Snickerdoodle cupcake duo

I know I've said this before, but this really IS my new favourite recipe. And once again it comes from Bakerella. The Snickerdoodle Duo (link to Bakerella's post here) is a delicious combination of cupcake and cinnamon cookie with frosting and cinnamon sugar to hold them together and decorate.

Snickerdoodle cookies were made known to me by my friends Rachael and Tim, and all the people who kept talking about Rach and Tim's Snickerdoodles. Amazingly this was the first time that I made them myself. They puff up really nicely and the texture is great.

The cupcakes pulled away from their cases a little (anyone know what causes that?) and they seemed a bit soft, so I thought maybe I under-cooked them, but they went perfectly with the cookies and icing.

Speaking of icing, Bakerella made a meringue icing, but didn't highly recommend it, and I have an aversion to recipes that use only parts of eggs. Seems like such a waste. So, using my growing knowledge of Australian ingredient equivalents (aka. baking nerd status), I fashioned a nice firm buttercream icing instead, using a magical ingredient... Pavlova Magic. The main ingredients are sugar and egg whites, and it seems you don't need much to get fantastic results :) (much cheaper than ordering purpose-made meringue powder from the US!)

This is my new, Australian-ified buttercream recipe that holds its shape beautifully. It makes enough to ice about 3 dozen cupcakes (or 6 dozen mini cupcakes). If you have some left over you can keep it refrigerated in an air-tight container and re-whip to use it later, but I'm not sure exactly how long it's good for (I used the last of mine within 5 days).

Semi-firm Buttercream Icing

(based on Cupcake Gal's recipe and an eHow post by Shelby Winchell)

125g unsalted butter, softened

125g cooking margarine, softened

6-8 cups icing sugar, sifted

1/2 cup of milk

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 tablespoon Pavlova Magic powder

1. Beat the butter and margarine in an electric mixer until smooth and creamy (roughly a few minutes).
2. Add 4 cups of icing sugar, the milk and vanilla. Mix on low speed until combined.
3. Add 2 more cups of icing sugar and mix until light and fluffy. Only add the last 2 cups of icing sugar if you need to.
4. Add the Pavlova powder and mix on low speed for a couple of minutes. You'll see it start to thicken.
5. Use without delay (or get it into an air-tight container to store).

My cupcakes didn't rise right to the top of the patty cases, but I like how the cookies looked kind of like muffin tops and they're kind of compact and neat like this. Also really delicious. Really.

See? So pretty.

Yum. Thanks Bakerella.

Apricot & cinnamon cupcakes with cream cheese & apricot icing

Cinnamon. Apricots. Cream cheese. Three things that are awesome. I hope that these cupcakes will prove to you that they can be awesome in partnership.

This recipe is adapted from one that a friend of my parents wrote on the back of an envelope for me. I'm sure there are similar versions around but I feel like I've played with this one enough to not reference further than the back of an envelope.

Lightly press a thin layer of batter onto the bottom of each patty case and top it with an apricot half. I think they look disturbingly like egg yolks here.

Then cover the apricot over with another layer of batter. I tend to press it down to make it smoother, but you don't really need to do this (see looser packed cakes on the right, below), especially if you're going to frost over it later anyway. You can put as much batter as you want on top really, but be aware that the cakes will rise and you don't want them spewing out over the rim (I've overloaded muffin tins with similar cake before and they looked rather ugly).

These came out just about the size I was aiming for :)

This cake tastes fine without icing. In fact, I think my dad would be horrified to learn that I heaped "sweet stuff" on top of this particular cake recipe. But we had a lot of cream cheese left over in the fridge and I didn't want it to be wasted. Thus, I decided on cream cheese icing.

I used the cream cheese frosting recipe that Bakerella posted with her Red Velvet Cake (which is also delicious), but only made half a batch, and also added 8 mashed up apricot halves (ie. equivalent of 4 apricots), mostly to see what would happen. It made the icing runnier, but I liked the little flecks of colour and texture. I think it made minimal difference to the taste, but I was happy enough with it.

Anyway, the cake recipe. I used to use 2 teaspoons each of baking powder, cinnamon, mixed spice and ground ginger, but decided to tone it down a bit, so went with one generous teaspoon of each (except the baking powder which I didn't dare alter, leaving it at 2).

