Calling these cupcakes Sacher-cupcakes is probably an insult to Austrians everywhere and they will never let me go back to their country, let alone that hotel, but I do think it’s a fair description.
Sachertorte is a light chocolate sponge covered with apricot jam and chocolate glaze. These cakes are also light and chocolatey, filled with apricot jam and covered with chocolate ganache, and they are really delicious. I’ve made this recipe quite a few times in the last year or two for work events, because it’s incredibly easy and fast to make, works with gluten-free flour mix if it needs to, and once you fill it with apricot jam and load it with ganache nobody will believe that it’s vegan.
These are really quite basic cupcakes with a little bit of lavender in them. If you’ve ever made a plain butter cake, you probably used this recipe, but without the lavender. The only slightly complex part is the whipped ganache, which is a bit fiddly, but actually very easy. Once you’ve made the ganache once, you’ll probably want to make it again, because it gives you a delicately flavoured cream that holds up much better than whipped cream if it needs to sit around for a few hours.
The only thing to remember is that you need to start the ganache at least 7 hours before you plan to serve the cupcakes. Making it the day before is fine.
Also, I just love the flavour of lavender, but usually I make it either too strong or not strong enough. For me, this whipped ganache is in the magical Goldilocks zone – noticeably lavender, without making you think about soap…
Your shopping list
75 white chocolate
125 + 160g cream, both chilled
3 blackberries, crushed
1 tsp dried culinary lavender + 2 tsp for the cake
12g liquid glucose (yes, I know, I know. This recipe is usually made in a much larger batch. This is about 1 1/2 teaspoons, I think. Just think how much worse it would be if I’d only made a dozen cupcakes!)
250g butter, softened
300 g caster sugar
4 eggs
370 g self-raising flour
160 ml milk
500g blackberry jam
Now what will you do with it?
First, make the ganache. Chop up the white chocolate and put it into a bowl.
Put 125g cream in a small saucepan with the blackberries and 1 tsp of lavender, and heat until boiling point. Switch off the heat and leave for five minutes.
Pour the cream through a seive into another bowl. Press the blackberries into the seive with the fork to make sure their juice comes through. Return the cream to the saucepan.
Add the liquid glucose, which is, yes, a pain to use, but it does somehow make the ganache more stable. What I recommend doing is rinsing a teaspoon and your hands in cold water, then using the teaspoon to scoop out the glucose and your finger to push it off into the cream – the cold water makes the glucose stick less. And I’m sorry about the quantities. This is the halved version of the recipe, and even with 24 cupcakes, you are going to have more than you need…
Bring the cream and glucose back to the boil, and pour the mixture over the white chocolate in the bowl. Stir until the chocolate melts. If you’ve made ganache before, you are probably worried about these ratios, because this is a very thin ganache and about to get thinner. Don’t worry – think of this as whipped cream thickened with chocolate, and it will make more sense.
Stir in the rest of the chilled cream. You might add a drop of purple colouring to the mixture to make it more inviting if you like, but this is optional. Cover the ganache with clingwrap, which should be directly on the surface of the cream, and refrigerate for at least six hours or up to two days.
When you are ready to make the cupcakes, preheat your oven to 180°C, and line two twelve-hole muffin tins with paper cases. (Or do this in two batches, one tin at a time.)
Grind the lavender in a mortar and pestle (you can grind it with some of the sugar if you find this easier) until it is somewhat broken down.
Put the lavender into a medium-sized mixing bowl with the butter and sugar, and cream together. Add the eggs one at a time, then mix in the flour and milk, alternately.
Divide the mixture between the muffin tins, and put into the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the cakes feel soft and springy when you poke at them gently. You might want to swap the trays around at the 15 or 20 minute mark, depending on how they are doing.
Remove from their tins, and let cool on a rack. Get out your ganache, and whip it as you would cream. The ganache has a higher fat content than cream, though, so it will whip up much faster – don’t put on a stand mixer and wander off to hang out the washing or something, this is probably only going to take a couple of minutes.
Use a small knife to cut a conical circle (I’m sure that is terrible geometry, but the right words escape me) in the middle of each cake – basically, you want a nice, round, section of cake, slightly pointed in the middle, which you are going to cut in half to make the butterfly wings, so don’t eat it!
Place a small spoonful of blackberry jam in the centre of each hole, and pipe or spoon the lavender ganache over the top of it.
Gently place the two ‘wings’ into the cream, pushing slightly inward as you do, to help raise the cream.
