Emily Loves Food

Sometimes we need a little piece of decadence. A cupcake-sized piece of decadence, to be exact.

These cupcakes are very pretty, very classy and would be perfect at high tea with some mini sandwiches and tiny fruit tarts. Except in that instance, it would probably be considered rude to eat them all.

The coffee cupcake recipe comes from my tried and true Crabapple Bakery cookbook – one of the original pioneers of the cupcake food fashion fad. It’s fluffy, soft, and deliciously light, though pairing coffee cupcake with coffee icing doesn’t appeal to me. For aesthetic purposes mainly. Coffee coloured cupcakes with coffee coloured frosting seems like a missed opportunity to make something a bit beautiful.

Plus, I have an ulterior motive.

We have to make a short film for class about our special place.

And, considering it’s only worth 6% of my final grade, I thought I’d feed a couple of birds with one cupcake and make some fresh new content for my wee blog.

So my special place is the kitchen. Don’t laugh. It’s better than boring shots of the back yard.

I have done next to no moving image stuff, so my plan was to use short quick cuts so that my shaky hand and amateurish focus-pulling isn’t thrown into light.

So take a look. It’s only 60 seconds.

Coffee Cupcakes with Baileys Buttercream - Makes 12

Prep time: 15 mins  Cook time: 18-20 mins

• 100g butter, softened
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 3/4 cup self-raising flour
• 1 tbs instant coffee powder
• 2 tbs boiling water
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

• 50g butter, softened
• 2 cups icing sugar
• 3 tbs Baileys Cream Liqueur

Preheat the oven to 180c and line a twelve hole muffin tray with appropriately coloured cupcake liners.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter for a few minutes until smooth and silky. Add the sugar, and cream for a further three minutes, til the mixture becomes light coloured and fluffy, and the sugar has almost disolved.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating for about a minute after each new addition until the mixture becomes voluptuous and moussey in texture. Add in the vanilla, and beat to combine.

In a separate bowl, dissolve the coffee in the boiling water and set aside.

Remove the bowl from the mixer, sift half of the flour onto the butter mixture, and fold in using a rubber spatula. Pour the coffee in, and fold that in too, finishing off with the last half of the flour and the baking powder. Be sure to only fold it until the mixture is just combined – overbeating will toughen your cuppies.

Finally, gently fold in the walnuts.

Divide the mixture between the cupcake cases, and bake in the oven for 18-20 mins, or until the tops are brown and springy and a skewer comes out clean.

Allow the cupcakes to cool on a wire rack before frosting.

To make the frosting:

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter, half of the icing sugar and baileys, gradually adding the remaining icing sugar until the desired consistency is reached.

Place in a piping bag, and pipe upward spirals of frosting on the cooled cupcakes.

As opposed to Skinny Lemon and Blueberry Muffins.

These little babies are pretty deluxe. Delicious dense lemony vanilla muffin, punctuated with berries, topped with a crunchy delicious stresuel topping.

Perfect comfort fare when paired with a cup of something warm on a wintery stormy morning.

Now, I must apologise for my lack of updates. I mean, it’s been 10 days since I last posted. And I don’t want you to think I’m not cooking – I am, but the winter nights get dark so early that by the time I’ve completed a delicious dinner, it’s far to dark for a decent photograph.

So it’s my daytime cooking that gets pushed into the spotlight in the winter, and seeing as I’m at uni during the day, stuff like muffins and slices take a bit of a back seat.

What’s more, I’ve had an unpleasant snuffle for the past wee while.

It’s because winter’s finally landed. It’s been freezing, and everyone’s getting sick. At work, at university, on the bus… it’s a constant chorus of coughs and sniffs and snuffles. Or which I am a contributor. Luckily, I got a free flu jab from my old work before I left, so I cashed it in at a local community doctor, which will hopefully stop any particularly nasty bugs getting in my system this winter.

But if they do, I’ll just do more baking. Muffins: the untold cure for the common cold!

Lemon and Blueberry Muffins - Makes 14

Prep time: 15 mins  Cook time: 25mins

• 100g softened butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• zest and juice of one large lemon
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• 2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen) + 3 tbs flour

• 20g butter, melted and cooled
• 2 tbs flour
• 2 tbs sugar
• 1/4 cup raw sugar (or something with similarly large grains)

Preheat the oven to 180c and line 14 muffin holes with appropriately coloured liners.

