Orange and Cardamom Birthday Cake

Goodness, I have got my first commission! My cupcake adventure around town during National Chocolate Week created a few waves and this was one of them - to make an enlarged version of one of my cardamom and orange cupcakes for a birthday. This is exciting but also rather scary and not the same as making a cake for a friend at all - it could all go horribly wrong and then what?

This is what I ended up doing:

• Remembered to get butter (200g unsalted) out of fridge early and put it over the heater to warm.
• Ground up seeds from 17 cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar.
• Infused pods in 4 fl oz hot water.
• Creamed softened butter with 200g of soft brown sugar, grated rind from 2 oranges, 1/4 tsp pink Himalayan salt and the ground cardamom until pale and fluffy. Then creamed it some more.
• Beat in 4 large eggs (from customers own smallholding) alternately with some of the flour (which I'm just about to get to).
• Sifted in 250g flour (1/2 wholemeal, 1/2 white spelt), 2 level tsp baking powder, 1 level tsp bicarb of soda and 50g cocoa.
• Stirred in water (with pods sieved out) whilst still warm.
• Mixed in 6 fl oz sour cream.
• Divided mixture between 2 22cm cake thingies and baked at 180C for 25 mins.

• Melted 200g 35% milk chocolate & left to cool slightly.
• Creamed further 100g unsalted butter with 100g icing sugar.
• Mixed in chocolate together with 2 tbsp orange liqueur.
• Used half of the mixture to sandwich the cold cakes together with, then spread remainder over the top.
• Used minstrels to decorate.

Sadly, neither myself nor my chief chocolate taster got to taste this one, so I'll just have to assume it was completely delicious!

Chilli Sauce

I know, I know. What's this got to do with chocolate I hear you ask? Well to be honest very little, other than chilli & chocolate come from the same part of the world and as Kath pointed out, they do go very well together. I was recently asked for this recipe and as it is one of my own and very dear to my heart I have decided to go against my own rules and put it on my chocolate blog.

We grow Alberto's Locoto which are hardier than most and we grow them outdoors. They are particularly good for making chilli sauce as they are large and thick fleshed. Unfortunately we didn't manage to get them ripe this year so we picked them green and have been waiting for them to ripen in our not so warm house. Today was the day we could wait no longer and luckily many of them were nice and red.

My chief taster helped out a bit with this one, he got the fun job of deseeding all the chillies!

This is how I do it:

• Halved and deseeded 2 lb hot red Locoto chillies (striclty speaking I didn't do this bit).
• Skinned 2 sweet red peppers by grilling them until skins were black and blistered then put them in a plastic bag for 5 mins (still messy but a lot easier to skin this way).
• Peeled 8oz shallots and quartered.
• Peeled 8 large cloves of garlic and quartered.
• Peeled and cored 1 large cooking apple (unnamed Cornish variety) and cut into pieces.
• Put all of this into a large saucepan together with 1/2 pt water, 3 bay leaves and several sprigs of thyme.
• Simmered this for 1/2 an hour.
• Added 1/2 pt red wine vinegar and 1 tsp sea salt.
• Simmered for about another 1/2 hour.
• Removed bay leaves and thyme.
• Pureed mixture using hand held blender.
• Mixed 2 level tsp arrowroot with a tbsp red wine vinegar until blended.
• Stirred this into chilli mixture and simmered for further 3 mins until sauce had thickened slightly.
• Poured into 7 clean smallish sterilised glass bottles and capped.
• Heat processed by placing bottles into a large saucepan filled with enough water so that bottles were 3/4 covered. Bought water up to boiling point and simmered for 20 mins (stored in a cool dark place, this should last for at least 18 months).

You can make this sauce milder by using more red peppers and less chillies. The red peppers give the sauce a wonderful colour and help to flavour it. The quantities I have used make for a light ketchup type consistency, but you can make it thicker or runnier by adding more or less arrowroot. I've also made a runnier version of this sauce using our yellow Fatalii chillies and yellow sweet peppers - it worked well but was very very hot so we only use it for cooking. My tongue is now burning from tasting the sauce - not the hottest sauce in the world, but you generally don't need a great deal of it! In my humble opinion, this is the best chilli sauce I've ever tasted.

