I told them what ingredients I wanted to bake with and asked for their suggestions.  Some suggestions were friands, double chocolate mud cupcakes and macarons.  While they all sounded delicious, one suggestion really intrigued me – Queen of Sheba cake, which was recommended by Jessica.  I had no idea what it was so had to google it.

The Queen of Sheba cake, or Reine De Saba, is a recipe from Julia Child.  Apparently it comes from her first book, The French Chef, but it appears that it can also be found, with slightly different versions, in a few other of Julia’s cookbooks.  In The French Chef, Julia says that it is the first French cake she had ever eaten, prepared by co-author Simon Beck, and she had never forgotten it.

I can’t figure out why this cake is called Queen of Sheba.  Does anyone know?

The cake itself is a soft, moist, gooey chocolate cake.  The preparation was fun and slightly different than I’m used to.  It starts out normal, by creaming butter and sugar, but then you beat in egg yolks, followed by folding in a mixture of melted chocolate and brewed coffee, then adding almond meal and almond extract (this is where my only variation came in, by adding my Beanilla Madagascar Bourbon vanilla extract instead because, although I like the smell of almond extract, I do not like the taste).

In another bowl, you will need to whisk egg whites with a pinch of salt and some sugar, then fold them in alternately with cake flour.  You’re then ready to go.

My cake didn’t rise very much, although in the pictures I’ve seen on the internets, it doesn’t appear to be a very high cake.  The top of the cake became shiny and a little crackly, sort of like a brownie.  The inside of the cake is very soft and moist and the taste is just beautiful.  I’m glad I used vanilla extract instead of almond.

What you absolutely need to note about this cake is that you must not overbake it. If you overbake it, you will lose that gooey texture that this cake is known for.

Originally, a recipe for a soft chocolate frosting accompanies this cake, but I chose not to use this.  Instead, I used some leftover dulce de leche to drizzle on each individual slice and sprinkled over a few pink sea salt flakes.  When served warm, this combination was absolutely to die for, so heavenly.

I am so thankful to Jessica for recommending the Queen of Sheba cake to me.  This recipe was such a great way to break my bout of baker’s block!

On a separate note, this post sees the launch of my new watermark for my photos.  After experiencing the trouble of someone using my photos to advertise their own “products” on Etsy, I have finally decided to take the time to watermark each photo.  I have tried and will try to keep them in an area of the photo that will not be so annoying, and I apologize if you don’t like them, but if you have experienced someone stealing your photos, then I’m sure you would take appropriate action as well.

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Recently, Kristy at KSayerphotography had a giveaway on her blog.  The prize was 14 blocks of Alter Eco Pacific chocolate.  First of all, I saw “14 blocks of chocolate”!  Awesome prize!  Then I realized I had never heard of Alter Eco Pacific chocolate before.  I went to their website to have a look.

Alter Eco Pacific is based in Australia.  Their products are Fair Trade, organic, and contain nothing artificial.  They use sustainable farming methods and natural fertilizers.  Just reading this on their website made me feel really great about consuming their chocolate.

I entered Kristy’s giveaway and hoped for the best!

A little while later, I received word that I had won the giveaway!  Awesome!  About a week later, I was opening the parcel containing over 1 kilogram of chocolate.  Here is what I had won:

Delicious!

Some of this chocolate I could bake with, and some I was going to just simply eat.  In this post, I’ll give a brief review of each of the blocks, and also give you a Donna Hay recipe that I made with the chocolate.

The first block I tried was the Crystallized Orange Peel chocolate.  I do love chocolate and orange!  The chocolate was exceptionally smooth and the orange peel, although while slightly annoyingly chewy, lent a hint of orange.  The orange was not strong or overpowering, just gentle and soft.  I didn’t bake with this chocolate; I just ate it straight from the block!

