Getting a little bit technical...

With my health it's not always possible to guarantee a weekly post.  In fact you cannot guarantee you'll be able to do anything regularly.  So often you start with good intentions, but you end up in a heap in bed or on the sofa unable to even type because your fingers hurt and your brain is so full of fog you can't remember how to type.  

You can use any powdered colour you like to home colour your non-pareils.  That means if you've used a powdered colour for the fondant or frosting you can use the same colour for the sprinkles, or a dramatically different colour to highlight them.  

An invisible illness doesn't cease to be a illness just because people cannot see a cause, or because I'm having a good enough day to be bright and bubbly while I'm wheeled round the shop.  I've been told I can't be ill because I'm happy, that I shouldn't be going out at all if I'm that ill; all of which achieves only one thing - it depresses me.  It makes me focus on what I can't do instead of the amazing things that I can still achieve.

I love using this colour.  As strong as turmeric it gives pretty, vibrant shades of yellow to the nonpareils.  

One of the things that makes me very happy is writing this blog.  Being able to hand out my knowledge and pass it on to you, the readers, to enjoy doing the things that I love doing so very much.  Even when I can't do them myself any more.  Going through pretty pictures of lovely colours makes me happy, too!

The tumeric yellow with the lovely non-pareils it coloured.  As you can see, I have quite a range of powder colours

This week was one of those difficult weeks where I couldn't bake, where I had to lay back and rest and catch up with all the things I'd set aside for times like this - catching up on the blogs, editing photographs, getting back in contact with people on Facebook and learning what's been happening in the baking world.  

So, whilst confined to the sofa I'm offering you a couple of little bits that I put together earlier, but which weren't enough on their own to make a blog.  How to colour your own sprinkles and a test of grinders and their ability to grind things properly.  I do hope they help you to make the most of your kitchen equipment and to have a delightful display of coloured candies to top your own creations with.  

My other little storage secret - Spice Stack boxes from Amazon.  Originally designed to hold 72 spice jars in three trays that pull out from the tidy box, they now hold my hundreds of jars of powdered colours and dusting powders and glitters and sprinkles that come in tiny tubes, and anything else very small that's dry and used for dusting, colouring or decorating my cakes

Colouring your own sprinkles is the easiest thing in the world.  You get some white sprinkles or, in this case, nonpareils, and some powdered colours.  You combine the one with the other and shake until it's done.  By the way - don't try this with the glittery ones, it just doesn't work.  I tried it myself and ended up covered in glitter but with none of it sticking to the coating of the candy.  Sad, but there you go.  

So - here's my little storage box, filled with lots of lovely sprinkles.  There are still a couple of boxes of plain ones to be coloured up as needed.  I have yellows, blues, reds, pinks, purples, gold and silver.  If it's a dusting powder or a powdered colour, it'll work!  It's because they stain, they don't just sit on the sugar coating but they give over their colour to it.  

I used these tiny organiser boxes from Rymans, made by Really Useful Box - they are really useful.

Put your sprinkles in a jar or box or whatever container you're using, add a small dash of the powder, to start with, and shake well in all directions.  The powder will constantly filter down as you shake, so tip it sideways, tip it upside down, and shake it all around to make sure all the sprinkles get the colour.  The more powder you use, the richer the colour on the sprinkles, and the more you shake, the more even the colour.  

Commercial coloured sprinkles, plain white nonpareils and home coloured - you choose!

I don't always want that, so I tend to make sure about half the sprinkles are done dark, first, then I add more sprinkles and carry on shaking to get a mixture of tones.  When they look how you want them to look, stop shaking!  Don't add too much powder, it's not needed and it will only end up in the bottom of the pot.  These particular nonpareils were supplied to me by the kilo from the lovely Alison at pink*hibiscus on eBay or you can contact her direct for special orders at alisonsmith100@gmail.com  

I have to say, of all the nonpareils that I have bought over the years, these ones are working especially well, and her kilo price is very good value, too. I shall certainly be buying more sprinkles from the lovely Alison.

