CRUMBSCRUMBSIssue 1

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4The Idiots Guide to Making Caramel

Do’s and Don’ts of the month Flavour of the Month: Peanut Butter

Nigella Lawson’s Snickers and Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Half Baked- The Trouble With Cupcake Feminism

1012Ms Cupcake: Vegan baking

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Compassion never tasted so good: Vegan baking

14Bakery Profile: The Hummingbird Bakery

Tools for the job19

The Quest For The Ultimate Red Velvet

17Baking news 21 Cupcake Reviews23

Contents

CrumbsMagazine

issue 1

Don’t stir when making caramel.

it will just go hard and then burn later.

Do use unsalted butterit just tastes really good in cake mixture

Do’s and Don’ts of the month Our tried and tested tips, i.e. mistakes and happy accidents we’ve made this month( )

4 5Do’s and Don’ts of the Month Do’s and Don’ts of the Month

Flavour Of The Month:

Peanut Butter

ull of good fats, protein to aide in muscle growth and plenty of fiber, peanut butter is basically a superfood for runners. In an article published on

the Runner’s World website in 2007, we discovered that all of that good stuff provides a slow release of energy during your workouts to help you push through to the very end. So while that banana you grab on your way out the door or candy bar you find stashed in your glovebox

gives you a quick sugar rush, they’re more likely to leave you gassed and puttering out near the end of your run.

We were already aware of many of the benefits of peanut butter and have jars of Krema Natural Crunchy Peanut Butter and Creamy Jif Peanut Butter & Honey in our cupboard, both purchased from a local grocery store. Peanut butter on toast or a bagel has been our favorite

pre-workout

food since high school and we have no brand loyalty, but prefer the crunchy stuff.

The only ingredient listed on our jar of Krema is peanuts and the label claims there is no added salt, sugar or hydrogenated oils which is kind of spiffy, though one of the experts in the Runner’s World article said a common misconception is that the all-natural brands are “better for you” than the commercial brands. We just prefer the nutty taste of the all natural kind.

Snacking on peanuts or peanut butter at least five days a week can nearly halve the risk of a heart attack.The nuts are thought to lower bad cholesterol, help reduce inflammation in the body and boost the health of blood vessels around the heart.

Nut Allergy?Try using a soynut butter as an alternative, or treat yourself to some chocolate spread and honey.

nigella Lawson’s

Snickers and Peanut Butter

Cupcakes

F

turn over for the scrumptious recipe

Flavour of the Month

Snickers and Peanut Butter Cupcakes

nigella Lawson’s

Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200°.Stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the peanut butter and mix until you have a bowl of coarse crumbs. Add the melted butter ad egg to the milk, and then stir this gently into the bowl. Mix in the snickers pieces and dollop into the cupcake cases.Cook for 20-25 minutes, when the tops should be riisen, golden and firm to the (light) touch. Sit the tin on a wire rack for 5-10 minutes before taking out each muffin in its case and leaving them on the wire rack to cool.

Ingriediants This recipe makes 12

250g plain flour6 tablespoons golden caster sugar (85g)

1 tablespoons baking powderpinch of salt

6 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter60g unsalted butter1 large egg, beaten

175ml milk3x65g Snickers bars

Nigella lawson says, “These muffins have a special charm: I think the ingredients speak for themselves.” And Nigella is right - the ingredients definitely say to us “this is insanely indulgent, but just a little bit special”.

Recipe

8 9Recipe of the Month Recipe of the Month

Preparation methodMelt the butter in a saucepan over a medium heat.Stir in the brown sugar and milk, and bring to the boil for 2-3 minutes, without stirring.Remove from the heat, and stir in the peanut butter and vanilla seeds.Place the icing sugar in a large bowl, and pour the hot butter and sugar mixture on top. Using a wooden spoon, beat the mixture until smooth.Pour into a 20cm/8in square baking tray, and set aside to cool slightly, then place in the fridge to chill completely.Cut the fudge into squares with a sharp knife, turn out of the tin and store in an airtight container.

