz soft avocado meat (about 1 medium avocado)
• 500ml/17.5fl.oz water
• 2 tbsp white vinegar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and grease two 20cm/8inch round cake tins.
2. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl.  Stir together.
3. Scoop the avocado meat into a medium bowl and mash thoroughly.  You may want to blitz it in a blender (I used a stick blender to give me a hand).
4. Once thoroughly mashed, mix in the oil, water, vinegar and vanilla extract.
5. Add the sugar to the wet ingredients and mix well.
6. Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl of dry and whisk by hand until smooth.
7. Distribute the batter evenly between the two cake tins.
8. Bake for 30-40 minutes until cakes are risen, slightly springy to the touch and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
9. Allow the cakes to cool in their tins before transferring to a wire rack.  Let them cool completely before frosting.

Buttercream:

• 200g/7oz avocado meat (2-3 avocados worth, ideally very ripe ones)
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 450g/1lb icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Put the avocado meat in a bowl (leave out any bits that have brown spots).  Mash thoroughly. (Again, I blitzed mine with a hand blender.  It probably wasn't as ripe as it could have been.)
2. Beat the lemon juice into the avocado meat until it lightens in colour and is smooth (though I had a few bits of avocado floating round in mine but don't think it really mattered in the long run).  You might want to use an electric whisk.
3. Add the icing sugar a little at a time, beating in after each addition.
4. Add vanilla extract and beat in.

Assembly:

• 100g/3.5oz dark vegan chocolate (optional for decoration)

1. Place one cake round on a plate.
2. Cover the top of it with half the avocado buttercream, smoothing it out with a spatula.
3. Place the other round on top and press down gently.
4. Cover the top of this one with the remaining buttercream and smooth out.
5. If making chocolate decorations, melt the chocolate in a glass bowl placed over a pan of gently simmering water. 
6. Pour chocolate into moulds (may have to be done in batches) and allow to set.
7. Decorate.

Strawberry and Cream Cake

Easter is the fiancé's mum's New Year.  The clocks have gone forward, making the days longer; the weather is usually brighter and warmer and she can put up the summer curtains.  She also insists on having her children over for lunch, and now me by extension.  Being the avid baker I was charged with dessert and could make whatever I wanted.  Well I really didn't know what I wanted to do except that it would be something I'd not made before.  And vaguely spring/summery, to reflect the changing seasons.

I had a look through my cupboards to see what I had and see if it sparked any ideas.  As often happens when I open my cupboard, something fell out: one of the packets of freeze dried strawberry powder I had bought to use in my quest for strawberry extract alternatives.  Well there was an idea.  A strawberry cakes.  Strawberries are quite a summery thing.  And what else does one think of when they have strawberries?  Why, cream of course.  There.  Strawberry and cream cake.  That should be fine.

However, I wasn't sure how to go about adding the strawberry powder to a cake.  Would it be like with cocoa where you supplement some in place of flour?  Should I rehydrate it first?  Obviously the safest answer was to look it up and see if I could find a recipe that used it.  Which clearly I did find and it was a vegan recipe too, which is cool.  Of course I ruin that by covering it with cream.  As far as I can tell, from this recipe and from comments on various forums, you just add the powdered strawberry to a white cake recipe, with a little liquid of some kind, like strawberry extract or reduced strawberry purée.  This recipe uses strawberry extract as its liquid, which I cannot get here in the UK (hence why I have my quest).  So I made a strawberry purée, since I had strawberries in my fridge (I bought them to use for decoration but didn't end up going with that idea in the end).  

I may have got a bit carried away with icing this cake.  Ages ago I saw several pictures of cakes covered in buttercream roses.  They all looked so pretty and though this cake is not particularly tall I wanted to give it a try.  And just to make it a bit more interesting, I wanted to have a gradient colour change running from the centre to the base.  Whipping the cream and icing the cake took about 40 minutes as a result but the final outcome did look so beautiful.  I was very proud.

The overall result was a very beautiful cake that tasted like strawberries with cream.  The only problem though is that it had quite a close texture and as a result was a little 'gummy'.  The fiancé said it was a bit like a fruit roll, only better.  Despite that though, everyone seemed to really enjoy it and a vast majority of it got eaten.

