Hot Cross Buns

I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but if you go into any shops in the UK, it's Christmas. It's the start of October - we haven't yet had Halloween - but Christmas stuff is EVERYWHERE.

So I'm skipping past that and now it's Easter and I made you Hot Cross Buns. Sorry I'm not sorry.

Ingredients:

For the buns:
- 500g strong white bread flour (and some for dusting)
- 10g salt
- 75g caster sugar
- 10g instant yeast
- 40g butter, softened
- 2 medium eggs, beaten
- 120ml warm milk (semi-skimmed or full fat)
- 120ml cool water
- 150g sultanas
- 80g chopped mixed peel
- Finely grated zest of 2 oranges
- 1 eating apple, peeled, cored and diced
- 1tsp ground cinnamon

For the crosses:
- 75g plain flour
- 75ml water

For the glaze:
- 75g lemon and lime marmalade (normal marmalade would be great too, as would apricot jam...just use what you have to hand.


- Tip the flour into the bowl; add the yeast to one side and the salt and sugar to the other.

- Add the butter, eggs, warm milk and half of the water and start to mix together with your fingers.

 - Continue to add the water until mixture forms a rough dough and can be used to clean flour from the edges of the bowl. You might now have to add all of the flour, go slowly.
- Once the dough comes together, tip it onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for 5-10 minutes. The dough will change from a rough texture to a smooth, soft one.
- When your dough feels smooth and silky, put it back into the bowl and cover with cling film.

- Leave the dough to rise in as warm as place as you can find until it has doubled in size. An hour should be enough but you can leave it for longer if you like.

- Zest your oranges, peel and chop your apple. Add to a bowl with weighed-out sultanas, mixed peel and cinnamon.

- Tip the risen dough onto a lightly floured surface and flatten it as much as possible.

- Scatter the zest, apple, sultanas, mixed peel and cinnamon over the dough.

- Knead them into the dough until evenly incorporated. Again, go slowly because this can be quite messy.

- Place back into the bowl and cover with clingfilm. Again, leave it to rise for another hour. Mine went slightly nuts...

- After an hour, fold the dough inwards repeatedly until all the air is knocked out. Divide into 12 pieces and roll them into balls. 

- Place them fairly close together across 2 baking trays lined with baking parchment.

- Put each tray into a clean plastic bag and leave to rest in a warm place for another hour. After half an hour, preheat the oven to 220C.

- For the crosses, mix the plain flour and water into a paste and use it to pipe crosses onto each bun.

- Bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

- Gently warm the jam or marmalade with a splash of water. Sieve it and brush it on to the buns to glaze.

- Leave to cool on a wire rack.

Hot cross buns just want to be loved. Their popularity shoots through the roof at Easter but for the rest of the year? Well, you have to search in only the largest supermarkets to find them. They're neglected. Help them. Make them yourself and see that a good hot cross bun, fresh from the oven, is perfect with a cup of tea in this horrible October weather. A hot cross bun is for life, not just for Easter.

Fudge, Apple & Pecan Muffins

Look! I'm here! Writing a recipe post within a respectable space of time since my cop-out post last week! How can this be?! Maybe I've taken time out of my busy working life in order to write to you, dear reader.
...or I'm still unemployed and even more bored than ever because everyone I know has gone back to university or started a new job or flown all the way to the other side of the planet.
Yep, baking is my only friend.
I made these muffins in a crazy "I NEED TO BAKE" whirlwind, in which I decided I would use whatever was in the house to whip something up. And then I went to the shop because I decided on this recipe and there were no fudge pieces just lying around the house.
Weird, I know.

Ingredients:

- 2 free range eggs, lightly beaten

- 80g caster sugar

- 240ml milk

- 100g butter

- 300g plain flour

- 2 tsp baking powder

- half a tsp salt

- half a tsp cinnamon

- 2 eating apples

- 100g of shop-bought fudge pieces

- 100g of pecans, plus extra for decoration

- Preheat the oven to 190C/380F/Gas 5 and line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper cases.

- Melt the butter in a saucepan.

- Mix the eggs, sugar, melted butter and milk.

- Sift in the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Fold into the mixture.

- Peel, core and chop the apples into small chunks.

- Chop the pecans into rough-size chunks. Leave 12 unchopped for later.

- Add the pecans, apple and a handful of the fudge pieces to the muffin mixture and stir in.

- Fill each muffin case a third full with the mixture.

- Take the remaining fudge pieces and sprinkle a few on top of each of the third-filled cases.

 - With the leftover mixture, fill each case to two-thirds full. Top each uncooked muffin with one of your leftover pecans.
- Bake for 30-35 mins until well-risen and golden. Transfer to a wire rack.

One of my favourite things that I've concocted and suitably autumnal for my first September recipe. Bake them, they'll make you happy inside. 

Can I offer you some excuses?

It's been so long!

It's been so so sooo long. And that's my fault and I'm very sorry. My reasonings range from "I couldn't be bothered" right up to "I was attending a five-day horror film festival so didn't have my laptop".

Yeah.

