Peanut Butter & Chocolate Rolls

by giraffescanbake // February 7, 2014 // 3 Comments

A perfect excuse to have peanut butter and chocolate for breakfast!

After I made the super easy cinnamon rolls I was itching to make them again, they were so good and so quick to bash out they had to be done again. This time I decided to mix things up and fill them with peanut butter and chocolate instead of cinnamon. Sweet and salty perfection!

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of chocolate with peanut butter which is blasphemy to some of you I’m sure. I overdosed on peanut butter m&ms once when I was teenager and I just haven’t enjoyed it the same since. So who knows what made me decide to make these but I’m glad I did. They were super yummy without the peanut butter filling being too overwhelming.

I used the same dough recipe I did on the cinnamon rolls, it’s wonderfully fluffy and rises beautifully with only one proving time needed. What more do you want from a sweet roll dough? I’ll include the recipe for the dough in this post so you don’t have to flip between recipes, I don’t want to delay your sweet roll gratification even a millisecond! Just pop the filled and cut rolls in a warm place (I heat an oven to 150C, turn it off and put the rolls in) for 60 minutes and you’re good to go!

Look at that rise after just 60 minutes!

They’re filled with a yummy mixture of creamy peanut butter and brown sugar, which is a much more satisfying filling that peanut butter fillings made with icing sugar. Then sprinkled with semi-sweet chocolate chips, you can use milk chocolate if you wish but personally I think peanut butter goes best with a more bittersweet chocolate. Roll it up and cut it into even slices and place in your dish! Once you’ve let them rise (see above), they just need baking for 25 minutes.

It’s not quite time to gobble them all up yet, you have to glaze them first. I used a simple chocolate glaze which is lovely and satiny, just chocolate, corn syrup (boo, hiss I know but what you gonna do) and butter made in a double boiler. I’ve seen some people use cream cheese frosting for it, which sounds a bit odd to me but whatever floats your boat. Drizzle it on while the rolls are still hot!

How awesome is this copper double boiler I got for christmas?! Love it!

Now you can dig in and eat as many as you can handle! Feel free to share if you’re feeling nice and if you can’t eat them all at once, just cover them with cling film and stick in the microwave for 30 seconds before eating one!

[recipe title=”Peanut Butter & Chocolate Rolls” time=”2hr 30mins”]
For the rolls:

345g all-purpose flour
3 tbsp white sugar
1 tsp salt
1 package instant yeast (1 packet = 7g)
120ml water
60ml milk
40g unsalted butter
1 large egg

For the filling:

150g brown sugar
250g creamy peanut butter
175g semi-sweet chocolate chips

For the glaze:

80g semi-sweet chocolate ships
1/2 tbsp corn syrup
25g unsalted butter

Make the dough

Set aside 75g of the flour. Then toss the remaining flour, sugar, salt and yeast together in a big bowl. Set aside
Put the water, milk and butter in a bowl and microwave until the butter is melted and mixture is hot, about 45 degrees C. Stir the butter mixture into the flour mixture until combined. Stir in the egg and enough of the reserved flour to make a soft, smooth dough. The dough is ready when it comes away from the side of the bowl and is elastic in consistency.
Lightly flour your worktop and knead the dough for about 5 minutes. Place in a lightly greased bowl and leave it to rest for about 10 minutes.
Roll the dough into a 14 x 8 inch rectangle

Make the filling and bake

Stir together the brown sugar and peanut butter and spread evenly over the dough, going right up to the edges
Sprinkle on the chocolate chips
Roll up length ways and cut into even slices
Place in light greased 9×9 dish, cover loosely with foil and place in a warm, draught free place for 60-90 minutes
Remove risen rolls from the oven (if proving in there) and preheat the oven to 190C/375F and bake for 25 minutes or until they have gone a light golden colour

Make the glaze and eat!

Put the chocolate, corn syrup and butter in double and stir until melted.
Drizzle over the still hot rolls
Serve warm and enjoy!

[/recipe]

Bring The Fun Back Into Baking!

by giraffescanbake // January 15, 2014 // No Comments

I love making yummy treats and pretty cakes that take days to perfect, but baking should also be fun! Sometimes I get too caught up in making everything look right that I forget I’m supposed to enjoy this, that’s normally when I end up going weeks without baking. This evening I went back to just having fun while baking and it was so good to not worry about the tiniest little things that may mess up how the cake looks, I didn’t worry about anything at all in fact. This evening I had my nephew over and helped him bake his birthday cake!

