Malted Caramel Blondies

This recipe is not photogenic. We're not doing it for the 'Gram. There are no vibrant colours, no chocolate, no oozing, luscious toffee, no artful dribbles of icing. It looks like a plain, brown, utilitarian cake. Maybe a little dry. The last one to go at the bake sale. The piece you take, politely but unenthusiastically, when offered by someone you don't know well enough to be honest to. But behind that unprepossessing, unfrosted facade, it tastes fantastic.

I've been on a pottery summer school - 4 days last week building, back today to glaze the bisque-fired pieces. And on the last day of last week the teacher mentioned it was her birthday so I said I would bake something for today. Now, usually I would do something citrussy, both because I like it and because it's a crowd pleaser. But another person at the arts & crafts centre is very proud of his lemon drizzle cake and I felt that bringing something similar would be needlessly antagonistic.

These have layers of stuff making them taste good - there's browned butter, and wholemeal flour for nuttiness, soft brown sugar and chunks of caramel (which mostly melt) for rich caramellyness, and vanilla and malted milk powder to round things out. These are quite a chewy, rather than gooey blondie. If you really want goo I guess you could reduce the cooking time a bit, but I like them like this. They probably keep well but I didn't get a chance to find out.

Folding in the caramel pieces

Malted Caramel Blondies (makes 18 generous pieces, could be cut bigger or smaller)

250g butter

300g light muscovado sugar

2 eggs

1tbs malted milk powder (I used Ovaltine) dissolved in 2 tsp vanilla extract

250g wholemeal plain flour

1/2 tsp salt (I use Diamond Kosher, adjust quantity for the salt you use)

1 1/4 tsp baking powder

125g soft caramels (I used Werthers with a soft centre, but I think original Werthers might hold their shape more) chopped roughly into pieces

First make the browned butter. Put your butter into a saucepan that's quite a lot bigger than you think you need, because it will foam up. Melt it over a medium heat, swirling gently, and continue to swirl until it is a rich brown colour and smells beautifully nutty. Remove from the heat and pour into a heatproof mixing bowl big enough to hold the rest of your ingredients. Make sure you get all the little toasty bits from the bottom of the pan - we're not clarifying the butter, we want those bits.

Allow the butter to cool.

Preheat the oven to 160C (fan). Line a 7" x 11" baking tin with baking parchment.

Beat the sugar into the butter, then add the eggs, one at a time, then the malt & vanilla mixture. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking powder, and then mix the dry ingredients into the butter and sugar mixture. Fold in the caramels.

Scrape the batter into the lined baking tin. Bake for 25 - 30 minutes until set but just slightly soft in the the middle. Cool completely in the tin before cutting into pieces. Although it probably wouldn't hurt to serve them warm with ice cream as a dessert.

Quince and ginger upside down cake

At Christmas, I bought some quinces. I had several extravagant plans for them, but then we didn't end up doing much in the way of desserts over the festive period. So I peeled, quartered and cored them and baked them in some sugar syrup until they were tender and amber coloured.

Some went into the quince and clementine trifle and the rest, with their syrup, went into the freezer until inspiration struck.

And inspiration has struck.

Quince and ginger upside down cake

75g caster sugar
2tbs water
4-6 quarters of poached quince (only use 4 if you are cooking it just for this recipe because otherwise it is madness)
140g golden caster sugar
140g butter, softened
2 eggs
40g ground almonds
100g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp ground ginger
5-6 pieces crystallised ginger, cut into chunky pieces

Preheat oven to 180C.

Line a 1lb loaf tin with a non-stick liner (or baking parchment).

In a small pan, gently melt together the 75g caster sugar and water until the sugar is dissolved, then increase heat and boil to an amber caramel. Pour into the base of the loaf tin and rotate tin to cover evenly.

Arrange the quince pieces on the caramel in a more-or-less pleasing fashion.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, then fold in the dry ingredients and crystallised ginger until combined but don't overwork.

Gently spread the batter over the quince, trying not to disturb it.

Bake for about 45 minutes or until well browned and a skewer tests clean.

Stand for 5 minutes before turning out to cool.

Peanut butter chocolate birthday cake

I hadn't been asked to make a birthday cake for my young friend The Hurricane since 2012. I had assumed that her growing sophistication meant she was well and truly too grown up for my extremely rudimentary decorating skills.

