'sup /nom/. Breadfag gave me an idea, except I don't care much for bread, but I do like cupcakes.
I've got to make some for the weekend, so I figured I would test out different recipes each night this week and chronicle them here and garner some cupcake-making tips.
Tonight I attempted Turkish Delight cupcakes. I put rosewater in with the cake batter. I also chopped up teeny pieces of turkish deligh, but they fell to the bottom :( Should I have added more flour to thicken the batter up? I also made a lemon icing with fresh lemon juice, icing sugar and a drop of food colouring.
Despite the fallen turkish delight comrades, they were delicious.
Anyway, blurry webcam pic related. They're what's left of my cupcakes.
Kindly keep reporting back on your experiments please, OP. I'm just getting started baking, really, I'm always interested to hear of people's successes and failures.
Day 2 of the great cupcake-a-thon found me baking strawberry cheesecake cupcakes. I wish my camera phone was less shit. I made a general cupcake batter and added a tablespoon of milk and some vanilla extract. After buying a proper sieve, (the last one disappeared) I was able to fold in the flour, so they came out much lighter than yesterday's almost-a-disaster.
For the top, I made a basic cheesecake topping. Crème fraîche, mascarpone, icing sugar, white chocolate and more vanilla, with British strawberries and white chocolate stars to garnish.
Left to chill for a few hours, and jebus, they're good. Perhaps a bit too sweet, but that's to be expected I guess.
Also I have heard that if you separate your eggs and whisk the whites and sugar as if making merangue then mix the rest of the ingredients in another bowl and then fold the two together all the extra air in the whipped whites gives the cake mix extra air for a super fluffy texture.
>>1330 I've let you down. I was supposed to go to a friend's to make caek, but she left it too late and I have some work to do that I won't get paid for if it's not done tonight. Final cake batch will be tomorrow, lads.
If you stop calling them cupcakes, I'd really like to discuss recipes with you. Have just myself made a 40+ batch of double chocolate chip cookies, baking is one of my hobbies.
Not OP, but I could swap cookie tales if you'd care to share your hints and tips. I'm rather obsessive about getting them right, it took me about a dozen different recipes and countless different attempts at baking them before I settled on what I consider to be worthy chocolate chip cookies.
This is what I love most about baking. You can learn something new from each batch, then take it onto the next one. The biggest lesson I learnt from my experiment was that it's just as fun licking the spoon at 25 as it was at 8.
Yes, please. One of the best recipes I found was for chocolate chunk (not chip) cookies years ago with porridge oats in the batter. They truly were amazing, the batter barely spread and I ended up with these thick motherfuckers that stayed chewy and nomlicious for days. Naturally I now can't find that recipe and all my attempts to recreate it from memory have failed. Do you share my love of porridge oats in the batter or do you have an even better recipe to share?
I also rock at cheesecake. Cheesecake is the best cake in the world, no exceptions.
>>1348 Most are very fiddly. I received a fantastic and very simple recipe from a magazine sent my my Aunt, and although I have insufficient time now, I will post it later.
It's baked, rather than gelatine-based, as I believe all the best cheesecakes are.
I'm going to have to try one of these things to see how it turns out. I know a lot of American recipes call for oats to aid chewiness, it sounds interesting. Peanut butter also adds a nice chewy texture if you like the flavour.
My recipe as it stands right now gives a simple cookie that is, first of all, very large (around a 6 inch diameter). The outside is slightly crispy, and it gets progressively chewier into the middle. If you've ever tried the fresh cookies from Marks and Spencer, those were the ones I've attempted to replicate. I'm working in old money here, I presume anybody who wants to try it can convert if necessary:
8 1/2 Oz. Plain Flour
8 1/2 Oz. Strong White Bread Flour
1 1/4 tsp. Bicarbonate of Soda
1 1/2 tsp. Baking Powder
1 1/2 tsp. Course Salt
10 Oz. Unsalted Butter, softened.
10 Oz. Light Brown Sugar
8 Oz. Golden Granulated Sugar
2 Large Eggs
2 tsp. Vanilla Extract
1 1/4 lbs chocolate, cut into chunks/chips/disks to your preference. I'm not a great stickler for specific cocoa solids percentages in cookies, as long as you would enjoy eating the chocolate on its own, it's suitable in my eyes.
Sift the plain flour three times on its own, then sift it together with the bread flour and the salt. Cream the butter and sugars together in a mixer for five minutes, or by hand for as long as it takes, until very light. Add the eggs at a low speed one at a time, switching back to a higher speed after each egg until it is fully incorporated.
Stir in the vanilla, then reduce the speed to low. Mix in the flour until it is only just incorporated, no more than ten seconds, and probably less. If your mixer can't take it all in one go, do it in three quick stages, or just by hand is fine, but do not overmix. Stir in your chocolate, then wrap the dough up and chill for 36-48 hours. This is so the thick liquid you've used, namely egg, has time to fully seep through the batter and moisten it evenly for cooking. It makes a difference in texture and flavour.
