Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing

Chocolate and chilli is a combination that people either love, or are really skeptical about. I am a lover of this combo, but am so often disappointed that you can't taste any chilli or get any heat. So when I decided to try this combination for myself, I made sure the flavours and heat were there!

I used the chocolate red wine cake recipe, which is an absolute winner, I use that ALL the time now, it's my go to recipe. It's so versatile - if you don't want the red wine in there, use full cream milk instead. You can add all kinds of flavourings to make this batter into whatever kind of cake you like. It works as a cake, or as cupcakes. This time I used mini cupcake tray, which gives me 24 cupcakes (the mix actually yields more than that, I also filled a 12 hole cupcake tray as well!). This is a great recipe for parties because you get so many cupcakes out of it!

Make sure you try the batter before you cook it - if you can get a hint of chilli, then it's perfect. When the cupcakes bake, the cayenne pepper becomes more pronounced - you can taste it, and it's hotter! Don't worry - the icing balances it out perfectly!

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup red wine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 160°C, and non stick your tray/prepare patty pans.

2) In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it forms ribbons. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. At this point, the cake will look a little split, but it's all good, it'll come together!

3) Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and cayenne together, and add to the wet ingredients. Mix gently until combined, then use a teaspoon to fill the cupcake holes about 2/3 to the top.

4) Place the trays in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes (depends on the size of your trays though!) or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool before icing.

Now, the cream cheese icing... This isn't a recipe. It's just a guideline. I often find cream cheese icing gets really runny. I decided not to follow a recipe and just wing it. It worked.

I used a whole packet of cream cheese, and used my KitchenAid to beat it with about a 2/3 cup of icing sugar until it was sweet enough for me, double cream to take the savoury tang off the cheese, and some full cream milk just to loosen it up a bit (because the double cream was REALLY thick!). I added a heaped tsp of cinnamon as well. Just add these ingredients until you get to a consistency you can work with, whether you're piping or just using a palette knife. Use your instinct. 

I experimented with how I wanted the piping to look, though I'm really not much of a piper. I found out that I pipe slightly to the left! I actually quite like the look of having the stars and swirls mixed up on the stand.

These little cupcakes are perfect for high tea as well, which is handy as that is this months Sweet Adventures Blog Hop theme! Have a look at Delicieux, the host blog for this month!

Secret Cake Club Perth - Pumpkin cake

We had our last Clandestine Cake Club meeting on Saturday, but there is no need to be sad! Because while this is the end of Clandestine, we have branched out and created the Secret Cake Club Perth! We found that while there is nothing wrong with cake, people were starting to to want to bake more than just cake... as one of our members said, she got a new cookbook recently, and was flicking through it looking for something to bake for a meeting and page after page of gorgeous bakes she still had nothing, because it MUST be cake. Our members are fabulous bakers, and we wanted to give them the opportunity to show off their creativity, and bake the things they like! Coming into summer, having the oven on for 90 minutes does not suit us here in Perth, it's simply too hot. So being able to create other dishes, which require less oven time, or even having things set in the fridge instead is what will work for us! We have a nice new webpage (www.secretcakeclubperth.com), facebook page (www.facebook.com/secretcakeclubperth) AND twitter account (@SCCPerth). So come and have a look at the new thing in Perth!!

After the last meeting, which was retro/childhood cakes, we all needed the month between meetings to get over the sugar coma, which was made worse by the food colouring! The cakes looked amazing, but it's no surprise kids go nuts at parties! So this time we tried to even it out a bit, and we chose vegetables/savoury cakes as the theme! It was probably the best meeting we've had so far, there was such variety, and with the announcement of the NEW cake club, everyone was buzzing with excitement, it was such a social meeting.

I chose to make a pumpkin cake with a chai drizzle. I used the recipe from Delishhh, changed a few things, but not really enough to warrant the recipe being written out again, I just added more ginger and used treacle rather than molasses. I got a perfect looking cake, which was moist and really nice. I really liked it! I would definitely make it again!!

Tha chai drizzle was really easy - I just put a teaspoon of loose chai tea into about a cup of full cream milk, and warmed it up. I then added it slowly to a cup of icing sugar until I got a thick, pouring consistency. Poke some holes in your cake and drizzle it over!