He turns 11 on Friday and normally I bake their cakes. But I had promised Jordon he could come bake with me one day, so he came and baked his own birthday cake. He did most of the work which seems like a cop out on my part, but we had a lot of fun and he was very pleased with the result. Honestly, I think this was much more exciting for him than just getting a good looking cake based on his interests like what his brothers got (well, semi-good looking. My fondant skills are still developing haha). I encourage you all to help a loved one (either a kid or baking impaired adult haha) bake their own cake, they’ll probably end up appreciating it much more!

So, today I’m giving you a lesson on how to bring the fun back into baking.

Step #1

Pre-measure the ingredients before you start. Once it’s done it’s done and then there’s nothing getting in the way of baking fun!

Step #2

Go crazy with colour! Who cares if it’s not along some particular theme or even if they go together, just pick your favourite colours and run with it!

Step #3

If you can’t decide between frosting flavours, do them all!

Vanilla?

Or chocolate?

Both! (and don’t forget those colours)

Step #4

Pile on the frosting, there’s plenty of time to worry about cavities tomorrow!

Step #5

Go wild with decorations! Why limit yourself? There’s no such thing as too much bling!

Step #6

Admire your creation. But not for too long, you don’t want to waste good eating time!

Step #7

Eat it!

Um, I don’t have photos of this step because by the time we were done it was already 30 minutes past his bed time (with a 20 minute drive back to his house) and I wasn’t about to feed him all that sugar so late on a school night, have him bouncing off the walls all night and face the wrath of my heavily pregnant with twins sister! Have fun guys, but be sensible haha!

Step #8

This is the most important step and is actually the second part of every step above: Have fun and don’t worry! Trust me, I know a lot of fun and enjoyment can come from creating beautiful baked delights, but every once in a while let your hair down and just do it for the fun of it. And, even better, show somebody else why you love doing this and how much fun it can be!

Time for bed for this baker, all that fun has worn me out! See ya later kiddos and don’t forget to lick the spoon when you’re done!

Quick and Easy Chocolate Mousse

by giraffescanbake // January 11, 2014 // 2 Comments

What do you when you have 15 egg yolks laying around? Make chocolate mousse of course!

I love most things meringue based, so while all these egg whites are living full and delicious (yet short) lives, the egg yolks are left to wallow in their unfulfilled destinies.

So if you’re anything like me you often have a lot of egg yolks laying around and nothing to do with them. There are plenty of things you make with egg yolks; crème pâtissière, custard, crème brûlée, mayonnaise, hollandaise etc. I wanted something nice and easy that could be eaten by itself (and wouldn’t require a chef’s torch!), and that’s where the mousse came in.

I used a Martha Stewart recipe for this, but slightly adapted as I didn’t have as much cream as I thought I did and I had less chocolate (I was also going for a recipe that I didn’t have to buy anything for, it was 9pm after all). Despite the lack of cream and less chocolate it was still the richest chocolate mousse I have ever eaten, I could only eat a few spoonfuls!

Ingredients:

4 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
300ml double cream
170g dark chocolate (min 60% cocoa solids), melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Whisk the egg yolks, 2 tablespoons sugar and 150 double cream in a medium saucepan. Heat over a medium/low heat, stirring constantly for 3-4 minutes, do not boil. Remove from heat and strain into a bowl. Whisk in melted chocolate and vanilla. You’ll end up with a custardy consistency. Chill until cooled.

With an electric mixer, beat remaining cream and sugar together until stiff peaks form. Stir 1/3 of the whipped cream into the cool custard mixture, and then every gently fold in the rest of the the cream with a rubber spatula.

Spoon into serving dishes, cover and chill for at least 30 minutes before serving.

And voila! Your egg yolks have new meaning and can die satisfied!

Black Forest Pavlovas

by giraffescanbake // January 6, 2014 // 2 Comments

Yummy single serving meringue desserts from down under!

Happy New Year everybody! I hope this year is your best one yet, I know it’s going to be mine! My first post of 2014 is going to be the dessert I made for Christmas day. It wasn’t actually eaten on Christmas day because I had work and then there were presents and dinner so by the time I finished baking it was 10:30pm! But they were enjoyed on Boxing Day.

Pavlova actually originated in Australia (or possibly New Zealand, I think they still argue over that). There are three good things to come out of Australia, they are: Heath Ledger, Chris Hemsworth and Pavlova. Since Heath Ledger is dead (sad face) and Chris Hemsworth is married, I’ll have to settle for eating pavlova! I actually only discovered that pavlova was Australian fairly recently, it’s always been a very British dessert in my head, probably because we eat it a lot and Eton Mess is basically a smashed up pavlova! This favourite dessert of mine consists of three main ingredients; meringue, fruit and cream. And it is open to so many different variations, you could never get bored with it!

