Friday, 28 December 2012
swiss meringue buttercream
Been so busy baking for our charity project I haven't had time to update this space! I actually have loads of recipes lined up, waiting to be tested, but until I find the time to carry out my ambitious plans, we'll just have to make do with this basic Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC) recipe.
2 factors I like about SMBC are its stability and its versatility. I've tried the standard buttercream before but it was just too unstable in our sweltering heat. SMBC tends to hold up a bit better, which is a blessing when you've got a staggering number of cupcakes to frost and deliver. Plus, it's so easy to flavour! You can add in chocolate, fruit purees or salted caramel like I did--the possibilities are endless, really.
The thing to take note while making SMBC is that during the mixing stage, the mixture goes through different phases. It starts out looking watery and 'soupy', then it turns into a curdled-looking mess (that got me panicky the first time I made it), and eventually it morphs into a thick, luscious, smooth buttercream. Despite having made the stuff many times in the past month, witnessing this transition never fails to amaze me.
Other important things I've learnt:
1. ALWAYS use fresh eggs. In addition to giving you peace of mind (and GI tract), fresh eggs are easier to separate.
2. When making the meringue, some recipes indicate heating the egg white-sugar mixture to a temperature of 140-150˚F. While I've tried 140˚F before and escaped unscathed, the recommended minimum cooking temperature for eggs is actually 160˚F (or ~71˚C) so you might want to go with that instead.
Ingredients
4 egg whites
120g caster sugar
168g unsalted butter, softened
Directions
- Pour egg whites and sugar into a clean, heatproof bowl
- Heat egg white + sugar over a saucepan of simmering water, whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 71˚C. I use a digital probe thermometer to check.
- Transfer to mixing bowl fitted with whisk attachment
- Whisk until stiff peaks form and meringue cools to room temperature
- Switch to paddle attachment and add in the butter
- Mix until thick, smooth buttercream is formed
- Add flavouring as desired (for chocolate buttercream, I add about 100g melted good quality dark chocolate)
- Frost cupcakes/cakes!
Monday, 10 December 2012
berry tart
When I visited the UK a few months back, I was delighted to find strawberries and blueberries going for about £1 a punnet. It was my first purchase upon touching down on English soil and they tasted absolutely amazing after starving for 14h on the plane. Sadly, the berries we get here in Singapore are not only hideously expensive but are often horribly sour/tasteless. I try to avoid buying them unless they're on sale at the supermarket.
I was planning to make a mixed berry tart with strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries but the eye-popping price tags on the berries made me decide on a 2-berry tart instead. Might have gone with a plain blueberry (my favourite berry!) tart if weren't for the irresistible lure of the strawberries' vibrant hue. Just seeing all the bright colours in this post makes me so happy.
The blueberries were surprisingly sweet and the strawberries weren't too bad either. Sadly, I think I'd overworked my pastry this time round so it was a bit tough intially. But a night in the fridge helped it to soak up a bit of moisture from the crème pâtissière and it was just right when we ate it the next day. As you can see from the photos, I went a bit overboard with the crème pâtissière on the larger tart but it was soooo good I couldn't resist flooding the tart with it. Can you tell it's my favourite thing at the moment?
I got the recipe for the pâte sucrée from Michel Roux's Pastry: Savoury of Sweet. I strongly encourage you to get the book if you haven't already done so. It's well worth the money! (Not that you have to fork out all that much for it anyway.)
For the filling I used a mixture of whipped cream and crème pâtissière. I did some guesstimation when it came to proportions so I can't give you the exact measurements but it's approximately a 1:1 ratio in weight.
Sorry for the sketchy recipe this time round! That's the problem with leaving it too late to blog a recipe (and failing to record it down in the first place)--you forget everything! I'll be sure to update this post the next time the berries go on sale at the supermarket.
Saturday, 24 November 2012
profiterole part 2: filling up on crème pâtissière
Finally got down to making some crème pâtissière last weekend so we are good to go with this post!
Ok, so you've got the perfect choux buns, but what's the point if you haven't got some luscious filling to stuff it with? There are many options when it comes to stuffing a profiterole. You can use run-of-the-mill whipped cream, ice cream, chantilly cream, or crème pâtissière (aka pastry cream). You can even opt to branch out into flavours aside from the traditional vanilla. The last time I made choux pastry, we had an appalling amount of durians waiting to be used so I made a batch of durian puffs. My elf says we no longer need to buy them from Goodwood Park Hotel. (But that's for another post, perhaps when the durians come flooding in again.)