My tiny tower of colour - not so tiny, but very colourful

Ok, onto the grinder test. I wanted to grind sesame seeds; sadly, like most oily things, if you try this you tend to end up with butter or a very clogged grinder. So over time I had acquired several means of doing things like grinding or milling grains and seeds. I still haven't found one that reliably crushes sesame seeds without pulping them, but I'm working on it. Meantime I have several grinders or things that also grind, and I never know which one to use. This means it's time to do some testing!

Having read about lemonade powder cookies and frosting and such I found some lovely berry tea granules that I wanted to try for the same things - we can't get lemonade powder in the UK, so this was a potential substitute with no artificial sweeteners or other allergy inducing contents. We love Lidl!

The granules were clearly going to be the perfect thing to test the grinders with. The rules were that the granules were put into the machine, either as many as I had or as many as the machine would take, ground until I couldn't ascertain any more changes occuring, so it's pretty much done all it's going to do, then removing the granules to a sieve.

Kitchen Aid artisan blender - not as good as it could be, to be honest, in several ways.

To start I went to the largest bowl of the 3 I was testing - the Kitchen Aid Food Processor. Having a clear, plastic bowl for processing foods meant that I could watch the process easily to see how it was going, both from the top and from the side.

Easy to see the big bowl didn't work

Sieving was first to be done by shaking only, with tapping allowed at the end of the powder having gone through, just to take out the bits caught in the mesh that will actually go through, but only a few taps, no more. The remainder in the sieve were to go to the next grinder.  

Ready to go with the top bowl in place with the smaller blade attached to it.

The granules put in the Kitchen Aid looked good at first, but when I sieved the powder it turned out only about a fifth the granules had been crushed. It also spat the powder out the lid, over the sides where there is no real seal. There are a lot of things I love about my KA food processor, but for every love there is a hate - and the lack of seal on that lid is very high on the hate list along with the bowls ability to scar badly!  

Small bowl in situ, inside the larger bowl

Because I'd used the largest bowl, designed for chopping not grinding, I wasn't overly surprised at the poor result. Next I used the smaller bowl that sits inside the big bowl, and the shorter blade, which is intended for grinding. I have to say, this was a great disappointment. It didn't actually process anything smaller than it went it. Total loss. Maybe if I'd tried the granules up here first the results would be the other way round; but either way you can say that the Kitchen Aid clearly doesn't grind things very well at all. 

The smaller bowl for the Kitchen Aid

So - biggest bowl on the Kitchen Aid with the relevant blade only did 20% of the granules, and the smaller bowl with the relevant blade did absolutely nothing. Not very good, but then this is a domestic piece of equipment intended for preparing vegetables, making pastry and so forth; so for domestic kit not designed to do the job it did its best. And I have to say, it knocks out amazingly good pastry in about 90 seconds flat!

Very not good - but the pastry is amazing!

On to the next machine, and a professional piece of kit this time. The Waring Pro Prep Commercial Chopper And Grinder made by Cuisinart. This machine comes with two bowls, one marked chop and one marked grind.  

Waring Pro Prep Commercial Chopper and Grinder by Cuisinart with chop bowl and blade fitted.

The grind bowl comes with a different, much lower blade designed to get as much as possible ground small. It is also fitted with a blade like attachment on the base of the bowl and a serrated blade on a protuberance on the lid - closing down the space so grains can't escape when you're grinding. This looked like a good idea and I was hopeful that it was going to work.

Yup, has it on the bowl - GRIND

I ground it the same way as the first one, until I couldn't see any more changes happening. It took about the same time, too. A couple of minutes straight run, then a few pulses and it was done. Or finished, at least! Again, having a clear plastic bowl paid dividends in being able to observe the process from the top or the side.

Looking good so far!

