Savoury muffins #2: Buttermilk muffins with blue cheese, olives, tiny tomatoes and herbs

Dr Cupcake's adventures with savoury muffins continue! Last time, I searched high and low for a tasty-sounding recipe with little success, and ended up making up my own, which you'll find here. This time I adapted the recipe to fit whatever I had in my fridge - which is basically what I advised last time!

So I'll admit I went hard on the dairy products. I had buttermilk, garlic yoghurt and three different cheeses in these muffins. The 'Greek style' yoghurt in the picture is a really lovely creamy yoghurt and usually, as soon as I buy a tub, I stir it up and pour in a few tablespoons of olive oil, a few teaspoons of minced garlic, a few pinches of salt, some pepper and some fresh herbs. So it becomes a little tub of homemade tzatziki. This version is what was in my muffins.

My recipe is as pictured and is as simple and messy as it looks. There's a basic 1:1:1 on flour, eggs and dairy (yoghurt/buttermilk/milk), plus a few handfuls of whatever flavourings you want...

 ... A few of which are seen here - some creamy blue cheese torn into small squidgy bits (I used some leftover St Agur which is my favorite blue cheese), and chopped black olives...

... Plus the very last of my backyard cherry tomato harvest. They were tiny, and just starting to dry up a little, so this was a good way to use them.

....And back to the garden to fetch some herbs - chives and thyme.

It all looked both messy and a bit exciting when it was all thrown in.

I dolloped it into a muffin tin which I'd buttered beforehand. I had also cut some circles from baking paper to place in the bottom of the pans, so that they would be easier to get out.

After 20 minutes in a moderate oven they came out golden brown and smelling heavenly.

They need a generous spread of butter and can be either cut or torn up to eat. The texture was light and the muffins very savoury - the cheese and olives came through well, and the tiny cherry toms provided little juice bombs which exploded nicely in the mouth - although this wouldn't have worked with 'normal' sized cherry toms, which would be too big - these tiny ones were only the size of a pea.

Happy muffin eating from Dr Cupcake!

How to make dyed and decorated Easter eggs

Good evening and Happy Easter!

As I'm typing this on Easter Monday I wanted to share with you my first experiment in making my own hand-blown and dyed eggs for Easter.

I tried a few different techniques, with various amounts of success and failure.

Yes, I am now bombarding this blog with pictures of a little Easter egg hunt...  with dyed eggs in my garden. I loved the bright colours of these against the different plants.

Yes it's another one!

This one would have been pretty good for Valentine's Day too. I liked this technique the best.

So, the techniques: these were all new to me, because I haven't done this kind of decoration before. I do have a vague memory of doing something similar with Mum when I was really little, using some german picture transfers - I wish I could still get them because they were wonderful. But in the absence of any of those, I did what every sensible person would do: go straight to the interwebs to consult the awesomely powerful font of all culinary and decorative knowledge, MARTHA STEWART.

And of course she had about a thousand techniques and designs and tips and tricks, which you can find here. Of course she did. She's Martha Stewart.

I purchased some crayons and some decals (stickers).

You can use boiled eggs, but they don't keep indefinitely so I thought it was worthwhile to 'blow' the eggs. Now, I definitely did this as a child with Mum because I still remember how. You make a tiny pierced hole in the top of a raw egg and a slightly larger hole at the base of the egg (I used the end of a corkscrew for both) and, holding the egg firmly, blow the insides of the egg out through the hole in the base. It's a bit like blowing up a balloon - at first nothing happens, then it works!

I washed out the eggs with warm soapy water and dried the, then tried the first technique: sticking various decals or stickers on the shell of the egg in whatever patterns you want. The idea is that you then dip the egg in dye, and allow it to dry before peeling off the stickers - where they have been will stay the original shell colour (which, because I use free range eggs, is brown rather than white).

These particular pink crystal decals were so pretty that they actually would have been really nice to stick on AFTER the egg had been dyed, and leave on - I guess if you get really pretty decals you should consider this option, because this particular egg looked less impressive after they were taken off than before it was dyed!