Black Forest, on the other hand, is German. It started with a dessert called Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte in Black Forest, Germany and eventually worked it’s way into my heart as my favourite ever cake! It consists of chocolate, cherries, cream and kirsch (a cherry liquor) and it is divine. If you’re European you no doubt grew up eating it, if you’re not European then you may never have even tried it. If that’s the case, get down to your nearest quality bakery and get something that’s black forest flavoured, you can thank me later!

While Black Forest cake is my favourite cake, pavlova is my favourite dessert. So I have no idea why it took me so long to mix the two together, perhaps I was afraid of too much pleasure at once! Either way, it was a great Christmas present to myself I must say! This is a slightly sobered version of true Black Forest though as I could not find Kirsch for the life of me. I also could not find black cherries (I swear there’s a cherry embargo on me, whenever I try to buy them in any form I can’t), I did managed to find black cherry pie filling though and it actually worked really well even if it was a bit of a cheat!

[recipe title=”Black Forest Single Serving Pavlovas” servings=”12″ time=”Approx 3 hours”]

Ingredients

For the meringue:

8 egg whites
400g granulated sugar
2 tablespoons good quality cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the topping:

500m double cream
2 tablespoons good quality cocoa powder
1 can black cherry pie filling
Dark chocolate curls*
Dark chocolate shavings**

* To make chocolate curls, run a clean potato cleaner peeler down the edge of a bar of chocolate.

** To make chocolate shavings, use a microplane or fine grater

To make the meringue

Preheat oven to 220C/430F/Gas 7. Line baking sheets with baking paper.

Separate your eggs and make sure you don’t get any yolk in your egg whites as it will prevent them from foaming up properly. You also need to make sure your equipment is grease free.

Beat your egg whites until stiff. Then slowly add sugar one tablespoon at a time and add the vanilla, keep beating at a medium speed until it forms stiff peaks. If you want to test they are stiff enough, turn the bowl upside down, if they stay you’re good! Obviously be careful as you do this in case they’re not stiff enough! Sift the cocoa powder into the raw meringue and gently fold in. You don’t want to fully incorporate the cocoa powder, you want to leave streaks (or not, it’s your life man).

Now you need to get your meringues formed on the baking sheet. Personally, I like to pipe them on, I find I can get them more evenly sized and better circles. Do it however feels easiest for you though. I piped 6 rounds per baking sheet (it makes 12 total), starting in the middle and circling out. Then I use the back of a spoon to create a well in the centre for all the filling to go in. I also use the back of the spoon to rough up the tops, you don’t want them to look piped, pavlova meringue is supposed to have a messy kind of look to it.

Place meringues in the oven and immediately turn the temperature down to 120C/240F/Gas. Bake for 50 minutes or until meringues are starting to go slightly golden on edges (try not to open the oven if you can help it though). Turn the oven off and leave the meringues in there until the oven has cooled.

To make the filling

Beat the cream with cocoa powder until stiff peaks form. Spoon scream into the middle of the cold meringues. Spoon over the cherry filling and top with the chocolate curls and shavings. Nice and simple.

If you’d like to make your own cherry and sauce mix it’s pretty simple. You need a large jar of morello cherries or even black cherries in kirsch or syrup. Drain the cherries, saving the syrup/kirsch. Set aside the cherries. Heat the syrup in a pan over medium heat and reduce it down to a honey consistency (5-10 minutes). Stir in the cherries and heat for a couple more minutes. Spoon over the top of the cream and meringue. You can also do the the cherries and syrup separately but I prefer mine to be all kinda mushed together! If you’d like to add real kirsch, add it to the syrups are you’re heating it. If using black cherry pie filling, mix a couple tablespoons of kirsch in with it before you spoon it over the meringues.

Enjoy.
[/recipe]

This recipe was adapted from Tanya Zouev’s Black Forest Pavlova with Espresso Cream

Profiteroles with Warm Chocolate Sauce

by giraffescanbake // October 23, 2013 // 16 Comments

Light and airy choux pastry buns filled with crème pâtissière and smothered in warm chocolate sauce. Simple enough for a treat after a family dinner, elegant enough for a dinner party dessert!

When I think profiteroles I think dessert at my nan’s house, so they bring up lots of good childhood memories. Even without the attached memories, I LOVE profiteroles. But for some reason it’s taken me until the ripe old age of 27 to try making them myself. I’m not a big pastry maker, I’m firmly in the “you don’t need to make your own pastry” cop out camp. Choux pastry is a different matter though, I can’t store buy that (I don’t think I’d want to either). I was a little intimated by the idea but after being assured it was a lot easier than it looked I took the jump!

