Proof once again that chocolate will always make things better

Last week was a tough week. Things went wrong. Things fell through. And at one stage, a chimney almost fell off - but I don't even want to go there and, believe me, neither do you!

Some of you may think I'm mad but I've been trying to coordinate setting up a café with my other full-time work. This means that the past few weeks have consisted of me constantly switching from journalist mode to teacher mode to hassled-person-trying-to-set-up-a-café mode. Mostly, I've been doing fine, though there have been times when I've forgotten just who I'm supposed to be...

That was until last Thursday. I'd been in Tralee on Wednesday, where I'd found tablecloths I liked. This was a huge step forward as I'd spent ages searching in Dublin, Limerick and Dingle. But when I called the shop early on Thursday morning to finalise the order, they hit me with a bombshell. They didn't have enough fabric and the pattern had been discontinued so they couldn't order in any more. Back to the drawing board went a VERY disheartened Sharon.

Barely a second after that phone call, there was the chimney incident (the less said about that, the better) and another phone call from my landlord with more bad news.

Feeling really discouraged by now, I then had to go and teach a computer literacy class to a group of pensioners. The computers were playing up and it took at least 40 minutes to get started, by which time my normally lovely pensioners were very crotchety.

Things got even worse after that but I can feel my blood pressure rising as I write so perhaps it's just best for me to say that by Friday, I had made little or no progress with the café and expected little from the weekend.

Needing some serious cheering up, I found myself browsing through Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard, one of the cookbooks I got this Christmas and a treasure trove of baking treats. I found a recipe for chocolate custard muffins and by their very name alone, I knew they were what I needed.

Note to readers: before you get too excited, the name refers to the cooking method. There is no chocolate custard inside. But this doesn't make them any less delicious. These muffins are moist, chocolately and more-ish. One will most definitely not be enough.
Note to self: must make chocolate muffins with chocolate custard inside.

You'll find Dan's recipe for the muffins on the Guardian website here. He's a regular contributor of theirs and I warn you that if you browse his recipes, you'll definitely end up wanting his book! 
While the muffins were baking in the oven and cooling afterwards, I made Dan's treacle chocolate fudge icing to go on top. 

Halve the measurements he uses and you'll have enough to swirl on top of 12 muffins as well as some left over to use as chocolate spread afterwards. It keeps very well in the fridge.

I felt so much better after baking and eating these that my weekend seemed to flow from there. My boyfriend, two of my sisters and one of their boyfriends came to help me get started with painting on Saturday. One of them even had lots of tablecloth samples for me and I found one that was better than my original choice. (Hooray!)

We made much more progress than I ever thought we would and I am so thankful to them all for helping me and lifting me out of what was becoming a dark and pessimistic mood.

I feel I should thank these muffins too. The very act of baking them and the pleasure of eating them made me remember just what I'm trying to do with this café. There will be obstacles to overcome along the way but if delicious food like this is the result, I feel that it will be worth it.

My helpers enjoyed eating the muffins too!

I'll definitely be making these again. They may even feature on the menu of my café. If they made me feel better and made a success of a weekend that I thought would be a total failure, they must be good.

Breathing is always important, especially when it's time for the annual Dingle Food Festival

Breathe, Sharon, breathe.

I'm suffering from mild hyperventilation at the moment because it's finally arrived: the Dingle Food Festival starts tomorrow and that means that today is officially my busiest day of the year. I ought to be mixing  batters and baking and icing cakes now but the reason I'm sitting at my computer is because I've got so much work to do, I don't even want to start. 

Those of you who've been reading my blog for a while will remember that I was ambitious for last year's festival and made ten different types of cupcakes as well as my ever-popular brownies.

Well, this year I'm going one better. I'm making eleven kinds as well as a range of cake pops - which are new to my stall and, as I haven't practiced them very much, may end up looking so unpresentable that they'll go into the bin - a possible but hopefully avoidable outcome!

This year's flavours are:

White chocolate and raspberry

Cookies and cream

Banoffee

Carrot 

Lemon meringue 

Black Forest Gateau

Guinness and Baileys

Chocolate and coffee

Chocolate and peanut

Ginger and lime

And mixed berry cheesecakes

My cake pops will include a Madeira cake base and a chocolate cake base flavoured with orange, Baileys, raspberry or coffee covered in either dark or white chocolate and topped with rose petals, pollen, chopped hazelnuts, candied orange peel or chocolate shavings. If they work out, they'll look fabulous. If not, then the bin it is!

