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 :)

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!

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!

Choc Mint Oreo Cupcakes

I've made these before, but I thought they looked especially cute this time.

Partly because they were accompanied by a playing child. And then partly because I put some into a cupcake box.

I think it's extra hard to make cupcakes look bad when they're packaged in white. (Hence the fact that these now appear at the header of this blog!)

I'm concentrating on presentation here, but just in case you actually want to make these: make a chocolate cake batter, distribute in cupcake wells, stick an Oreo (or similar) in the top of each cupcake before baking, top with a little piped peppermint butter cream. Devour.