So this isn't going to have a recipe in it as such. I have a couple of things that I've done and I need to make up my mind about what I post here...BUT! In the meantime, here are some things that I made but didn't take pictures of along the way. 

Normal blogging will resume soon, I promise.

 So these beauties were made for a job interview! At a cake shop! They asked me to make a couple of bits so I made these Peppermint Chocolate Cupcakes and my Norwegian Apple Cake. The cakes themselves were just flavoured with cocoa. I made normal buttercream icing and split it in two. One half was flavoured with peppermint extract and dyed green, and the other I added cocoa powder to. I spooned each flavour vertically into my icing syringe and then iced them! Oh, and I made peppermint creams. By hand.
I didn't get that job, but the cupcakes were lovely!

I made these as a snack for a girly weekend away in Taunton. It's just flapjack really, but I used the recipe from a Katie Morag book that we had when we were kids. Here's the recipe.

In other news, my friend Morgan packed her little suitcase and flew to bloomin' China for the year. She threw another girly-weekend-type party so I made this! For the cake I used a Victoria sponge mixture in an oven-proof bowl. The icing idea came from various books/internet sources.

Aaaand finally, there might be another reason why I haven't been blogging. My favourite programme, The Great British Bake Off has started again. It's awesome. And the week before last they had their bread episode, in which the technical bake was an 8-strand plait loaf of bread. I haven't made bread in a long long time but was inspired and so the next morning I made this, slightly-dodgy but pretty-tasty 8-strand plait loaf. Paul Hollywood, eat your heart out.

I'm completely smitten with bread making at the minute so, be warned, there could be an awful lot of dough-porn hitting your screens...

Apple Meringue Cupcakes

So, because it has been WAY too long since I last posted (or even baked, really) I decided to make you something special.

And you're so so welcome.

I've spent a week thinking about making lemon meringue pie. I'm not sure why. And then, yesterday, I decided to make lemon meringue cupcakes because apparently I can't resist making fun-sized things.

THEN, I decided I wanted to do something a bit more original and decided on Apple Meringue Cupcakes. My best friend once presented me with a pudding (I think she called it Eve's Pudding but when I googled that it comes up with a more spongy pud) which was basically Lemon Meringue Pie but...with Apple. And I decided to base some cupcakes on that because, frankly, it was wonderful.

Ingredients:

For the cakes:

- 80g (3oz) unsalted butter, softened

- 280g (10oz) caster sugar

- 240g (8 and a half oz) plain flour

- 1tbsp baking powder

- Quarter of a tsp of salt

- 1 tsp cinnamon

- 2 large eggs

- 240 ml (8 and a half fl oz) whole milk (although I used semi-skimmed!)\

- 1.5 eating apples

For the meringue:

- 200g (7oz caster sugar)

- 4 egg whites

- Preheat the over to 190°C (375°F), Gas mark 5, and line a muffin tin with 12 muffin cases.

- Using a hand-held electric whisk or a freestanding electric mixer, beat together the butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon on a low speed until the ingredients are well incorporated and resemble fine breadcrumbs...

 - Like so!

- Measure the milk in a jug and add the 2 eggs. Whisk together by hand. Pour three-quarters of the milk and eggs into the dry ingredients and mix on a low speed to combine.

- Increase the speed to medium and keep beating until smooth and thick.

 - Pour in the remaining milk and eggs and continue to mix on a medium speed until all the ingredients are incorporated and the mixture is smooth.
- Peel, core and chop the apples into 1cm chunks.
- Coat them in flour to stop them sinking to the bottom of the cakes.

- Add the apples to the mixture and fold in.

- Spoon the mixture into the paper cases, filling each case by about two-thirds.
- Bake in the oven for 18-20 minutes or until risen and springy to the touch. You can check that they're done by poking one with a skewer or a knife; if it comes out with some residue, then your cakes need a few more minutes.
- The cakes will need to cool for 30-60 mins before you frost them.

- The recipe I followed uses Italian meringue. This is meant to be notoriously tricky, but I found it to be fine as long as I kept an eye on the sugar.

- Add the 200g of caster sugar to a saucepan and cover with water (about 150ml/5 and a half fl oz) and bring to the boil. Don't stir it!

- While this is happening, separate your four egg whites into a clean, dry bowl and whisk them with a handheld electric whisk or a freestanding mixer until they are just foamy.

- Allow the sugar to boil for 5-10 minutes or until it has reached the soft ball stage. The soft ball stage is when you use a spoon to drop some of your syrup into a bowl of very cold water. If the syrup has been cooked to the correct heat, it will form a ball in the bowl of water. When you remove this ball with your hand, it will flatten.

- Once the sugar has cooked for long enough, turn your mixer up to medium and carefully (really really carefully!!) add it to your egg whites.
- When all the sugar has been added, turn your mixer up to high and whisk it until the mixture has quadrupled in volume, is very white, smooth and quite shiny.
- You just made Italian Meringue (I was ridiculously proud of myself after this stage...)

