Vegan Chocolate and Chilli Cupcakes

I often make cupcakes, they are quick and simple.

When I was a Rainbow leader I used to make them with a team of 5 year olds, if you were wondering how easy they are are to make.

But now my teen is a vegan...yeah I know....so what to do?

Help is at hand! In the form of egg replacement. I was sceptical so I tested the Orgran brand (other brands are available), and the recipe, so that you can make them with confidence.

For a deadly twist I went for chilli chocolate flavour, but dried fruit, just chocolate, or other flavours are simple to substitute into the basic recipe.

I tend to make double this recipe and make 12 cupcakes, it's a bit odd as I realise the maths doesn't add up, but they seem to not rise as much as cakes with real eggs, feel free to experiment based on your pan/cake case size.

One of the things you will notice is that the consistency of the baked cakes is changed due to the lack of egg, the cakes don't seem to hold together as well, so always let them cool a bit before removing them from the pan, even if they are in paper cases they will still crumble if you move them when they are hot.

Using chilli oil rather than fresh chillis or crushed chillis means that the heat spreads evenly through the cakes. I decorated the cakes with vegan butter cream icing (using the non dairy margarine) and vegan chocolate drops.

Warning: depending on your chilli oil - this recipe may be extremely hot.

Ingredients

• 3oz Vegan (dairy free) margarine
• 2oz Sugar
• 1 egg replacement portion
• 3oz self raising flour
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons chilli oil

Method

Cream the margarine and sugar together.
Mix the egg replacement powder with water and add to the mix.
Add the flour and 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder.
Add 2 teaspoons chilli oil.
Divide into 8 paper cake cases.
Bake for 15 minutes at 180c/250f/gas 4.

This post is not sponsored, but contains affiliate links.

Rainbow Cake

DD has always fancied making a rainbow cake. We have tried in the past and found that either the cake was pale and barely looked like a rainbow, or we had to use so much colouring that the cake tasted horrible!

As DD just came out as gay it seemed the perfect time to do this thing properly!

So I asked twitter who told me about gel colouring, specifically Wilton, when our local Hobbycraft let us down we turned to next day delivery from Amazon and on Sunday we grabbed our Mary Berry cook book and DD began her Great British Bake Off style fun. She decided that the recipe for a 4 layered cake was not good enough, so she doubled the quantities and made a 6 layer cake... it was HUGE!

Smooshed Creme Egg Bakes - Neither big nor clever

*trigger warning for huge amounts of creme egg cake recipes

On social media and in the world of blogging it seems you cannot blink this Easter without another picture of a cake covered in broken Cadbury Creme Eggs.

For anyone visiting from Uranus, a creme egg is a chocolate and fondant confection of teeth rotting sweetness. The centre wittily resembles that of a real egg.

In my youth I too liked a creme egg at Easter, and like many before and since, I poked my tongue into the moist middle with delight. But as I've grown up my sweet tooth has diminished and the diabetic inducing sweet no longer appeals. That would be fine, and I could ignore them and get on with my life that except that the world has gone berserk adding the eggs to anything and everything claiming that it makes something tastier and more Easter themed. I blame Pinterest.

Well, adding creme eggs doesn't improve things. It just adds extra sugar, and the horrible look of a house attacked by angry trick or treaters (ooh idea for Halloween cakes - no! stop, enough). A smashed creme egg looks like a smashed egg, that is not attractive. They taste only of sugar and American disappointment.

And if you don't believe how prevalent this horror is just look at a few of these examples! We have chocolate brownies and they are delicious, they do not need the addition of gloop, but despite that a recipe exists with just that.

Brownies made by The Minis and Me

And as for a creme egg 'blondie'...well, I really have no words, a blondie is something I already view with some suspicion, to add a creme egg into this dubious American mess can only end badly.

Blondies via MamaMummyMum

Cakes, whole cakes, already a treat, chocolate flavoured and covered in icing (frosting) I'm fairly sure crushed  creme eggs all over the top are an unneeded gilding of the cocoa lily!