Pouring the granules into the sieve and shaking it we did really well, almost 90% of the remaining granules were powder. A significant increase on the previous machine. Also, the bowl being about half the size of the KA it meant that half the granules was plenty to test it at a max setting. I was really quite pleased with this - but we still had about 8% of the original amount of granules left.

Not so good after all.

Enter machine number three, the smallest, but still a professional piece of equipment; the Waring Professional Spice Grinder. This suffers from having a metal jar with the blade fixed in the bottom of the jar, so you cannot change the blade, and you cannot see what's happening in the jar.  

Waring Professional Spice Grinder

The jar slots into the base and you have a clear cover that goes over the top of the jar and engages with the base so you can press the large button on the top to set the motor running. This also contrives to ensure you can't see what's going on because your own hand is now in the way.

Not a lot of granules left to grind

The machine comes with three jars and three lids so that you can save your spices in the jar if you wish - assuming you only ever use three spices! You can, of course, buy extra jars and lids if you want to go this route and being stainless they won't hold smells, either.  

The only machine to try to recreate a desert sand storm in my kitchen.  Not to self - next time leave it a while before you disengage the jar

Being a spice grinder, designed to cope with hard shells, I was hopeful that this would be the one to do the job. Despite being half the size of the previous bowl I could only fill the jar enough to cover the blade with what was left in the sieve; and being unable to watch the process I had to listen for the tone of the motor.  

Looks promising from up here

When it's working it meets resistance, so the tone of the motor is different to when the blade is spinning freely. When I had heard two changes of tone I opened the lid and took a look.  

Looks very promising here, too.  Let's give it a shake

From the top the results looked good, but I was aware that heavier particles would be underneath, so it wasn't necessarily a good result yet. I could have taken it off too early. However, when I tipped the jar into the sieve the contents went straight through without hesitation. It was a 100% success! I was seriously happy.  

One very empty sieve

Knowing what your kitchen equipment can do, and to what level it can do it, is just as important as knowing your oven temperature or which knife to use for which job. If you don't know it then you've not only wasted money buying the equipment; but you will end up with several pieces of equipment that do the same job and you just don't realise it. Clearly these three machines do three very different jobs to different levels of precision. Knowing that means I can go straight to the machine I need for the job.  

Pouring the powder back into the jar I had to use a chopstick to clear the log jam in the funnel

If I want to chop peppers or make amazingly good shortcrust pastry, I'll use my Kitchen Aid Food Processor. If I want to roughly chop nuts or fresh herbs I'll go to the Waring Pro Prep. But if I want to mill spices or grains I'll go straight to the Waring Spice Grinder. Since, under normal conditions, I do all of those jobs, it's great to know that I have the equipment I need to do it right.

Lemon granules in a full jar showing where we started and powdered berry tea granules which now fill four fifths of the jar showing how we ended up.  Powdered!

Sadly I'm still stuck with not having anything that will crush, crack or lightly grind sesame seeds without making them into sesame butter. Very taste, but not what I want in my recipes!



Waring Professional Spice Grinder and Waring Pro Prep Commercial Chopper And Grinder from Nisbets.

Kitchen Aid Food Processor from Kitchen Aid

Pink Hibiscus on eBay  for all your spinkles and nonpareils.

Not completely lost...

I just had to take a small break to set up another blog, build a website for a friend and the thousand and one other things that had backed up. In good news there is going to be more to explore now with the addition of the second blog: fumblingfrenchchef.blogspot.com If you pop over there you can see lots of lovely French food and learn how to choose your kitchen knives. Over time it will help you understand the equipment you use, what it does, why we use the ingredients we do, How to choose the best ingredients and to show you the techniques that you will need to cook anything you want to.

When you add the liquid to this mix, at the end, it's worth taking off the splash guard and replacing it with a cloth.  You need to keep the cloth loose and high so it doesn't get eaten by the whisk as it turns.  It will, however, stop your entire kitchen being washed in a thing coating of coffee and cake mix.  

