Guest baker! Annika makes Hummingbird Bakery Brownies

I haven't been baking much recently, partly (and somewhat ironically) because I'm home a lot more and know I would end up eating most of the goodies myself. I did make this carrot cake with cream cheese icing for a departing Kiwi friend though...

And then, Annika came over and baked brownies with me! She looks surprised, but she wasn't really.

We used Hummingbird bakery's traditional brownie recipe, which you can find here. Simple yet effective.

It would probably be easier to cut if you waited for it to cool completely, but that takes a long time and we wanted to try some. We're very professional like that.

In case you can't read Annika's crazy eyes, they're saying, "This is amazing!"

Rich, moist, chocolatey goodness.

White Chocolate Mud Cupcakes

I already have a white mud cake recipe that I really like, but it's in a book back in Australia. Google helped me find a recipe here, and that worked out OK for me.

These were dense in a way that reminded me of baked cheesecake.

I tend to think mud cake doesn't really need to be iced, so I did some messy drizzling of white chocolate and butter melted together. The photo above shows how smooth and pretty the cupcakes on the bottom shelf came out, while the photo below shows a cracked one from the top shelf. They all tasted like cake.

Chamomile Cupcakes with Sneaky Peppermint

I'm not very creative with my baking choices at the moment. I first made chamomile cupcakes last year (original post here) and just recently I kept thinking I should make them again.

Of course, if you're going to bake cupcakes you need someone to eat them, and I finally saw my opportunity on Saturday when we invited friends over for dinner.

Just before the teabag massacre...

I bought a box of chamomile tea, but it wasn't until I had already starting putting ingredients together that I read the label more carefully to see that it was called "Relax Chamomile" and it was actually a mixture of chamomile (>50%) and peppermint!

Thankfully peppermint is delicious, and these turned out fine. The little pepperminty aftertaste was actually kind of refreshing.

They look a bit grainier with the "Relax" tea mix, but they were still nice and light. I'll have to try some other herbal teas and see how they come out. :)

Snowflakes on Peach and Cinnamon

I just finished this box of liners, so I guess that means I've made about 120 cupcakes in about 10 months. A dozen cupcakes a month isn't too bad an average considering how busy we get in Japan!

We had some friends over for dinner recently, and while the dinner itself was cooking I set them to work decorating cupcakes with icing sugar.

We just used regular paper to make the snowflake templates and sprinkled the icing sugar over it.

Larger shapes seem to come out clearer.

And our newest resident, Johnasaurus, seemed pretty keen to try them.

Photogenic Banana Chocolate Chunk Cupcakes

"How awesome would chocolate banana cake be?" I thought to myself. "I'm so original."

Then I thought some more and decided banana cake with chocolate chips would be even better. Genius!

Then I Googled it and realised that EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD has already done that. Including me. Seriously - previous post here. Hahaha.

I used a different recipe this time anyway. You can check it out here.

But I used chocolate butter cream. Made of stuff like this (more or less):
- 65 grams of butter
- 2 cups of icing sugar
- 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- A little boiling water to help it mix together

And because it was a public holiday I took lots and lots of photos.

Isn't grated chocolate a beautiful thing? Chocolate chips are inexplicably expensive here in Japan so I actually just chopped up a couple of Meiji chocolate bars and used the chunks in the batter, keeping a bit in reserve for the shaved topping.

I got 15 cupcakes out of this recipe, but my cupcake stand has 19 spaces. Panda marshmallows to the rescue!

Banana Meets Caramel

I like using overripe bananas as an excuse to bake, and on this occasion I realised I'd never actually posted the banana cake recipe I use (though I've mentioned it before, and its source - my friend Jenn).

I'll post it now, as much for my own convenience the next time I want to use it as anything else. (Locating my recipes became somewhat trickier when we moved to Japan, leaving most of my hard copies behind in a giant glorious box of baking books and folders >_<.)

Amazing Banana Cake

• 125g butter (softened)
• 1.5 cup caster sugar
• 2 mashed bananas (the riper the better, seriously!)
• 2 eggs
• dash vanilla extract
• 100mL milk
• 1.5 cup SR flour
• half tsp bicarb soda

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius
2. Grease/line a 20cm cake tin or 12 muffin tray
3. Food process all wet ingredients (butter, sugar, bananas, eggs, vanilla, milk)
4. Add flour, bicarb and process well
5. Pour into tin/tray
6. Bake 1 hour for cake or 25 mins for muffins

The catch is that I don't have a food processor. So I just mixed it all up as best I could by hand. And by, "as best I could," I actually mean I didn't incorporate the butter very well at all. I had this idea that maybe it would all just melt together nicely in the oven (and my arm was tired from mixing).

As it turns out, unincorporated butter does not just obediently mix itself into the cake once you put it in the oven. In fact, the butter bubbles to the top of the cake and drips all over the oven. I was worried that I had managed to fail with a never-fail recipe.

But in a happy turn of fate, the bubbling butter actually had a kind of caramelising effect on the top of the cake. And in a fortunate coincidence I had already prepared a caramel sauce (admittedly only after realising I didn't have enough cream on hand to make chocolate ganache).

I got the idea and recipe for caramel on banana from the always fantastic Donna Hay, on here recipe page, here. She's surely a genius. That said, fresh cream is quite expensive in Japan, so I reduced the quantities down to the following, which was a good amount to cover my cake.

