Friday night caramels

*Grandparental advisory: do not give these caramels to your nan. They will pull her fillings/false teeth out and it will be very embarrassing for everyone involved*

These remind me of my Grannie Gracie actually, not quite sure why - she never made anything like this. But she always used to line her cake tins with heaps of paper and I think wrapping the caramels in twists of baking paper like I did was what made me think of her.

caramel setting in the moulds

Thanks to the Frankie Sweet Treats cookbook for the recipe and Instagram for getting across in picture form the old fashioned simple quality of the caramels.

Only ingredients are brown sugar, castor sugar, glucose syrup, condensed milk and butter, boiled to soft ball stage (115C).









It hardened quite quickly in the mould. I turned it out when it was still warm and cut it into squares with an oiled knife, then hand-shaped them into oblongs. The consistency when cool is very firm, but will yield when pressed between thumb and forefinger.

I am looking forward to taking these in to work on Monday and finding out which of my co-workers has loose fillings :-)



Recipe:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup glucose syrup
3/4 cup condensed milk
1/4 cup unsalted butter
pinch of salt

Line a rectangular container with greaseproof paper.
Combine all ingredients in a saucepan over low heat, stirring, until the mixture comes to the boil. Increase the heat to medium and boil until you reach 115C or soft ball stage (about 10-15 minutes). Stir constantly, the mixture is very prone to sticking to the bottom of the saucepan and burning. Remove from heat and pour into containers. When the mixture has cooled and firmed up, cut into squares with oiled scissors or an oiled knife. Wrap in twists of baking paper.

Sean the Sheep Cupcakes

This would be a perfect present for any stray New Zealanders you come across ahaha... sorry.

I was trying to come up with a design for Will Tatchell who runs Van Dieman Brewing.
I wondered about a beer cupcake but I wasn't sure how to do it, so in the end I fixed on Sean the Sheep because Will's brewery is on a farming property, and there is a sheep that was bottlefed who follows him around.

For Sean's head I looked at an old Wallace and Gromit alarm clock. Jade was confused to find it on the kitchen table but guessed straight away that it was possibly cupcake related.

The green background (left) works better than the purple one below because it looks like grass. The cachous were just to glam it up a bit but were possibly a mistake.

It would also be fun to do a more three dimensional Sean by modelling half of his body and making it look as if he was jumping out of the cupcake.

My problem though with that type of solid modelling is that you end up with so much icing relative to the amount of cake, it's not really edible.

Baa-aaaa, happy eating Will.

ssss

Australia day macaroons

It was a Frenchy kind of Australia Day at our place with no lamingtons or pavlova in sight, Sam Kekovich would have been very disappointed (although we did have lamb).

These are coffee flavoured with a coffee buttercream filling.

I had some trouble getting the flavour how I wanted it without upsetting the texture of the mixture. Using a shot of expresso coffee is a beautiful flavour but it makes the buttercream separate and curdle.

First batch of buttercream went straight in the bin, second batch I tried a syrup flavouring, Bushells coffee and chicory essence, it comes in a tall glass bottle in the coffee/tea aisle of Coles, costs about $3. It's strange stuff that smells quite bitter, but it worked really well and I got a flavour and colour that I was ok with.

So the coffee buttercream is still a work in progress as I am playing around with quantities and ingredients.

Here's a tip, if you get something right when you're experimenting, bloody well write it down straight away - I made a really good coffee cream a few months back and have never been able to do it again.

I have discovered that piping the macaroon mixture onto the oven trays is heaps easier than trying to spoon it out evenly. I am using disposable piping bags from the supermarket, how easy is that?

One Eureka moment I got from reading my new book on macaroons is that you need to leave them for half an hour after piping but before baking, to form a skin on the top. This is how you get that classic shape of the smooth upper with the little rough 'foot' on the bottom.

These chocolate macaroons were made about a week before we ate them but were still in really good condition after being kept in the fridge. In fact having them cold from the fridge seemed to add a denseness to the filling which improved them. I think they would last quite well for up to two weeks.

Proof that following a recipe can achieve results similar to those pictured in the recipe book! Thanks Jose Marechal for writing such a great teaching textbook on my favourite food.

A pirate with eyepatch and earring

Pirates are fun to make and not very hard - thanks Paris from Planet Cake for this design which is in the book Planet Cake Cupcakes. 

This little fellow is a bit grumpy but not very scary. I will have to work on more scary facial expressions. 

The Planet Cake design had only one strap coming off the eyepatch (the one on the left) but I thought he needed a bit of balance so I put another one on the other side. The straps are a bit too wide and next time I will cut them finer. 

The cut on the cheek adds a bit of interest to what is a very simple design, this was just painted on with red food colouring and a fine paint brush. 

If you were doing more than one pirate it would be fun to do the headscarves all different colours.

Macaroon Madness.... pistachio v chocolate

Macaroons or ‘macarons’ if you want to be all French about it are possibly the most awesome foodstuff on the planet. 

I know there are many people who would argue with that statement, but I would argue that those people should not be reading this blog. 

Now if you live in a small and mostly un-French place like Tasmania there are limited opportunities to purchase macaroons, and you may be forced to make your own. That is basically why I started to make macaroons.

Macaroons are fiddly and time consuming to make but they are worth it for the enjoyment factor. They also last really well (about 10 days). 

The ones in these photos are chocolate (above) and pistachio (right).

I was a little more careful in shaping the chocolate ones - you can see the pistachio ones are misshapen and a bit weird looking. This was because I was just doling them out on to the oven tray with a teaspoon. You get a much better result if you pipe the mixture out into circles using a wide nozzle. 