Then, put about 20 drops of liquid food colouring (or half a teaspoon of gel colouring) into a small bowl of hot water, with a teaspoon of vinegar. Not sure why the vinegar is needed, but I consider it generally dangerous to question Martha's judgement. I used a very expensive French tarragon and white wine vinegar, not because I wanted to, but because it was the only one I had. Goddamn waste of good salad vinegar. (Note to self: buy cheap vinegar and stuff in back of larder.)

Place the egg in the bowl and sink it until fully covered. The weird glass-on-top arrangement here is because I took ages to work out how to 'sink' the egg properly, and this was my first attempt - glass on top to hold the egg down.
(Second note to self: wear latex gloves to prevent your fingers getting completely dyed blue for days.)

I kept the egg in for about 10 minutes, although you can make a lighter shade by submerging it for less time. In my case this was hard because the eggs were so brown. Using very white eggs would have given me much more shading options, but you don't want a brown egg with a slightly blue tinge - you have to get the colour deeper for it to work.

This was how the egg looked after I took it out....

And this was how it looked after the decals came off. It's still pretty, but quite subtle, and not nearly as fine and precise as I had expected. This is partly the fault of the decals - they didn't always stick firmly and evenly to the shell, so some parts of the pattern came through better than others.

I still think, in comparing these two pictures, that the egg would have been prettier had I left the decals on. A thought for next time.

This is a pic of the different eggs I was preparing - the green, purple and pink diamante patterns are all decals but the heart was drawn on with a crayon.

The crayon technique worked beautifully and I want to do more in the future. You simply draw on the eggshell with a wax crayon, then dip and dye it. When it's dry, put it in a moderate oven for 5 minutes. You'll see the wax of the crayons begin to go shiny - take out of the oven and rub gently with a cloth, the wax will come off to expose the uncoloured parts of the shell underneath.

You can do names, as in this egg, or hearts, or just lines... so many options.

It doesn't matter what colour the crayon is because you will be wiping it off - but it's better to use a darkish colour because you need to be able to see what you've drawn during the drawing process.

A closeup of the heart egg. I really liked the graininess of the crayon and the homespun look of this egg.

This is another of the decal eggs. Again the pattern came out clearly but it was less precise and fine than I expected. Not sure how to avoid this (maybe use a better quality of decals?)

I loved the strong clear designs on this. This was the egg that you can see above with the purple flower stickers on it. These nice simple shapes worked really well.

Another, different technique is to wrap your blown egg in string or raffia before dyeing - it's quite difficult to tie it on securely - then dip it for a lined effect around the centre.

This egg was wrapped in raffia and dyed dark brown:

This was the result - interesting and better than I had expected, given that the raffia could be expected to just soak up the dye and transfer it to the egg, so I wasn't sure I'd get any sort of distinct pattern.

You could do a much clearer version of this with sticky tape if it was cut into very fine lengths.

That is the end of my Easter egg dyeing odyssey - Happy Easter from Dr Cupcake!

Collingwood Football Club Cake Number Two!

Birthdays come but once a year, but even that is way too often for me, given that my boss is a mad Collingwood fan.

Last year I made him a cake with the Collingwood logo, which you can see here. This year, even though I hate Collingwood with a passion, as most sensible Australians do, I decided to revisit the theme in a slightly different way.

 I did a Collingwood guernsey together with an Aussie Rules football lying next to it.

 This is how the guernsey started out. I had made a rectangular chocolate mud cake, to my favorite ultra-rich recipe, and had ganached the surface to make it smooth.

I then looked up the interwebs for a picture of a Collingwood guernsey lying flat, to get the basic shape. As you can see in this pic, I needed only to cut three slightly curved portions from the cake for the neckline and the arm holes, and then I had to cut the tops of the shoulder-pieces at a slight angle.

After I had got the shape right, I ganached the edges I had cut to get a smooth surface and rolled out black fondant to cover the whole shape.

I haven't covered many 'shaped' cakes before, and I'm very pleased to report that the fondant - handled very carefully - stretched over the edges beautifully.

After I had covered the entire top and edges in black fondant, I cut some 1cm wide white rolled fondant stripes, being careful to try to copy the pattern carefully (i.e., the number of stripes and the relative distance of each to the other).

There is a bit of balancing between trying to follow a design exactly, and being able to simplify it so it's clear and crisp. You don't want to get bogged down in difficult detail that you won't be able to do very well, so it's best to leave out really tricky things.

