Mini burger / slider cakes

I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but some food bloggers are very keen on burgers. Very keen indeed. So when they have a birthday, there is only one possible cake that can be baked for them: a burger cake.

Originally I’d planned on doing a giant burger cake, but after I saw this post on Bakerella I realised sliders (aka mini burgers) were the way to go.

Bakerella used cake mixes and canned frosting, which wouldn’t do for a British food blogger birthday cake at all. Instead, I baked the brownies the night before (using my stem ginger brownie recipe, but ditching the ginger) to give them time to firm up, and vanilla fairy cakes on the day, so they were springy and fresh.

The resulting cakes would’ve looked neater if, at the assembly stage, I hadn’t totally forgotten how to make paper icing bags. My mind went blank and there is still a gaping void in my brain where the memory for paper icing bags used to be. All the instructions on the internet produced things that were feeble imitations of a paper icing bag, so I abandoned it as a bad job and spooned and spread the icing as best as I could.

The resulting cakes are, naturally, a mental sugar hit. But then they are cakes disguised as burgers. If they weren’t extremely bad for you, then something would be terribly wrong.

Mini burger cakes
Makes 22

For the brownie burger: 
180g cold butter, chopped into small chunks, plus extra for greasing
200g 70% dark chocolate, broken into small chunks
3 medium eggs
280g caster sugar
85g plain flour
40g cocoa powder


For the fairy cake buns:
150g butter, softened
150g caster sugar
3 medium eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g self raising flour, sifted

For the buttercream icing:
175g butter, softened
350g icing sugar, sifted
4 tbsp milk
Red, green and yellow food colourings

To decorate:
100g caster sugar
Sesame seeds

Start the day before by making the brownies: place the butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl and set over a saucepan quarter filled with simmering water (make sure the water doesn’t touch the bowl). Keep over a low heat, stirring occasionally, until the butter and chocolate have melted and are smooth. Remove from the heat and leave for about 10 minutes to cool.

Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C. Grease an 18cm x 30cm brownie tin and line the base with baking parchment.

Beat the eggs and sugar together with an electric whisk for 3–4 minutes until they are very pale, thick and creamy. Using a flexible, rubber spatula, stir the melted chocolate into the eggs, trying not to knock too much air out of the mixture. Sift in the flour and cocoa. Stir in to combine. Scrape into the prepared tin and bake for about 25 minutes, until a crust has formed (they’re best a bit underbaked). Leave to cool completely in the tin. This is best done the day before so the brownies are completely solid.

Next, make the fairy cakes: preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C and line 2 bun tins with 22 cake cases.

Beat the butter and sugar together until fluffy and combined. Beat in the eggs, a little at a time, until combined, then stir in the vanilla extract. Sift in the flour and stir to combine. Divide the mixture between the cake cases and bake for 15–20 minutes or until the cakes are risen and firm to the touch. Cool on a wire rack. When completely cold, peel off the cake cases and discard.

Make the buttercream icing: beat the butter until soft and creamy, then sift in the icing sugar and add the milk. Stir to combine. Divide into 3 and colour with the food colourings (you’ll need slightly more green icing, then red and yellow).

Make some sugar syrup: place the caster sugar in a pan with 100ml cold water. Gently heat until the sugar has dissolved, then bring to the boil. Boil for 1 minute, then remove from the heat and leave to cool.

You’re ready to begin assembling the cakes!

Stamp rounds out of the fairy cakes using a 5cm wide cutter. Using a serrated knife, slice them in half to create 2 buns.

Stamp 11 rounds from the brownie using a 5cm wide cutter. Using a serrated knife, slice them in half horizontally to create 22 burgers.

Brush the cut sides of the buns with the sugar syrup. Spread or pipe the green icing on the bottom of the buns to create lettuce. Place a brownie burger on top of the icing and gently press down.

Brush the top of each brownie with sugar syrup and top with some yellow icing and red icing for mustard and ketchup. Gently press the remaining bun halves on top of the burgers.

Using a clean pastry brush (one free from brownie crumbs), brush the top of the burgers with the remaining sugar syrup and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Leave for an hour or so to dry completely before serving.

St Clements rice pudding for Aol Lifestyle

If your winter nights are in need of warming up, take a stroll over to Aol Lifestyle for a recipe for St Clements rice pudding. Bagsy the skin.

Malouf: New Middle Eastern Food by Greg and Lucy Malouf

Australian chef Greg Malouf’s new cookbook Malouf, written with his ex-wife and food writer Lucy, was delivered to my office by a courier who must’ve cursed the day that the Maloufs decided to put together a really comprehensive collection of their favourite Middle Eastern inspired recipes. Weighing in at over 2kgs, it’s a back breaker of a book. Carting it home would’ve been a chore had I not been so utterly delighted by it.