However, this year she asked if I would. Of course I said yes. We brainstormed over drinks (prosecco for me, water for her). Chocolate was a given. I offered ideas for additional flavourings and she scorned all thoughts of raspberries or apricots but decided that peanut butter and caramel would be good.

Peanut butter buttercream swirled with caramel

It was always going to be the Be-Ro Milk Chocolate Cake. It's obedient, reliable, sturdy enough to slice and decorate and not overwhelmingly chocolatey. The Hurricane may be an unbearably grownup a-couple-of-days-from 12 year old, but she still doesn't like too much intense chocolate.

The rest was assembly really. The layers were sandwiched with Perfect Peanut Buttercream (astonishingly good. I used a smooth, organic peanut butter with salt but no added sugar), swirled through with some Carnation Caramel, then covered with more of the buttercream. I'd thought about putting some chopped peanut brittle in with the layers, but I thought The Hurricane's parents and orthodontist wouldn't thank me at all if I buggered her braces two weeks before Christmas.

Chocolate mirror glaze

Then I topped it with John Whaite's chocolate mirror glaze. I got the consistency a bit wrong with this one - I cooled it so it wouldn't melt off the butter cream but then it was too thick to flow easily. I liked the result of the dribbles showing the underlying buttercream though, so let's call it deliberate. It does have a gorgeously shiny finish though, and a rich chocolate flavour.

The final decoration was a bunch of gold sugar stars, white and dark chocolate stars printed with gold stars, and gold star sprinkles. Simple, but effective. When I delivered it, she was pretty darn pleased. I did have to issue a warning that the glaze would show if she attempted to eat any of the chocolate stars off it.

I asked them to send me a picture of the cross section - the lairs (as Mary Berry says) have held their definition very well. And they ate an impressive amount!

Seville orange Madeira cake for a blogoversary

On this day in 2007 I started this blog. I think eight years of blogging is deserving of a piece of cake! Unfortunately I have grave doubts as to whether I will get a piece of this one. You see, Great British Bake Off is back. Last year I made a couple of the bakes featured on the show, and sent them in to Paul's office. They went down well! And he said that if I wanted to do any baking this year, they would also find it acceptable. The first week's "signature bake" was a Madeira cake, which is absolutely in Paul's cake wheelhouse - quite dense and plain with a bit of citrus, good with a cup of tea.

I've posted my great grandmother's first prize certificate for Madeira cake before, but I've never actually made one that I can remember. Some other bloggers that I know and love have made GBBO-inspired Madeira cakes (Miss Whiplash got hers out the day after the show aired, which was impressively speedy) and they all looked wonderfully inspiring. Jassy at Gin & Crumpets based her lemon and fennel flavoured cake on Nigella Lawson's mother-in-law's Madeira cake - which seemed like a good pattern to follow.  

My "twist", because the signature bake always needs a twist, was to use the zest and juice of two Seville oranges instead of the traditional lemon. "But wait", I hear observant readers cry, "it's August!". Well yes, these oranges are part of a stash in my freezer from January when the lovely bitter oranges are in season. The microplane zests them beautifully while they are still rock-hard, and then when they thaw the cells have broken down enough to get maximum juice out of them. The smell of the grated zest filled the whole house deliciously.

Based on the Bake Off judging last week, I now know that one of the things you have to look for in a Madeira cake is the long crack down the top. So even if I don't get to taste my cake, or get meaningful feedback from the gannets who eat it, I am still quite satisfied that this was a very successful bake. Worthy of an 8th blogoversary.

Masala chai friands

I've never had a pumpkin spice latte. It seems so perverse to me that a country that generally abhors actual pumpkin goes weak at the knees for sweet frothy coffee with pumpkin pie spices, and it's disrespectful to good coffee. I also avoid chai tea lattes because it's a stupid, tautological name for a product that already has a good name. Masala chai.

I know it is all kinds of contrary to dive into the middle of pumpkin pie season with an alternatively spicy dessert, but if you haven't figured out that I am contrary by nature this must be your first visit to my blog. I also happen to think that the masala for a delicious sweet cup of masala chai is quite a lot nicer than the standard blend for pumpkin pie spice, with pepper to give it kick and cardamom rounding out the aroma. Anyway, as an alternative to other spicy cakes, these friands are slightly spicy, beautifully buttery and not too sweet, perfect after dinner with a glass of dessert wine, mid afternoon with a glass of mulled wine or mid morning with a cup of tea. Or glass of wine. Drink it while you can.

