Marzipany Poppyseed Mini Muffins

Marzipany poppyseed mini muffins. With a tulip. Because it's spring.

It’s about time I posted a recipe again, and this one is not even stolen from anywhere but my very own creation. Well yes, I used another recipe I have as inspiration but I do think that’s how (almost) everybody works.

So, I have been thinking about marzipan. It’s interesting because people either hate it or love it. I myself am one of the few who don’t feel strongly about it. I do have strong feelings for my marzipany poppyseed mini muffins though! :)

The texture of these mini muffins is lovely. They are very light and fluffy, with a hint of a crust on top, which sets it off in a rather delightful way. Yes, I am happy today!

You should definitely try them yourself:

Marzipany Poppyseed Mini Muffins

Ingredients
90 g margarine
160 g sugar
1 egg
1 tsp marzipan flavouring
2 tsp baking powder
1 pinch salt
140 g flour
150 ml milk

Method
Put the margarine and the sugar into a mixing bowl and get to work on them with your electric whisk. When combined and smooth, add the egg and do some more whisking. Then add all the other ingredients* and beat until well combined. The mixture is a bit runny for muffin batter but that’s fine. Because I say so. Pour it into 24 mini muffin liners sitting in your mini muffin baking tin. Bake at 190° C for about 17 minutes.

* You can tell that that was the point when my culinary creativity left me. Probably wandered off to have a drink with my urge to clean the house, which I haven’t seen much of lately…

Chocolate Chilli Zombie Graves

Yes, I’ve put these into the category cute. They are. Even if you may not see it. :)

I am so happy with the way my zombie graves turned out! My zombie film group has become hard to impress (I do spoil them ;) but I think I succeeded once more, yay!

In case you are as mad as me and/or have friends as mad as mine, here’s a how-to:

1. Bake a chocolate chilli tray bake. (See recipe below)
2. When you chop up the chillies for the tray bake, do touch your eyes at least once. It’s how I did it, and I think it’s part of the whole experience…
3. Cut off the top of your tray bake so that it is nice and level. Crumb the tray bake top and top the cake with it. I used store-bought chocolate spread to make the crumbs stick.
4. Melt some white chocolate, and pipe zombie arms onto a piece of baking parchment. Make plenty of them because they WILL break when you try to stick them into your graves.
5. Make your own tombstone biscuit stencil using your zombie calendar tombstone as a model. (Everybody should have one of those! :)
6. Bake simple sugar biscuits for your tombstones. Scrawl RIP onto them with a bit of melted dark chocolate. (Or write your friends’ names – I must admit that I was tempted!)
7. Assemble your graves with lots of patience and care.
8. Ignore step seven because I only wrote that to sound mature. Assemble your graves with lots of sweating and swearing.
9. Present the chocolate chilli zombie graves to your mad friends! :D

Recipe: Chocolate Chilli Cake

This is the recipe for a round 26 cm baking tin. If you make a tray bake, adapt the quantities accordingly.

Ingredients
2 – 3 large chillies
250 g butter
250 g dark chocolate
4 eggs
250 g sugar
100 g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder

Method
Remove the seeds from the chillies and chop them up as small as you can (or as small as you can be bothered to). I’ve used 2.5 chillies this time, but I think the next time around I will use three.
Melt the butter in a small pan. Add the chocolate when the butter is almost melted. Stir over low heat until chocolate and butter are completely melted, then set aside to let cool a little.
In a mixing bowl, beat eggs and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add chocolate butter, beat again.
Sift and stir in the flour and the baking powder, then stir in the chilli bits. Stir well but don’t overmix. (Don’t you like these exact instructions? :-P)
Pour your cake batter into your baking tin and bake at 190°C for about 40 minutes.

Birthday Fairy Cakes for Grown-Ups

For our birthday party on Saturday, I baked two different kinds of fairy cakes for grown-ups:

For the cappuccino cakes I used this recipe from BBC Good Food. I love coffee-flavoured cakes, and this is one of my favourite ones. And even people who don’t like coffee have told me that the cakes are nice! (And they’re weren’t just being polite. My friends don’t do polite. ;)

The mascarpone cream behaved strangely but I liked that the cakes looked all shiny, and I’ve used the leftover way-too-liquid cream to make cappuccino ice cream. Win-win! :D

The other cakes are cashew & lime. I adapted a recipe from a German cookbook. The original recipe is for pistachio cakes but I decided to make cashew ones because part of me just cannot bear to follow instructions. It’s a personal trait that doesn’t always make dealing with me very easy – but at least it also leads to yummy cakes!

