Banana Caramelized Peanut Muffins

Personally I do not like bananas, I think they completely lack texture and are too mushy and gooey. But then my better half does like them, so was trying to be kind :) 

I love peanut butter, but am trying to bake more consciously, so thought of making the muffins with chopped caramelized peanuts. Of course nothing can compare to yummy peanut butter, but these cupcakes came pretty close to nailing the peanuty essence.

The recipe is very simple, easy to make and truly rewarding as well!

GET

Part A

• 250g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Part B

• 2 large eggs
• 125ml vegetable oil
• 200g brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Part C

• 2 bananas, slightly mashed
• 100g caramelized peanuts, chopped

 

SET

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

1. Sift together the dry ingredients of Part A.

2. Beat the wet ingredients of Part B.

3. Stir Part A (dry ingredients) into Part B (wet ingredients).

4. Fold in Part C - the mashed bananas and chopped peanuts.Do not overmix or overbeat, just gently fold in the bananas and the peanuts.

5. Scoop the batter into paper muffin cups and bake for 20-25 minutes or untill they are springy to touch.

GO

Drizzle some caramel sauce on the top, and they are ready to travel to your tummy!

Speculoos Ginger Madeleines

Humm.. what can I say.. I so lurve the Speculoos spread.. It's my next best favourite thing! After peanut butter that is.

I had the great fortune of meeting Nicolette from CafeCreme at the Cupcake Camp Paris mentioned that normally it's not Speculoos as the French pronounce it, it's Speculaas (as the Dutch say it). We couldn't quite figure out  how they would translate in English, but it would be more towards a ginger snap biscuit spread. It's something like Nutella, you can't quite explain it well. Any which way, I loves it.
So I very much wanted to make "madeleines", having heard they are not easy, you have to have the right moulds, blah blah blah. Nothing doing, they are simple and simply decadent. And even though they seem light and fluffy, they can be very filling!

Now ginger and speculoos make a great combination, although I tried to keep the ginger on very small note. Else it can easily become overpowering, and, also, I did not use fresh ginger, as I did not know how it would impact the lightness of the madeleines.
Here is the recipe, it makes a great breakfast munch and a great tea time snack!

GET

• 80 g or 2/3rd cup flour
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsps ginger powder
• pinch of salt
• 2 eggs
• 100 g or 1/2 cup sugar
• 70 g or 3 tbsp Speculoos spread
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 90 g or 6 tbsps butter, melted and cooled down

SET

1. Sift the dry ingredients together - flour + baking powder + ginger powder + salt. 
2. In a bowl, beat the wet ingredients - eggs, then add sugar, beat until fluffy. 
3. Beat in the Speculoos spread and vanilla extract. 
4. Add spoon by spoon the dry ingredients to the wet egg mixture.
5. Lastly add the cool butter. 
6. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 3 hours. 
7. Remove from the refrigerator, don't worry if the batter has hardened. Wait for a couple of minutes till the batter gets back to normal.
8. Spoon out the mixture into madeleine moulds, bake for 11-13 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 200°C. 
9. Once done, let the madeleines cool off on a wire rack and then unmould them. 

GO
While these take time to sit out or 3 hours, you can bake them after 30 minutes of rest period as well, that is if you are pressed for time.

They make great accompaniments as dippers for chocolate fondues.

Spiced Chocolate Chip Muffins

I followed Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Chip Muffin recipe, which is super easy to make! To the mixture I just added a few spices from my ‘Vin Chaud’ spices box! And also the recipe is a bit adapted from hers.
The good and maybe the best part of making muffins, is that that are so super EASY to make, I use a ABC method, which is basically mixing all the dry ingredients and then beating all the wet ingredients together, and then mixing A+B=C becomes the batter in which you can fold in nuts, choco chips, fruits, etc. 

GET

A.
250 g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
4 tbsps cocoa powder
A pinch of salt

B
150 g brown sugar
125 ml buttermilk
125 ml milk
90 ml light olive oil
1 egg
1 tsp Vanilla essence

Add-ins
135 chocolate chips / pieces
3 tsps mixed spices

SET
Preheat the oven at 200°C.
A - Pass the dry ingredients – flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and soda and salt through a sieve to ensure that all the powders are well mixed.

B - Beat the egg, milk, buttermilk, oil, sugar, vanilla essence together until light and fluffy.

C - Incorporate dry ingredients A and the wet ingredients B together. Fold in the spices and the chopped chocolate pieces.

Scoop mixture into muffin cases, bake for 20 minutes.

