Skip to main content

Comfort baking

So I've indulged in a little comfort baking lately. Which is to be understood given my current situation. I'm not saying it's the best idea in the world, being that it means I now seek comfort in baking rather than, I don't know, socialising, meeting people and friends. These days my social circle is limited to a few stress-heads that I know and love, and somehow I've left the rest of my world just to fall away because it's too hard to concentrate. Either way, enjoy some of my little delectations. The above is a Lemon cupcake with lemon butter icing.

The recipe for the cake is as follows, but it gives you slightly too little for the cupcake size and alarmingly grease soaks into the cupcake papers like crazy.

The buttercream icing I suggest you find your own as, whilst I had a recipe, I possibly ended up putting twice as much icing sugar in as required, and felt it could have used a lot more lemon juice to give that punch.

The swirls I was quite happy with, a bit of fun in my mundane world. I've also got a bowl left over so I better bake something else this week!!

Lemon cupcakes:
Ingredients:
125g unsalted butter
1 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 cup self raising flour
lemon zest (1/2 lemon but tbh I just scraped a little in)
3 tbsp milk (warm it up a bit)

Method:
1. Cream the butter and the sugar together.
2. Add eggs.
3. Add everything else.
To be honest, you could just shove everything in and mix it, this recipe originally called for a food processor. But mix, pour, make 12 slightly undersized cupcakes.
4. Bake at Gas Mark 5 for 15 minutes until springy.
5. Cool it down (that's hard for me!!) then cut a little cone out of the top (and eat) and fill with a teaspoon or so of lemon curd (or jam I suppose - blackberry would be very cool).
6. Top with buttercream (125g butter, 4-6 cups of icing sugar, 1/2 lemon's juice, 2 tbsp milk)




This is the Malteaser cheesecake I made recently. Not a favourite, well people ate it! But they tend to with the cheesecakes because they don't necessarily become "second-rate" as such after the first five minutes out of the oven! It's my usual recipe for cheesecake, but topped with crumbled digestives and malteasers. There was also an abundance of malteasers crushed in when I made the base. I'm not a fan, but I think if I tried the baileys chilled malteaser cheesecake one day I might be a convert.

Comments

Maggie said…
Wonderful maltezer cheesecake - new to me this one! The lemon cupcakes also look delicious. Found you on the BBC Food website.

Popular posts from this blog

Rachel Allen's Chicken Pie

Some things should be noted. I'm not a major fan of Rachel Allen. She always seemed such a poor man's version of Nigella. Some trophy wife of a producer somewhere making a lady of leisure's living of cookery shows playing up the Irish accent in a cavernous show kitchen. Perhaps it was because all her helpful "tricks" had already been touted by others a long time ago - like getting the garlic smell out of your hands... But over the years she's kind of grown on me. The format is a little twee, the pink accessories want to make me barf, but she isn't the spawn of all things faux goddess anymore. (FYI I have no idea with regards to her personal life etc, but like my distaste for Ashley Judd, one wonders how she gets good films with little acting skill.) So here I was, tapping away on the internet last week whilst she was on tv, and there it was. A beast of a pie. It was so beautiful. Her job was done. Out I trotted to buy a huge pie dish (we don't own cera

Low carb diet plan

It's January. I've allowed my weight to grow UP with the Covid curve and somehow it still has not come down. Thanks to a large part to me using up a number of hot chocolate bomb "fails" just before Christmas I think. Wall of text alert - I don't plan on ever writing about this ever again. To be clear, I've never been a fan of carb-cutting. Cutting an entire food group seems wrong. Carbs, as we were taught at school, are cornerstones for growth. I felt like decking a "doctor" at an annual work health check when he told me to cut carbs as a way to get my weight down. The fact he then pushed a blog which was at its infancy at the time felt like a distinct conflict of interest. Anyway, I do absolutely agree I need to cut sugar, and I will never disagree that whole grains are better for you. It is also very, very effective dieting wise on me. We don't know why, I do know I have a lot of water weight which fluctuates a lot in the month and also it does

Amazon dependency

Random non-food moment, I am trying to boycott Amazon at the moment. It's monopoly and ethics don't sit well with me. I'm not one who thinks Bezos should be lynched for his money for the greater good, nor do I think taxing the company is particularly effective as they do have choices of jurisdictions and in the case of France, a smile and a "pass it on to the supplier" approach. Instead I'm just going to do my part by not buying from them. Probably not the greatest protest on earth since I'm cutting down on purchasing anyway (minimalism, where for art thou? Buried under two rooms of baking equipment that's where.) Anyway, I still want books. My favourite place in the world is sitting in Waterstones Piccadilly with a pile of books. On a few occasions I have read them cover to cover over a number of weeks like using it as a public library. Much like the occasional homeless guy having a nap in a safe space. (I'd like to say one book was on minimalism