Masala Chai Friands (makes 12 large & 16 mini friands)

250g butter
1 1/2 tsp masala*
120g plain flour
380g icing sugar
Grated zest of 1 lemon
200g ground almonds
9 eggwhites (or 240ml pasteurised liquid eggwhite)
2tbs chopped stem ginger (preserved in syrup)

Preheat the oven to 210C.

Melt the butter. Use some of it to thoroughly grease your friand tins (or muffin/cupcake tins, if you don't have friand tins), then add the spices to the remaining butter and allow to infuse while you get on with the rest of it. The aromatics in these spices are fat-soluble, so you will get more flavour carried through the friands if you allow them to sit in the butter for a while.

Combine the sifted flour and icing sugar in a large bowl, then stir in the lemon zest and ground almonds.

Beat the eggwhites until slightly frothy then mix them into the dry ingredients and mix in the spiced butter. Fold through the chopped ginger.

Spoon into the prepared tins, filling them about 2/3 full. I like to use a Chinese soup spoon for this sort of thing; I feel like I make less mess.

Bake the large ones for 15 minutes at 210C, then reduce the temperature to 200C (rotate the trays at this point if you need to in order to get an even bake) and cook for another 10 minutes. Then remove and bake the small ones for 10-15 minutes at the lower temperature, or until slightly risen and nicely browned.

Cool in the tins for 5 minutes before turning onto wire racks to cool completely.

*for my masala I used Schwartz whole spices - 1 stick of cinnamon, the seeds of 9 cardamom pods, a few cloves, a small piece of nutmeg and some peppercorns, ground in a spice grinder. You could also use ground spices, but I wanted the little flecks of imperfectly powdered cinnamon scattered through the friands. If I was making this to use in masala chai I'd normally add ground ginger as well, but I left it out because of the stem ginger - I didn't want the ginger to dominate!

In association with Schwartz.

Ginger banana cake

For the last couple of years at Christmas I've bought decorative blue and white china jars filled with chunks of crystallised ginger. Hardly any of it has survived to be made into anything, I just dip my hand into the pot every time I walk past the kitchen. I love fresh, lemony ginger, chocolate coated crystallised ginger, firey, sweet ground ginger, weird ginger gummy bears, ginger beer, ginger liqueur and ginger cordial. Acting on a tip from an Indian friend, I recently banished a lingering cough with ginger tea (made a ginger infusion with a little sugar and used that to make my normal black tea). I just love ginger.

I saw this recipe for making your own crystallised ginger. Serendipitously, it coincided with some very nice root ginger being discounted at the supermarket. It was meant to be. Reading the recipe more closely, I realised that it was actually to make something more like what the British call "stem" ginger - candied ginger preserved in syrup - rather than crunchy-coated crystallised ginger (which is what the picture shows...).

Even though there are several steps involved, none of it was onerous. And the end product was delicious - really firey, with a good texture (tender but with a bite to it). It also worked out marginally cheaper than the bought stuff.

I couldn't decide what to make with it. Ginger biscuits? Gelato? Parkin? Truffles? In the end, other factors forced my hand. Three over-ripe bananas.

I thought I'd posted about Nigella's banana bread before, because it is my favourite banana bread, but I can't find the post so I obviously didn't. And it very conveniently requires three over-ripe bananas (well, the recipe in How to be a domestic goddess calls for 300g, or four small, and my three large bananas weighed 300g). Instead of 100g sultanas and 75ml rum, I used 70g of my ginger, chopped, and 50ml ginger wine (just chucked them in, didn't worry about the warming etc).

It made a richly flavoured, very moist cake with a strong but not overpowering taste of ginger. Paul felt that it was almost as good as his Aunty Ena's cake, but since she was famed for carrot cake and this was banana cake I'm not sure how they could be compared? He also thought the ginger could have been in slightly finer pieces, which I will take on board.

Heartburn and Coconut Cake - Cook the Books Club

This month's Cook the Books Club feels like a turning point. After four years, we've had our first change in host personnel, as Joanna has stepped out and Simona and Heather have stepped in. After four years, the site has moved to a new blogspot home. And after four years of sourcing second hand copies of our books on Amazon, this is the first time I have used an e-reader. We live in interesting times.

