Mini Chocolate Cake Doughnuts - and Home Made Cake Release - Perfect for use with Silicone Moulds

These iced (or chocolate dipped) mini cake doughnuts are really easy to make and a huge hit with kids. My little boy is now 7 years old, and can easily devour several of these as fast as they can be dipped / iced.

 Have a few disposable piping bags to hand to pipe the batter into the cells of your mould - otherwise this ends up a VERY messy job !

HOMEMADE CAKE RELEASE 

First up has to be the easiest and cheapest recipe you'll ever make. This stuff is AWESOME. If you are used to greasing and flouring baking pans, tins and silicone moulds - you'll just love this. IT saves so much time and works like an absolute charm.

Make some homemade cake release and your cakes will never again stick in your silicone moulds. This stuff will keep in jar in your fridge for a good month or two. Just lightly apply inside any baking tin or silicone mould (when making cakes) lightly with a pastry brush. Those cakes will literally just flip out the pans when done.

Mix equal WEIGHTS of plain cake flour, white vegetable fat such as TREX (UK) or CRISCO (USA) and vegetable oil and then mix together with a hand mixer. I find that 75grams of each is a perfect amount and will treat dozens of moulds :-)

I've absolutely always got this in the fridge.

Anyway - here is the recipe for the mini chocolate cake doughnuts. I'll warn you now - you need at least two moulds and the recipe makes tons (around 40)

Prepare your silicone mini donut / doughnut pans but either greasing and flouring or with a very light coating of cake release. If you can't be bothered making your own,  Dr Oeteker does an aerosol one and Wilton's comes in a little bottle. Cake release is so fast and easy for prepping pans.

Place mould on baking tray for support. I can get two of these pans on one tray at the same time.

Preheat the oven to 200deg C / 180deg C fan

Recipe 

1 cup (250ml volume) white granulated sugar

2.1/2 cups of self raising flour *

1/2 a cup of cocoa powder

2tsp of baking powder

2 tsp vanilla extract

300ml milk (warmed)

3 eggs

2 tablespoons of  golden syrup

115g melted butter or use vegetable oil

can be substituted for 2.1/2 cups normal plain (cake flour) plus 6 tsp baking powder

Sieve dry ingredients together, then mix with a whisk to make sure properly combined.

Combine wet ingredients together.

Add wet and dry ingredients together and then mix with a hand or stand mixer just until you have a smooth mix.

Put a disposable piping bag into a small jug or large glass to hold upright and fill 3/4 with the cake batter. Twist the top and then cut off the point of the bag. You can now pipe the batter into the prepared cake pans which is both quick and relatively mess free.

Do not over fill. You want to fill the cells to approx 1mm BELOW the raised part in the centre. This way, your cake doughnut will rise and retain the hole in the centre.

Bake for approx 7 > 8 minutes or until done. Remove from oven and allow to cool for approx 5 mins before turning out

Sarah-Jane Nash - www.siliconemoulds.com - January 2016

Sweeney Todd Halloween Cakes with Chocolate Fingers - Gruesome !

Yes - this IS just cake, fondant, chocolate and some piping gel with food colouring...

The cake has been made to look like a meat pie. 

I've had this idea of making Sweeney Todd cakes for Halloween for some time, so created a new silicone bakeware mould to make chocolate or cookie FINGERS  that really do look like fingers !

This mould is a unique registered design belonging to SiliconeMoulds.com , and is being released today for the first time at £4.50 per mould.

Our 6 cell Spooky Fingers chocolate mould makes six life-size cookie or chocolate fingers. It is suitable for use in the freezer down to -40deg C or in the oven up to +260deg C. Do always use on a baking tray for support.

 The fingers you see in these pictures (other than mine) are made from white chocolate with a tiny bit of Wilton red Candy colour added to give it a fleshy colour.

Note that if colouring chocolate, you cannot use gel paste colourings for fondant / icing. They MUST be oil based - hence why you need to use the candy colours.

You could make spooky witches finger cookies for halloween and place a nut on the nail bed with some icing..... or green chocolate zombie fingers and fill them with red coloured fondant centres.

These are bound to be a hit for all ages - though a few may take a step back in horror !

You could also use coloured sugarpaste or modeling chocolate if you want to be able to bend the fingers at the knuckles.