Cake from Chilling with Lucas

Cheesecake, cheesecake!, is there no end to the abomination that is the creme egg takeover! A cheese cake needs no extra, it is cheese, soft and delicious, maybe with a tart fruit addition, but a smooshed creme egg? No no no. Just no.

Cheesecake from MotherGeek

And breakfast, the first meal of the day, where we need some protein and goodness, do we need creme eggs? No we do not, and yet it seems there are those among us that think a creme egg will improve a croissant. A croissant! That sophisticated and chic French pastry of delicate buttery loveliness, just no.

Croissant from Californian Mum in London

And last and most unnecessary of all, the Scotch Egg Brownie. I'm not sure I can fully express my horror and disgust, to hide the runny candy egg within and innocent brownie casing, to trap the unwary nibbler with a horrific gooey mine...

Scotch Egg Brownies form Nobody Said it Was Easy

I am ashamed of you all - I am especially ashamed of those blog readers that are, even now, writing down some of those recipes for later. You are sick! Sick I say! (or you will be later) Stick to proper recipes using chocolate mini eggs like normal people.

Recipes for Easter like mini white chocolate nests,  or regular chocolate nests, or even chocolate mini egg fudge, these are for normal, good and proper people.

Chocolate nests from The Messy Blog

Thank you to all the bloggers who agreed to be featured in this round up of loathing and disgust. All photos used with permission from the original posts.

Come and chat over on Twitter or my Facebook page I'd love to hear from you

No Spread, no chill, simple, quick, biscuit recipe

This is an American recipe so maybe I should say cookie, but to me a cookie is a slightly soft affair, thick and full of chocolate chips. These biscuits are as crisp and delicious as their French "twice baked" namesake but much easier to make. They don't spread out, so your cute cutters will work like a charm with them, great for making with the children and perfect for the children to decorate.

I have Anglicized and tweaked the recipe a bit but the American version can be found here. I have made these several times now and the flexibility with the flavouring, along with the ability to keep a shape, has swiftly made them my 'go to' recipe.

You will need:
420g self raising flour (you can substitute a little of the flour with cocoa powder for a chocolate biscuit)
200g sugar
220g butter, cut into chunks
1 egg
A few drops of vanilla essence

 Cream together the sugar and butter, add the egg and vanilla and mix. Gradually add the flour and stir in until combined. You can add chocolate chips at this stage, a handful or two to add some fun to your biscuits.

The dough will be crumbly, and you will need to knead it together with your hands and then scoop it out of the bowl for rolling out, treat it gently or your biscuits will be tough.

Roll the biscuit dough on a floured surface to about half a cm thick, and cut into shapes. (I do this in several goes as there is a lot of dough! You could also chill some of the dough to use the next day)

Place on parchment or silicone lined baking sheets and bake at 180C for 10-12 minutes until slightly browned. Let sit a few minutes on the sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.

When cool decorate with icing, sweets or sprinkles. Ready made tubes of coloured icing are great for children to use! No mixing mess and small tubes are handy for little hands.

Other options include adding dried fruit to make a sort of Shrewsbury biscuit, some dessicated coconut works too, or adding spices and ginger for a tasty bite. Experiment, have fun with flavours!

Baking Rock Cakes with children

I have a trusty old recipe book, it was the first cook book that Mr TM bought, and I've inherited it. It is by Marguerite Patten and just covers everything you could ever need to know about cooking, oven temperatures, cake tin sizes, what 'dropping consistency' actually is...and everything else. I use it a lot. One of the recipes that Mr TM loves is the one for rock cakes, so called for their look and shape not their texture!

They are simple to make and a good choice to make with children (inserts joke about how I usually use dried fruit) as it's a real 'bung it all in a bowl and mix' type recipe.

If you are baking with small children as helpers I suggest, clear surfaces, pre weighed and measured ingredients in plastic bowls like on a cooking show - maybe leave one thing to weigh like the dried fruit. And invest in some anti slip mat stuff to put under the bowls as they mix.