Heartburn was announced as our book for this month back in April, a couple of months before author Nora Ephron passed away. The flood of obituaries that followed her death took Heartburn from a book that I had vaguely heard of, but was a little more familiar with as a movie, to a sort of cultural icon. There were articles on how it changed the dialogue about divorce and the background of her own marriage and divorce. Even more of the obituaries talked about Ephron's love of food. It made me very, very interested to finally read the book!

It's honestly not like anything I have read before. Very funny, even when describing heartbreak: for a story about the end of a marriage it was a very easy read. I didn't find any of the characters particularly sympathetic. Ephron managed to write a character based on herself without making herself particularly heroic or endearing.

One element I did like was the occasional line that Ephron used in later work. A rival is described as "Your basic nightmare", which is also how one of Sally's rivals is described in When Harry Met Sally, and there were other familiar turns of phrase.

Food runs throughout Heartburn, as Rachel is a cookery writer, but I didn't feel particularly inspired by any of those recipes. I decided to look into Ephron's work to a more ultimately optimistic view of relationships. At the end of When Harry Met Sally when they are describing how they fell in love, they talk about their wedding cake. An enormous coconut cake with a very rich chocolate sauce on the side. 

So I decided to make a coconut cake with very rich chocolate icing. Not on the side, because picky eaters annoy me.

I used Dan Lepard's coconut milk layer cake recipe - making 2/3 of the quantity and baking it in a single 9" cake tin. I omitted the lime juice but sprinkled it liberally with rum. I frosted it generously with buttercream.

Bounty Buttercream

125g soft butter
2 tbs good cocoa
3 tbs rum or malibu
3 tbs coconut cream
Small slosh coconut essence (if not using malibu)
Up to 500g icing sugar

Beat together the butter and cocoa until fluffy and the cocoa is evenly mixed. Add the rum, coconut cream and coconut essence if using. Then gradually beat in sifted icing sugar until it is the consistency you want - I was just piling it on so I left it quite soft, would have added more if I'd intended to pipe it.

It's moist, it's rich and uses plenty of butter. Nora Ephron would have loved it.

Rich, moist coconut cake topped with chocolate rum buttercream

Chocolate cherry birthday cake

Cherries waiting for sugar and booze

I've just had a birthday. Not a *big* birthday, the one before that. I don't usually make too much fuss about my birthday, but this year I decided that I wanted to make myself a cake.

I actually began thinking about this cake about a month ago. I started with the way I wanted to decorate it, and worked my way back. On my first birthday after I moved to the UK, my mother sent me a very pretty card with cherry blossoms on it, and made the point that even though it was autumn where I was, I'd been a spring baby.

So I knew I wanted to decorate it with cherry blossoms. And that pretty much decided me on it being a chocolate and cherry cake (although I had a brief moment of flirting with the idea of a green tea sponge, to make it more Japanese).

We've had a terrible summer for cherries. We sponsor a cherry tree in an orchard in Kent, and the newsletters we were getting through the summer became progressively gloomier as everything that could go wrong for a cherry tree did. In August I did spot some English cherries in the supermarket, and put them down in some sugar and alcool pour fruits, a strong clear spirit.

I made my normal chocolate cake, using a mixture of sour cream and evaporated milk, thinned with a little water, instead of the evap milk and water mixture in the recipe. And butter not marg, of course.

Cherry blossoms

I rolled out about 100g of bought pink fondant quite thinly (could have been thinner though, I think) and cut out cherry blossoms (I have some Japanese cookie/vegetable cutters in cherry blossom, plum blossom and maple leaf shapes). I sandwiched 2 blossoms together, slightly offset, with a dab of edible glue and pressed the end of a chopstick in the middle to give a bit of a divot and splay the petals out into more of a cup shape. Then I put a dab more edible glue and a few gold sugar pearls into the middle of each and dusted them with a sprinkling of decorator glitter.

I made a sourcream buttercream from not-quite-enough butter, sourcream, vanilla and icing sugar. About a third of the frosting I mixed with the drained, boozy cherries, and used it to fill the split cake. The rest of the buttercream I spread over the cake, and allowed to set in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, I used chocolate writing fudge to draw on some branches, and placed the blossoms on the cake. I thought it looked really effective. Tasted very good too!