There's so much to look forward to at this year's festival - if you're lucky enough to be a visitor and not a stallholder.  If I'm able to break free from my stall or the stove for any length of time, here's what I'd like to go to:

• Some of the workshops, which include chocolate making with Benoit Lorge; rearing and curing a pig with Fingal Ferguson of Gubbeen Farmhouse Products and Ted Berner and Ivan Wheelan of Wildside Catering; hen keeping; foraging; and 'coffee from around the world' with Mark Kingston from the Golden Bean.
• For Food's Sake: a series of thought-provoking talks, film screenings and discussions - all about food.
• Come Dine with the Penguins: a seafood feast served in the penguins' enclosure at Oceanworld Aquarium.
• And, finally, the wonderful taste trail where 55 businesses in the town play host to some of the area's food producers and serve creatively cooked local food. There's seafood in Curran's Bar, a kangaroo BBQ in Finn McCool's Surf Shop, Píog pies with a pint in Hannie Agnes' Bar, Terayaki salmon skewers with warm sake shots at Fish at the Marina and so much more. 
  
  So, who is coming to Dingle this weekend? If you are, do call by and say hello. I'll be manning my stall at the market on Holy Ground from 9am to 2.30pm tomorrow and from 11am to 4pm (ish) on Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the time, I'll be breathing - or should I say baking!   
  
  
  

The ups and downs of life at a farmers' market

It's raining outside and I can't help but feel downhearted. Rain is forecast for all this week and I'm not relishing the thought of another deluge of a day at Dingle Farmers' Market this Friday.

The past two weeks at the market have proven just how unpredictable the life of a market stallholder can be. A fortnight ago, it rained so hard and so long that all of my customers stayed away. There was a break in the rainfall for approximately 20 minutes at around 11 o'clock and any cupcakes that were sold were sold during those precious few minutes.

Those types of days are hard to take. All of the work and preparation amounts to little and you wonder what on earth ever possessed you to set up a market stall in a country where the weather is as variable as it is in Ireland.

The only thing that makes up for it is that you can swap those same leftover cupcakes for some of the other stallholders' produce. That rainy day, I arrived home soaked but bearing bread, new potatoes, homemade chocolates, organic salad leaves, fresh fish and even a pot of handmade, organic moisturiser.

The other stallholders make up for it too. Klaus cheered my spirits with his renditions of 'Singing in the Rain' and 'Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head' while Saorla and I swapped horror stories about stalkers.

Such a different day to last week when the sun shone and hordes of customers descended upon us. We'd organised a special kids' day to celebrate school being out for the summer and had face painters, a drum band, jugglers and a choir from the local Camphill community. Everyone was smiling. Lots of cupcakes were sold. And there was lots of cheery banter.

Here's Klaus with his stall of the most wonderful cosmetics. He and his wife (under their company name Flourish Cosmetics) make amazing cleansers, toners, moisturisers and other products, using completely natural and organic ingredients. Nothing has been tested on animals and everything feels luxurious on the skin.
Here's Saorla, with her ever-popular cookies and chocolate lollipops. What you can't see in this picture is her growing range of handmade chocolates. One of her latest additions is the Green Faerie - an absinthe flavoured truffle that really is to die for.And here am I with my cupcakes, smiling in the sunshine.


Here's hoping I'm smiling this Friday. When I'll be selling chocolate brownies, Black Forest gateau cupcakes, white chocolate and raspberry cupcakes, banoffee cupcakes, Oreo cupcakes and Guinness and Baileys cupcakes - that's what I've decided on so far at least.

Fingers crossed for sunshine. And hope to see you there, if not this Friday, then some time.

All together now: send me some sunshine

I've got cupcakes baking in the oven at this very moment. Chocolate cupcakes, strawberry ones, Black Forest Gateau cupcakes, banoffee, white chocolate and raspberry and even lemon meringue ones: all destined for my stall at Dingle Farmers' Market tomorrow.


And lest fans of my brownies despair, they'll be on my stall too.

I've been back at the market for the past two weeks and it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride so far. Two weeks ago, I ignored the weather forecast, mixed up some cupcake batter and decided the time was right for Little Miss Cupcake to return. After all, how bad could the weather really be?

It turns out that the question I should have asked was: how foolish can a cupcake maker really be? When I arrived at the market that Friday morning, it was so windy that everyone's canopy umbrella's were literally taking off. Anything that wasn't firmly tied down was blown away.

Hmm, thought Sharon. I don't have anything to tie my canopy down with and I don't really have anything to tie it to either.

Fortunately, my ever-resourceful boyfriend was nearby and together we found rope and tied my stall to a phone box, a tree, an electricity pole and my car! On a normal morning, it takes between 20 and 30 minutes to get my stall set up but on this windswept morning, it took two whole hours. Two hours of tying everything as tightly as possible, of chasing objects that would suddenly become windborne and at one stage rescuing a box of 50 cupcakes that was about to crash to the ground. STRESS!