Meanwhile, and getting back to this blog, a friend of mine, the lovely Andi, has started a website to raise money for charity selling the beautiful jewellery and charms that she makes and donating the profits to a different charity each month.  I know how beautiful they are, and how well made, because I bought some recently.  An amazing pendant and some charms for myself and a pendant and some earrings for a friends birthday.

Grease or spread with release up the sides as well as on the base so your parchment sticks all over and doesn't end up in the cake batter where you will struggle to get it all out.  

If you'd like to buy something or just want to donate to the charity of the month you can find her at JazzAndiGems.com  It was for Andi that I built the website, with the help of CoffeeCup software and hosting  Not only do they offer free hosting and templates that you can adjust to suit your own needs, but they also offer free editing software and if you're getting into it all a bit deeper they have an amazing amount of CSS, HTML and other website building software.  Their editors for Windows and OSX are worth their weight in gold!

Make sure you pour roughly even amounts into the two baking tins, if one or other is much larger it will be harder to put the whole thing together as a layer cake, and they will take very different cooking times, too.

Food! That's why you're really here, isn't it? That's also why I got a phone call from a dear friend asking if I could "just do a little sponge cake for her mother in law's birthday. She wasn't sure what sort and hubby was shouting behind her so I got her to hand him the phone. What we settled on was a rich, moist Devil's food cake with peanut butter frosting.

Even when covered with a cloth and the splash guard icing sugar + anything = MESS! 

And if you're already dribbling into your keyboard, you're going to love this recipe!

Frosting time!

This cake is pure Americana at its very best. It's a recipe from the lovely Holly's blog, Phemomenon, where she broke it down into cup cakes - equally amazing! The very original can be found in the Sweet Melissa Baking Book.  

One the frosting is pale and smooth it's time to add the peanut butter.  Don't get smart at this point - you really *don't* want to use crunchy.  I know it's tempting.  It's tempting right up until the moment you go "I'll just pipe a border round the bottom to make it look nice".  Don't do it.  I've don't it, you don't have it.  

Using sour cream and bicarbonate of soda to raise the cake results in something incredible - a cake batter that shoots up in the tin then gradually collapses back into the tin under its own weight. This means it's almost impossible to get that toothpick to come out clean, and in fact you don't even want to try that. My rule is to have no more than 1cm of stickiness on there and no liquid. 

Make sure you beat that frosting as fast as you can - you need to get lots of air in there to make it light and fluffy.

It also gets a crusty top layer, so it's not going to bounce back for you, either. This cake is one of experience, trial and error. Once you've made it right you'll know what to look for next time. You'll also never buy another packet mix again.

This is not a dark frosting, it's pale and smooth and fluffy to go with the heaviness of the sponge.

Two lots of dark chocolate, one of them Belgian, ensure that this is not sweet or sickly. It has an intense flavour, from the sticky fudge bottom through the sponge middle of each layer and into the crispy crust.  

There's a good reason why Mr AB calls it the Messy Bakery!

The frosting is light, fluffy, smooth and buttery with a gentle taste of peanut butter that compliments rather than smothers the cake. With only a pound of icing sugar to the pound and a half of butter and a cup and a half of PB this is not sugary or cloying, either.

The crust has suck down, the gooey bottom is clinging to the paper, and the thin layer of sponge in between is still rich and beautiful  Not the pretties of cakes at this point, but just about the tastiest I've ever made!

All in all it is a very grown up cake that children will also adore. I have made this cake very successfully as cup cakes and topped them with my own Fluff based frosting, which went down very well with grown ups as much as the pink obsessed little girl they were made for! A few pearls on the strawberry pink frosting and some sparkly flowers and princess bits from my Cricut gave her a lovely treat for her birthday. Not to mention earning me a lot of asks for the recipes!

If you get your top well covered and levelled first it gives you a rough height guide before you start slapping the frosting on the sides.  Take the frosting down, not up.  You want to smooth it down and round and then sweep off the excess.  It's much easier than the alternative!

