Sunday afternoon - Meringues, Strawberries and Champagne!

Dear Readers,

Well! It is day five of five in the week-long Whimsy blog-a-thon and I am exhausted! (And full of cake.) Those avid readers amongst you may have thought that I'd given up on the final day but I do not intend to disappoint and bring you, in the final blog for this week, the most perfect chewy-on-the-inside crispy-on-the-outside Sunday Afternoon Meringues. Whilst I *have* blogged about meringues before, those were the super complex Swiss meringue method meringues  or the 'let's heat up a load of caster sugar first' meringues, whereas these are far simpler and ones that you can whisk up in a couple of hours.

Mise en place is key! Separate three large free range eggs ensuring the egg white is placed in a scrupulously clean metal bowl. Weigh 125g of caster sugar and 75g icing sugar (use golden icing sugar if you'd like your meringues to turn out wedding-dress-white and normal icing sugar if you's like them snow-white). Sieve the icing sugar so that when you sieve it again into the meringue mix layer it is super-super fine.

Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. You should whisk them for quite awhile really if you're after maximum volume.

Add the caster sugar a quarter at a time and whisk in thoroughly between each addition. The key here is to make sure the caster sugar is completely integrated before adding more. The mix will become increasingly thick and glossy and should look a bit like the pic below when it's ready.

Now sieve the icing sugar into the bowl and use a large metal spoon to fold it through. This is a little tricky as it feels wrong to fold icing sugar in when you've just spent ages whisking the meringue but have faith! It does not alter the volume you'll get from the finished delight. 

When it's fully integrated, it should look a bit like the pic below. (Note the creamier wedding-dress colour as I used golden icing sugar here, I think it looks nicer.)

Line a baking tray with silver foil and dollop little smurf-mounds of the mix onto the foil. 

Cook in the oven at 100 degrees (fan assisted) for one and a half hours. This mix makes twelve small meringues, and you could use the rest of the meringue to make a medium sized pavlova disc as below (or just make more meringue nests). You could go in for piping but I personally don't think it looks as nice. 

To serve the meringues, whip up some double cream with a tablespoon of icing sugar and a dash of vanilla and then sandwich two meringues together with the pillowy thick cream.

 Add some strawberries and a bottle of champagne and what more could you ask for?

Perfect Sunday Afternoon Tea (- tea + champagne)! This has been a five day blog-a-thon. I have been Silver Whimsy. Thank you and good night! x 

PS I think I'll be blogging again on Monday! x

Brazil Nut Espresso Cake

Dear Readers, 

I had promised you a complex Saturday Brazil nut extravaganza grace a Dan Lepard, however, I changed my mind! I *am* still delivering a coffee cake with brazil nuts, but I have decided to forego the Lepard inclusion of wholemeal flour and actual ground roasted coffee beans and have created my own version. This is a Brazil Nut Espresso Cake that can be made in an express Saturday fashion! 

 Follow the basic ingredients for a Victoria Sponge - ie weigh three (or four if you're after a super-huge cake) eggs in their shells and use that measurement to weigh out the same weight of butter, caster sugar and self raising flour. Then make an espresso and have your roughly chopped brazil nuts and vanilla extract at the ready! (I held four brazil nuts back for decoration and used 75g of nuts in total!)

Beat the butter til its pale, then add the sugar and cream together. Crack in the eggs one by one and beat in thoroughly (add a tablespoon of self raising flour if the mix looks as if it's going to curdle).

Make your espresso and beat it in along with a teaspoon or so of vanilla. Then fold in your self raising flour with a large silver spoon, followed by the roughly chopped brazil nuts, and put into two greased and lined Victoria Sponge tins. Bake in the oven at 170 fan assisted for about thirty minutes - top should be golden and springy when it's ready and the cake should be moving away from the sides of the tin. Or insert a skewer and it should come out with a few crumbs stuck to it if the cake's ready. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

Meanwhile, make the coffee flavoured buttercream icing! I swear by the ratio of 100g butter to 300g golden icing sugar, about one tablespoon or so of espresso and a dash of vanilla. Beat the butter in a bowl then add the icing sugar, begin to beat in (reserving a little icing sugar in the bowl) before adding the espresso and vanilla. The liquid makes it much easier to beat together, but keep testing as you beat more icing sugar in as you should make the icing to your own taste.

