Hibiscus tea and poppy seed shortbread

Shortbread is super simple and tasty biscuit to make and its a great recipe to make with kids of any age - yes even I can just about manage this one.

Hibiscus tea has a huge variety of health benefits, not least that it helps lower lower blood pressure and stops you from having nose bleeds (which led me to discovering this tea in the first place.) to find out more about the health benefits of Hibiscus tea click here 
I buy my hibiscus tea tea here 

I used the simple BBC recipe of:

125g butter

55g sugar

180g flour

Additional ingredients that I used are:          2-3 tbsp of hibiscus loose leaf tea

     25g poppy seeds

When I first decided to make tea infused baked goods I wondered how I was even going to do so without the mixture being very runny; the key I have found is to make a tea infused butter. This should normally be made a few hours before you make your shortbread or even the night before.

The shortbread recipe requires 125g butter yet for the infusion stage I would advise that you use a little extra. Therefore I added 150g of butter to a pan and melted it. As the melted butter comes to the boil remove from the heat and add 2-3 tbsp of hibiscus tea depending on how strong you want the flavours to be.  Leave to steep for about fives minutes and then strain the tea. Use a spoon to make sure that you get as much of the butter out of the tea leaves.

Once cooled move the butter into a small container and put it into the fridge to set.

yay the infused butter set- or as my dad likes to refer to it: a culture with bacteria

Place the sugar and flour in a bowl and rub in the butter much like you would do with a crumb;e/ However unlike a crumble the crumb doesn't need to be that fine you just want to make sure that the butter is evenly mixed in.

At this stage add the poppy seeds and bring the mixture together to form a smooth dough. You shouldn't need any liquid to do this but a dash of water or indeed hibiscus tea may be required if your mixture is very dry.

As with most biscuit doughs, shortbread works best if it is left to rest therefore put your dough in a freezer bag or wrap it up in some cling film and place in the fridge for half an hour.

Now would be a good time to preheat your oven to 190 degrees c and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

After it has rested a while take out your dough and using plenty of flour to dust the work surface and rolling pin roll out your dough to about a 2cm thickness. I cut mine out into rounds but you can use whatever shape that you like or stick to the traditional shapes such as fingers.

Bake in the oven for 10-12 minutes or until golden depending on the size and thickness of your biscuits. Leave to cool completely before removing from the sheet of greaseproof paper and demolishing your biscuits with a cup of (hibiscus) tea. 

Salted Caramel Cupcakes

After extensively scrolling through the internet for a good salted caramel cupcakes recipe and I was coming up short. This was not because a lack of recipes - there are hundreds out there but I didn't find one that I liked so I was left with only option; make my own.

For these cupcakes I used:

For the cake

150g golden caster sugar
150g butter
3eggs
175g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1tsp vanilla essence

For the icing

100g  butter
200g golden icing
50g philadelphia

For the caramel

125g butter
125g golden caster sugar
1 tsp double cream (optional)
A pinch of salt

In most cake recipes, well if you are using the creaming method anyway, the first thing you will do with your ingredients is to cream the butter and sugar until they are light and fluffy but I wanted to make caramel ones so instead of creaming the two I melted them instead.  (For added saltiness to the caramel I could have added an additional handful of salt at this stage.) Once I was happy with the consistency of my caramel I removed the pan from the heat and left to cool.

Meanwhile I did a little dance and sung into down my hairbrush while the caramel cooled.

After singing along to MTV for a few songs I was satisfied with the temperature of the caramel and proceeded to beat in the eggs…one by one…..careful not to get any shell in. At this point the mixture looked very runny but fear not because this why I added more flour than the other ingredients. Yet before folding the flour trying to incorporate as much air as possible I incorporated the baking powder and vanilla essence.

The mixture was then divided equally (well I tried to make them equal but it didn't really work) between 12 muffin cases and baked at 180 degrees for approximately 17 minutes.

With stage one complete I moved onto making the caramel filling and icing.

For the caramel I melted more butter and sugar with some salt yet feeling a tad adventurous I also added a little double cream thus making my caramel a little thicker and more fudge like. In the same way as butterfly buns I cut a groove into the top of the cupcakes before filling the space with the salted caramel and placing the piece of cake on top like a hat.

I used golden icing sugar for my icing as not only does it have a nice golden tint to it (as the name suggests) but also because the icing has a subtle caramel flavour to it. 

For the best effect I should have piped the icing onto the cakes but I have come to realisation that piping really isn't my my forte so I used the trusty spoon and knife method.

 Finally I decorated using honeycomb and butterscotch pieces. Eh voila scrummy cupcakes!