The finished article

When life hands you beetroot, make chocolate cake

We're back at that challenging time of year when the veg box contains beetroot every week. Even now that we have opted back in to potatoes in the box (partly because the substitute was often radishes, and I just can't see radishes as more than a minor player in a salad) we still get an awful lot of beetroot.

I've done a lot with them, over the last few years, but Paul still isn't a fan.

This recipe may have finally turned him around. As the reviews on the website said (which I should have read beforehand) the batter is too thick for a blender. I ended up having to scrape it into a bowl to finish making it, because I was in pretty real danger of burning out the motor. But eventually a startlingly red batter forms, which bakes to a delectably rich, moist chocolate cake. Paul said I should use this recipe every time I want to make a chocolate cake from here on in. So that's a very good sign.

Chocolate Butterscotch Cake

I've been waiting for an opportunity to make Grace's Butterscotch Goombah since last July. The idea of a caramel buttercream studded with chunks of toffee was just too good to let go of. And obviously that name is brilliant. Goombah. Goombah, goombah, goombah.

The perfect opportunity arose last weekend. It was my sister-in-law's sister's 40th birthday and she was having a tea party. I decided to use the goombah to sandwich a chocolate cake, and cover the whole lot with a chocolate cream cheese frosting. If there is one thing I have learned in several years of relationship with the Langland girls, it is that they do love chocolate.

For the cake itself, I used the Be-Ro recipe again, although I substituted buttermilk for the evaporated milk, and a slosh of Camp coffee for the vanilla, to give it a bit more of an adult flavour. It could easily have tipped over into cloyingly sweet and I didn't want that to happen.

I only made a half quantity of the goombah, and that really was plenty for a cake with a rich icing. If I'd just been dusting the top with a bit of icing sugar, or a thin glaze, then the full quantity would have been fine. I'm not entirely sure what the "toffee bits" the recipe called for are, but I used some dairy caramels, cut into chunks.

For the icing, I creamed 150g butter and 300g cream cheese together with a couple of tablespoons of icing sugar, then beat in 200g melted and cooled dark chocolate, then spread it on the cake (which I had brushed with a cocoa-flavoured simple syrup) quickly before it set too hard. I pressed more chopped caramels into the top of the cake as a garnish.

It was a great success! Possibly a little too rich, but with a deep, dark chocolate flavour and that slightly burnt sugar taste of butterscotch. I will make this again!

Zebra cake unveiled

You may remember I recently posted a sneak peak of this zebra cake. You see, friends had asked me to make a birthday cake for their little girl, and I'd agreed, despite not being entirely sure I had the baking chops to carry off such a project.

Then I had to make a plan. I like planning.

I've had Grace's zorse cake bookmarked for months, because I loved the delicate stripes, but I knew that a cinnamon-flavoured cake was really not going to cut it for a bowling party of seven year olds. It had to be chocolate. Not too chocolatey of course - these may be modern middle-class kiddies but in my (limited) experience of children they are mostly about the icing and a dark, sophisticated chocolate cake would be wasted.

I turned to a brains trust of experienced bakers, and was recommended the Be-Ro Milk Chocolate Cake recipe. Now, Be-Ro produced the world's first self-raising flour. As far as I can tell, saying you are using a Be-Ro recipe gives the same sort of this-is-my-grannie's-recipe reassurance that the Edmond's cookbook gives kiwis or the Commonsense Cookery Book gives Australians. So despite the unusual technique (rubbing the fat into the flour, then adding the liquids) I knew I was in safe hands if I followed the recipe. Of course, I wanted to make it a zebra cake, so I wasn't going to follow the recipe, hence the need for the trial run, to see how my batter worked when divided.

As I'd decided to make a 10" cake, I also had to scale up the recipe - I made 1 1/2 times the batter. If I'd wanted to cut it in half to layer it, I would have doubled the recipe.

So I followed the recipe, using butter instead of margarine and omitting the cocoa until after I had divided the batter in half, then I thoroughly beat the sifted cocoa into one half. And I ignored the bit about not using a loose-bottomed cake tin. It's really a very thick batter, I don't know why they were worried about it running out!

