White chocolate cupcakes with raspberry cream cheese icing

The more astute of you will have noticed* that raspberry cream cheese icing is not part of this week's Alpha Baker recipe for White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Mousseline. This week's baking adventure is a tale of shortcuts, go-arounds and straight out laziness. I had a lot of trouble finding the energy to make these, this week. Although I was spurred on by the thought of white chocolate and raspberry - one of my favourite flavour combinations. In the end I decided I could do the little cakes or the mousseline but not both. And since the mousseline is not a lot of use without cake to put it on, cake it was. [Actually, who I am kidding, I just didn't want to bother with all that sugar syrup palaver.]

My favourite icing is cream cheese icing which is incredibly quick and easy to make. I wondered (to google) whether I could make it in raspberry flavour and, lo and behold, other people had thought of it before me. With that stumbling block removed, I suddenly had the energy to whip up the little cakes. 

In theory, with a simplified icing, these little cakes should have been quick and easy. I botched a few things which made it a little less than Q & E but they did turn out to be delicious. As long as they were eaten quickly, before the icing melted.

*That'll sort the sheep from the goats.

The cakes were simple to mix up in the standmixer, with Rose's usual method of mixing most of the wet ingredients first and adding to the dry. After 2 years cooking with Rose, I now usually measure the weight of the eggs rather than just going with the  number specified. I often find that my eggs are bigger than the recipe's estimation.  I forgot to do that this time with the egg whites and I think my mixture might have been a bit more liquid than it should have been. 

I was too miserly to buy more than one block of white chocolate so I added a little bit of dark chocolate I had in the fridge. This made the cakes a funny tan colour but they still tasted white chocolatey.

The cakes came out all right (I don't seem to have any photographic evidence of this) although they took a long time to bake. This is possibly due to the thicker cardboard cases I used. I didn't even consider that when I bought them*. Ho hum. 

*I was looking at their racey red stripes.

I made the raspberry sauce early in the week. I started off on the right track but after 10 minutes I found that I just couldn't be mucking around with raspberries and sieves, and separate cooking of syrup, and blending of raspberries etc. So I put all the ingredients in the pan and simmered it for a while, then sieved it all. Probably not the perfect product that Rose's would be, but raspberry puree all the same. And it left me with a modicum of sanity.

Which I then completely lost on the cream cheese icing that was meant to be easy. I ran out of icing sugar (late last night) so had to make some in the processor. Still, I didn't do a very good job and the icing tasted a bit sugary to me, so I added some more raspberry puree, and then it seemed too liquid, so I added some more badly made icing sugar, then some more cream cheese and...you get the picture. In the end it tasted nice but was still a bit runny. It just held together enough for me to pipe it, after a night in the fridge. 

To me, piping is just an invitation to slather icing or cake mixture up your right arm, this being the common result for me of any attempt at piping. However this time I secured the icing bag with one of those Ikea bag clip things which kept it more under control. I wasn't unhappy with my efforts, given the heat of the room and the runniness of the icing. Most of the attraction of these little cakes was in the beautiful pink icing so it was good to be able to replicate this is in some small way.

I'm planning to take these to Misia's 3rd birthday on the weekend. Misia is a cocker spaniel and will not be eating the cakes (if I have anything to say about it). And to solve the heat (it's VERY hot and humid here at the moment) and the already runny icing problems, I'm planning to serve them frozen. We Alpha Bakers are very resourceful and resilient.

Next (and the penultimate) week for the Alpha Baker's bake-through of The Baking Bible is Luxury Chocolate Buttercrunch Toffee.

Bright and sunny Lemon Curd Raspberry Pielets

A quick pictorial post on these very delicious and easy (and not too time consuming, all things considered) pielets. From the bottom up we have: sweet pastry, lemon curd, lemon curd flavoured whipped cream and fresh raspberries. I haven't had time to try them on anyone else but my bet is they'd wow a crowd. And I got to use my new teeny tiny brioche shapes which I found, where else but in the local Asian grocery. Happy days.

I ran out of time to take them out of the moulds. Never mind. Next week we're making Fudgy Chocolate Sandwich Cookies.

Raspberry (not blueberry) Muffins

The Alpha Bakers' Bread Bible project for May was Blueberry muffins. I made raspberry muffins because I'm not that fond of blueberries. These were great muffins - light and delicious with a bit of a tang from the raspberries in contrast to the sweetness of the cake. These are definitely on the make again list. In fact I would have made them several times recently except that I (luckily) don't usually have sour cream in my fridge.

The recipe only makes six muffins so if I made them again I'd at least double it. But since it was such a small amount I creamed the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, as the recipe suggests. It wasn't that difficult but while I was doing it I thought of all the cooks pre-mechanisation, who used to to whip up large cakes by hand. They must have had some big arm muscles. No need for the gym.

The cake part of the mixture was truly delicious - possibly the influence of the sour cream? I used frozen raspberries which worked out fine despite some of them being a bit icy. I love the colour of raspberries, or any berry really. It's not only the birds their bright colours attract.

I found some shop-type paper cases in the supermarket which were very easy to use and looked quite nice. I have some left over which need using up...muffin anyone?