If you'd like to come along to the Secret Cake Club Perth then check our website or Facebook page for the next meeting, or email me on secretcakeclubperth{at}gmail{dot}com, we'd love to have you!

Citrus cake with marmalade

Some days just call for cake. I don't even eat a lot of cake but I needed to make some anyway. Especially when I see a recipe where I already have everything I need! This was the case with Rachel Khoo's Quatre-quarts aux agrumes, or citrus fruit cake. I had everything except the orange zest. In place of that I had a jar of Maggies Place thick cut 4 fruits marmalade, that I got from my Urban Locavore box. 

This can become something. I think.

It totally did.

A buttery, sweet cake, covered in the contrasting marmalade, which has a touch of sweetness finished off with a kick of bitter orange and a citrus tang! This is a very adult bake, as it is not completely sweet, but sweet enough to know it's cake. To keep it sweet, make a sugar syrup with lemon and rosemary and drown the cake in that instead of the marmalade. Heaven.

I took this to Carolanne's Kitchens 2nd birthday celebrations (I kinda cake crashed! Who brings cake to a birthday party!?) and was happy to see most of it gone! 

Recipe inspired by Rachel Khoo's Quatre-quarts aux agrumes.

Ingredients
4 eggs
250g golden caster sugar
250g plain flour
a pinch of salt
finely grated zest of a lemon + juice
1 tsp baking powder
250g butter, melted and cooled
1 jar of Maggies Place thick cut 4 fruit marmalade (or any brand that is your fave!)

Method
1) Preheat oven to 180C, and prepare your baking tin (original recipe calls for a loaf tin but I used a bundt).

2) Seperate the eggs and in one bowl beat the whites with half the sugar to form soft peaks, in the other bowl, beat the egg yolks with the other half of the sugar, until thick and pale.

3) Gently combine the flour, salt, zest, juice and baking powder with the egg yolk mix and then slowly add the melted butter.

4) Add the egg whites carefully, folding them into the mix until combined.
5) Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

6) Leave the cake to cool in the tin, when it has cooled enough to take it out of the tin, heat your marmalade gently on the stove until it has become pouring consistency. 

7) Prick holes all over the top of your cake, then pour over the marmalade. 

NB The original recipe says the cake cooks in 35-40 minutes, however mine was not NEARLY done by then, and it needed an additional 25-30 minutes. You'll have to use your judgement here, and just keep checking your cake after its been in the oven 40 minutes.

June Clandestine Cake Club - Gluten free!

What an awesome spread our talented bakers bought to the June Clandestine Cake Club, Perth! The theme was gluten free, which gave us an amazing range of cakes! We expected almond/hazelnut meal cakes but we had a range of cakes made with all kinds of different flours, as well as an espresso roulade made with no flour or nut meal at all, and a raw cake! Big thanks go out to Liv, who hosted this months event - she was the hostess with the mostess!

Our cake club numbers jumped significantly when Renee Bergere of Great About Perth, Agenda City and Scoop featured a write up about us, and we were stoked when there were so many people interested!

What is kinda funny is... you'd expect the organisers of cake club to be fab bakers right? Well, Carolanne is, but of course, my cake didn't work! I made a baked cheesecake with roast pineapple in it, but it WOULD NOT set! ARGH! I learned something though, so now I know for next time to add a lot less pineapple! It goes to show that you do NOT have to be an amazing baker to come to cake club! You just have to have a love for baking and a want to socialise!

We're going to try and get a collection of the recipes, so if you're reading this and you attended, please get in touch if you'd like to include your recipe!

Have a look at the amazing range of gluten free cakes below!

For the recipe for Martines' delicious coffee pecan bundt cake, check her awesome blog Chomp Chomp!

If you're interested in attending the next cake club, then please check in HERE for updates!

Fondant au Mocha

The Clandestine Cake Club of Perth recently had its 2nd meeting, about 6 weeks after we recovered from the first one! We started our cake club with the theme of autumnal fruits, but this time we went as far away as possible from anything remotely healthy. This time, the theme was decadence! What a rich, over the top afternoon! There was some bubbles to start out with, and as an antidote for sugar overdoses, we had some salted nuts and chips stashed away, just in case!

But the stars of the show were obviously the cakes. We had some awesome creations, but the best thing about it was everyones' interpretation of the theme! It was a really impressive display of baking, exactly what the theme demanded! It turns out that our interpretation of decadence has something to do with chocolate and booze!