This recipe makes 36-42 pieces

125g/4½oz butter500g/1lb 2oz dark brown sugar120ml/4fl oz milk250g/9oz crunchy peanut butter1 vanilla pod, seeds only300g/10½oz icing sugar

Ingredients

Recipe

After making your scrumptious snickers and peanut butter cupcakes, why not carry on the peanut butter theme and make some yummy peanut butter fudge. You’ll have all the ingreidiants in your cupboard (even real vanilla pods I hear you ask? Yes, every baker should have vanilla pods at the ready!) We love Sophie Dahl’s homemade fudge recipe, and it makes an easy sweet treat or a stunning edible gift.

Peanut Butter Fudge

Pop the sugar into the pan with 125ml of cold water, and dissolve over a low heat.

It is important to remember at this stage, DO NOT STIR! The sugar will crystalise if you do, which will cause it to burn at a later stage.

When it seems dissolved, turn up the heat and boil until it turns a dark golden colour, for around 10-15 minutes. When everything seems to be melted and smooth, you have your caramel!

tHE IDIotS GUIDE to:

Some Important tips to bear in mind:1. Use the heaviest gauge metal pot you have. Inexpensive or thin cookware heats unevenly, so drag out the most solid pot you’ve got.2. If making a liquid caramel (sugar and water) avoid stirring it. Once the sugar dissolves, those aforementioned crystals are still there (you just can’t see ‘em) and still want to hook up with each other. Pushing them into each other encourages that. Gently tilt the pan side-to-side to ensure things to cook evenly and avoids burn spots.3. If you burn a caramel, there’s not much you can do but toss it. It’s impossible to hide the taste of something burnt—so don’t even think about it.4. Caramel is very, very hot. And very sticky. Keep a deep bowl of water with lots of ice in it nearby if you’re a newbie: if some caramel lands on your hand, plunge it right into the ice water immediately. And wear an oven mitt just to be sure when handling hot pots.

Once you’ve mastered the art of melting the sugar down to a tasty syrupy caramel, there are all sorts of things you can do with it, Drizzle over your freshly iced vanilla cupcakesAdd butter and cream to make a butterscotch sauce.Stir butter, evaporated milk, and sugar together over a low heat, not allowing to come to a boil. Then add the caramel to this mixture to make caramel icing. Once ou have mastered the art, you really can combine caramel with anything to make lovely and rich treats.

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One word. Caramel. A word that frightens even the most experienced and hardcore bakers. Anyone who’s ever attempted it will probably warn you of the perils of burning the hot sugar. However, we’ve

decided its something that every baking enthusiast needs to know how to do, and be able to do it well.Making caramel transforms ordinary caster sugar, into liquid gold. It gives a feeling of massive accomplishment to see the smooth and sweet nectar being slowly stirred in a warm pan. This is why the most important thing to remember when making caramel is that there is a fine line between cooking it, and burning it. And if it crosses over to the burnt side, you will probably have to throw away whatever the caramel has touched. No one wants a sticky, tar-like consistency on their saucepans forever.Now it may seem like the cowards way out, but here at CRUMBS, we prefer to make ‘wet’ caramel. Yes, this is the easier way, but it also means you dont have to bother with tyring to transfer your caramel from pan to cake in under 2 seconds (before it solifies again). Instead, you end up with a sauce, which is much more versatile!

. To start with, you need 300g of caster sugar and a heavy based saucepan. 1

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10 Idiots Guide

When you have mastered the art of making caramel, you’ll be able to sculpt anything out of it!

TMs Cupcakethats

to youondon is famous for many reasons and

millions of people travel to the capital for theatre, fashion

and historical relevance. Well, now you can add vegan cupcakes to that list as Ms Cupcake finally throws open her doors to the world.

