Hαℓℓσωєєи Cυρcαкєs & Mυƒƒιиs ωιтн α spєcιαℓ Effєcт

Halloween will be over soon… however, I’d like to share my Cupcake & Muffin ideas for Halloween! I had so much fun to give my little cakes a rich and colourful appearance.

Trick or Treat!  ^^

 

For this RIP Muffin you need:
- ladyfingers (long biscuits) for the RIP gravestones
- stiffly whipped cream
- crumbled Oreo Cookies & chokolate flakes for a “dry soil”-look
- gummi worms

 

For this Vampire Cupcake you need:
- red jam
- stiffly whipped cream, mascarpone & coconut flakes
- make little wholes for a “vampire bite”-look

 

For this Spider Muffin you need:
- candy-coated chocolates
- liquorice (ugly!! I don’t like it -__-, I coudn’t find an alternative)

 

Aи Appℓє a ∂αу…

…keeps the doktor away! Apples are so yummy and healthy!
Here some reasons why you should eat these tasting fruit:

it’s really good for your health and your skin
you can choose from several thousand different varieties of apples
 they rich in so many of the essential vitamins (A, B, C) and minerals
 an apple a day could help keep your memory sharp
it lowers the risk for several cancers
and at the end: they are great for baking (see below )

For 12 apple strudels you need:

puff pastry (already rolled)
1 apple
4 tablespoon of (brown) sugar
1 tablespoon of cinnamon

oven baking temperature: 185 C°
baking time: ~20min

Instruction:
filling
1. Mix all the ingredients (except the pastry) together.

croissants
2. Cut out 12 squares from the puff pastry and make a diagonal cut in every wedges. (You can choose the number and the size of the squares on your own)
3. Put the apple filling in the middle of the pastry
4. bring four of the corner into the centre like a windmill
5. Bake the croissants about 20 minutes.

I also made some apple pies in miniformat.

My tip for the little hearts:

Enjoy the apple strudles and a nice cup of tea.

I also made some kind of sweet Triangoli – filled with chocolate,
apple/cinnamon and cranberry jam

This Triangoli failed…
but it made me laugh!!!

Sωєєт Sυrprιsε ~ Oяεo Cσcσиυт Mυƒƒιи

My dear friend recently celebrated his birthday, so this was a good excuse to mess up the kitchen with flour and sugar.  I knew that he adores coconuts and Oreos so I thought: why not combine them together?? 

For 16 Muffins you need:

16 Oreo-Cookies
100g butter
3 eggs
110g sugar
190g flour
110g coconut flakes
100cc milk
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 package of vanilla sugar
a pinch of sugar and natron

oven baking temperature: 185 C°
baking time: 25~30min

Instruction:
1. Half the Oreo-Cookies and put the side with the white filling into the baking cups.
2. Crumble the other half of the Oreos (without the filling).  I used a little plastic bag and beat it against the wall *lol*

1. Beat butter, sugar and vanilla sugar together until it becomes creamy
2. Add the eggs and continue mixing
3. In a seperate bowl; mix the flour with the baking powder, coconut flakes, salt and natron, add the flour-mixture and the milk alternately to the butter-egg-mixture
4. Add the Oreo crumbles to the mixture
5. Fill the dough into the prepared baking cups

6. Bake the Muffins and let them cool completely on a rack

looks like dry soil >w< ??

Gσσ∂вує Sυммєя! Hєℓℓσ Aυтυми!

Autumn officially started today It’s suddenly getting damn cold the last days and you even can follow how the leaves are changing their colours and falling from the trees. I rather prefer warm/hot seasons cause in cold seasons, my hands and feet quickly become freezy, even though I am wearing fluffy socks and gloves.  Nevertheless, autumn is a very nice season and I look forward for some yummy specialties like chestnuts and pumpkins  As you can see I’ll already started to bake seasonal sweets with our home-planted Japanese pumpkins. The one which is growing in our garden has a pretty cute name: ほっこり姫  (Hokkori Hime means a kind of “Heartwarming Princess”). It has a green skin and an intense yellow-orange colour in the inside.

Here is my recipe for カボチャ-Cupcakes (Kabocha is Japanese and means pumpkin ).

For 15 Pumpkin Cupcakes you need:

100g butter
1 egg
0.5 cup of sugar
1 cup of flour
100cc milk
2 teaspoon of baking powder
¹/₂ teaspoon of cinnamon
¹/₄ teaspoon of ground ginger
¹/₄ teaspoon of ground nutmeg

selfmade pumpkin puree
2 pumpkins (I used my Japanese princess ^^)
100g sugar
4 tablespoon of water
a pinch of salt

for the frosting
100g butter
8 tablespoon of squeezed pumpkin (selfmade)

oven baking temperature: 185C°
baking time: ~25min

Instruction:
pumpkin puree
1. Wash pumpkins, cut them into quaters and remove seeds.
2. Cook pumpkins in a pressure cooker.
3. After the cooking, the pumpkin should become soft and you can remove the green skin very easily.
4. Squeeze the yellow-orange part of the pumpkin through a sieve. (repeat the procedure several times)
5. Add sugar, water and a pinch of salt to the pumpkin and cook it well in a pot.

 

Cupcakes
1. Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.
2. Cut butter into little pieces and add it to the flour-mixture.
3. In a separate bowl, mix together approx. 400g of the pumpkin puree (see recipe above), milk, and egg.
4. Add pumpkin-mixture to the flour-mixture. (mix mix mix)
5. Fill the dough into the baking cups
6. Bake the cakes and let them cool completely on a rack

the golden combi – also known as pumpkin spice

 

7. For the frosting just mix all the ingredients together and let it cool in the fridge. Use a frosting tube and put the cooled buttercream on the cakes.

8. Last but not least: Don’t leave your Cupcakes naked – give them a bit of decoration!

if you like you can half the cakes and squeeze the frosting between

 

Oh dear, it’s already dark outside and I still should prepare my school stuff. We have school tomorrow!  It supposed to be quite hard to study on Saturdays. No more free time from 8.30am until 5.00pm, but I hope to get used to it soon. Fight Miho, it’s only for two years!!

Sтєp by Sтєp…

Say hello to my new baking cook book!  I was starring at this book for a while, I leafed through the pages forward and backward and thought… should I buy it or not… should I…  well, as you can see I couldn’t resist.

What’s special on this book? I guess everybody knows the problem when you are reading a recipe instruction, which is only text and don’t have any pictures (or just a few) For a “baker” it’s quite hard to imagine how the result looks like at the end.  I really appreciate when people are sharing their recipe (whether on the Internet or in cooking books) and decribing the baking instructions step-by-step with lots of pictures. So the book Die Step-by-Step-Küche is perfect for those who like a “picture-book-step-by-step-instruction”.

Die Step-by-Step-Küche has insightful chapters about cakes, tarts, patisserie, muffins, cookies and bread. A mix of sweet and spicy bakery products. I still cannot decide which recipe I should try…

stay tuned for my next baking-adventure!