Buttermilk Scones with Caramel Apple Jam

 ***Before I start, I may ramble in this, it was done over 2 days :) ***



Over the weekend I decided I would muck around with scone recipes. Not really. Well, yeah, really, but I actually had a light bulb moment. Laying in bed on Saturday night it just came to me. I wanted to make apple pie, but have had issues with shortcrust pastry, so that got me thinking about different sorts of pastries, which then led me to scones, then I thought I could make scones with some sort of apple jam. A caramel apple jam!! Ta-da! An idea was born. I struggled to sleep with ideas of how I could pull this all together floated in my head.

Anyway, I must've slept, since I woke up Sunday morning. My morning was taken up by going to the Launch of I AM Norma. It is a beautiful little caravan, and I entered a raffle to win an afternoon tea with 5 friends in Norma. Fingers crossed!

Back at home I got to work, I'd sussed out various scone recipes and then just decided I would make my own. There seems to be a lot of variances in scone recipes, so, go with what works for you. This one that I made up produced scones that were lovely and fluffy (but not cake fluffy) on the inside. They were light, and rose well, although I forgot my oven is temperamental, so only one side of them browned. But they were still good. Fresh out of the oven I broke one apart. The smell was wonderful and I got a big thumbs up from the 3 people in my house at the time.

Then came the caramel apple jam. Again, my own invention, so it was anyone's guess just how well it would turn out. I started with a basic caramel, then stewed some apples. Then blended them all together. Pretty simple, pretty awesome. There is a freshness of the apple in the first bite then the caramel sweetness comes through. Its still sweet though, but in a subtle way.

If you go ahead and make both of these for an occasion, I would suggest making the caramel apple jam the day before, as it needs to chill to set.


BUTTERMILK SCONES (made 18 x 4cm diameter scones)
 3 cups self raising flour
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 - 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, depending on how much you like cinnamon
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
70g cold butter, cubed
Extra buttermilk for brushing
brown sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. line a tray with baking paper.
Sift flour, sugar and cinnamon together at least three times. Place into a bowl.

Add the butter cubes and using your fingers work the flour and butter together until you have a fine bread crumb consistency. Dont worry if it doesn't look like bread crumbs to you, just make sure that all the butter has blended with the flour.

Make a well in the centre and add the buttermilk. Using a butter knife or your fingers gently mix together until a dough forms. Turn out on to a clean bench dusted with flour. Press in to a round, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to rest for 5 - 10 minutes.

Once the dough has rested, roll out to about 2cm thickness. Using a round cutter or a knife, cut into the shapes you want and place on to the prepared tray. Place them close together so they rise up not out, however, probably not as close as what I did. (I wanted to get as many on the tray as I could)
Brush the tops with buttermilk and sprinkle with brown sugar.

Place in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until tops have brown and they don't feel doughy any more.

CARAMEL APPLE JAM  (makes 2ish cups)
200g caster sugar
50g water
300ml cream
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
3 apples (2 to stew, 1 to grate)
150g butter (100g for caramel, 50g for apples)
Cinnamon & brown sugar to taste

Place the sugar and water in one pot and the cream and vanilla in another. Place both on a high heat.
Let the sugar go, it will not be ready before the cream is. Heat up the cream, stirring constantly, being careful not to bring it to the boil. Turn off the heat.

Back to the sugar. By now it should be bubbling. Watch for the colour change. Once the sugar has reached a nice golden colour, remove for the heat and working quickly but carefully, pour the cream into the sugar and place back on to a low heat. Start whisking when it is put back on the heat. It will bubble, so be careful, if you whisk too hard or pour the cream in too fast it will bubble over. Put the 100g of butter in and whisk through the caramel. Turn off the heat when the butter has half melted, and keep whisking until butter has completely melted. Pour into a heat safe container and place in the fridge to cool.

Skin and dice 2 apples. Place into the pot that had the caramel in it. Add the 50g of butter and cinnamon and brown sugar to taste (no more than 1/4 cup brown sugar) Put on a high heat and stir, once it comes to a soft boil turn down and let simmer until apples are soft. Take off the heat.