Breakfast Muffins

Sundays is the day I do the housework, the washing and various other chores - it's always really busy. Today I have the additional task of making the annual batch of chilli sauce. So, just to give myself a bit more work and, more crucially, the incentive to keep me going, I decided to make some muffins for breakfast. I used Rachel Demuth's recipe for Blackberry & Chocolate Muffins. Having discovered last week what a good combination chocolate and ground cherries made, I substituted the blackberries for ground cherries.

This is what I did:

• Sifted 300g flour (200g white spelt, 100g wholemeal spelt) into a bowl along with 1 heaped tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp cinnamon and a large pinch of salt.
• Beat 2 Duck eggs together with 75g granulated sugar and 1 tsp vanilla essence until smooth.
• Added this to the flour together with 100ml yogurt and 100ml of milk and mixed until well incorporated.
• Folded in 200g ground cherries and 100g bar of 70% chocolate cut into bits.
• Finally stirred in 100g melted butter.
• Divided mixture between 12 muffin cases and baked in a preheated oven at 200C for 20 mins until risen and golden.

We ate them for breakfast (some of them anyway) warm from the oven. They were great, not sweet, but with a big energy giving chocolate and berry boost. What a nice change from a slice of toast eaten whilst dashing to the station in the mornings. I might have to do this more often.

Chocolate Ground Cherry Upside Down Cake

Finally, after weeks of waiting, we had enough ripe ground cherries (a type of physalis) to cook up a bit of a storm. Hum, what to make? Ground cherry crumble was all I'd ever had before and I fancied something a bit different - something with chocolate! So I came up with this.

• Dehusked 200g ground cherries
• Melted 50g unsalted butter in a pan and mixed in ground cherries then 100g demerara sugar
• Poured this into a 22cm cake thingie

• Melted 125g unsalted butter with 125g brown sugar & 100g 85% chocolate.
• Sieved 150g flour, 1 rounded tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt into a bowl.
• Made a well in the centre, poured the chocolate mixture in and stirred .
• Mixed in 2 duck eggs and 3 tbsp milk.
• Poured this over the ground cherries and baked for 30 mins at 180C.
• Removed from oven and left to cool for 5 mins then turned out onto a plate.

The photos, taken with a flash, have really not done this cake justice. It was really pretty with the golden ground cherries making a great contrast to the lusciously dark cake. We had this warm, fresh from the oven and served with cream for dinner. It was completely delicious and equally delicious the next day cold. My chief taster and ground cherry fan was particularly impressed. The cake vanished with remarkable rapidity. I've discovered that ground cherries go particularly well with chocolate and I shall certainly be making this one again. Why don't more people grow ground cherries I wonder?

White Chocolate & Orange Cookies: Sweet & Simple Bakes

This is a first for me. I had noted all the wonderful St Clement's Drizzle Cakes made by the members of Sweet & Simple Bakes last month and thought it would be fun to have a go myself. As this month's bake included chocolate, I couldn't really dip out!

I mostly stuck to the recipe as given - sort of! I used 1/2 wholemeal and 1/2 white spelt flour and all my ingredients are, of course, organic. Actually, I also used less chocolate - G&B Vanilla is so rich, I thought 100g would be enough.

Here is a link to the original recipe.

The results were pretty good, they were crisp around the edges and a bit chewy in the middle and I like my biscuits like that. I wasn't quite so happy with the high sugar content though and found them rather too sweet. So I was glad I didn't use the full quantity of chocolate as stated. The flavour combination was good though, so I will be making these again - less sugar next time and maybe a bit more chocolate. Thanks go to Maria and Rosie of Sweet & Simple Bakes for this.

Baking Tips 1: Flour

Whatever flour a recipe states, I tend to substitute a different one! This is mostly because I try to turn rather decadent baking offerings into something that can be as healthy as possible whilst still remaining delicious. I very rarely use plain old white flour when baking. Nor do I use self-raising flour as I prefer to add a good quality gluten free raising agent myself. Stoneground wholemeal spelt is my staple - see Ingredients are the Key. It's about the healthiest wheat flour you can get and can often be eaten by those who don't normally fare too well with wheat. However, I will often use a combination of flours depending on what I have to hand and what I feel like using at the time.

The best flour I have ever used was ground less than 1/2 an hour before I used it for baking bread - it was the most delicious bread I think I've ever eaten. Sadly, for most of us our flour is unlikely to be that fresh.

