Peanut Butter Banana Muffin

If you love peanut butter banana sandwich, you will love this muffin. This muffin has a dollop of creamy peanut butter in the centre and with a few slices of banana added to it. I love peanut butter banana sandwich. I thought, why not create a peanut butter banana muffin? I got down to working out the recipe and baked. Ummm .... it's yummy. Soft and moist with the taste of fragrant peanut butter and sweetness of the banana slices. How about a cup of freshly brewed coffee and a peanut butter banana muffin for breakfast to kickstart your morning?

Chocolate Symphony

I had some leftover of the chocolate ganache from the Devil's Food Cake. I did not want to waste it and was thinking of what new cake creation can I come up with. Finally decided to bake the chocolate sponge cake first while squeezing some creative juices out of my brain. I normally do not manage to bake a very soft and spongy chocolate sponge. It usually turns out the the bottom is denser and harder than the top and I have to cut the bottom away. It's a lot of wastage. This time round, I tried to be a little more courageous by folding the the chocolate and cooled butter mixture more thoroughly into the fluffy egg and flour mixture. Pop it went into the oven. After waiting anxiously for about 30 minutes, I got a beautiful tall, soft and spongy chocolate sponge cake. No more denser and tougher base and wastage. Hooray! It's a success. Here's a picture of it.

Devil's Food Cake

It's my mum's birthday. I have actually wanted to bake a mango mousse cake. However, I could not find any nice and good mangoes around this time. In the end, I settled on a devil's food cake taken from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Roses's Heavenly Cakes book. It's extremely chocolatey and moise because it contained 99% cocoa chocolate and cocoa powder and sour cream. Can you taste it with your imagination?

The cake is sliced horizontally into 3 layers and sandwiched with chocolate ganache. I used Valrhona 64% Manjari chocolate for the ganache. I love this Manjari chocolate as it's not as bitter as the 70% Guanjana chocolate I used to use. It's quite well balanced and kids will not find it too bitter. This cake is eventually dressed with a layer of Valrhona chocolate glaze. The only bug I have with this cake is that I couldn't make a beautiful glaze. The temperature of the chocolate mixture is very important towards making a beautiful glaze. Too high a temperature, the chocolate will be too thin and runny. A little lower than 32 degree celsius, it will become a little too thick for a smooth glaze, like what happened here.

This cake will definitely appeal to all chocoholics. For a lighter texture, you can actually replace the chocolate butter cake base with a chocolate sponge cake soaked with syryp, like the Awfully Chocolate Cake I posted sometime back.