By this stage the caramel should have cooled. If you have a stick mixer, fantastic, you can start to combine ingredients in the pot. I however, dont, so, I poured my apples into a blender, and added caramel a little at a time, mixing to a smooth consistency between each addition. At this point you should be tasting between each addition of caramel. If it is too caramelly add some grated apple (no skin) and keep adjusting as necessary. You may not use all the caramel, I didn't, but that cool, put it back in the fridge and use it on ice cream or other cakes! :)

Once the caramel apple jam is smooth in consistency and you are happy with the flavour, put into a container and into the fridge to chill for about an hour or so.

After its chilled it is ready to use, or if, like me, you like it a bit fluffy, you can whisk it a little before using. It does lighten the caramel, but that's about it. Doesn't change the flavour.

Non-whisked caramel apple jam

After being whisked

And there you go, my buttermilk scones with caramel apple jam :) :)

The Australia Post Experiment

Over the next few weeks I will be testing out our postal system. It would be nice to know that I can send my food to friends in other states, or if friends have friends or family and want to surprise them with my sweets it would be good if I could offer them!

A few of my friends have volunteered to be the guinea pigs in this, I totally had to twist their arms for them to agree :) I will have packages going to Brisbane, Townsville, Perth, Sydney, Darwin & Humpty Doo. Still no one from SA or VIC, but this should give me an idea of how they travel.

Will keep you updated on how it goes!

Multi-Coloured Icing

Green, Blue & Purple cupcake and icing

This week at work we did a demo on piping nozzles. Trying out different ones and just generally mucking around with different techniques.

The ladies that watched us this week were lovely and enjoyed learning a few different styles. I thought I would jazz it up a bit by trying two-toned icing. I'd only seen this done and hadn't actually attempted it, but it worked!!! So I'll provide a tutorial for you too, its really really easy :) :)

All the different nozzles I tried & a close up of the basket weave

Attempting a rose

Getting all technical

Swirlicious!

You will need:
Icing of your choice, as long as it is fairly stiff (I used my Italian Meringue Buttercream)
Cake/cupcake to decorate
Colours of your choice, it does work with shades of the one colour but looks more awesome with contrasting colours (I used electric purple by americolour and wiltons violet, sky blue & Kelly green)
Piping bag, coupler & nozzle.


Firstly I decided to make my cupcakes in the same colours as my icing, the other night I made up the green, blue & purple ones, but this time I wanted to try shades of purple since I was feeling girly. Mix up the cake batter as normal, then before putting it into the tin, separate into even quantities for as many colours as you like. Colour.

Shades of purple

There's no right way to put the colours into the tin, it will mostly depend on how you want the cake to turn out. I just slopped each coloured batter in so they meshed a little. You can also pour the coloured batter in the middle, one on top of the other to create a vertical layer effect, or drag a skewer lightly through it to make it swirly. cook as per your cakes instructions and leave to cool.

Before cooking

After, looking pretty.

This is the fun part! Get your icing ready and separate into as many colours as you want. Tint the icing with said colours. Now, get the cling wrap and lay a piece out on the bench. Spoon a bit of the icing in a semi line  on the cling wrap. Roll the icing up, tying a knot at one end. Try not to twist the cling wrap too much as this will make piping harder. As you're rolling up the icing slim it out a bit to make it longer in the cling wrap. Do the same for all the colours.

Buttercream

Purple!!!

Icing on cling wrap before being rolled

Once you have all your colours, bundle them together, making sure the start of the icing in each cling wrap roll line up. Squeeze the cling wrap tips together so you have one tip, just be careful not to twist it too much. Grab the piping bag, without the nozzle on it (but the coupler in the bag) Roll the bag down a bit and feed the cling wrap tip through the bag and coupler. pull up the bag and pull the cling wrap through until you can start to see the icing out the opening. Snip off the cling wrap and put the nozzle of your choice on.

All my icings, in cling wrap tied at one end, and fairly well lined up at the other

In the piping bag, before the cling wrap is snipped off, if you look closely you can see the start of the icing

I checked to make sure the icing was flowing well on a plate, if you find one colour isn't coming through take off the nozzle and make sure the cling wrap isn't tangled. Once the icing is flowing well, decorate your cake! :)

Practice swirls

Ok, so shades of purple was probably not the best colour combo, but its still pretty!

Using the flash brought out the different shades a lot better :)

And if you run out of cupcakes, you can always decorate cake balls!

