Chocolate and Orange Cupcakes

A new cook book is a very exciting thing to hold. Letting it flop open to a few randomly selected pages to see if anything grabs the attention you get wafts of potential, the new car smell, from the turning pages. Then you settle in to a good flick through, not reading the recipes fully just a scan of the titles and some of the ingredients. Occasionally you are caught by something new or something you know so well you can run off your own version blindfolded and a full blooded analysis commences. The comparison of proportions, wonderment at the inclusion of something unusual or intrigue at some hitherto untried technique.

So it was with me when I came across this recipe for chocolate and orange cupcakes in The Great British Bake Off's new book. Cupcakes I can do, for me they are a recipe I can recite backwards and I know at any given time if the kitchen contains the ingredients needed. However I'm always a sucker for a chocolate sponge recipe, it's a life's ambition to find one that tastes of chocolate instead of just being a brown sponge. The ingredient list for this cake is quite different to my own, it uses melted chocolate, milk and very little egg and butter so I thought it was worth a try to see how it compared. It produced a very light but ultimately limp sort of brown sponge that didn't hold together when you tried to do anything with it. Like lifting it up to put it in your mouth, for example. That was a bit of a problem but the frosting in the recipe introduced me to a handy technique for flavouring icings despite being overwhelmingly sweet.

First get some chocolate melting (50g) then make the little cakes by mixing up the batter in a food processor. Put in the dry ingredients (120g flour, 1tsp baking powder & 140g sugar) and pulse in a food processor to mix before adding a little butter (40g) and pulsing again. To this you add milk (120ml) and an egg then the melted chocolate whilst the processor is running thus swiftly creating a batter for baking. It was very runny relative to the cake mixes I'm used to but I baked it anyway (180C, 15 -20 mins) and it produced a good looking batch.

Leaving them to cool I turned to the topping. Usually I'd make a butter icing with a fat to icing sugar ratio of 1:2 by weight which produces a very handy and easily flavoured paste. This recipe uses a sugar rush (and headache, in my case) inducing 1:4 plus a splash of flavoured milk and some fairly redundant melted white chocolate. To make the flavoured milk heat some (about 4 tbsp) milk, add a piece of orange peel and leave it to infuse until cool. Beating some of this into the icing gives it a strong orange flavour which was delicious but overpowered the white chocolate entirely.

So the lame sponge and terribly sweet pungent icing was not ultimately a great success but it has inspired an attempt at my own version at some point in the near future.

A blog about baking

I like to bake.  Not sure why.  It's something I find easy I suppose.  The results are easy to obtain and it's hard to go really wrong.  I'm pretty good at it.  I've developed a minor reputation at the office for being quite handy at turning out a tasty bun for a bake sale.  It's probably a better idea to be focused on having a reputation for being good at your job in the office but I'm more proud of the bun rep if I'm being honest.  And the band I play in are generally a little dismayed when I turn up for practice empty handed.  I've learned to show up with something spongy every so often to keep them interested in my piano playing.

So I've decided to start this little blog to keep track of the things I bake.  I tend to stick to well tried and tested recipes that I know won't let me down but I'm coming down with recipe books that are mostly untouched.  I intend to try making a new recipe every week, an objective to feel guilty about is a useful thing in my world.