Maple Coconut Caramel Bites

Recipe base from Not Quite Nigella

Mrs NQN has many ideas and gives many inspirations. My one issue is that I feel that prior knowledge is required for a few recipes, and therefore vital pointers are omitted in the instructions.

I felt that this recipe was one such case.

I was so excited that I had all the ingredients and also an opportunity to use my new cooking thermometer, that I did not do my usual sense check when I was reading the recipe, so did not realise until the crucial moment that I did not know what the final tinder toffee, perhaps(?) was meant to be like either in appearance or texture.

Bubbling away

I ended up with a bit of a roue after adding the final ingredients that somehow devolved into a granular breadcrumb like mixture that in no way resembled caramel or toffee or indeed gel or liquid like.

Baked Caramel

I was not willing to go through this process of getting the syrup to 150°C again so grabbed the last of my homemade caramel from the fridge and my jar of Dulce de Leche and added enough to spread it over my tin, baked it for just under 10 minutes, and ended up with a chewy coconut-ty mess. I could see that this would never harden to be able to be broken into the signature brittle pieces, so I went through the sticky procedure of rolling clumps up into balls or bites.

Jar o' Poo? Sorry, maple coconut bites

I have since written to Lorraine of NQN, and I am hoping that she updates her instructions so I can try it again with more confidence!

Salted Caramel Chocolate Cupcakes

Recipe base: LINK

I have a problem. If I see an interesting ingredient AND it's on some kind of promotion, I get filled with an increasing need to purchase said ingredient.

This happened with a jar of Dulce de Leche on offer in my local supermarket. Keeping in mind that I live in Sweden, whose grocery prices are pretty lofty, and whose price saving promotions are few and far between in my humble opinion. Even when there are offers, the price saving is not usually that great. However! You mustn't look a gift horse in the mouth regardless of the size of the gift, so covet it I did. Well I coveted two. Crafty producers offered two variations: Baking, and Classic. How could I choose?! I decided that as I wanted to use it with cake, I would opt for the baking option.

I went home, found a recipe, made it, was suitably disappointed, yada yada, more about that later.

You would think that the purchase would satisfy my needs, if not dampen them. Well, no, it did not. I am all about possession, and as with Pokémon, I gotta catch them all! The price promotion was still on at least three weeks later! They were really tempting me. I managed to talk myself down from the ledge of hopelessness, and put the jar down. I didn't really need it. Turns out, I had already bought the Classic jar in some sort of Supermarket Sweep blackout. I really didn't know, and happened upon the sneaky pot nestled behind a box of cocoa. Kerazy.

Anyhoo, so I was desperate to justify my initial purchase of the Baking Dulce de Leche so I scoured my usual suspects that I could search by ingredient with, and stumbled across a recipe for iced cupcakes. Huzzahs all around, everybody.

It seemed fairly straightforward except for the coring, filling, de-coring (is that a word?) of the cupcakes. Fiddly, monotonous stuff that I really had no time for, but beggars cannot be choosers: I had selected this recipe based on the limited ingredients at home, so I plowed on.

From memory, the cupcake mixture seemed nice and smooth, however proved to be heavy and close textured after baking. Big disappointment. Still edible nonetheless.

The Army

Reflection: add equivalent of bicarbonate of soda to baking powder for extra lift.

At the coring stage, I had a twinkling of a doubt that seeing as I was not baking the Dulce de Leche, I should have bought the other one, but I figured it wouldn't be much different. Kämpa kämpa. It turns out, I'm a mean corer; I could definitely have left more space for the gooey filling, but I retrospectively justified my actions by figuring that these were not results I could waste expensive ingredients on.

The icing was a bit grainy, maybe because I used the wrong sugar, but I don't quite remember. They were impressively uniform looking once they were frosted, so I surprised myself with my passable icing skills. Alas I did not think this through, so my transportation methods resulted in a few sad squashed fellows. Boo.

Cupcake

I have since invested in a 24-cupcake carrier. It is certainly a beast, however somehow more comfortable to carry than my old case.

Better luck next time... watch out for attempt 2!