St Clements Cake

This weekend I decided I wanted to treat a colleague/friend's folks.  They've been having a very tough time lately and I so often hear (and say) the line, "If there's anything I can do, just let me know."  Well usually there isn't anything we can do and often people don't "just say" because they don't want to impose.  So this time instead of saying it I considered what I might actually be able to do; not to help their situation (because I know I can't), but just to maybe make them smile for a few moments, have a few seconds where everything isn't just bad, painful and upsetting.  Then I remembered that they once tried cupcakes I made for my colleague, and ever since then almost every cake they eat is followed by the line, "It's nice, but it's nothing like that girl's cakes, that one you work with!".  Apparently they tell anyone who'll listen.

So this weekend was a special St Clements cake made to a recipe I made up as I went along.  I bet you never saw that coming!

The basic mix was the usual victoria sponge, but with added lemon zest in one, and orange zest in the other.  This was to be a three-layered cake.

The icing was a blend of mascarpone, double cream and icing sugar.  I separated it into three parts.  First, the main bulk, coloured yellow, the second coloured orange, and the third was set aside to make the orange filling.

St Clements Cake - the main event
The two-tone mascarpone icing.  The picture isn't as clear as I'd like but you hopefully get the idea!

I considered making my own lemon and orange curds, but as this was the first stage of an experimental recipe I decided instead to use the best lemon curd I could find in the shop (one I've had before and know it's blimmin' good!), and for the orange layer I warmed some good quality orange marmalade, which I then sieved and mixed into the batch of icing I'd set aside earlier.  There was a bonus to using marmalade that I didn't anticipate; it added a little bitterness to the cake that balanced very well with the sweetness of the lemon curd.

So then it was just a case of slicing the cakes and putting it all together.  As it turns out there was enough cake for two, although the 'spare' cake was a bit wonky and uneven and had no icing on the sides.

St Clements Cake - the spare one
No icing on the sides but plenty for the top.
Yes, it's in the shape of a flower that was lovingly carved by hand from square cakes, not from a flower mould.

The main cake unfortunately didn't have the finish I was going for, mainly because I'm still a novice at decorating large cakes and the end result was actually my third attempt at something even remotely attractive, but I think the two-tone effect has real potential now that I have an idea what I'm doing with it and how it spreads and pipes.

I did write down the recipe as I went along, which I think is the first time I've ever done that.  I'll post it once I've tweaked it and made it again.

All this experimenting with cakes really isn't all that difficult.  If you know what you like and you're not afraid to make mistakes, it's a lot of fun and a feck load more satisfying than a Mr Kipling!

The cake has approval

Victoria Sponge Flowers

This afternoon has been an exercise in simplicity.  I decided to make victoria sponge with jam and cream because it turns out that it's one of dad's favourites, and as he's feeling a little fragile this weekend I thought I'd treat him.

But can I really just make a sponge cake and fill it with jam and cream?  Um... it turns out I can't.

I used Mary Berry's basic recipe for butterfly cakes and added a touch of vanilla extract, as I usually do with a bog-standard sponge.  Instead of making one big cake or lots of little butterfly cakes, I wanted to try out some flower-shaped silicone moulds that I originally bought for making rather large chocolateycakeythings (which I'll still make, and I have lots of ideas!).

Victoria Sponge Flowers

The cakes with cherries on top are simply filled with raspberry jam and whipped cream.  The cakes without the cherries are filled with ginger and whipped cream.  To be more specific, I took a few pieces of stem ginger in syrup from the jar, and blended it until smooth with some of the syrup, essentially making a rather potent sweet ginger jam.  I definitely prefer the ginger ones to the raspberry!

Victoria Sponge Flowers
The close-up

I wanted these to look more pretty than they do, and I had planned to pipe the cream on instead of spreading it, but I ran out of piping bags and forgot to replenish my stock.  Oops.

So anyway, that's it.  Simple, quick and blinkin' moreish!  And you can't beat a cake with a nipply cherry on top!

Lebkuchen & a huge Caramel Slice!

About a week ago I made some Lebkuchen using one of my nice sparkly new baking books from Christmas, The Great British Bake Off: How to turn everyday bakes into showstoppers.  It didn't stay sparkly for long!  These soft, spiced, light cakes are ridiculously addictive, but I was surprised to find no flour listed in the ingredients.  Like the curious beast I am I decided, for once, to follow the recipe to the letter and see what happened.  As far as I could tell they would end up as Lebkuchen style meringues.  I wasn't wrong.

It appears that original recipes for this delectable German delight vary depending on the area they were made.  Most had flour, some didn't.  My personal taste is with flour, although the ones I made were light and crumbly and no less delicious!

Here they are in all their huge, palm-sized glory.

Rather large Lebkuchen!

Next time I'll make them bite-sized and dip their little bottoms in chocolate.  At some point I also intend to try a flour-based recipe.  Maybe I could make them at the same time and do a taste test.  If you decide to make these without flour, be extremely careful when handling them; they're very, very delicate.

Right, onto the next.  This slab of chocolatey goodness is one big Caramel Slice, or as some would call it 'Millionaire's Shortbread', which to me is just plain wrong!  Sorry.

