How to: Cream the butter and the sugar

A lot of baking requires "creaming butter and sugar" together. So, what does this *mean*? And *how* is it done?

"Creaming" the butter and the sugar means mixing or blending the two ingredients together until they take on a light, creamy texture. The purpose is to incorporate lots of air bubbles into the mixture, which ensures that your baked cake will be light and fluffy, and will rise nicely.

Food Processor Method:
Many recipes indicate that this process ought to be done with a food processor, and indeed it can be. Chop your butter into 1 inch cubes, add your sugar, and blend or pulse on low speed, using short bursts, until the two ingredients form the creamy paste we are after.

To cream by hand:
Never let anyone tell you you *need* a food processor to do this (or any other baking task, come to that.). Some people like to use a pastry cutter or a knife for this process, but here at LastPenny we prefer to use a heavy tablespoon (the oldfashioned serving kind) in a heavy old crockery bowl.

Place the sugar in your bowl, and cut the butter into slices - about 2 inches square, and each slice a quarter inch thick makes for the easiest to mix, I find, but you can use any dimension.

If using margarine, simply scoop out required amount and place in bowl.

You *can* do this with hard butter straight from the fridge, but it is much much easier and faster to do it with softened butter.

The *best* way to soften butter is to allow it to come naturally to room temperature. But it's rare we have the time to wait for that! Instead, you can place the amount of butter you want in a glass jug or bowl, and stand the container in a pan of warm water for 5 minutes. You can leave it longer if the butter is not yet soft enough, but keep an eye on it - you don't want it to start melting. Alternately, you can soften it in the microwave by giving it ten second bursts, checking after each.

Important: don't melt the butter at this stage.

Then, rub or cut the butter into the sugar. I like to "squash" the butter between my heavy spoon and heavy bowl, thus rubbing it into the sugar this way. After a few minutes, the mixing should get easier and you'll get the nice fluffy texture we're talking about!

TOP TIP: You can substitute margarine for butter, and use your choice of sugar - plain white, brown, raw, etc - and achieve the same or a similar result.

Great Lunchbox Recipe - Creme de Menthe Cake (Arsenic Cake!)

Creme de Menthe cake (or Arsenic Cake, which is what we affectionately called this tasty treat :)) was one of my favourite childhood recipes - and simple enough to make that it was one of the first cakes I learned to bake alone.

Basically, it's a chocolate peppermint cake - a plain cake, flavoured with peppermint and tinted with green food colouring; and iced with rich chocolate icing (frosting). It tastes wonderful, and it's startling colour makes it a lunchbox or party favourite - as well as making it perfect for birthday cakes, St Patrick's Day or halloween!

Creme De Menthe Cake

4 oz (115g) butter
6 oz (170g) caster sugar (Don't buy it specially if you don't have it to hand: use plain white!)
2 eggs
6 oz (170g) flour
1/4 c milk
1/2 baking soda
1 t cream of tartar*
1 t peppermint essence
1 t green food colouring (optional of course)**

Cream the butter and sugar (Check out a post later in the week for directions if you're not sure what this means!) Add the eggs and stir gently. NOTE: Never beat a cake mix, unless the recipe specifically calls for it. Stir gently :)

Dissolve the baking soda in the milk. Add it alternately with your remaining dry ingredients (flour, cream of tartar). NOTE: this means, stir in some of the dry ingredients, then an equivalent proportion of milk, and repeat until all have been added. It's to help you achieve a smooth cake batter :)

Your cake batter should be a nice gold, and reasonably thick. add your peppermint essence and green colour, and stir through until mixed. The batter will turn a pale grass green - don't get it too bright, it always looks brighter when it's cooked!

Grease your cake pan, or line it with baking paper, and pour in your cake batter. I prefer to make this cake in a square pan, so as to have lovely squares with four green sides when it's cut, but use your favorite cake pan for the occasion. Round is usually better for birthdays!

Bake the cake at 180 deg C (350F) until done - it takes around 40 minutes in a standard oven. A fan oven will be faster.

