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!

Basil infused lemon ice cream

We have a lot of basil in our garden, somehow this year I've managed to grow more of it than I normally use (there seems to be forever a jar of pesto in the fridge!), which just means that I've become a bit more creative in how I use it, or (most of the time) just throw it into dishes more often. It added an extra dimension to a stir fry of thinly sliced kangaroo (marinated briefly in soy, sambal oelek and garlic), mushrooms, a red pepper from the garden and jasmine rice - its stronger aniseed notes went really well with the asian flavours in the wok. It was such a simple delicious dinner, I'm no longer bound by Italian cooking when thinking of how to use my basil! I have purple basil as well, but tend to use the green basil more often purely because I have more of it, it's thrived where the purple basil has been much more subdued (though its a very pretty addition to any garden!).

The creation of a new ice cream flavour follows a pattern in my house. I have full cream milk and cream in my fridge for some reason (which I dont normally have - usually hilo and NO cream!), and there will be some pantry items or fruit which need using. This time I had a lemon, and this worked nicely with the theme for this months Sweet Adventures Blog Hop being lemons! I assumed there would be many lemony cakes, curds and tarts so I didn't want to go down that road. Ice cream it would be! I then had a thought of including basil in with the lemon - I must have seen it somewhere before and subconsciously remembered it, but I thought that would be something a little different!

What I ended up with was a really interesting flavoured ice cream, totally delicious! You get hints of lemon and basil, but together they almost taste a bit like spearmint! It was not a sweet ice cream but really refreshing, definitely for use as a palate cleanser, or a light after dinner treat. I think this would be fabulous as a sorbet, you could get alot more sharpness of lemon into the mix then (I was too worried about the mixture curdling - I wasn't keen on making cheese!).

Heres how I did it... note that normally I would use more cream, but I ended up having equal quantities of both. For a creamier ice cream use more, or all cream.

Ingredients

350ml cream

350ml full fat milk

1/4 cup sugar

1 egg (or 2 really small ones)

zest of 1 lemon

Tops of 3 or 4 basil bunches

Method

1) Put the cream, milk, basil and lemon rind into a saucepan to warm up - don't bring to the boil.

2) Beat the sugar and egg together until pale and ribbony.

3) Pour a spoonful of the warm milk/cream mixture into the eggs and incorporate well, then start pouring the rest in, beating the whole time (you don't want the eggs to scramble!).

4) With a slotted spoon, discard the basil and lemon zest, and pour into your ice cream machine and churn until its thickened. If you want soft serve style ice cream then serve this now! I found that the mixture was slightly grainy/icy and would have benefited from being whipped in the mixer, however it was about 11:30pm and I wasn't feeling like it!

5) Pour into covered containers and freeze until you're ready to use them!

Its worth noting that, upon speaking to others who make ice cream, it is harder when you get it from the freezer than store bought stuff. You just have to take it out of the freezer 10 minutes before you want to eat it, and not forget about it!

Yoghurt Orange Tarts

Jamie Oliver has a lot to answer for... All of a sudden my bf is using cook books and wanting to try things he sees on tele. This is good. JO might not be everyone's cup of tea but he's certainly making being a decent cook a challenge that macho men are accepting. My fella is however not a macho man. But he cooks now. And this is good.


We were watching JO's 30 Minute Meals on tele and I saw him make some stupidly easy custard tarts. I quite like these tarts, so I thought that I would give them a go, and I ended up making them for my Tapas for Life fundraiser, since Jamie made them look so easy. Let me tell you, they are SO easy and a crowd pleaser. 

I came across a small hurdle though, in that when I went to make them, I realised I was a noob and had no cream or creme fraiche (as the recipe calls for). Hm. A quick look in my fridge and I have low fat Greek yoghurt. I can't be arsed going to the shops and neither can S, so I decided to just use it. Great choice - they were awesome.


Here's what I did... This recipe makes 6 (I tripled it though, and made quite a few!)


Ingredients
1 sheet puff pastry
ground cinnamon
125g Greek yoghurt (approx 1 cup)
2 eggs (I had 42g eggs, really small)
1 tsp vanilla paste/extract
3 tblsp sugar plus extra for sprinkling
4 tbsp sugar (for the caramel)
1 orange (zest and juice)


Preheat oven to 200C.


Method 
1) Take your puff pastry sheet and sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, then roll it up.

See those layers of cinnamony, sugary goodness? Yum.

2) Cut the roll into 6 pieces (about an inch each), and then pop each piece into a muffin tray, layered side up. You then use your thumb to squish the pastry down, and then stretch it out and up the sides to make a little cup. 


3) Pop the tray into the oven (bottom shelf) and leave them for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown.


4) In a bowl, combine well the yoghurt, zest of the orange, sugar, vanilla and eggs.


5) Using a dessert spoon, pour a little of the yoghurt mix into the little pastry cups. These aren't meant to be big - the pastry will have shrunk down a little, so you shouldn't need more than a spoonful of mixture per cup.


6) Put the cups back in the oven for 8 minutes.


7) Add 4 tbsp of sugar to a pan with the juice of the orange and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and keep an eye on it, it will start to turn golden brown after a few minutes. When its a golden brown colour turn the heat off - by this stage your tarts aren't far off being done, so the caramel won't go hard.


8) Once you've taken the tarts out of the oven, spoon the caramel over each tart. Make it as neat or rustic as you like.

My oven is much hotter at the back than the front, I discovered. 

Naked tarts.

These are delicious tarts. They aren't that pretty, they're "rustic" little things, but still great! They aren't too sweet, they taste a little like ricotta cake. The orange really comes through, however I couldn't really get much of the cinnamon - next time I'll add more! Once the caramel has set, it kinda bleeds a little all over the top of the custard - this is good, as it covered up the shoddy caramel job I did! It doesn't stay hard for long though. These are best eaten the day after making them, the flavours come together and work themselves out. They're great straight out of the oven, but better if eaten cold, later on. I can imagine this being awesome with orange blossom water too.


This is also my entry to the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop! The theme this month is Layers upon Layers - and puff pastry is layers! As well as the way the bases are made, layering the cinnamon through the pastry... It fits the bill!