Even worse was the fact that all but the most weather-beaten of our customers were scared off by the wind and I had very few sales. I was hugely disappointed that this was the outcome of my first day back at the market but the fact that I was able to barter cupcakes for produce from the other stalls made up for it a little.

Last Friday, the sun shone and things were better. More of the stallholders had returned too and with them came more customers. It felt like the market had come back to life after its winter slumbers.

Saorla was there with her vegan delights and delicious sandwiches (you should all try her roasted veggie sandwiches - they're scrummy!)


Mary had returned with her jams, home baking and hand-knitted cardigans for babies.


Janet's stall displayed her farm-fresh eggs, wonderful honey products and sweet treats.


Vegetable man Tom was especially proud of his rhubarb.


Eithne was pleased with her pancakes.


Lorna (who runs the Phonenix Restaurant in Keale and makes fabulous vegetarian food) had brought along someone who serenaded us with her violin.


Marie (from Quebec) is new to the market and as well as her excellent preserves and chutneys, she makes fudge that is to die for.


Greg is new too and one of the things he sells is bird houses that he crafts himself.


Neil's bread stall (with bread made by his wife Orla) is one of the market's busiest and last week, he was joined by Aine who was learning how to bake as part of her transition year work experience.


We will all be back again tomorrow and so will Olivier, Bríd, Britta, Sarah, Betsy and more. If you're there, do call by to say hello.

And don't forget: send some sunshine our way!

Romantic relationships, being 33 and cupcakes

Ladies aren't supposed to reveal their ages but - in conclusive proof that I'm definitely not a lady - I'm about to reveal mine. I'm 33 and so too are several of my friends.
What I'm beginning to realise is that 33 seems to be the age at which women of my generation start to feel the pressure. The pressure to settle down with a man they love and start a family.

Today is Valentine's Day and in the past few days, I've had several conversations with my single friends about this. In fact, since the year began, I've had countless conversations about love, the lack of it and what this means for a woman in her thirties.

Some of my single friends are beginning to worry. A few of them are on the brink of panic. And the older they are, the more anxious they are feeling.

It's not just my single friends either. In the past two months, I've consoled friends who have been casually and cruelly jilted. I've congratulated others who have joined dating agencies in a pro-active attempt to meet men who are ready for commitment. I've listened to one friend who is seriously unhappy in her marriage and another who has just finalised her divorce proceedings.


Here's what I've learned from their many different experiences:
1. Men - grr! - have it lucky. Most of them are blissfully oblivious to the ticking of a biological clock and they can sail through their thirties, forties and even fifties without feeling any pressure at all.

2. Love is ridiculously difficult to find.

3. Even if you do find it, you'll soon that the sentiments behind the Beatles' 'All You Need is Love' aren't quite truthful. You need a lot more than that if you want your relationship to succeed: you need commitment, honesty, a willingness to devote time and care to each other and quite a lot of luck.

If you've got someone to love who loves you back, tell them just how lucky you consider yourself to have them (today and every day).

I'm not going to utter any tired clichés to those of you who are single and wish you weren't. What I will say, however, is that people who are confident and happy attract other people. So, take time to focus on yourself. Take part in activities you enjoy: travelling, painting, scuba diving, salsa dancing, astro physics, whatever. Become the person you were meant to be and you will attract all sorts of like-minded people; friends and maybe even potential loves.

In the meantime, here's a cupcake:

And not just any cupcake, a sticky toffee cupcake with salted caramel buttercream from Fiona Cairns' 'Bake & Decorate'.

This recipe makes 12 cupcakes.

Ingredients for the cakes:
180g dates, pitted and chopped
1tsp vanilla extract
180g self-raising flour
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
80g unsalted butter, softened
150g light muscuvado sugar
2 eggs

Ingredients for the buttercream
125g white caster sugar
80ml double cream
1/2 tsp salt (or to taste; I actually added a little more)
1 tsp vanilla extract

160g unsalted butter, softened
200g icing sugar, sifted

Place the chopped dates in a heatproof bowl, pour 180ml of boiling water over the dates and leave to soak for 20 mins.

Preheat oven to 180 degress/ 350 degrees F/gas mark 4.

Sift the flour and the bicarbonate of soda into a bowl and set aside.

Cream together the butter and sugar for 5 mins or until the mix is light and fluffy.

Add the eggs gradually, beating between each addition and slipping in 1tbsp of flour about halfway through to prevent curdling.

Lastly, fold in the remaining flour and the date mixture, to which you have added the vanilla extract.