I alternated portions of the batters, allowing each one to spread out naturally from the centre, and pouring the next carefully onto the middle of the preceding circle. Then I baked it at a slightly lower temperature, for slightly longer, testing a couple of times with a toothpick until it came out clean.

During my planning phase I'd done a LOT of reading about cake decorating. Most of which I confess made me want to run away screaming because it was so much more complicated than I wanted to attempt. There were a couple of cracking tips though:

a) put strips of baking parchment on your cake board just under the cake, so you keep it clean while decorating and don't have to try to move a decorated cake onto the board.

b) apply a "crumb coat" - this is a thin layer of jam or syrup (or booze if you aren't cooking for seven year olds) that you brush onto the cake. It adds flavour, moisture, and seals any loose crumbs to the surface of the cake so you get a clean surface to ice.

I used warmed, sieved strawberry jam, because some of the decorations I used were strawberry flavoured.

As well as knowing that the cake had to be chocolate, I knew it had to involve the colour pink. I am not a fan of the pink-for-girls thing and left to myself I would probably have taken a stand and decorated in pale blue or bright green to show what I think of gendered colours, but she's seven, she loves pink and she is not a puppet of my politics.

I thought about doing a white chocolate ganache, but white chocolate can be a bit temperamental and also tends to look quite yellow. I came upon this recipe, for a white chocolate buttercream, and thought that would be exactly the thing. I wanted an icing thick enough to completely conceal the stripy insides, so it would be a surprise when it was cut. I just did a straight swap of American to Australian cups, because I couldn't be bothered with the conversion, and used 200g white chocolate because that is how big the block was. I also didn't add any extra vanilla; I only had vanilla bean paste and the last thing a little girl needs is black-speckled frosting.

I urge you to try this frosting. It is absolutely delicious and extremely well-behaved. I think it will be my go-to icing forever more - I was thinking about how good it would be with coffee or some lemon zest added.

After that, it was pretty straight-forward. I smeared the frosting on liberally with a palette knife, then put some in a freezer bag and snipped off the corner, piping a rampart around the top edge of the cake, then adding little rosettes. Strawberry and white chocolate curls, pink sugar pearls, pink and white sugar flowers and a liberal dusting of edible glitter finished it off.

You know what? I was thrilled with how it turned out. It looks home made, not mass-produced, and very importantly, it tasted really good. The cake had a good, moist texture and lovely chocolate flavour (I used good quality cocoa). I don't see myself doing this sort of thing often, but I did enjoy the challenge!

Sneak peek: Zebra cake

Trial run for a larger project... watch this space...

Cinnamon buns, cornbread and plum cake, oh my!

I've been quite up front about my love of a good breakfast. I have never denied my passion for bacon and eggs, eggs benedict, omelettes and the gamut of savoury dishes that can be eaten with piles of buttered toast and copious coffee.

But from time to time I have an itch that bacon can't scratch. I want something sweet and if at all possible sticky and a bit, well, cake-y, for my breakfast. Something more like these:

I have a spreadsheet of recipes that I intend to try, ideas that I am working on and themes or events for blog posts. It currently contains 182 dishes that I haven't yet written about, and 8 of those are variations on cinnamon buns. Every time I see someone blog about a cinnamon bun I am helpless before it and add it to the sheet. This, actually, doesn't follow any of those recipes. It's Paul Hollywood's iced fingers dough with some vanilla bean paste kneaded in, spread liberally with freshly ground cinnamon, butter and dark muscovado sugar & sprinkled with the zest of a lemon before rolling and slicing into 12. The glaze is a variation on Peter's cream cheese glaze, using the juice of half a lemon instead of vanilla.

They were delicious.

They were also surprisingly well-behaved and kept very well. We ate the last buns 5 days after baking and they were still soft and tempting.

This buttermilk-blueberry breakfast cake recipe has also been sitting in my spreadsheet for ages, waiting for a good moment. My only variation for this recipe was to use some lovely little plums (I think they were Marjorie's Seedling) cut into quarters, instead of the blueberries. The usual tossing-them-in-flour trick didn't work, so the fruit was all down at the bottom but the flavour was excellent.

