What is it about tiny treats that make the food taste better? I love perfectly portioned food so I was excited to be sent Petite Treats: Mini Versions of Your Favorite Baked Delights. The cookbook has recipes for mini donuts, muffins, scones, pies, and bundt cakes. The recipes sound absolutely delicious but to make most of the treats, you’ll need quite a bit of hardware: mini bunt cake pans, mini donut pans, mini scone pans, mini cupcake pans, etc. There are a few recipes that use a normal muffin pan that sounded really appealing, including mini cakes, but I decided to make the mini coffee cakes so I could have breakfast all week.
Ingredients:
- 1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
- 1 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 cup fresh cranberries (I used frozen cranberries, thawed)
- 2 cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour, divided
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon unsalted butter,at room temperature, divided
- 2 large eggs
- 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Line a 12-well muffin pan with paper liners. Scrape out the vanilla bean into a food processor fitted with a blade using a knife. Discard the pod.
Add the sugar and pulse until combined. Transfer to a medium bowl.
Add the cranberries to the food processor.
Pulse briefly until the cranberries are coarsely chopped but not pureed.
Add 1/4 cup of the sugar mixture to the cranberries and mix to combine.
In a medium bowl, combine 2 cups of the flour with the baking powder and salt. Set aside.
In a large bowl, combine 1/4 cup of butter with 1/2 cup of the sugar mixture.
Beat on medium until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes.
Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing fully after each one.
Reduce the speed to low. Add half the flour mixture.
Then 1/4 cup whipping cream.
Then the remaining flour mixture.
The the last 1/4 cup whipping cream. Scrape down the bowl as needed.
Fill each muffin liner halfway full. (The dough was kind of sticky so this was kind of a challenge to get them down into the tins)
Place about 1/2 teaspoon of the cranberry sugar mixture on top of the batter, avoiding the edges.
Top with the remaining batter, filling each liner three-quarters full. I ran out of batter after topping 9 of the 12 tins. Sigh.
Add the remaining 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to the remaining vanilla sugar.
Blend with your hands until combined. I ended up with this… I have a feeling they meant to say to melt the last tablespoon of butter because this doesn’t seem right at all.
Sprinkle over the top of each cake.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center returns with no crumbs. (They didn’t give a baking time estimate, which I find to be super troubling. I went with 18 minutes, so try 18-20 minutes.)
Allow to completely cool in the pan.
So I found a few problems with this recipe which is really frustrating when you’re trying to bake; precision is key and this recipe kind of made precision impossible. They still turned out fine, but I had 9 coffee cakes, 3 cranberry topped half coffee cakes, and a ton of cranberries and sugar left over, which I now need to find another use for.
The normal coffee cakes turned out to be really tasty, although I couldn’t really taste the vanilla too much. The bite of cranberry was nice but I think I’d actually prefer them mixed throughout the entire batter to give it more flavor.
I hope some of the other recipes in this cookbook work out better than this one; I’ll try out another one in the near future. Petite Treats is available now for pre-order so be sure to check it out!
What do you think?