A final festive post of 2017

Recipe of the week...
... Reindeer Christmas cupcakes

Ingredients: 225g butter, 175g caster sugar, 2 eggs, 200g self-raising flour, 2 tablespoons cocoa powder, 100ml milk, 150g dark chocolate, 2 tablespoons Irish cream liqueur (optional), 200g icing sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 24 white chocolate buttons, 6 glace cherries, and half a box of Matchmakers.

Makes: 12 Christmassy buns!

Time taken: 20 mins prep, 20 mins in the oven, half an hour to cool and then half an hour to decorate. (1hr 40mins total)

Hi readers,

It’s nearly Christmas!! We’re so near now! 3 sleeps to go and I’m beginning to get really excited! Are you??????????? SANTASCOMINGAHMAGAADDDDDDD!

And. On a not-so-hyperactive note, as this will be my last ChefBeHere blog post of the year, I’d just like to say thank you. To everyone who has been reading, been liking my posts, been mentioning my blog to others, been trying out the recipes at home… thank you for all your support!

I’d like to wish you all a very merry Christmas indeed. I hope we all have a safe, fun time celebrating with friends and family. And anyone who isn’t feeling so good this Christmas, or can’t spend it with friends and family, or if it feels like everyone on social media is having a bigger better time than you…

Everything is fine, and it’s going to be fine. Believe in yourself, take good care of yourself and 2018 will be the year for you. Talk to someone if you’re not so sure. I’m sending love.

Plus – obvs – I’m sending a recipe. One final festive recipe to see you through Christmastime! Here, readers, is one last ChefBeHere recipe of 2017… *drumroll please* … for Reindeer Christmas cupcakes! Based on a BBC Food recipe found here, they’re cute and easy to make and tasty and very very Christmassy!

Here’s the recipe in just ten simple steps…

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Recipe: Reindeer Christmas cupcakes

Ingredients: 225g butter, 175g caster sugar, 2 eggs, 200g self-raising flour, 2 tablespoons cocoa powder, 100ml milk, 150g dark chocolate, 2 tablespoons Irish cream liqueur (optional), 200g icing sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 24 white chocolate buttons, 6 glace cherries, and half a box of Matchmakers. 

1.     Whack on some Christmas tunes… tis the season! Get a drink of something mulled in your hand and take the time to enjoy yourself – simply have fun doing some baking.

2.     Heat the oven to 180C, line a muffin tray with 12 festive paper cases, and get all your ingredients out on the kitchen side.

3.     Melt 100g of your dark chocolate, either on the hob or in the microwave, and break your remaining 50g of dark chocolate up into pieces.  

ChefBeHere Top Tip: I say it every time but BE CAREFUL when melting chocolate – as it can very easily burn. Go slow and keep an eye on it at all times.

4.     Measure 100g of your butter and all of the caster sugar into a mixing bowl and cream together using a wooden spoon, until light-coloured and smooth.

5.     Gradually beat in your eggs, until well combined, and then sift your flour and cocoa powder into the bowl. Fold into the cupcake mix.

6.     Next, fold in the milk, your melted chocolate and Irish cream liqueur (if using), then spoon your cake mix into the muffin cases and carefully transport into the oven.

7.     Leave to bake for 20-25 minutes, or until well risen and lightly firm to the touch. Once they’re done, safely remove your buns from the oven and switch it off. Leave to cool on the side for at least half an hour.

8.     Once your buns feel cool to touch, melt the remaining chocolate and leave to cool for a few minutes. Meanwhile, in a mixing bowl, cream together the remaining butter, your icing sugar and vanilla extract. Fold in your melted chocolate and mix until smooth.

9.     To decorate the cupcakes, begin by chopping your glace cherries in half. Spread the cupcakes with icing and press half a glace cherry onto each cake as a nose, then two chocolate buttons on the cake as eyes.

10.  Use a tiny blob of melted chocolate to ice pupils on the button eyes, and then stick broken up Matchmakers in as the reindeers’ antlers… and you’re all done!

