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.

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.

Banana Cake with Chocolate Ganache

Getting ready to move house is not hugely conducive to blogging. Or baking for that matter. But I did recently make banana cake with chocolate ganache - I had some very ripe bananas and some fresh cream that I wanted to use up!

This is the moment when you start to question whether your food processor can actually deal with a double batch of banana cake batter...

Thankfully, it turns out, mine can.

The other half of this batch went into cupcakes but I didn't get any photos as they were a bit messy once I'd scooped out the middles and dolloped in the delightful chocolate mixture.

Something I've learned about chocolate ganache (which is made by melting chocolate into just-boiled cream): if you try to make it and use it in a hurry it's almost certainly going to be very runny. This time I got smart and refrigerated the ganache overnight, which made it nice and firm, without being too hard to spread. Definitely the way to go!

Pretty Banana Cupcakes (Gluten & Dairy Free)

I love this photo. And I didn't even take it! I was busily preparing to host an afternoon tea and Jess went to work with the camera.

I got the recipe for these out of a book, but I wouldn't say it was particularly good. I had already started when I realised it needed dairy free milk... but I didn't have any on hand so just used water instead. They were still quite edible, but a bit denser than I would've liked. I used cinnamon icing which helped them along.

Anyway, it was worth it if only for the pretty photos. Afternoon tea is a lovely thing indeed.

Hummingbird Cupcakes, Muesli Muffins and Mini Quiches

Another mish-mash blog post.

I had some very ripe bananas and a tin of pineapple in the pantry so I had a go at hummingbird cupcakes. I needed them to be gluten and dairy free, so used this recipe and just substituted regular flour with gluten free. It worked OK, but I'm still not sold on that grainy texture you get from the gluten free flour, and as yet I've been too lazy to look into ways to avoid it!

I put some crushed pineapple and some juice into the icing to make it a little bit tart. Seemed to go OK.

For Mother's Day brunch celebrations I made muesli muffins using this recipe. I felt these were a bit bland, but I'd say that's mostly because I'm used to cupcakes, which are obviously a lot sweeter. These are quite nice as a snack anyway (especially warmed up with a little butter or margarine) and relatively healthy. I opted to use grated carrot instead of apple, so if I wanted to boost the sweetness I'd probably make sure I had the apple handy!

Mother's Day picnic also saw some more quiche, this time in mini form (post on the dinner sized version is here). I like the flexibility of quiche in that you can basically put in any fillings you fancy or have handy to use up. For this lot I used grated zucchini, a little diced onion, bacon and corn.

Mish mash over and out.

LSA Banana Bread Muffins (gluten & dairy free)

I've made LSA banana bread before from a delightful Australian Women's Weekly recipe - see my previous post here. But you know I love mini cakes, so I had to try these as muffins.

The magic of LSA.


These do work as muffins. Don't think cupcakes though - they're heavy and less sweet.


But still great. Coconutty, banana-y single-serve goodness. With a tinge of golden.

Banana Walnut Bread

Domestic Cowboy started a new job today so I got a bit wifely on the weekend and baked some banana bread for our work lunches. Banana Walnut Bread to be precise.

It starts out kinda ugly (especially with the flash reflecting off the bowl!).

And it ends up... well, I guess still kinda ugly. But it looks a lot more edible like this :)

A friend shared this recipe with me, and it comes from Janelle Bloom's book "Fast, Fresh and Fabulous." It must be one of her staples, because it also appears on her website's recipe page (just search for "Banana Walnut Bread" or scan down a little :).

The version that my friend wrote out for me (thanks Gemma!) suggests sprinkling the cake with a tablespoon of raw sugar just before baking. I didn't have any raw sugar, so used brown sugar instead, which gave this particular loaf a speckly, tiger-bread-ish look.


This is so good served warm with a little butter/margarine! And not nearly as bad for you as cake. It does contain half a cup of brown sugar (+ any that you sprinkle on top), but no butter in the mix itself - what you choose to spread it with is probably the least healthy part!

Janelle herself spruiks it as "low in fat but high in flavour. Great for lunchboxes or toasted for breakfast or an after school snack." Hear, hear, Janelle. Yum.

Banana-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

I happily received a number of new baking books for Christmas, one of which was Betty Crocker's The Big Book of Cupcakes - a collection of over 175 cupcake varieties and decorations.

My first conquest from this book was the Banana-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes. You can find the recipe online here, but interestingly only the packet mix version. I guess if you want the "secrets" to Betty Crocker cupcake success you need to get the book! Anyway, I made these from scratch, not from a packet.

Banana and chocolate. Such a good combination.

This was my first use of chocolate buttercream. It didn't come out nearly as dark in colour as it was in the book, but it tasted good :)

I got some Runts for Christmas too (childhood nostalgia) so I could go to town on the fruit-themed decorating. This particular box only had 4 bananas in it so I had to diversify.

Bananas!


Not bananas... but still cute.

I thought the candy decorations might be hard and annoying to crunch through, but it turns out that they soften once they sit on the icing for a while. Even better :)

Playing catchup - caramel, banana, peach, choc mint and vanilla

Once you've found some recipes that you like, it's inevitable that they will be repeated! Here are some of my recent baked goods. (This is actually a sneaky mixed-up blog post to make me feel like I've caught up!)

Delicious caramel mudcake. The obvious option for when you're out of white sugar and too lazy to go and get some :p

I tried out my basket weave icing tip for the first time. This icing was too soft so you can't see the ridges, but I can see the potential.

I made banana cupcakes for work to farewell a colleague.

These are peach and cinnamon cupcakes, using the leftover cream cheese icing from the banana cupcakes. Icing keeps pretty well in the fridge so I often use the same icing a couple of times in a row to avoid wasting any.

This batch is chocolate wacky cake with mint Nuttelex icing - made for a friend whose little boy can't have eggs or dairy. The icing doesn't hold its shape as well, but still tastes fine.


Finally, a batch of vanilla with a mish-mash of icing flavours and colours.


My most reliable decoration methods are swirls and solid colour with a little star, so no doubt you'll continue seeing these. Hopefully over the Christmas break I'll get a chance to try some new things too :).