Bakefest

About a month back, I finally found where my mixer had been kept, and because things have quietened down a lot at work, I've been going into a baking frenzy. Out came all the cookbooks I brought with me to London, and I spent many a night poring over them, wondering what recipes to try. I decided to revisit recipes I'd tried before (like Nigella's chocolate cherry cupcakes and Pierre Herme's Suzy Cake recipes) before tackling new and untrodden grounds.


I'm really happy that I've finally nailed the Suzy Cake recipe. I realise that I hadn't made any mistakes the first time round. I had only been too impatient and tried to un-tin my cake before it had cooled. I've since made this twice and both times, it has come out superbly. I love serving it with raspberries and some cream. It's also an instant crowd hit because of that tremendous hit of chocolateyness.

The Nigella recipe, I have discovered, definitely needs tweaking. To be honest, I'm not much of a Nigella fan. She very often uses too much butter, cream, oil and sugar in a lot of her recipes, and I've found that her measurements aren't always right. If I cooked like that all the time at home, I'd have a really fat ass in no time. However, I will admit the cherry chocolate cupcake recipe (I made strawberry chocolate cupcakes previously) is just too yummy and easy to pass up. It doesn't even require a mixer. The second attempt came out well, but I still feel there was a wee bit too much sugar. My colleagues didn't have any complaints though.


I decided to decorate the cupcakes with some lavender from our garden

Confident that my baking mojo hadn't gone, I've now branched out to non-chocolate desserts. The first I tested was a lemon angel cupcake recipe from Cupcakes!. The taste was really yummy, but consistency-wise, not so hot. Turns out I had overbeaten the egg whites and sugar, so they were a little chewy.

I tested another lemon cupcake recipe from the same book, and remembering not to overwork the dough, the lemon tea cakes turned out much better. I think I'm slowly learning the science of cooking :) Next thing on my list is to resurrect my chocolate chip cookie recipe.