For the cakes you will need:
8oz self raising flour
4oz margarine or butter
4oz castor sugar (I sometimes only use 3oz as Mr TM isn't keen on over sweet cakes)
4oz dried fruit
1 egg (beaten)
some spice if you like that sort of thing
2 tablespoonfuls of milk.

Sieve the flour into a bowl, then rub in the margarine until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Kids love helping with this bit, but ensure that hands are washed first! The odd nibbled crumb won't do anyone any harm. Next add the sugar and the fruit, give it a stir, add the spice if you are going to use it, then add the beaten egg to pull it all together. The mix should be sticky, but not runny, add milk if needed..

Plop small 'lumps' of mixture onto a greased (I use silicone baking parchment to save myself the bother) baking tray, they will spread a bit, so space them!

Bake in a hot oven for 12-15 minutes. Eat when cool. (it's always cool to eat cake)

Orange and Almond cake - so easy a 16 year old can make it

Last weekend I was bored. It was raining (again) and DD was bored too. I suggested we do some baking. I fancied making some bread rolls to go with the soup I had previously made, and then DH suggested that he fancied some rock cakes...DD wanted to make something more fancy and worthy of 'Bake Off'. In the end all our wishes can true, I made the rolls (recipe and method etc here) then I rustled up some rock cakes and DD decided to try a BBC cake recipe from our little GoodFood magazine 101 Cakes & Bakes

She chose the orange and almond cake, fascinating as it uses an entire orange, skin and all, in the recipe. It was moist and delicious, and I heartily recommend it - easy too, she made it all without help - and from start to eating in less than 2 hours (the book says 50 minutes - more of that later)

Ingredients:

• 1 medium orange
• 6 oz softened butter
• 6oz light muscovado sugar (we used caster sugar as it's all we had)
• 3 eggs (ours were large...)
• 6oz self raising flour
• 1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• 2oz ground almonds
• icing sugar for decoration

 You also need a 9inch round deep cake tin - ours has a movable bottom(!) , and a blender or smoothie maker.

First roughly chop the orange, peel and all, and whizz it up in a blender (remove any pips first) to a puree.
Then add the butter, sugar, eggs, flour and bicarb to the blender and whizz until smooth...our blender isn't big enough for all this so we did some in stages and then just mixed it all in a bowl, it was very runny so it wasn't difficult to mix.
Pour it all into the greased tin and bung it in the oven (Gas 5/190C/fan 170C) the recipe says 30 minutes but I think our cake need at least 50 minutes, maybe a little longer as the middle was still runny after half an hour, in true Bake Off style DD turned down the gas for last 15 minutes to ensure it cooked without burning.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for a while before turning it out and dredging the top with icing sugar.

The cake was delicious, really orangey (surprise) and with a crisp outside and moist middle. The recipe book claims it freezes well, but ours didn't get a chance. We all really enjoyed it and will be making it again.

Serves 12 (ie gives 12 slices, we had 4 each obviously)
Per slice 266 calories

Gooey, chocolatey, delicious, brownies

When I did the MorrisonsMum thing, with the vouchers and the blog post etc. you'll remember one of the things we did was make Meringues for the yummy Eton Mess. Meringues leave you with egg yolks and so I decided to use the egg yolks up in a recipe I found online for brownies.

I tweaked the recipe a bit, like you do, so here is my version. It uses 'cups' as measurements because I have a rather cute set of Russian Doll style measuring cups and I like to use them. You can buy them here if you really want some!

Time from starting, to eating (including clearing up the disaster zone that is the kitchen and cooling the brownies) 3 hours (yes really, don't trust anyone who tells you otherwise! we made them at night and had them for breakfast) it was worth it though.