GO
Just eat them already

M&M Mania– June edition

Days just seem to whiz by! Seriously, I thought it was just a few days by that I hadn’t made anything in my precious little oven, and boom, before you know it, it’s almost a month! Gulp. 


In all fairness, it was my 30th birthday (I know I should be graceful about aging and stuff, but hell no, I am a big 3 zero!), a quick dash to motherland and back and getting ready to go ITALIA! Aaaaooooooo
So as P was going to camp out in some hotel in Milan, I thought I’d be a good wifey, and make him some goodies. Now knowing his penchant for sweets, I thought I’d whip a batch of muffins (and some madeleines)

I just had to try out madeleines, they are so cute, and besides, on a sceptical note, I bought a silicone mould for the madeleines. Now, I read on one of the million sites that I surf everyday, for inspiration of course, that the silicone moulds do not really yield good results. But I wasn’t able to find the good ol’ metal mould. So anywhos, went ahead and bought the mould, and I must say, not heeding to my hesitation, they turned out just fine. Perfectly fine. Fat and fluffy.

So here’s a run down of the Muffin & Madeleine Mania.

Spiced Chocolate Chip Muffins

Banana Caramelized Peanut Muffins

Speculoos Ginger Madeleines

Moroccan Spice Cookies

As a part of my rendition of La France, my pièce montée or Croquembouche showed different aspects of La France. Morocco and France go a long way, the former being known as one of the largest emigration countries. From the 30 million Moroccan population, 2 million of Moroccan descent live in Western Europe and France hosts approximately 1 million Moroccans (not counting those of Moroccan descent).
The Moroccan (Maghreb) influence is quite prominent in France, their cuisine being one of the finest and most cherished here. Personally I think they are some of the warmest communities I have come across.
So as a tribute to the lovely country, I picked up some of their essential spices and thought of making a cookie based on these spices!
These are very easy sugar cookies, really very very simple to make, the recipe follows herein:

 GET
 1 cup flour

1 tbsps spice mix: Saffron, Paprika, Cinnamon, Cumin, White Pepper, and cardamom
pinch of salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 tbsps milk



SET
* Sift together: flour + spices + salt - set aside.
* Beater butter and sugar till creamy and light.
* Add egg and milk, beat well.
* Stir in flour, mix well. Knead softly into a dough.
* Cover the dough with cling wrap, refridgerate for 1 hour.
* Preheat oven to 180° C.
* On a floured platform, roll out the dough to a thickness you like.
Cut into desired shapes and bake for 10 minutes. Do not brown the cookies!

GO
To get the effect of my cookies, simply decorate the cookies with an icing of your choice, the base colour will be the final shade, so choose accordingly. Then dip the cookies in a pool of coloured sugar and let to dry.. yumm yumm yumm :)

Piece Montee, Croquembouche anyone?

So finally I get around to writing how the piece montée or the croquembouche comes together.
So by now, you should have the 2 essential elements in place,

- the choux pastry/ pâte à choux/ profiteroles
- the filling for the pastry - crème patisserie

Completing the pastry and the filling:
* Fit a plain pastry tip in the piping bag and fill it with the pastry cream.
* Pierce the bottom of every choux with the pastry tip, and fill the choux with the pastry cream. Place on a silicon mat or baking paper.
* If there is too much of humidity around you, keep the filled choux pastry in the fridge till you make the glaze.

Some tips:

To begin with:
* Line your working area with used parchment paper, place your base for the piece montée in the middle, preferably use something you can turn easily, like a turnaround cake plate.
* If you are right handed - keep all your utensils and tools to the right, and similarly left, if you are left handed.
* Most IMPORTANT: the caramel burns like hell even if a drop touches your skin! I am testament to 4 such fingers :) Keep your kitchen sink full of cold water, or keep a bowl of ice cold water near you. A good home remedy to heal burns, rub a slice of raw potato over the burn.
* If you have anything in shape of a cone to model your croquembouche, great! If not, take a round baking pan/ cheesecake mould. This helps in getting a ground round shape.
* If you have enough time, make a sample mock up of the final piece montee, which simply means, make a layout of the end result.
* It would be smart to separate the large choux pastry from the small ones. Try and fill the smaller ones with lesser filling so as to make them lighter which then means they can go on the top!
* It would also be wise to finish dipping the choux into the caramel first and then make another batch of caramel once you have finished dipping all the choux. This will help in having a uniform colour for all the choux pastries.
* The second batch of caramel will be used in gluing all the pieces together and the cooled off version can be used in making sugar decorations.

