Easter Meringue Nest with Passion fruit Coulis and Cadbury Creme Egg

Passion fruit - indeed fruit of any kind - and Cadbury Creme Egg are two things that I wouldn't have thought particularly go together, but I have been proven wrong.


Cadbury sent me several Creme Eggs just in time for Easter, along with four recipes where they have teamed up with the Rinkoff bakery. I already made these mini s'more brownie cupcakes with Cadbury Creme Eggs which were really good, and I mean really good.


On Easter Sunday I had my mother- and father-in-law over for lunch and cooked a delicious roast lamb... plus chicken for my husband as he doesn't eat lamb, and butternut squash for my mother-in-law who is vegetarian. So with all that, I needed an easy dessert!


The Cadbury/Rinkoff recipe for meringue nests with passion fruit coulis and Cadbury Creme Egg was just the thing as I could prepare most of it in advance. This is the recipe - I will explain afterwards a few tweaks I made. The recipe below says it makes eight meringue nests but they would be pretty small I think as I had to double the quantity of ingredients to make eight.


You need:
For the meringue:
2 large egg whites at room temperature
100g caster sugar


For the passion fruit coulis:
250ml passion fruit puree (thaw if frozen)
240g sugar


For the ganache:
5 Cadbury Creme Eggs, melted
100g butter
8 Cadbury Creme Eggs, cut into small pieces


Method
For the meringue:
Pre-heat your oven to 120C. Put the egg whites into a large clean bowl and whisk on a medium speed. Keep whisking until they form stiff peaks.


Add the 100g caster sugar a tablespoon at a time and whisk until combined. The meringue should be nice and glossy.


Line a flat baking tray with greaseproof paper or a non-stick baking sheet. If necessary use a bit of butter to make it stick to the tray.


Place a star nozzle into a piping bag and spoon in the meringue. Start by piping a dot in the centre of your meringue nest then in one continuous motion go around the dot twice to make a bigger circle, then go round again on top of the outer circle to make the sides. Repeat until you've piped all nests.

NB The recipe didn't state the cooking time so this is what worked for me Place the baking sheet into the pre-heated oven and bake for one hour until the meringues are crisp. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before removing from the greaseproof paper and baking sheet.

For the passion fruit coulis:
In a medium-sized saucepan mix the passion fruit and sugar together. Bring to the boil on a medium heat and simmer for 3-5 minutes. Put aside to cool.

For the ganache:

In a saucepan heat up a small amount of water and place a glass bowl on top (like a bain marie). Place 4 Cadbury Creme Eggs (yes I know the ingredients list says 5.... perhaps they expect you to eat one while cooking) and butter in a glass bowl and stir until all the ingredients have melted (this should take approximately four or five minutes). The mixture should have a slight gloss and be quite runny.

Leave to cool for a minute or two. Drizzle the ganache and coulis over the nest and top with broken pieces of Cadbury Creme Egg.

Here are my tweaks:

• I doubled the quantity so each person had two meringues
• I couldn't find my star piping nozzle so the sides of the meringue are smooth, which doesn't look as good
• I actually forgot to build up the sides of the meringues so they are flat which isn't as good either!
• The recipe didn't give a cooking time, I recommend one hour
• Instead of making the fruit coulis, as I couldn't find passion fruit puree, I bought Sainsbury's mango and passion fruit coulis and used that in the recipe
• I layered two meringue nests with passion fruit coulis and Creme Egg ganache, then put half a crushed Creme Egg on top of each portion, so using six Creme Eggs in total.

The chocolate and fruit flavours went together surprisingly well, and I loved the chewy meringue and the smooth chocolate. This made a really good Easter dessert!

Mini S'more Brownie Cupcakes with Cadbury Creme Eggs

I now have an answer to the question from the famous Cadbury Creme Egg advert: how do you eat yours? I like mine crushed up on top of toasted marshmallow and chocolate brownies!

Cadbury sent me several packets of Creme Eggs, an apron and some recipe cards, and asked me to recreate some of their recipes. One was based around a banana split and neither my husband nor I like bananas, but my eye was immediately caught by these.



They have a chocolate brownie base, which is baked into a cupcake case; you spoon marshmallow fluff (which you can buy in a tub from most large supermarkets) on top of the raw brownie mixture and bake it in the oven shortly. Then top them off with some crushed up some Cadbury Creme Eggs.


Not only are these easy to make but they taste absolutely delicious. The brownie is rich and chocolatey, and the toasted marshmallow is chewy and delicious, and the Creme Egg on top gives you alternative bites of chunks of chocolate and the creamy sugary filling. I was really pleased with how these turned out!