Dust with icing sugar or little purple stars.
Feed to the people you love.
Variations
Well, there’s no reason this has to be a lavender cake, I suppose, but isn’t that rather a waste? You might make the cakes with raspberry jam and a little rosewater in the ganache (add half a teaspoon with the cold cream, then taste and see if you need a little more), in which case I’d keep the cakes plain vanilla, because it is far too easy to wind up with overly-perfumed rose cakes.
You could replace 50 grams of the flour with cocoa, and then fill the cakes with cherry jam and add kirsch to your ganache. Apparently, I’ve decided that black forest is the variation I want for every cupcake I’m doing. Or just go ultra-chocolate – I bet this would be amazing with dark chocolate whipped ganache and a caramel filling, or a raspberry one, or maybe you could add peppermint essence to your whipped chocolate ganache, and have a choc-mint cupcake. At which point you should probably decorate it with shards of Peppermint Crisp, because that is the law.
In terms of dietary requirements, I don’t think you are going to be able to avoid dairy here, but if you have a good, basic vegan vanilla cupcake recipe you could certainly make this ensemble eggless. It is obviously free of nuts. It would work just fine with my gluten-free self-raising flour mix, and the result should also be low in fructose, though certainly not in lactose.
So, judging by the reaction I’ve had every time I’ve shown anyone any photos of this cake, this is probably the first recipe I ought to be sharing. Because, let’s face it, that was one spectacular-looking cake.
It’s also a lot easier than it looks. Seriously, if you can make a passable marble cake, and have access to good-quality food colouring, you can make this.
I actually found the prototype for this recipe online, and I’ll share the YouTube video below, because I didn’t actually take photos of the various steps, being as I was engaged in just trying to get the thing to work.
I changed a handful of things for this recipe. For one thing, I made it gluten-free, using a modified version of my gluten-free flour mix. For another, I decided to flavour it with orange flower water instead of vanilla. Using orange blossoms in the bouquet or bridal wreath is a very old bridal tradition, and I thought it would be nice to give a nod to that, especially given how interested one of the brides had been in my use of rosewater and lavender in cupcakes. I kept the flavour pretty subtle, because too much orange flower water can be very much like eating soap.
But you know what was the big thing I did that changed this cake into a proper rainbow cake?
I baked it in a smaller tin.
That’s it.
And the smaller tin meant that the arch of the rainbow was raised, giving a much more impressive rainbow effect than it might otherwise have had.
I’m going to suggest two different decorating ideas for this – the one I used in my practice run, and the one I used for the actual wedding cake. It really depends how formal you are feeling…
Your shopping list
150g butter
160g sugar
3 eggs
270g gluten-free flour mix
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
120g yoghurt
60g milk
1 tsp orange flower water
red, yellow, green, blue and purple food colouring pastes (these are far more vibrant than liquid food colouring)
200g white chocolate
65 ml cream
500g white icing OR lots of hundreds and thousands
You will also need a 5 inch (12.5cm) round tin with tall sides.
Now what will you do with it?
Grease the tin with butter, and line the bottom and the sides. You really don’t want all your good work to come to nothing when you turn the cake out! Preheat oven to 170°C.
(Also, you need to know now that you are not going to use all this mixture in a cake tin this size. You need somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4. You can make the rest into really psychedelic cupcakes, if you want.)
Cream the butter and the sugar, then beat in the eggs one by one.
Beat in the dry ingredients, then the yoghurt and the milk. Mix in half a teaspoon of orange flower water, and taste to see if it’s strong enough. Add the other half teaspoon if you think it needs more (I’ve found that some brands are stronger than others).
Divide the mixture between six bowls, and colour them red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Orange requires only a tiny amount of red compared to yellow, and I strongly recommend that you buy a purple colour if you can – you can never get a really vibrant purple from red and blue colour.
Make sure the mixture is super-bright. Now is not the time to worry about the chemicals in food colouring – you don’t want a pastel rainbow, and baking will bleach the cake slightly.
Now for the fun bit! Get a big dollop of the red mixture – about 2/3 – 3/4 of what’s in the bowl, and plop it carefully into the middle of the tin. Bang the tin really hard on the bench to make the red mixture spread out a bit. It won’t go all the way to the edges yet, and that’s fine.
Get a similarly sized dollop of the orange, and plop it carefully into the very centre of the tin on top of the red. Bash the tin on the bench again – the orange will spread out with the red spreading out further under it, so you have concentric circles. Well, circle-ish things.
