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.

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!

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!

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...).

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 :)

Bye Bye Australia Cupcakes

Dear blog,

It's been a while. A really long while. But since I lasted posted I have moved to Japan, so I'm hoping you'll cut me some slack.

These are the cupcakes I made for our farewell party.

The pink ones had Turkish delight chunks and rosewater icing. The green ones were melon flavoured with gold glitter (because lovely friends had given me melon oil and edible glitter and I wanted to try it all out before I left the country!).

I also made gluten and dairy free chocolate and strawberry cupcakes. Because they're still awesome.

I have been baking in Japan, but you'll have to wait until next time for that. Let's face it - this is progress!