December 2012: Chocolate Strawberries, Scones, Blueberry Mini Cakes and Crumpet Rings Mini Cakes

In December two of my friends moved to Sweden. It was a sad parting, but to send them off properly we had a 'British' themed picnic.

This involved lots of tasty food and of course Scones were a must, one of my friends really likes strawberries so I made sure to include some.

Scones

These are adapted from a Mary Berry recipe.
Put 200g SF flour, 2tsp baking powder, 1tblsp caster sugar and 50g butter in a food processor a pulse until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. With a wooden spoon mix in 1egg and enough milk to make a pliable dough. Roll out until about 1" thick and using a round 5cm cutter cut out and place on a baking tray lined with baking parchment. Brush tops with milk and bake 200° for 10-12mins.

We filled them with copious amounts of clotted cream and jam. mmmmm.

Chocolate Strawberries

These are really simple all you need to do is Melt some chocolate, dip the pointed end of the strawberries (washed) in until about half way then place either on a tray lined with Greaseproof paper, or into a petit four (mini cupcake) case. So pretty and delish!

Strawberries in Grand Marnier

This recipe was first suggested to me by one of my customers and it's such a great idea!
Due to the fact my friend was driving I didn't make them but here's how to do them anyway.  Wash, hull and halve some Strawberries put in a bowl and sprinkle some Icing sugar over the top, then drizzle some Grand Marnier over the top (a 2-3 tblsp is probably about right). Using a spoon gently spoon the syrup from the bottom of the bowl of the strawberries and leave to marinate for a few hours. Then all you need to do is eat them - they are very moreish.

Blueberry Mini Cakes

Always popular blueberry and vanilla mini cakes with vanilla buttercream. Simply add some blueberries (fresh or frozen) to the cake batter before you add the flour adding a couple of extra tblsp of flour as well.

The mini cakes were baked in my Alan Silverwood cake pan and cut in half horizontally - I cook these for the same time as cupcakes - 12mins.

Crumpet Ring Single portion cakes 

These were more of an experiment - these were the same blueberry cake batter, filled with the vanilla buttercream but baked using Crumpet rings. The rings were put ontop of a baking sheet lined with baking parchment and baked for about 15mins.
They look cute don't they!

To finish off the stacks of cake I made - Good old Basic Chocolate Cake squares, with topped with Chocolate buttercream. (I used my other Alan Silverwood pan to make them all uniformly square!)