If We Only Have Cupcakes

 Our choir celebrated Spring in our recent concert, so I made some treats to serve after the show. I felt like being "crafty" and I wanted to feature all the lovely pansies growing in the back yard.  We had some bananas that were going soft, so I made chocolate banana cupcakes.

 For the icing, I used a combination of coconut oil and (dairy) butter. I have been reading that coconut oil is good for those who tend towards diabetes. The jury is still out on that matter, but I am intrigued at how coconut oil behaves at different temperatures. And yes, it does have the unctuous quality of good old-fashioned butter. I added lots of cocoa powder to the icing and just a bit of icing sugar. I put the icing in the fridge overnight and brought it up to room temperature to ice the cupcakes.

 The texture seemed to hold up, but the coconut tends to "weep" a bit into the paper. I wrote some of the lyrics from our songs onto flags along with "I love you" in several languages. I searched the kitchen for toothpicks to use for flag poles, but they were AWOL, so I went to my neighbor's house to see if she had some. She didn't have toothpicks, but was just about to compost some black bamboo twigs. "Why don't you use these?" Well, lots of toothpicks are made of bamboo anyway, so I cut them down and they worked perfectly! I present to you spring cupcakes with homemade toothpicks!

For Mom

As I was researching my talk for Stone Soup this weekend I realized how much my love of baking comes from my mom. My mom is a wonderful cook. I had a sweet tooth as a child. Still do. Mom allowed me complete freedom in the kitchen. She taught me the basics of baking and I taught myself to bake new things as soon as I could read cookbooks. Mom used to say I made better meringues than she did. I had beginner's luck and a naive fearlessness.

My mom made me fantastic birthday cakes. My childhood birthdays each had a theme.  My favourite was my Raggedy Anne cake made with coconut on the icing. Mom indulged my love of chocolate and she made really good cakes from scratch with farm eggs. Cake mixes were a joke to me. Who needs a mix for something as easy as a basic cake? In fact, cake mixes were an insult to the intelligent home baker. Icing in a tin was an abomination. Frozen Sarah Lee cakes were the Food of the Damned. We were country women and we baked from scratch.

Today sweet friend Catherine made some blackberry oatmeal squares from scratch in honor of Mother's Day which we ate in her dining room with whipped cream. She thickens frozen blackberries with cornstarch and cooks them down with brown sugar. Delicious!

Happy Mother's Day!

Sweet Sunday

 Sundays should be sweet, full of light and cups of tea drunken at leisure in a garden full of spring blossoms. I decided to make individual sticky toffee pudding cups inspired by Sticky, Chewy, Messy Gooey: Desserts for the Serious Sweet Tooth by Jill O' Connor. I picked up a copy in the library because I'm trying to keep my son interested in baking. He browsed the cookbook and said, "There's enough chocolate in that book to kill someone."

This is the first tea party of 2012 chez nous.

 

Tulips, forget-me-nots, rhodos, lilacs, strawberries, clematis, et al.

 Later in the afternoon we were invited over to Catherine and Dave's for Deana's awesome lemon meringue pie. Deana learned this recipe at cooking school and it is a classic, piled high withe ethereal egg whites and garnished with a lemon rose. Much ceremony is made over the cutting of the pie and a phone call to the chef confirmed it must be sliced all at once with a hot straight-edge knife.

Deana had learned to bake the proper way, weighing all the dry ingredients. She searched the neighborhood for a baking scale and ended up making the trip to Zellers to find a digital kitchen scale. Her attention to detail means she's got the makings of a serious baker. We are very lucky to taste the results of her work: tangy, creamy filling and the perfect flaky crust. Here's to more sweet Sundays!

Staycation Baking

After all my experiments with gluten free baking I had to go back and get a fix of baking with wheat flour. After all, it is Spring Break and my son won't eat most of the gf experiments. He requested we make Alton Brown's pretzel recipe which was a lot of fun.

I made some blood orange sticky buns and decided to use the dough recipe to make buns with saffron and cardamon. These remind me of my mom's Easter bread she bakes in coffee tins or braids and bakes with Easter eggs on top. My mom makes really good bread and buns.

I also made some lime curd which tastes good on the saffron buns. I find that making the curd with honey gives it a deeper flavor. I used honey infused with lemon verbena leaves.

My son loves muffins so I made a couple of batches. These are orange carrot chocolate chip. I like using and reusing those silicon cupcake "papers".

This morning I decided to make oatmeal cookies and I added one half cup of hemp hearts to the recipe. Next time I'd add some hazelnuts as well. Considering it snowed this morning, it's no wonder I am celebrating Spring with a baking marathon! Oh look, the sun has just come out. It's time to head out into the garden!

Pssst: Speaking of baking, check out Amy Jo Ehman's charming story of a bakery in a small prairie town called Consul, Saskatchewan. (You'll have to scroll down one post.)