In this case there were some logos on the front of the guernsey that you can see in the pic above, that I decided not to go with. Too fiddly. I did, however, cut into my black fondant for the neckpiece and placed a white half-moon piece in there for better detail.

The trusty ol' Sherrin footy was made entirely of fondant icing. I rolled it in a fabulous substance called tylose powder, which basically hardens up the fondant as you work it so that large shapes can set harder and not lose their shape.

Confession: despite watching my fair share of footy, I was about to make the ball in a brown colour, and checked at the last minute to find that Aussie Rules footballs are bright red, and have been for about 50 years. Observation fail!!

I did the 'stitching' marks in four lines with the end of a pin.

The final cake with football had the footy with its famous maker's name, 'Sherrin' printed as neatly as possible on the side.

It brought a smile to the boss's face and horror to all other opposing team supporters... Happy Birthday to Collingwood's No. 1 fan!

A Tiffany Box cupcake

I was recently approached by a friend who had a slightly unusual request: she wanted me to make a replica of a Tiffany box at cupcake-size. She even offered to pay me!! This was the first time I have ever actually charged for a cupcake apart from charity events to fundraise!

 

 This was the final result. It's about 8cm (3 inches) square.

Having never actually seen a Tiffany box, because I live in Australia and we don't have Tiffany here, she was wise enough to send me a web pic of what she wanted. This was really useful although the resolution was poor and I couldn't really see how the middle of the bow worked. It was also (I'm guessing) a full-size cake, and it is much harder to do miniature designs. I told her straight out that I wouldn't be able to do the printed text, but this wasn't a problem for her, so I decided to give it a try!

I started by cutting a 7cm square piece from a larger ganached square cake, then I ganached the cut sides and hot-knifed it to be square around all the edges.

Then it was time to roll out some tinted blue fondant and cover the cake... and I discovered my first mistake. Because I had not covered many square cakes before, I didn't realise that the perfectly hot-knifed, SHARP edges and corners of the cake might tear the icing - see here it's starting to go in the right front corner?

I pulled the icing off and discarded it, then went back to my cake. This time, rather than squaring the corners off with a spatula, I gently rubbed all the edges and corners with my finger. The small amount of heat transferred began to soften the ganache, and I was able to create slightly rounded edges, which were able to be covered much more successfully.

Next came the bow. I rolled white fondant and cut it into centimetre-thick strips with a ruler and a sharp knife.

I stuck the 'ribbon' to the cake, then used the same thickness and size of fondant to make the bow for the cupcake.

Here are the bows. I did two cakes, thinking that I would be able to give my friend the best of the two and keep the other.

I'm really glad I did, because in making the second cake, I tore holes through the icing in one side. After working on this and trying to fix it for ages. I decided it would be better off hidden under a bow, and kept for myself - This result just wasn't acceptable.

This was my workspace halfway through proceedings. Your can see my referral image on the iPad on the right, and the cake with ribbons on but bows still not attached, on the left.

I finished off the bow, wrapping it with the middle band of white fondant and finishing with a cashou. I wasn't unhappy with the result - one was definitely better than the other, so I was quite happy to sell the good one and keep the 'poor cousin' as a model.

End result: a box within a box - a fun project and it's always great when you can make other people happy too!

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NEW WORKSHOP - Portrait Cupcakes

Portraits with Dr Cupcake!

New Workshop for Winter 2013

In this special three-hour workshop, you’ll learn all the techniques necessary to decorate fondant-iced cupcake portraits of real or imaginary people! 

 

Step by step instructions and advice will guide the beginner. Intermediate cupcakers will learn new skills and techniques.

At the end, you get to take your decorated cupcakes home and share them with your family or scoff them yourself… 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All cupcakes provided! If you can roll out play dough and cut simple shapes, you can do this.

Three of the pictured designs will be taught.

Cost:              $60 per person, $45 under 18 / concession

When:           Saturday, 15 June 2013, 11am – 2pm

Where:          Meeting Room, Salamanca Arts Centre, Salamanca Place, Hobart

Contact:       wootton.astrid@gmail.com or 0409 190 890 to reserve a place.