Cashew & Lime Fairy Cakes

Ingredients (for about 16 cakes)
90 g cashews
250 g softened butter
140 g sugar
140 g flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp Greek yoghurt
2 eggs
4 tbsp lime juice
200 g icing sugar
zest of 1 lime

Method
Grind/chop/foodprocessorwhiz your cashews as much as you can. (It helps to project all your anger onto the cashews. If you don’t have that much anger, call me. I will be happy to help! ;) Then mix them together with 125 g butter, sugar, flour, baking powder and the Greek yoghurt. Beat your eggs a little (again, depending on your anger level), then stir them into the rest of your cake batter until combined. Spoon your batter into your muffin tin/muffin liners. Bake at 180°C for 20 – 25 minutes.
For the topping, beat the remaining 125 g softened butter together with the lime juice until light and fluffy. Sift in the icing sugar and beat some more. Add the zest and stir well. Spread or pipe your topping onto your cakes; then eat at least one immediately before your friends devour them all!

Orange and Poppyseed Birthday Cake with Chocolate Sauce

Yeah, let’s talk some more about food photography, why don’t we. This picture does NOT do the cake justice. Not. At. All. Cutting it up and taking picture of a slice of cake would be a much better option but it’s for my friend and I can’t give her a cake with a piece missing. (Nobody would ever believe me that it was for photography purposes; they know me too well for that!) And call me undedicated to my blog but I don’t want to bake another cake just so I can take a nice picture.

So this is what you get. An underwhelming picture of an overwhelming cake, if I may say so myself! I baked this cake for my friend whose birthday I missed because I was knocked out by a mean jetlag. Yes, that was more than a month ago but I like to think it was worth the wait! :) It’s an lovely orange cake with poppyseeds and a fairly decadent chocolate sauce. Yum.

I printed the recipe off of the BBC Good Food website a while ago but it does not seem to be on there anymore. Shame! Guess I will have to give it to you on here because you definitely want to make this cake. And you want to eat this cake. And then you want to make and eat some more of it!

Orange and Poppyseed Cake with Chocolate Sauce

Ingredients
250 g softened butter
200 g sugar
3 eggs
250 g flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
juice and zest of 2 oranges
50 g poppyseeds
100 ml double cream
100 g chopped chocolate or chocolate chips

Method
Grease a 20 cm cake tin.
Beat 200 g of butter and all the sugar in a large bowl until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beat well. Sift in flour and baking powder, and again beat well. Add the orange juice and zest as well as the poppyseeds and give the whole thing another good beating. Then spoon the mixture into your cake tin and bake at 180° C for 50 minutes.
Let the cake cool in the tin and make the chocolate sauce in the meantime: heat the double cream in a small pan. Take it off the heat and add the remaining 50 g butter and the chocolate (chips). Let sit for one minute, then give it a very good stir until everything is blended really well. Let cool until your cake is nice and cool, then spread it all over the top of it. If there is some sauce left, eat it with a big spoon and don’t hold back if you feel like groaning in enjoyment of all the chocolatey goodness!

Light Coconut and Lemon Cream Cheese Cake

I always find it quite astounding when people tell me that they find it hard to resist temptation. That’s the easiest thing in the world! In fact, I think it’s too easy. So I’ve decided to stop doing it. Resisting temptation is for beginners. ;)

And this is why when I read this recipe I immediately gave in to the temptation…

Light coconut and lemon cream cheese cake

I only changed the original recipe a tiny bit but in the first attempt, the cake was strangely flat. For the second attempt I used a smaller cake tin, and the third time around I adjusted the baking time some more. Perfect!

I really like how light the cake is, with the right level of sweetness for my taste. And it’s low in calories, which you can’t tell when you eat it – if you know me you know how important that is to me!

So I am happy to give you my slightly adapted version of the recipe:

Light Coconut and Lemon Cream Cheese Cake

Ingredients
75 g plain biscuits
30 g desiccated coconut, plus 2 tbsp for garnishing
2 tbsp low-fat yoghurt (I don’t believe in non-fat yoghurt!)
300 g low-fat cream cheese
90 g sugar
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp lemon juice

Method
Butter a 20-cm baking tin, then line it with baking paper.
Crush the biscuits (or use a food processor) thoroughly so you get fine crumbs. Mix them with the desiccated coconut, then add the yoghurt. Mix thoroughly. Spread and press the mixture over the base of your baking tin.
Beat the cream cheese, sugar, eggs, vanilla and lemon juice until well combined. Pour it into the baking tin.
Bake at 160°C for about 40 minutes (until set). From my personal experience I recommend baking it for a bit longer rather than shorter. (Yes, we had coconut and lemon cream cheese cake mush when I made the cake for the second time. Still yummy though.)
Let the cake cool in the tin. Store in the fridge; remove from fridge about an hour before serving. Carefully remove the cake from the pan and top it with 2 tbsp desiccated coconut.
Depending on how lemony you want your cake (be careful not to override the taste of the coconut though!) you can also sprinkle your cake with lemon zest.