Spoon into cupcake cases and bake in the oven for 15 to 20 mins (until the tops spring back when pressed with a finger).

Leave to cool.

While the cakes are cooling, dissolve the sugar and 60ml of water in a small, heavy-based saucepan over a gentle heat.

Once dissolved, turn the heat up and boil the syrupy solution.

Wait for a few minutes, watching the syrup carefully. As soon as it changes to a caramel colour (like strong tea) and becomes a thicker consistency, remove it from the heat and, standing well back, add the cream. (It may splatter a little and you may think it has gone wrong but it hasn't.)

Keep stirring and add the salt and the vanilla.

Leave to cool.

Cream the butter and the icing sugar for 5 mins or so and then add the caramel.

Pipe this icing onto the cupcakes and you've got gooey, sticky, sweet toffee cupcakes with a sophisticated hint of saltiness.

Happy Valentine's Day to you all!

A cupcake for Christmas

I'm writing this to the sounds of happy voices and laughter coming from the kitchen. The aroma of a ham cooking in Nigella's festive mix of cranberry juice, apple juice and all sorts of spices carries in the air. There's snow on the ground outside.

It must be Christmas.

The view from Baile Dháith (the village I live in) on Christmas Eve

I'd love to be in a position to give you all a gift this Christmas but the best I can do is to present you with this recipe for one of the best-selling cupcakes on my stall at yesterday's Christmas market in Dingle. It's a cupcake that I think has all of the festive flavours of Christmas.

It's a Christmas pudding cupcake, a lighter version of its more traditional grown-up relative that bursts with fruity flavour and is topped with brandy butter.

Here's how you make 18 of them.
Ingredients:
200g sultanas
140g currants
6 dates
170g unsalted butter at room temperature
255g dark muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
170g self-raising flour
1 medium apple, peeled and grated
1/2 tsp mixed spice
4tbsp rum

• Place the sultanas, currants and dates in a pan. Cover with water and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 15 minutes so that the fruits are soft and swollen.
• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line your muffin tins with paper cases.
• Beat the butter and sugar together until fully combined.
• Add the eggs one at a time, followed by the flour.
• Sir in the grated apple, spice, rum and drained fruit.
• Divide the mixture between the paper cases.
• Bake for 25 minutes then check that they are cooked by inserting a skewer into the centre.
• Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

To make the brandy butter, you need equal amounts of icing sugar and butter and enough brandy to taste.
I used 220g of each, combining them in the food processor (you could use a hand-held whisk) and then I added about 5tbsp of brandy. You can add more or less according to your own taste.
You then need to fill a piping bag with this mixture and pipe it on to the cupcakes. If you've never done this before, here's how you do it. You start from the ouside and work towards the centre in a circular motion. It probably won't look that good first time but you'll get better. I promise!
You can top your cupcake off with a few sultanas for decoration. And then you should have something that looks like this:

This cupcake is brimful of the taste of Christmas and judging from the reactions of my customers and fellow stallholders when they tasted them yesterday, your guests are sure to scoff them.

Merry Christmas.

Cupcakes, farmers' markets and all I've learned in the past year

Yesterday was my last day at Dingle Farmers' Market until our Christmas markets in December (dates yet to be decided).

My reaction to this my decision to call a halt to cupcake baking for the winter is a mixed one. My head (and body) says: Phew! I'm glad that's over.

Yet it's more complicated than that. Ever since I set up my stall just over a year ago, I've learned a huge amount from my involvement with the market and my life has become richer as a result.

I've found people to be so generous . When I first started, I was unsure whether my venture would be successful and so wasn't keen to shell out money on a canopy. I told an old lady who used to be in charge of the market about my reluctance to invest too much upfront and she immediately swung into action, contacting stallholders and asking if anybody had a canopy they weren't using. Organic vegetable enthusiast Deckie came up trumps and loaned me one until I felt the time had come to purchase one of my own. (Thanks Deckie!)

The other stallholders have been friendly too. Tom often helps me to set up my stall in the morning (hoping he'll get a banoffee cupcake in return!).

Mark, the market controller is always on hand to carry boxes, assemble canopies and solve occasional disputes (!). The atmosphere is always convivial, with everyone swapping stories, chatting with customers and marvelling at the weather (it was sunny every single Friday - bar one - from the beginning of April until yesterday!).

The customers have to be one of the things that make the market so special. It's great building up a regular customer base, learning what they like and having them come back to tell you what they think of your products. My customers often suggest new flavours I should try and what they think of cupcakes they have tasted elsewhere.