I find a combination of chantilly cream and crème pâtissière works best for my profiteroles. Crème pâtissière can be a little bit heavy so combining the two results in a more desirable consistency. The resulting mixture was so good we piled it on top a bunch of strawberries and polished off the punnet. (Better than the strawberries & cream at Wimbledon, in my opinion.)
There are various methods to filling a profiterole, depending on the type of filling you choose. If you're going with a stiffer filling like ice cream, you can section the choux bun transverely (like a hamburger bun), pipe or scoop the filling onto the bottom half, and then top it with the choux lid. If your filling is of a thinner consistency, you can use my method which is to pour the cream into a squeeze bottle, poke a hole in the bottom of the choux bun and slowly squeeze the filling in. Be careful, though. The pastry is rather delicate so using too much force or overfilling can result in unwanted extrusion at the other end. (Like a badly done root canal. Sorry I couldn't resist.)
Crème pâtissière -- makes ~370g
Ingredients
3 egg yolks
60g caster sugar
20g plain flour
250ml milk
1 vanilla pod, split longitudinally
Directions
- Whisk egg yolks and ⅓ of the sugar together in a bowl to a light ribbon consistency
- Whisk in the flour
- Pour the milk into a saucepan and add the vanilla pod (and the seeds scraped out from the pod)
- Heat the vanilla-milk until it comes to a boil, then pour the milk into the egg yolk mixture, stirring as you go.
- Transfer the mixture back into the saucepan and bring it to a boil over a medium heat, stirring continuously with a whisk until mixture starts to thicken.
- Pour into a bowl and place a clingwrap film on the surface of the mixture to prevent a skin from forming
- Leave to cool to room temperature then chill in the fridge for ~1h
Chantilly Cream -- makes ~250g
Ingredients
200ml whipping cream, chilled
10g icing sugar
pinch of vanilla powder or ½ tsp vanilla extract
Directions
- Pour the chilled whipping cream, icing sugar and vanilla into a mixing bowl fitted with a whisk attachment and whisk until soft peaks form.
**Assembly
- Gently fold the crème pâtissière into the chantilly cream with a spatula until combined.
- Fill a squeeze bottle (or piping bag with small round nozzle) with the cream mixture
- Poke a hole in the base of the choux puff with a toothpick/skewer
- Fill puff with desired amount of cream
- Coat the top of the choux puffs with ganache (optional)
Friday, 26 October 2012
lemon & maple syrup cupcakes
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.
So vanilla cupcake + lemon and maple syrup frosting then? I wasn't entirely satisfied with that. I wanted something less...predictable. And so we threw in a surprise lemon curd centre!
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
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
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
olive herb bread
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.
Olive Herb Bread
(base Hokkaido Milk Loaf recipe obtained from Christine's Recipe)
Ingredients
270g + 25g bread flour
43g caster sugar
4g salt
4.5g full cream milk powder
5.5g instant dried yeast
125ml water
1 egg, beaten (and 1 more egg for the eggwash)
30g whipping cream
27g milk
25g salted butter, melted and cooled to room
temperature
¼ cup chopped black olives
1 tsp dried oregano
1 ½ tsp garlic powder
Directions
- In a saucepan dissolve 25g bread flour in 125ml water
- Cook in medium-low heat, stirring constantly with whisk, until mixture starts to thicken and forms streaks when stirred.
- Pour thickened mixture (or tangzhong) into bowl
- Place clingwrap film over tangzhong (film should be sticking to tangzhong to prevent surface from drying up) and leave to cool to room temperature
- In a mixing bowl add 270g bread flour, sugar, salt, milk powder, oregano, garlic powder and yeast
- Add in egg, whipped cream, milk and 92g of tangzhong
- Mix using dough hook attachment on speed 2
- When ingredients start to come together, add melted butter and chopped black olives (picture 1)
- Continue to mix until dough is smooth and elastic (about 20min)
- Leave to proof for about 40min or until dough doubles in volume (picture 3)
- Transfer dough to a clean, floured surface and punch it down
- Divide dough into portions weighing about 70g
- Roll it out into a flattened circle and fold (as in picture 4)
- With seal upwards, roll into a cylinder (as in picture 5)
- Place in a bread pan and leave to rise (picture 6)
- Preheat oven to 180 deg Celsius
- Brush tops of risen dough with eggwash
- Bake for 30min or until golden brown
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