Cupcakes - no aqua faba this time

Well not wanting to open another can of chickpeas I have tried a new cupcake recipe based on a few older cake recipes on this site. This is a proper amalgamation. My daughter asked for pink and blue cakes, so we ended up adding food colouring from my icing sets to get some colour in the mix. This recipe is vegan friendly.

Ingredients

• 200g self raising flour
• 50g Tex butter substitute
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 tbl flax seed in 70ml of water
• 150ml yogurt (I used soya/ almond)
• Dash of almond milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Methodology

• Pre heat oven to 180C
• mix up the flour and sugar
• in second bowl mix up the butter, yogurt, vanilla essence, and flax seed
• add the flour and sugar to the wet ingredients 
• place a tablespoon in each cupcake case - this made 16 cupcakes.

Notes

• This may not be sweet enough for you but the kids loved it - my daughter happily cleaned the bowls for me and sat sucking the paper after eating the cupcake first out of oven (still stuck to paper as they hadn't cooled at that point)
• The cupcakes took a while in the oven - around 20/ 25mins. this did seem a long time but they were still moist and yummy.

Preserving Cherries

So it is that time of the year that the garden starts giving me the challenge of what to do with the fruit it is busily producing. This is the first year we have managed to get anything off the cherry tree. So pleased but struggled to find a way to use them all up. So I decided to try the recipe from Tori Avey. I found the following:

• This recipe was way too sweet for  me
• De-steming before doing this meant the cherries went black at that point very quickly, don't destem until ready to make the preserve (read this to find out how to stop the discolouring happening, this is also useful as cherries go a funny colour as you pit them)
• It takes an age to cut stones out of the cherries
• It takes longer to create the syrup than she states
• Cherries stain your hands when destoning with a knife
• 2lb makes just about two jars of preserved cherries
• This recipe had a lot of left over liquid even after additional reduction process.

Ingredients

• 2lb cherries - before stoning and steming
• 2 cups of sugar
• 4 cups of water

Methodology

• Put the water and sugar mix on the stove to boil
• Whilst mix is boiling pit the cherries
• When the mix is like a thin syrup - thicker than water, but not quite like honey - add cherries
• Bring back to a boil
• Simmer for 30 mins, in an open pan
• Check the liquid - it should have reduced to around 2 cup by this point. You may not use all the liquid in the jars.
• Allow to cool in the pan
• Add to sterilised jars - cover fruit with the syrup, leaving 1/2 inch at the top
• Keep in the fridge