Minim Confection

What do you give to someone to thank them for the wonderful gift of a phenomenal book?  Manuscript-themed cupcakes, of course!  At least this is the sensible course if the book is a manuscript facsimile.  That, and I may have been on a bit of a cupcake kick at the start of the year...

Because I'm a nerd, I wanted the cupcakes to spell out 'diolch am y lyfr' (Welsh for 'thanks for the book'), and my first thought was to cut out circles of fondant, paint them with a textura or gothic script and place them on top of smooth-topped cupcakes.  Fortunately I came to my senses and realized that mini fondant manuscripts would be so much cooler as toppers, so that's what I made.  I used initials, decorated with red for each new word, on the pages to spell out my message of thanks.

Admittedly, the cupcakes themselves are as much the superfluous part of this post as they were the superfluous part of the gift.  That being said, they were pretty good.  They were a variation on my whisky cake, in that the chocolate cupcakes were filled with chocolate and Guiness ganache and topped with whisky buttercream.  I used this recipe from Joy of Baking for the cupcakes, and be careful to note that the recipe makes sixteen cupcakes.  Since the average tray has a dozen cups, this could be a problem, and you should be prepared for it before it comes time to pour the batter.  Since I only have one cupcake tray, I poured the excess batter into two small greased and cocoa-powdered souffle dishes.  This meant that in the end I had two 3-4 inch cake layers going spare... perfect for a bonus tiny cake.  The cupcakes were generally nice although they came out somewhat fudgier than I might have liked; others liked the fudginess, so this is personal preference.  The only change that I made to the recipe was using hot coffee in place of hot water, because coffee strengthens the flavour of chocolate cake.  I may also not have mixed the hot coffee with the cocoa poweder - too much time has passed now to remember - and it might be this that resulted in said fudginess.  The cupcakes were also quite susceptible to cracking when coring them to fill with ganache, possibly for the same reason.  If you pipe the ganache into the centres of the cupcakes with a piping bag and do not use too much pressure, it should not be terribly problematic.  The recipe for the swiss buttercream is in the Recipe Box, just add whisky to taste, and the same goes for the recipe for ganache but adding Guiness to taste.

I did learn something valuable in making this ganache: how to fix a broken ganache.  I can safely say that I had never broken a ganache before (I must have been lucky), so when it happened I wasn't sure what I was looking at.  I had been unable to buy my preferred ganache-making chocolate, so my first instinct was to blame the lumpy, oily mess on low-quality chocolate.  I tried draining off the oil, reheating the mess, stirring and stirring and stirring, and it still looked gross.  I wondered if adding the Guiness had caused the problem, but since it was clearly oil sitting on top of the chocolate and not stout, that did not seem to be the issue.  Finally I googled  'broken ganache' and found Matthew Kayahara's blog, where he explained that a broken ganache is the result of an unbalanced fat-to-water ratio, with the fat content being too high.  To fix it, heat some low-fat milk and, very slowly, incorporate it into the ganache until everything comes together and it looks like the smooth chocolate confection it should be.  Where did bakers and chefs go for answers before google?  Medieval scrolls, I guess.

On to the manuscripts!  I knew how I wanted my books to look, and a vague idea of how to get there, but for tips I googled (again!) and found this how-to from A Grey Eyed Girl.  She provides a very good step-by-step, complete with pictures.  I used different tools, but followed her closely with variation in the details (turned up edges or corners of pages, thickness of the book, lift of the pages from the binding) for each manuscript.  I also coloured my fondant with a mix of red, yellow and black gel dyes, just as I did with my Black Book of Cake manuscript cake, to make it resemble vellum.

Colour a ball of fondant to your desired shade, and break off a small lump for your first manuscript.  Shape it into a soft rectangle.

Using the blunt edge of a knife or a fondant or gum paste cutting tool, slice into the centre of the rectangle, approximately halfway through it.

Using a round pencil or another fondant tool for which I do not know the name, widen the incision and spread and smooth the pages on either side so that they resemble the wings of a bird if viewed from the bottom or top edge.  Trim the left and right edges of the manuscript at an angle to mimic the spread of the pages of an open book.

With the tip of the knife or cutting tool, draw the lines of individual pages into the top and bottom edges of the book, following the wing-shape you created.  On the right and left edges create the pages by pressing in with the length of the blade, rather than drawing the lines with the tip.  Turn up the corner of a page by gently sawing into it and lifting.