Next, I tried the Quinoa, which is another block I did not bake with, but just simply ate.  This chocolate was much darker in flavor than the orange.  I think the quinoa is a nice textural addition to the chocolate, giving it a bit of a crunch.  I had never eaten quinoa before tasting this.  I feel I still don’t have a good idea of what quinoa tastes like, as I mainly just tasted the dark chocolate in this block.

I had to try to bake something with this chocolate, so I used a bit of the Dark Velvet (which contains organic milk) in some chocolate chunk cookies.  They were very delicious, but I actually loved eating this chocolate straight from the block more than the cookies.  It was very, very velvety and so smooth.  It wasn’t as hard as the other blocks.  I loved it!

Another one I decided to use in a batch of chocolate chunk cookies was the Cocao Nib.  This one I was really looking forward to try, as I had never eaten cocao nibs.  I loved the crunch and I loved the taste of this block.  In the cookies, the crunch was more subtle after baking.  Again though, I wish I wouldn’t have baked with this block as I wanted to eat more of it on its own!

The Almond one was delicious as well, much better than any almond chocolate bar you’d by in the candy aisle at the grocery store!

I used both whole blocks of the Blackout chocolate, containing 85% cocoa, to make Donna Hay’s dark chocolate and caramel pudding.  This recipe is on the cover of her most recent winter magazine.  The pudding is basically made up of a layer of dulce de leche on the bottom, and gooey chocolate cake on top – in other words, heaven!

This recipe was so heavenly I made it twice in two weeks!  For the first go, I used Alter Eco’s Pacific Blackout.  The block melted down so smoothly and smelled great as they melted.  The end result was super delicious and super chocolaty.  The recipe for this is at the end of this post.

I’m saving the best chocolate for last… the Mint Chocolate.  I have tasted a lot of mint chocolate, and although I like the combination, I normally wouldn’t name it as one of my favorites.  But this block of mint chocolate was the best ever mint chocolate I have tasted in my entire life.  It contains tiny pieces of peppermint which are crunchy and release bursts of mint that are just to die for.  This was without a doubt my most favorite of Alter Eco Pacific’s chocolate.

My second favorite was the Dark Velvet.  My least favorite was the orange.

I’ve got to find where these blocks are sold and buy some more to add to my stash.  My last mint chocolate is half gone, and I feel I absolutely need to have more!

 

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Dark Chocolate And Caramel Pudding
Adapted from Donna Hay magazine, issue 57
Makes 4* (see my note below)

Ingredients
1 x 380g can store-bought caramel filling*
1/3 cup (80ml) double (thick) cream
200g dark chocolate, chopped
60g unsalted butter
3 eggs
½ cup (90g) brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup (60g) almond meal
Cocoa, for dusting

Method
Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Place the caramel in a bowl and whisk until smooth. Add the cream and mix well to combine. Place 1/3 cup (80ml) of the caramel mixture in the base of a 4 x 1 ½ cup-capacity (375ml) ovenproof dishes.

Place the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and stir until the chocolate is melted and smooth.

Place the eggs, sugar and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for 8-10 minutes or until doubled in size. Fold the chocolate mixture and almond meal through the egg mixture and divide between the dishes.

Place on a baking tray and bake for 18-20 minutes or until risen and the centres are soft. Stand for 5 minutes. Dust with cocoa to serve.

*Find caramel filling in the baking aisle of the supermarket. If this isn’t available, use store-bought or homemade dulce de leche. Here in Australia, you can use Nestle Top ‘N Fill caramel, which is essentially dulce de leche.

*I divided the caramel and cake mixture between 6 1-cup ramekins, instead of only 4 1 1/2 cup ramekins.  After seeing the quantities of the mixtures, I felt that it could easily fit in 6 smaller ones.  In the end, I am glad I did this because the pudding is so rich and had it just been 4 ramekins, I don’t think we could have eaten the entire contents of the ramekin in one go!

