All posts by Ashley

Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes

I may be a weekend baker, but during the week I do have a real job. “Design Strategist by day, crazy baker by night.” This year, the company I work for is celebrating their 20th anniversary and to celebrate the entire Chicago office flew over for a big party and some trans-Atlantic office team building. I wanted to add my own touch to the celebrations by baking some welcome cupcakes for the Chicago team – really it was just to give them a sugar boost as we had festivities planned for the evening and they had no time for jet lag!

I went to my trusty vanilla vanilla cupcakes recipe, I’ve had it for a few years now. I love this recipe because these cakes are full on flavour and because they’re vanilla and vanilla they’re very versatile! I’ve often dyed these cakes and frostings different colors, or add in sprinkles to the batter. Basically, this is a great recipe to play with.

This time, I went a bit overboard with the playfulness. Because our company uses white + different colors in our branding, I decided to incorporate a few of them by swirling together four different colors.

To do this, I used a bit of difficult, but still manageable tricks. For future attempts, I’d suggest only doing three. I have two different sizes of piping bags as well as tips – the standard and then jumbo “cupcake” piping tips which are huge. I made a double batch of frosting, divided it into four separate batches and dyed each batch a different color (white, blue, purple, and yellow). Then, I filled a standard piping bag with each color (so four bags total) and cut the tip of each bag. Then I used one of the jumbo cupcake piping tips and placed it in a large pastry piping bag (a big blue one). Once that one was set up, I gathered my four colored bags and dropped them into the jumbo pastry bag. (Ben was gracious enough to hold the bag open for me so I could drop them in.)

In hindsight, I probably should have taken pictures of this part. Anyways, to pipe, just hold the bag straight up and down and swirl, the colors should them swirl themselves! The most difficult part at this point is just trying to hold the giant bag full of frosting! If any of you are crazy enough to try this, make sure to send me pics of your results!

Ingredients

For the cupcakes:

1 3/4 cups cake flour
1 1/4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup (230 grams) unsalted butter, softened and cut into cubes
4 eggs, room temperature
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

For the frosting:

1 cup (230 grams) unsalted butter, softened
4 cups icing sugar, sifted
2 teaspoons vanilla
pinch of salt
1/4 cup milk or heavy cream

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325° F (approx 165°C). Place cupcake liners into the pan.

2. In the bowl of your mixer, sift together the flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Turn on the mixer to low speed, then slowly add in cubed butter. Mix until the butter is just coated with flour and you have a crumbly consistency.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, and vanilla. Turn the mixer up to medium speed then add in the wet mixture in three parts, scraping down the sides of the bowl in between each addition. Mix until the ingredients are just incorporated; be careful not to over mix.

4. Fill each of the cupcake tins with a couple spoonfuls of the batter until they are filled just about 2/3 full.

5. Bake the cakes for 17-20 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. Rotate the pans halfway through the baking time. Once they are ready, let them cool in the pan for about 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

6. To make the frosting, beat the butter in your mixer until it starts to become creamy. Then turn the mixer to low speed and gradually add in the sifted icing sugar.

7. When all of the sugar is mixed in, add in the vanilla, salt, and cream. Let mix on medium speed for five minutes or until it reaches the desired consistency.

1 Comment

by Ashley on September 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Cupcakes

Tagged Buttercream

Posted by Ashley on September 21, 2012

https://pajamabaker.com/2012/09/21/vanilla-vanilla-cupcakes/

Baby Cakes

This week I decided to take a slight detour from the Bake Off challenges due to a very special occasion. My boss, Gemma, is taking a few months off for maternity leave as a first-time mother! Seeing as it was a momentous occasion, I couldn’t let Gemma have any ordinary send off cake.

I originally found the idea for these a few months ago on Pinterest, and I had to give it a shot. I’d never worked with fondant before, so I was really setting myself up for a challenge. Add in the fact that I was doing this on a weeknight, it also made for a very late night. But the smile on Gemma’s face (and everyone else’s for that matter) was totally worth it!

The first thing to do when working with fondant is make sure that your cakes are completely cool. Then put a nice layer of buttercream on the top that will allow the fondant to adhere. Then, color your fondant using gel food coloring. If you add too much color, the consistency of the fondant will start to get gummy. If that happens, just work in a tiny bit of icing sugar to get it back to the right consistency. If it gets too dry, wet your finger tips and work the dough. Just try not to do either too much as it eventually will just wear out.

