The Scale!

I enjoy reading food blogs and one of them had what I thought was the perfect post on the importance of the weighing scale.

Good equipment really is indispensable!

http://www.delish.com/food/dessert-blog/the-bakers-toolbox-kitchen-scale

Indispensable baking equipment - Part 1

I admit it, I was lazy this weekend and therefore decided to steer clear of the kitchen. This basically means that I did not bake either of the cupcake recipes I so proudly mentioned in my last post.

The trouble with baking is not the baking but the washing up afterwards, and this Sunday I was in no mood for washing up. So after I got back from church, I took a short nap (must compensate for waking up at 7:30 a.m. every Sunday), ate a lovely lunch and then settled down to finish my book - The Lost City of Z - great book and a must read for all who are interested in exploration and adventure. (Rumour has it that Arthur Conan Doyle based The Lost World at least partially on the adventures of Col. Percy Fawcett - protagonist of Lost City of Z)

Anyhoo, moving on though, I thought I'd intersperse my baking experiments with notes about equipment and if anything is indispensable in the quest for baking greatness, its measuring equipment. How can you bake without measuring cups, spoons and the like?

Of course there are exceptions to this rule - my late maternal grandma being one of them. Back in the 50s when she had no oven (let alone a weighing scale) and very little disposable income, she ensured that all four of her daughters and my grandpa had a beautifully turned out cake each birthday, and also invented some really fabulous recipes on her own which have been passed on to me - no one can beat her carrot cake and bread pudding!

I am not such an expert however and I do love my creature comforts in the kitchen. I can't resist buying shiny new implements and tools - they are necessities after all, are they not!

                                Baker's essentials 

I use my weighing scale religiously when I bake - I find that it is actually far more accurate to weigh flour and sugar in terms of grams than it is to do so by cup. I use this digital one although I do have an old fashioned one as well. I find it really exciting to put a bowl on the scale, press a button, put in the ingredient and then watch the scale work its magic. (Putting the bowl on the scale before switching it on allows the scale to make an adjustment for the weight of the bowl.) Digi scale makes me feel most high tech :)

I know a lot of people use a regular tea cup to measure stuff out but nothing beats a set of the real thing - they are a total investment, as is the spoon set. And the liquid measure, who can do without one. I actually have two of these, the one in the picture is the smaller of the two and is good for measuring in ml. The other is larger and works better for large scale projects that require litre measures.

If you're interested in baking and can't figure out why things go wrong, I strongly suggest investing in the best quality measuring equipment, you'll never be sorry about it!

A touch of pink and some music!

Just in case you're logging on after a few days and are surprised by the change of appearance... I thought I'd write a quick note.

I'm your typical girl in that I love the colour pink... plus it is sooo sooo... well it just reminds me of frosting and swirls and pastries and cakes. Anyway, hope you enjoy the pink blog. Also if you put your headphones on you can listen to some great music while you read my blog because great food and music go together, right!

I'm hoping to attempt another recipe from the cookbook this weekend. It's a contest between 'peaches and cream cupcakes' or 'coconut and pineapple cupcakes'. Let's see which one wins; for the time being have a lovely weekend :)

Getting tangy

Recipe: Lemon bars

Most challenging moment: Zesting lemons

Lessons learnt: Extracting lemon zest is hard work but well worth the effort

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Mrs. J, a reader of my blog, said via email last week that I must put up the recipes of the things I cook in order for the tips to be useful. When I started this blog, I did consider this but deliberately decided against doing so because I didn't want this to become a 'recipe blog'. However after due consideration to Mrs J's suggestion I have decided to slightly update the format of my posts and hopefully this will provide an improved point of reference for my readers. (Please do write in and let me know what you think, Mrs. J)

So, lemon bars - I once tried to make them a LONG time ago (probably over 10 years ago now) with very, very sad results. That incident is best not revisited at present, but when I saw this recipe in the Hummingbird cookbook, my heart lurched with fear... could I tackle my old nemesis? 

I started by taking a picture of what the bars looked like in the cookbook. 

Then I got down to business. The most crucial task in the entire recipe was to procure 5 tsps of lemon zest. I started with 5-6 lemons and a hand grater and assumed it would take a few minutes... ummm, not so! It took an hour, 17 lemons and one slightly zested finger - when it was all done, I was quite ready to break out into the Hallelujah chorus.

With the zesting complete, I moved on to making the crust, which was simple enough. It involved butter, sugar, flour and half the lemon zest. I whizzed it all up in my mixer and miraculously found exactly the right sized pan to put it in - 22cm by 33 cm (just as the book suggested). I also used a fork to make pock marks in the crust before baking it for 20 minutes. This stops the creation of air bubbles in the crust.

Next I made the filling with the leftover zest, some eggs, 100 ml of lemon juice and some sugar, and poured it over the crust. The whole thing went into the over again for 40 minutes, was cooled and refrigerated and finally came out looking rather wonderful :)

My family loved them so much, we cut them up into smaller squares and gobbled up quite a few. If I had to make these again, I would change... nothing! The recipe was perfect, the bars were lovely but next time I will consider paying someone to zest the lemons for me!!