When the cakes are cool, use about half the buttercream to sandwich them together and the other half to ice the top of the cake. ICING TIP: I always start by dolloping small amounts of icing around the circumference of the 'base cake' so that you have the illusion of extremely thick icing and then use a spatula to spread it across the rest of the cake base. When icing the 'top cake', follow the same idea but in reverse ie work from the inside of the cake outwards. Does that make any sense??

Et voila! A Brazil Nut Espresso Cake in express time! To decorate, I shaved the held-back brazil nuts and scattered them around the edge along with some shaved dark chocolate to give the look of the crema on top of an espresso!

One more day to go!!
Silver Whimsy x

Day three of five... Adventures in Chocolate!

Dear Readers, 

How are you bearing up during The Marathon of Whimsy? Silver Whimsy herself is becoming slightly fatigued by all this baking, but is nonetheless ENJOYING the CHALLENGE! (Never a good sign when one talks of oneself in the third person is it?)

So today, the Whimsy Kitchens bring you what has been described by our Number One Baking Guru Dan Lepard as "simply the best chocolate muffin you'll ever eat". And, by George, I tell thee this needs be true because this is quite probably the most complex chocolate muffin you will ever make as well. I started baking at 11 am and I have only just finished, so from mise-en-place prep through to baking to icing to Whimsy photoshoot, these chocolate muffins have taken THREE HOURS to make. That is a long time in my book! 

First things first, here are the ingredients: 

50g cornflour

3 tablespoons cocoa

100g dark soft brown sugar

225 ml cold water 

75g unsalted butter (cubed) 

125g dark choc broken up into small pieces

75ml sunflower oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 large free range eggs

125g caster sugar

125g plain flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

So, these are entitled 'Chocolate custard muffins' and come from Dan Lepard's 'Short and Sweet' book. The name instantly put me off as did the complexity of the recipe. It has;t really been noted here but I have NO luck when it comes to baking with chocolate. It always seems to go wrong. SIBF suggests it's just that my palate doesn't really work around chocolate in baking and I think that's true, but I also think I just suck at baking with chocolate. I was hoping Dan's recipe would break that trend! 

The first step was super-exciting because it felt like SCIENCE! Place the cornflour, cocoa, brown sugar and water into a saucepan. Whisk under a medium heat constantly and watch the magic happen!!! As it reaches boiling point (don't be put off - it will take a few minutes), your mixture will begin to turn incredibly thick, smooth and shiny as pictured above. It is v exciting! When this happens, remove from the heat and...

...beat in the butter and chocolate until melted and absorbed (doesn't take very long at all). 

Then, beat in the oil, vanilla and one of the eggs until it's combined before...

...beating in the caster sugar and remaining egg until the mixture is smooth, glossy and thick. It will probably look a bit like this: 

Sift the flour and baking powder together into the pan and marvel as your hand too turns preternaturally enormous as mine in the picture below. (Sorry, I just had to include this image as I CANNOT BELIEVE how long my fingers look. I am also EXTREMELY AMUSED by the shape of my little finger.)

 Scoop out into your muffin tray. TOP TIP: I wasn't sure how deep I could fill them and ended up with some mixture left over but having made them I can now confirm that you can fill your cases to the top as they don't rise *that* much and mine could have definitely taken more mix.

 Bake in the oven at 160 fan assisted for twenty five minutes. They do give you a sense of pride when they come out of the oven because they promise so much! Especially for a baker renowned (by her SIBF) for chocolate baking disasters.

 I'm not even going to BEGIN explaining how I made the extremely extra-chocolatey-get-me-some-more-chocolate-oh-no-that-is-way-too-much-chocolate-help-I-have-now-o'd'd-on-green-and-blacks chocolate icing, but if you would like the recipe, feel free to email me or leave a message on the blog.

 I suggest serving in the garden with a cocktail umbrella. And possibly a cocktail.