I used Gordon Ramsay’s profiterole recipe because he gives me heart eyes and when I stumbled across his recipe, how could I not give that one a go? You can find his original recipe here, I however didn’t fill mine with chantilly cream because creme patissiere is always better let’s be honest. When I told my mum I was using creme patissiere (which is literally pastry cream in English btw) instead of fresh cream she was disappointed, but after trying my profiteroles she saw the light! And the warm chocolate sauce is beautifully rich, I recommend making a big batch up and using it for everything (I still have some I’m trying to find an excuse to use!). Gordon’s recipe wasn’t too helpful with baking time either, it wasn’t until my 3rd tray that I got them to bake properly all the way through!

This bake was actually part of my belated Great British Bake Off challenge for pastry week. Yes, it’s taken me this long to make this post! The Great British Bake Off is over now and although my favourite didn’t win, I enjoyed this series a lot, it’s around this time I’m tempted to apply (by the time the next series comes around I’m always glad I didn’t!) The profiteroles were my last bake along, it was a very short lived challenge, although I am tempted to give Charlotte Royale a go after French week!

Let’s get down to business shall we?

Ingredients

For the choux pastry:

125ml milk
200ml cold water
150g plain flour
1 tsp golden caster sugar
½ tsp salt
100g unsalted butter
4 medium eggs, lightly beaten

For the creme patissiere:

500ml whole milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
6 medium egg yolks
75g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
25g plain flour
20g cornflour

For the warm chocolate sauce:

200g good quality dark chocolate (about 70% cocoa solids)
30g unsalted butter
3 tbsp clear honey
125ml whole milk

Method

Preheat the oven to 200C/390F/Gas 6. A properly preheated oven is very important to get your pastry to bake properly. Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

To make the choux buns, sift the flour into a bowl and set aside. Pour the milk, water, salt and sugar into a pan and gently heat on low, once the sugar and salt has all dissolved add the butter. Once all the butter has melted, bring the mixture to a rolling boil and remove from heat. Pour in the flour and beat with a wooden spoon, when the mixture starts to come away from the side of the pan, stop beating and tip onto a plate cool. Your mixture will probably look a bit like mashed potato at this point!

Once it’s cool (make sure it’s completely cool or your mixture will be too runny) return the mixture to the pan and gradually beat in the eggs a little at time, mixing well between each addition until you have a smooth paste.

Spoon the pastry into a piping bag fitted with a large plain nozzle. If you don’t have any nozzles, buy some they’ll come in handy, but for not you can just snip off the end of the bag to get a circle hole, you need the hole to be about 1.5cm in diameter. Pipe a small blob of pastry under each corner of the greaseproof paper on your baking sheet, this will help keep it in place while you pipe the buns. Pipe balls onto the baking sheet, about 3cm in diameter, spaced well apart. Level the tops slightly with the tip of your finger, wet your finger a little first to stop the pastry sticking to you! Bake at 200C/390F/Gas 6 for 10 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 175C/350F/Gas 4 and bake for 20 more minutes until well risen and golden brown. Remove from the oven and poke a small hole in each bun (this will let any steam out and stop your buns going soggy), transfer to wire rack and leave to cool completely.

To make the creme patissiere, put the milk and vanilla in a heavy bottomed saucepan and bring to the boil (make sure you have a large pan, milk increases A LOT in size when it boils) and simmer very gently for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool for 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, whisk together the egg yolks and caster sugar until they turn a pale yellow. Then whisk in both flours. Pour on the milk, whisking constantly, then pour back into the pan. Make sure you always pour the hot milk/cream into cold eggs when making pastry creams, if you do it the other way you’re in danger of scrambling the eggs!

Whisking constantly to avoid lumps, bring back to the boil over a medium heat and cook for 1 minute. Pour the mixture into a bowl. Sprinkle the surface with a light dusting of caster sugar to prevent a skin from forming and leave to cool completely.

Spoon the crem pat into a piping bag fitted with a small nozzle (this is where you really do need a nozzle or you’re gonna have to fiddle around with poking a hole in the bottom of the buns separately!). Poke the nozzle gently into the bottom of one of the buns and pipe in the cream until it is filled. Repeat for all buns. If your cream is thick enough (and it should be) it will stay in the bun just fine.

To make the warm chocolate sauce, break the chocolate into small pieces and put in a heatproof bowl, place the bowl over a pan of simmering water and heat. Add the butter and honey, stirring occasionally until the chocolate is melted. Gradually whisk in the milk until you have a smooth sauce and warm through. Drizzle the sauce of the cream filled profiteroles, serve and be the most popular person at the party/dinner/night alone in your pjs/mother in the office.

Don’t let me even worse than usual photography skills put you off attempting these, they barely take any time at all and people will think you’ve spent hours in the kitchen slaving away!

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