If you like vegan sweets, the Ms Cupcake bakery on Coldharbour Lane, Brixton is a dream come to life. The store (opened officially today) is a wonderland of

animal-free frosting, sugary sponges

and sweet

concoctions. I was overwhelmed on entering the store for the first time. Everywhere I looked I was confronted by a staggering amount of temptations. It took me a while to process I was standing in a real, honest-to-goodness vegan bakery. Let the eating begin.The first thing that you notice as you walk into the bakery is the marvellous array of cupcakes. The choice on offer is a bit much to take in. You can choose from strawberry/chocolate, triple choc0late, vanilla, pina colada, jaffa cake, ferrero rocher, lemon drop and so many more. I was beside my FGV self with delight. My eyes darted from flavour to flavour as I attempted to decide on the six pack of cakes I would be taking home.There are cookies in varying sizes and cupcakes in cups called… wait for it… Cuppa Cupcakes! Ms Cupcake packs in cake and frosting and then some more cake and frosting to create a portable, sugary meal in a cup. It doesn’t get better. Well, maybe it does. I went into overdrive when I spotted the pudding cups. I snared one filled with a mixture of mousse, caramel and biscuit. Delightful doesn’t describe it. It was layer upon layer of the stuff that makes me a happy FGV.Next on my to do list at Ms Cupcake was to get my chubby, queer fingers around a cookie sandwich. My heart dropped a little when I realised they had sold out of the chocolate frosting-filled sandwich, but in a vegan bakery there is always a silver lining. I grabbed a jumbo treat featuring two chocolate chip cookies held together with lashings of luscious vanilla frosting. I’m not sure how I held back, but I have only eaten half and I’m sure I will dream about the remaining portion all through the night.

Taken from www.fatgayvegan.com/2011/04/01/cupcakes-in-the-capital

hese are heady times for vegan bakers, who are shedding their reputation as makers of

tasteless, hockey-puck pastries.Vegan baking is hitting the mainstream. BabyCakes

NYC owner Erin McKenna shows off some tricks of the trade for keeping the eggless from becoming the tasteless. WJS’s Katy

McLaughlin reports from New York.Vegan bakers—who eschew milk, eggs, butter, and honey—took first-place honors twice on the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars” television series. A vegan bakery recently opened at Walt Disney World. Vegan bakeries have evolved into fast-growing businesses, racking up sales of moist flax-seed cakes, soy-butter cookies and fudgy brownies (one secret: adzuki beans).All this success ought to be giving vegan baking a good name.The problem: Some vegan bakeries don’t flaunt their identity for fear of scaring off customers. That stirs up proud vegans who believe every delicious pastry should help promote a world in which no animal is used for the sake of a snickerdoodle.At Mighty-O Donuts in Seattle, which makes vegan doughnuts, there is no sign highlighting that fact. Founder Ryan Kellner says it could lose him omnivore business. “We use terms like egg-free and dairy-free. Vegans read labels,” and can figure out the code, he says.When Jennie Scheinbach opened Pattycake Vegan Bakery in Columbus, Ohio, in 2006, her idea was to “be political, and to say, ‘hey, this is vegan and it’s good.’”The plan collapsed like an egg-free souffle. She says that while Columbus’s tiny population of hard-core vegans loved her pastries, others who wandered into the store refused to even try them. She removed “vegan” from her company name, signs and logos three years ago, and has been gradually eliminating it from her Web presence. Business has steadily grown ever since, she says.BabyCakes NYC bakery specializes in vegan and gluten-free pastries and advertises that on its website. But inside its New York store, “I didn’t put signs up that it was a vegan bakery. I didn’t want to repel anyone,” says owner Erin McKenna.On a recent afternoon, Ms. McKenna, wearing a 1960s-style miniskirted uniform, demonstrated baking techniques in the kitchen, coagulating soy milk with cider