 Anyone want a chocolate muffin? Seriously I have SO MUCH CAKE IN THE HOUSE HELP! COME AND EAT SOME!!
Until the next time, which I calculate to be tomorrow,
Silver Whimsy x

Dream Bars for World Cat Day - they're purrrfect (maybe).

Dear Readers,
I have managed to keep to my Sinitta-esque daily blog-a-thon and here I am with a new recipe for Nigella's 'Dream Bars'on this most feline of days.

Gratuitous Photo of Tildred Enjoying World Cat Day

When choosing a recipe, I have found that I am more likely to go for something with a picture rather than without. Today, I decided to choose a recipe based on the inclusion of Brazil Nuts rather than an enticing visual aid. Those of you reading yesterday will recall the thrill with which I re-told the events relating to the creation of BRAZIL NUT TOFFEE. Well, today I realised that I had 175g of Brazil nuts remaining meaning that I could attempt another Brazil Nut based recipe. (And, indeed, the super-saving will continue on Saturday when I bring you a Double Espresso Brazil Nut Cake.) Brazil nuts are quite expensive - my organic ones cost £3.65 for 250g BUT if this equates to three separate recipes then I think they become quite financially viable. I was also convinced by Nigella's recipe based on it containing several different types of sugar. If, like me, you have a tendency to hoard different varieties of muscavado sugar bought during a reckless baking shopping-spree, then this is the recipe in which you can use up ALL of those sugars. However, if I'm honest, as I type I think I know the real reason why Nigella's publishers chose not to include a picture of the 'Dream Bar' and that is that whilst your kitchen does smell truly dreamy whilst you're making them, they are not remotely dreamy to look at. In fact they are decidedly un-dreamy (especially if, like mine, they have managed to burn) and they also look *shock* *horror* healthy which is ridiculous because whilst a bar with nuts and coconuts and no chocolate at all might *sound* like a healthy option, bear in mind this is Nigella's recipe and it is not healthy. No. There is no remote healthiness in this here 'Dream Bar'. The simplified version of the recipe would read:
Take some sugar. Add more sugar. Mix in lots of butter. Add more sugar. The end.
The actual recipe is as follows:

For the base:
200g unsalted butter
4 tablespoons light muscavado sugar
4 tablespoons caster sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g plain flour
For the topping:
3 large free range eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
125g muscavado sugar
3 tablespoons self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
100g shredded coconut
75g roughly chopped brazil nuts
75g raw unsalted cashews
Oven at 180 - I forgot to adjust for my fan assisted oven so my bars burnt - I'd suggest 170 fan and 180 conventional.

 The base (as you will have gathered from the ingredients) is basically a very rich shortbread. Cream the butter and sugars together until they are perfectly light, fluffy and creamy.

 Add the flour and vanilla and stir to form a shortbread base.

Use your fingertips to press the shortbread base into the tin and then part-bake it for ten minutes.
Allow it to cool a little as you begin making the topping.
Beat the eggs together with the vanilla and then continue beating as you add in the muscavado sugar. It's a very dark colour as below:

Stir the flour and baking powder together and then fold it into the mix followed by the other dry ingredients. This is quite fun because the baking powder immediately begins to react to the eggs and flour and it all starts to bubble. Although this is also the stage where you understand why Nigella's publishers left out the 'Dream Bar' photographic entry...

 Pour the sticky mixture onto the pre-baked shortbread and spread it out evenly gazing in awe at the ugliness of your creation and the fact that it clearly looks *healthy* when it so clearly isn't.

Pop in the oven and bake for thirty minutes. At this point you can erase the image of the uncooked 'Dream Bar' from your mind and feast on the amazing scents of it instead.
To be fair to this 'chewy, fudgy, nutty, crisp tray bake' (Nigella Lawson, 'How to be a Domestic Goddess') it looks a lot better when you cut it up and it *is* true to its creator's description.

Chewy and nutty and I think it will last well in a sealed container. The shortbread base would be worth making by itself and would be the perfect Millionaire's Shortbread base. In fact, the shortbread is very dangerous as it makes the bars exceptionally more-ish and because they *look* healthy it feels completely possible to keep going back for more.

Will I be making 'Dream Bars' again? Probably not. Am I glad I tried them out? Yes, definitely.

