Courgette Cupcakes aka Vehicle for Italian Meringue Buttercream

As you know, I have been doing some research into baking over the last few weeks. Trying to hone my skills in the basics, creme patisserie, creme anglaise, pastry and buttercream icing. Who knew there were so many varieties of the buttercream icing? And so many better tasting buttercreams too! Of course I have made the classic, butter, icing sugar and vanilla extract and the cream cheese variety but the Italian Meringue buttercream and the French butter cream are new to me. I started with the former, the IMBC and boy is it dreamy.
I wanted to make it but had to have something to put it on, you can't just eat it by the spoonful can you? No? Ok, yes you're right, mustn't eat it by the spoonful!
We have recently been getting a fruit and veg box from Abel & Cole and the week before last we got two courgettes. Now, I am in two minds about the courgette. Cooked in the right way it can be delicious but get it wrong and it can be a very tasteless. One of my favourite ways of cooking the courgette is to put it in a cake, it makes a great alternative to the carrot cake. One of the signing up gifts from Abel & Cole was their cook book. All you have to do is go to the index, look up your fruit or veg and there are some lovely recipes to open. Italian Courgette Cupcakes was where I stopped under the courgette. I replaced the honey and nut topping with the IMBC.
I found this recipe for the IMBC, it was very clear, the pictures helped. The basis of this buttercream is a meringue made with a hot sugar syrup. You get a very thick and silky meringue and then add your butter whisking all the while. At first I thought that it wouldn't work, the addition of the butter makes it split but you just whisk on through and you end up with this thick, unctuous, creamy icing that you can use on anything. The thing you have to remember, again, is that you shouldn't just eat it by the spoonful. It's hard to remember when you are faced with the finished product.

I then piped it on to the courgette cupcakes. The cakes were lovely (a nod to the healthy) but the thing that my husband remarked on the the icing, he liked it, a lot!

Leith's British Baking Masterclass

As you know I was recently made redundant from my day job and my lovely work friends were very generous with my leaving gifts. I got a set of Orla Kiely cake tins, a great necklace with an oven glove, grater, whisk and frying pan charms and (the reason for this post) a voucher for Leith's Cookery School. I chose to do the British Baking Masterclass, a one day course that covered all the basics. I thought it would be a good class to make sure I was solid in all the cake techniques.
I did the course two weeks ago. I really enjoyed the day, everyone was very helpful. What it showed me was that I am pretty ok on the basics, now I need to start using those skills to experiment.

The things I learned that I sort of already knew:
1. Creaming the butter and sugar until it is really, really, really pale and fluffy, you can never do this too much.
2. Always fold in the flour to your batter, not over-working it.
3. Oven temperature is key, "know your oven".
4. I'm pretty good on all the techniques.
5. Always have the eggs at room temperature.

The things I learned that I didn't know:
1. When making a sponge beat all the eggs together first and then add them a tablespoon at a time to your creamed butter and sugar, whisking them well in between each addition. This makes for a lighter sponge, you get more air into the mixture.
2. Whatever raising agent you are using (Baking Powder, Bicarbonate of Soda) once this added to your mixture the chemical reaction starts immediately so it's important to get the cake in the oven as soon as possible to take advantage of that rising.

As I knew, baking is a science. It's about chemical reactions, the the ingredients you use as well as how you use them will determine the outcome of your cake. I also got a book recommendation from one of the chefs. It is all about the science The Science of Good Cooking . I want to learn the science behind all these reactions and then I can use that knowledge to experiment and be creative. Well, that's the idea anyway!

Below are the fruits of my labour: Victoria sponge with a passion fruit butter icing, lemon and blueberry friands, sun-dried tomato and basil scones and cherry and chocolate cookies. I have to say that the sponge was probably one of the best I have ever made so the course was worth it just to master that.

I also got a certificate! It came in the post yesterday, to get it framed or not?!!!