The edges of the cake will brown, but when you cut it you'll find the cake is quite a virulent green. if it's for a birthday or St Patrick's Day, you might like to trim the edges off to make a nice bright green edge - you can serve these offcuts as desserts with icecream.

Ice with your favorite chocolate icing/frosting recipe - I'll bring you mine tomorrow, but this cake will take your own favorite.

*Unfortunately, there's not really a good substitute for cream of tartar, if you don't happen to have it. You could try popping in a teaspoon of baking powder instead. You'll find recommendations to leave out the baking soda if you do that, but I wouldn't recommend that course for this particular recipe.

Serving suggestions

• This cake is a lunchbox favorite - very tasty, and great looking!
• Un-iced, sliced thinly and topped with chocolate sauce as a dessert
• Birthday party - either as the birthday cake or sliced into fingers
• St Patrick's Day or Hallowe'en party fare
  

**TOP TIP: If you are making a "grown up" cake, add 1/2 cup of cocoa to the mix, and another few drops of peppermint essence. This will give you a real chocolate peppermint cake, with a night light fluffy texture.

Baking Staples - things for the pantry!

Note: In this post, by "baking" I mean: making cakes, cookies, slices, breads and other things you'd find in the baked goods section at your supermarket, or at the bakery.

If you want to be able to bake "at the drop of a hat", it pays to keep a set of baking staple items in the pantry. That way, when you suddenly realise you need something extra for the lunchboxes in the morning, or feel like treating yourself for Sunday lunch, you'll be able to choose your favorite recipe and be ready to go in minutes.

It means no special trip to the supermarket too - and we all know the dangers of those "special trips" when you're on a budget. "I'll just get one of those"... perhaps the worst words ever to pass a penny-saver's lips! I bet everyone reading knows exactly what I mean there...

So without further ado, what items do *you* need in your pantry to be ready to bake?

Flour
Plain white flour is what I buy myself, with a small bag of wholemeal on hand as well. There are lots of wholemeal and wholegrain flours available and I'm sure they're all excellent, but healthy-choices not withstanding, my family prefers white. And while I'd *love* to get them eating better, I'm weaning them off store-bought sweet treats, so I figure white flour is a compromise I don't mind making - for now!

Choose your favorite brand of flour - I buy what's on special myself - and if you prefer to use a wholemeal flour, substitute at will.

When it comes to self-raising flour, I don't buy it. Why not? Make your own.**

• Baking powder
• Baking soda
• Cream of tartar
  
• Salt
• Sugar - many recipes use brown sugar, raw sugar, caster sugar etc. Now, you *can* buy all those kinds of sugar if you want, but pretty much, you can use whichever kind you have on hand. I try to keep white sugar and either brown or raw sugar in my pantry, but on those tight weeks, I stick to just plain old versatile white.
• Cornflour or cornstarch - a lot of recipes use it for thickening. It's a nice to have; you can do without it - but it *is* handy for thickening savoury dishes and sauces, and I do try to keep it myself.

With these basic items, you can pretty much consider yourself baking-ready. As well, a lot of recipes use eggs, butter and milk, but you can find plenty of egg-free recipes if you look - our own Honey Loaf is an example. And butter can usually be replaced by margarine or any other fat you have on hand (sour cream, yoghurt, or even cooking oil, to name 3 I've used in a pinch), and milk can often be replaced by water.

Flavouring Pantry Items

These definitely come under the heading of nice-to-haves, but most of them last a long long time - often you'll need only tiny amounts of these items. I try to buy one every second shop, and then I have a stack before I know it, without having a huge outlay all at once. And of course, your family may not like some of the flavours (chocolate and peppermint are big in my house, but orange rarely goes down well, for example) so that will also determine what you buy.

Flavoured essences to keep on hand:

• Peppermint
• Vanilla
• Lemon

These are the only three I consider *essential* for myself - but essences come in all flavours. Others you might like to try include:

• Almond
• Brandy
• Rum
  

If you have kids, the investment of a couple of dollars in some food colouring can really pay off - both in interesting kids in cooking, and in getting them eating the results! I like to keep green and red food colouring at home, blue is also a popular choice.