If this is confusing, have a look at the video below. This is where I got the recipe from – so thank you Emma, for this fantastic method.
Dollop the yellow on top of the orange, and repeat the banging bit, then do the same with the green, then the blue, then the purple.
If you are miraculously good at this, you should be able to see a little bit of red, a little bit of orange, a little bit of yellow, a little bit of green and a little bit of blue, all in concentric circles under the purple. I wasn’t that good, but it still worked pretty well.
If you are about 2/3 of the way up the tin, you can stop here. If it’s only half full, go for a double rainbow. The next layers will be a bit smaller, but that’s OK.
Put the tin in the oven, and bake for about 45 minutes to an hour. If, after 45 minutes, it’s browning too fast but still wet in the middle, reduce the temperature to 165. It will bake eventually, I promise, but deep cakes are a bit tricky. This one should pass the skewer test when it’s done.
Turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool.
Once the cake is cool, your next step is to make the cake nice and flat on top, because you want to serve this cake upside down from where it was in the tin, so that you have a rainbow rather than a series of colourful smiles. I have no tips for this. My cakes almost always turn out looking drunk. I fluked the wedding cake, and it was still a tiny bit crooked, frankly. Just do your best.
My practice cake looked very drunk, but nobody cared once I covered it in sprinkles.
Now you are going to cover the cake in ganache and then either white icing, or sprinkles.
To make the ganache, chop the white chocolate finely and put it into a bowl.
Bring the cream to a boil, and pour over the ganache. Cover the bowl with a lid for a minute or so, to start the chocolate melting, then stir the mixture until it is smooth. Use a spatula to coat the cake thinly in ganache.
If you are looking for a nice, formal cake, you want the white icing. Sprinkle your work surface with icing sugar, and knead the icing firmly until it is soft enough to work into a smooth ball.
Use a rolling pin to roll it out. It wants to stick to the surface, so what you do is this. First, sprinkle more icing sugar on the work surface, and roll the rolling pin over the ball twice, away from you, so that you have an oval. Pick it up, and turn it over, and then rotate it 90 degrees and roll the rolling pin over it twice more. Turn it over and rotate it again, and keep going until the icing is about 3-5 mm thick, and big enough to cover the cake with several centimetres to spare on each side. So about 35cm diameter, maybe? The reason you are turning it over constantly, by the way, is that this helps the icing not to stick to the work surface, so don’t forget to do that bit.
Now you need to drape it over the cake. This is a pain, and the trick is not to stretch it. Pick it up carefully and place it gently over the top of the cake. Use a spatula or smoother (or your hand…) to smooth down the top of the cake only.
Now smooth the cake down the sides with downward strokes, a little at a time. If you are about to get wrinkles, gently pull the bottom of the icing outward, being careful not to stretch it, while you smooth down the side from top to bottom. If you are lucky, this will result in no lumps or wrinkles. I strongly suggest watching some YouTube videos (look up ‘covering a cake with fondant’) until you think you can replicate the method. That’s what I did…
If this sounds like way too much faffing around, go with the sprinkle topping instead!
To do this, cover the cake with ganache again, but this time, get out a big metal skewer and skewer the cake from bottom to top.
Make a layer of 100s and 1000s or other coloured sprinkles on a long, flat tray or your working surface, and use the skewer to place the cake on its side at one end of the sprinkles. Carefully push the skewer all the way through the cake, and use it to roll the cake along the layer of sprinkles until it is completely coated.
Now draw back the skewer a little, and use it to lever up the cake and place it face down into the sprinkles (or alternatively, get the cake back onto a cake plate, and leave the top white, or cover it with sprinkles by the more traditional, sprinkling method).
Carefully lever the cake up onto a cake plate.
Serve to someone who needs more colour in their life!
Variations
This is a gluten-free cake, obviously, and it is also low in fructose, and nut-free. You could probably make a vegan version – just start with a vegan cake recipe that has a fairly wet, but not liquid, consistency. You don’t want something that is too pancake-batterish, but you don’t want something really stiff, either. I’m sorry – I don’t have any recommendations for this one.
If you just need it to be gluten and dairy free, you can, of course, use a good dairy-free margarine like Nuttelex, and a soy or coconut milk and yoghurt.
I’m sure you could use natural food colours for this, but I think you’d have to work hard to stop your rainbow from being too pastel – though that could be pretty, too, in the right circumstances.
