Rich Tea Biscuits (Dairy- and Egg Free, with Wheat Free Option)

Is there anything quite as deliciously dunkable as a rich tea biscuit? Well, now you can make them at home!

Here in Ireland and the British Isles, these biscuits are readily available in every super market as a biscuit barrel staple; supermarkets even have their own brand versions of this crispy, plain treat. Not too fatty, not too sweet, with the perfect level of firm snap to withstand a thorough soaking in a hot cup of tea.

Essentially, a rich tea is a flat, thin, crunchy scone; it was almost exactly the same ingredients, and in nearly exactly the same proportions. If you look at the nutritional information on a pack of rich teas, you'll see that they're generally 15% fat and 20% sugar, and mostly flour. A scone is generally 25% fat and 15% sugar.

I've made this using self-raising wheat flour, and with spelt flour with added raising agents. I've noticed the ones made using shop-bought self-raising flour work the best, because it has just the right proportion of raising agents. However, I've included a recipe for homemade self-raising flour.

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DIFFICULTY
Requires a light touch with dough

TIME

About an hour

RECIPE RATING

Intermediate

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INGREDIMENTS

Ingredients for about 14 to 16 biscuits, depending on size

5 ounces (140 grammes) self raising flour*

Good pinch of salt

1 ounce (30 grammes) caster sugar

1 ounces (30 grammes) very cold margarine, or butter if you like

Water to bind, about 1 to 2 tablespoons

* - If you want to make your own self-raising flour, sieve 1 teaspoon of baking powder into every 4 ounces (115 grammes) of plain white spelt or wheat flour

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METHOD

• Line a one or two baking trays with non-stick baking paper, and preheat the oven to 160°C (325°F, Gas Mk.2).
• In a large mixing bowl, sieve the flour (and baking powder, if using), salt, and sugar. Rub in the margarine, or butter, until you have a very fine mixture.
• Gradually add the water, bringing the dough together with your hand. Add just enough water to bring the dough together into a stiff ball.
• Wrap the dough in cling film, or place in an airtight container, and allow to rest in the fridge for an hour to relax the gluten and set the margarine.
• Roll the dough out as thin as you dare on a floured work surface, making sure the turn the dough frequently as you roll so it doesn't pull back against the rolling pin. Cut 3 inch (7.5 centimetre) circles with a glass or biscuit cutter and prick each biscuit with a fork.
• Lie them gently on the baking trays, about half an inch (1 centimetre) apart, and bake in the centre of the preheated oven for about 15 minutes, or until the biscuits are completely dry and a light golden brown.
• Transfer the biscuits from the tray to a wire rack to cool to room temperature before eating. Store in an airtight container for up to a week.

Red Velvet Cupcakes with "Cream Cheese" Butter Cream

In recent years I have found that the best way to make cream cheese icing is to not use cream cheese at all. Intrigued? Well, read on a to find out how I made these delicious red velvet cakes with "cream cheese" icing!

Here in Ireland, cream cheese can be very inconsistent: some brands are perfectly thick and creamy, but other brands can be watery and thin. Sometimes you can make a cream cheese icing that whips up beautifully, then other times it will turn into a sugary cream cheese sauce.

The issue at play here is the moisture levels in the cream cheese. Sugar absorbs water and goes runny, and the more water there is for the sugar to absorb, the sloppier your mixture becomes. I'd found the best way to avoid this is to make an icing that tastes like cream cheese, without actually using cream cheese.

Creamy cheese is rich and fatty, but it's also slightly tangy from the fermentation process, and salty to preserve its freshness. Understanding this balance between fatty, tangy, and salty is the key to mimicking its flavour.

In my previous foray into non-cream cheese icing, I made a white chocolate and greek yoghurt fudge icing, and it was absolutely fabulous. However, if you don't want to cook up a yoghurt simple syrup, or you don't have any white chocolate, there is a way to make plain old vanilla buttercream taste like cream cheese icing.

To make enough icing for 12 cakes, simply beat together 4 ounces (115 grammes) of unsalted butter with 4 ounces (115 grammes) of condensed milk. Gradually beat in 8 ounces (225 grammes) of sieved icing sugar to make a thick and creamy icing. Add vanilla essence to taste.

