Chocolate transfer

I bought this transfer ages ago on a whim and finally tried them out for my sister's birthday (faux birthday as we celebrated with Bea's of Bloomsbury cupcakes on the day!) Since they were a bit worse for wear you can see where the transfer was a bit patchy even before we stuck chocolate on it, but it decidedly worked better with a thick coat of milk chocolate than the dark. I assume it's because there's more fat to make the transfer stick but that's a guess. It worked anyway. Pretty simple to use. Put it out with the transfer on the right side. Pour over chocolate. Leave to set. Done.

The cake was an oil based sponge which I won't make again (Rachel Ray) but that's because I always know that any sponge that involves a lot of milk in the mix tends to be a bit "tighter" and I don't like that texture. The coating is some chocolate stuff I bought in Brazil. Bear with me, that was a year ago but it worked fine. For some reason when I started buying food stuffs from abroad, I bought chocolate coating in both Brazil and I think Madrid? Good stuff. You just put it boil in a bag style on the hob and then cut it open and voila, instant er... not buttercream but kind of like an emulsified moussy ganache which sets quite nicely.

What I learnt about chocolate and transfers has to be that it's pretty hard to make nice NEAT triangles out of the chocolate as it shatters under the blade. Ergo the artistic chunks above. Tasty all the same and didn't need a filling. Till the next time. x

Comments

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...

Raspberry Cream Cheese Buns

What with my new cupcake books arriving from Amazon, one look at the Raspberry Cream Cheese buns on someone elses's site (made with blackcurrant there) and I had to make them. Knowing full well my family wouldn't touch them. Four of these babies were therefore made with big dollops of lemon curd instead, which made delightfully caramelly messes of the tin, but also on the buns, not that I get to touch those - I have eight buns to eat! The original recipe is from Buttercup Bakery book (New York) and one of these days I'll try the dried cherry one from Magnolias (since I own the book...) What you need to know about these is that the recipe is easy - as easy as muffins are, but they sink like heck given the amount of preserves you're putting in them. What they give back though, is something so moist and rich you just want to sink yourself into them. And since I've eaten two of them, I'm doing quite well! As you can see, massive craters. If you don't want that...

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...

Obsession

Search This Blog