Lemon and Poppyseed Muffins
02 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
To anyone reading my blog for its baking content, I apologise most sincerely for my departure from my roots, but still suffering a lack of baking motivation coupled with a sudden worry about swimsuit season (were it not for the lovely sunshine we are currently enjoying, the disappearance of the “need to build up the fat reserves for winter” excuse would rather sadden me)… These muffins are light enough and yet are quite numerous, so I’d advise having a crowd to feed. They’re the nicest thus far of my efforts at making lemon and poppyseed muffins, though I fear that in this area for the moment I must still bow to the superiority of Starbucks. Not that I’ve ever had a Starbucks Lemon and Poppyseed muffin actually, but in my mind they are about the pinnacle of the field, if that mixed metaphor even makes sense. These have the benefit of not needing the milk product which starts with a “y” which I shall forgo mentioning on the basis that someone out there might still know how to do a complex google search and be using the NOT function to search for recipes without that very ingredient.
Gateau au Speculoos (Speculoos Cake)
07 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Cake, Recipes Tags: baking, birthday, cake, france, recipe, speculoos, sugar, sweet
If you have never lived in France or the Netherlands, you have probably never come across the spreadable gingerbread that is Speculoos. You may have come across Lotus biscuits perhaps, particularly if you frequent the Rainbow Room Hairdressers, and this spread, manufactured by the same people, is basically a liquid form of these. I wanted to make a cake for my friend’s birthday and thought I’d do something a bit different from the normal chocolate variety, so tweaked a recipe for peanut butter cake and came up with this. If you have the misfortune to live in a land without Speculoos but you do like peanut butter, feel free to re-substitute creamy peanut butter into the mix.
This cake is incredibly sweet. Quite a lot of batter is generated, so I made a bundt cake and 7 cupcakes with it. I’ll give you the recipe for half the icing I made as admittedly it may have smothered the cake a bit. Nonetheless, I reckon it will feed at least 12 people and probably more. If you’re not using a bundt cake tin, you may have to cover the tin with silver foil and leave it in for a bit longer if it’s browning too quickly but is still wobbly in the middle.
Baking and Ratios
04 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Cake, Desserts, Recipes Tags: baking, chocolate, dessert, eggless, ovenless, ratio cooking, ratios, recipe, require chilling
A love of maths is a supremely helpful quality for baking. Even if I mostly divide recipes by use of chrome’s toolbar rather than in my head these days, it’s my good old standard grade maths grounding that means I know to type in “300/3*2” to work out that 2/3 of 300 is 200. Ok, so I wouldn’t actually have to type that in to work out that particular sum. Honest. Apparently you’re not really meant to tweak recipes which specify a number of eggs, but I’ve never had any problems with doing so: if you don’t have a large enough baking tin or enough people to feed to do the whole batch of 20 brownies, I’ve found doing 2/3 of it in a smaller tin works perfectly.
Anyway, so one of the great things about baking is ratios. Though I’ve known for years that the basic sponge cake recipe has the perfect ratio of 1:1:1:1 for the weights of butter:sugar:eggs:self-raising flour (cream butter and sugar; beat in eggs 1 at a time; fold in half the flour then the other half then bake for about 20 minutes at gas mark 5*), and discovered recently that 1:1 for cream:chocolate makes the perfect ganache (or truffles), for some reason I’d not really thought of extending that to other recipes. But actually, it makes them so much easier to remember. And when I was given a recipe for
Chocolate Truffle Cake
By the lovely Sarah W, it was the perfect opportunity to test this ratio thing out further.
(apologies for photo quality, my camera was elsewhere so had to use a blackberry. Also, in the words of someone that wasn’t me: “It looks ok but tastes amazing!”)
The basic recipe serves about 8-12 depending on your portion-size, costs about £3.50 depending on the quality of your chocolate, and is:
225g digestive biscuits
450g dark chocolate
100g butter
1 pt double cream
cocoa powder/grated chocolate (for dusting/decoration).
- Relieve all your stress by bashing the digestives repeatedly over the head with a rolling pin until they are completely smooshed (my interpretation of ”smash biscuits to rough crumb form”) and melt the butter.
- Mix the crumbs and butter and press into a spring form cake tin (around 24cm). Place in the fridge.
- Melt the chocolate carefully, either in a bowl on top of some boiling water, or on a really gentle heat on the stovetop directly in a pot, or by turning the microwave power to low and stirring frequently.
- Whip the double cream until stiff.
- Pour in the melted chocolate and fold in gently – this may take a little time, but keep gently folding, making sure you don’t overmix.
