Gingerbread Cupcakes

I decided to go home early yesterday, and what better to do with the extra time than bake cupcakes?  I wanted to try a different recipe from VCTOTW, and it was a toss-up between carrot or ginger cakes.   I imagine you've already guessed the outcome of that quandry.

I followed the recipe almost to the letter, the only slight problem was I only had half a lemon, so trying to source enough zest was a problem.  Oh, and I didn't have light molasses so swapped it for golden syrup which I presume is similar.  I also added a tiny bit of black molasses for flavour.

As I had no neutral-tasting cream cheese to make cream cheese frosting with, I went with the lemony buttercream option.  I wanted to practise my piping, and after last time's was too soft, decided to put the icing in the fridge until it was needed.  As a result I ended up trying to pipe really cold, unpliable icing, so the decoration wasn't the best.  I tried to cover this up with strategically-placed pieces of crystallised ginger.

Outcome: these tasted way better than they looked after my bodged decoration attempts!  They have a really delicious caramel/ginger flavour, and a very soft and light texture.  The lemon frosting went beautifully,  My only negative observation is that before cool the cakes seemed slightly greasy.

I'm not sure whether or not to be annoyed that people are constantly surprised that my food isn't disgusting.  These cakes prompted the question "how can these be so delicious when there's none of the good stuff in them?".

Butternut Rancheros

Tried out this recipe from theppk.com.  Very easy and really tasty.

Sunflower, Sesame and Flax Seed Loaf

Thought I'd bake something that wasn't cake for once.  Followed this recipe. Lovely texture though slightly yeasty probably as I added extra yeast as the first lot of water didn't seem to be frothing very well...

Vegan Chelsea Buns

I decided to make some Chelsea buns.   So I looked round the net at a number of different recipes, did some jiggery-pokery and came up with the one below.  Instead of just using currants for the filling, I thought I'd make things a bit more colourful and used a mixture of yellow and black raisins, and chopped dried dates,cranberries, cherries and blueberries.

Vegan Chelsea Buns - makes about 14 smallish ones, or 9 larger ones.

Dough
120ml lukewarm soya milk
1 & 1/2 tsp dried yeast
50g caster sugar
250g strong bread flour

1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp mixed spice or pinch each of cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, ginger
25g vegan margarine

Filling

20g vegan margarine, melted
50g brown sugar
1 tsp mixed spice (as above)
100g dried fruit (sultanas, or whatever you want)

Glaze:

2 tablespoons (30ml) caster sugar

1 tablespoon (15ml) soya milk
1/4 tsp Cinnamon

Method
 

Put the yeast and 1 tsp of the sugar into the warm milk, stir and leave somewhere warm for 10 minutes until frothy.  Sift the flour, the rest of the sugar, salt and spices into a large bowl and rub in the margarine with your fingers.  Make a well in the centre, add the yeasty milk and mix to form a soft dough.  Add a small amount of extra flour if it seems too wet.  

Lightly flour a clean surface and knead the dough til smooth and elastic.  Place the dough in a lightly oiled or dusted bowl and leave somewhere warm to rise, for about an hour or until doubled in size.

Grease a baking sheet, and in a small bowl mix together sugar, spice and dried fruit,for the filling.  Knock down the dough and roll out into a rectangle.  For smaller buns, make your rectangle approximately 20cm by 40cm.   For larger ones, try 30cm by 30cm.  Brush the dough with the melted margarine and sprinkle over the fruit and sugar mix. 








Roll up your dough,  starting from the longest edge (or either way if it's square).  





Stick down the edge with some soya milk or water.  Cut into 4cm wedges and place these into your greased baking sheet, leaving plenty of space between them.  Leave to rise for 20 mins.  Meanwhile, preheat oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6.






Bake the buns in the warm oven for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.  Once the buns are out of the oven, make the glaze by heating the milk, adding the sugar and stirring until dissolved.  Before the buns are cool, transfer them to a wire rack and brush them with the glaze.

Verdict: I'm really pleased with how they turned out; everyone who tried one loved them.  However, I'm not sure putting in all that different fruit was really worth the expense; due to the spice flavouring, individual fruit flavours were not really discernible.  I'll definitely make these again, but will probably stick to sultanas next time.  I used a lot of cinnamon - probably more than my recipe stated- and my buns slightly resembled a cinnamon swirl.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but less could be used for a less strong-tasting bun.  Also I rolled out my dough to 20cm by 40cm, which made lots of smallish buns.  I'll try 30 by 30 next time, which reckon should give each bun another circle of dough, and would probably produce about 8-10 buns.