And now we get a little bit adventurous: it's time to add small amounts of sea salt and distilled white (or apple cider) vinegar. I think vinegar is the best because it was a fermented sourness that is like cream cheese. However, if you don't want to use vinegar, you can substitute fresh lemon juice.

Add the salt and vinegar, a pinch and a few drops at a time, until you have the right level of "cheesiness". I used just under a quarter teaspoon each of salt and vinegar, but please add slowly and to your taste: you can always add, but you can't take it out!

If you want it to taste like lemon cheesecake icing, you can also add some lemon zest to taste.

To make the cupcakes, I used my newly revised cupcake recipe and substituted a teaspoon of the flour with cocoa powder, and substituted buttermilk for milk. I also added red food colouring.... but I don't think I added enough!

I also added some nice little red and white flowers that I had got in a Halloween cake decoration kit, although sadly one of the red flowers crumbled in the packet and had to start a new life as sprinkles. The kit also had sugar devils and ghosts, which I still haven't found a use for.

I hope you give these delicious cakes a try soon!

Nice and Simple Lemon Cupcakes

As I teased in my previous choco-cinnamint cupcakes, here is another delicious cupcake idea: yellow and purple lemon cupcakes!

When I went to art college, we were taught about colour theory, how each of the primary colours have an opposite and complementary colour: blue goes with orange, red goes with green, and yellow goes with purple. If you're painting a picture and want to dull a colour for a shadow, per se, you don't mix the paint with black, you mix it with its complement.

Of all the complementary colours, my favourite two are yellow and purple. It's such a pretty, floral palette that makes me thing of a pretty summer field. My least favourite is blue and orange: it's extremely hard to get that to look un-garish.

That's why my eye was immediately drawn to these one day a few years ago when I was walking down the homebaking aisle of Tesco....

I saw them and I knew it was fate.

I bought them and thought one day, I'll have a use for these, and that day finally came recently during my cupcake experiments. I thought making some lovely lemon cakes in purple wrappers would be the ideal way to make the best of these decorations.

For these cakes, I made a two-egg quantity of my newly revised cupcakes, adding in a teaspoon of lemon zest along with the vanilla essence. To make the lemon icing for 12 cakes, I mixed together 4 ounces (115 grammes) of room temperature butter with 4 ounces (115 grammes) of shop-bought lemon curd in a bowl with an electric mixer. I then gradually added 8 ounces (225 grammes) of sieved icing sugar and a splash of vanilla essence until I had a lovely soft icing. I then piped this onto the cakes in a swirl using a star-shaped nozzle, and sprinkled with some multicoloured sprinkles before popping a yellow and purple sugar swirl onto each cake.

Lemon cake is a classic, and I have done lemon cupcakes in the past, but I'm very pleased with the revised cake and buttercream recipe!

Choco-Cinnamint Cupcakes: a Flavour Experiment

I am finally back from a week-long summer camp where I taught teenagers how to play the bass guitar! And just before I left I made some delicious little cupcakes, including these fabulous Choco-Cinnamint cakes!

I think I may have mentioned it before, but I really like the combination of cinnamon and mint (I love "cinnamint" tea) and I especially love the combination of chocolate, cinnamon, and mint. I first discovered it when I ordered a hot chocolate from a coffee stand in the train station, and had forgotten that I'd asked for mint syrup and asked for cinnamon sprinkled on top instead of cocoa powder. The accidental discovery of this warm and aromatic flavour combination is one of my best culinary experiences.

I've always wanted to try making a cake using the choco-cinnamint theme, and my recent experimentations with cupcakes seemed like the perfect opportunity! I think cupcakes are a great outlet for flavour curiosities because they are single serving and can be made in small batches. As seen above, I made these with some delicious lemon cupcakes around the same time.

I made these cupcakes by making a two-egg quantity of my most recently revised cupcake recipe and replacing an eighth of the flour with cocoa powder, and adding half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. I also made some chocolate buttercream with a little pinch of cinnamon, and then half as much buttercream flavoured with peppermint essence and tinted green. I filled a piping bag fitted with a star tip, keeping the minty icing to one side and the chocolate icing to the other, then piped each cake with a swirl. As you can see, I didn't quite get the icings even on either side so some cakes are greener than others!

If you feel like something different, I encourage you to give this interesting flavour combination a try!