 

As I’ve been busy with this other post, I realized I hadn’t posted a recipe here in nearly 10 days!  This is going to be a short, but sweet post about mini rustic salted chocolate and caramel tarts.

I decided to call these tarts “rustic” because I didn’t use a rolling pin to roll out the pastry shells – I flattened them with my hand (I was feeling too lazy to roll the pastry!) and also because I don’t have flan tins – I stuffed the pastry into a cupcake tin!  Both of these situations resulted in a not-so-perfect, or “rustic”, tart shell!

The caramel filling in these tarts isn’t just any caramel – it’s dulce de leche.  This is topped with a chocolate ganache, which is then sprinkled lightly with sea salt flakes.

So delicious!  You should store these in the refrigerator, but I found that they taste best at room temperature.  So let them sit on the counter for 15 minutes or so after taking them out of the refrigerator.

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In October 2009 there were two cupcake challenges that I participated in.  One was Iron Cupcake: Earth, where the theme was “music”; the other was Cupcake Hero, where the theme was “Halloween/pumpkin”.  I wanted to compete in both.  I also had a package of zombie hands and spiders cupcake toppers that I had ordered from Bake It Pretty.  Hm, how to put them to good use while coming up with an idea for both competitions….

This scary zombie cupcake was thus born.  I entered it into Iron Cupcake: Earth, and the song I chose to go with it was one of the best all-time songs ever, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.  It was perfect!  I entered it into Cupcake Hero as well.  It wasn’t very popular in the voting polls, but that’s okay because since posting it on my blog, this cupcake has received thousands of more views than any other recipe I’ve posted.  I’m surprised to see that this year, my zombie hand cupcake is once again the most popular recipe on my blog so far in October.  It was even listed in the St Louis River Front Times in the Best Twelve Halloween-Themed Cupcakes (at #9) on October 12, 2010.

Click here to view the original post with  more pictures and details.  To sum it up, the zombie hand cupcake is made up of a chocolate pumpkin cupcake filled with pumpkin buttercream.  It is frosted in a mound of chocolate frosting which is completely coated with finely crushed Oreos.  The “tombstone” is one half of an Oreo Fudgee cookie.

Okay, so that cupcake took care of my zombie hands, but I still had the spiders to use…

These are one of THE best cupcakes I have EVER had the pleasure of eating and making.  These little cuppies blew my mind.  The inspiration for the combination of flavors came from looking at one simple recipe for a caramel pumpkin pie.  A little later, I turned that idea into these pumpkin dulce de leche cupcakes.  They start with a pumpkin cupcake that is filled with dulce de leche.  They are frosted with dulce de leche buttercream and the spiderweb design is simply melted chocolate with a smidgen of shortening mixed in.  The spiders looked great on them.  And I entered these into Cupcake Hero as well, which won me a place in the throwdown with Samantha of Sweet Remedy – we ended up tying for first place!

I just can’t express in words how delicious these were, you just have to make them for yourself!

Now back in October of 2010, I still have the zombie hands and spiders, but I haven’t made any Halloween cupcakes this year.  I’m not even sure if I will at all.  Halloween isn’t so big in Australia, and making Autumn-themed food is a little out of season, as it is Spring here!  But, while I haven’t been inspired to make a Halloween cupcake, I was inspired to make an Autumn one.  I grew up in Indiana, I’ve spent a huge majority of my life there, so this time of year is naturally Autumn to me.  I wanted to make a contribution to Autumn-themed food in the Northern Hemisphere, even though I’m not there to enjoy the beautiful red, orange and yellow trees, the pumpkin pies and festivals…

So I bring you a little pumpkin cupcake with white chocolate frosting, drizzled in caramel sauce and topped off with a shard of walnut praline.  It’s the first cupcake picture I’ve ever taken outside.  It’s sort of a contrast in a way, to me, with this Autumn-themed cupcake, sitting on bright green grass.  Autumn should be chilly, the deciduous vegetation should be turning brown, but here in Sydney, it is Spring, and whatever was dormant over the Winter is now coming back to life in brilliant shades of green.  Beautiful, yes, but it’s completely backwards to me.  It’s something I will never get used to.