When I got back to work after my long service leave earlier this year, I discovered a cookbook on my desk, courtesy of one of my Professors. This is an excellent way to come back from long service leave and I highly recommend it to any who are considering such a thing. The book was Deceptive Desserts: A Lady’s Guide to Baking Bad! (which I see is actually discounted at the Book Depository right now), and it is a rather brilliant collection of recipes for ill-advised treats – face-hugger cake, cannoli with little kitten faces, Frankenstein’s monster cake, terror-mi-su, cinnamon buns shaped to look like serpents ready to strike, cat-lady jello, and my personal favourite, screaming strawberries in vanilla mousse with chocolate tentacles.
The illustrations are truly a thing of beauty – Christine McConnell, who is a stylist and photographer as well as a baker, photographs herself in vintage costumes that coordinate with her various disturbing desserts, with the occasional cat in the background, looking appalled.
The recipes are also nicely varied – it isn’t the sort of cake book that gives you six basic recipes at the start and then focuses on how to decorate them; there are recipes for sugar cookies (decorated to look like gravestones), waffle cones, various mousses and jellies, lime meringue cakes, devil’s food cakes, donuts (disguised as fried chicken and vegetables), banana bread, caramel popcorn, peppermint brownies, and apple pie, to name a random assortment. I would note that the recipes are American and thus tend to have rather more sugar than I prefer in my cakes, but this is a minor quibble for an extremely fun and comprehensive book.
This is the time of year when bloggers do their retrospectives, but I don’t feel like doing a blog retrospective for 2015. For one thing, I did hardly any blogging, and barely kept up with reading other blogs. For another, the end of 2015 was made absolutely horrible for us by the disappearance of our beloved cat, Mystery. She slipped out on the evening of December 22nd, and has not been seen since. We’ve letterboxed and doorknocked and rung vets and visited shelters, but to no avail, and at this stage, we hold out little hope. It’s been a painful and distressing way to end an exhausting year, and it’s very hard to look ahead and come up with plans, resolutions, or even hopes for 2016 at this point – because right now we are all too aware that life is uncertain and cannot truly be planned for.
So no perspectives from me, just a remarkably silly recipe, inspired by Rosanna Pansino’s Nerdy Nummies Cookbook. She has a very fun recipe for a cupcake that looks like a cheeseburger, with a brownie patty, coconut lettuce, and buttercream piped to resemble cheese, tomatoes.
It’s very cute, but it also looked terribly sweet. Also, I was cooking in part for Steph, so I needed a vegan recipe, and frankly, I found the idea of a vegan cheeseburger cupcake absolutely hilarious and thus irresistible, so off I went.
To avoid the excessive use of buttercream, I decided it would be more fun to give the burger a fruity sort of theme. Mango fruit leather strips make an excellent (and truly revolting-looking) substitute for plastic cheese, jam makes a fine substitute for tomato sauce, and tinned plums replace the beetroot that is a necessity in any Aussie hamburger. Mint leaves made a delicious substitute for lettuce, and at that point, you’re done.
OK, after yesterday’s exploration of the truly disgusting things one can create while in pursuit of dessert, I thought we deserved something a bit less traumatic. So here, have a soothing brownie.
Is it not beautiful? Does it not inspire meditation? Or, indeed, imitation?
Or even levitation? This brownie is not, in fact, levitating, but you wouldn’t know it to look at this photo.
The good news is, you can plan this brownie ahead of time and eat it whenever you like.
This brownie mix grew out of the fact that at certain times of the month I desperately, desperately crave chocolate cake and brownies, but am generally feeling far too unwell to do the culinary work required to create them. This leaves me with the option of buying brownies made by someone else – and I don’t have any good sources for those in my vicinity – or resorting to packet mixes (I use the Donna Hay ones because the ingredients are actually proper cake ingredients). Only then I feel guilty about resorting to packet mixes, and then I need to eat more chocolate brownies. This cycle serves nobody (except, perhaps, Donna Hay).
But I am breaking the cycle! I am breaking the cycle by creating my own packet mix, that can be put together on days when I actually feel like measuring stuff, and then stashed in the pantry, ready to be made up when I need it.
This packet mix is gluten-free, and can be made in a variety of flavour profiles. I haven’t yet figured out how to veganise it, but I suspect this would not be too difficult for anyone with practice in the matter. That will be my next brownie experiment.