We had a delicious bourbon chocolate cake, with bourbon cream cheese icing and a bourbon cider jelly on top from Ai-Ling, the brains behind Food Endeavours of the Blue Apocalypse! This was so impressive and such an original idea... The cake was Nigellas' Chocolate Guinness cake, but used bourbon instead! This cake is a go to fave of mine, so I was pretty much sold as soon as I tried it. I was really surprised how well the cider and bourbon went together! Such a great cake! We couldn't help but wobble it every now and again!

Bri of the fabulous blog Eat Meets West made a ridiculously impressive crepe cake, with something like SIXTEEN crepes! WOMAN! You crazy! But it was SO NICE. I thought it would be a bit sickly, as crepes have never agreed with me, but the swiss meringue buttercream between each layer did something to my cakey soul. It was so nice. We needed some teamwork to get the first slice out, but after that it was pretty special. Did I mention the chocolate icing that had been poured all over it? Bitch please.

To follow that was Liv's creation from Col Panna - Caprioska cake! She explained that to her, decadence meant cocktails, so she designed a cake to fit her favourite cocktail! There was lime, vodka in the cake, icing AND a glaze, as well as a coating of sugar with the vodka syrup, to replicate the crunch of the sugar in the cocktail. It was another really creative cake, as well as obviously being delicious! It was a nice change from all the chocolate too!

Then there was fellow organiser Carolanne, of Carolannes Kitchen, who, inspired by a recent trip to see Heston Blumenthal live, replicated one of his recipes - the exploding gateaux! Pop rocks in the base, and she used a water gun to squirt the top of the cake with chocolate! Very cool!

Then finally, my cake, which was a pimped up version of Trish Deseines Fondant au Chocolat. This, along with the choc guinness cake by Nigella is one of my go to choc cakes (along with the choc red wine cake I made last meeting!), because it is so simple, has few ingredients and is totally decadent! It is very rich, which is why its perfect for a Parisienne lady, as she only wants a tiny slice! I changed the recipe, but only slightly. I used almond meal rather than flour to make it gluten free, and to make it a bit more decadent I used espresso in the glaze rather than water. I made a coffee almond praline, blitzed it up and crumbled it on top for some crunch against the fudgy cake!


Here it is below...

Fondant au Mocha


Cake
200g Dark chocolate (minimum 65%)
200g butter (softened)
200g Sugar
1 tbsp hot espresso coffee
5 eggs
2 heaped tbsp almond meal


Glaze
100g Chocolate (minimum 65%)
50g butter
2 tbsp espresso coffee


Praline
1 Cup sugar
1/2 chopped almonds
Rest of the espresso (1-2 tbsp)


Method

1) Preheat the oven to 180C, and prepare a 25cm round cake tin.

2) Break the chocolate into small pieces and place in a mixing bowl, set over barely simmering water and pour on the hot coffee.

3) Let it sit until the chocolate is mostly melted, then add the butter. Again, leave it until it has melted then give it a quick, gentle stir to incorporate everything together.

4) Add the sugar and stir well, then break the eggs into the mixture one at a time mixing well after each egg has been added. Finally mix in the almond meal.

5) Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake for 20-25 minutes, you'll find the cake very moist in the middle - it shouldn't wobble still, but if it does, a couple more minutes and it'll be done! Just keep an eye on it. Note this is not a cake that rises much, and any rise that DOES occur, it falls back pretty flat once its out - don't worry, that's normal!

6) Leave the cake to cool completely in the tin/mould, and if you can, leave it overnight before serving.

7) While its cooling (or while its cooking!) put the sugar and coffee into a pan on a medium heat, and watch it bubble up and thicken into a caramel - DO NOT STIR!

8) Once its thickened, add the almonds and swirl the pan to combine. Pour it out onto grease proof paper and let set.

9) Crack the disc of caramel up, and put it into your blitzing device and blitz away! You decide how fine/chunky you'd like it, but don't go too far with it or it'll feel like you're eating sand!

This is also my entry to the We Should Cocoa challenge! This month the challenge is to pair chocolate with coffee, which is a pretty easy task as I LOVE it together! We Should Cocoa was started by Chocolate Log Blog and Chocolate Teapot but this month is hosted by The Kitchen Maid! 