Hummingbird takes off

Recipe: Banana and chocolate cupcakes
Most challenging moment: Trying to apply frosting with a palette knife (it is surprisingly difficult)
Lessons learnt: A cup of flour weighs more than a cup of sugar; ALWAYS use cupcake papers!
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I love bananas, the great thing is they're available all year round, and yet they are so undermined. Anyway I thought I'd kick things off with a banana recipe - Banana chocolate cupcakes (since Hummingbird is most famous for its cupcakes, it made sense to start with that).

In my experience, there aren't too many desserts that combine bananas and chocolate, which is sort of odd because the flavours work really well together. I tried this combo for the first time at a youth group barbecue when I was 16. These Aussie friends of mine barbecued the bananas and then buried them in Hershey's chocolate sauce. Pure heaven - and when you're 16, the calories, they don't mean a thing!

In any case, as cupcake recipes go, this one was incredibly simple. I had the batter for the banana cupcakes ready within 15 minutes...

Baker's dozen - ready for the oven :)

The cupcakes came out of the oven looking fantastic - soft, moist and utterly... well... edible! Some twisted logic compelled me to bake them without cupcake cases (even though I have 1000 cases in stock!!) and this proved to be problematic because, unlike other types of cupcakes, the banana are soft and stick to the pan even after they have cooled. But I did manage to take them out of the pan without utterly mutilating them. 

The chocolate frosting was tricky - it called for 300 grams of icing sugar (that's about 3 cups!), which I thought was rather a lot. Still I wanted to stay true to the recipe so I followed it precisely. I think it was a mistake because it was an incredibly (read sickeningly) sweet frosting. Additionally there was no chocolate in it, only cocoa - and while I do appreciate that a lot of recipes use cocoa, I am a purist. Good choc frosting MUST have good quality, slightly bittersweet chocolate. 

I used a palette knife to layer on the frosting (as the book suggested). This was also a mistake because i'm not really an expert at doing this kind of thing and my cupcakes fare a lot better (and look a lot prettier) when I use a piping bag. On the whole though, the cupcakes were great and the frosting was average. Combined, they were pretty good but not as good as they could have been had I used my own frosting recipe. That didn't really make a difference however because most of them were polished off by my mum and brother and I gave some to a sweet old lady from church who really appreciated them.


Here they are in pictures - Banana Chocolate Cupcakes
Photos by Stephan Andrew 
Styling by yours truly 

Setting the scene

Last night I sat down with the cookbook to figure out exactly what I have gotten myself into; to do the math as it were. You would think this is an exercise I would have done before setting myself up for the challenge but I like to do things backwards, in fact I’ve got it down to a fine art.

So there are 60 recipes, divided into six sections: cupcakes, cakes, pies, muffins, brownies & bars and cookies.

Some are relatively easy such as the chocolate and vanilla cupcakes; others are going to be a little more tricky like making a pie crust from scratch (I’ve watched my mum do it and it ain’t easy!); then there are others which, to put it euphemistically, will be an acquired taste (ginger cupcakes anyone?).

I am dreading (yet excited about) looking for some of the more difficult-to-find ingredients like the lavender flowers, blueberries, pecan nuts and key limes. A friend of mine suggested substitutions for some ingredients and ultimately compromises will have to be made. However I will try to stay as true to the book as possible, and apply to friends and family to send stuff from abroad if necessary! After all, what’s the point of taking on a challenge if you don’t do it authentically!

I am not giving myself a fixed deadline but am vaguely thinking of finishing before my 31^st birthday (21 November) but since I have a full time job and I don’t want to have a nervous breakdown in the process, I will take it at my own pace. BUT – I hope to be done before March next year!

Here’s to a year full of baking and sampling – it’s time to START COOKING :)

The cookbook arrives in the mail

The Hummingbird Bakery cookbook arrived in the mail this morning. More precisely, it arrived on Saturday but I wasn't in the office that day so I received it today. It is a beautiful 140-page book with recipes (and lots of pictures!!) for cupcakes, cakes, pies, cookies and cheesecakes.

The book is a present from my friend Sam. She and I haven't really been in touch for a while except for the sporadic Facebook messages so this was a totally out-of-the-blue gift for me. Sam, like all my other friends, has been witnessing my baking frenzy via Facebook these last few weeks.

I have always been rather partial to baking but things have really heated up (excuse the awful pun) since the end of January when I randomly decided to bake some vanilla cupcakes based on a recipe from a website. All the praise for the cupcakes went to my head and since then I have been on a mission to bake every new recipe I can get my hands on.

I'm really excited to start baking all the recipes in the cookbook and tasting the results (I will have to be careful about that). Hopefully, one of these days I will make it to London and taste the real thing at The Hummingbird Bakery on Portobello Road or South Kensington.