Donna Hay's caramel sauce of deliciousness
(...possibly not its official name...)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar

- 165 mL cream

"While the cake is cooling, place the sugar and cream in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Increase the heat and simmer rapidly for 8 minutes or until the sauce thickens. Allow to cool and spread over the cake."

I enjoy it immensely when my baking errors produce unexpectedly positive results.

Carrot Cupcakes in Japan (aka. "ninja cake")

Sometimes what you need is a sea of carrot cupcakes in your kitchen. These ones were toasty brown, and just a little crisp on top - just the way I like them. You can find a link to the carrot cake recipe I use in a previous post --> here.

I'm pretty much a stickler for the recipe, but I've become a bit less concerned as I've done more baking. Approximately accurate is usually good enough (though it pays to be a little careful when it comes to rising agents ;). My cream cheese icing was about 85 grams of butter, a bit more of cream cheese, about 3 cups of icing sugar and a good shake of cinnamon, because I felt like it. And cinnamon is awesome.

The pale, uncoloured icing doesn't make for particularly spectacular photos, but in real life these looked pretty appealing. Carrot is ninjin in Japanese, but a slight translational error resulted in these being dubbed ninja cakes at our dinner party. (They do conceal three and a half carrots with a good deal of stealth.)

If you bake in a small oven and don't turn the cupcakes at the appropriate time you may end up with nicely slanted ones, like this. Not that you really notice much once the icing's on top (or with Anpanman and a penguin sitting on the table...).

Cakie takes on Smitten Kitchen's Salted Caramel Brownies

I noted some inspiration from Smitten Kitchen in my last post, and I've been holding onto it all week, just waiting for the weekend to arrive! My photos aren't as pretty, but these brownies are seriously, dangerously delicious.

I've never made my own caramel before, but it was surprisingly easy!

Most of the cream sold in Japanese supermarkets is whipped, and I would guess perhaps artificial. I only found two non-whipped options, and the one that I chose seems to have set fine in the caramel (although I'm still not sure if it's actually heavy cream or not!).

This looked more attractive before cooking than after.

It kind of cracked, and was a much lighter colour than Smitten Kitchen's. But cutting it into heart shapes increased the attractiveness by about 150%.

Unfortunately that left a lot of scrap edges though...

In order to avoid consuming half of the slab myself in aid of "cleaning up the leftovers," I decided to cut a large section into boring old rectangles. Once you taste them you don't care what they look like anyway. You'll be concentrating on how to sneak a second one ;)

PS. See the sneaky caramel heart? <3

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Inspiration

It's a long while since I've checked into the blogosphere to see what my favourites have been up to.

Now that I've looked, I just have to say: how AWESOME do these salted caramel brownies by smittenkitchen look? Inspired.

Big Cake, Small Oven

My little Japanese oven can handle cupcakes quite well, although they tend to rise more evenly if I turn the tray part-way through baking.

The first time I cooked a larger cake was a learning experience. Fruit is pretty expensive here, but I can still buy peaches in a can so I decided to try making my fruit and cinnamon cake recipe (also delicious with apple, but apples are pricey in Japan!).

Peach!

I put it in to bake and all seemed well. I thought I was done. I let the cake cool a bit and then went to remove it from the pan... but alas, it wasn't cooked through and collapsed all over the place! Not to be defeated by a rebellious cake, I squeezed it back into the tin and put it back in the oven.

A bit of icing sugar helped to disguise its disfigurement and it still tasted good. Next time I bake a big cake in a small oven I'll be watching it a bit more carefully!

Baking Supplies in Japan

Wow. I just realised how long it's been since I last posted anything. Time to bake has been scarce, and time to blog about baking has been even scarcer!

When we arrived in Japan about 6 months ago I had to start my baking supplies from scratch. Japanese kitchens don't typically have a built-in oven, but a lovely lady who'd already been here a few years very kindly loaned me the cute little oven that she hadn't been using. An excellent start to my collecting!

We don't live too far from a Costco, and they stock decent amounts of flour, cinnamon and vanilla essence.

I tracked down powdered food colouring - not something I'd used before, but worth a try. I also got some cute measuring cups, cupcake liners, some spices, and some sakura (cherry blossom) essence to try out one day when I'm feeling adventurous.

My main annoyance was that I couldn't find cocoa powder or icing sugar in any decent quantity at regular stores, so I continued to search different places looking for options. Seriously, what are you going to do with 40 grams of cocoa?

I made these lists quite a while back when I was obviously feeling a bit nerdy...

Cocoa

• 40g for 228 yen at local supermarket --> 6 yen/gram
• 40g for 221 yen at foreign food store near Kobe station --> 6 yen/gram
• 226g of Hershey's cocoa for 647 yen at Jupiter foreign food store --> 3 yen/gram

Hershey's to the rescue!

Icing sugar

• 70g for 135 yen at local supermarket --> 2 yen/gram
• 250g for 336 yen at Tokyu Hands --> 1.5 yen/gram
• 200g for 221 yen at foreign food store near Kobe station --> 1 yen/gram
• 300g for 287 yen at Jupiter foreign food store --> just under 1 yen/gram

Looks like Jupiter wins for both! There are, of course, also some ingredients available here that wouldn't be so common at home. These powders, for example.

Anyway, fear not! I haven't totally abandoned my baking. And when I finally made my first batch of cupcakes they turned out pretty well :)