This not-very-promising-looking bowlful is a classic example of not judging a book by its cover. This is Marion Cunningham's custard filled cornbread, as written about by Orangette. I can't find that recipe on her site, so you'll have to buy the book. Anyway, it's one of those magic things, where you pour cream into the middle of a batter, and it all floats into the middle while it bakes, creating a thick, rich, custard layer. It begs for maple syrup. It's divine, but next time I think I will add a good grating of nutmeg to the batter, to really play up the glorious custardyness.

Best carrot cake in the world? Second attempt

Another load of carrots in the veg box means another attempt on Aunty Ena's title as best carrot cake maker in the world.

This time I used a Jamie Oliver recipe, which is no longer online and I can't remember what it was called to see if it's anywhere else. And I made a lemon cream cheese frosting, topped with a little flick of orange zest rather than the lime mascarpone frosting.

This was a gorgeous cake! For me, pretty nearly perfect. Paul thought it should have had more walnuts and more spice in it, which leads me to think that he actually doesn't want it to taste like carrots at all.

So this is the best carrot cake in the world that still tastes a bit like carrot.

Cook the Books - Eating for England Coffee and Walnut Cake

It's a very good thing that Johanna asked me to judge this round of Cook The Books. Her reasoning was based in part on me actually living in the UK, giving me a good perspective on all the entries, inspired by Nigel Slater's Eating For England. And my relief is based on the failure of the dish that I was intending to enter!

So this is not a formal entry, but I did want to chip in my tuppence worth on the book before I set to judging the entries after the round-up!

I really like Nigel Slater. His columns in the Guardian newspaper are a much-valued part of my weekend routine, with their gentle tone and straightforward, seasonal recipes. And on one occasion I emailed him a question and he got back to me almost instantly, even though it was quite early on a Sunday morning.

Eating for England is a collection of short pieces - some exceedingly short - on British food. It's not erudite essays on history or sociology, it's more of a personal food memoir, which, at it's best, gives an almost Alan Bennett-esque sense of time and place. I certainly felt that Bennett would recognise Slater's father's coffee-making. I thought that it would have benefited from a bit of editing. The several pieces on farmer's markets could probably have been condensed into one, likewise the pieces on biscuits. I got the definite impression that this is a book to be left in the spare bedroom, for people to dip in and out of, not to read the whole way through in a short space of time! But the only really unforgivable error was in the piece on seaside rock. How, how, can you write about the wonder of seaside rock and not talk about the magic of the letters going all the way through? I don't care how many flavours it comes in, how do they get the words in?

It didn't take me long to decide what I was going to make. I toyed with the idea of a treacle tart, because it is delicious and it is Harry Potter's favourite. I briefly considered making a custard tart, although I think the Portuguese and Chinese do them better. But I rapidly settled on Coffee and Walnut Cake. It gets a couple of mentions in the book: as a exemplar of British cake making and as a use for Camp coffee and chicory essence. And it also featured in one of Slater's columns as one of the things he could consider for his last meal on earth.

At this point, I would like to show you something.
This is my great-grandmother's first prize certificate for her madeira cake. I show this as proof that the blood of distinguished cake makers does in fact flow in my veins. Because god knows you'd never guess from my baking.

I followed the recipe - varying the ingredients only in that I used the famous Camp coffee and chicory instead of instant coffee in water. I don't have 2 21cm cake tins, so I thought I'd use a 23cm tin and vary the cooking time, and then just cut it through the centre to fill it. But when I went to scrape the batter into the tin, I realised that something was very, very wrong. The batter hardly covered the base of the tin. I stuck it in the oven, closed my eyes and hoped for the best. The best did not eventuate. It did rise enough to cover the base of the tin, but it rose in a bowl shape that was never, ever going to be sandwichable. So I made a smaller quantity of buttercream to top it, added a final walnut, took a picture and took a bite.


It was disgusting. It was heavy, leathery and had a nasty metallic tang. Absolutely horrible. And the thing is, I KNOW it was something I did. I have looked at dozens of recipes for this bloody cake and they are all pretty much the same. It is me that is wrong and I have no idea why. I couldn't bear wasting all that cake, so I ended up turning it into a really very successful bread and butter pudding, but that really is not the point. I think the current tally is Cakes 5, Alicia 1 (3 if we allow friands as a cake).

The deadline for inclusion in the Cook the Books round up is tomorrow, but if you miss it, keep an eye out for the round up and the announcement of the next book that we are cooking!

