Happy B-Day B.!!

Last Thursday was lil'sis b-day and off course I made cake. She demanded asked for a Cookies and Cream Cake, so Cookies and Cream Cake it was. And it had to look EXACTLY like this one. Yeah, she's kinda bossy...but it was her birthday so...

I have to admit that she did a great choice, though. This cake is amazing! So moist, and fluffy, and light. Not too sweet, just the way we like it. Perfect. The only change I made was to use whipped cream instead of buttercream. Oh, and I added crushed cookies to the filling. =D

PS.: Dec 1st was Ann's mother's birthday,too, so I'm also dedicating her this cake. Elaine, I hope you had an amazing day and have many more birthdays to come. Happy (belated) Birthday!! =)

~Ana

Cake

1 1/4 cups All-purpose Flour

2/3 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder (or Hershey's Special Dark)

1 1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 tsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Salt

3/4 cup Unsalted Butter

1 1/2 cups Sugar

1 tsp Vanilla

3 large Eggs, room temperature

1 1/4 cups Buttermilk

Frosting/Filling

600ml whipping cream

Sugar, to taste

Crushed Oreos - 4-5

For the cake:

1. Preheat oven to 350F/180ºC. Prepare two 8-inch cake pans with butter and flour.

2. Into a medium bowl, sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, salt. Set aside.

3. In the bowl of a standing mixer, or a large bowl using a hand held mixer, beat together the butter, sugar, and vanilla until light and fluffy. About 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until incorporated and scraping down sides as needed.

4. With mixer on low speed, add 1/3 of the dry ingredients, mix until incorporated. Then add 1/2 of the buttermilk, mix until incorporated. Repeat until the last 1/3 of flour has been used. Mix until incorporated and then beat for 1 additional minute. Batter might look curdled but it's okay.

5. Divide the batter evenly between the two prepared pans. Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and the sides begin to pull away from the edges. Allow to cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Turn the cakes out onto the racks and allow the cakes to cool completely. I used just one 9-inch cake pan and baked for aprox. 1 hour.

For the filling:

1. Beat  2/3 of the whipping cream and sugar until soft peaks form. 

2. Fold in crushed Oreos.

For the frosting:

1. Beat remaining whipping cream - with sugar to taste- until stiff peaks form.

Cake Assembly:

1. When the cakes are completely cool, cut each cake in half  horizontally. Use 1/3-1/2 cup of frosting to fill between each layer. When all the layers are stacked, set aside 1/2 cup of frosting then use rest to frost the outside.*

2. Using a ziploc bag and a rolling pin, crush all but 7 of the Oreo cookies. Apply the cookie crumbs to the sides of the cake*

3. Use the reserved 1/2 cup of frosting to create 7 swirls on the top of the cake, place a cookie in each swirl.

*I assembled the cake inside the cake pan and left covered with foil overnight in the fridge. Next day, I used a foam plate, smaller than the cake pan, as a base - you can use a cardboard wrapped in plastic wrap; inverted the cake, frosted with whipped cream - spreading a thick layer on top.

Now comes the hard part: using a spatula, try to lift the cake, together with the cardboard, and slide it into your palm. Be careful not to lift too much or the cake will tumble. Follow step 2. I find it easier and less messy to do this step with a rectangle pan or parchment paper underneath, or else you will end up with cookie crumbs all over your kitchen. Set on a nice cake plate. 

Recipe taken from Sunny Side Up in San Diego, that adapted from Family Circle Magazine, February 2009.

=B

Cream Cheese

I was feeling kind of lazy in doing any major baking this week, so I wanted to make something that would not be so much work, just mix, put it in the pan, and bake. Since this week was about cream cheese, I went to Kraft's Philadelphia Cream Cheese website, where it holds hundreds of recipes and meal ideas. From that site I found Oreo Mini Cheesecake. It was easy to make, and does not take much effort to do, which was great. The web site's intention is to encourage consumers to use their products in their recipes, but generic brands are just as good to use in this recipe. I've changed the ingredients and the directions a bit, but to get the original recipe just visit http://www.cookingwithphiliy.ca/

-Ann

Oreo Mini Cheesecake

2 package (250g each) brick cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla (optional)

12 Oreo Cookies (or any other chocolate sandwich cookies)

3 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate (I used semi-sweet chocolate chips,) melted

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Beat cream cheese and sugar in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Add eggs, one at a time, beating on low speed. Add vanilla and continue to blend.

2. Place 1 cookie in bottom of each of 12 paper-lined muffin cups. Fill evenly with batter.

3. Bake 20 minutes or until centres are almost set. Cool. Refrigerate 3 hours or overnight. Drizzle with melted chocolate.

~Serves 12

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I am a passion fruit freak so of course I enjoyed these little squares. They are creamy and tangy. Yum, yum! To give an extra tanginess to them I made a passion fruit syrup ( In a small saucepan, add 100ml of concentrated passion fruit juice, plus 1 1/2 tablespoon sugar and a tiny amount of water -1/2 tablespoon. Cook over medium heat until it thickens. Let it cool down a little and drizzle over the squares.).

Taken from here.