First prepare the topping by mixing the 20g cooled butter, 2 tbs of flour and sugar and 1/4 cup of raw sugar in a small bowl, until it’s crumbly and about the texture of couscous. If you find it’s to wet, add more sugar. To dry? Add a tiny bit more softened butter. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy – about 3 minites. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until voluptuous and moussey.

Mix in the vanilla essence, lemon zest and lemon juice.

Remove the bowl from the stand mixer, and fold in the flour and baking powder by hand. The mixture should be quite thick.

If you’re using frozen blueberries, in a separate bowl, coat them in the 3 tbs of flour. Remove with a slotted spoon (or your fingers) to avoid adding the excess flour at the bottom, and add to the muffin batter. Stir them in gently.

Pop a big dollop of the batter into each of the prepared muffin cases, and top with a rounded tsp of the streusel topping. Bake in the oven for 22-26 mins, or until a skewer comes out clean and they’re slightly golden around the edges.

Let them cool for a few minites before tucking in.

Recipe ever so slightly adapted from Gimme Some Oven

Coffee and Walnut Slice. Or Coffee and Walnut Bars. Depending on what corner of the world you’re from.

Either way, these are ridiculously easy. No bake, and ready in about 10 minutes if you don’t mind slightly sticky icing. The perfect accompaniment to a cup of tea in the afternoon. What’s even better is you probably have most of the ingredients begging to be used up in the back of your pantry – some vanilla wine cookies or similar, half a can of condensed milk, a bit of butter, and some instant coffee (I’m not relying on you having the walnuts as well – but one ingredient out of the whole recipe isn’t bad, right?).

For the last week or so I’ve been down at my batch (holiday home) on Lake Taupo. Unfortunately that brilliant sun I was raving about a few weeks past has turned north, and the cold weather is starting to bite. I had my electric blanket on – a commodity I simply can’t live without, because cold beds are simply the worst of all things – and about five heavy woolen blankets over the top. I’m wearing jeans and long sleeve shirts and shoes with socks on.

Oh, and my umbrella broke in the first windy-stormy-crazy-blustery attack of the season.

It’s an omen for a bad winter.

That being said, it’s still a nice shiny day outside my window this morning. Perfect weather for dog walking without getting sticky and sweaty after the first fifty meters. But I’m reaching here. I hate winter – always have, always will and I cannot wait for summer to roll round the corner again. Bring on November… or, more realistically, January. That’s only 9 months away.

Back on track with this slice though. It’s simple, classy and deceptively easy. When your guests bite into it, they’ll have no idea you whipped it up a quarter of an hour pior.

Because it sets reasonably hard, it’s also good for gift giving, though it will get a bit sticky if it warms up.

Coffee and Walnut Slice  – Makes 20-30 bars, depending on how big you cut them.

Prep time: 10 mins

• 125g butter
• 1/2 400g can sweetened condensed milk
• 250g milk arrowroot/vanilla wine cookies
• 2/3 cup roughly chopped walnuts

• 15g butter, softened
• 1 3/4 cups icing sugar
• 1 tsp instant coffee powder mixed with 2 tbs boiling water

Line a 16x26cm slice tin with baking paper.

In a food processor or similar whizzing instrument, blitz most of the cookies until they form a smooth meal. Take the reserved few, and break them up into pea-sized bits, tipping the whole lot into a large mixing bowl with the chopped walnuts.

In a small saucepan over a medium-low heat, melt together the butter and condensed milk until you have a lukewarm, consistant mixture. Pour this into the dry ingredients, mixing together until everything is equally coated and you don’t have any dry spots.

Press firmly into the slice tin, smoothing the surface with the back of a spoon and place in the freezer while you prepare the icing. (If you don’t want to prepare the icing immediately, place in the fridge.)

To make the icing, combine the butter, icing sugar and coffee into a smooth, spreadable buttercream. Too wet? Add more icing sugar. Too dry? Add more coffee.

Spread over the slice, and cllow to chill in the fridge for an hour (or the freezer for a few minutes if you’re in a hurry) before digging in.