If there is enough local interest, I'd also be happy to put on a 3 hour evening class in October at our new Cookery School in Attleborough, Norfolk for those that want to make Sweeney Todd cakes. Please email us or call 01953 457699 to register interest.

I'd love to see what you do with our latest release mold. 

Happy Baking !

Sarah-Jane Nash, August 2013

Macarons ! Double Chocolate and Cherry... (Recipe)

Hey - it's been a while since I last made macarons. Too long actually. When a fellow cakey person was having some trouble, I decided it was time to knock up a batch to try and troubleshoot the problems and give her a comparison to try.

I love making these pretty, dainty macarons using our double sided macaron mats. The beauty is that they all end up identical in size and pair beautifully. They look divine packed several together and stood up straight like soldiers in a line.

RECIPE

 makes 75 shells (so you'll need 3 mats or to do 3 bakes) = 37 macarons plus an extra shell

180g powdered (icing) sugar

180g of egg whites - split into two 90g batches

40g good quality cocoa powder

180g ground almonds

200g of caster sugar

80mls of water.

Preheat fan ovens to 160deg C

Put the ground almonds and icing sugar into a blender and blitz until powder fine consistency.

Add this to a large bowl with 90g of egg white, the icing sugar and cocoa powder. Mix together to form a thick, sticky paste.

Put the caster sugar and water in a saucepan. Bring to the boil until temperature reaches 110deg C. At this point, start whipping the remaining egg whites to firm peak.

Remove sugar syrup from the heat at 118deg C. Whipping the egg whites at full speed, slowly pour in hot sugar syrup. Whip until this is meringue like in volume and the bowl is warm but not really hot.

Take a good spoonful of the meringue mix and stir well into the almond / egg white / cocoa mix to loosen. Fold the remaining meringue mix in with a spatula until it's a lava like consistency and a trail merges into the rest within about 30 seconds.

Pipe onto the large side of your REVOLUTIONARY DOUBLE SIDED MACARON MATS available from www.siliconemoulds.com (these baking sheets are available in several colours)- to within about 5mm of the outside of each cell. The mix will relax to fill the cells. 

Pop into the oven at 160deg C for 5 mins with the door a few inches ajar. Then, close the door and bake for a further 20 > 22mins.

I filled these with white chocolate ganache and a very nice cherry preserve. I also filled some others with the same ganache and ginger preserve.

Creating a wall of firm but pipeable ganache helps to stop the preserve oozing out. 1/2 a tsp of preserve is plenty in each centre. Sandwich together and chill overnight before serving

One is a treat, two would be a total indulgence ! I have to confess.... on THIS occasion  we didn't scoff all these macarons. These are macarons - though some still call them macaroons. No comparison to the coconut variety ! Some were gifted to some very lovely people we met last week at the NEC Spring Fair.

Our stand was directly opposite Alan Silverwood Ltd - they have produced the new range of bakeware for DELIA SMITH and very nice it is too ! All UK manufactured and available from independant retailers from this month.

Delia Smith was doing demonstrations in the cookery live theatre and Kathryn was brave enough to ask her to sign the hard back copy of my blog book (2012 recipes). A little confusing though as it's now 2013 ! Bless her.... exciting time for both Silverwoods and Delia at the moment and we wish them both lots of success.

We took lots and lots of stuff with us - but unfortunately there was not enough space to take everything !

Our range of large number silicone birthday cake moulds are proving very popular and we are looking forward to launching many new product lines in the next couple of weeks  - including our new registered design chocolate tractors mould

Sarah-Jane Nash - SiliconeMoulds.com - silicone bakeware specialists

Matcha Green Tea Macarons & Double Sided Macaroon Mat

I love making macarons. If I'm honest, I like making them more than I like eating them (though they are yummy too !) Some people still call these macaroons - but macaroons are very different (though just as tasty) and made from dessicated coconut.

I adore the pretty colours and being able to make them all so uniform and perfect in size and shape. It's so satisfying when things go right to pull two trays of perfect macarons from the oven. Baking on our Revolutionary Double Sided Macaron Mat means you can make every macaron identical in size.

Sometimes it may take you a few attempts to get the hang of baking macarons. The key is making sure that the batter (macaronage) is neither under or over mixed.

You'll find my Youtube video tutorial on making Macarons here.