Ingredients
1/3 cup fairtrade cocoa powder
1/2 cup and 2 tablespoons boiling water
2 ounces grated plain or cooking chocolate (grating chocolate is ridiculous - it gets static and leaps all over the place, makes the worst mess EVER!)
2oz butter (melted -I used the microwave)
1/2 cup and 2 tablespoons vegetable oil.
2 large eggs
2 egg yolks (remember them!)
2 and 1/2 cups caster sugar
1 and 3/4 cups self raising flour
6oz chocolate chunks or a few handfuls of M&Ms or nuts etc

 Mix cocoa and boiling water together in large bowl until smooth. Add grated chocolate and continue mixing until chocolate is melted. Mix in melted butter and oil. Add eggs, yolks, and vanilla keep stirring! Keep stirring until it's smooth...

  Add in the sugar and mix until fully incorporated. Add sifted flour and mix  until combined. Finally fold in bittersweet chocolate pieces.(or M&Ms etc)

Line a 9x13-inch baking tray with foil, leaving about a one-inch overhang on all sides, oil the foil to stop the brownies sticking, pour the mix into the tray.

bake for 40 to 45 minutes at gas 4 or 180c


Leave to cool for 1 and a half hours, then remove the brownie from the pan using the foil lip...let cool for another hour! (yeah right!)

Cut the brownies into squares. EAT ALL THE BROWNIES!!!!

Thanks to The Brown Eyed Baker for the recipe I 'borrowed' and Anglicised

Bacon, Maple Syrup and Whisky Cupcakes. Oh the humanity!

Remember the blog post about poke cake, where I thought about baking an American dream cupcake?


Well I made them. DD and I cycled out to the supermarket and bought the shameful ingredients (well not the whisky, or the maple syrup, no shame in that!) we had to substitute vanilla cake mix as that was all that was on offer! and we set to work like the Bad Bakers we are.

We followed the recipe we found on Pinterest,

though I added whisky to the cake mix not more maple syrup as by the time it was being mixed it smelled horribly horribly sweet!

and it was revoltingly gloopy by now too, no wonder Americans refer to cake 'batter' *barf* it looked and smelled vile, but we thought of Kylie's hopeful face, her Poke Cake face.....and we bravely added the bacon

neither of us wanted to lick the bowl. The sloppy, sweet smelling, lumpy horror we had created terrified us.
We shared the mixture into cupcake cases, ready for the oven...

Time passed (we made whisky and maple syrup icing as we waited)

They emerged looking surprisingly OK. So we let them cool, and then iced them, added a tiny slice of crispy dead pig for decoration. At this point my DH asked what the hell we were doing, why we were making something so disgusting and why on earth we were taking such trouble for something so obviously nasty!

They were ready....

I was nominated the first taster.

And a truly surprising thing happened. They tasted lovely, really really nice, sweet with maple syrup, a bitter tang of whisky a surprise salty crunch of bacon!

I ate several. Would I make them again? Not using the vile packet mix which is full of horrible chemical sounding stuff and was stupidly expensive. But yes, I will add maple syrup, whisky and bacon to my usual cup cake mix on occasion because ....well because BACON!

Don't forget you can join the Bad Food Bake Off here  - the linky is still open

Found: a fab recipe for no spread cookies

Amongst all the laughter at terrible recipes that can be found on line (see this post) , I stumbled across a rather fabulous recipe for sugar cookies at bakeat350.co.uk I was after a "no spread" cookie recipe as often when I try to make cookies (UK translation - biscuits) they lose their shapes and spread all over the place!

DD and I tried this recipe this afternoon, we divided the mixture and made some plain and some with chocolate chips, some plain chocolate and some colour chocolate beans! W experimented with thickness of the cookies too, making some thinner and crispy and some fatter and softer. Both types were nice!

DD was keen to try the new cookie cutter that Father Christmas had given her and the cookies turned out really well! It's a recipe I will be printing out and sticking in my recipe book.

Nice Apron there DD

Some plain

some choc chip

some coloured chocolate beans!

