Absentee blogger returns once more!

I suck at this - apologies once more to anyone who follows this blog (anyone?) and has found nothing new on it for a while. Here's the latest from the world of Hummingbird baking.


Recipe: Coffee cake
Most challenging moment: none
Lessons learnt: Coffee cake is so very delicious!
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After trying out stuff from the cupcakes and bars sections, I decided to try my hand at one of the Hummingbird cakes. The simplest one seemed to be this coffee cake. At this point, it's important for me to give you an aside about my relationship with coffee. Growing up I hated it... the smell, the taste... it just made me want to hurl. Then about three years ago, I started by drinking a cup every week, then two cups a week and now my morning doesn't begin without a good, strong coffee (with one brown sugar and skim milk, thank you!)

So this seemed like a good time to try a coffee cake. The recipe was very straightforward. It involved making a coffee essence by boiling a few tablespoons of water with two teaspoons of strong instant coffee. Once the essence had cooled, it was poured into a very standard cake mix of butter, sugar, eggs, flour and baking powder. I decided to double the recipe because I wanted two cakes (one for a friend who had just completed six years at work; and the other for a dinner party we were planning that week). I used my brand new blue, shaped silicone pan and the results were oh so beautiful.

I used my own icing because I don't like the Hummingbird icings at all - they use too much sugar. I made a standard chocolate icing with melted bittersweet chocolate, butter, sugar and milk and mixed in some more coffee essence. The first icing was too thick so the cake didn't look so great... although I improved the appearance slightly by adding chocolate shavings... however everyone at work thought was delicious.

For the second cake, I decided to add more milk to the icing to make it more runny and that turned out great. It was served with vanilla and coffee ice cream and the guests (a family that doesn't always enjoy a 'western' dessert recipe) asked for seconds - woo hoo! Converted by Hummingbird!

So that was the success...

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