Gingerbread Christmas Cupcakes

I did some baking today and wanted to share these really delicious and quite unusual cupcakes I made with you. They really do taste like you're eating a gingerbread man in the form of a cupcake, and topped with delicious caramel cream cheese icing, they are just so good. 

I got the recipe from Tanya Burr, and really like it because the cake batter contains quite a bit of buttermilk, which always makes cakes really moist and light. So let me give you the recipe and show you some pictures of the end result :D

The ingredients you'll need are:
* 150ml milk
* 3 tablespoons treacle/molasses
* 375g light brown sugar
* 385g cake flour
* 3 teaspoons baking powder
* 1,5 teaspoons bicarb/baking soda
* 1,5 teaspoons cinnamon
* 1,5 teaspoons ground ginger
* 225ml oil
* 300ml buttermilk
* 1,5 teaspoons vanilla essence
* 3 eggs

and then for the icing you'll need
* 200g of caramel (this can be bought salted caramel, a caramel ice-cream type sauce or if you're feeling adventurous, a homemade caramel, whatever you want)
* 150g butter
* 500g icing sugar
* 200g cream cheese (plain) 
* 2 teaspoons vanilla essence

Start by preheating the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
In a pot on the stove/hot, on medium heat, add the milk and treacle and lightly stir until the treacle is dissolved in the milk, then turn off the heat. 
It is super super simple from here on in that all you do is basically mix the dry and wet ingredients separately then added them. 
So in one large bowl, sieve in the flour, then add the sugar, baking powder, bicarb and spices and mix. 
In a separate, medium sized bowl, add the oil, buttermilk, eggs and vanilla essence and mix. Now add the treacle milk mixture to the rest of the wet ingredients and whisk (a hand whisk is perfect, no need to do so electrically) until they are pretty much combined. 
Now, while stirring, add the wet ingredients to the dry to form your batter. 
Don't worry if the batter seems super wet and runny, it is meant to be like that. 
Now all you need to do is spoon the mixture into cupcake cases and pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes (but obviously keep and eye on them as this will depend on your oven). Check that they're done by sticking a knife or skewer into the centre and checking it comes out clean without any raw batter on it. 
If you don't want cupcakes, you can always pour the mixture into a cake tin and cook for 40 minutes rather. 

While the cupcakes cook, you can get on with the icing. Again, it's pretty much case of just adding everything. Make sure to sieve you icing sugar, or else it leaves clumps in the icing. And also mush up your cream cheese in a separate bowl before adding it so it is really smooth. Then just add it all together. Because of the cream cheese it is a relatively runny frosting, but if you want, you can thicken it up with a bit more icing sugar. 

When the cakes are done, let them cool entirely (this is the point my impatient is at a high, so I usually pop them in the freezer for 10 minutes to cool, because it is important they are not at all warm). Now you can ice them however you want- I put the icing into a piping bag and just did a little spiral on top of each one. 

You can decorate them however, if at all, depending on what you want. To make these even more christmassy, I just used a ready-to-roll red fondant, rolled it out and cut out a bunch of little stars to put on top of each one. 

This recipe makes a lot of cupcakes, like probably about 36, so you can definitely half it if you don't want so many!

And that's it! Do make these, they are really delicious, and like I said earlier, they are quite an unusual thing, like not many people make them, but because of the gingerbread-y ingredients, they feel very familiar and really are super yummy. Happy baking!

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies || Baking

I did some baking on the weekend and took a few pictures while I was doing so, so that I could share the recipe with you! I can honestly say these are the most delicious cookies I've discovered so far, because they are crunchy on the outside but really chewy and delicious in the middle, and they are so super easy!

I am all for cookies that are jam-packed with chocolate but you could really put anything in these, you could do nuts, MnMs, sweets, caramel, anything like that, so feel free to switch the chocolate for anything you feel like! You can also very easily leave out the cocoa and add in a few teaspoons of vanilla essence instead if you want vanilla cookies rather, pretty much anything will work with these!

Okay so the first thing you want to do is preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and make sure you've got all the ingredients; you will need:

250g room temperature butter

270g self-raising flour

280g caster sugar

60g cocoa

1 large egg

1/4 cup water

As much chocolate and whatever type that you like:

I used 400g of milk chocolate and 160g of white chocolate

Okay, so get out a big mixing bowl (it does need to be quite large) and throw in the butter and caster sugar. Before putting the butter in the bowl, chop it roughly into smaller blocks, so it is easier to break down. 

You could do this in a KitchenAid or electric mixer, but I think it is easy enough and less complicated with a wooden spoon or spatula. 

So now you want to cream together the butter and sugar. This does take a little while as the butter needs to be broken down and there is a lot of sugar to incorporate, but basically keep mixing and working the mixture until you have a smooth, creamy mixture. 

Now whisk in the egg. 

Next, you can sift in the flour and the cocoa together. This might be easier if done in small batches of the dry ingredients being gradually added and then incorporated, and so on. The full 1/4 cup of water doesn't all need to be added. If the mixture is too dry at this point, add some of the water. You will probably need to add at least half of it, but see how wet/dry your mixture is and adjust accordingly. 

You can switch to your hands to incorporate the last of the flour-cocoa mix, I find it a lot easier as the mixture should be dough-y and thick. 