I know, I know. I said I was going to write about carrot cake and crackling chocolate crackles. But then I realised it was my choir friend’s birthday, and because I am on holiday, I actually had time to make a cake! And I had this beautiful recipe for a turkish delight layer cake, with rose-flavoured cake in pink and white layers with rose flavoured cream in the middle, very simple, very lovely.
But then I thought, that’s going to be rather sweet, isn’t it? So I decided to make the pink cake rose, like the recipe suggested, but make the second cake pistachio. Which also makes it green, definitely a bonus. And then I thought – wait, whipped cream, in a four layer cake that has to travel for half an hour on public transport or, best case scenario, in a car. Hmm. Probably not a structurally sound idea…
So I decided to make a white chocolate and rose water mousse on a crème anglaise base instead. Because that is a totally rational thing to do.
After all, rational is what gets you the best cake result, don’t you think?
And this is an excellent cake result. It’s almost, but not quite, too sweet, with layers of rose and pistachio and mousse. The white chocolate is subtle, and somewhere along the way the mousse acquired a hint of cardamom. I have no idea how this happened, because I didn’t actually use any cardamom. I can only assume that the mousse knew that cardamom was required, and thus it created some through kitchen magic.
(Incidentally, I did an absolutely shocking job on the sponge cakes, mostly because I was too lazy to follow the recipe properly, but the nice thing about a layer cake like this is that nobody can tell because it’s all covered in happy happy rose and white chocolate mousse. Which is another win-win situation, really. So don’t be intimidated by this recipe. But maybe do try following it a little bit.)
It’s Andrew’s birthday today! Happy birthday, Andrew! Every year, I ask him what kind of cake he would like for his birthday, and every year, I get a slightly terrified look (you want me to make a decision? About food?), followed by a sheepish acknowledgement, after some discussion, that yes, he does want something chocolatey and minty. Again. Because being an Andrew means wanting choc-mint everything all the time. (He knows what he likes…)
The problem with Andrew having a birthday at this time of year is that he never gets a truly elaborate birthday cake, mostly because I am in the middle of grant season. This grant season has been particularly diabolical, too, what with the NHMRC compressing all the due dates so that all the grants are due a week apart, changing the rules twice (so far), and then our finance department providing the coup de grace by introducing new costings for all our internal services the day all the budgets were due to the grants office. It’s all rather exhausting, not to say demoralising, and while it’s awfully early in the year to be losing the will to live, I, for one, am getting close to that point.
(The good news is that I’m getting a lot of singing work, which is always a balm to the soul. Though not conducive to blogging. So yes, there is a significant chance that I will be disappearing off the radar quite a bit over the next couple of months. And I’m sorry about that lengthy whinge. As I said, I’m feeling rather demoralised.)
Here, have some cupcakes to un-demoralise you.
Anyway. Cake! So, as you may have gathered, my priority for Andrew’s birthday cake is to produce a cake that is on the one hand suitably choc-minty and decadent, and on the other hand really, really fast to make. Which, oddly enough, tends to mean vegan or nearly-vegan, since most of those cupcake recipes are very straightforward. As a bonus, of course, this means that I can easily cater to my sister-in-law, who prefers to avoid dairy if possible.
These cupcakes, then, are just a nice, simple, vegan cupcake, flavoured with really good cocoa, and an optional (non vegan) cube of mint-filled chocolate in the centre. I’ve topped them with a really basic peppermint-spiked chocolate tofu mousse, which is, frankly, easier to make than chocolate ganache, and not a lot more complicated than chocolate buttercream, and much tastier.
Not elaborate, but entirely delicious. Which is really all you can ask for from a cupcake…
Your Shopping List (Makes seven big cupcakes – one for everyone in the family, plus an extra one for the birthday boy)
2/3 cup almond milk + 20 ml for the topping
3/4 tsp cider or white wine vinegar
3/4 cup plain flour or plain spelt flour
1/4 cup really good Dutch-style cocoa
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1/4 cup canola oil
1/3 cup sugar
7 squares of Cadbury Peppermint Block, or similar (optional)
125 g silken tofu
2 tsp creme de cacao (optional)
115 g dark chocolate
6 drops peppermint oil, or peppermint essence to taste (start with 1/4 teaspoon)
Green sugar, optional
I always have my suspicions when a recipe calls itself a ‘sunken cake’. I am sure that this is meant to convey a sense of dense, richness, almost of decadence – the sense of a cake that is so full of wonderful things that it sinks under its own weight.