For the Caramel Glaze: (From Cat's recipe)- has to be made into 2 batches.
1 cup (225 g.) sugar
½ teaspoon lemon juice

Combine sugar and lemon juice in a saucepan with a metal kitchen spoon stirring until the sugar resembles wet sand. Place on medium heat; heat without stirring until sugar starts to melt around the sides of the pan and the center begins to smoke. Begin to stir sugar. Continue heating, stirring occasionally until the sugar is a clear, amber color. Remove from heat immediately; place bottom of pan in ice water to stop the cooking. Use immediately.

The final GO

* At this stage, everything SHOULD have been done: you should have enough already filled choux pastries and the caramel should be hot. You cannot wait for even 5 minutes once you make the caramel, so, time it right.
* Dip the top of each choux pastry into the hot caramel (be careful). Set aside.
* Once you have finished with all the choux pastry, start the assembly process.
* Place the choux next to each other and glue them with the help of the caramel, which means that you will have to dip two opposite sides of the choux to be able to from a circle.
* Continue this till you have completed a round, then start the mounting. When you start assembling on top of each other, you will have to dip the choux on two different sides, one on the downside to glue to the bottom and one opposite side to glue on their neigbours.
* Keep going till you arrive to the conical shape! Et voilà, you have now climbed the highest mountain!!

Unfortunately, since I was alone, I do not have a step by step picture for you. Hopefully I shal have it the next time.

As you will notice in the pictures, I stuck on some Eiffel Tower shaped Moroccan Spice Cookies on the base and the top (like a Christmas tree huh?).

Creme Patisserie

One of the most essential fillings in one too many desserts, the ubiquitous pastry cream usually decides the fate of the entire dessert. It such a delicate thing this, as if the eggs are cooked a little bit too much, it results in a broken or spoilt cream. A broken pastry cream will end and taste like scrambled eggs and just ruins all your efforts.

This was my first attempt at making pastry cream and as per the rules of the May Challenge for the Daring Bakers, we had to follow Cat’s wonderful recipe for the pastry cream.

The 2 different pastry creams I made were:

- Chocolate spiked Tequila Creme

- Chai Creme Patisserie

For the Chocolate Spiked Tequila Crème

GET

1 ¼ cup whole milk to be divided into:

¼ cup will be mixed with cornstarch

¼ cup will be mixed with dark chocolate

½ cup to be mixed with sugar and constitutes the main part of the cooking

2 Tbsp. cornstarch

6 Tbsp. sugar

80 g dark chocolate chopped

1 large egg

2 large egg yolks

2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

2 tsp tequila

SET

• Dissolve cornstarch in ¼ cup of milk.
• Combine the remaining ½ cup of milk with the sugar in a saucepan; bring to boil; remove from heat.
• Beat the whole egg, then the yolks into the cornstarch mixture. Pour 1/3 of boiling milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly so that the eggs do not begin to cook.
• Return the remaining milk to boil. Pour in the hot egg mixture in a stream, continuing whisking.
• Continue whisking until the cream thickens and comes to a boil. 
• Bring ¼ cup milk to a boil in a small pan; remove from heat and add in the dark chocolate, finely chopped, and mix until smooth. 
• Remove from heat and beat in the butter and tequila.
• Pour cream into a stainless steel/ceramic bowl.  Press plastic wrap firmly against the surface. Chill immediately and until ready to use.

For the Chai Creme Patisserie

GET

1 cup whole milk to be divided into:

¼ cup will be mixed with cornstarch

¾ cup will be boiled with the tea & sugar and constitutes the main part of the cooking

3 Chai teabags / 3 tbsps chai powder

2 Tbsp. cornstarch

6 Tbsp. sugar

1 large egg

2 large egg yolks

2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

SET

• Dissolve cornstarch in ¼ cup of milk.
• Combine the remaining ¾ cup of milk with the tea and sugar in a saucepan; bring to boil; remove from heat. Strain the tea if you are not using tea bags.
• Beat the whole egg, then the yolks into the cornstarch mixture. Pour 1/3 of boiling milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly so that the eggs do not begin to cook.
• Return the remaining milk to boil. Pour in the hot egg mixture in a stream, continuing whisking.
• Continue whisking until the cream thickens and comes to a boil. 
• Remove from heat and beat in the butter and tequila.
• Pour cream into a stainless steel/ceramic bowl.  Press plastic wrap firmly against the surface. Chill immediately and until ready to use.