A slab of Caramel Slice

This is what I made today ready for a colleague's birthday this week.  He has no clue it's sitting there waiting for him like a crunchy, soft, sweet heart attack waiting to happen.  I did consider making a cake, but there's a little running joke about caramel slices and I just couldn't resist making one huge one for him (it's about 9x13"), and pimping it up Kirsty stylee.  Yes, yes I did just type that.  No, I'm not going to delete it.

Essential close-up of the slab!
The sweets on top are Curly Wurly, Maltesers, Smarties and fingers of Fudge.

The recipe I used is here (BBC Good Food website), and I did change this one.  My experience of using extra sugar when making the caramel with condensed milk is that is crystalises incredibly easily, leaving a very grainy mouth-feel when it's eaten.  So I omitted the sugar, I used unsalted butter in both the shortbread and the caramel and I added a little salt to each separately.  You might think this an odd thing to do, but it just means I can control the salt content precisely to my needs and taste, and this recipe really does need a touch of salt to take the edge off the sweetness, even without the additional sweets on top and the extra sugar in the caramel!

I also baked the shortbread for 30 minutes instead of the 20 recommended.  When a recipe doesn't specify a 'fan assisted' oven temperature and the book/recipe doesn't make it clear either way, I always assume it's not and I knock 20 off the total.  So I baked for 30 minutes, 160 fan, but kept a good eye on it just in case.

It would have been incredibly easy to chop a big slice off the edge.  My colleague would never have known, and I'd be sitting here with a big chocolate/caramel/sweeties grin on my face while waiting for the sugar crash to knock me out for the evening.  I behaved.  I only cut off the tiniest sliver from each end to make it fit into its carry box.  I'm talking millimetres.  It was hardly enough for even a mouthful.

I don't blow my own trumpet often, but what little I did taste was friggin lush!  You really should try it.  I mean really, it's all I can do not to go back to it, pick it up in that one big slab and sink my teeth into it.

Back in a sec.........

Lotsa Choccy

You could be forgiven for thinking I've been lazy in the approach to Christmas since I've been so quiet on the blog.  It's true that I haven't been baking recently, but that's only because I've instead been experimenting with making chocolates.

It's taken a few attempts to get the fillings right but I finally got there in time for Christmas, and gave myself the mammoth task of making enough to give to all my family.

It would have been easy to opt for standard truffles rolled in cocoa powder, or even peppermint creams, but I've never been someone to go for the easy option.  So I took inspiration from the Double Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes, and decided to make chocolates filled with soft, salted caramel.  This idea just kept growing, and eventually what I produced (in various batches along the way) was:

• Soft butter caramel
• Salted caramel (soft caramel with cracked sea salt)
• Banoffee (soft caramel with mashed banana)
• Peanut caramel (soft caramel with crushed roasted peanuts)
• Pistachio cream (whipped cream, lightly sweetened, with crushed pistachios)
• Maple & pecan cream (whipped cream with crushed toasted pecans and maple syrup)
• Ginger cream (whipped cream with finely chopped preserved ginger and ginger syrup)
• Gin fizz (whipped cream, lightly sweetened, with gin and lemon zest, finished with a dusting of sherbert for the 'fizz')

And here they are:


A small selection of the caramels and pistachio cream


I do have a small problem now when it comes to chocolates.  Others just won't do!  They're nice, but they're not my own recipes made to my taste with my favourite flavours.  They don't make me produce that little moan of pleasure when I bite down.  For someone who needs to get back to a healthy diet and lifestyle, knowing there are leftover fillings in the freezer and plenty of special chocolate ready for filling moulds is a dangerous thing!

Oh, so very dangerous....

Ah, but now we come to the joint creation of the richest yule log in the world, made by my sister and me.  We decided in our infinite wisdom to make a nice dessert from one of our new baking books that Santa brought.  We settled on a Buche de Noel from Paul Hollywood's 'How to Bake'.  However me being me, I couldn't resist playing with the recipe, and instead of coating it with the chocolate buttercream that was suggested we instead went for a chocolate ganache.  It was filled with raspberries and (instead of whipped cream) extra thick cream with brandy.

Buche de Noel, aka the richest yule log in the world.  Ever.

In my defense one of my nieces doesn't like buttercream, so it wasn't all my fault.  However as nice as this cake was (and still is), it doesn't change the fact that it has the ability to melt fillings from ten paces.  Perhaps next time I'll just stick with the buttercream.  Oh, or I'll use milk instead of 70% chocolate.  Yeah, that might do the trick.

Lebkuchen will be next.  Oh yes!

Chocolate Cake Bites

My intention this morning was to make Ice Cream Cakes for my nieces, and croissants for a hangover breakfast on Sunday morning for my sister, dad and me.  What came out the other end of the day was Ice Cream Cakes and experimental Chocolate Bites.

I have too many cake ideas fighting inside my head and it's starting to get a bit noisy, so the croissants were unfortunately sidelined on this occasion so I could let out some ideas.

Now, bear in mind that these aren't meant to look perfect (no, really), because they're mostly a taste/idea experiment.  I also couldn't get hold of the silicone moulds I wanted for them in time to try them out, and excitement won out over patience.

