It's been a very long time...

For some reason, the idea to make a tiramisu occurred to me over Christmas, so I got stuff in for it. I've only got one recipe for tiramisu, which I'm fairly sure is a Prue Leith recipe from the Good Book, so it's the same recipe as the last time - which apparently was all the way back in 2009! As ever, I left out the wine, and was somewhat short on sponge fingers because apparently the Sainsbury's pack of sponge fingers that "serves 30" only came with 26 in it. Apparently having an entire sponge finger would be excessive...

Here it is just before going into the fridge. It turns out that not only do I still have the tupperware container that I used the last time, but I remembered that it was the perfect size for this tiramisu!

Simple cherry muffins

I don't get to bake as often as I used to, but sometimes you just wake up and feel like baking. Today was one of those days. I thought I'd try to use up the frozen cherries that we have had sitting in the freezer for far too long, so cherry muffins sounded like a good idea. I'm cribbing this recipe, which just happened to be one of the first few search results.

Simple Cherry Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 Egg
• 120g Vegetable oil
• 155g Milk
• 1-2tbsp* Vanilla extract
• 300g Plain flour
• 3tsp Baking powder
• 100g Caster sugar
• 205g Frozen cherries

Method

1. Mix the egg, oil, milk and vanilla together.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the flour, baking powder and sugar together.
3. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.
4. Fold in the frozen cherries
5. Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180C for ~25 mins.

*I didn't bother measuring this, so I don't know how much vanilla I actually used. I was pretty heavy handed with it though!

One small snag was that I didn't have a suitable cupcake/muffin tin. I had an idea though (which might end up being an awful one), which was that if I crammed the cases together on a normal baking tray, they'd push up against each other as they expanded and they'd support each other. So goes the theory anyway - we might just end up with it taking ages to bake in the centre because of the proximity. In any case, this is what they looked like going in to the oven.

You know, it kinda worked! They're all weird shapes as a result, but I kinda like that. The ones in the centre were looking rather a lot paler than the ones at the edges though, so after taking this photo, I took the edge ones off the tray and put the inner ones back in for another few minutes.

It's an awful photo, but here's the finished result. I couldn't quite get them onto a single layer on the plate...

And of course, the verdict - pretty good overall. They're not the most exciting muffins ever, but they're nice. They're also not overly sweet, which is usually my concern when trying a random recipe that I've just found online; in actual fact, I'd say that these are nicely balanced. Nothing to write home about perhaps, but they go very well with a cup of tea!

Birthday cinnamon rolls

It's Rich's 75th this week, and there's a big party planned for the weekend. I said that I'd bake something for it, and a request was made for cinnamon rolls, so that's what I'm doing! I'm doing a double-batch this time around. It's essentially the normal recipe as far as ingredients goes - I used ~120ml spiced rum and ~180ml white rum to soak the raisins, and substituted a small amount of the caster sugar in the filling with dark soft brown sugar (mostly to use up the bag of it). I also ran out of raisins (which, let's face it, are basically the same as sultanas anyway), but discovered that cheap mixed fruit is just a mixture of raisins and mixed peel, so I spent a ridiculous 10 minutes picking raisins out of a bag of mixed fruit to make up the difference.

The real change to the recipe this time around is that, in order to make the timings work, I'm going for an overnight proof. After forming and cutting the rolls, I've popped each of the trays of cinnamon rolls in a bin bag to prevent them drying out, and put them in the fridge. I'll get them out of the fridge in the morning, and give them a few (hopefully around 3) hours to warm up to room temperature, then egg wash, bake and finish as normal. Fingers crossed that this works!

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And a quick addition from the next day - looks like it wasn't harmed by the overnight proof. They got just shy of 3 hours at room temperature before going into the oven, and while I would have liked to have got a little bit more of a rise before they went in, they're not looking bad. Here they are post egg-wash about to go in:

Straight from the oven, they're looking as good as usual!

¡ǝlddɐǝuᴉԀ

 It's a bank holiday, and I'm not teaching for once! The weather's a bit crap too, so it's a perfect opportunity to bake something. For no reason other than the fact that I saw it online and it looked good and easy, I'decided to go for this pineapple upside-down cake from King Arthur Baking, with only very minor substitutions for what ingredients I had.

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Ingredients

For the topping

• 57g Butter
• 106g Soft dark brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp Ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp Ground ginger
• 1 large tin (425g) Pineapple slices
• 7 Frozen cherries 

For the cake

• 43g Butter
• 149g Granulated sugar
• 1 Egg
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 3/4 Baking powder
• 1 tsp Vanilla extract
• 150g Plain flour
• 113g Milk

Method

1. Melt the butter for the topping.
2. Mix in the dark brown sugar, cinnamon and ginger.
3. Spread over the base of a greased cast iron skillet*.
4. Arrange the pineapple slices and cherries over the top.
5. Cream the butter for the cake and granulated sugar together.
6. Beat in the egg, salt, baking powder and vanilla.
7. Mix in the plain flour and milk, alternating a little at a time, to form a relatively thick batter.
8. Spoon over the toppings.
9. Bake at 190C for ~30 mins until a skewer comes out clean.
10. Remove from oven and wait 3 minutes.
11. Invert onto a plate and wait 30s before lifting the pan off.

*I think I've got a 10 inch skillet

Here's the topping at the end of step 4:

And here's the cake ready for the oven. The layers are both fairly thin, but I did get full coverage on both.

It released cleanly from the pan! Looks pretty darned good in my opinion.

This one surprised me with how good it was overall. The cake part is rather bland and boring, but it's thin enough that it doesn't really matter. But the topping is lovely - rather sweet, but again thin enough not to be overwhelming. For the low effort required, this cake is really rather good!