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What’s not to love about these Christmassy little cupcakes?? If you don’t like glace cherries, you can sub them for smarties or M&Ms. If you don’t like white chocolate, sub the buttons for sliced up marshmallows. If you don’t like Matchmakers, try pretzels or broken up bits of Curly Wurly.

If you don’t like chocolate or cupcakes or reindeers… you can piss right off and I’ll see you in January!! Merry Christmas everyone!

Celebrate safely,

Hayley

I finally got to use my
reindeer cupcake boxes - hurray!

CUPCAKE MISTAKE

Blueberry Cupcakes

Ingredients: 120g plain flour, 140g caster sugar, 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder, a pinch of salt, 100g butter, 120ml milk, 1 egg, a splash of vanilla extract, 300g icing sugar, 100g blueberry cream cheese, 150g blueberries.

Time taken: Probably an hour or so (without disaster management).

Hi readers,

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! To any Irish readers, I hope you’ve had a wonderful day and that you’ve been having a terrific time and wearing an array of oversized green shamrock hats. This is your day! One of the funnest national celebrations around. And here’s wishing that everybody today has had fun celebrating… safely. And that twenty one hours into the day all merrymakers are still able to hold a pint of Guinness with a sort-of steady hand!

Sadly, readers, St. Patrick’s falls this year amidst the big student migration home for Easter break. Bad timing! I’m staying here in Newcastle a little while longer but most folks by now are making the journey down south for a month-long study break. And so there hasn’t been anyone around today for me to raise a Baileys with! What a shame! Me and my Mother Bear will definitely have to correct this the next time I’m home. FO SHO.

But I’ve not had such a bad day, readers. I’ve been super productive sorting summer travel this’s and that’s. Plus, I write to you today HAVING SURVIVED a full weekend at work, which I’m still feeling good about. Mexican wave, everyone! I’m not usually one to complain… but Saturday and Sunday this week were utterly dreadful for me. Serving fast food is never a good job. In fact, it’s a very bad job. The work is tough and you face a constant battle against tiredness and intense boredom. You aren’t paid to be a human being, readers.

But also IN AN AIRPORT there are a disastrously high numbers of customers who don’t speak good English, can’t read the English written on menus and definitely can’t comprehend the mysterious British currency. A lot of customers are stressed and a good few drunk because they have to imminently board a plane. Which is a scary for them.

PLUS a staggering number of the customers are Irish men. And this weekend, slap bang just before St. Patrick’s… the Irish men were appalling. So drunk they didn’t know what to order, how to order, how to pay, what they’d ordered, what I was saying, or where we’d hid from them the FECKING STRAWS. It was a grim two days.

But I did it! More money in the Travel Fund and I live on! So, yesterday, I woke up knowing I didn’t have to get on the Metro to the airport and I was Mrs. SUNSHINE and RAINBOWS and BUTTERFLIES and HAPPINESS.  Literally, a good sleep and the prospect of freedom is the best thing. I woke up in top spirits, readers. Decided to go shopping for a little retail therapy then spent WAY MORE THAN I’D INTENDED TO. But this was ok. Treats are ok.

And Floss had me and our geography friend Alison over for tea and chatter in the evening. A liiiiiiiiiiiiiittle wine was consumed… THE VINO WAS FLOWING. And I spent a very lovely evening with friends. :)  Did I go empty handed over to Floss’s? No I did not! Readers, yesterday afternoon I GOT MY BAKE ON so I’d have something to take along with me later on to give to Floss.

The apron was on! Having formulated a fruity, Springy recipe to try out, I set about getting my bake on in the kitchen. The radio was on with me singing and dancing around the ChefBeHere kitchen… and everything went REALLY disastrously wrong.