Then start to layer up the different pieces of your design. As you add pieces, you can get them to adhere by brushing with a small amount of water.

Just for laughs, I added in a few grumpy babies. I think they were some of my favorites. I also mixed it up by adding hair to a few of the girls, hats, or even pacifiers.

Gemma was leaving the baby’s gender as a surprise, so I made half of them boys and half of them girls. Interestingly, all the boy cakes got eaten first! Wonder what that means??

Congratulations Gemma and Chris!

2 Comments

by Ashley on September 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Cupcakes

Tagged Fondant

Posted by Ashley on September 21, 2012

https://pajamabaker.com/2012/09/21/baby-cakes/

Sweet Pastry

This week on GBBO, the showstopper challenge was to make an American Pie. Surely this challenge was made for me! I’m an American, it should be my topic of expertise. I was so excited when Catherine made a chocolate peanut butter pie – the perfect combination and one of my all-time favorite pies but it didn’t go over well with the judges. I don’t know what Paul Hollywood was talking about when he said he didn’t like it! I mean, how could you NOT?! Catherine was robbed.

For my challenge I wanted to make a pecan pie, one of my mother’s classics and a surefire hit. Unfortunately for me, my mother was travelling for work so I scoured the internet to find another recipe. Turns out that was a huge mistake. First I made my pastry using a slightly different recipe than before, and it worked sooooo well. I felt like everything was going to plan. Pastry was good. Filling looked good. Pecans were arranged beautifully. But then I stuck it in the oven and it all came crashing down from there. The pie completely bubbled up into a huge dome and had terrible cracks and flakes of filling everywhere. I can’t even describe the carnage. It was devastating – I failed at a challenge based on my own heritage. I’m sorry, American pie, I failed you.

However, all is not lost! The sweet pastry was really good, so I felt I should at least post this one because it’s been the only pastry recipe I’ve been happy with so far. So for now, here’s the recipe. Pecan pie – we shall meet again.

Ingredients

500 grams flour, sifted
100 grams icing sugar, sifted
250 grams butter, cold and cut into cubes
2 eggs
milk

Directions

1. Sift together the flour and icing sugar into a large bowl. Then, using your hands, rub the cubes of cold butter into the flour mixture, incorporating it as much as you can. It should have a slightly crumbly texture.

2. Pour out your mixture onto your work surface and bring it together into a little pile with a hole in the middle – like a volcano. Put both of your eggs into the hole and bring together the pastry mixture until it starts to form a dough.

3. As you bring everything together, add a bit of milk, about a teaspoon at a time until you have all of the dry ingredients evenly incorporated. Once it becomes a smooth dough, wrap your pastry in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

The trick is to bring everything together as quickly as possible so that your don’t heat the butter up too much or overwork the dough. When it’s chilled and ready to go, then just roll out as needed over a surface dusted with flour. And that’s it! Easy peasy.

Lemon Griestorte

Today has been a very long day. Ben left to go to a conference in Poland until Wednesday, so he was out the door before 6 a.m. to catch his flight. Unfortunately for me, I’m one of those people that once I’m awake, I’m awake. So I’ve pretty much been awake since about 5 a.m. When I decided to actually roll out of bed 2 hours later, I was greeted by the most enormous spider I have ever seen!!!

I am absolutely terrified of spiders, so I found myself frozen in the doorway, facing off against this creature who was preventing me from entering my bathroom. Normally Ben comes to my rescue (as he did last night when he went after another giant spider that had crawled under our bed), but he’d left hours ago and I was left to fend for myself. So what else could I do but start throwing shoes at it? It was the most logical solution. Four tosses later, and the sucker was squished under one of Ben’s boat shoes, which is where he will stay until someone braver (i.e. Mr Moxey) comes home to dispose of the evidence.

I have no idea where all these spiders are coming from all of a sudden, but hopefully that will be the last one until at least Wednesday.

Anyways, back to business. This week on the Bake Off, the challengers made flourless cakes, or tortes. Originally I had planned to make a chocolate one, but I’m afraid that chocolate is the absolute last ingredient I want to have in the house at the moment. I spent all of Thursday touring around London visiting chocolate shops, gelaterias, and patisseries for a project at work and ended up getting really sick Thursday night and felt like crap most of Friday from eating so much rich, dark chocolate. So yeah, taking a break from that.