Recipe (makes 75 x 2" dia shells = 37 macarons)

180g ground almonds

200g icing sugar / powdered sugar

2 tsp Matcha green tea powder

180g egg whites (split into two batches)

200g caster sugar

Preheat your oven to 150deg C fan.

Grind the ground almonds and icing sugar together until very very fine.

Add these to a large bowl with the matcha powder and 90g of egg whites. Mix to form a thick, smooth paste.

Put the caster sugar in a pan with 80ml of water and boil to 118deg C without stirring. When temperature hits 110 deg C, start whisking the egg whites to firm peak.

Slowly pour the sugar syrup into the egg whites, whipping constantly. Continue to whip until thick and shiny and cooled - but a little warm.

Fold the whipped egg whites / sugar mix into the paste making sure not to leave any streaky traces of paste mix of white meringue. It's ready when a ribbon trail of the macaronage starts to disappear into the rest of the mix within about 20 seconds.

Pipe on to your double sided macaron mat to within about 5mm of the ring of each cell. Please refer to my video tutorial in the link above if you need to see how to do this. The macaronage will relax to fill each cell.

Rap the tray on the worktop a couple of times to help release air bubbles.

Put trays in the oven and bake for 5 mins with the door open. Shut the door and bake for a further 20mins.

Allow to cool thoroughly before removing from the mats.

Fill with white chocolate ganache or vanilla buttercream.

To make white chocolate ganache, use 3 : 1 ratio of melted white chocolate and scalded double cream. Allow to cool until thickened but pipe-able or spreadable.

Here is Oliver in the office with Spencer bear and a macaron. 

Spencer is the bear from nursery, and Oliver was lucky enough to be chosen to bring Spencer home and look after him for the weekend.

Oliver was very proud to bring Spencer home. Daddy and Oliver showed Spencer how to light our stove and make the house lovely and cosy.

Unfortunately Spencer had a little accident and got sopping wet when Oliver dropped him in a great big puddle. He had to spend a few hours on the fire guard drying out whilst Oliver and I took the motorbike (powered by feet) that he got for his birthday out for a ride.....

As always, we stopped off to see Bess the dog just down the road. She's such a sweetie. Even she seemed puzzled by why Oliver was still partially dressed as a pirate !

Typically - EVERY puddle was for splashing in. This kid was SOAKED more than Spencer by the time he got home....

Awesome Triple Chocolate Cookies - Taste Test Approved

On Sunday afternoon, Oliver and I went shopping up in Norwich for a couple of jigsaws. He had been really good ALL day and I treated him to a cookie to eat in the car on the way home.

That was it - he'd had a taste of a real chocolate cookie..... and it was only going to be a matter of time before his request was put in. Oliver doesn't forget anything.

This morning, he was up and playing around the house after finishing his breakfast.

"Cookies ! Can Oliver and Mummy make cookies ?"

Well, we dug out an old recipe from the cupboard and made up a quick batch of these. They were made and ready (and Oliver had eaten one) before 11am !

On picking my rascal up from nursery this evening I found he had informed everyon that he had made chocolate cookies for breakfast. Ah well. He's only had ONE so far... and the rest will be rationed to make them last.

Do be warned. These cookies are delightfully fugdy and gooey and SERIOUSLY chocolatey. Almost brownie like in the centre but with crisp edges.

RECIPE

1 egg

125g salted butter

250g light brown soft sugar

1 tsp vanilla

175g self raising flour

70g cocoa powder

100g white chocolate chips

100g milk chocolate chips

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Add in sieved flour and cocoa and mix to combine. Mix in chocolate chips - you could add nuts too if you like

Roll into walnut size balls and place on prepared baking trays. Putting them on greaseproof paper is ok, but if you have silicone baking mats  / tray liners - my preference is to use the smooth side up.

Put into a 170deg C Fan oven for approx 9 mins. Theese do spread, but not too much. The cookies will end up about 3" diameter. You can get about 9 on a tray and this mix makes approx 24. Of course, you could always make them bigger and cook longer.

Mine were in the oven for 9 minutes. The outsides were crisp and the insides really yummy and squishy. From the outside, they looked disapointingly cakey when I wanted chewy and gooey - but looks sometimes do deceive ! Oliver seemed satisfied with the results. You can see how squidgy they are from the inside and the colour of his teeth. Yeuch !

I think we will be making these again soon.....

When removed from the oven, leave on the tray for a minute or two to cool before transferring to a wire rack until totally cooled. If putting on silicone baking sheets, these need to cool a little longer on the trays as the silicone retains quite a bit of heat.

