Inspiration

I haven't baked for a million years >_< but just saw Bakerella's post on Brownie Caramel Sandwich Cookies, and I think they will be on my mind until I try making them!

Chocolate Truffles for Valentine's Day

I'm not particularly fussed on Valentine's Day, but it was fun to make sweets with friends today :). We had a go at chocolate truffles, since that's something we could easily do together and it allows for some creativity (sort of).

I made up the truffle mix in advance since it needed to chill for at least a couple of hours before handling. It was really simple - just bring 100mL of thick cream to the boil, pour it over 200 grams of chocolate (I used dark chocolate chips), stir until smooth, and add any desired flavouring before chilling.

I based my cream to chocolate ratio on this recipe for Mint Chocolate Truffles, and made 2 batches - one with about 1 tablespoon of peppermint essence (the recipe states less, but I went with commenters suggestions) and the other with just 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence.

For coating we had cocoa, icing sugar, dessicated coconut, some pretty sprinkles, and caramel cookie crumbs. It was rather a messy process rolling the mix out into balls, so there was a lot of hand washing going on, and many paper towels used!

But the results were actually more impressive than I had expected :) I got a few kinds of candy cups and some plastic containers at the 100 yen (~dollar) store and they were a good fit. I have plenty left over for future attempts too!

Here are my partners in chocolatey crime. They did rather a good job.

We also made some banana and chocolate chip cupcakes for good measure, and they came out nice and light (well, except for the chocolate part). To the basic recipe we added about 3/4 cup of chocolate chips and it made around 18 regular sized cupcakes which needed around 25 minutes in the oven.

Finally we got to decorating them with whipped cream and leftover truffle coatings. Waste not, want not.

And there ends a very sugary Valentine's Day.

The Magic and Science of Baking

Turns out I'm not the only one who thinks that baking is a bit magical. 

8 Things People Who Bake Love About Baking That Have Nothing To Do With Eating

Also, science:

"Everyone thinks you’re a genius, but really you just know how to read and follow orders." 

There's definitely also some learning from experience involved though. I think anyone can bake if they're just willing to give it a go. If your cake collapses or you burn your cookies, just try again :).

Super Easy Mikan (mandarin) Rice

So again, this isn't actually baking. But it does involve food, and that's what matters right?

I get email newsletters from a Japanese health food company called Yomeishu Seizo, and this month they did a feature on mandarins (mikan in Japanese), including some novel "cooking challenges." Namely, oven roasted mandarin and mandarin rice. The mandarin rice looked so easy that I had to try it! 

You literally just put rice and water in your rice cooker as usual (I was my usual lazy self and didn't even rinse the rice), sit a peeled mikan on top of the rice, and press go (or whatever you usually do to make your rice cooker work).

By the time the rice is cooked the mikan gets soft enough that it's easy to break up and mix through.

The original post (here, in Japanese - scroll down to "Challenge 2" for their photos) suggests 2 cups of rice with 1 mikan, but I tried 1 cup with one mikan and the flavour was good. Subtler than I was expecting actually, but good.

So there's one super easy way to add some vitamin C to your dinner!

Chocolate Ripple Cake - Happy Australia Day

This is more assembly than baking (as in, there's no baking involved whatsoever), but it's still pretty! Plus, I'm lead to believe that this is an Australian recipe, and it's nearly Australia Day :).

The recipe on the packet calls for 500 mL of fresh cream, but I used slightly less than 400mL. I think I was supposed to start with more on the bottom, but I was being cautious in case I ran out partway through the biscuit sandwiching.

Maybe this would be a good dessert for a black and white party! (Apparently that's a thing.)

After setting in the fridge for about 7 hours (the suggested minimum is 6) the cake (aka chocolate biscuits) was getting towards soft, but still a little bit of crunch. If you want it really soft you'd be better off leaving it overnight so the cream can really soak in. But this was good too!

After checking the price of fresh strawberries I opted to defrost a packet of frozen ones to decorate with.

There's no Vegemite in the cake. It's just part of the Australia Day theme I guess.

Cranberry cupcakes for Christmas

Fresh cranberries! I don't think I ever saw them for sale in Australia, or maybe I just wasn't looking. Anyway, Costco carries them around Christmas time (all the way from Wisconsin to Japan) and they're quite a festive looking berry :)

I wanted to bake something for a Christmas party and was a bit short on time, so I tried to find a fairly simple/easy/quick recipe to utilize my bag of cranberries. This is what I found: Quick Cranberry Cake by onecaketwocake... but I opted to make mini cakes rather than a large one.

As usual I did all the mixing by hand, which is a little slower and a littler harder, but it still works out fine.

The berries are so pretty it almost seems unkind to bake them. Almost. There was also a very high berry to batter ratio and I was a bit worried they wouldn't hold together, but they cooked just fine.

The cake is light and sweet which balances the tartness of the berries really nicely. I hope you had a fantastic Christmas, regardless of whether it involved cranberries!

Quaker Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Wow, I got into quite a non-blogging rut there. I may have even forgotten I had a blog.

I still bake sometimes, but I find I get sugar headaches quite easily, particularly if I just taste icing on its own (like, even just a tiny bit to check it's not horrible before I put it on a cake), so I have to be a bit careful.

I made some oatmeal raisin cookies recently for a charity bake sale, and I think the oats do a good job of balancing the sugar content.

You can find the --->recipe here<<--- and I found the serving size was actually spot on - a neat 4 dozen smallish cookies!

And since they were for sale they were all bagged and labelled. (Sorry, planet.) Oh, also I soaked the raisins in boiling water for about 10-15 minutes before adding, because I read somewhere that that makes them plumper and reduces the chance they'll burn.

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!