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The Sweetest Kitchen hasn’t always been The Sweetest Kitchen.  I started out blogging about cupcakes in late May of 2008 at Blogspot; my blog was then called The Cupcake Review.  As I started to expand and blog about more than cupcakes I knew that I needed to switch to my own domain.  After much thought, I finally decided on the name The Sweetest Kitchen in late February of 2009, and launched the new domain on March 3.  It’s now been one year and my blogging experience has been such fun.  The Sweetest Kitchen has became more popular than I ever expected it to – I’ve almost reached 500,000 page views!

My most famous post, with at least 30,000 page views so far, was the zombie Halloween cupcake I made for Iron Cupcake: Earth and Cupcake Hero in October 2009.  However, my personal favorite of anything I have ever baked since beginning this blog is the pumpkin dulce de leche cupcake.  Everyone who has made these has raved about them, and I’m so happy about that!

Today I’ve made some cupcakes in celebration of The Sweetest Kitchen’s 1-year anniversary.  They are actually very similar to the pumpkin dulce de leche cupcakes, but instead of the pumpkin cake, I used a chocolate cake and sprinkled the frosting with sea salt.

The great thing about this dulce de leche is that I didn’t have to make it myself.  I bought it at the store, where it was casually sitting next to cans of plain sweetened condensed milk and selling itself under the pseudonym of “Top ‘n’ Fill Caramel” from Nestle.  I found this at Coles but not Woolworth’s (in Australia), for anyone wanting specific details.  And I recommend giving the caramel a good stir with a wire whisk before using to smooth out the lumps.

If you can’t find dulce de leche, find directions for preparing it yourself in my pumpkin dulce de leche cupcake post.

Totally scrumptious!

Okay, now I’ve given you some cupcakes for my anniversary party, now what about that giveaway, you say?  Right, let’s get to it.

Bake It Pretty is one of, if not the, best places to buy your baking supplies from online.  I have made my share of purchases from this lovely store, and Amanda, the owner, is so sweet.  In fact, Bake It Pretty is where I got those zombie hands and spider toppers that made those particular cupcakes of mine so famous!

I knew I wanted to do a Bake It Pretty giveaway for my blog’s anniversary, so here it is – leave a comment on this post to receive a $50 gift certificate for Bake It Pretty!

Earn an extra entry by mentioning this giveaway and a link to this post on Twitter! Leave a comment on this post with the link to your Twitter status that mentions this giveaway.

Earn another extra entry by mentioning this giveaway and a link to this post on your blog! Leave a comment on this post with the link to your blog post that mentions this giveaway.

You have until Sunday, March 7 at 6:59PM to enter. In the meantime, click on over to Bake It Pretty to create your wishlist!  Note, the deadline is Sydney, Australia time, or Pacific Standard Time in the US on March 6, 11:59PM.

Thanks for stopping by over the past year and helping to make The Sweetest Kitchen the great little place that it is!  :)

The giveaway is now over and any comments left after 7PM on March 7, 2010 as recorded on the comment will not be counted.  The winner will be chosen tomorrow so check back then to see if you have won!

This is just your average apple cupcake, baked with chopped apples inside, a filling of dulce de leche for a rich caramel taste, and cream cheese frosting.  A pecan sits on top.

Now, I don’t have a picture of the inside of these, but I assure you that there is a dollop of dulce de leche in there.  The cupcakes didn’t last long enough here to have their pictures taken!