Ten Points to Gryffindor! Quidditch Pitch Birthday Cake

This year was my little sister's 21st birthday! She's a proper grown up now.... although she'll always be little in my mind. I think every big sister feels the same way, no matter how old their little sister gets.

So for this very special birthday, I thought I'd do a very special cake. She loves Harry Potter, and so I thought I'd make her a Quidditch pitch cake. For people who aren't Harry Potter fans, Quidditch is a team sport where the players fly broom sticks and try to throw a ball, called a Quaffle, through their opponents hoops to score points. However, they have to avoid being hit by a Bludger, which is a ball that's deliberately hit at players of the opposite team to dismount them from their broomsticks. The winner of the game is the team that has the most points by full time, and if your team catches the third and most important ball, the Golden Snitch, you get an extra 150 points. The Snitch flies around the pitch of its own accord, and can only be caught by a special teammate called a Seeker.

I'm not a big Harry Potter person, I read all the books and watched all the movies once each and that was enough for me, but my sister is mad for it. So much so that by coincidence we all bought Harry Potter themed presents for her without planning it ahead of time.

Her birthday coincided with my parents' 35th wedding anniversary weekend, so we had a big family celebration; all told there were 12 people, including me, at the party, so I needed a big cake! This cake used half a dozen eggs, and three quarters of a pound of flour and sugar. There was cake leftover after dinner, but I always like to make a cake big enough to be enjoyed the next day too.

I made two 10 by 8 inch (25 by 20 centimetre) rectangular cakes, trimmed off the domes (I didn't have much of a dome on either cake), and sandwiched them together with chocolate buttercream. I crumb coated the cake, allowed it to set in the fridge for 30 minutes before proceeding with decorating.

While I was baking the cakes, I also baked some green tinted shortbread and some plain shortbread to crumble later for decoration. I used biscuits instead of coconut because my sister doesn't like coconut, however if that's not an issue you can just colour some and use that instead.

I made an oval shaped stencil out of non-stick baking paper, and I also made one circular and two semicircular masks. I coated the sides of the cake with a sheer layer of icing before packing a mixture of sugar strands and hundred and thousands (which to my American readers are simply tiny ball-shaped sprinkles) onto all four sides.

I coated the top in a sheery coating of icing before setting down my oval stencil. I then placed the circular mask in the centre, and the semicircular masks on either narrow end. I sprinkled on crushed green biscuits even inside the stencil, then removed the masks and filled in the gaps with plain crushed biscuits. I removed the stencil, then piped on some remaining icing into all the un-biscuited areas.

I piped on some simple glacé icing to represent the white grass paint that marks out the different parts of the field.

 To make the golden snitch, I made a cake truffle out of the dome trimmings and some icing, rolled it into a ball, and rolled it round some gold lustre dust. I allowed it to set and crust completely in the fridge.

I made some little white card wings and stuck them in the top, and also used paper straws and loops of white card to make the hoops.

I was extremely pleased with the results of this cake. The cake itself was fluffy and delicious, and the icing was thick and creamy. But my favourite thing about it was the look on my sister's face when she saw it!

Two novelty cake in one year?! I think I might be getting the taste for novelty cakes after all these years....

Perfectly Rounded Cupcakes (Wheat Free with Dairy Free Option)

I was starting to worry about my cupcake fixation: I thought I'd need some kind of psychological intervention at some point. But, as it turns out, engaging in a compulsive and obsessive trial and error process until you get the results you want works!

Sure, my house may have been littered with cupcakes for a solid fortnight, and that was after palming them off continually on my fiancé's coworkers, but it meant that I finally cracked the code to perfectly rounded cupcakes like these:

Aren't they a thing of beauty? When this batch came out of my mother's oven I was dancing with glee, and when I was able to replicate the results in my own problematic home oven I was even more excited. I learned a few things along the way about what was causing my cupcake problems.

I learned:

• From my tests, using a egg-foam (sabayon) based cake mixture gets the most consistent and roundest results. Whenever I used a butter-based creamed mixture, like Madeira, the tops peaked and cracked open, producing a mostly flat cupcake with a nose.
• However, using an egg-foam technique where the egg whites were whipped separately and added to the mxiture later made cupcakes that shrank after cooking. It also made very dry cupcakes.
• I found that using baking powder sometimes made the cupcakes rise too fast and then collapse immediately after baking. The combat the issue, I used baking soda instead, and the results were massively improved. Baking soda is a slower acting raising agent, which in this scenario I think helped a lot.
• Melted butter made a deliciously rich cake, but they went hard once they were cold and staled quickly. Using all sunflower oil made for a lovely moist cake that stayed moist for days on end, and had a nice soft springy texture.