Pimped chocolate red wine cake

If there are 2 things in life that are meant to be together, it's chocolate and red wine. How many bad days are sorted out by a combination of these 2 magical things? Cake can sometimes fix a crap day too. If you know a monumentally shit day is coming up, then you'd better stock up on red wine and chocolate. and cake. 

Or better yet...

Make chocolate red wine cake!!

It is REALLY good. Moist, not too sweet and rich enough to feel good, but not too rich to make you feel sick. It's fab with ganache. Its just fab. 

This was my contribution to the first meeting of the Clandestine Cake Club. I had read about this cake club on facebook and other blogs, and thought well, why can't we be the first CCC in Australia? So I put it to my dear friend Carolanne, and we held our first meeting in April. Basically, people come bearing cake, and it very specifically states it must be CAKE - not cupcakes or brownies or tray bakes or pies. Cake. The Clandestine Cake Club started small - but its quality not quantity, and that, we had in spades! All the cakes were fabulous, Liv from Col Panna made a BRILLIANT apple pie cheese cake (which S devoured when he got home!), which was layered with caramel, pecans, cheesecake, and stewed apples. It was a OMG moment. Bri from Eat Meets West made a caramalised pear and apple semolina cake, which I had never had before. I loved the texture of the semolina, and found that it was even better the next day! Carolanne from Carolannes Kitchen made a bit of a layer cake extravaganza! Olive oil sponge with orange blossom water, coconut sugar, persimmon cream and delicious ganache. WOOAAH!

The other cakey contributions!

Each meeting has a theme and ours was autumnal fruits, as we wanted to be seasonal and take advantage of all the wonderful fruit we have at the markets at the moment. I chose to adorn my cake with pear and glaze it with the Maggies Place fig jam I got from my Urban Locavore box, being that pears and figs are at their peak right now!

This recipe will make one roughly inch high cake. Considering this was the Clandestine Cake Club, I upped the cake a notch and made the recipe twice, and sandwiched the 2 cakes together with dark chocolate ganache. It was a delicious tweak! I used the ganache recipe from Maggie Beers Harvest book, that goes along with the chocolate fig cake.

This recipe was adapted from the one I found at Smitten Kitchen. There are a few recipes floating around on the net, all pretty similar, so far, all great!

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup red wine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Method 
1) Preheat the oven to 160°C, and non stick your tin (I just gave my silicon mould a spray with canola oil). 

2) In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it forms ribbons. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. At this point, the cake will look a little split, but its all good, it'll come together!

3) Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and cinnamon together, and add to the wet ingredients. Mix gently until combined, then spread batter into the greased tin/mould. 

4) Slice up a pear into half cm slices, and arrange them gently on top of the batter in any pattern you like.

5) Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a skewer  comes out clean. Cool in pan for about 10 minutes, then flip out of pan and cool the rest of the way on a cooling rack. If you're using a silicon mould, wait until its completely cooled before turning the cake out.

6) Warm up a couple of tablespoons of fig jam in a small saucepan, and brush it over the cooled cake.

If you wish to add ganache just make sure the cake is fully cooled! The cake does not rise a huge amount, so I would make 2 cakes if you're looking to layer them - however would love to know how you go if you just cut one in half!

Melbourne - St Kilda

My bf and I went to Melbourne for a celebratory long weekend after his birthday and finishing his masters degree. We hadnt made many plans aside from eating and drinking, walking around exploring and figuring out what to see next!

One of the days was spent in St Kilda, by the water and on the famous Acland St, renowned for its cakes! I had this street recommended to me if I liked cake. Who DOESNT like cake? I also met an old friend there for lunch. (HINT - scroll down for cake!)

We took the tram from our hotel and got off at the esplanade, as we had planned to meet my friend at The Espy, a live music venue for a few drinks and lunch. The Espy is by the harbour, but you cant really see the water... There was a market over the road which sold all manner of homemade wares such as candles, jewellery, pictures and clothes, none of which really interested S or myself. We found the Espy easy enough and its looked pretty dingy. Plastic chairs n old tables, it was shabby chic without the chic. It was pretty big inside and its got uite a few different rooms for all the live bands they have there all the time. On the previous friday they had 5 bands on! There were plenty of alternative types there, and next door they have the Espy Kitchen, which serves up pretty standard pub grub, but it was all pretty cheap! We ended up eating somewhere else, but the servings looked massive and we both agreed that this would be a good place for a cheap hangover feed when you needed it!

