Hello and welcome back to the Cupcake Gemma channel with me, Gemma, and I'm at home making something truly delicious that I just developed for a really fun collaboration evening with a restaurant in Brighton called Lost in the Lane. Chef Jess and I developed the menu and I did the dessert and the little post-dessert treat. And I wanted to share the dessert recipe with you because it was so delicious. But I thought it was only fair that you got in on the act as well. So, it's going to be a S'mores blondie. Now, the first thing that I did was make pie crumb because that's going through the whole blondie and on the top as decoration. Now, if you know anything about me, you'll know that I love making pie crumb. I don't

really know why. It's just such a fun thing to make and I think it's really versatile. You can do so many different flavors. I've got a whole video um dedicated to piec to show you how exactly to make it. This is going to be a graham cracker pie crumb. We don't really get graham crackers here, so I've actually in my life never had one. We tend to use different kinds of biscuits here if we're making smalls, but I know that it's a kind of whole memely honey cinnamony biscuit. So, we have something a bit similar, which is a digested biscuit, which is a kind of basic biscuit with a kind of whole mealy vibe to it. But I really wanted to make this pie crumb just to give it a little bit

of extra cinnamoness and a little bit of extra texture in the blondie itself and on top. To make that, all I did was grab a bowl. I put 50 g of plain flour along with 60 g of wholemeal flour, 25 g of soft light brown sugar, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, a good pinch of sea salt, 10 g of honey, and then 60 g of melted butter, which I just poured over the whole lot. Then you can grab a spoon or a spatula just to mix those ingredients together. We're not trying to like make it into a solid lump or anything like that. We're just trying to incorporate these ingredients together. Get rid of your spoon and get your hands in there.

I like to use this technique to make my pie crumb because it ends up giving you a really nice like round texture. I gently lift up all the mixture and kind of roll the nuggets off my fingers with my thumb. Just ever so gently. I'm not trying to smush anything. It's not strictly a rubbing technique. It's like a super soft, light touch. And I do that actually for quite a long time to get the nice little round nuggets that I like. And sometimes I'll get my hands in there like combs and just sort of scoop it all up and let it all fall. And this process really helps create that shape, that little round nuggety shape. If you don't do that, this is a common mistake is that you don't process your pie crumb

enough before you bake it. And that way it ends up a little bit dusty. What you want is these little tiny round nuggets. Once you're happy with the look of it, pop it all onto a lined baking sheet. Just spread it out a little bit with your hands just to make sure it doesn't end up baking into one big lump. And then bake that at 170° C for 10 minutes. Once it's baked, bring it out the oven. And while it's still hot, just peel the edges of the baking paper just to loosen the nuggets up a little bit because they will have stuck together a bit in the oven. And then leave that all to cool

and put it to one side. Next, I made my blondie mixture. Now, this is so easy, but I did start with burnt butter. What you need to know about burnt butter is I need 135 g of burnt butter, liquid burnt butter for this recipe. So, I started with about 160 170 g of butter before browning it because it loses so much moisture in the cooking process. And then it needs to be liquid but not super duper hot. In the browning process, it does get really mega like sizzling hot. We don't want that because once we start adding the other ingredients, it's going to be cooking eggs. It's going to be melting chocolate. So, let it cool for about 15 minutes. That does seem like quite a long time, but it, like I

said, it starts off pretty darn hot. And then in a really big bowl, put 335 g of soft light brown sugar. And then just pour your slightly cooled brown butter all over the top of that. Make sure you get all those dark flexcks in as well. Then with a whisk, just stir that all together. We're not trying to whip it up. And actually, it's kind of impossible to do that at this stage. You'll notice it won't really mix very well. It'll still stay quite almost like a really wet sand. But don't worry about that because we're not trying to incorporate air or anything like that.

Once it's all mixed together, add three large freerange eggs. And then again, using the whisk, just whisk that all together just to make sure it's all smooth. Then get rid of your whisk and grab your spatula. Now, we're going to fold our dry ingredients in. And I've got 270 g of plain flour, 1/3 of a teaspoon of sea salt, and 1/4 of a teaspoon of baking powder. And I'm just going to fold that in with my spatula, just really lightly. And then once it's almost all mixed in, you can add your additions. Now, in this case, I'm going to be adding 100 g of dark chocolate chips. And then I've grabbed 80 g of that pie crumb back as well. Add that to the bowl. And again, just fold it in

gently with your spatula until it's all incorporated. And then pop all that batter into a greased and lined 9 by13 in tin. And then using a palette knife, just level that off. And then that gets baked at 170° C for I'm going to say 17 to 20 minutes. It depends if you want a slightly fudgier texture. I do, or if you want it to be a little bit more cakey, add a few more minutes. I like to check it at 15 and then add minutes as I go. Now, my blondie, I left it in the fridge for an hour or so after it cooled down just to make it nice and set because especially if you've baked it for a little bit less time to keep it more fudgy, it's going to need that time in