Readers, I messed this one up! So, so bad. It was incredibly funny. Also TERRIBLE and I felt very bad for Floss and Alison because they had to eat my baking with smiles on their faces. But I did have a very funny time in the kitchen in the afternoon. Time spent trying to patch up my batch of SERIOUSLY tearaway cupcakes. You really cannot win every bake… no matter how hard you try! And in the end the cupcakes were still terrible but they were presentable. I took them over to the dinner party and inflicted them on my friends, who were very kind and reassuring. But… oh my word.

So, the following things went wrong with my baking:

1. I took a recipe for 12 cupcakes and decided to make 8 ‘big uns’ instead. This was a bad call. My mix rose in the oven and overflowed each muffin case. I had to use a knife to try and chop off the extra cake which had overflowed out of the cases. Never a good start.

2. I mixed blueberries into my cake mix before spooning this into muffin cases. Bad move again. The blueberries sank to the bottom of the cases in the oven, and gave my cupcakes very soggy bottoms.

3. I put too much cream cheese into my frosting and so I couldn’t get it to be firm. The frosting was really quite runny and it went EVERYWHERE. Especially, all over me.

The result was a batch of Blueberry Cupcakes which you could most definitely describe as ‘made with love’. We all have our off days, readers! Sometimes you have to make the most of a bad bake. I used cut-off bits of overflow cupcake as decorative sprinkling, in the end. Being creative. And these cupcakes did taste quite scrumptious. They just look as if a five year old made them.

SO ANYWAYS here I’ve taken the time to write out the recipe for Blueberry Cupcakes as it SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE. I imagine (and really hope) that if you follow these corrected steps you won’t hit disaster like I did. You’ll bake up a storm and will produce a wonderful batch of cupcakes – the ones which I’d imagined in my head, before disaster struck

Here’s how to PROPERLY bake your Blueberry Cupcakes, in just twelve easy steps…

1. Heat your oven to 170˚C.

2. Measure your flour, baking powder, salt and half of your butter into a large mixing bowl.

3. Beat together with a wooden spoon until the mix has a sandy consistency.

4. Then, add half of your milk to the mix. Stir this in so that your sand becomes pebbles.

5. Add your vanilla extract and your egg to the remaining half of your milk, and stir this up!

6. Pour your milky mix into the main bowl and stir your cupcake mix, until everything comes together and the mix is light and smooth.

7. Line a muffin tray with 12 cases (not 8, an entire 12 of them) and spoon your cupcake mix evenly between the cases.

8. Set 36 blueberries to one side. Pop the remaining blueberries into a bowl along with a teaspoon of plain flour. Gently stir your blueberries around in the bowl until they all become coated with flour.

9. Then, spoon a couple of blueberries into each muffin case until all of your floured blueberries are topping cupcake mix. Safely transport your tray of cupcakes into the oven to bake for 20-35 minutes.

10. Once the cupcakes are risen and golden brown (and a knife jabbed into the centre of one comes out with nothing but blueberry juice on it) then remove them from the oven.

11. Leave your cupcakes to cool a while inside the muffin tray.

12. Once your cupcakes are cool, you can make your frosting! This is simple – just add 300g icing sugar, 50g butter and 100g blueberry cream cheese to a bowl (Not 125g like I did. This was too much). And stir it up!

ChefBeHere Top Tip: You’re aiming to make a fairly firm frosting (NOT A RUNNY ONE) so if you need to add more icing sugar to the frosting then do this. Firm it up.

12. Use a knife to neatly top your cupcakes with blueberry frosting and then pop 3 blueberries on top of each cupcake to decorate them!

And that’s all there is to it! So simple that’s it’s more than A LITTLE embarrassing how badly my cupcakes turned out. Really, it was a fail. But oh well! Readers, I want to hear from you, can you make this recipe work?? Because I feel like this could work!! I didn’t make the magic it happen but I’m really sure that one of YOU CAN.

So go, go forth readers, and have a crack at this recipe. I dare you! Blueberry cupcakes (when baked correctly) should be the best thing ever and I had such bloody high hopes for them. I strongly believe that if you take a risk with this corrected recipe, you won’t regret it. Let me know how things go!!!

And risk safely,

Hayley