One tip with this - whether cupcakes or tins - Do not fill more than one third. Because it rises so dramatically it can easily overflow and leave you with a cake crusted oven and empty cake cases. Trust me on this - I was the one steam cleaning my oven at one in the morning, fuming as I did so.

Don't skimp on the frosting, not between the cakes and not over the cakes.  Make it good and thick, so if you are brave enough to use your fingers they sent into oodles of gooey stickiness at the same time as you bite into the moist sponge

Oh, and as you can see, I wrap the bowl of the mixer when I add certain ingredients, the photos kind of say it all on that point!  

Smooth the cake over as best you can - depending on how hot your kitchen is you might be able to do a thin crumb coat to smooth and then put your cake in the fridge for a few hours to set it so you can achieve a perfect finish.  But if you're short of time, the kitchen is hot, the day is sweltering, etc. then quite honestly you're better of saving your energy and just aiming for achievable rather than perfect.  

I don't use canola/rape or vegetable oil, I stick to sunflower as being lighter than olive oil and a better oil than the alternatives suggested.  

Sprayed gold and ready for chocolate rolls and gold balls to be applied.
Don't worry about the finish, you never will get this one perfect.  

It's worth getting really good chocolate for this one, 70% or more solids.  It does make a difference.

Time to transfer the cake using my heavyweight Nordic cake lifter.
Do not underestimate the weight or stickiness of this cake!

The cocoa I use for this is Bourneville, by Cadburys, as it is also a dark chocolate.  Some cocoas add sugar to the mix or milk powders and such.  This is just powdered chocolate.  

Candles on and ready to go!

Having a bean to cup machine I use an Americano - 2 shots of espresso made up to a long coffee with water.  I got a bit fed up with measuring it out in cups, so I calculated the amount by emptying the cups into my jug.  It works out at about 333.33 ml, so that's what I use.  

Golden buttercream from doing a quick retouch

For the English, confectioners sugar is icing sugar, and all-purpose flour is just plain flour.   

And not just the cake was sprayed!  Thank goodness this washes off of marble.

I didn't use the milk - which made the cats happy - mostly because the mix was already soft and sloppy.  It didn't need the extra!  Perhaps in Winter I'd use it, but right now the kitchen is warm enough to melt this frosting, so I skipped it.  

My reward to myself when all was finished!

Devil’s Food Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting  (Printable Version)

For the Cake:
6 oz best-quality unsweetened chocolate, coarsely shopped
2/3 cup vegetable or canola oil
2 2/3 cup sugar
1 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup best-quality unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp kosher salt
2/3 cup sour cream
3 large eggs
1 1/3 cups hot strong brewed coffee (I just used hot water) 

For the Peanut Butter Frosting:

1 pound confectioner’s sugar, sifted
1 ½ pounds unsalted butter, softened
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
3 Tbsp whole milk
1-1½ cup smooth peanut butter, at room temperature

Position a rack in the center of your oven. Preheat the oven to 350. Butter and flour two 9×2-inch round cake pans, Line each pan with a 9-inch round of parchment paper.

To Make the Cake

2. In the bowl, of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt, and mix well.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the sour cream and eggs until smooth.

4. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture, and mix until combined. Be sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the melted chocolate mixture and mix until combined. add the hot coffee (or water) in a stream, and mix until combined. (Again, scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.) The batter will be loose.

5. Divide the batter evenly between the prepared cake pans. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until a wooden skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove to a wire rack to cool in the pans for 25 minutes before turning out the layers onto the rack. Cool completely before finishing.

The baked layers may be stored tightly wrapped in plastic wrap at room temperature for 2 days. For longer storage, wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to 5 days, or freeze wrapped in plastic wrap and them aluminum foil for up to 2 weeks. Do not unwrap before thawing.

To Make the Frosting

2. Add the peanut butter and mix until combined. Use the frosting immediately, if possible. It may be stored in an airtight container at room temperature overnight, or in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. Let the frosting come to room temperature and briefly rebeat it in the mixer before using.