So to find a recipe for Plan B, I went to the Bake Off authority herself, miss Merry Berry. This recipe is from her Baking Bible, and uses whipped cream and lemon curd to make a delectable filling.

Ingredients

For the cake:

3 large eggs, separated (you’ll need both the whites and yolks!)
100 grams sugar
zest from 1 lemon
juice from 1/2 lemon
50 grams fine semolina
15 grams ground almonds

For the filling:

300 ml whipping cream
8 Tablespoons lemon curd
fresh raspberries
icing sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F (approx 175°C). Grease a deep round cake tin and line both the bottom and sides with baking paper. (I don’t have a deep tin, so I used 2 8-inch tins and halved the baking time. The layers were really thin, but it worked out alright.)

2. In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks and sugar until they are pale and have a light texture. Add the lemon juice and continue to whisk until the mixture thickens. Fold in the lemon zest, followed by the semolina and ground almonds.

3. In a separate bowl (preferably with an electric mixer), whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks, then fold into the egg yolk mixture until it’s evenly blended. Gently pour into your prepared baking tin.

4. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until it turns a pale golden brown (I did mine for 13 minutes in the two tins). Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before removing and placing on a cooling rack to peel off the baking paper and cool completely. When cool, cut the cake in half horizontally.

5. Whisk the cream until it thickens and holds its shape, then fold in the lemon curd until it’s evenly blended. Spread half of this onto the bottom layer of your cake, then place a few raspberries around the cake. Add the second layer, then top with the rest of the whipped cream mixture.

6. Add a ring of fresh raspberries around the top, then dust with icing sugar to finish it off.

Summer Fruits Tart

Another week and another episode of the Great British Bake Off. This week as a bit more entertaining as the contestants attempted to flip tarte tatins out of their pans, and put a lattice onto treacle tarts. But I was most excited about the patisserie-style fruit tarts they made for the showstopper challenge.

Every time I pass a patisserie with the windows filled with shiny fruit-covered cakes and pies, my mouth literally starts watering. This tart is super simple to make, it’s just a creme patisserie with fruit on top. The most difficult part for me was not eating all of the fruit before I could put it on top of the cream.

Unfortunately, this tart was a bit to delicate to make the hour-plus trek on the rush-hour Tube to work, so Ben and I had to undertake the incredible difficult task of enjoying this bake all by ourselves. And boy was it lovely! The cream and fruit was so refreshing!

If you’re looking to impress some friends at a get-together without much effort, this would definitely be my recommendation

Ingredients

1 batch of sweet shortcrust pastry
4 egg yolks
100 grams sugar
25 grams flour, sifted
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
350 ml milk
a mix of summer fruits, in this case, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries
4 Tablespoons raspberry jam
approximately 1 teaspoon water

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C). Line your pie dish (preferably one with a removable bottom, it’ll make your life easier) with the shortcrust pastry, then gently prick the base and sides with a fork. Lay a sheet of baking paper over your pastry, then fill with baking beans and place in the oven to bake for 10-15 minutes until it just starts to turn golden. Once finished, remove and let it cool completely.

2. Next, make the creme patisserie. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together until they turn light and creamy, then stir in the flour.

3. Bring the milk just to a boil. While continuously whisking the egg mixture, slowly pour in the heated milk. Mix together, then return to the pan and return to the burner on a medium-low heat until it just starts to bubble. Begin stirring and cook for 2 minutes while stirring to allow the mixture to thicken. Remove from the heat, then add in the vanilla.

4. Cover the mixture with plastic wrap, allowing the plastic to touch the top of the creme so that you don’t have a skin forming on top. Allow the creme patisserie cool completely in the fridge. Once cool, spoon the creme patisserie into your baked pastry base and smooth over evenly.

5. Arrange the fruit in any pattern you like on the top of the tart. To create the shiny glaze, place the raspberry jam into a small pan and add a few drops (about 1 teaspoon) of water. Stir continuously until the jam melts, then brush the glaze over the top of each piece of fruit. And that’s it!

pajama baker

All posts by Ashley

Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes

Ingredients

Directions

Baby Cakes

Sweet Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

Lemon Griestorte

Ingredients

Directions

Summer Fruits Tart

Ingredients

Directions

Recent Recipes

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