Cadbury's recipe is below; I got 8 out of these using large cupcake cases, so didn't use the whole jar of marshmallow fluff and used half a Crème Egg to top each one rather than a whole one.

You need:
125g dark chocolate
100g unsalted butter
125g light muscovado sugar
2 large free-range eggs
75g plain flour, sifted
1/4 tsp sea salt
1 tub of marshmallow fluff (you will have some left over)
12 Cadbury Creme Eggs, crushed

Heat the oven to 180C, 160C fan, 350F, Gas 4. Melt the chocolate and butter together in a large saucepan over a low heat. When completely melted, stir in the sugar, then the eggs one by one.

 

Fold in the flour and salt, and then spoon into the cupcake cases so they are nearly full.

 

Pipe the fluff onto each cupcake and bake in the centre of the oven for 12 minutes.

 

Leave to cool and add the crushed Creme Eggs on top.

I was amazed at how the marshmallow fluff rose and set like meringue - I wasn't expecting to do that at all!

 

 

 Here are some of the results!

 

Thanks to Cadbury who sent me the Creme Eggs, apron and a Sainsbury's voucher to buy the other ingredients

 

Humpty Dumpty Creme Egg Cake

 

This is a great cake for Easter - it has Cadburys Creme Eggs baked in the middle!

I made it for a meeting of my local Clandestine Cake Club which had a triple theme. First it was "Once upon a time", plus Easter, plus a hidden ingredient. That was quite a lot to get into one cake and everyone else made Easter cakes decorated with chicks and mini eggs, and a few people also had a hidden ingredient. I was more interested by the "once upon a time" theme and was thinking about nursery rhymes and fairy tales and realised that there was one that would also fit the Easter theme - humpty dumpty! I then remembered that I had seen recipes online for chocolate brownies with Cadburys creme eggs baked in the middle and wondered if I could do the same with cake. Strangely, I couldn't find any recipes or blog posts on the internet for Cadburys creme egg cakes- I found plenty of brownie recipes and also cupcakes but I couldn't find an example where someone had tried it in a cake. So I wasn't sure if it would work or not... but look how it turned out!

 I did wonder about freezing the creme eggs before I baked them in the cake to see if they would hold their shape better; if you want to have a go at making this cake and trying that I would be interested to hear how it turns out. The eggs did remain relatively intact anyway the way that I did it.

Humpty Dumpty Cadburys Creme Egg Cake - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

For the loaf cake:

175g softened butter or margarine

175g caster sugar

3 eggs

125g self-raising flour

50g cocoa powder

50ml milk

6 Cadburys creme eggs

For the humpty dumpty cake:

120g softened butter or margarine

120g caster sugar

2 eggs

80g self-raising flour

30g cocoa powder

20ml milk

For the buttercream

200g softened butter or margarine

400g icing sugar

50g cocoa powder

Roll-out fondant to decorate: I used two 250g packs of Renshaw ready-to-roll icing in teddy bear brown (though I didn't use it all), plus about 500g of white ready-to-roll icing, half of which I coloured blue with Sugarflair baby blue gel paste, and some Dr. Oetker wafer daisies. I also used a tiny amount of black sugarpaste though you can also use an edible pen or mark on the mouth with a curved modelling tool or a spoon and I bought some edible eyes by Suck UK, though you could make eyes from white and black sugarpaste. I also had a brickwork embosser from the Sugarcraft Patchwork Cutters range though you could use a knife if you don't have this. You'll see pictures and explanations of all these below.

To make the cake, preheat the oven to 175C. Grease and line a loaf tin or spray with Cake Release and do the same with either a small round cake tin or line a muffin tin with cupcake cases.

For the loaf cake, cream the butter and the sugar with an electric beater then add the eggs one at a time. Fold in the flour and the cocoa powder and finally the milk.

I bought a pack of six Cadbury's creme eggs in the supermarket for £2 which I thought was pretty good.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared loaf tin and gently press in each of the creme eggs once you have taken them out of their wrappers of course. I pushed them down like the ones you can see in the back row, then spread the cake mixture so it covered the tops of the creme eggs, as I thought they would melt too quickly in the oven otherwise. Bake in the oven for 25 minutes.

 Do the same process with the ingredients for the humpty dumpty cake, without the creme eggs. Bake this in either a small round cake tin or as cupcakes; it doesn't matter because you are going to crumble this cake up like when you make cake pops.

 Here is the loaf cake - leave it to cool in the tin for a while then turn out onto a wire rack.