Until tomorrow,
Silver Whimsy x

PS Serving Suggestion: best served with a magical pot of coffee.

Parallel Lines

Dear Readers,

I am amazed / awed / thrilled to discover that I do not blog and yet still you read! Many thanks for that. I am going to try and set myself a five day project, today being day one. It will be a somewhat costly project but one I will attempt to adhere to nonetheless. I intend to bake once a day for the next five days. That means Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. (Those of you who grew up in the 80s might note the similarity that sentence holds to Sinitta's 'Toy Boy' - except that whilst aforementioned pop starlet was going out on dates every night, I will be getting flustered in the kitchen  with the baking powder and wooden spoons.) Anyway, that is my intention but, as I so frequently tell my students, 'the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley' so we'll see how it all turns out...

But enough of this chattering! Today I have been experimenting with Dan Lepard's 'Short and Sweet' recipe book. I am not much of a banana eater unless the fruit features in a cake, but when faced with some over-ripe bananas today I didn't want to resort to the usual fail-safe banana and chocolate cake and so looked to Dan Lepard for the answer. And, Dear Reader, indeed he held that answer!

Dan Lepard's recipe says that "if Carmen Miranda ever wondered what to do when her bananas ripened, she should have got some of her personal stash of baking powder out ( I hear she'd hide it in the heel of her shoes) and made these." Well, I'm not beginning to compare myself to Carmen Miranda (although I have been known to wonder around with a fruit hat) but I was wondering what to do with my over-ripened bananas and I do have a very lovely pot of baking powder so I thought I was all set to make these little wonders.

The recipe is slightly more complicated than I initially thought because to begin with you have to make BRAZIL NUT TOFFEE! Yes! Actual home-made toffee with brazil nuts. In all my baking adventures I have never experimented with HOT SUGAR until today and it was mighty exciting.

Put 75 g caster sugar in a pan with two tablespoons of cold water and heat it to the boil!

(I took photos of the process so that if, like me, you too are a novice at sugar-boiling hopefully you won't get too scared.)

Dan Lepard says to wait til it turns a 'reddish-golden caramel' and then take it off the boil. I sort of had to guess what the colour was but I guessed that it meant this colour:

and the smell coming from the pan seemed to confirm my belief. Have 75g of roughly chopped brazil nuts ready and stir them into the toffee immediately.

TIP: Work very quickly!! The toffee sets faster than you can imagine and I soon realised I needed to up my speed if I was going to get the toffee out of the pan and onto the pre-prepared baking tray with a sheet of baking parchment. Spread the mixture out and wait for it to go cold. When it's cold, cut it up into small bits and try to resist the temptation to eat it all like sweets and try to save it for your actual tray-bake.

I have to say the BRAZIL NUT TOFFEE was a BIG hit with my SIBF who enjoyed it very much.Thinking about it, if you were super-organised you could have this made in advance and stored in your cupboard for a rainy day.

Next, make the blondies! This is the easy bit. Heat the oven to 190/170 fan and line your brownie tray with foil. Melt 100g unsalted butter with 200g white chocolate over a low heat.

Add it to a bowl and beat in 225g sugar, two teaspoons vanilla extract, 2 ripe bananas peeled and chopped, and one free range egg.

Then sift 225g plain flour with a quarter teaspoon of baking powder into the bowl and fold it in along with the (remaining) BRAZIL NUT TOFFEE.

Scrape the mixture into your brownie tin and bake in the pre-heated oven for 35minutes.

I baked it on the middle shelf and thirty-five minutes was spot on for my fan assisted oven.

Unfortunately, you have to hold off eating them straightaway as Dan Lepard said they needed to be stone cold before cutting...but I would be lying if I told you I managed to wait until they were stone cold...they were just too tempting.

The brazil nut toffee provides a wonderful contrast to the squidy smooth white chocolate cake and the whole blondie is infused with the taste and scent of bananas. In a better way than that sounds. To sum up in the words of the SIBF: "I have to step away from the blondie!"

Best served next to the record player with a healthy dose of 'Parallel Lines'. (Beats Sinitta any day of the week.)

Love and other demons,
Silver Whimsy x

PS You can find Dan Lepard's original recipe here: Banana Blondies