We decided not to eat here though, and headed around to Acland St to find something delicious. We ended up at Bluecorn, a mexican place that was busy and smelled great! The menu wasnt too long but had enough different options to suit everyone who might be there. They had sangria for $8 a glass that they made in house, and a good beer list, which suited S. I went with the cacao mole lamb ribs, with grilled red pepper and tomato sauce, which was $13.50 on the specials menu - I went with the main course size which ended up being $27. S ordered the "too big to wrap" burrito, and my friend got the smoked ocean trout quesadilla. We were advised not to get any sides with these meals as they were big! Our waitress was right, both the burrito and quesadilla were huge portions! They were both filled with black beans, guacamole, meat, cheese, sour cream - the lot! They looked delicious. I was a bit jealous, as my ribs just came as ribs, nothing else. The quesadilla, we all agreed wasnt was any of us expected, as it looked the same as the burrito - thought it would have been flatter but it was a huge mound of filling! The sangria was really sweet and not really to my taste, I think it was filled out with lemonade which I dont like because its too sweet - soda water I can live with.

I didnt take any pics, because I was with  an old friend and we were talking and I just forgot really... My meal was ok, but based on that I wouldnt go back - however Id go back to try the burritos/quesadillas cos, while huge, they looked great. All up with 3 main courses, and 3 drinks it was about $100 which, for lunch, is pricey really. It was about $25+ per main.

But the real fun started when we said goodbye to the mate, and went exploring the cake shops! Acland St is famous for its cakes, and we didnt go away disappointed at all! The choice is monumental. 

Its a little bit ridiculous! But AWESOME if you love cake! We love cake...

We ended up choosing the more upmarket looking 95 Espresso. The cakes in the window werent as numerous but looked amazing.

I apologise for the poor quality of the pics but the fluorescent lights dont really help out the old camera phone!  But they all looked amazing, great colours, beautifully presented... Along with the gorgeous cakes, the sign that said they had been voted the best coffee in st kilda by Beanhunter was another winner. Best coffee in a burb known for great coffee? Winner! I chose the salted cashew caramel slice and S chose the flourless chocolate brownie, and shared a coffee (I know it was the best coffee in St Kilda, but we had been drinking ALOT of coffee! I have my limits!). For a start the service was really good, the waiter was friendly and smiley, he looked stoked to be there. He got our coffee quickly, and it looked fab. Its not really standard in Perth to get any kinda coffee art on your flat white, but in Melbourne it is. This looked so nice - and the little sugar bottles were cute, I thought it was a really nice little touch!

The coffee was really really good. It was creamy without being too milky. It wasnt too bitter, it was pretty much just as I like it. Ill be honest though, we had the coffee for about 2mins before the cakes came out, and I kinda forgot about the coffee - so thats not really a great description! At the end of the day... great coffee!

But the cakes... WOW! My salted cashew caramel slice was heavy going, alot of caramel but DELICIOUS! The caramel wasnt toothmeltingly sweet, it was buttery, creamy and rich. Not easy to eat with a fork, I just picked it up and bit into it. Crunchy nuts, and crumble... a buttery biscuit base... caramel... love at first bite.

S fell in love with his flourless choccake. It was dense, rich, chocolatey... the swirl on top was cherry sauce which gave it a black forest cake feeling, and the cream lightened the dense chocolate perfectly. It was really good... S didnt talk for a while, as is his habit when hes got something delicious in front of him!

You get 50c off your coffee if you check in on facebook, which is a cool incentive! The place is clean and spacious enough, the staff were friendly and attentive and the coffee/cake were great. It was pretty pricey though, with 2 cakes and 1 coffee coming to $17 (the coffee was $3.50), but for a once in a while treat it was totally worth it. I took the other half of my slice away with me for the flight home, and the staff were more than happy to take it and bag it up. The bags are even cool, waxed paper inside, and sealable. Nice. Id go back here in a flash!

St Kilda is pretty cool, with Acland st having a real beachy feel to it (even though the beaches are average), with PLENTY of places to eat. There is a cool community garden around the corner and an oval where S and I laid in the sun n read a book for a while to recover from our food coma! Its a cool place, and Id love to go back there again!