Recipe - adapted from My Vegan Cookbook

Whilst the cake itself is a vegan recipe, my decision to use cream to decorate it means I've essentially ruined that.  So if you want a fully vegan cake, use a vegan alternative for the cream.  A lot of places I've seen use whipped coconut cream. 

• 290g/10oz plain flour
• 180g/6.5oz caster sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1.25 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 75g/3oz freeze dried strawberry powder
• 330ml/11.5fl.oz water
• 30g/1oz butter
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 115g/4oz strawberries
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• Pink food colouring
• 450ml/16fl.oz double cream (or coconut cream for fully vegan cake)

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and grease and line 20cm/8inch round cake tin.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and freeze dried strawberry powder.
3. Blitz the strawberries to a purée and run through a sieve into a saucepan.
4. Reduce the strawberry purée over a medium heat until you are left with about half.  You should have about 1.5 tbsp worth of purée.
5. Melt the butter.
6. In a small bowl, combine the water, oil, melted butter, lemon juice, strawberry purée and a few drops of food colouring.
7. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix together gently with a spoon until combined.  
8. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and level out.
9. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
10. Allow to sit in the tin for about 10 minutes and then transfer to a rack to finish cooling.
11. Whip the cream until you get stiff peaks.
12. Spoon about a quarter into a piping bag fitted with a large closed star nozzle.  
13. First pipe a large rose in the centre of the cake, then pipe a circle of smaller roses around it.  It doesn't matter if there are gaps between roses, fill these by holding the nozzle perpendicular to the cake and squeezing out just a little cream to create a small flower shape.
14. Squeeze any cream left in the bag back into the bowl and add a few drops of pink colouring.  Fold in carefully so you have a slightly pinkish cream.  If there are obvious streaks of colouring running through it doesn't matter since it adds to the effect.
15. Pipe another circle of roses around the outside of the first circle.  These ones should be pretty close to the edge.  Fill any gaps between the roses in the same manner as before.
16. Repeat step 14.  You should now have a darker pink cream.
17. Pipe roses around the side of the cake and fill in all gaps along the top edges, base and between roses with small cream flours.

Eggless Chocolate Chip Cookies

So last week there was a knock at the door mid afternoon.  The fiancé goes to answer it and comes back with a box addressed to me.  Me getting parcels is not strange.  I do a lot of my shopping online.  However I hadn't ordered anything recently, and certainly not something that warranted a box of this size or shape.  Confused but curious I opened it.  Turns out my lovely sister had sent me and the fiancé an Easter gift in the form of a box full of different Lindor truffles, which was quite wonderful.  However, this got me wanting to send something back to her but since I'm trying to be more careful with my money I didn't really want to buy expensive Easter chocolate.  I did however have a cupboard full of baking ingredients and we had recently discussed biscuits on our last Skype chat.  But if I'm sending her biscuits then I obviously have to send biscuits to my brothers and Dad and his partner too.  Otherwise it wouldn't be fair.  So I spent all of Tuesday evening baking four different types of biscuits.  My sister had mentioned Vienesse Fingers in our chat, so I mad her some of those though I piped them into egg shapes.  For my Dad and his partner, I made orange shortbread covered in chocolate.

My two brothers though...I wasn't really sure about them.  The elder eats pretty much anything and in the end I settled on a chocolate biscuit (which I will post soon) but the younger is picky.  Ridiculously so.  Even about sweet things.  He doesn't like ice cream or cake or anything like that.  Did he even like biscuits?  It was a while before I remembered that he had mentioned there was one type of biscuit he likes: Maryland Chocolate Chip Cookies.  They are rather scrumptious cookies.  There has been many an occasion where I have eaten a whole pack of them in one sitting without realising.  So I went looking for a copy-cat recipe, which found one.  Or at least one that claimed to be one.  I figured it was worth a shot.

Well, the final result didn't taste like Maryland Cookies.  They were still nice though.  My honest analysis of the taste is that they are like gingerbread but without the ginger.  The fiancé agrees with this.  I think it's the golden syrup in the recipe.  You can taste it.  They are not a particularly crunchy biscuit either.  I'm glad I flattened them before baking because otherwise they wouldn't have been flat and would have been even softer.  Not that they were that soft.  Just not as crunchy and crumbly as I would have liked.  We enjoyed them though.  Quite a lovely biscuit.  And no eggs in this one either.