the fridge just to like hold itself together. And then what I did was I cut it. So, I used my ruler because I like to be precise. And I did it about 11 1/2 cm by 3 cm because that worked and that way I didn't have to chop any bits off. But now they're in these neat little fingers over here just waiting to get topped. In the restaurant I actually did torched Italian meringue because the original recipe that I made, which is the one I'm giving you now, has Rav's marshmallow recipe, Ravnik Gill, from her book Pastry Chef's Guide. It's a brilliant marshmallow recipe. It's perfect and foolproof. So, I'm going to be giving you that as is. So, thanks, Rob. While it is really yummy on its own, I just felt in a dessert

environment where people were kind of eating it with forks. Um, I also used a little bit of creme fresh chuntelli cream, which another recipe which Matt Adlard gave me, which I'm really grateful for cuz it was just the thing to cut through all the sweetness. I just felt that like putting a fork through a bit of marshmallow just wasn't really the one, you know? And the best thing about Italian meringue is it torches up just as nicely as marshmallow. It gives you that really delicious torched sugar flavor, that caramelized flavor. Looks really good, but it just has a slightly softer mouth feel. So, if you want to do Italian mering, go ahead. We've got tons of recipes on the channel for that and

it's also in my book. If you're vegetarian, you don't want to use gelatin, again, that's a really great alternative. But, I'm just giving you the good stuff. So, I am starting with I mean, this isn't going to look very exciting. This is just going to look like a bowl of water to you. But there is three sheets of platinum grade gelatin in there. It's supposed to be ice water. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I just don't have any ice, so it's just cold water. Hopefully, that'll do the trick. I'm going to let that sit uh sit to soften the gelatin for like 10 minutes or so while I get on with making the sugar syrup. So, I've got a pan here. Into that, well, first of all, make sure you've got a um sugar

thermometer because otherwise you're not going to know how hot things get. So, pop that in. I'm going to start by putting 55 g of water into the pan. Then 225 g of caster sugar and then 40 g of liquid glucose. Put that over a medium heat. And we're going to let that bubble away. The sugar's going to dissolve. We're not going to stir it or agitate it at all cuz that can lead to crystallization. Although the glucose will go some way to prevent that. And we're just going to let that bubble away. The temperature we're looking for here is 116° C. When it's reached 116° C, I've got 40 g of egg whites and I'm putting it into the bowl of my stand mixer with a bloom whisk attachment.

Start whisking slowly at first and then increasing the speed. And what we want to do is get it to soft peaks. By the time the sugar syrup reaches 119° C. So when your eggs have reached soft peaks and your syrup has reached 1190° C, carefully pour your sugar syrup into the bowl. And you want to do this down the side of the bowl. Once all your sugar syrup's in, you can increase the speed. And you're going to whisk that for 10 to 15 minutes until the mixture is cool, super thick and flumpy and glossy. Meanwhile, you need to melt your gelatin. Now, the first thing to do is squeeze as much of the water out as possible. Then, pop it into a heat proof bowl. Sit that over a banmarie on a gentle heat just to melt it. Once it's

turned to liquid, you can then slowly add that to the meringue mixture, which will turn it into marshmallow. Right. It's really important that you work quickly with marshmallow because it starts to sort of set fairly quickly. So, I have a piping bag with a little nodle which I prepared earlier. And I'm just going to as quickly as I can put in my marshmallow mixture into the piping bag and get piping. But it's mega sticky. These need to go into the fridge to set. The marshmallow is sticky and wet and it's still kind of moving a little bit. So, it's it'll do a little bit of spreading. We want it to just be nice and set before we start doing the next

bit. And that's great because you get to put your feet up, have a cup of tea, and make some chocolate ganache. Anyway, I'm going to pop these into the fridge for probably about half an hour to an hour. They're set. They're ready to roll. While they were in the fridge, I made some chocolate ganache. I've also got my blowtorrch. And I've got my leftover pie crumb. So now all we need to do is get torching and finish these bad boys off. Well, these might be my new favorite thing. They're so fun. Check this out. Focus. So, in there, you can see all the little pieces of pie crumb and chocolate chips. You've got the marshmallow on top, the glossy ganache.

Why can't I get it in the middle? the glossy ganache on top and of course the pie crumb to finish. I just know this is going to be delicious. Mainly because I've made it before and it was just to prove it though. Always with the two big bites. What we've got going on here is a really soft delicious blondie. The toasty toasted marshmallow flavor which is unmistakable and absolutely essential in a s'mores which gives it this like fireside vibe. We've got it ever so slightly smoky. Maybe because I set my baking paper on fire, but we'll just forget about that. The ganache on top, which just adds a little bit of extra richness. The pie crumb on top, which is more texture. And every now and then you

get a little cuz I've used sea salt. I get a little sort of nugget of sea salt in my teeth, which is really a treat. I love this dessert, and I hope you do, too. And I really hope you give it a go. Please let me know how you get on in the comments box. Make sure you check out Lost in the Lanes to see how the evening went down. I'm sure there'll be lots of pictures. And what else can I tell you? I will be back soon with another recipe and I hope you stick around for that. I've really enjoyed sharing this one with you. So, please let me know if you liked it by giving it a thumbs up.

Should I have some more? Yeah, I think I probably should have some more.