To cook, heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (for any novice bakers reading, an oven thermometer might be the most useful £2.50 you ever spend in your kitchen. Oven dials are not to be trusted). Line a large baking sheet with baking parchment, and place six 3 1/2 Oz. spheres of dough on it, evenly spaced with room to spread. Sprinkle very lightly with salt and place in the oven for 8 minutes, then turn the tray and return for a further 5 minutes, or until just brown around the edge and still soft and pale over the middle. You have to watch them like a hawk, because as soon as they look 'done' they are already overcooked. Get them out of the oven, and slide the cookies, still on the parchment, off the baking sheet to cool. Repeat twice more, and you should have used all your dough.
cool, I'm >>1351 and funnily enough have just made a similar cake to the one I made before, though the marshmallows went in it and it has sprinkles on top.
>>1804 There really is.
Tomorrow will be spent in the kitchen baking, my friend is having a party tomorrow and I was asked to bake alot of confections for it. I'll post pics of any other delicious experiments.
>>1803 OP here, nice job. Please do post baking pictures.
I'm hoping to bake my socks off after I move house. My new kitchen is far more suited to baking than my current one. I quite fancy my own pastry, but can reliably predict that I'll most likely fuck it up. Anyone tried to knock up a good choux?
>>1323 correct. i am also a cupcaekfaggot and do it exactly that way. love the turkish delight idea with the rosewater and the lemon icing. sound like something i would become addicted to. should try that myself.
non the fairycaek/cupcaek argument. Actually they are the same. Just one trendier name gets used instead of the old one. Some people call buns muffins. I do not care what you call them, as long as they are tasty.
My special Cupcake/Fairycake recipe is to make a simple fluffy cake mixture, put some fruit in and bake. Then make a standard buttercream icing (that thick and sinful stuff!) out of lots of icing sugar, butter and maybe a drop of milk to make it smooth. Also add some fruit juice for flavour.
I seem to have developed a love for food colouring as alot of the cakes I have made recently have been highly colourful.
Pic related, one of a batch I baked yesterday.
I'd call it a butterfly cake, but people also call them fairy cakes (>>1344). Either way, it's fucking delicious, if a little sickly after the amount of cake I've eaten recently. (Following two pics related)
Another picture of the table, with my contribution to the party. The only picture of it before everyone arrived and ate it, asking if there were illicit substances concealed within.
>>1884 that is such a beautiful table. will be making blueberry cupcakes for my mates tomorrow that are coming for tea. will post pictures of those. my table will not be as elegant though.
They're butterfly cakes if they look like yours there, with a circle cut out of the top and little "wings" made with a spot of buttercream, jam or other sticky sweet stuff. Fairy cakes are any small cake made in a little cake case, what American degenerates would call a "cupcake". This is Britain, though, so the above word in quotation marks should never be uttered upon this green and pleasant land.
OP again. My housemates both have birthdays today, and as I've just moved, I'm skint as hell, so I decided to give my new kitchen a go and made two sets of cakes instead of buying them something.
Here we have burger cakes. Normal vanilla cakes with a slice of chocolate in between with royal icing for cheese, lettuce and tomato, held together with jam and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
Greetings from across the pond... Prior to surfing here, I never would have dreamed that cupcakefaggot could endear the user to the degree that it did... (trans: I thought inb4lolcupcakefaggot was most amusing)... You guys make me long for the days when I wasn't diabetic...
Keep on nom'ing...
Oh, yeah... Man, that was an elegant table setting...
OP, you put my cakes to shame. Once I have honed my skills and moved into my new place next month, I challenge you to a bake off...other /nom/ anons vote for the most beautiful and delicious looking cakes. What say you?
Oh, and have a picture of one of the cakes I baked a few weeks back...they're not great.
I may be in for this, but I don't make little cakes (am >>1351). I find they go stale too quickly and are a faff to make look nice. In fact all of my cookery is of the 'make something big' school rather than 'make a metric fuckton of the same thing over and over and over'
Perhaps >>1907 and I should have a proper CAEKOFF.
>>2010 Well my new concept is BIG CAEK, so was planning that anyway. Perhaps just a caek-off with whichever way you want to interpret it.
Incidentally, off the back of my burger pictures, my housemate's boss wants to give me ridiculous monies for making her boyfriend a cake. This, I can work with.
not at all, for they were super thick, they weren't brittle, though there were some bits where the malteser inner went a bit crispy, eg the malteser in the middle of each one
Moral: maltesers don't make a great cookie crumble
Slight modifications to that: I forgot to mention to sift the baking powder and bicarbonate of soda with the other dry ingredients, and since I moved house and started using an old gas oven rather than a new electric one I find that they take around 20 minutes now even though it's heated to the same temperature.
I also let them sit on the baking tray for ten minutes before transferring them to a rack now.
The key really is the resting. Minimum 24 hours in the fridge before baking.