In June the Bread Bible Alpha Bakers' are making Flaky Scones.

A Virus and a Raspberry Buckle

The Never Ending Virus (which, as you might have guessed, just. won't. go. away.) has made it very hard to get around to writing about the Raspberry Buckle (aka the Blueberry Buckle), so this will be a short and slightly phlegmy post. 

Reading the recipe for the Buckle (great name) lead me to reminisce about my mother's baking again. At first I thought the buckle sounded like a fruity version of a pudding Mum used to make; which was a plain pudding (a moist cake mixture) made in a pudding bowl with just enough jam underneath to flavour the pudding. This is a similar concept but actually the buckle is more like fruit pie filling topped with a thin cake layer.

The buckle was really delicious although I wished I'd bought some ice-cream to eat with it. I substituted raspberries for the suggested blueberries because I like them better, and they made a lovely, slightly sour contrast to the sweet pudding.

The raspberries were a bit sour because I cut down the sugar. The fruit part of the recipe included lemon zest and juice as well as sugar and cornflour - you can see why I said it was like a pie filling. I left out the cornflour as well as cutting down the sugar. I tipped out a bit of juice from the macerating (frozen) raspberry mix because it was quite liquid. The reject juice was delicious.

I only made a half quantity because it's not the sort of thing you can easily take to work. Next time I'd use a smaller dish to bake it so the pudding was a bit deeper. Actually I could have just eaten the batter raw - it's definitely in the top ten most delicious batters.

I should point out that the recipe instructs us to leave a gap between the edge of the dish and the batter. This time it's actually not another example of my slapdash-ness.

So over all it seems that the verdict is delicious at every stage. I'm particularly fond of puddings and I'm going to add buckle to my list of favourites. 

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making Chocolate Ganache Tartlets.

Cran-Raspberry Upside Down Cake

Earlier this week I thought I was going to have to call this Rasp-Raspberry Upside Down Cake. Then I miraculously found some frozen cranberries and thought I would have to change the name to Outrageously Expensive Cran-Raspberry Upside Down Cake. It was doubly miraculous since I actually couldn't identify fresh cranberries - and when I checked with the girl on the counter she didn't know either. We had to trust the label was right. I sound like a terrible hick but they're just not at all common in Australia. It's only in the last ten or so years that dried cranberries (craisins) have become common in supermarkets here. 

My cake came out looking a bit more like roadkill than the picture in the Baking Bible. It was, however, delicious, with a tart lemony berry and caramel flavour (which just has to be Rose's favourite flavour judging by the recipes we've baked so far). I served this with plain cream. To my mind the addition of Italian meringue was unnecessary and waaaay too sweet for my audience. I think Australian palates (in general) can't take that much sweetness.

[Those of you with good eyesight may be able to spot a bristle off the pastry brush which disintegrated while I was brushing on the raspberry jam.]

Apart from the cranberries the ingredients for this cake are fairly mundane. Not pictured is the sour cream (keeping cool in the fridge until I needed it) which is a more unusual inclusion in a fruit and batter cake.

I thought $22.95 worth of cranberries deserved a photo on their own. This is what they look like (Southern Hemispherans take note).

I tried not to groan when I saw we were making caramel, again. But I substituted caster sugar for the granulated sugar and added a little more lemon juice and managed not to crystallise it this time. Hooray!

My thermometer had recently bitten the dust so I had to guess when it had reached the right shade of brown (aiming for hard crack not black crack). The caramel is poured into a buttered lined cake tin.  It made a fairly thick coating.

Next, spread $5.00 worth of cranberries onto the caramel. Okay $4.59, since I know some of you are good at maths. I could have put more on to fill all the gaps but I thought I'd see where the recipe took me the first time. They're a very pretty colour, although to an untrained eye (i.e. mine) they could be taken for those poisonous berries you see on garden shrubs. 

I had seen a couple of the other Alpha Bakers comment that their cranberries floated up into the cake during baking so I pressed them into the caramel in an attempt to encourage them to stay at the bottom-soon-to-be-top of the cake.

The cake batter itself was an easy mix in the stand mixer, with the butter and sour cream added to the flour and raising agents and then eggs with a little more sour cream.

A nice smooth batter. That offset spatula is paying its way.

The cake took about forty minutes to bake. It looks a bit freckly but it was cooked through.

It was actually less gruesome-looking straight out of the oven without the raspberry jam on top. It reminds me a bit of a 1970s pineapple upside down cake decorated with glace cherries. You can see I could have put more cranberries on.

I heated some raspberry jam and strained it to get rid of the seeds, then brushed it onto the cake. This did give the cake a more uniform look. The caramel appeared to have deserted the middle of the cake.

I'm not sure if this was intended but the caramel seemed to sink through the cake so the crumb (although fully cooked) was heavy with a caramelly taste. I probably could have done with more cake to topping and if I made it again I might try it in a 20cm tin with a little less caramel and more berries. And I'll have plenty of opportunity to try it out again with my leftover 800g of frozen cranberries (yes that's $18.36 worth).

Next week is a Strawberry Shortcake Genoise (and another new cake tin).