Our Generous IronCupcake:Earth Prize Providers:

• The Demy™ by Key Ingredient
• Hello, Cupcake by Karen Tack & Alan Richardson
• Bella Cupcake Couture
• Cupcake Stackers by Gourmac
• The Cake Mix Doctor Returns! by Anne Byrne
• Beautiful Baking Liners by Vestli House
• Sweet Cuppin’ Cakes Bakery & Cupcakey Supply

Apple Cupcakes
Adapted from Baking Bites
Makes 12 cupcakes

Ingredients
3 tablespoons butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup + 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
3/4 cup applesauce
1 cup Granny Smith apples, diced

Method
Preheat oven to 350F. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners.
In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in egg, followed by vanilla extract.

In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices. Add one third of this mixture to the butter mixture, stirring to incorporate, followed by half of the applesauce. Repeat with the rest of the flour and applesauce and mix only until no streaks of flour remain in the batter. Fold in diced apples.  Divide evenly into prepared muffin cups, filling each about 2/3 full.

Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the muffins spring back when lightly pressed and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from pan and cool on a wire rack.

When cooled completely, fill cupcakes, using the cone method, with dulce de leche (recipe follows). Frost with cream cheese frosting (recipe follows) and top with a pecan.

Dulce De Leche
Adapted from Recipe Girl
Makes enough to fill cupcakes plus about 1/4 cup leftover

Ingredients
1 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk
boiling water

Method
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

Open up the can and pour the sweetened-condensed milk into a pie pan. Cover tightly with foil. Place into a larger pan and pour boiling water in larger pan & around pie plate (level of water should be about halfway up the pie plate). Don’t let any water seep up and into the pie plate.

Place in oven and bake for 1 hour. At the one hour point, peel off foil and check for progress. If the mixture has thickened and turned a caramelly color, it’s done. If it doesn’t quite look thick enough or dark enough, cover it up and bake it a little longer (mine took 75 minutes).

When the mixture appears to have turned into a nice, thick caramel, remove from the oven. Let sit for a few minutes, and then beat with an electric mixer until smooth.

Use leftovers for coffee or ice cream!

Cream Cheese Frosting
Adapted from – source unknown
Makes enough to generously frost cupcakes, plus leftovers

Ingredients
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened and cut into small pieces
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened and cut into small pieces
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
12 pecans

Method
In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese and butter until smooth, about 3 minutes. Add the vanilla and beat well. Gradually add the sugar, 1/2 cup at a time, beating continuously until smooth and creamy. Cover and refrigerate icing for 2 to 3 hours, but no longer, to thicken before using. Frost cupcakes then top each cupcake with a pecan.

My second batch of Halloween cupcakes, baked especially for October‘s Cupcake Hero, uses dulce de leche, which I chose to make in the oven.  Mine took about 1 hour, 15 minutes at 425°F.  It didn’t turn very dark before the top of the dulce de leche started to turn a little hard and dark brown around the edges, even though I had it tightly covered with foil.  I used an electric mixer to smooth out the lumps, but little tiny bits of the burnt edges remained.  It didn’t affect the taste, though; it tastes great!

These are delicious and super moist pumpkin cupcakes, filled with dulce de leche and frosted with dulce de leche buttercream.  The web is made from melted semisweet chocolate and an awesome, creepy spider from Bake It Pretty adorns each cupcake.

The chocolate web is very easy to make.  I melted 2-3 tablespoons of semisweet chocolate chips, with about 1/4 teaspoon of shortening to make the chocolate a little looser, and spooned it into a Ziploc bag.  I then cut off a very tiny sliver of the bottom corner of the bag and piped four circles on top of each cupcake.  I would have used a toothpick to draw through the circles, but I didn’t have any, so I used an uncooked stick of spaghetti that I had broken down to the length of a toothpick!  But I just simply pulled the spaghetti stick through the circles, starting from the center for each line.  Easy spiderweb decoration!

These cupcakes are quite rich, and I knew they would be before I even made them, but they are absolutely delicious.  The pumpkin and caramel go very well together.  If you’re not after so rich of a cupcake, skip the dulce de leche filling and just use the dulce de leche buttercream on top.

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