For the binding, roll out fondant of a different colour (I prefer black) and trim it to the size of your manuscript.  Round the corners a bit if desired, and create the spine by placing two indents on either side of the sheet using a toothpick.

To paint on the 'text', you will need a fine brush and more of the gel dye used to colour the fondant.  As I showed in the Black Book of Cake, to paint with these gels it is helpful to thin them out using a clear alcohol such as gin or vodka.  As the paint dries this will evaporate, so there's no worry if feeding the fondant to kids!  By thinning the dyes, it is possible to adjust the consistency and the transparency of your colours.  Having the alcohol and cotton swabs on hand is also helpful in the event that you make a mistake, because if you act quickly it is possible to wipe it off using an alcohol-soaked swab or paper towel.

Because I did not take photos throughout the process of making the first batch of manuscripts, I made one more to top off the bonus tiny cake I mentioned earlier; this is the manuscript featured in my step-by-step.  I painted this one slightly differently, in that I included both coloured initials and 'text' on the same page, rather than the sort of carpet pages I made in my thank you cupcakes.  The 'text' of all of the manuscripts I formed purely out of minims; there weren't enough hours in the day for the level of procrastination that it would have taken to copy true tiny texts into these miniscule manuscripts, and fortunately minim confusion is not an issue on pages that are going to be eaten...

Bourbon Beans and Baking Problems

You may have a baking problem when, after going a few weeks without pulling something sweet-smelling out of the oven, people begin to ask questions.  Not only have I not been baking much lately, but I've been blogging about it even less.  In reality this is probably a good thing; less procrastibaking (at least in theory) means more working.  Nevertheless, I feel well overdue for a post or two, and I've got a bit of a backlog of bakes.  That, and I can't have the last post up be a commemoration of the time I blew chestnuts up all over my oven...

Back in January (so long ago now!) I baked some cupcakes.  Bourbon vanilla bean cupcakes with salted caramel buttercream, to be exact.  Cupcakes can be tedious little things, especially if you're making a few dozen of them and even more especially if they need to be decorated in any elaborate way.  They're small and fiddly, that's the nature of cupcakes.  These were not so bad, however, because I was only making one dozen and because they were going to be topped with buttercream leftover from a batch my sister had made and frozen.

I found a recipe for plain vanilla cupcakes on Joy of Baking, and adapted that to make them bourbon by replacing the milk in the recipe with - you guessed it! - bourbon.  My version of the recipe can be found in the Recipe Box.

Another reason that cupcakes are fiddly is that they are easy to over-bake and become dried out.  I've also had them inexplicably fall flat coming out of the oven, but fortunately there were no issues with these.  I set the timer a bit early at 15 minutes and checked them then, but they weren't quite ready.  By the low-end estimate of 17 minutes, however, they were good to go and I popped them out.  As with any cake, be careful not to over mix the batter, and try to pour them into the tray and get them in the oven with a bit of speed.

Let the cupcakes cool before icing them with the buttercream.  My sister had made swiss buttercream of the type that can be found in the Recipe Box, except that she used salted butter.  Salted buttercream can be very good on its own (as a flavour, not on a spoon... although to each his own), but I felt like adding something else to it - caramel.  Salted caramel is delicious, and with bourbon... yes.  Plus I had time to make caramel since I didn't actually have to make the buttercream.  For the caramel I used the recipe for Salted Caramel Whisky Sauce in the Recipe Box, but substituted bourbon for whisky.  I had left the buttercream out to defrost - and I should mention now that swiss buttercream does keep very well if you freeze it in ziploc bags or an airtight container - and once it was soft I beat it in the kitchen aid with a paddle attachment.  When it was at its smooth, light buttercream consistency, I continued to beat at a low speed and added caramel to taste.

I piped the buttercream onto the cooled cupcakes using a star tip, and then drizzled them with some of the leftover caramel sauce.  As a finishing touch, I sprinkled some demerara sugar on top.

"Chest-nuts burst-ing, all over the ovennnn..."

'Twas the night before Bake Off, when all through the house,

one baker was stirring, cocoa all over her blouse.

The parchment was lined in the cake pan with care,

in hopes that the batter would soon be in there.