- Pour chocolate cream mixture in over the base and leave to set in the fridge overnight.
- Dust with cocoa powder before serving.
But if you know that a pint is roughly 550 ml and it’s a sort of basic ganache topping (though the difference in method means it comes out completely differently), then you can take that ratio and make it 2:1:4:4 in terms of digestives:butter:chocolate:cream. And then make it for as many or as few people as you want. I had only 400g of chocolate so did 200g:100g:400g:400ml and that worked out fine (I also substituted the dark chocolate for 3 bars milk and 1 bar dark, and the double cream for single as the shop had run out, and that worked well – its recipients raved [somewhat to my surprise, in fact!], but I think it would be even better made with double or whipping cream as directed).
End summary: have fun, experiment, and look to see if your favourite recipes have an innate ratio that make them much easier to remember. And stay in school, kids, maths is the key to success…
*Interestingly when procrastinating by investigating for doing this blog, I found that using this method with plain flour should yield the denser pound cake. While for a different type of sponge cake, you can reclassify the ratio as egg:sugar:flour:melted butter (whisk eggs and sugar, fold in flour [plain or self raising], fold in melted butter)
Black Magic Cake
28 Dec 2011 2 Comments
in Cake, Recipes Tags: baking, birthday, butterless, cake, chocolate, oil, recipe
Found this post lost in the depths of draft posts, thought I’d update to tide everyone over while they wait avidly for my next update on my obviously incredibly interesting life. It has been 9 months since I’ve made a cake if my memory serves me correctly, a shocking state of affairs if you ask me… This one is probably the last one I made, and I described it at the time as “delicious” (it’s not that difficult so to be with this amount of chocolate), so I might make it again next time I’ve a proper oven and equipment at my disposal. Also good if you’ve run out of butter.
Fudgy Chocolate Cake.2
12 Aug 2011 1 Comment
in Cake, Desserts, Recipes Tags: baking, birthday, cake, chocolate, decorative, dessert, recipe, special
A definite contender for my favourite chocolate cake ever awards… Though I think the Dark Fudgy Chocolate cake just has the edge on this. The original recipe just called for double the filling and spread butter icing on top as well, but I had double cream going spare, so thought I’d do a ganache over the top; worked really well, if I say so myself!
Apple Cake
09 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Cake, Desserts, Recipes Tags: baking, cake, dessert, fruit, recipe
If life throws you apples… make apple cake! Fed up of apple crumble all the time and had a few eggs to spare, so thought I’d try this recipe, adding some cinnamon and mixed spice to give it a little extra oomph. Tastes best just out of the oven, though can be eaten cold and/or heated up in the microwave. Lovely with a bit of double cream.
Chocolate and Treacle Cake
24 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in Cake, Recipes Tags: afternoon tea, baking, birthday, cake, chocolate, icing, recipe
Plain chocolate cake all the time can get a bit boring. And sometimes there’s treacle begging to be used, and you want to try something new. If this sounds familiar, here’s a yummy cake for you. As long as you like treacle, naturally.
Citrus Rainbow Cake
09 May 2011 2 Comments
in Cake, Desserts, Recipes Tags: baking, birthday, cake, fruit, recipe
That’s right… Cake! That’s not chocolate! Quite controversial, I’ll concede, but sometimes (rarely) it’s nice to have a bit of a change. The beauty of this adaptation of a basic sponge recipe is that you can chuck in as many flavours as you like – I had lime, lemon, orange, and then raspberry middle icing; none were very strong, as I just used juice rather than pulp or flavouring oil, but it gave it a nice light flavour. Plus, it’s fun to have a lovely white cake with all those colours hidden within.
On a side note, I may have just spent £10 on getting new icing pastes after hearing rave reviews of how strong they were and how little is needed for a vivid colour… they certainly were (I can’t really say “worth it”), but very, very good! And I suppose for 5 of them, that wasn’t too bad a price.
Treacle Round
16 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in Cake, Recipes, Traybakes Tags: afternoon tea, baking, recipe
Quite gingerbread-esque. My granny’s recipe… serve warm, and, optionally, buttered.
Banana Bread
17 Mar 2011 3 Comments
in Cake, Recipes, Traybakes Tags: afternoon tea, baking, fruit, recipe
I’ve got a couple of recipes that I want to try which require bananas… but this recipe is just so yummy that I never get around to trying them! Serves about 10 people – cut off a slice and heat up in the microwave or toaster (if it’s firm enough) if you’re not eating it straight out of the oven.