Sarah-Jane Nash - http://www.siliconemoulds.com/ January, 2011     silicone bakeware moulds

Another GIANT XXXXL Cupcake !

Yup - it's another GIANT cupcake. The 2 litre milk carton is there to give you an idea of the size of the cake

This is an very popular mould in our collection and I know many out there are looking for volumes, recipes and cooking times for this really really HUGE jumbo sized cupcake mould.

Our mould isn't just big - it's MASSIVE and totally dwarfs both the Big Top Jumbo Muffin Mould and the Wilton Giant Cupcake pan.

I've been having a play over the weekend and have a recipe that has turned out very well which I can share. It WAS my second attempt. The first attempt was thwarted after almost 2 hours cooking time. I HAD to go out and the cake was nearly but not quite cooked. The only option was to turn off the cooker and leave the cake in. Unfortuantely, by the time I got back it was way over done. The recipe volume was spot on and I do believe it would have been really good had I been there to keep an eye on it.

This recipe includes a lot of pureed apple. This is to retain the moisture in the cake during a long baknig time and also to keep fat content as low as I could. I used sunflower oil for speed. You need to make two big batches of cake mix before you can put the mould in the oven, so speed is of the essence. I really didn't want to spend ages creaming butter !

Recipe

you will need to do this twice. If you do not have american measure cups, use a standard teacup.

2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups apple puree

1 cup of vegetable oil

3 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp of bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp salt

2 tsp of cinnamon - if you really like cinnamon, double it !

1 tsp nutmeg

1 cup of sultanas or raisins

Add all wet ingreditents together and beat with electric hand mixer. Sift dry ingredients (apart from raisins) into wet. Combine and beat in until smooth - then stir in raisins.

Lightly butter giant muffin mould and then dust with flour - tipping out any excess. Put mould on a baking tray. It must be supported at all times.

Pour first batch of mix into base side. Make 2nd batch of mix. Add about 2 cups of the mix to the mix in the base side.

CAREFULLY Put into a preheated 180deg C fan oven for 30mins.

Remove from oven and pour rest of batter into top side of mould. Put back into oven for 1 hour. After 30mins, put a piece of greaseproof paper over the base side only and tuck round to stop the top darkening too much.

When cooking time is up, check cake with a tester. Be careful not to puncture your mould or it will rip ! I like to use a cake tester which is not sharp and has a colour changing tip to tell you when the cake is cooked. I think mine needed a further 10 > 15 mins.

Remove from oven and allow to cool until just warm before turning out and cooling fully on a rack. The good thing with this cake is that it did not get a big domed top. This meant the tops of each part did not need cut off . They natuarally say nicely together which was actually a big surprise !

The cooked cake filled 3/4 of each side of the mould. The finished height of my cake was 12.1/2" and it weighed just a snitch under 4kg as you can see further down.

When cooled try the pieces together to make sure they sit straight. The top will need carved off a little to give a point instead of a foot / stump.

For the icing, I used :

 250g of softened, salted butter

1kg of icing sugar

250ml double cream

cream butter and then CAREFULLY add in icing sugar and cream. I say carefully - or you'll end up with a kitchen full of white clouds of sugar. Mine was still too dry, so I also added a good glug of white rum. Rum, sugar, butter and apples was a classic combination.

Instead of piping, I simply applied the frosting to the top of the base and covered the top part using a normal table knife. For decoration, I kept it simple and simply used a scattering of sugar nibs. We now have sugar nibs available. I'll add them to the website shortly.

Finished cake was just shy of 4kg. It COULD have been bigger if I totally filled up the mould using another batch of mix and spliting it between the sides - but cooking time would be increased to over 2.5hrs ! I'd say this is big enough ! If everyone had a 100g portion - which is a reasonable sized bit - you'd have 40 portions.

I then cut mine into slices.... Enough cake to feed and army  ! Slices were the almost the width of a full sized dinner plate.....

One slice is enough to feed several people. I wrapped the slices in greaseproof paper and have shared much of it around the neighbours. If they weren't in , they didn't get any !

The following photos are not mine, but have been sent to me of cakes that customers have made. Thank you to both Louise and Lorraine for allowing me to share your photos.

Sarah-Jane Nash, August 2010 - http://www.siliconemoulds.com/ - THE silicone bakeware moulds cook shop.