You can see that the creme eggs have melted and actually left holes in the bottom of the cake. This didn't seem to be a problem for me but if you have any ideas on how to stop this happening I'd like to hear them!

 When you have baked the other cake or the cupcakes, leave them to cool and then crumble up the cake into a large bowl. Make the buttercream by creaming the butter and icing sugar with the cocoa powder and add a little at a time to the cake crumbs and mix well, kneading with your hands, until you have a dough consistency. Have a look at this post on cake pops for some pictures and a step-by-step description.

When you have your ball of cake roll it between your hands to make it a little more egg-shaped. Then roll out some white fondant and cover the cake ball - it doesn't matter if the bottom is a bit uneven (I find it quite hard to cover a ball without ragged seams on the bottom) as you won't see the bottom of the cake.

Then colour some fondant in another colour - I used baby blue - or roll out some coloured fondant and cover the bottom half of the egg. Again the underneath won't be seen.

I wanted to make it look as if Humpty Dumpty was wearing a shirt so I cut out a triangle of white fondant and made some buttons in blue. I stuck this on the front.

I found these edible eyes in a gift shop; they weren't cheap at £4.99 but I thought they would be fun to try out.

I also made a hat out of fondant and a mouth - though I didn't get the smile right, but I couldn't move it as the black fondant would have left a mark. Roll out some sausage shapes in blue fondant to make the arms and the legs which you will fix on later.

When the loaf cake is cold, roll out some brown or reddish-brown coloured fondant - I used teddy bear brown - and cover the cake. Spread a thin layer of buttercream over the cake first then cover with the fondant. Place it on a cake board.

I bought this patchwork brickwork cutter/embosser a while ago after making this dog basket cake 
and decided it would be perfect to make the wall.

Simply press into the fondant so you can see the brick pattern.

And finally assemble the cake - sit humpty dumpty on the wall, and fix on his arms and legs with either a little buttercream or edible glue. I added some Dr. Oetker wafer daisies on one end of the wall.

 I had no idea what the inside would look like until I cut into the cake at the Clandestine Cake Club meeting.... I was really pleased to see the Cadbury's creme eggs had kept their shape and melted a little, but when you eat the cake you definitely know you are eating a piece of the creme egg at the same time. This was quite a fudgy cake and really delicious.

A wonderful experiment for Easter!

 

The Clandestine Cake Club meeting was very enjoyable; it took place in Waterstone's cafe so we drank tea and ate cake while surrounded by cookery books.

Here are some of the other delicious cakes that CCC members made, around the Easter theme, some of which also had a hidden ingredient, but nobody else used the "once upon a time" theme.

I am sending this to We Should Cocoa, created by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog and hosted this month by Rachel Cotterill as the theme this month is Easter.

The theme for Love Cake, hosted by Jibber Jabber UK, is "springing into Easter".

The theme for Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at Dollybakes, is also Easter.

Chocolate Pumpkin Halloween Cake

Happy Halloween! How are you celebrating this year?

I decided to make a Halloween-themed cake and knew from the start I wanted to make a two-tier cake and decorate it with spooky shapes. There was also only one flavour I wanted to use for the cake- pumpkin! I decided to pair the pumpkin with chocolate and the result was very tasty.

You need:

For the base cake:

225g can of Libby's pumpkin pie filling, or pumpkin flesh stewed and sweetened a little

150g butter

225g brown sugar

3 eggs

225g self-raising flour

35g cocoa powder

juice of half an orange (optional)

This actually makes one layer; if you have a lot of people to feed and want a big cake, I would recommend doubling the above quantity (but then baking the cake in two tins).

For the top cake:

225g pumpkin pie filling, or pumpkin flesh stewed and sweetened a little

150g butter

225g brown sugar

3 eggs

225g self-raising flour

100g Dr. Oetker chocolate chunks or similar chocolate chips

For the buttercream:

About 250g butter

500g icing sugar, sieved

50g cocoa powder

However I always find I need to adjust the quantities depending on how soft my butter is. 

To decorate (optional - you can use whatever you like):

2x 250g packs Renshaw Regalice Amethyst sugar paste

500g white or orange sugar paste, plus orange food colour gel (I used Wilton's) if you are using white

50g Renshaw Regalice black sugar paste

sugar glue

 Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease a 7 inch and a 9 inch loose-bottomed cake tin (I used Dr. Oetker's Cake Release).

For the first cake, cream the butter and brown sugar in a large bowl.

Add half a tin of pumpkin pie filling, or your stewed and mashed pumpkin.

The mixture takes on a distinct orange colour - but the taste really isn't that strong if you are worried!