Recipe - adapted from Allrecipes
Makes about 30

• 165g/6oz vegetable shortening or margarine (not butter, I used Stork)
  
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 75g/3oz caster sugar
• 4 tbsp golden syrup
• 2 tsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 260g/9oz plain flour
• 1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 100g/3.5oz milk chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and line 2-3 baking trays with greaseproof paper.
2. In a large bowl mix the shortening/margarine with the salt and sugar until pale and fluffy.
3. Add in the golden syrup, milk and vanilla extract and mix in.
4. Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda and chocolate chips and mix until just combined.
5. Shape teaspoonfuls of mixture into balls and then flatten and place on the trays.
6. Bake for 10-15 minutes until the edges of the biscuits start to turn golden.
7. Remove and let sit on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes

For the past six months I have been working at the W H Smith in Glenrothes but have now finished as I was only covering someone's maternity leave.  Saturday night was the staff night out, a treat paid for with the prize we earned selling Kobos over Christmas.  At the end of the meal I was presented with a bag of gifts, the majority of which were related to baking.  I made cakes and biscuits for the staff at Christmas and they clearly went down well.  So I figured I would something to say thank you and thus, more cakes!

The recipe for these cakes came from Cupcakes & Muffins, which is the book I was given as one of my presents.  It was quite different from the cakes I've made before.  There are no eggs in this recipe and I had to make a sugar and butter syrup.  I have not tried one myself since I'm not actually a fan of chocolate cake (or almost anything chocolate flavoured).  However, my boyfriend had one with the white chocolate topping and he said it was nice and moist, with the white chocolate adding a nice sweet contrast to the rich taste of the cake.

The recipe is apparently for 20 cakes but I ended up with 20 very tiny cakes.  I do not know if it's the cases I chose that make them look deceptively small or if I didn't get enough air into the recipe so they didn't rise very well or if they're meant to be that way.  Whatever the reason I would probably spread the mixture over fewer cases next time.  Maybe 12 or so.  I also found the amount of topping I ended up making was just a little bit insufficient.  So that would benefit from there being fewer cakes too.

Recipe, adapted from Cupcakes & Muffins:


The fudge cakes:

• 200ml water
• 85g/3oz butter
• 85g/3oz caster sugar
• 1 tbsp golden syrup
• 3 tbsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 225g/8oz plain flour
• 2 tbsp cocoa powder 

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4.
2. Set out your paper cases in a cake tray.  I recommend 12 rather than 20.
3. Put the water, butter, sugar and syrup in a saucepan on a gentle heat.  You're supposed to stir until the sugar dissolves but I did not know when this was.  I got it to a boil though and kept it like that for about 5 to 10 minutes, which is close to what the recipe asks for.  I figured as long as it wasn't burnt it would be fine.
4. In a small jug, mix the milk, vanilla and bicarbonate of soda until the bicarbonate of soda has dissolved.
5. In another bowl put the flour and the cocoa (sifting optional), add the cool syrup mixture and the milk and then beat until smooth.
6. Spoon into the cases.  When making 20 I got about 2 soup spoon's worth per case.  You can probably get 3 (or 4 at a push) with 12 cases.  Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes or until a skewer (or thin end of a teaspoon or toothpick) inserted into the centre comes out clean.  Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool.

White chocolate topping - covers half the cakes:

• 2 tbsp water
• 50g/1.75oz white chocolate
• 175g/6oz icing sugar
• 25g/ 0.8oz butter

Dark chocolate topping - covers half the cakes:

• 2 tbsp water
• 50g/1.75oz dark chocolate
• 175g/6oz icing sugar
• 25g/ 0.8oz butter

1. Put butter, white chocolate and water in a heat proof bowl and melt over a pan of simmering water, mixing it together.
2. Do the same for the dark chocolate in another bowl.
3. When fully melted,add the sugar to each and mix until smooth and thick.
4. Top half the cakes with each type.

Decoration wise you could do what you want.  The book suggests 100g/3.5oz of shavings of each type of chocolate.  I grated chocolate onto mine (dark onto the white icing and white onto the dark) and also made little chocolate hearts by melting some spare chocolate and putting them in a mould.  Since the hearts are so small they only took about 10 minutes to set in the fridge.  I would suggest making them before you do the icing though so the icing hasn't completely hardened by the time they come out the fridge.