Cheery Cherry Cupcakes and Fat Bottoms

I recently got Susannah Blake's Cupcakes book and have been making many scrumptious recipes from it. I especially liked these lemon meringue cupcakes which have lemon curd in the middle and are topped with meringue. Needless to say they didn't last very long. I've been reading a lot of Donal Skehan's lovely blog recently with all it's great tasty recipes. He has a recipe for Christmas Cupcakes which I must try before the festive season.

Speaking of which last year the Fat Bottomed Santa made his majestic journey around our house at christmas time. This year with all the cutbacks in the house and the recession I have to say I was worried if he'd show up at all. I needn't have worried because the Fat Bottomed Santa is much more resourceful than that. He showed up for the first time today with some cherry almond cupcakes he'd made. They're very tasty and he even left me a recipe.

Cherry Almond Cupcakes

115g Margarine or Butter

115g Golden Caster Sugar

95g Self Raising Flour

20g Ground Almonds

1tsp Vanilla Essence

1-2 tbsp Milk

2 Eggs

Glace Cherries

Icing Sugar

Lemon Juice

Cream the butter and sugar together until it's light fully mixed. Then mix in the eggs one at a time and add the vanilla essence. Sieve the flour and almonds onto the mix and add the cherries. Fold together the mixture adding the milk if needed.

Bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius for about 15-20 minutes until the cupcakes have a golden top and are firm to the touch. Times may vary depending on your oven.

Leave the cupcakes to cool.

I mix icing in a kind of random manner. I usually use about 300g of icing sugar and add a tbsp of lemon juice and a tbsp of warm water. I mix it adding more icing sugar if it is too thin and more water if it's too thick. This icing shouldn't be too thick. Spoon it over the cupcakes, it helps if the cases are those big muffin ones so the icing doesn't spill out. Then top each one with a cherry and enjoy.

Westley's Bog Bounty Heather Ale

I went hiking in Wicklow recently with Dave and a friend of ours Katie. The dog came too, he was delighted with how dirty he was at the end of the walk. The heather has started flowering coating the whole place in a purple carpet. We collected some heather flower tips, 95g in all. I decided to make my own version of Fraoch. I know Fraoch has bog myrtle in it as well, I really like the taste bog myrtle gives to a beer. We didn't get any other herbs that day so it's just heather flavouring in there.
I used some low AA hops to bitter at the start. The heather was added at the end for aroma. The base malt should make it nicely sweet like the Scottish ales.

Grain:
3.5kg Maris Otter Pale Ale Malt
345g Amber Malt
500g Wheat Malt
230g Crystal Malt

Hops and Heather:
60 minutes: 55g Hallertau 2.1%AA
15 minutes: 1 tsp Irish Moss and a small handful of heather flowers
At end of boil: Rest of heather flowers added to the boil.
95g of heather in total

Mash:
Infusion mash at 66-67 deg C. Batch sparged.
Yeast: Safale S04

Volume: About 22-23 Litres

OG: 1.049

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Brewing usually takes up most of a day so while I brew I usually cook something nice. This time I went for something completely new involving yeast, homemade pizza. I'd never made pizza from my own dough before. It turned out really well. I'll definitely be making it again.

Beer Jelly - The Session #30

This month the session hosted over at Beer47 is on the subject of beer deserts. I decided to take it literally and make a desert from beer trying out a recipe I'd been wanting to make for a while. It's from Appetite for Ale by Will Beckett and Fiona Beckett. I love this book, it's like a manual on how to match food and beer with recipes as a bonus.

I made the beer jelly recipe from the book. I used Liefmann's Kriek since the off license didn't have any Floris. I'll probably use Floris in a future version of this recipe since it's pretty sweet and comes in lots of different flavours which you can match to the fruit used in the jelly. Since I was using kriek beer I used preserved cherries from the local Polish shop, these are one of the few things you find preserved in jars from Poland that are actually nice. I also put in some fresh raspberries. Leaf gelatine and some sugar completed the ingredients.

I never knew making real jelly was so easy. I always used stuff from packets but now I've used the gelatine I'll be on the look out for new jelly recipes. A few hours in the fridge and it was all set.

We had some friends over for dinner and they tested out the jelly. We topped it with some vanilla ice cream. It was really good. I didn't sweeten up the beer too much so there was a lovely lambic tartness to the jelly which worked really well as jelly is usually too sticky sweet for me. I paired it with some Rodenbach Grand Cru. I love this beer but I do think it's one of those love or hate it affairs. It's fruity and sour and a bit complicated. I think it went well with the jelly for me. If you have a sweet tooth I think something a bit sweeter would go better with it. Or you could just drink the beer that the jelly was made from. In this case Liefmann's kriek was too expensive to buy a few of so I just used it to make the jelly.

I'll definitely make beer jelly again so thanks to the session for giving me the push to try it out.

Iced Cupcakes

I made some cupcakes this weekend. The icing is a cool lipstick pink colour. Here's the recipe.

Ingredients:
175g unsalted butter
175g caster sugar
3 eggs
175g self raising flour, sieved
finely grated zest and juice of a lemon

Icing:
225g icing sugar, sieved
2-3 teaspoons lemon juice
2 drops Cochineal food dye



Instructions:
Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.
Cream butter and sugar in a bowl until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time while beating the mixture. Fold in the flour and the lemon juice and zest.

Spoon into a bun tin lined with bun cases. Bake for 15-20 minutes until pale golden, the mixture should have risen. Turn out and cool on a wire rack.



For the icing mix all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk. Mix in lemon juice until it's smooth and not too runny. Spoon the icing onto the cakes or use an icing bag.

I recommend having them while having a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

Cake and Blind Ale

Over at Tangelled Angel Sweensie posted the best brown bread recipe ever. So I had to try it out, I can report that's it's really tasty and easy to make. Give it a go.

While I was in the baking mood I also made this lovely Lemon Cake from the joy of baking website. It's really nice, I have to stop myself eating the whole lot of it. The icing is lovely and it's just icing sugar mixed with lemon juice. One of my new years resolutions is to make more good food and baking is definitely part of that.

Oz and James Drink to Britain was on last night and the Irish Craft Brewer section they filmed at the Bull and Castle last year made it onto the show. It showed home brewed beer in a good light I thought. It was nice to be described as the future of brewing in Ireland. Though I hope it's because we all go set up micro breweries and not because the only way to get good beer in Ireland will be to brew it yourself. The Bull and Castle got a great plug which it should as it's a great pub. Thom's beer as presented by The Beer Nut was the deserved winner. My friend Ed's beer was second due his to his tasty beer and great blarney.

The home brewers who appeared on the show gathered at The Bull and Castle to watch the programme last night. For extra amusement we did a blind taste test on five english ales. We had to taste the five ales blind and identify them. The five were black sheep ale, fullers london pride, fuller's esb, abbotts ale and bishops finger. I surprised myself by getting three right. The abbotts ale and bishops finger both tasted light struck. The abbotts really wasn't pleasant at all. I could spot black sheep as well. I mixed up the two Fullers beers. In the unmarked beers the one I thought was london pride was my favourite. It was actually ESB which is the beer I prefer most so I don't know why I didn't spot it. It's an interesting thing to do. It makes you think about what it is you like about a beer.

Boozeberies and Ice Cream

Having bought some boozeberries at Septemberfest in Farmleigh I decided to try them out and I discovered a lovely combination. Blackcurrant Boozeberries poured over Maud's Ice Cream in Poor Bears Delight. I got some cheap Prosecco and I think some boozeberries poured into it would make it taste much nicer. This could be an ongoing series I think.