Next, chop/break up your chocolate (or whatever else you want to put in the biscuits). You can chop the chocolate as finely or roughly as you like, but I choose to leave mine really big and chunky- so I just break up the squares and add them like that, no chopping or anything. Use your hands to make sure all the chocolate is nicely mixed into the cookie dough. 

You're pretty much done now. Grease/line with baking paper 2/3 baking trays and then roll the dough into fairly large balls and place them, nicely spread out, on the baking trays. You can change the size of the balls depending on how big you want your cookies, but I find the size of about a ping-pong ball makes perfectly big cookies. 

Pop the trays in the oven for 7-10 minutes. This completely depends on your oven, so make sure you check them so that they don't burn. When you take them out, leave them until they are completely cool and voiiila- there you have it!

This recipe, for me, makes about 24 fairly large cookies. 

Enjoy- happy baking! 

More Belated Christmas Cookies

So, on the day that I made my Christmas Gingerbread Cookies I also made a huuuge batch of my absolute favourite type of cookies.

I made these delicious peanut and chocolate chip biscuits which were really so easy. It's basically a very basic recipe for butter cookies with a huge amount of chocolate and peanuts added in, but I have finally found the perfect basis (like the butter biscuit recipe) to make these. I cut them into christmas-sy shapes but they are not really specific to christmas at all, so you could just roll them into little balls and squish them lightly with a fork or use any other types of cookie-cutters.

1) Start by sifting all the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. These will include: 560ml (2 and a quarter cups) of cake flour and 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda).

2) In a separate mixing bowl, cream together 155g of very soft 

 butter, 175ml of muscovado (soft brown) sugar and 60ml of normal white sugar with a spatula. Whisk in 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence.

3) Now add the wet ingredients (the egg, butter and sugar mixture) to the dry ingredients. Blend until a relatively thick dough is formed. 

4) Chop up very roughly (so in quite big chunks) 250g of milk chocolate and 140g of white chocolate. Add the roughly chopped chocolate into the dough as well as 150g of peanuts. Use your hands to mix them into the dough, to form a thick, chunky ball of dough. The chocolate and peanuts will look like they're far exceeding the amount of dough, but use your discretion, the mixture is meant to be very chunky. 

5) Now roll out the dough over a lightly floured surface. Note that this will seem pretty hard to roll out because of all the nuts and chocolate, but it will work. And cut them into the shapes you want with cookie-cutters. 

6) Place your cookies onto a greased baking tray, or a Silpat over a baking tray and cook them at 180 degrees Celsius (350F) for 8-10 mins. They burn easily so make sure to watch them and take them out when they're quite firm and golden. Let them cool for a few minutes and there you go. Delicious :) 

I hope you enjoy my chocolate chip and peanut cookies! 

Christmas Gingerbread Cookies

Happy new year everyone!

So I was really hoping to post this before Christmas because I actually baked these cute little gingerbread men (and some other stuff) a few days before Christmas eve to get into the festive mood, but for some reason the drive on my laptop to read my camera's memory stick has stopped working, so I had some trouble. But all is set now, so here we go...

So I baked these gingerbread men, recipe courtesy of Zoella- and they were so cute that I had to share them and the recipe with you.

Here's what you'll need:

So, what to do:

1) In a pot on the hob (medium heat) add 75g of light brown sugar, 2 heaped tablespoons of golden syrup (this is often called corn syrup in the U.S I think?), 1 heaped tablespoon of black treacle (molasses), 1 tablespoon of water and stir with a wooden spoon while they melt.

2) After a few minutes stir in the spices: 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of ground ginger (you can add more or less depending on how gingery you like them). 

3) To the mixture in the pot, add 95g of butter at room temperature and gradually stir it in, having turned down the heat to low, until it is completely combined and melted in. 

4) Turn off the stove. Add half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) and stir till it lightens slightly in colour. 

5) Sift in 225g of cake flour and mix it up until it forms a ball of thick dough, add more or less flour to it so that the dough is neither too sticky nor too dry. Cover the dough lightly in cling wrap plastic and put it aside to cool for 30 mins. While you wait, preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius (350 F).

6) After the dough has finished resting, sprinkle a surface lightly with flour and roll out the dough thinly with a rolling pin. 

7) Now I just went to town with cutting all the different shapes I liked. Use cookie cutters (I used gingerbread men and dove shapes) to cut out the cookies and keep doing this and then rerolling out the dough till it is all used up. Place your cookie cut-outs on a Silpat or wax paper on top of a baking tray (you could also just grease it with Spray 'n Cook). Cook them for 8-15 minutes, check that they're firm when you take them out, but if you poke too hard, obviously you will squish them. Let them cool completely. 

8) Once they've cooled, you can ice them how you'd like. I used ready-to-roll fondant in christmas colours. Roll the fondant out until it is very thin, and cut out shapes using the same cookie cutters. 

9) Mix half a cup of icing sugar with 3 tablespoons of water to form a thick paste to act as 'glue' (add more icing sugar if it is too watery). Spread this on the back of the fondant and put it face-down onto the cookie so that they fit together. 

And taaah daaaah :D I had so much fun making these and they really are so easy and very festive. Hope you enjoyed this post as much as I did making it.