- Spoon the meringue mixture on top of your cakes with a spoon (you can also pipe it!) and use the back of the spoon to make a cool-looking swirl.

- If you're fancy and have a cook's blowtorch then you can use this to brown the top of the cupcakes.
- I, however, am not so fancy, so I stuck my cakes under a hot grill for a few seconds. Keep a very careful eye on them - they don't take long to turn golden at all!

That's it! Cupcakes with tasty chunks of apple and posh Italian meringue = done!

Now excuse me while I enjoy mine in front of angsty Kenneth Branagh.

Raspberry Cheesecake Brownie

I got the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook a couple of years ago and this raspberry cheesecake brownie is the thing I've made most because a) it's pretty easy, b) it's pretty impressive looking, and c) it tastes like harrarrarrrrr.

(That's a good thing.)

I've been threatening to make this for my housemates all year and finally (in our last week), I did it! It's probably not the cheapest thing to make and it's not quite as fast as my Norwegian Apple Cake, but it's definitely worth the effort. 

 Ingredients:

For the Brownie bit:
- 200g dark chocolate, broken into small pieces
- 200g unsalted butter
- 250g icing sugar
- 3 eggs
- 110g plain flour

For the Cheesecake bit:
- 400g Philadelphia cream cheese
- 150g icing sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
- 2 eggs

For the Raspberry bit:
- 300ml whipping cream
- 100g icing sugar
- 150g raspberries, plus extra to decorate

- Line a 33 x 23 x 5cm baking tray with greaseproof paper and preheat the oven to 170°C.
- Put the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water and let it melt, stirring occasionally.

 - Put the butter and icing sugar in a freestanding electric mixer with a paddle attachment and beat until the ingredients are well incorporated (I've already sent my Kenwood home so I did this all by hand and it was absolutely fine).

 - Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well to incorporate everything.
- Gradually beat in the flour, mixing well after each addition, then turn the mixer (or your arm!) up to high speed and beat for longer until the mixture is smoother.

 - Slowly pour in the slightly-cooled, melted chocolate and mix thoroughly. Pour into the prepared baking tray and smooth over.

 - For the cheesecake-y bit....put the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla extract into freestanding electric mixer with a paddle attachment and beat on a slow speed until smooth and thick.
- Whilst still mixing, add one egg at a time. The mixture should be very smooth and creamy.

 - The mixer can be turned up to a higher speed at the end to make the mix a little lighter and fluffier. Make sure not to over-mix and split the cream cheese.

 - Spoon on top of the brownie mix and spread it evenly.
- Bake in the pre-heated oven for 30-40 minutes or until the cheesecake is firm to the touch and slightly golden at the edges. The centre should still be pale; as you can see, mine was slightly overdone, but I think this was due to the scales running out of batteries halfway through and some educated guesses about the measurements...

 - Leave this to cool completely, and then refrigerate for at least 2 hours, although it's better to leave it overnight, if you can resist.
- For the creamy, raspberry bit...put the cream, sugar and raspberries into a freestanding electric mixer with a whisk attachment and beat until firm but not stiff.
- Turn the brownie out onto a board the the right way up (so the cheesecake bit is on top).
- Spread the raspberry mix over the top and decorate with extra raspberries (I ran out...)

And you're done! Wait for the masses to come running. I don't think I took a picture to do it justice, but the effect of it is really quite impressive for a recipe that consists mainly of a lot of whisking. The chocolate/cheesecake/raspberry colours have sort of a Neopolitan quality about them and, if I do say so myself, they tasted pretty wonderful together too.
So far my Hummingbird books (I now have Cake Days, too!) have been foolproof - everything so far works and has been delicious - especially this recipe and the choc chip cookies...which I may now have to go and make...

Blueberry Muffins

When I said I'd post once or twice a week, that was whilst I had essays and dissertations and job applications to fill out. So when I handed in said essays and dissertation and ran out of hope that I'll ever get a proper job, I found other ways to procrastinate, like going on holiday. But I am back, nearly a month later, with some fresh enthusiasm to avoid job applications and a recipe for blueberry muffins. I made this at home, using a recipe from one of my mum's Mary Berry books.

Ingredients:

250g self-raising flour

50g margarine

1 tsp baking powder

75g caster sugar

175g blueberries

grated zest of 1 lemon

2 eggs

250ml milk

- Preheat the oven to 200C & place 12 muffin cases into a muffin tin.
- Measure the flour, baking powder, and margarine into a bowl. Rub them together using fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs

- Stir in the sugar, blueberries and lemon zest.

- In a separate jug, mix together the milk and eggs.

- Pour into the dry ingredients in one go and mix quickly.

- The mixture should have a lumpy consistency.

- Spoon the mixture into the muffin cases until it reaches the top (although the recipe says it makes 12, I only had 10 muffin cases and found that the mixture was suitable for this).

- Bake for 2--25 minutes until well-risen, golden and firm to the touch. Leave to cool for a few minutes before placing them onto a wire rack.

- I meant to get a nice picture of the first one, a couple of bites in, but...it didn't last that long. Such a good recipe.