NordicWare’s Filled Cupcakes Pan is easily one of the most fun looking pans I’ve played with in quite some time. The pan has a very unusual concept because it lets you bake both the bottom and the top of a cupcake out of cake (where the top would usually be just frosting) and puts a small cavity in the middle for adding some filling. You end up with double-sized cupcakes that have a convenient place for the filling to go and, although I like ordinary cupcakes quite a bit, I was curious about how cakes made with the pan would work out – especially after I found a pan on sale to bring home.
Like most NordicWare pans I’ve used, the cakes came out of the nonstick cavities quite easily. As with most cakes that offer a significant amount of detail, I still prefer lightly greasing the pan and adding a little flour to ensure that the cake doesn’t stick in any corners. While the pan’s pattern came out clearly, the cake batter I used rose enough to give every one of my shapes a domed top – which was far from idea for cakes that I intented to stack together! After I leveled all of my mini cakes, I didn’t have quite as clean a look to the finished treats as I had hoped, but they were still pretty darn cute to look out (and tasty enough that it wouldn’t have mattered if they had been seriously off anyway).
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Irish soda bread is one of my favorite quick breads to make because it is so easy and so versatile. The history of the bread (not to mention the name) always emphasize how popular the bread is in Ireland, so while it is easy to make from scratch, I couldn’t resist giving Neill’s Irish Soda Bread Mix a try because it actually comes from Ireland.
The mix contains just flour, baking soda, buttermilk and salt, which are the same ingredients you’d find in a scratch recipe for soda bread. To make it, you simply add milk or buttermilk to the mix, shape it in to a loaf and bake it. The bread turned into one of the most beautiful loaves of soda bread I’ve seen, and was perfectly browned on the outside while remaining moist and tender inside. It was much lighter than some soda breads that I’ve had, which tend towards being rather dense and heavy. It stored well and still made great toast the next day.
The bread had a subtle buttermilk flavor, which you can enhance by using more buttermilk as your liquid (as opposed to plain milk). I should also note that this mix makes a great base for mix-ins, if you want to add raisins or other dried fruits for a sweet soda bread or feel like stirring in some herbs or sun dried tomatoes for a savory version. There are a few suggestions right on the packaging. The mix has just recently become available in the the US, so keep an eye out for it if you want to give it a try.
Sometimes, it just takes a very small change to make a big difference. This is true in many things, but it is equally true in the kitchen. The BeaterBlade is a great example. This stand mixer attachment has a silicone “blade” that extends from what is otherwise a regular paddle attachment. It scrapes the bowl as it mixes, making blending easier and faster than with a regular paddle attachment, particularly for things like creaming butter and sugar. The same company, New Metro Design, has come out with another kitchen innovation, the MixerMate Bowl.
The MixerMate is a bowl designed to improve the efficiency of your hand mixer (because not everyone has a stand mixer or those who do don’t use them all the time). The bowl has an unusual shape: oval, with sides that taper in towards a relatively narrow bottom. This is a contrast from rounder, straight-sided bowls. The tornado-inspired shape of the bowl is supposed to reduce mixing time by up to 30%, while the extra-tall walls of the bowl will reduce splatter.I found the bowl to work just as promised. My butter and sugar creamed extremely fast and I didn’t need to move the beaters around the bowl as much to get everything blended. I was also able to whip up cream and frosting even faster than usual. I didn’t expect there to be much difference between this bowl and my other bowls, but I was pretty impressed with how well it performed!
The bowl also has two pouring spouts and the handles can double as pouring spouts, so it is very easy to get anything you put into the bowl out again, and there is a nonslip base on the bowl to prevent it from sliding around the countertop. It comes in four colors and is a great little tool to add to your kitchen, especially if you use a hand mixer frequently.
I have an extensive collection of baking cups and have a wide variety of sizes and colors that I choose from each time I bake. For holidays, it is usually easy to choose a themed cupcake wrapper, but for everyday baking, it can be nice to use something a little more understated, especially for baking a batch of simple bran muffins that doesn’t cry out for brightly colored cupcake wrappers. I actually really like brown baking cups because they compliment a wide variety of baked goods and also look good in photographs and that is what let me to pick up a package of Beyond Gourmet Unbleached Baking Cups in the first place.
These baking cups are made from completely unbleached, chemical-free paper and have a very natural brown tone to them. They perform just as well as most other muffin papers I’ve used, releasing muffins easily when it comes time to serve. I like the light brown color for baking muffins in particular and would still probably opt for something brighter for most cupcake recipes. The fact that they’re environmentally friendly and unbleached is a big plus for a lot of shoppers and it is nice to know that there are some good options out there for baking even if you’re not specifically interested in brown baking cups!
Butterscotch chips are something of a novelty in the chocolate chip aisle at the grocery store. Butterscotch itself is a thick dessert syrup made with brown sugar and butter. It has a rich, buttery sweetness that goes well with many other flavors. Butterscotch chips typically have a brown sugar and butter flavor to them and are a much easier way to add some sweetness to a recipe than dealing with butterscotch syrup (which is much more difficult to mix into a batch of cookies!).
Butterscotch chips are generally made with sugar, some type of vegetable shortening, milk, natural/artificial flavorings and colorings to capture that amber butterscotch color. Guittard’s Butterscotch Chips are no exception, but unlike other butterscotch chips they use real vanilla and, while sweet, don’t have an artificial super-sweetness to them that some other butterscotch chips do. You can eat them straight out of the bag (which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend with some of the sweeter chip brands) or incorporate them into a favorite recipe. Besides the vanilla, you can easily taste notes of brown sugar/molasses with a hint of dairy in these. They are a pale amber color in the bag and bake up to be a bright orange. Some butterscotch chips I’ve baked with remain hard even after baking, but these soften up fairly quickly in the oven and leave you with a much creamier overall feel – in addition to a good butterscotch flavor – than similar chips of other brands.