Gingerbread-spiced Pumpkin and Walnut Cake with Honey Icing

This is the end. I’ve used up all the pumpkin which my friend gave to me. With this cake I officially declare this year’s pumpkin season to be over.

However! The end of the pumpkin season means it’s (almost) the beginning of the Christmas-themed baking season! I am usually seriously strict when it comes to my ban on all Christmas foods, decorations, etc before the first Sunday of advent. But this year everything’s different. Actually, this may very well be the only time I’m baking anything remotely Christmassy this year!

For all of these reasons, this cake had to be special. I went and came up with my own recipe – yes, there are thousands of similar pumpkin bars recipes but this one’s mine. My precioussssss!

And I am happy with the result. Not entirely – when am I ever entirely happy with anything!? Unless there are dinosaurs and/or sharks and/or zombies involved. I am as happy with the result as it’s possible for me.

Reasons why I like this cake:

1. You can taste the pumpkin. This is essential. You cannot have a pumpkin cake with other things overpowering the taste.
2. The gingerbread spice and the cinnamon work nicely with the rest, and while with other recipes I often think they are a bit much I have found the perfect amount for my taste.
3. It’s so soft and moist! The texture is awesome.
4. It uses orange zests. Oranges are cool.
5. The honey icing! I am not even that big a fan of honey but I could eat this icing all day long.
6. The colour and the sliminess of the pumpkin-egg mixture. Never fails to make me happy.

Enough reasons? Good. Now have the recipe:

Gingerbread-spiced Pumpkin and Walnut Cake with Honey Icing

Ingredients
5 eggs
350 g sugar
300 ml oil
530 g puréed pumpkin
250 g flour
3.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp gingerbread spice
0.5 tsp cinnamon
2.5 tsp orange zests
1 dash salt
100 g chopped walnuts
250 g mascarpone
130 g butter, softened
260 g icing sugar
3 tbsp honey (feel free to use the most intense one you can find!)

Method
Line a 38 x 25 cm baking tray or tin with baking parchment.
In a big bowl mix together the eggs and the puréed pumpkin. Enjoy. :) Add the sugar and the oil and whisk until well combined and fluffy. In a second bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, spices, zests and walnuts; then fold the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture. Spoon onto the baking tray.
Bake at 180°C for about 27 minutes.
Let cool.
For the icing, combine mascarpone and butter, sift the icing sugar onto it. Then add the honey and stir it all well until smooth. Spread the icing onto the cooled cake.

Honey Beer Bread

We hosted another dinner party last night. It was so much fun – not least because it was officially this season’s first Glühwein night!

The sad thing was that I was NOT in charge of dessert, so it looked like there was no baking occasion for me. It’s not like I don’t love cooking, and I like to think that both my Middle Eastern pumpkin soup and the lamb tagine were a real success. But still. Me wants baking.

So I thought … if my friends are going to keep me from baking a cake for Friday night, I am baking bread for Saturday morning! They all stayed the night at our place anyway. (Remember I mentioned Glühwein? ;)

Never having baked bread before I was intrigued by an incredibly simple and yummy sounding recipe I found on my wanderings through various food blogs.

Honey Beer Bread

The bread is wonderful; I really like the taste. I did a trial run on Wednesday, and this second time round I have changed the recipe only a tiny little bit. Now I really want to try out different variations of it though!

Honey Beer Bread

Ingredients
300 g flour
1 tbsp baking powder
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp honey
355 ml beer
60 g butter, melted

Method
Whisk together flour, baking powder, sugar and salt; then stir in honey and beer – you may want to microwave the honey for a few seconds because that makes it easier to stir it in. Spoon half the melted butter into a loaf tin and use some of it to lightly grease the sides of the tin. Then add the batter and finally the second half of the melted butter. Spread it on top of the batter with a brush or the backside of a spoon.
Bake at 180° C for about 55 minutes.

Minty Cherry and Chocolate Tray Bake

This weekend’s cake was baked especially for my brother-in-law because it was very subtly suggested that he might like it.

A while ago, I saw this recipe  (German!) and I found the combination of flavours quite intriguing. So I gave it a go, and I must say I was not disappointed! I guess the hint of mint is not for everyone but it’s for me, and surely that’s what counts, right? Also, the mintiness is what gives this recipe a certain twist. And twisted minds like twisted recipes.

