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...

Cookie Carnival: Lemon Bars

My first Cookie Carnival project. Many thanks to the organiser and this month's host for letting me join in. Lemon bars from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book by Melissa Murphy. I have no idea who Melissa is but I'm not a fan of her lemon bars. Hmm, I sense I'm already at odds with the cheery Cookie club mentality, but to thy own self be true. (Lord, I'm quoting Clueless again...) The recipe looks close to Lemon Meringue bars, but with less yolk and a touch of flour. And missing all important meringue. Now here’s the thing. This is the UK . We don’t HAVE Lemon Bars. I’ve just done a quick search on Google Images and it appears they have a very standard appearance. Adding meringue would definitely be cheating, as would my first thoughts of drizzling these babies with dark chocolate. These babies are rectangular, they are dusted in icing sugar and they better be made with lemon. I made a few changes but not enough as far as I'm concerned. More yolks would have made the ...

Cookie Carnival: Hazelnut Macaroon Sandwiches

I made these insanely early, but here is my schedule: 4th May the Cookie Carnival email came out from Kate, this weekend I made them, next weekend I'm in Scotland, that gives me two weekends left. Yeah, looking at that, now I have no idea why I thought I HAD to make them this weekend (10th) :S I'll figure out what I HAVE to do in May soon. Probably some hen-do or wedding for someone I've forgotten. Ouch. I've always struggled with macaroons. I've made them... twice. Once using the Roux brother's book, once from the wonderful Tartlette blog (see right). Both failed miserably. The first one was edible. It probably wasn't a good idea to try and use teaspoons which they SAID was okay, the second time I tried to risk it with greaseproof and naturally everything stuck everywhere. They also make scarily little so by the time you've peeled them off the tray, you've eaten most of them. This recipe made a shed-load. There's pictures of the macaroons on eve...