Vanilla Toffee

The second gift that I made for the Ndali Vanilla Gift Swap was inspired by the old rusty toffee hammer that my cousin found when we were clearing out my granddad's toolshed a year or so ago and rescued for me.

Obviously, the first thing I did on getting it home was to (google a recipe, and) make toffee to hammer with it.

It turns out that homemade toffee is both simple and delicious. AND you get to hit it with its own special tool - big win!

So - when I heard about the gift swap, I immediately started scouring eBay for a good toffee hammer so that I could make vanilla toffee - good gift, no?

I melted 225g salted butter (you could use unsalted and add a sprinkle of salt) and a cup (apologies for the silly US measurement, but that's how it goes) of butter in a little saucepan and then slowly brought it to the boil, stirring all the time.

I boiled the mixture until it reached 'soft crack' stage - 153oC at which point I took it off the heat and stirred in a tsp of vanilla powder (the powder really comes into its own here - liquid would be impractical) and poured it onto baking parchment to set.

At this stage, for one of my batches, I sprinkled dark and white chocolate chips over the slab while it was still hot and they melted on in a very pleasing way.
You could easily add other toppings here - I am quite partial to flaked almonds and Maldon sea salt.

Super easy - see!

Obviously then you should hit with a hammer to break it up into edible pieces. Yum!

Autumn Ice Cream

When I was invited to the Ndali Vanilla Gift Swap by the lovely (and extremely energetic) Vanessa Kimbell and found that I needed to make something vanillaey, the first thing that sprang to mind was ice cream.
Obviously.

But, of course, ice cream is a pretty impractical gift to take along to an afternoon tea party, so I had to rethink and I came up with the seemingly geniustastic idea of ice cream flavoured fairy cakes.

I raced off to the supermarket in a haze of geniosity to buy ice cream cones, only to find that, not only was I not the first person to think of cooking fairy cakes in cones, but that the cone packet actually had a wee recipe link on it suggesting that you do so...

Ah well - I was not to be put off - not necessarily as original as I had originally imagined, but fairy cakes, ice cream stylee still seemed like a pretty good idea.

I weighed three eggs and then measured their weight in butter and sugar, which I threw into Kenwood with some vanilla powder and creamed, till it was light and fluffy.

I added the eggs gradually, along with a tsp or so of vanilla powder (the powder is a bit of a revelation - I've only ever seen extract or paste before - the powder is dry, obviously, so can be added to all kinds of things that might have been destabilised by liquids) and kept beating till all incorporated.

I added the same weight of flour and a splodge of baking powder and folded it in.

I two thirds (or thereabouts) filled my lovely flat bottomed ice cream cones with the mixture and put them in the oven (at about 180) in a fairy cake tin for 25 minutes.

While they were cooling, I whipped up a quick vanilla buttercream by frantically beating 120g butter with 380g icing sugar until combined, mixing in 40ml milk and some more vanilla powder and beating for a further 5 or 10 minutes (thank goodness for stand mixers) until it was super super fluffy.

I piped the buttercream onto the cold fairy cakes and added flakes for extra 99iness.

They turned out really well - I might add red syrup (such as the ice cream man uses) next time, but generally I was pleased with the effect.