-Ana

Passion Fruit Cheesecake Squares

250g plain sweet cookies

180g unsalted butter, melted

250g ricotta cheese

250g cream cheese, softened

½ cup (100g) caster sugar

1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest

3 eggs

¾ cup (180ml) passion fruit pulp - I used concentrated passion fruit juice

Directions

Place the cookies in the bowl of a food processor and process until they resemble fine breadcrumbs - mine weren't so fine. Add the butter and mix to combine. Press the mixture into the base of a 20x30cm lightly greased rectangular pan lined with baking paper. Refrigerate for 30 minutes or until firm and cold.

Preheat the oven to 160ºC/320ºF. Place the ricotta, cream cheese, caster sugar and lemon zest in the bowl of a food processor and process until smooth – I used an electric mixer.

Gradually add the eggs, processing well after each addition. Fold through the passion fruit pulp and pour mixture over the base. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until set - mine took 55 minutes (!!), maybe because I had a thicker layer of cream.

Allow to cool completely; carefully slice to serve.

~Serves 8, or more.

This week we decided to make cupcakes. It was kind of a bittersweet event because this week is Ana’s last week living with me (Ann) before she’s off to her new home. Ana loves, loves, loves cupcakes! Just utter the word and it will totally make her day. For the past four months or so, we’ve talked about cupcakes, eaten cupcakes at cupcake bakeries, watched TV shows of people making cupcakes, but we’ve never actually made our own until now. We thought that this week we would play it safe and use a simple recipe, and voila, Cookies and Cream cupcakes became our recipe of choice. Not only are these cupcakes easy to make, but are great to make if you feel upset and need to let out some stress - there’s serious cookie crushing involved. You’ll have fun making them - we promise!

Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

The recipe that we used to make the cupcakes comes from Patricia Scarpin’s blog, Technicolor Kitchen; Her recipe is actually a cake recipe which she got from a book called Whimsical Bakehouse: Fun –to-Make Cakes that Taste as Good as They Look! by Kaye Hansen. The ingredients and directions are taken exactly from Scarpin’s blog. The changes that we made to the recipe are written in italics.

Ingredients

170g (1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 ½ cups (300g) sugar

4 large egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 ½ cups + 2 tablespoons (370g) cake flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

A generous pinch of salt (optional)

1 cup + 2 tablespoons (270ml) milk


Yield: Two dozen cupcakes

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180⁰C/350⁰F.
2. Line two muffin trays with paper cups.
3. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
4. Using an electric mixer, or in our case a bowl and a wooden spoon, beat the butter and sugar at high speed until light and fluffy. Add the yolks and vanilla and beat on medium speed until fluffy.
5. At low speed, add the dry ingredients, alternately with the milk, beating until incorporated.
6. Take about 10-15 Oreo cookies and using a knife, remove the cream, and please do not directly lick the cream off the cookies…after all people will be eating them. Place the cookies into a freezer bag, and using a rolling pin, mallet, or any other object used to whack stuff, bang on the bag until the cookies are crumbs.
7. Add the cookie crumbs into the batter and mix at low speed.
8. Using an ice cream scoop, fill muffin trays.
9. Bake for about 15-20 minutes. Or check by poking one of the cupcakes with a knife, if there isn’t any batter on the knife then it’s ready.

Cookies and Cream Icing 

450ml (very cold) heavy cream

3 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. In a bowl of an electric mixer at high speed, whip the cream, sugar, and vanilla until stiff. This can also be done by hand with a bowl and whisk.
2. Scoop in an icing pipe bag, and decorate your cooled cupcakes. Sprinkle the remaining cookies onto of the cupcakes.

Ann’s Thoughts

So when we decided to get the ingredients for this cupcake recipe, I volunteered to get the cake flour. The brand that I always buy is Brodie XXX Cake Flour, which also contains baking powder and salt. The thing is that because this is the only cake flour that I buy I’ve always assumed that all cake flour has baking powder and salt, so when Ana and I were mixing the ingredients together I mentioned that it was kinda funny that we’re already adding more baking powder when the cake flour already has baking powder. Ana gave me this look of shock and exclaimed “The cake flour already has baking powder?! I had no idea!”

Well apparently cake flour doesn’t normally have baking powder and salt added. I just checked online, and what makes cake flour, well cake flour, is that it contains low wheat protein which make it more fluffier than all purpose flour (I Wiki-ed it.) So here we were with a batch of cake batter with double, maybe triple the amount of baking powder than we needed. I don’t know, but we’ve got some issues with baking powder (see last week’s post). Despite that, I was more confident in this recipe, and ya know what? They turned out really good, as you can tell by the lovely pics taken by Ana, and they tasted even better.

Ana’s Thoughts

This week things worked out pretty well. Even our little mistake turned out to be a good one. I have to agree with Ann, I think the extra baking powder made the cupcakes even better =). I can say that because I’ve already made this cake once with the exact amount of baking powder and the result was a dense and heavy cake, plus I didn’t mix crushed Oreos into the batter. Not that it was bad, don’t get me wrong, it was delicious and I think I ate fiv…more slices than I should have =O but this cupcakes..oh my…so light and airy and with bits of Oreos throughout the batter... Pure heaven! The whole process was pretty straightforward and simple, and the final result was so, so good. What are you waiting for? Run for the kitchen and do it right now! I bet you have all the ingredients in your pantry. ;)

See you next week!


Receita em Português:
Nós retiramos a receita dos cupcakes daqui. A única coisa que modificamos foi acrescentar os biscoitos na massa e assá-los em formas de muffins. =)