Here are some stand-out memories of interactions I had with customers this year:

A lovely German girl whose granny had been a prize-winning baker in Bavaria sampling my white chocolate and raspberry cupcakes and trying to guess all the different ingredients.

The delight on the face of a charming elderly man who bought cupcakes every week when I returned to the market after a few weeks of being off sick.

There was also the lady who would visit my stall every week, spend ages looking at all the different options and then complain about my cupcakes being too expensive. She would try to haggle about the price and I would stand firm and refuse. (I give discounts if you buy lots, not just two!) Two weeks ago, she eventually relented and decided she'd spend €4 on two white chocolate and raspberry cupcakes. She returned yesterday to say how nice they were "even though they were dear". She then bought 12! And for that, I did give her a discount.

(white chocolate and raspberry cupcakes; the cakes that eventually made her crack)

I've learned lots about baking and decorating cakes during the year too. It's amazing to look back at photos and see just how much my cakes have improved. They always tasted good but at the beginning I had a lot to learn about making them look good.

I've also developed an even deeper respect for food producers. There is such a huge amount of work and committment involved in producing fresh food and anyone who succeeds in doing so ought to be commended.

Dingle Farmers' Market has grown and developed during the year too. When I started in September 2009, the market was located in an out-of-the-way strip of wasteland. The ground was potholed and uneven and turned into a muddy quagmire when it rained. This meant that only a hardy core of six or so stallholders turned up every Friday and the market was losing customers by the week.

A man called Michael Gleeson came to our rescue and he negotiated with Kerry County Council on our behalf. We were moved to a new location - the car park on Holy Ground - and it's been onwards and upwards ever since. Over the summer months, we had 20+ stallholders and many more expressing interest in joining.

Sausages and all sorts of cured meats, farmhouse cheeses, vegetarian and vegan food, savoury pies, fresh fish, homemade pizzas and quiches, bread, a huge variety of vegetables, pancakes, local honey, local organic beef, great hot food such as lamb koftas and crab bisque, my cupcakes and brownies and a fabulous range of local crafts; Dingle Farmers' Market is now not to be missed. Just ask the hundreds of regulars who come every Friday.

I'm already planning to spend the winter experimenting with new cupcake flavours, macaroons and whoopie pies but for those of you who'll suffer withdrawal symptoms until then, here are some Oreo cupcakes to tide you over:

Bleary-eyed recollections of this year's Dingle Food and Wine Festival

A year has gone by since I first set up my stall at Dingle's Farmers' Market. Little Miss Cupcake - a stall specialising in (yup, you've guessed it!) cupcakes and brownies - came into existence in September of last year and a mere month later, I was selling hundreds of cupcakes at Dingle's Food and Wine Festival, an annual event that takes place on the first weekend of October.

To mark my first year anniversary, I decided that I wanted this year's food festival to be even bigger and better than before.

This marked the start of the madness.

I decided that as well as baking brownies, I would bake ten different varieties of cupcake. That's right. Ten! Chocolate, white chocolate and raspberry, strawberry, banoffee, carrot, Guinness and Baileys, Oreo, mini mixed berry and vanilla cheesecakes, almond and orange and Black Forest cupcakes. Why did nobody think to stop me?

As a result of this crazy decision, my weekend passed in a blur of bleary-eyed activity. I rose at dawn, baked and iced cupcakes, spent the afternoon enticing people to buy them, rushed home to bake some more, snatched a few hours of precious sleep and then rose to do it all over again. This was the pattern on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Somehow, I also managed to find the time to enjoy a nine course tasting menu at the Global Village restaurant on Saturday night. I'm not going to review it here as the owners are friends of mine but believe me when I say that it was fabulous.

Highlights included a ravioli filled with the sweetest concentrated tomato that burst when cut and intensified a deeply flavoured tomato broth; albacore tuna served with seaweed; a wonderfully minty mojito sorbet; and an imaginative take on millionaire's shortbread where the caramel was replaced with zingy lemon.

One of the highlights of the Dingle Food Festival - besides the excellent market and the food demonstrations - is the taste trail. Almost all of the businesses in the town take part and each of them hosts a different food producer. So, essentially, you can stroll around the town, following your nose and your appetite and enjoying bite-sized meals in pubs, shops, restaurants and art galleries.

Tuck into some barbequed seafood at the fishmonger's. Slurp on some oysters and Guinness in one pub or tuck into a pint and a pork pie in another. Enjoy a spit-roast pig, Spanish paella, Murphy's ice cream sandwiches, gourmet coffee, wine tastings and so much more.

Unfortunately, I missed most of this as I was busy manning my stall. Next year, cupcakes or no cupcakes, I have vowed not to be so overtaken by madness. I too will eat my way around Dingle.