Home Bake Box: Lavender Macarons

Getting things in the post is such fun – I still hand-write letters, shop online both for ‘proper stuff’ (clothes, household goods) and also craft supplies from Ebay, which is usually such a spur of the moment 99p (or less) purchase that by the time a little packet of die cuts or beads arrives, I’d forgetten I bought it!

 

I’ve written before about Degustabox and how much I like the idea of a parcel of goodies turning up once a month, so I was excited when I came across a new company called Home Bake Box.

 

They deliver a box every month containing all the ingredients you need – already weighed out and sealed in separate packets – to make a particular recipe. There’s also a recipe card, a longer leaflet and a whole load of online content you can go onto their website to access (eg different flavour combinations).

 

Home Bake Box is a small family run business so the kind of thing I like to support – they haven’t paid, or asked, or even know, that I’m writing this blog post. I subscribed for a couple of months though ended my subscription as I just wasn’t finding the time to bake along with all the other things I had planned.

 

Communication was great – when I tweeted a question about whether something was gluten free, I had a reply from Abhi straight away. As as aside, the macaron mix was gluten free but she said they couldn’t guarantee it was fine for coeliacs essentially due to other variables, so I thought it best not to chance it. But according to their website, gluten free and vegan mixes are coming soon!

 

Abhi admits on her website she thinks there is room for improvement with the look of the packaging and that the first time they tried to send out jam (as a filling for one of the cake recipes) the sachets leaked, though mine didn’t- I think I received one of the double-bagged ones! I actually like the plain and simple packaging though, and how neat all the little packets look inside the box. It makes the whole thing seem quite accessible and achievable which is good for more inexperienced bakers.

 

I also love the fact that the boxes are small and flat enough to go through the letterbox. While I love getting parcels, it’s a pain when it means knocking on elderly neighbours’ doors when I get home in the evenings as the courier has left my parcels with them! These however came straight through my letterbox.

 

So what were the two boxes I’ve received so far? Well, my heart sank – but in a good way – a little when I opened the first one. Macarons! I find macarons really hard and have even been on a one-day course to improve my technique. In a way I was pleased I would get to try again but at the same time a bit disappointed the recipe wasn’t something different that I hadn’t come across before. On the other hand I think for the majority of bakers, that would be true.

 

Similarly, the following month, which I haven’t baked yet, was Sachertorte. I was a bit disappointed again as I made a Sachertorte once before and it turned out fine – it wasn’t a particularly difficult or unusual bake. I guess it’s because I’m a fairly experienced baker but one thing that I would like to see Home Bake Box doing as the company expands is perhaps offer a beginner’s box, with something simple or something that most bakers won’t have tried before, and an advanced box, with something that is either more technically challenging or uses unusual ingredients that are hard to find in the shops.

 

Having said that, I’ve just seen on their website what was in their October box: ingredients for a pan de muerto, in honour of Mexico’s day of the dead – which is something I’ve never even heard of. I should have stuck with my subscription perhaps!

 

The box that I subscribed to cost £8.99 a month which is actually quite a lot for some of the recipes – though with the Sachertorte kit it even included gold leaf, which is expensive.

 

However, they also offer a Classic Bake Box, which looks much better and is £19.99 a month. If I had realised this when I first subscribed I probably would have bought one of these. In October for instance, as well as the pan de muerto mix, you got a 9-piece skull cookie cutter set and ingredients and icing for decorated sugar cookies, and the kit for a lime, marigold and orange genoise cake. I like the idea of being given a piece of baking equipment as well as the ingredients for the recipes.

 

So how did the macaron recipe turn out? Not quite as well as I had hoped, but macarons are notoriously difficult to make.



I followed the instructions, mixing the ingredients and piping the mixture out onto a silicon macaron mat I already owned.

I waited until they were cool to peel off the baking sheet but unfortunately a lot of them stuck. Perhaps they were too big and therefore not quite cooked through, I'm not sure.

I then made the filling, which was called buttercream but actually involved mixing the powder sachet with egg and milk to make a sort of custard, which was then allowed to cool. I filled the macarons with this and they did taste good, even if they didn't look all that great!

The pack came with a tiny little box to package a few of the macarons up in, which I did to give to my mum as a gift.

I'm sharing these macarons with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is M.

 

Delicious Alchemy Gluten-free, Dairy-free Oaty Cookies

One of my work colleagues is gluten intolerant but most of the bakes I’ve brought into work recently have been things I’ve made to have at home and had some left, and I thought it was about time I actually made something gluten free.

 

Every so often I purchase a Degustabox – it’s a monthly subscription service but you can dip in and out, which I have reviewed (after buying with my own money) before. I had one of their boxes a couple of months ago which included a packet of gluten-free cookie mix so one evening – given I’m always short of time after work – I decided to make the cookies.