Chana Towers

Living in Brighton, I'm almost spoilt for choice when it comes to finding a vegan meal out.   For special occasions, however, Terre-a-Terre is usually the destination, due to its beautiful presentation and wonderful pairings of flavours.  So when I saw their cookbook was out, I excitedly ordered a copy.  Unfortunately, as I suspected, making their food is not easy.  Every recipe involves about 5 different elements, all requiring about 8 ingredients each, to be cooked separately then assembled at the end.  So, instead of attempting any of their recipes I thought I'd try and come up with a simpler version of their Chana Chat, which might not be as impressive, but would (hopefully) be tasty and would at least be something I can actually attempt without devoting a whole week of my life to the sourcing, preparation, cooking, and presentation of the meal.

So this is what I did:

Chana Towers

Spice Mix
1/2 tsp each cumin, mustard, coriander, fenugreek and fennel seeds
1/2 tsp each salt, amchoor (dried mango powder) and paprika
pinch chilli powder


Chana Masala

2 tbsp oil
1tsp cumin seeds
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 inch piece ginger, finely chopped/grated
1tsp crushed green chilli
1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 medium potato, chopped into 1cm cubes
1/2 tin tomatoes, chopped
tablespoon tomato puree
Juice 1/4 lemon
1tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp spice mix


Discs:

100g plain flour
50g gram (chick pea) flour
1/3 tsp cumin seeds, toasted and ground
pinch salt
50ml water
25g soya margarine, melted
sunflower oil for deep frying
coriander


Method
 
Start by making your spice mix: toast the whole spices in a frying pan until they begin to brown and smell great.  Pour into a spice grinder along with the salt, amchoor, paprika and chilli, and blitz til fine.

Once this is done you can start on the discs: in a medium-sized mixing bowl, sift together flours, then add cumin and salt. Gradually pour in the water, mixing all the time, until you have a smooth paste.  Add the marg and mix to form a soft dough.  Stick in the fridge for half an hour.
Once chilled, roll out onto floured surface until very thin (approx 1mm thick).  Then use a large cookie cutter to cut out circles.  (Or, if you realise, as I did, that all of your cookie cutters are shaped like either bats, teapots, or dinosaurs, you could always resort to using the rim of a cup measure).  Place on a lightly floured plate and stick back in the fridge for another half hour.

Now start the chana masala: heat the oil in a saucepan, add the cumin seeds and fry for 20 seconds.  Add onion and fry until softened.  Add garlic, chilli and ginger.  Fry for a couple more minutes.  Add the tomato puree, tomatoes, lemon juice, turmeric, spice mix, chilli, salt, potato and chickpeas.  Leave to simmer on a low heat, stirring occasionally, til potatoes are soft.

When your chana are ready, deep fry your discs at 170 degrees centigrade, until golden brown.  Remove and place on kitchen paper to soak up excess grease.  Sprinkle on some of the spice.

To serve, put a disc on each plate, spoon on some chana, stick on an extra disc, and repeat, until you have a triple (or , if you are confident in your balancing skills, or hungry, quadruple) -decker chana sandwich.  Garnish with coriander


Eat with some rice and soy yoghurt.  Or whatever you want.

Outcome: pretty tasty.  Chana a little dry as it turned out I'd no tomato puree, which would have helped stick everything together.  I also used brown chick peas which are a little harder and drier than white ones, which didn't help matters.  The discs were fab!

Chocolate Cupcakes with Mocha Frosting

Having spent a large proportion of my Sunday looking online at bakery porn, when I got home I just had to do some cakes, with the aim of practising doing some piping with a new nozzle I recently purchased.  I chose the basic chocolate cupcakes out of my favourite vegan cake book, VCTOTW - as I had no soya milk I had to substitute oat milk.  This came out ok but didn't curdle in the same way the soy does.

But it seems to have done the trick -the cupcakes came out beautifully soft and light.

Unfortunately I hadn't the proper ingredients for the book's  vegan buttercream recipe as I had no vegetable shortening, and it wasn't available at the only shop open at 9pm on a Sunday.  I made my own mocha buttercream out of margarine, cocoa, espresso powder, and icing sugar.
The icing tasted really good. However without the shortening the icing was just too soft and didn't hold its shape well enough - the first couple of cakes came out ok but as the icing warmed up the piping lost its shape and the results were disappointing.



Conclusion: more cupcakes to be baked next weekend to ensure a proper piping session.