a millygram of sugar

Next step was trying to figure out how to incorporate it into a cupcake. Lemon and maple syrup frosting on a butter cupcake base would have been the obvious choice. But I had been wanting to try out Glory's Perfect Vanilla Cupcake recipe for the longest time so I chose to omit the butter component and play up the lemon and maple syrup parts more.

Final product: vanilla cupcake with a lemon curd centre, topped with a lemon-maple syrup cream cheese frosting, served with a drizzle of maple syrup.

Lemon & Maple Syrup Cupcakes

(yields ~ 16 cupcakes)

Vanilla Cupcake Recipe

(from Glorious Treats' Perfect Vanilla Cupcake)

Ingredients

1¼ cup cake flour

1¼ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

2 eggs

¾ cup sugar

1½ tsp pure vanilla extract

½ cup vegetable oil

½ cup buttermilk

Directions

• Preheat oven to 175 deg Celsius
• In a bowl, add cake flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir the dry ingredients together and set aside
• In a mixing bowl, beat eggs for ~10-20s. Add in the sugar and continue to beat for 30s on medium speed.
• Add in vanilla extract and oil and beat again.
• Add in half the dry ingredient mixture and mix together on low speed
• Add half of the buttermilk, then rest of the flour, followed by rest of the buttermilk, mixing well in between each addition
• Line muffin pan with cupcake liners and pour batter into liners until ~⅔ full
• Bake in oven for ~15min or until toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean.

Lemon Curd

(adapted from Valli Little's recipe on taste.com.au)

(Note: There will be quite a bit left after filling the cupcakes. You can use the rest on pancakes, toast, biscuits, as a tart filling, in crepes and so on.)

Ingredients

1 egg + 1 egg yolk

82g caster sugar

40g unsalted butter

zest and juice of 1 lemon

Directions

• In a saucepan, whisk together the egg, egg yolk and sugar until smooth.
• Place pan over a low heat
• Add the butter, lemon juice and lemon zest, whisking continuously until mixture thickens
• Remove from heat, pour into a jar and leave to cool

Lemon-Maple Syrup Cream Cheese Frosting

(adapted from Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting recipe on allrecipes.com)

Ingredients

150g cream cheese, softened

40g unsalted butter

20ml lemon juice

1 tsp lemon zest

¾ tsp vanilla extract

1 tbsp maple syrup

¾ cup confectioner's sugar (this is subjective, you can add more/less depending on your preferred level of sweetness)

Directions

• In a mixing bowl, beat cream cheese, butter, lemon juice, lemon zest, maple syrup and vanilla together until smooth and fluffy
• Add the sugar gradually, tasting in between additions until desired level of sweetness is attained.

*Assembly

• Use a sharp paring knife to core out the centre of the cupcake, taking care to leave a little bit of cake at the base.
• Cut the core in half (in a transverse direction), leaving the upper segment as a lid and discarding the other segment (or you can eat it!)
• Add a tsp of lemon curd into the hole you just made and fit back the upper part of the cupcake core (or the lid) to close the hole
• Pipe frosting as desired
• Drizzle maple syrup over the frosted cupcake before serving

I haven't really had time to do my weekly baking lately, what with Saturday duties and wedding preparations getting in the way, so Profiterole Part II is still work in progress! Thankfully I've got a few unblogged recipes to fill the gap in the meantime.

First up is a bread recipe! Have I mentioned how much I prefer baking bread to anything else? It's so much quicker and cleaner! As opposed to desserts where you have to wash your mixing bowl multiple times (depending on how many components you have), not to mention the frosting paraphernalia like nozzles and couplers which are such a pain to clean (thank goodness for interdental brushes!) And everything is just so greasy that I find myself constantly depleting the detergent supply. Bread, on the other hand, is a single component so you only have to use the mixing bowl once (or not at all if you knead by hand) and the flour soaks up all the butter/oil so it's much less greasy.

Anyway, having been so thoroughly satisfied with the Japanese Milk Bread using the tangzhong method, I decided to use it as a base for my herb bread. I was a bit worried initially because my dough didn't seem to want to rise. Had to wait much longer before expansion became evident. Perhaps it was because I did this on a cold, rainy day and my little yeast friends were feeling a bit lethargic? Whatever the case, they eventually rose to the occasion (hurhurhur) and a beautiful tasty loaf was born.

Creamy scrambled eggs piled on top of slice of this makes for a perfect weekend breakfast, in my opinion. Or you could eat it plain, which was how we phagocytosed half the loaf after it came out of the oven.

In hopes of improving my culinary skills, I have been reading more pastry books to better my knowledge on the subject. An important lesson I learnt in university is that you need to know what you are doing in order to do it properly. (Otherwise you should get out of the clinic kitchen.) The problem with recipes from such books is that, more often than not, you get products that do not turn out as well as they appear in the drool-worthy accompanying photographs. Thankfully, this was not the case in Michel Roux's Pastry. I've always maintained that the French are the best when it comes to pastries and he's proven me right with his recipes. I tested out his choux paste recipe and it worked beautifully! The puffs inflated impressively and held their shape, and the texture was amazingly light and fluffy. It was so good you could happily eat it sans filling.


But of course, they taste even better stuffed with crème pâtissière and coated with chocolate so that's what I did.



I highly recommend getting his book. It's got all sorts of pastry recipes and, more importantly, pictures to guide you every step of the way. I can't wait to test out the croissant and brioche recipes! My goal for this year is to successfully make a croissant but it's really labour-intensive and time-consuming so I'll have to wait till I'm on leave to attempt it. For now, I'll leave you with the choux recipe.
Pâte à choux -- makes 40-50 choux buns
(adapted from Michel Roux's Pastry: Savoury & Sweet)

Ingredients
125ml milk
125ml water
100g unsalted butter, diced
½ tsp salt
1 tsp caster sugar
150g plain flour
4 eggs
eggwash (1 egg yolk mixed with 1 tbsp milk)

Directions

• Combine milk, water, sugar, salt and butter in a saucepan and set over low heat (picture 1)
• Bring to a boil and remove saucepan from heat
• Add in flour and mix with a wooden spoon until smooth (picture 2)
• Return pan to medium heat and stir continuously for 1min to dry out the paste
• Transfer to a mixing bowl and fit on a paddle attachment
• Add eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition, until you get a smooth paste (picture 3)
• (optional step) Using a pencil, draw staggered rows of circles (~2cm in diameter) on a baking paper, leaving about 1.5cm space between circles. (I used a nozzle for this as shown in picture 4.) Turn paper facedown on baking tray. The pencil markings should still be visible.
• Preheat oven to 180 deg Celsius
• Pour paste into a piping bag fitted with a 1cm plain nozzle and pipe small mounds of paste the size of the drawn circles (picture 5)
• Brush choux with eggwash, flattening the pointed ends with the pastry brush (picture 6)
• Bake in oven for ~20min or until tops are golden brown (picture 7)
• Use a spatula or tongs to separate the choux buns from the baking paper immediately after removing from the oven. The excess eggwash will cause them to stick
• Place on a wire rack and leave to cool