 

The company behind these mixes is called Delicious Alchemy; they make cake and bread mixes and cereals as well and have a limited edition Christmas fruit cake mix available at the moment as well. It was started by a computer games producer who discovered she was coeliac and went off to university to study food science and marketing. They’ve launched products in Sainsburys and Waitrose and they are also available through their website. I’d never come across the company before but I love their colourful packaging and fun approach – the company history timeline has an anecdote about how the founder discovered she was coeliac (an ear of wheat down her sock!) and another about the time the company accountant got stuck in a lift.

 

The mix I had, the Oaty Cookie mix, was so easy to make. All you do is mix the contents of the bag with melted butter and water – you can also make these cookies vegan by using a butter-substitute which is what I did, after hearing that another colleague also can’t eat gluten or dairy.

 

I got 9 cookies out of the mixture and they were so quick and easy to make, and tasted pretty good too. I think they would have been better with butter and they were not particularly sweet – which is a good thing as it makes them feel a bit healthier. Also, my colleague said that often gluten-free products are packed full of sugar and she finds them too sweet, so she really likes these. In fact when I told her about the packet mix I’d used, she went on to the company’s website and ordered some herself!

I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as their theme this month is autumn, and I think there is something very autumnal and warming about oats.

 

How to Make a Zebra Cake - Duff Goldman Cake Mix Review

I take a lot of shortcuts when I'm cooking but packet cake mixes are something I don't usually do. I couldn't resist this one however - it's from Duff Goldman, the man behind Charm City Cakes - as seen in the television show Ace of Cakes. I went to Charm City Cakes when I was in Baltimore a couple of years ago but I didn't get to see Duff!

On the back of his new-found fame he launched a range of products including equipment, frosting and cake mixes. I got this packet cake mix from America and finally used it a few months ago - it's pretty unique, like Duff, as you can make a zebra stripe cake.

The box came with a packet of dry mixture to which you add - if memory serves - egg and oil, though don't quote me on that. It also has a sachet of purple food colouring, which you add to HALF of the cake mixture after separating it out into two bowls. This is how to make a zebra cake whether you are using a packet mix or not.

Simply take a spoonful of your first colour and place in the very centre of a greased round cake pan. Don't spread it out. Then take a spoonful of your second colour and place it on top of the first - again don't spread it out. The weight of the second colour (in this case white) will cause the first colour (purple) to spread underneath, but the white will stay in the centre.

 

Repeat until you have used up all the cake mixture, alternating the colours each time and placing the spoonful directly on top and allowing the mixture to spread out by itself. I did find it hard after a while to keep my spoonfuls of mixture exactly in the centre so the concentric circles aren't so even any more!

 

Here's the cake ready to go in the oven. Bake according to pack instructions or following your own recipe.

It started to crack slightly in the oven, so you can see that while the outside is golden brown cake, the inside is still bright purple and white!

Unfortunately I was so excited to see the cake I took it out of the tin straight away.. and it broke into several pieces! This was the lightest, fluffiest cake I've ever had - as I said I don't usually use packet mixes - and it was almost cloud-like in texture. You can hardly pick it up even when it's cool so definitely do not try before it has fully cooled or this will happen!

I made some buttercream and added the remainder of the purple food colouring and used the buttercream to stick the broken pieces of cake together! I also spread some on the top. You can see from this slice that the zebra effect goes right through - it looks a bit strange in purple but would be great in black and white or orange stripes for a tiger.

 

As well as being the lightest, fluffiest cake I've ever had, this was also by far the sweetest. I don't know if all American cakes (or packet mixes) are like that; after all US chocolate is very different on the whole to British chocolate. This cake was actually too sweet for me and I have a very sweet tooth! I do like the look of a lot of the products in Duff Goldman's range though and will be looking out for them when I go to America in September.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More than Occasional baker, as the letter this month is Z.

Minions Cookies

The Minions film is out this weekend - I haven't seen it but I loved them in Despicable Me and the sequel, so much so that my boyfriend bought me a cuddly Minion toy and the unicorn (It's so fluffy!) at different times.

I couldn't resist buying this cookie kit for just £1 from Iceland; I don't usually buy packet mixes so I was curious to see how it turned out. You get a bag of shortbread mixture, to which you only have to add 20g butter or marg; a packet of icing sugar that looks white but turns yellow as soon as you add water, and a packet of rice paper decorations - eyes and mouths.

It couldn't be simpler to make up the packet mix, but you only get a tiny amount of dough - enough for just six cookies. I got seven as my cutter was slightly smaller than the recommended size.

They only take 10 minutes to cook in the oven; when they have cooled, decorate with the yellow icing. Mine was ever so slightly too runny so it spilled over the sides a bit. When the icing is still tacky add the edible decorations.

These would be really fun to make with kids and I had hoped to make these with my boyfriend's nephews while we were babysitting but I hadn't realised they were only allowed a certain amount of treats - which they'd already had with their grandmother by the time I got there- and I didn't want to be told off for filling them with sugar! So I made them myself at home and my boyfriend polished them off after dinner. Not quite as grown up as after-dinner mints but a lot more fun!

Raspberry Macarons

I've never found making macarons easy - and while I managed to make them as part of a group lesson, I had rather less success when trying to make them at home. I'd even tried making them from an expensive packet mix, which cost £7.50, so when I saw that Sainsbury's had introduced a new macaron packet mix costing only £2, I knew I had to try it.