The chocolate ones are made by adding cocoa to the basic meringue mix of egg whites, sugar and almond meal. The chocolate buttercream I made by just adding some melted dark chocolate to some creamed butter (unsalted) and icing sugar. In other words it is a butter icing with lots of chocolate in it!

The pistachio macaroons are a bit more tricky. For a start they are a lot more expensive to make because pistachios cost heaps more than almonds (this may be a seasonal thing I guess). Then you have to buy them whole and grind them from scratch. Whatever you do, don't buy salted ones. And don't try to grind them by hand with a mortar and pestle, your arms will drop off. You need to whizz them in a food processor with some icing sugar so they don't get too oily. And then you need to whizz them again. And again. Just saying. 

For the filling in the pistachio macaroons, I discovered that traditional recipes often put a couple of egg yolks in the buttercream along with butter, sugar and some ground pistachios. I was a bit worried about this but it worked really well, I can recommend using the egg yolks as it seems to stabilise the mixture and add an extra smoothness and taste dimension. 

I'll post more pics as I make some more.

Just FYI, I have actually found three places in Tassie that sell macaroons. In Launceston, Tant Pour Tant in Charles St has them but only about once a week and you mostly have to order them specially. In Hobart you can get them at Sweet Envy in Elizabeth St North Hobart, and there is a microbusiness called Ruby’s Macarons (do a search on Facebook, they have a page) who supplies some delis. Companion Bakery at Oatlands also has them sometimes.

Quick comparison between suppliers:

Tant Pour Tant makes very traditional medium sized macaroons, mostly vanilla ones, with a firm buttercream filling. They are similar to  Laurent Patisserie’s in Melbourne.

Sweet Envy’s are smaller and have buttercream filling plus a mystery additional filling of syrup or something, and a huge range of flavours, blackberry, raspberry, lemon, orange, lemon myrtle etc. I love their coffee one especially.

Ruby’s are medium sized, traditional buttercream and they do an awesome salted caramel one that is filled with a soft caramel, outstanding!

Companion is more a rustic style and they are very large, only vanilla, and the filling is a stiff almond paste which I didn’t like very much (sorry Companion, you do awesome sourdough bread and semolina biscuits though).

Mandy and her butterscotch sauce

Along with fairy cakes and caramel, my other great childhood success was butterscotch sauce. I don't like butterscotch sweets very much so I was always surprised at how good this tasted. 

My best friend Mandy had the most awesome recipe which she shared with me when we were about 13 years old. She copied it out for me in her best writing on a piece of pretty notepaper. I have never rewritten it because I really like still having the original piece of paper she gave me. 

Ingredients: 
1/2 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup cream
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup caster sugar

Equipment: Double boiler saucepan; if you don't have one, use a bowl that fits tightly on top of a saucepan and fill the saucepan beneath with hot water. 

Place the double boiler on a low heat, the lower saucepan one third full of water. In the upper saucepan, combine all ingredients, stirring gently. 

Simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. How easy is that?






























Pour the sauce into a glass screw top jar and put it into the fridge for a few hours to thicken.


I used Bonne Maman jam jars because I love the gingham-pattern lids (and I love the jam that comes in them too).


Warm it to room temperature to serve. 

You can keep this almost indefinitely if you keep it in the fridge and sterilise the jar before putting the sauce in. You could also freeze it I guess - in fact it would be awesome swirled through icecream and then frozen. 

Other things to do with fondant – stamped sweets

After being scared of making my own fondant for ages, I found a very simple recipe for these small fondant sweets in Frankie Magazine’s cookbook, Sweet Treats. 

They reminded me of lollies that I used to get when I was little. Jade pointed out that I may be mistaken for a drug dealer trying to flog eccy tabs, but I think it’s worth the risk.

The fondant is sugar, water and gelatine that is boiled and then beaten until it forms a white mass that you can ball up loosely. You then dust your hands with icing sugar and knead it for 5 minutes or so until it starts to look shiny on the surface. You can tint it whatever colour you want, I divided it up in three parts and did pink, blue and yellow. I used gel colouring and was very sparing because I wanted light pastel shades. 

Who knew that you could still buy paper doilies? Thanks Frankie for making them cool again.

 I found these tiny cello bags at Birchalls which seemed to suit the whole cutesy theme.

Flavouring was a problem for me, I experimented with using no flavour (pretty foul), vanilla (worse), lemon (not strong enough – need lots) and peppermint (quite nice). If I had rose water I would have tried that for the pink ones. Reckon it’s worth trying to match flavours and colours. Yellow – lemon, pink – rose, green or blue – peppermint.

The cut outs were small pastry cutters, continuing the childhood theme, the ones I used were actually ones that I have had since I was little, I used to use them with scraps of bread dough when Mum was making bread. On my last trip home I raided her kitchen cupboard and rediscovered them, thanks Mum for keeping them safe all this time!

The lettering was made with a DIY stamping kit that I bought at Birchall’s (newsagency), most big stationers would have something similar. The kit contains lots of individual rubber letter stamps, some stamp holders with parallel bars to slot the letters into, and a set of tweezers to help you pick up and position the letter stamps (they are about 2mm tall). So you can put together a stamp to say anything you want. I thought it would be nice to do some friends’ names. Great birthday or wedding present.

A word of warning, these are fragile when they have dried hard and are liable to break. Particularly packaged in the bags you have to be very careful with them.