Add the eggs. There are supposed to be three eggs - but I got my first ever double yolk! The yolks in that egg were a lot smaller so I figured the total amount probably equated to three. This is a good opportunity for me to remind you to break eggs into a cup or small bowl first, and then transfer them one at a time to your main mixing bowl - particularly if you are trying to separate eggs and only need the white, as if you go wrong, you only need to throw away the egg and not your entire cake mixture!

The next stage is to fold in the flour.

I decided to flavour this half of the cake with orange and chocolate, so I squeezed half an orange and added the juice. I also added cocoa powder and spooned the cake mixture into the larger tin.

I repeated the same process for the second cake, using the other half of the tin of pumpkin, but without the orange juice or the cocoa powder. Dr. Oetker sent me this bag of chocolate chunks so I added the entire 100g to the cake mixture.

The chunks are bigger than regular chocolate chips and hold up really well when the cake is cooked. Here is the mixture before the second cake went into the oven. Spoon into the smaller tin and bake both cakes for 25-30 minutes, testing with a skewer. If you are doubling the recipe for the bottom cake, I recommend baking that in two tins.

The first cake - the chocolate and pumpkin cake - is ready and cooling.

I made some chocolate buttercream and spread it on top of the cake. You need the top to be quite smooth as you are going to cover it with fondant.

I then used Wilton orange gel to colour some white fondant and rolled it out on a large silicon mat I bought recently from Ikea. That made it very easy to turn the mat upside down and put the fondant on top of the cake without it breaking. I can see from this photo that I didn't mix in the orange particularly well, as the streaks were on the other side that was on the mat so I couldn't see them. They did end up being covered up by decorations though.

I also placed the cake on a black cake board to fit the Halloween theme. Use a knife to trim off the excess around the cake and smooth the cake over the top.

The smaller cake was quite deep as I used the same amount of mixture, so I sliced it through the middle. Here you can see the pumpkin has given the cake a slight orange colour and you can also see the chocolate chunks.

I filled the cake with chocolate buttercream and spread more over the top.

I wanted this cake to be purple as I thought the colour would go nicely with orange and was suitable for Halloween. Colouring fondant yourself is harder with a darker colour so I decided to buy some Renshaw Regalice sugarpaste in amethyst, which worked really well. I covered the cake, trimmed the edges and sat it on top of the larger cake.

I saw these Dairy Milk Pebbles in the supermarket and when I came to decorate the cake I remembered they were in the cupboard. They are similar to mini eggs in that they are bite-sized pieces of chocolate in a crisp candy shell, but they are flat pebbles and come in purple, yellow and grey. Perfect for Halloween!

I used them as decorations where the two cakes joined, as I think it can look quite untidy unless you have a ribbon or some other kind of decoration (or unless your fondant skills are perfect!). They were just the right size and the colours worked really well - and the chocolate is an added bonus when you cut a slice of cake.

You can decorate the cake however you like. I had some small Halloween cookie cutters from the Wilton brand that I bought in America a couple of years ago, so I used these to cut skulls, bats, pumpkins and ghosts out of fondant, using the leftover white and orange fondant and also a packet of black fondant. I also fashioned some pumpkins by making a ball and pressing it down slightly, and using a knife to mark around the sides. The green stem on top is a little piece of leftover green fondant I had from another project. I also wanted something large to go on top so made a skull out of white fondant. It's quite easy just to press into shape with your fingers and use a knife to mark the teeth.

 

I placed the different shapes around the sides of the cake and stuck them on with sugar glue, though you could also use leftover buttercream or even water.

I used two of the grey pebbles (though they look brown in this photo) for eye holes in the skull and sat the skull and pumpkins on top of the cake.

Here's my chocolate pumpkin Halloween cake in all its gory glory! The cake tasted very nice and was popular at work as I made it for a charity bake sale.

The Dot Com Gift Shop sent me these products from their Halloween range to review. There is a set of paper plates, paper napkins and paper cups all with a trendy black and white skull print. I love the design and the items are good quality; if you are having a Halloween party check out the other items on the website.

 Regular readers of my blog will know that I like to share my bakes with other bloggers, and monthly topical challenges hosted by other blogs. So first I am sharing this with Let's Cook With Pumpkin, hosted by Simply Sensational Food.

We Should Cocoa is the brainchild of Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog and she asks us to bake with chocolate and one other ingredient every month; this month the challenge is hosted by JibberJabber who has chosen vegetables. I hope they don't mind that my pumpkin came out of a tin!

Finally the theme for this month's Calendar Cakes, hosted by Laura of Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel of Dollybakes, is Halloween so I am sending in this cake.