The instructions are very easy to follow and you only need a couple of ingredients beside what is included in the packet - they even give you a piping bag. First you have to whisk two egg whites to stiff peaks.

Here are the two packets of mixture, one for the macarons and one for the filling.

Simply mix the macaron packet mix into the whisked egg whites. It's a very bright pink colour and has a zingy raspberry taste but is also quite sweet.

The instructions say to pipe the macarons onto a piece of greaseproof paper on a baking tray but I decided to use my macaron mat. It has two sizes of circles marked out (on the back and front) to use as a guide and is made of silicon so it's easy to peel the macarons off when they are cooked.

There's a paper piping bag included in the box. I was a bit dubious but stood the bag in a tall glass so I could fill it, and snipped off a little piece at the bottom. I was pleased to find that the macaron mixture was quite thick so didn't start running out of the piping bag until I was ready.

 

I found it quite easy to pipe the macarons onto the marked circles - definitely easier than the last time I made macarons where my discs were all shapes and sizes (even using the mat, as my mixture was quite runny).

Bake in the oven- the instructions say to put the macarons into a cold oven and turn it to 50C for 20 minutes, then turn the oven up to 150C ( I think - don't quote me on that) for another 15 mins. That was different to how I've made them before; I also put my silicon mat onto a baking tray to keep it flat, and banged it on the worktop a few times to eliminate any bubbles, something that wasn't in the instructions but I've been taught to do.

They came off the macaron mat very easily and many were almost perfect circles with only a few that had spread.

To make the filling, I whisked the packet mixture together with some butter. It's pink and has a zesty raspberry taste; it's also a good consistency - not too thick, not too thin.

However, I didn't quite have enough to sandwich all the macarons together (and I don't think I was particularly heavy handed with the filling). I had some leftover raspberry puree I had made from a punnet of raspberries that I have been eating in a breakfast fruit pot I've made so I mixed this with some icing sugar to make some more filling for the macarons.

The homemade filling

It was very easy to sandwich the macarons together and the filling stayed put and did not run out. For some reason though the macarons had lost their pink colour and turned more brown on the outside - mine always seem to do that, I wonder why?

The inside is a lovely bright pink though!

I decided to package these up in a small box and send to a friend for his birthday. I hope they made it in the post OK!

I'm sending these raspberry macarons to Alphabakes, the challenge I co-host with Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter we have randomly chosen this month is R.

Raspberries are the ingredient for this month's One Ingredient Challenge, hosted by Nazima from Franglais Kitchen and Laura from How To Cook Good Food.

Easter Egg Surprise Cakes

The surprise when you crack open one of these eggs is.... there's cake inside!

I can't take credit for this idea at all. I saw it on Ros's blog The More Than Occasional Baker last Easter, and immediately bookmarked it for next year; though she says she got the idea from another website and it may have come from somewhere else before that!

I've been carefully breaking eggshells by using a spoon to make a hole at one end every time I've used eggs recently, so I could wash out the shells and keep them relatively intact. Today I set about making the cake to go inside. Ros made multicolour cakes but said her mum had made the suggestion of putting small balls of marzipan inside to look like a yolk. When I saw that, I remembered I had bought some white cake mix when I was in America; I'm not usually a fan of packet mix but I wanted to see how this would turn out. The white cake would contrast perfectly with the yellow marzipan and make pretty realistic eggs.

You just add some water, oil and three egg whites to the packet cake mix, it only took a minute to mix together. It tasted incredibly sweet though, and was much more runny than the cake mixture I would normally make.

I could only get hold of 'white' marzipan rather than yellow; it was still slightly yellow in colour but not that much so I added some Dr. Oetker yellow gel colouring and kneaded it in (this is the before picture).

 I rolled several small balls of marzipan, though some of them turned out to be too big so I broke them in half and made two.

Here are some of the egg shells I saved and washed out. The holes aren't particularly neat but that doesn't really matter.

I put the cake mixture into a piping bag and piped some in to each shell, then placed a ball of marzipan inside, then filled in the shells with some more cake mixture. It was quite messy as it was so runny!

They only took 15 minutes in the oven, though I obviously overfilled the shells as a lot of the cake came out.

I learnt how to do it better on the second batch and the cake only spilled out slightly.

Here's a very unassuming box of eggs... I plan to take them into work and offer them around, which will get me a few strange looks!

Until people start peeling the shells off, that is! I was pleased the white cake mix genuinely did come out white unlike 'normal' cake which is more of a golden brown in colour. I guess they do that by bleaching the flour somehow.

Here's the cake 'egg' nestling in the egg box

When you cut it in half, the marzipan really does look like an egg yolk!

I'm really pleased with these; they were easy to make though messy to fill the eggs. But I think they will make a great Easter surprise!

I'm sending these to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Laura of Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel of Dollybakes, as their theme this month is Easter.

I'm also sending this to Bookmarked Recipes, hosted by Jacqueline of Tinned Tomatoes.