But I’m pretty sure what it means is that the cook in question made this awesome, delicious, moist cake, and yet, through some accident of culinary alchemy, the rotten thing came out of the oven with a canyon in the middle. But naturally you can’t tell your visitors or customers that, so you pretend that this was what you were aiming for all along. “Oh, that’s just my famous sunken chocolate cake. It’s simply divine with cream. Would you like the recipe?”
Of course, it’s possible that my suspicions are founded entirely on the fact that this is what happened to these cupcakes. I decided to experiment with macadamia meal (which does not, thank you so much, Sunbeam, behave exactly like almond meal in a cake), and thought I’d start fiddling around with a recipe loosely based on another one of those beautiful things from Red Velvet, Chocolate Heartache. And of course, the macadamias turned out to brown much faster than almond meal, and then it’s possible I put in too many blueberries, and the whole thing sank like a stone. Well, stones. There were 14 cupcakes, so that makes 14 little valleys of the shadow of culinary disaster…
I wasn’t going to post the recipe, because they looked so disastrous, but they actually met with a fair bit of enthusiasm at this morning’s meeting, so there you go. Which is another way of saying that the photographs on this recipe are rather minimalist. I’m sorry about that. If I could think of a way to make that sound intentional and appetising, I would…
Your Shopping List
150 g macadamia meal
50 g white rice flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt
zest and juice of 1 lime
200 g zucchini, peeled, topped and tailed
2 medium eggs
120 caster sugar
125 g blueberries, plus 12 for decoration
250 g icing sugar
a teeny tiny drop of green colouring
I freely admit, this recipe did not start off as brownies. I had been given some Teff flour, originally with bread in mind, but my wrist ganglion won’t really let me knead dough at present, so that was just not going to happen. So then I was planning to make cookies, on the generally sound principle that when experimenting with a new kind of flour, cookies are a fairly safe bet (they are small enough to maintain structural integrity even with a fairly non-sticky flour).
But then I realised that I kept on using things in measures of 1/3 cup, and I got all excited about making a recipe based on everything going in 1/3 cup measures and had to keep going come hell or high water… and then I realised that this recipe wanted a bit of a gingerbread personality, which means treacle instead of sugar, and then with oil replacing the butter (and I still don’t know why I did that, given that I then went and replaced the egg with yoghurt, so it isn’t like this recipe is dairy-free in any case), the whole batter started looking very cake-batter-ish, and indeed, soon took on that shiny texture I associate with brownies.
I know when I can argue with a recipe, and I know when a recipe is going its own way. This recipe knew what it wanted, and I did not have the strength of will to stop it.
The result? Well, it’s somewhere between brownie and cake. Teff flour, it turns out, has quite a distinct flavour – wholemeal and nutty and something else I can’t quite identify. It is also a little on the powdery side, though the denseness and moistness in the cake rescue it somewhat.
But do you know what’s really weird about this brownie? It tastes like a rum and raisin brownie with walnuts, despite containing none of those ingredients. Bizarre. Don’t get me wrong – the flavours are lovely. They just aren’t the ones I was trying to put into the cake…
As culinary experiments go, I think it’s a success. Though if I were writing this up as a paper, I’d probably fudge my initial aims and hypothesis a bit, to match my results.
(Come to think of it, I wrote more than one history paper as a student where I had to go back and re-write my introduction once I was done, because during the course of writing, I had argued myself around to a completely different point of view. So perhaps this brownie is actually an essay about Eleanor of Aquitaine. Stranger things have happened.)
Your Shopping List
1 1/3 cups Teff flour
1/3 cup almond meal
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/3 cup white sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp gingerbread spice (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg)
1/4 tsp dried orange peel powder (optional, or use zest of one orange)
1/3 cup canola oil
1/3 cup coconut oil, melted
1/3 cup yoghurt
1/3 cup treacle
1/3 cup chopped dried apricots
1/3 cup chopped dark chocolate
1/3 cup chopped glacé ginger
Welcome to my online table! My name is Catherine and I love feeding people. By day, I am a scientific co-ordinator in a medical research institute. By night - or by weekend - I am generally found cooking like a maniac, rejoicing in farmers' markets, or talking endlessly about food.
While I am an omnivore, the vast majority of recipes on this blog are vegetarian, and many more are vegan, gluten-free or allergy friendly. You can find them through the menus above, or click on What if there isn't enough food? to learn more about this blog.