I have hardly changed the original recipe at all, which could be interpreted as a compliment, I suppose. :) The main change was regarding quantities because I used a 38 x 25 cm baking tray.

Minty Cherry and Chocolate Tray Bake

Ingredients
200 g butter or margarine
100 g sugar
1 packages vanilla sugar
1 pinch salt
3 eggs
180 g flour
2 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp milk
100 g mint chocolate
350 g cherries, pitted
50 g plain chocolate

Method
Mix together butter, sugars and salt. Beat in eggs one at a time. Sift in flour and baking powder, then add milk. Beat. Chop the mint chocolate and fold it into the cake batter. Spread batter onto baking tray lined with baking parchment, then scatter cherries on top.
Bake at 175°C for about 40 minutes.
Melt the plain chocolate in a small bowl over a pan of simmering water. Sprinkle cake with melted chocolate.

Obviously the degree of mintiness depends on the kind of chocolate you’re using. I like Ritter Sport Peppermint.

One more tip: if nephews are involved in the eating of your cake, use all your clumsiness when sprinkling the melted chocolate so that there are pieces with massive dollops of chocolate on them. The kids will love it!

Super quick chocolate muffins for four / Chocolate, cinnamon & plum muffins

 

Yay for spontaneous baking! When husband said yesterday that I was overdoing it, I assured him that I was not going to bake ANYTHING until the end of the week. Er … yes.

But it’s not my fault! I was surfing the web totally innocently, not knowing that inspiration was lurking just around the corner, waiting to take me by surprise. So there I was, reading this blog entry when I thought two things – actually, I thought a wide range of things which you don’t want to know about. Seriously. You don’t.

In any case, there were two new thoughts in my weird little head: a) I’m not convinced when it comes to microwave baking. Not that I’ve ever tried it. But still. b) However, this small-quantity recipe would be perfect for a round of muffins or fairy cakes without husband’s workmates getting leftovers.

 

I’ve changed the basic recipe a little bit:

Super quick chocolate muffins for four

6 tbsp flour
6 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp vanilla sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
4 tbsp cocoa powder
5 tbsp milk
5 tbsp oil

Mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl, spoon into four lined or greased muffin moulds and bake (in a regular old-fashioned oven for regular old-fashioned people like me) at 180°C for 15 – 20 minutes or until a skewer … you know the drill.

And for today’s muffins I’ve added some cinnamon and a few chocolate chips as well as two small slices of plum per muffin. The glaze is made from icing sugar, coffee and ground cinnamon.

I just realised that I’ve now moved three steps away from the original recipe; I changed the cooking method, the quantities AND then added other ingredients. I seriously don’t seem to be able to follow a recipe exactly. Ah well. Obeying is just not my thing, I guess. :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beetroot Brownies

It’s Sunday, and if that’s not enough of an occasion, we are also having friends round. Brownies time! In this special case: Beetroot Brownies time! Yes, I know it sounds strange. And I tried out the recipe because it sounded strange in the first place. But what can I say, they are DELICIOUS*. Out of the two people in this household, one claims you can’t really taste the beetroot at all; you can tell there’s something but you’d never be able to pinpoint it. The other person says the brownies are really nice but too much beetroot for his taste and I should try making them with a bit less beetroot next time around.

We both agree that the texture is lovely. It’s so moist and chocolatey and … I must admit that while I am usually quite wary of “healthy” cake recipes I was quite astonished when I realised that in terms of brownies, this one’s an actual lower-calorie recipe. Yes, it still uses lots of chocolate and sugar. We’re talking cake. Give me a cake recipe without sugar or fat and I am giving you … dunno. An arrogant snort, most likely.

These brownies do not taste like they’re lower (not low! lower!) in calories, and that’s the most important thing. Food that tastes low in calories is bad enough, but there’s seriously nothing worse than cakes that taste of little calories. [/rant]

Finally, here’s the link to the recipe: Beetroot Brownies. I’ve changed it a little bit; me still not owning a food processor I simply bought soft-cooked beetroot and grated it, and I melted the chocolate and butter in a bain-marie.

When we’re having our grown-up Sunday afternoon coffee & cakes later, I won’t tell our friends what the secret ingredient is. Can’t wait to see whether they’ll be able to guess it!

* Yes, shout-worthy delicious. Do feel free, however, to read all-upper-case words in Pterry’s Death’s voice. IT’S FUN. HAH. HAH.

 

 

Update:

Our friends did guess the secret ingredient. I am not trying to say my husband was right because that would just be silly. But I must admit that this morning, when I opened the box in which the brownies have spent their night, the smell of beetroot was overwhelming and not entirely pleasant. I still love the taste, though. But I might actually use slightly less of the evil healthy stuff next time I bake them.