UK Recipe Translation
375g unbleached, plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
200g sugar
225g butter, cold & cut into chunks
1 egg
Optional
3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp pure almond extract

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 180c, gas mark 4

Mix the flour and baking powder. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg and vanilla and almond extracts (if required) mix. Gradually add the flour mixture and beat until combined.

The dough is crumbly, knead it together with your hands until it's in one lump for rolling.

Roll on a floured surface to about 1/4" to 3/8" thick, and use you cutters to cut it into shapes, knead left over bits back into a ball and re-roll until it's all used up, places the biscuit shapes on baking trays (use parchment to prevent sticking) and bake for 10-12 minutes. Let sit a few minutes on the sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack. Decorate as required.

Dairy Free Apple Cake Recipe - perfect for Autumn

A cake that is nice and simple to make although there is a fair bit of time involved in the preparation and then the cooking. It is dairy free.

The Apples we used were from the tree in our garden and it's a great way to use up a glut of autumnal goodies! 

I helped to peel and dice the apples, but only as we needed so many! DD (aged 13) did all the rest. Why not give it a go? It's from my Amish cook book. If you are struggling with 'cup' measurements (American) try this conversion website.

And ignore the temp they list for cooking as that's F not C.

The temp you need is 180C

And here is the tasty result. Which Mamacrow and Eddsnotdead tried and declared nice. And then DD ate for breakfast and tea until it was all gone!

 

Have you been doing any autumn baking?

The most useful gadget you've never used

Is your kitchen an old style Amish one? No electricity, a mangle and a washboard? Or are you a teensy bit more high tech?

I have a few gadgets, I say a few, once I start to list my 'labour saving appliances' it seems I really do have quite a few. I don't have a dish washer or a tumble drier, but I do have a washing machine, a bread maker, a smoothie maker, an electric whisk, an electric carving knife, a food processor...

The smoothie maker is a recent acquisition, a gift at Christmas and I love it. DD and I have smoothies at least once a week and often more, I'm sure as it gets warmer we'll experiment further, maybe making ice lollies, or alcoholic smoothie cocktails (for me not her). We love the smoothie maker, it's simple to use, quick, easy to clean. Those are things that for me are really important! 

I rarely use the carving knife. I inherited it, I assume it's for enormous roast beef joints and getting smoothly cut slices for everyone, but as we don't really have roasts, and there are only 3 of us, and we don't care if our meat looks 'tidily sliced' we never use it. It's silly, it takes ages to plug all the bits in, has two blades, has to be used near an electric point and takes as long to clean as it does to set up. I don't know why I keep it...

The bread maker is really DH's domain. He makes bread every other day, his own recipe (yes ladies he not only has a beard but he bakes too - I win!) he bakes wholemeal or raisin bread with no salt. It's good. So the bread makers we buy tend to wear out, not rust away. I think this is our third in 10 years. He loves his bread maker, he only uses it to do the initial mix and knead, but it saves time, presenting him with a risen dough ready to shape and bake.

We use the washing machine of course. Too often I expect, when did we get so clean? :-) I'm sure in the 50s a weekly bath and a weekly clothes wash kept everyone alive (if slightly fragrant).

And obviously I have a cooker which (quite frankly) I am in love with, it's one of those big country range affairs (though it's dual fuel not coke fired) and it cooks things so much better than my old cooker (which had heat up to 9 but needed at least up to 11)

 And we have a fridge, I'm sure this is standard by now in most houses (though when living in my bedsit I used the shady window ledge to keep milk cool) 

So what about you? Is you kitchen full of useful gadgets? Or gadgets that seemed like they would be useful but actually sit there doing nothing? (I disposed of a slow cooker after about 3 years of not using it at all!)

I want to know about your kitchen gadgets! And if you tell me you'll be entered into a competition to win £100 in Amazon vouchers! Seriously! What an awesome prize, you can spend it on more gadgets! Ones you might actually use! Or just buy a few books to read while your gadgets do all the work.

So a huge thank you to Appliances Online who have offered this super prize. (You might like their Home Style Blog too - it's pretty good!)

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