For most cakes I will use half wholemeal spelt and half white spelt as this gives a lighter texture than straight wholemeal. However, I often substitute some other flour for some of the white - buckwheat works particularly well as it is a very fine flour. These are the flours I use on a regular basis. All are, of course, organic.

• Wholemeal Spelt - see Ingredients are the Key
• White Spelt - used on those rare occasions when nothing but white flour will do. More often I mix it with wholemeal to lighten a cake or biscuit mixture.
• Wholemeal - I grew up using only wholemeal flour and until I discovered Spelt, just over a decade ago, this is what I used for all of my baking.
• Gluten Free - I use this if making cakes for anyone who is wheat or gluten intolerant and sometimes use it for lightening the wholemeal.
• Quinoa - a white fairly grainy flour which has a particularly high protein content, is meant to be easy to digest and is gluten free.
• Buckwheat - a very fine grey flour which works really well added to cakes and is also gluten free. Ysanne Spevack is more informative than I am on the subject.

I have just booked onto Baking for a New Food Culture with Andrew Whitley - the Real Bread guru - at Shumacher College in a few weeks time. I'm terribly excited about this and am hoping I will learn heaps more about flour and the best flours to use (as well as bread making of course).

The main thing is not to worry too much about what flour the recipe states, just use whatever you have to hand. If you've never tried using anything but traditional white, you could just try substituting a tbsp with an alternative flour the next time you are baking. See how it goes and if all is well, build on that.

Dark Chilli Chocolate Cupcakes

And here follows the other promised cupcake recipe. I have long been wanting to try a cake using chilli and as I was on a spicy cupcake role, I again used a recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess as my starting point - Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake this time.

This is what I did:

• Cut a fresh scotch bonnet chilli into pieces and then brought to boil in a covered pan with 100ml water. Left to infuse for a couple of hours.
• Melted 4oz unsalted butter with 200g muscovado sugar and 2oz 85% dark chocolate.
• Sieved 4oz flour (1/2 wholemeal & 1/2 gluten free) with 1/2 tsp bicarb of soda.
• Made a well in the centre, poured in chocolate mixture and mixed together with 1 large egg.
• Reheated chilli water then poured this into cake mixture through a sieve to catch chilli pieces (which I discarded) and stirred well.
• Divided this mixture between 12 cupcake recipes and baked in a preheated oven at 180C for 22 mins.

• Melted 90g 70% chilli chocolate with 50g unsalted butter.
• Left to cool until thick enough to pour onto cooled cupcakes without running, but not so thick it wouldn't easily spread.
• Decorated with remaining 10g chilli chocolate - grated.

I was really pleased with the outcome of these - just what I had been hoping for. Not so hot that they were overpowering, but enough of a residual heat left after eating to know the chocolate cupcakes were unusual. They were light, chocolatey and completely delicious - definitely one for the grown-ups though.

Cardamom & Orange Chocolate Cupcakes

Here is the first of the promised cupcake recipes. I'd recently indulged in some cardamom chocolate and it was so delicious and worked so well, I was keen to try it out in cake format. I took Nigella's Cappuccino Cupcakes recipe as a starting point and adapted it somewhat. This is how I did it:

• Creamed 125g unsalted butter with 125g soft brown sugar
• Ground seeds from 8 cardamom pods in a pestle & mortar then beat into butter mixture with grated zest of 1 orange.
• Beat in 2 large eggs (had run out of duck eggs) one after the other.
• Sieved in 125g flour (1/2 wholemeal, 1/2 gluten free) with 2 tsp baking powder and 1 tbsp cocoa powder.
• Mixed in 3 tbsp milk.
• Divided this between 12 cupcake cases and baked at 180C in a preheated oven for 18 mins.

Whilst these were cooking, I made the icing.

• Melted 100g milk chocolate (35%) and allowed to cool slightly.
• Creamed 75g butter with 75g icing sugar.
• Mixed in chocolate and 1 tbsp orange liqueur.
• Iced the cooled cupcakes and decorated with a Minstrel.

As I'd hoped the flavours here worked really well together. The texture was good although not quite as light as the chilli cupcakes. The icing was so good I could have eaten the whole bowl. Luckily for those concerned, I managed to restrain myself.