Re-visiting Cake Pops

Tim Tams were on sale, so I thought, hmmm, they'd be pretty good as cake pops too, so I bought like 8 packets of Tim Tams and went home to experiment.
I made so many balls, there were rum & raisin, mint, white chocolate and normal chocolate. Then, once I had made all the balls, I realised I didn't have enough sticks for them all. *sad face!*

I made up what I could though and decorated them with hot pink candy melt squiggles and glitter, coz everything is more magical when it sparkles :)

The hubby often takes my creations into work, and then often comes home with requests for more. This time one of his friends was after 40 cake pops for the weekend. So I went out and got some more sticks and went to work coating and sticking all 40 balls. Although they were different flavours they all ended up blue, coz I got lazy and was playing around with my new powdered food colouring. Plus it's like a surprise when you bite into it and realise what flavour you've got!

So that's my story about cake pops for now, here are some pretty pictures:

Parties, Vintage Weekend & Afternoon Tea

My sister & I, at the start of the night

Ok so I have been a little absent, but I'm back!!!
This post is about last weekend, mostly because I had so much fun I just have to share :)

So my weekend kicked off on the Friday. I had been last minute invited by my workmate to a nutrimetics party at her place that night. So I said yes, there was guaranteed to be some awesome cake there, and I wouldn't want to miss that :)
I was not disappointed. Miss K had made some chocolate baileys (I cant actually remember but I think that is the right flavour) cupcakes topped with fresh whipped cream. Yum. The nutrimetics side was good too. My hand ended up looking very sexy ;)

Mmm Cupcakes!

Saturday night I had Miss N's birthday party. My sister and I were heading out afterwards as her friends had a gig to celebrate the launch of their EP. I swear Saturday was freezing, and trust that it was a cocktail party, so short little dresses were called for. Or that's how I interpreted it. So we dressed up and headed out.

Cue short little dress

Dinner was at Hogs Breath, I'd never been before so it was.... an experience. At least the bar staff were cute. We started on the cocktails, Annon picked the caramel obsession and stuck with it, I shopped around, I think I had a sexy time, yes!, fruit tingle and some other cocktail that mostly tasted like vodka... I forget what that was called. We missed out on all the excitement though, we were inside when a fight broke out outside, then when we went outside a fight broke out inside. Damn timing.

I forget what this was, but it was good

After dinner we had a few hours to kill before Annons friends gig, so we decided to go see Damo & friends as they were out celebrating birthdays too. We met up with them at Honkytonks, another place I had never been to, and probably not a place I would go back to. We got a white sangria which was sadly dirt tasting. Annon finished that. We all migrated to Muddle bar, again I had never been here (can you tell I don't get out often!) Annon had a weis bar cocktail and I had a femme fatale, maybe we had 2 of those..... I'm not sure. There was also a long island iced tea, which was very cute as it came in a tea pot with tea cups :)

Annons Weis bar cocktail

Chillin'

Damo called it a night shortly after, so Annon and I headed round to her friends gig. On the way we stopped at the theatre as Annon had to show me a sculpture they'd erected. It was very.... phallic looking. Canberra seems to have a small obsession with erecting pieces of art with a borderline sexual feel/look. Drive around, I'm sure you'll see it.

Awkwardly shaped art

I'll admit, at this point I was so tired and feeling old that I bailed. I didn't leave Annon by herself though, we met up with her friends and boyfriend first, then I called it a night, coz I'm considerate like that. :)

Sunday morning I woke up bright and early and without a hangover. Win for me!! I have a confession, I like collecting tea cups/pots, glassware, old school stuff like that. So when I heard that the Love Vintage Show was in Canberra for the weekend, I had to go. So, because I was up nice and early I got to spend a couple of hours at the show. I loved it! There was so much stuff there. Although not as much servingware as what I had hoped I still thoroughly enjoyed looking through all the stalls and admiring the "vintage" (hot rod) vehicles. They had a couple of workshops there and B and I got our hair done. The hubby was fairly content looking through everything with me. He either secretly like this stuff too, or just loves me lots :)

By the time we'd finished wandering around it was almost afternoon tea time, we went home so I could change into something more appropriate for my hairstyle, and went into Adore Tea. It was very busy, but as always, the staff were lovely, and the food was delicious.

More appropriately dressed!

I'll have what she's having

Dutch "pancakes"

Cookies & cream

After all that we ended up having roast chicken for dinner, perfect way to end a perfect weekend!