So here we have Chocolate Bites:



Chocolate Bites


There are two flavours with the same basic idea.  They're made up of chocolate sponge as the base, topped with whipped cream, coated in melted chocolate.  The variations are:

1. Choc 'n' Orange Cake Bites

• Chocolate sponge
• Drizzled with orange syrup (sugar and orange juice)
• Topped with whipped cream which is flavoured with a little orange extract and lots of orange zest
• Coated with milk chocolate
• Decorated with orange zest



Choc 'n' Orange Cake Bites


2. Choc 'n' Ginger Cake Bites

• Chocolate sponge
• Drizzled with ginger syrup (the syrup from a jar of preserved stem ginger)
• Spinkled with chopped preserved stem ginger (from the same jar)
• Topped with plain whipped cream
• Coated with dark chocolate
• Decorated with preserved stem ginger





Choc 'n' Ginger Cake Bites

You might think that as there's one less orange cake than there are ginger, that I've already taste tested one.  You'd be wrong.  That one was a fallen soldier.  Literally.  He fell off the tray when I was putting them in the fridge, cream-side down of course  :(  I hate cake waste!

So there they are, all imperfect and not at all glossy.  The intention, when I have the lovely bendy, non stick silicone tray I want, is that they'll be perfect domes of cakey goodness.  Until then homemade imperfection will just have to do.

Oh and just in case there was any doubt... cakey goodness is the best kind!

Ice Cream Cakes. Sort of.

A short while ago I made Raspberry & Marshmallow Cupcakes.  When two of my nieces taste tested them for me I asked them if I were to make marshmallow cakes again, what flavour should I put with them?  The answer was, of course, chocolate.  They were specific though.  They asked for chocolate chips and chocolate sauce.

So there I was soaking in the bath yesterday thinking about cake (this isn't as unusual as it sounds!), and I considered adding a flake as decoration, stuck out like a '99', and I realised just how much it would look like an ice cream.  Then the cogs really started turning.  How could I make it look even more like an ice cream?  It was simple.  Bake the cakes in flat-bottomed ice cream cones instead of paper cases.

Now, I've googled this since I sat down to write this blog and of course I'm not the first person to think of it, but I do wonder whether I'm the first to mess around with it quite this much....

Oh, wait.  You need photos first!



'99' Ice Cream Cakes

 Before I continue, I feel I should add that I didn't intend for the marshmallow topping to look like melting ice cream.  It should have been all pert and pretty like it just came out of the Mr Whippy machine, but some accidents are happy ones and I think these are just cute!

So, yes, I baked the little cakes inside ice cream cones... or rather, cups.  It was just bog standard vanilla sponge, but once they were cooled I took out the cores and filled them with marshmallow.  Next I pushed some chocolate chips down into the marshmallow, then added more marshmallow in a ring around the edge which gave me more of a well.  Then I poured in chocolate sauce.  Oh yes!  "And then what?  There can't be more!".  Oh yes there can.  I added more chocolate chips, then finished piping on the marshmallow.  I popped in the Flakes and dusted them with an equal mix of icing sugar and cornflour.

So there they are, my '99 Ice Cream Cakes.

You might think that I stopped at that little experiment but you'd be wrong.  Look here...

Haribo Ice Cream Cake

The Haribo Ice Cream Cake was inspired by my sister who recently made a cake and decorated it with Haribo.  I also have a friend who could quite possibly live on them, so she may want to be prepared for a cakey delivery tomorrow!  You know who you are.

I followed the same steps as with the '99' cakes, but substituted the chocolate sauce for raspberry sauce, and the chocolate chips and Flake for Haribo.

Personally I prefer the chocolate version, which happily for my friend means she gets more Haribo cakes.  Hurrah!

I have a headache now.  Perhaps it's too much baking and not enough eating.  Or maybe I got that the wrong way round... hmmmmmmm...

Tomorrow I have soup and stew to make, perhaps with a side order of sundried tomato and parmesan buns.  If I get around to it, there might be photos of those too.

My Big Cheesy Buns

Indeed.  I do have big cheesy buns.  There are seven in total because I ate one with my soup!

This weekend I was planning to bake something bready that would challenge me, but other events took over, my life became an unexpected blur of activity, and this morning all I really wanted to bake was bog-standard bread rolls.  Except with a bit of very strong parmesan on top for some delectable cheesiness.

My big cheesy buns

The recipe I used is here.  It's a Hairy Bikers recipe, and unusually it suggests kneading the dough the first time for 20-25 mins.  I only kneaded mine for about 10 mins and it was plenty.  It was all nice and silky smooth so I figured I was onto a winner.

My first proving time took about 1 hour, and the second proving after shaping into buns and directly before baking was about 30 mins.

The result was eight large, light, fluffy buns, and I couldn't be happier.  For my next batch I'll make 12 from the same recipe because these are a little too big for my current dietary requirements.  However for basic bun loveliness I see no reason to look for any other recipe.

My next bready challenge may involve focaccia.  Or... oooooh... I could drive myself demented with Mr Hollywood's eight-strand plaited loaf!