And it’s hard not to be enchanted by a book that has been so lavishly produced. For a start, it has not one, but two thick ribbon bookmarks tied into it (which was actually quite useful when I was cooking from it, and needed to flip back and forth between recipes), and the photography is beautiful. Malouf is full of simple shots with barely any props, but they glow on the page.

The meat of the book, however, is the recipes. Malouf is an Australian chef of Lebanese descent and his previous cookbooks have wandered through Persia, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and North Africa. Malouf, by contrast, is a stroll through the flavours of the Middle East.

Notions of tradition, regionality and dreaded authenticity are ditched in favour of picking up the herbs, spices and cooking methods of the Middle East and shaking them together with the rest of the world. So there are recipes for fattouche, kibbeh and tzatziki, as well as cock-a-leekie soup with dates and croques monsieurs (which is introduced with the line: “Let’s be honest, there’s nothing remotely Middle Eastern about Scotland’s favourite soup!” Good to have that cleared up).

In the spirit of fusion cuisine, I decided to Malouf up a Sunday lunch. Roast leg of lamb with spiced pumpkin (page 193) involved smearing the lamb in a spice paste made from garlic, chilli, shallot, cardamom, caraway, nutmeg, cinnamon and black pepper. The spiced pumpkin that should’ve been roasted in the dish with the lamb I added to a pan of spiced roasted root vegetables (page 247), which had an almost identical spice mix tossed through it before baking.

Both were easy to knock together and had a gentle, warming fragrance from the spices (and a bit of extra pow from the chillies in the veg). The leftover roasted roots (naturally, I made too much food) also made a brilliant soup blitzed up afterwards with vegetable stock and an onion sweated in olive oil. A dish of parsnip skordalia (page 248) was Gulf State sheikh rich and much improved the quality of my breakfast bubble ‘n’squeak the next day.

Dessert was saffron rice pudding with caramel oranges (page 353; should’ve been blood oranges, but wrong time of year and all that), which is made on the hob, then chilled and finished with a stir through of whipped cream to loosen the sticky grains. A tank of a dessert, the suggested serving size (6) must be based on the assumption that you eat a thin soup for dinner before tackling the pud. It was therefore perfect for Sunday lunch, and we ended the meal flopped on the sofa, all our energies focussed on digesting the staggering quantities of cream, carb and sugar we’d consumed.

Another fabulously decadent dessert is the Turkish coffee ice cream (page 335), which uses a litre of cream and 12 egg yolks. I served it with a few tiny slabs of Persian baklava with rose-lime syrup (page 309) after a dinner of Sultan’s Delight with cheesy eggplant purée (page 210). It’s impossible not to make a stew with that name, and the sugar and caffeine heavy pudding perked everyone up out of their lamb and casein comas.

The only downside to this book is that it is enormous. Finding somewhere to prop it up while I cooked was next to impossible and I ended up leaving it open on one worktop and chopping and peeling on another, nipping between the two when I needed my next instruction. This impracticality combined with the book’s beauty suggests that it has been designed to decorate your coffee table, but it’d be a shame not to cook from it when the recipes produce such consistently fantastic results.

Published by Hardie Grant, Malouf is priced £30 (I was sent my copy gratis), although it’s obviously available at bargain prices from Amazon.

Pink pickled onions

Hello Magazine isn’t usually my first stop for recipes, especially for something as rustic and proletarian as pickled onions. But, having decided that my house would benefit enormously from smelling like a used chip wrapper for a few days, I idly googled ‘pickled onions’ and this recipe for pink pickled onions popped up on the first page. The combination of celebrity toadying and princess colouring was too much to resist.

To make gossipy pickles, you briefly boil slices of red onion in pickling vinegar three times, so they keep their rosy colouring as well as their crunch. It’s a bit of a faff and it really does make your kitchen smell like an explosion at a Sarson’s factory, but the result is awfully pretty.

The crazy amount of sugar means the onion rings are super sweet at first chew and then they hit you with a cheek-sucking slug of vinegar. It’s quite addictive. The recipe claims the onions are ready to eat the next day, and they were OK. But 3 weeks after I first made them, they are a little mellower and I’m planning on making another batch to brighten up Boxing Day’s inevitable roast dinner sandwiches.

For the recipe, click here.

 

Upside-down pear gingerbread for Aol lifestyle

There’s no better way to beat the cold than with a British pudding. The kind of sweet thing that settles in your stomach like a punch to the guts and forces you to slide from your chair and lie underneath the dining room table as if you’re a snake that just swallowed an antelope.

If you’re searching for such a thing to end your Sunday lunch this weekend, wander on over to AOL lifestyle where you’ll find a recipe for Upside-down pear gingerbread. A plateful of sticky, treacle and golden-syrup heavy gingerbread topped with a layer of sturdy pears that self-sauces as it bakes is better than a blanket for keeping you cosy.