Vanillicious.com – Easy Desserts

Best Muffin Recipe

No, this is not just a catchy headline, these muffins really turned to be the best I’ve ever baked.

The credentials for this recipe and tips go to Natalie Levin, a pastry chef. As a big fan (well, and a muffin lover, too) I decided to give this recipe a try and since I just loved these fabulous muffins, I must share!

Some muffins tips before you go and bake these little wonders:

• The following recipe will make 12 normal sized muffins and will require 5cm bottom diameter muffin paper cases.
• This can be a great basic muffin recipe, and blueberries can be replaced with almost any other berry or fruit of your choice (raspberries, apricots, nectarines etc).
• When stirring, use a wooden spoon and mix only until all ingredients blend together. Don’t over-mix, and this will give your muffins the right, dense texture that
• Bake the muffins immediately. The longer the mixture sits, it’ll contain less leavening power.
• Bake the muffins until a skewer inserted in to the centre comes out with moisty crumbs, not totally clean. That will keep them soft for few more days.
• If necessary, these muffins can be freeze up to a month.

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Bake the perfect Shortcrust Pastry

The following recipe for a sweet shortcrust pastry can be the base for every pie, tart or tartlets you are about to bake from now on!

There are two reasons I publish this recipe: my new rolling pin and tartlet tins. Yes, I haven’t had a rolling pin before and I found these great loose bottom tartlet tins. So why not using them as often as possible?

You can use this recipe for savoury pies (quiches) as well. Just replace the sugar with a pinch of salt, you can use a salted butter if you like (but don’t have to) and omit the lemon zest.

But before you go on and try it yourselves, here are some shortcrust pastry tips:

• Keep the ingredients cold. Moreover, using a cold bowl can be considered as a bonus.
• Shortcrust pastry can be made either by hand, or using a food processor.
• Another important tip is to work the dough quickly and not to overwork it. Otherwise, its texture won’t be as crumbly as expected of a shortcrust pastry. This is why the processor method is preferred. Though it is possible to prepare the dough by hand. That’s what I did before I had a food processor, and I can’t recall any complains! Oh, and try to keep your hands cold before preparing it.
• The shortcrust pastry should be chilled for at least 30 minutes before rolling it out. It will also help the dough shrink less when baked. Ideally you should chill the shortcrust pastry after rolling as well.
• Preferably, you should roll your pastry on a cool surface (a marble surface is just perfect), lightly dusted with flour. When baking a sweet shortcrust pastry, I sometime dust with a little bit of icing sugar.
• Blind Baking: sometime we’d want to bake the shortcrust pastry without the filling. This is called Blind Baking. When baking blind, we need to put some weight over the pastry base, so it won’t puff or rise. This is where the baking beans come for our rescue. You should roll out the pastry and line it on your tin(s). Line it with baking paper and fill it with baking beans. Baking beans can be either ceramic or dried ones. I usually use red kidney beans as they seem to be the haviest available, relatively cheap and are re-useable.
• When should we blind bake? When the shortcrust pastry is to be filled with cold or unbaked filling. Such fillings are crème pâtissière, jam, cheese filling etc. My White Chocolate and Mascarpone tarts is a good example. Some recipes will ask us to blind bake the pastry for 5-10 minutes, and then add the filling and bake for further 10-20 minutes. It usually depends on the baked filling, and it is done when the pastry requires more baking time than the filling itself.

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In spite of what you might hear or read, preparing a basic yeast dough, is (litterally) a piece of cake. When preparing, the most complicated part is kneading it, and even amateur bakers or beginners can handle that. By the way, if you have a good mixer, you’re not even going to do that!

I agree that some yeast doughs can require some time and a little more skills (but only very little), but this is the simplest of all, and I bet everybody can master it easily!

Some yeast dough tips before you get to work:

• You can’t be spontaneous about yeast cakes and pastries, because it has to rise for several hours. Therefore, when you plan to bake a yeast cake, take into account that it will probably take at least 6 hours from the moment you start mixing the dough ingredients until you take the cake out of the oven.
• From my experience, the rising time usually depends on the type of yeast you’re using – fresh or dry, when dry usually takes longer. Another factor is the room temp where the dough rises.
• A yeast dough can left to rise overnight in the fridge.
• 25g fresh yeast = 1 tbsp quick dry yeast = 1 sachet of 7 grams.
• The milk can be replaced with a similar amount of sour cream or natural yogurt.
• When working with a sweet yeast pastry, I sometimes dust my work surface with icing sugar rather than flour. There’ll be no complaints if the dough is just a little sweeter than it supposed to be (which is not too sweet anyway!).
• A baked yeast pastry can be freeze. When necessary, just warm it up again in your oven.
• The quantities specified in the following recipe are sufficient for: 1 Kugelhopf OR 2 loaf tin sized yeast cakes (25-30cm long)

So what so complicated about yeast dough?…

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