Creme Patissiere vs Creme Anglaise

Watching GBBO always put me in mind of creme pat, don't you find that? No? Just me then... It was the floating islands in their creme anglaise that got me thinking about it (I haven't made them yet but they are on the agenda soon) and the difference between them.
It seems that the difference is that creme pat uses a thickening agent (flour, cornflour or a mixture of both) and is therefore a lot thicker and can be used in tarts etc. Creme anglaise just uses the eggs to thicken it and therefore has more of a pouring texture.
I have made creme pat twice recently. The first time was a few weeks ago when I made a Boston Cream Pie. This is a sponge sandwich with creme pat in the centre covered in a chocolate ganache. No pictures I'm afraid but it was yum despite the sponge being undercooked and the creme pat not being quite thick enough. It would appear that I am having a few issues in the kitchen at the moment what with Muffingate last week! In fact one of my friends said that it was the nicest thing she had tasted in a long time so disaster disschmaster!! I used a recipe from the BBC website for the creme pat and it used cornflour to thicken it. I think I may have taken it off the heat too soon, hence the lack of thickness.
The second time was last week. After doing some research online and in Master the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child I found that there were many recipes and many different ways of making it. The recipe I went with was from the Cordon Blue website.

Ingredients:
250mls Milk
1 vanilla pod
2 egg yolks
60g sugar
30g flour

I wanted to see if I could make a cardamom custard so I replaced the vanilla pod with a cardamom pod, I used just one as I wasn't sure. It had a hint of cardamom flavour but not enough so next time I would use at least 4. The milk is heated with the pod and a third of the sugar until almost boiling. Whisk the egg yolks with the remaining sugar until pale and fluffy then add the flour and mix well. This is where it gets tricky. Add about a third of the almost boiling milk to the egg mixture, this tempers the eggs. Whisk well and then add this back into the rest of the milk whisking all the time. Put back on the heat and and cook until bubbling, let it cook for a minute to cook out the flour. This recipe called for butter to be patted along the surface of the custard once it is off the heat, to stop a skin forming. Other recipes say to whisk in the butter once it is off the heat and then cover with clingfilm before refrigerating it. I did the latter, not sure why, it seemed more logical!
As I said above it had a hint of cardamom but not enough and again it wasn't very thick. A lot of the websites warn against heating it too much in case of curdling and I think I was too quick to take it off the heat, it needed another few minutes and it would have been fine, I need to take my courage in my hands the next time. I used it to make two mini tarts with kiwi atop and they went down very nicely.
Next up is the creme anglaise which will be attempted as part of my GBBO technical challenge challenge!

Technical Challenge Failure

Great British Bake Off is back, very excited here at Cakes and Cardies, very excited. I have mentioned my love of GBBO before and if you can stretch back into the mists of time (2011) you will remember my attempt to bake the technical challenges from series 2. I did three (Iced fingers, Tart au Citron and Miniature Pork Pies), blogged about the first two but not the third (can't remember why). Then my personal life took a turn for the worse and blogging silence ensued. But as you can see from the last couple of months I am now back in earnest.
So as series 4 of Bake Off gets of to a start so does my new challenge to make all the technical bakes from this series. I want to try to do them in the week after they are aired if possible. As I only decided to do this as the second week started I am already behind, not a great start, but hopefully I will catch up by the end of this week. Week 1 was Angel Food Cake, I will be making this on Friday.
And so to my failure. Week 2 was English muffins, bread week. Bread is good for me, I have been making it for a couple of years now and feel comfortable with it so this should be easy....oh dear. To cut to the chase, these were a disaster. So many things went wrong and I'm not sure why.
First I decided to make half the mixture as 8 muffins are a lot for two people to consume, four on the other hand is perfect, two each. Halving the ingredients was fine apart from the egg, how to halve an egg? I have done this before but it isn't an exact science. I pretty much beat the egg and then added half using the that-looks-about-right method. The dough was a bit sticky but that's not usually a problem, I think I may not have kneaded it for long enough because it didn't really rise very much. Then instead of rolling out the dough (as specified in the recipe!) I did it by hand and so the dough wasn't even. I should have started again but I carried on regardless. I cut out two muffins which were very thin and then rolled the dough again and cut out a huge one and used the remaining dough to fashion the fourth muffin.
As you can see, flying by the seat of my pants, not very Bake Off. They rested for 30 minutes and then came the cooking. I used my heavy based frying pan and heated it to a high temperature before putting in the muffins. I lowered the temperature once they were on and gave them 6 minutes on each side. But, they were all different sizes so some were done before and the big one....well lets just say Paul would not have eaten it!! See what you think...

If I had produced these on Bake Off last week it would have been me leaving, definitely. So I need to try again and see if I can get it right. I have to say that they tasted good and had a light airy texture (apart from the giant one, I still ate it though). Many lessons to learn. I don't know how they do it on the show without all the instructions and to a time limit, pretty impressive.