The other key food flavouring I keep is cocoa. Essential for chocolate cakes!*

Of course, you can also keep ingredients like dried fruit, crushed nuts and cooking chocolate to hand. But you don't *need* them to bake successfully!

**TOP TIP: To make your own self-raising flour, add one and a half-teaspoons of baking powder and a half-teaspoon of salt for every cup of plain flour. Simple, huh? :)

*TIP: If you run out of cocoa, you can substitute instant chocolate drinks such as Drinking Chocolate, Milo or NesQuik. The flavour will be slightly different, but if your wee one or significant other really wants their favorite chocolate snack, it can save your bacon!

Second hand shopping for the kitchen - even the celebrities are doing it!

Last Night on Campbell Live, celebrity chef Richard Till talked about "retro" baking utensils.

He had a lot of items that many of us still have and use at home, but he also made a key point - the young presenter didn't even *recognise* a lot of the items that our mothers and grandmothers used every day.

Two of the items discussed last night:


These are a flour sifter (left) and a Gem iron (right). (Watch this space - next week LastPenny will bring you Mum's wonderful Gem recipe. It's not exactly healthy eating, mind, but we all need comfort food, right? *vbg*)

Baking at Home

The point of today's post is twofold. The first key point is that baking at home provides a more cost-effective and often healthier alternative to buying snacks.

By looking out those old recipes (or following LastPenny!) you can keep the family in cakes, biscuits, desserts and many other tasty treats, all without spending a fortune.

Here's the SECOND key point. With the busy, instant focus of life in this new millennium, many of us simply aren't set up to bake at home. We're missing a number of the key items we need to get going. But don't despair! Don't put home baking in the too hard basket, or think it will take a lot of expensive equipment to get going.

So what utensils I need to bake at home?

• First up, you don't need a food processor, blender, or any other fancy electronic equipment. While those are nice to haves, your gran didn't have them, and quite likely your mother started without them too - and they all baked, very successfully.
  
• What you do need are a couple of good heavy tablespoons, a set of measuring spoons, a set of measuring cups, a fork, an egg-whisk, a rolling pin and a measuring cup or bottle with a fitting lid (that you can shake liquid ingredients in).
• If you don't have a rolling pin, a wine bottle or something similar-shaped and reasonably heavy will do the trick.
  
• A sieve or sifter for flour is desirable, but you can live without it.
• A rubber spatula for scraping out bowls is a nice to have.
• A set of kitchen scales is helpful, but you CAN do without it - many recipe books including the Edmonds Cook Book have conversion charts at the front, listing the conversions from weight to volume for common ingredients.
• The final key thing you need, especially if you're a new baker, is a RECIPE BOOK. And I don't mean Jamie Oliver's newest coffee table masterpiece, either. Find your mum's favourite old recipe book - I have one of my mother's grandmothers, that gives the method for regulating the temperature in a wood-burning stove. That's the kind of recipe book you need. In the front of those books are a whole lot of lovely tips for the first-time baker - all about what terms such as "cream the butter and sugar" mean, and advice on really how to rub the butter into the flour. (LastPenny will bring you those in due course, too - but having them at your fingertips is a great idea)
  

Now, don't go off to Farmers and spend a couple of hundred dollars in the kitchen department! The VERY BEST THING about all of those things listed above? You can buy them all at your nearest Salvation Army Op Shop, or at garage sales. All those items together will set you back less than $20.00.

While you're there, pick up the other items you'dd need. These vary depending on what you're intending to cook, but will likely include:

• Cake pans*
• Muffin trays**
• Cookie sheets
• Loaf tins

*TOP TOP: If you have a smallish lasagne pan or a square baking dish, you can use it as a cake pan. Many casseroles will also do double duty.

**TIP: You can buy muffin and cupcake papers at the supermarket, and if you don't have a muffin pan, many muffin or cake doughs will hold their shape in a paper receptacle. The key here is not to overfill the muffin or cake paper.

We'll bring you some top baking recipes and tips over the next week :) Look out for them, and if you've got an old favorite, drop us a line in comments or by using the form on our webpage here, and we'll find your favorite recipe for you! Or, if you have a recipe to share, send it in - we'll include it, with a link to your website or blog.