Raspberry & Lemon Friands

Friands are delicious little teacakes that originated from the French financiers.They are made mainly with ground almonds, egg whites and very little flour which makes them moist and extremelly moreish too !

I made financiers recently and was bowled over with how nice they were. Zurin from Cherry On a Cake made some too.

Friands are seriously popular in Australia and are found in cafes, beach huts and even McDonalds all over the country. They are much more popular there than muffins and cupcakes. Once you've tried these you'll want to eat the lot ....

The heady and seductive aromas of fresh summer raspberries and fresh smell of lemon filled my kitchen. Oh - if only that smell could be bottled ! These won't hang around long so neither will the smell..... :-(

Oval Friand Cake tins or pans seem to be really hard to find, which is why we've made some in flexible silicone bakeware. The cakes release beautifully with ease leaving a perfect oval form.

You don't want Friands to rise too high and the top should be domed but not cracked. There is no inclusion of any baking agents in this recipe. Friands are also very easy to make and supposedly keep and freeze very well. Needless to say, I've not tried freezing them.

With financiers, you need to cook the butter until nut brown. Australians it seems skip this step with Friands and just melt the butter..... brown it if you like !

Recipe

175g melted butter (I use salted)

210g icing sugar

60 g plain flour

120g ground almonds

5 egg whites

zest of 1/2 a lemon.

20 large, juicy raspberries

Sift icing sugar and flour. Add almonds and stir. Whip egg whites to break up until they start to foam, but well before they reach peaking. Add the eggs and mix. Quickly mix in warm / hot melted butter.

Pour into greased and floured Friand mould.  Each cell should be approx 3/4 full. This mix is enough to make 10 - so you may want to put the remaining batter into a couple of silicone baking cups or a muffin tin / mould. Top each cell with a couple of raspberries and some lemon zest.

Bake at 190deg C fan oven (210deg normal) for 15 > 20 mins until springy to the touch.

With the remaining mix, I made another couple of snowflake shaped friands but without the addition of rasperries. The doming on the top was useful for propping the friands up to show the snowflake design. I love these !

Sarah-Jane Nash - http://www.siliconemoulds.com/ July 2010

Homemade Chocolates - GUEST POST

Today's Guest Post is from Jill of Jillispaiges.blogspot.com

My name is Jill, I'm a Mum to 2 girls and I have the most delicious 3 year old Grandson. I have been crafting and creating things for as long as I can remember, with my main passion being card making which I've done for the last 4 years. With money being tight I am always on the look out for ideas for cheap handmade gifts, which seem to be appreciated a lot more than shop brought ones.

I decided to dabble in chocolate making after a friend of mine told me all about her unsuccessful Easter egg making with moulds brought from QVC, which were the rigid ones. I just had to try it out myself, but with silicone moulds ... I figured these would be easier and searched EBay for the cheapest around, which brought me to www.siliconemoulds.com - so with my son-in-law's 30th birthday approaching we (my daughter and I) thought handmade chocolates would be a good thing to put in his party favor bags and help keep the costs down!

I can't do anything easy though and these chocolates had to have different flavoured centre's in. That was the biggest mission I had - finding a fondant crème recipe. Google is a fabulous thing and after hours of trawling the internet I found the one I liked the look of, which also told you how to make different flavours http://www.wrenscottage.com/kitchen/recipes/candy/creamfondant.php.

It's turned into a bit of an obsession - and close to 400 chocolates later I still have a passion to make more. I've just sold some of my rubber stamps to help finance the purchase of 3 new moulds and have brought the ingredients ready to make 4 new flavours when they arrive .... brandy crème's, raspberry crème's, fudge and almonds! Of course I'm going to need a few more mould's so that I can tell the difference between each flavour (well that's what I've told my hubby ;) !)

I've had a few requests for boxes of chocolates for gifts and have been approached by a couple of friends to make chocolates for their wedding favors but that's still under discussion at the moment.

The biggest compliment I've received was from my son-in-law's Dad who said my chocolate's were as good as Thornton's!

 

 

Jill uses the 24 chocolate truffle mould in the photos above - which is a semi sphere. We also do a larger version of the same mould which is called the 15 bonbon. Our other chocolate moulds can be found following this link. We are due to add a number of new chocolate moulds to our collection in the coming weeks.