vinegar and stirring it into red velvet cake batter. Customers studied the shop’s pink cupcakes and chocolate whoopee pies. BabyCakes, which has outlets in Los Angeles and at Disney World in Orlando, had $1.8 million in sales last year.Not all vegan bakers underplay their animal-free origins and some are dismayed by the soft-pedaling of the message. Danielle Konya, who launched Vegan Treats in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1998, plasters her bakery and marketing material—she distributes to 100 restaurants in the Northeast, she says—with the term “vegan.” Every tote bag is embossed with the slogan “compassion never tasted so delicious.”Covertly vegan bakeries are “counterproductive,” Ms. Konya says. “If you’re not making people aware of food choices, you’re not going to change the world around you.”Today’s discretion in vegan baking stands in contrast to the early days of animal-free pastry, when being vegan was often the only thing leaden scones and overly sweet cakes had to recommend them.

By Katy Mclaughlinwww. online.wsj.com

Compassion never tasted So Delicious

Vegan Cupcakes: Ms Cupcake Vegan Cupcakes

The Hummingbird Bakery

Bakery Profile:

The Hummingbird Bakery

The Hummingbird Bakery is an American-style bakery founded in 2004 to bring the authentic taste of

American home baking to London. The company opened its first branch on Portobello Road in Notting Hill in 2004 and has since opened a further four branches across London in South Kensington, Soho, Spitalfields and Islington. Tarek Malouf, the company founder, developed the

concept for The Hummingbird Bakery in response to what he saw as a lack of any places in London to enjoy the taste

of the truly authentic American-style baking. His vision for the bakery and love of American baking transpired to be something that many within London, from across the UK and globally came to share. Today the bakery sells an average of 22,000 cupcakes per week and has become a highly celebrated and iconic High Street brand. One of the key factors in The Hummingbird Bakery’s success has been its ethos that cakes taste best when they’ve been freshly baked using exactly the same ingredients and techniques as those used in home baking. For this reason, each and every Hummingbird Bakery branch has its own kitchen and a team of resident expert bakers and cake decorators. This enables the bakery to bake to order and to only offer its customers cakes that have been freshly baked the very same day. The Hummingbird Bakery offers a full range of American-style baked treats and desserts including cupcakes, layer cakes, brownies, pies, cheesecakes, muffins and much more. It played a lead role in bringing cupcakes and whoopie pies to popularity in the UK and continues to innovate, introducing new and exciting cupcake flavours through its ‘Daily Specials’ series. For customers looking for bespoke cakes and cupcakes for weddings, birthdays, events and other celebrations, the bakery offers its ‘Cakes by Consultation’ service. This allows customers to meet with one of The Hummingbird Bakery’s expert Cake Consultants in the bakery’s purpose built consultation room and to devise their own completely unique cake creations.I have been living in London for close to 2 years, but I was born and raised in Los Angeles. When I think about the difference in food, and what I miss most from home, it is difficult to really pinpoint something truly American. The US is on the forefront of the culinary world, but it doesn’t have it’s own identity.