So, the main takeaway is use baking soda instead of powder, whip the eggs and sugar together as a base, and don't overwhip the eggs.

I am so pleased that I found the way to make lovely round cakes. Now, I have to experiment with storage, freezing, and defrosting: I'll be a monkey's uncle before I make and ice 120 cakes the day before my wedding.

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DIFFICULTY
Requires whipping eggs and gently folding

TIME

About an hour

RECIPE RATING

Intermediate

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INGREDIMENTS

For 12 cupcakes

2 medium (US Large) eggs, room temperature

4 ounces (115 grammes) caster sugar

2 ounces (55 grammes) sunflower oil

2 tablespoons (30 millilitres) milk, or milk alternative, room temperature

1 or 2 teaspoons (5 or 10 millilitres) vanilla essence

4 ounces (115 grammes) plain white spelt flour

¼ teaspoon (2 grammes) bicarbonate of soda

Two pinches of salt

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METHOD

• Line a 12 hole muffin tin with regular cake cases, measuring about 2 inches (5 centimetres) across the base. Preheat the oven to 170°C (340°F, Gas Mk.3).
• Set a sieve over a bowl, or a piece of baking paper, and add in the flour, bicarbonate of soda, and a pinch of salt. Sieve thoroughly and set aside.
• In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs, a pinch of salt, and the sugar with an electric mixer for about 3 minutes, or until the mixture has turned a pale yellow colour and has doubled in volume.
• With the mixer still running, pour in the oil gradually, followed by the milk. Mix only enough to combine. 
• Sieve over the flour mixture, and fold through quickly with a balloon whisk. Stir until the flour is completely absorbed, and the mixture has a ribbon consistency: if you lift the whisk, the mixture will run off the end like a ribbon.
• Divide the mixture between the cases and bake on the centre shelf of the preheated oven for 14 to 16 minutes, until the tops are perfectly rounded the the centre of the cake springs back when gently pressed with your little finger.
• Take the cakes out of the tin and transfer to a wire cooling rack. Cool completely before decorating, about 45 minutes to an hour.

VARIATIONS

• For chocolate cakes, replace an eighth of the flour with cocoa powder.
• For lemon or orange flavoured cakes, add in a teaspoon of lemon or orange zest.
• For toffee flavoured cakes, use soft brown sugar instead of caster sugar. If you like, you can replace half of the oil with cooled melted butter.
• For coconut cakes, add in an ounce (30 grammes) of desiccated coconut and use coconut milk.
• For coffee flavoured cakes, you could add in a teaspoon (5 millilitres) of ground instant coffee with the flour, or you could use espresso in place of the milk.
• If you'd like a red velvet style cake, you can double the vanilla, replace a teaspoon of flour with a teaspoon of cocoa and add some red food colouring. For extra points, you could use buttermilk instead of milk.
• You could also add any kind of ground mixed spices you like: add in 1 to 2 teaspoons (5 to 10 millilitres) of ground spice per dozen cakes.
• You could also add in mix-ins for a bit of texture interest: chopped nuts, dried fruit, chocolate chips. For a dozen cakes, add 2 ounces (55 grammes) of mix-ins, but make sure they are tossed in a little flour before adding to the cake mixture.
• Of course, any of the above ideas can be combined: for example you can add mixed spice to a brown sugar cake to make a gingerbread cake, you could add orange zest to a chocolate cake.

STORAGE

These keep well in a completely airtight container, stored at room temperature, for up to 5 days. After 5 days, they start to go dry. These can be frozen, based on previous experience of using this style of cake, for up to 3 months. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have frozen these for 6 months and they've been completely fine on defrosting, but were only edible for about 2 days before going completely stale.

THIS DAY IN 2014: Anniversary Gift: Chocolate Dipped Gingerbread Teddies (Wheat Free)
There were no blogs on this day in 2013, 2015, 2016, nor 2017