When out of the oven sounded such a loud bang,

that the bowl nearly fell to the floor with a clang!

Away to the oven I flew like a flash,

threw open the door and had all my hopes dashed.

A great wave of heat rushed up into my eyes,

yet not from that sprung the tears, but from the surprise.

The walls of the oven showed I was a clutz:

splattered bits everywhere, in place of chestnuts.

I apologize, I don't know what happened there.  I need to get out more.  As is probably now clear, despite hearing Nat King Cole croon about chestnuts annually, I had next to zero familiarity with the shiny brown nuts prior to my blowing them up.  What possessed me, then, to want to bake a chestnut coffee cake, I do not know.  It was, in fact, the night of the Bake Off finale in early October, but I was already feeling a touch of holiday spirit.  So when I saw Bon Appétite's recipe for Chestnut Coffee Cake earlier on in the day, it grabbed my attention.  Never mind that I didn't know how to handle chestnuts, it couldn't be that hard, right?

I bought some lovely-looking nuts from the local market and took them home to get started.  The recipe calls for nuts in a vacuum-pack or a jar, but while I'd seen some in a can in the grocery store I hadn't seen any others.  Since fresh ones were available I thought they'd be best, plus I wanted to try roasting them first (not called for in the recipe) and wasn't sure about trying to roast chestnuts which had already been peeled, such as those in the can.  What I didn't think about was the possibility of rotten nuts.  Or blowing them up.

Of course, I knew the scoring of the nuts, as directed by BBC Food, was to allow for expansion; I expected the skins to open up, but for some reason it never occurred to me that they might start popping like popcorn.  So I scored them and put them in the oven to roast, uncovered.  The bang like the shot of a gun in the corner of the kitchen caught me totally off guard, and the mess inside... it wasn't pretty.  Only one nut had burst, but it had done so with gusto, coating the entire inside of the oven - top, bottom and sides - with a soft powder of chestnut guts.

I pulled the hot roasting pan from the oven and let the nuts cool while I aired out and cleaned out the oven.  By the time that was finished and I was no longer worried about any of the remaining chestnuts exploding in my face, I investigated them.  Some seemed ready to be peeled, but a number of them were discoloured inside.  I'd happened upon advice in another recipe to over-buy chestnuts because they often have rotten centres.  Without knowing what exactly a rotten centre looked like, or how to tell if my chestnuts were bad, I ran out and bought the canned variety.  It's never worth risking making people sick, and this cake wasn't just for me.

The canned variety come suspended in some sort of thick liquid, so I rinsed them off and then stuck them in to roast very very briefly before chopping them up.  The chopped nuts are then (or first, if you skip the roasting) cooked in a skillet with water and brown sugar to make a syrup.  The recipe calls for a half-cup of chestnuts, but I believe I might actually have gone a little crazy with the chestnut chopping (revenge therapy for the chestnut exploding?) and ended up using a full cup; if so I would also have doubled the water and sugar, as well as the cocoa and remaining sugar for coating.

There were a lot of nuts.  I let those cool while making the streusel topping.  This, unlike the nut fiasco, was very straightforward: simply mix almond meal, sugar, flour and salt and work the chunks of butter into it with your hands.  The cake recipe itself is very easy and fairly standard, with the inclusion of sour cream.  After the batter was made, I worked pretty quickly to get half of it in the pan and then to crumble a layer of the cocoa-coated chestnuts over it before topping it off with the second half of the batter and finally the streusel.

The recipe says to sprinkle the chestnuts over the first layer of batter, but mine were pretty sticky and thick, and not really sprinkle material...  I also had twice the amount, so rather than a chestnut here and a chestnut there, I wound up with an entire layer's worth.  In the end I quite liked it that way.

Unfortunately, even after my fallen cake and my flooded cake, I was still adjusting to my new oven (I still am, in fact), and one side got a little to near to the flame in the back.  Open fires, huh?  So it was singed and certainly wouldn't have won me any star baker accolades, but it was far from inedible.  Having had, as I mentioned, no previous experience with chestnuts I was surprised to find that they were meaty, but they really do work with the chocolate and the somewhat crumbly spongy texture of the coffee cake.  It was good for enjoying with friends (and their goodies!) during the finale of Bake Off, and a leftover slice was equally tasty with coffee the next morning.