Apricot & Cinnamon Cupcakes

Makes approximately 12 muffin sized cupcakes and 15 mini cupcakes

150g butter, melted

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 cups self-raising flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon mixed spice

1 teaspoon ground ginger

2 teaspoons baking powder

Large tin of apricots (will have some left over from an 800g tin)

1. Prepare your tins and preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

2. In a large bowl, mix all ingredients (except apricots!).

3. Put a layer of batter on the bottom of each cupcake case (using about half the total amount of batter).

4. Lightly press an apricot half into each case of batter. Use a quarter of an apricot for mini cupcakes.

5. Use the rest of the batter to make another layer on top of the apricot.

6. Bake for 20-30 minutes (depending on your oven). Test with a skewer.

Cream Cheese Frosting (based on half batch of Bakerella's recipe)

Makes more icing than you'll need for these cakes!

125g cream cheese, room temperature

125g butter, room temperature

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups icing sugar, sifted

8 apricot halves, well mashed

1. Beat cream cheese and butter on high until creamy and add vanilla.

2. Add icing sugar a cup at a time and blend in.

3. Add apricot puree and mix until just combined.

4. Ice your cupcakes once they're cool.

This recipe is also great with apple instead of apricot, and, as mentioned, it's really not essential to add frosting. Also makes a lovely loaf cake.

Caramel Cookies

OK, so I've been slack with blogging. But not with baking. In fact, a few times I've thought about blogging and then decided to bake instead. Now it's time for some back-blogging.

I think Jersey Caramels (along with most things caramel) are fantastic. So when I saw Donna Hay's recipe for Caramel Cookies (<<- link) in a newspaper a couple of years ago I was slightly dismayed that I hadn't dreamt these up myself.

They're very simple and never fail. Seriously - I hideously overcooked them one time and they were still worth eating.

This is how the cookies begin their life, in a saucepan.

Cool and combine that with self-raising flour and you can make these...

...then add these...

... and bake, to end up with these. Delicious caramel goodness! And cute too.

This lot of cookies (a double batch) was for a fundraiser, so I put them into this handy jar for display.

Impatient caramel mud cake --> caramel mud cupcakes!

I really love caramel, so I wanted to try making a caramel mud cake. However, I didn't want to cook it for 2 hours, which, I found, is what many recipes call for.

All the recipes I found also say to let the melted butter and sugar mix cool for 15 or even 20 minutes. That's OK when you've got time to burn, but sometimes when you're in a hurry this kind of instruction is just annoying.

My slight cheat? Rather than just letting it sit there cooling ever so slowly, fill a larger saucepan (or something) with tap water and sit the saucepan containing the hot mixture in the water. The heat will dissipate into the water and you'll see steam rising up. Stir the mixture to help it cool evenly. (I don't suggest using water colder than from the tap just because it might cool the edges too quickly, but you can try it if you're game.)

I ended up using a recipe from Best Recipes that only called for 60 minutes baking... but my oven usually takes longer than any recipe stipulates and I only had about an hour and a half total available for this baking session. So I decided it would have to be cupcakes again, and a couple of little gingerbread men silicone molds for the excess - cute.

Another beauty of this recipe is that a.) it does not require an electric mixer and, b.) you only have to wash up a single saucepan when you're done :)

The cupcakes only needed about half an hour in the oven. It was more like 40 minutes for the gingerbread men, but partly because they were on the "cool" shelf of my oven. So I successfully got my mud cake baked before I had to go out!

Best Recipes suggested a simple dusting of icing sugar to finish, which would have been impatient-person-friendly. But I didn't actually need the cakes until the next day, so when I got home later I made some caramel icing, using a Women's Weekly recipe (I didn't use the cake part of the recipe because it was one of the ones that needed to bake for 2 hours). This icing, as you'd expect, is a lot runnier than any buttercream, but I thought I'd try piping it anyway to see what would happen.

I didn't feel like dealing with a piping bag, so I got out this child-friendly "Cookie and Cupcake Decorating Kit," which was less than $10. The one annoying thing about using a bottle is that you have to get the icing into it through quite a small opening, but if you can get past that it's nice and contained - no icing coming out the wrong end of a bag.

I was a bit worried the icing would be so runny that it would drip down the sides of the cakes so I ended up putting it in the fridge for just a little while. This helped to thicken it a little, but keep an eye on it - I don't know how much it will harden if you forget about it!

The results were pretty good. The icing was soft but not running everywhere. You could manipulate it a little bit, but anything 3D (like a swirl) was out of the question - it all settles out relatively flat.

I played around with some embellishments of jersey caramel pieces. It's not entirely necessary of course, but I like how it looks, and the addition of a little chewy texture. These tasted FANTASTIC. Caramel wins again.

I also found another use for the white candy sections of the jersey caramels.

Run, run, as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the (caramel-mud-cake-) gingerbread man...