Very few foods, especially ones worth caring about, are truly American. One though that I do brand as such is the cupcake and as far as American-style cupcakes go in London, Hummingbird Bakery is the best.About a month ago the home-grown bakery opened the doors to its fourth venue conveniently located near Spitalfields and the City. It is a bit difficult to find and my GPS refused to register the location, but upon arrival, I was so happy I persevered to find it. This is by far the most spacious of locations and the first to offer bespoke cakes for parties and special occasions starting at £22.50 for a 6-inch (feeds 6-8). I however wasn’t looking for cakes; I was looking for my beloved cupcakes.What sets Hummingbird apart from the competition, in my American opinion, is the frosting. Whereas some bakeries go for bold flavor combinations, Hummingbird sticks to the classics, but focuses on the texture. It comes down to getting the precise sugar to butter to milk/cream ratio to produce a silky, sweet, rich icing that blends together. I find at some other bakeries the frosting is grainy because the sugar granules don’t melt in enough.I opted for a carrot cake cupcake topped with a superb cream cheese frosting. The cupcake’s warm spices remind me of Christmas and the cream cheese frosting is a comforting harmony of savory and sweet. I chose to pair my treat with an Illy cappuccino, although as this branch is trying out Teapigs tea, I was almost swayed away from my favored drink.While there, I picked up a box to go. I even grabbed a gluten-free cupcake for a friend who rarely gets cake because of his intolerance. I also picked up a Rocky Road and would recommend anyone who loves chocolate, malt balls, and marshmallows run to get one NOW. I devoured it in shear minutes and have been craving one ever since. I heard of places having “crack-cake”, so this must be the equivalent of “crack-cupcakes”. Beware, they’re addictive!I also picked up the newest Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, which came out a few months ago. Tantalizing recipes are coupled with stunning food porn. I can’t wait to start testing it out. My waistline doesn’t stand a chance.

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Everyone’s favourite cupcakes come from this bakery. And its taking over London!

“this must be the equivalent of “crack-cupcakes””

The Ultimate Red Velvet

the quest for...

Vegan Cupcakes: Ms Cupcake

A little over eighteen months ago, I undertook a crazy person’s assignment: I set out to find the Best Red Velvet Cake in America. I began tasting cakes

everywhere from Seattle to Springfield to Santa Fe. And I began working on a list of criteria for judgment: something a little more refined than my normal “yum” scale. I contacted a lot of chefs, bakers, bakery managers, and various Red Velvet experts (aka: mom and her friends) in order to develop a list of qualities to assess. Sadly, for me, their answers were so wide and varied as to what was most essential to an ideal Red Velvet, I began longing for the “yum” scale. How could all these things matter -- and matter so much: The benefits of using cherries versus beet juice, the amount of red food coloring, the precise ratio of buttermilk to sugar to vinegar. I have baked (and eaten) my fair share of cakes, but I was learning quickly that Red Velvets were not an eye-it type of operation. James Beard’s American Cookery references three distinct types of Red Velvets. And don’t get a Red Velvet baker started on the complications of frosting. I can now write, with full confidence, a thesis paper on the advantage of cream-cheese frosting over a pure butter icing; and one on why a butter icing is more authentic than its sugary-vanilla counterpart.

There is an urban legend that, mid-century, a baker at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel

baked the very first Red Velvet Cake. According to the legend, a customer at the restaurant requested the recipe for the unique cake, and was billed hundreds of dollars. In retribution, she spread the recipe to all of her friends. It is a charming story, but a legend from start to finish. The real history of the cake’s origin seems to begin somewhere in the 1920s in the American South. Exactly who was responsible? That is still a matter of debate. And all versions I’ve heard are full of emotion. My favorite -- and the one I utilized in my novel -- revolves around a Southern baker who wanted to create a cake that symbolized the contrast between good and evil: the good represented by the lily, white frosting, the evil represented by the red cake. She wanted to make a cake that would have an emotional impact on those who ate it, even if they didn’t completely understand why. And while I’m afraid to name a current front-runner in my own search, I will say that I keep that first baker in mind as I try different options: like the wonderful piece of Red Velvet I recently ate at a quaint restaurant in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles called Auntie Em’s Kitchen.

Can I tell you why I enjoyed it so much? Maybe not. But I’m working on it. And I promise it’s not just a yum thing. It’s an emotional one.

Anatomy of aCream Cheese Frosting

Cocoa, White Vinegar and Buttermilk filling

with red colouring

Believe it or not, a red velvet is not just a normal cake with red food colouring. It is a perfect blend of cocoa, vanilla, buttermilk and white vinegar, giving

it the perfect sweet, yet with a hint of bitter taste. The conciseness of the mix of ingreidiants is what makes it so special. And tasty.

Red Velvet

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