Red Velvet Cake

Some time ago I heard myself offering to make cupcakes for a friend's daughter's birthday party. I said that my silicon rose moulds would be perfect for little birthday cakes for a 5 year old.

Then I realised that I had had more failures than successes with those bloody cake moulds and that I really needed to do a dry run or two.

I also decided that red velvet cakes would be terribly cute in rose shapes. I have never tasted red velvet cake before, but I thought it would be good.

I googled, and came upon Paula Deen's recipe. Now, you may not have come across Paula Deen before (she's fairly new to me - I don't think her shows are on TV here) but she is a Southern American TV cook and restaurateur who first came to my attention with a Brunch Burger featuring a burger patty, bacon and a fried egg sandwiched between glazed doughnuts. I figured the mind behind that burger had to know a thing or two about the quintessentially Southern red velvet cake.

I made a half quantity & used colouring paste instead of liquid food colouring. And they worked beautifully! They turned out without a fuss, they had a lovely light, open but moist texture and were pretty much fantastic.

I think when I make them for the actual birthday I will use a lot more cocoa powder, because the cakes sort of tasted vanilla-y and sweet, rather than having any sort of chocolate flavour to them. It'd also make the red colour richer. My camera totally freaked out and made them look a glowing orange, but they were actually a bright lipstick red. Can't wait to do them again!

Best carrot cake in the world?

Paul maintains that his Aunty Ena made the best carrot cake in the world. He doesn't have much of a sweet tooth so that is pretty high praise!

Apparently it was moist, very spicy and had loads of walnuts. So when again I had a huge pile of carrots from a couple of successive vegetable boxes, I decided to try to make a rival to Aunty Ena's carrot cake.

I came upon this recipe for the Best Carrot Cake Ever. I used mixed peel instead of raisins (because it turned out we didn't have any and I couldn't be bothered to go to the shop). And I have come to the conclusion that I have a dud batch of baking powder. This is the third thing I have made with this box of baking powder that hasn't worked very well. It collapsed in the middle (cunningly hidden with frosting and chopped walnuts) and had a bit of a metallic aftertaste. And all of the mixed peel sank to the bottom and stuck to the tin.

Aunty Ena's reputation as a baker is safe. Mine continues to suffer.

Collapsed Marmalade Cake

At work, we have adopted a new policy on birthday cakes. It's previously been ad hoc, and some people had cakes bought for them, some didn't, some had presents bought, some were told they couldn't even sign the freaking card because it was "just in our team" and the whole thing led to ill-feeling and elitism. If you can have an elitist cake. It certainly felt a bit like a popularity contest. So, after a Dilbertian amount of discussion, we adopted a new policy. BYO birthday cake.

On my birthday, I decided that I would bake a cake. I thought that marmalade cake would hit the spot, using some of my home-made whiskey marmalade. The last time I made this buttery, light, delicious cake, it looked like this:But on this occasion it looked like this:
















Even cream cheese frosting couldn't hide the cavity in the middle. I have no idea what went wrong. At half time in the baking I had a look at it (without opening the oven door) and it was rising beautifully and looking perfect. By the end of the cook-time it had collapsed like a pancake and by the time I turned it out of the tin a hole had developed in the middle and it broke in half in my hands. Then when my back was turned the edge somehow fell off and disappeared...

I bought a supermarket cheesecake to take into the office.

Summer Berry Yoghurt Cake

Last weekend we went to Hampstead for lunch. At least, we set out for Hampstead, but after we'd spent an hour on the M1 and had travelled 1/4 mile, we aborted the mission and came (very slowly) home. And thus the beautiful Summer Berry Yoghurt Cake that I had nursed on my lap for the entire tedious journey only ended up with an appreciative audience of two. Which is a crying shame, because it was a bloody good cake.

I spotted it on Farida's Azerbaijani Cookbook, and she had adapted it from a recipe on the wonderful Elle's New England Kitchen.

And now this is my version.

Summer Berry Yoghurt Cake

2 cups plain flour
2tsp baking powder
1/2 cup butter (I only had salted in, so I didn't add any extra salt to the cake)
1 cup raw caster sugar
3 eggs (Farida's recipe called for 4, but I only had 3 and the texture was just fine)
Splash of vanilla extract (adds a little flavour, but it is mostly because I adore the scent of baking vanilla)
1 cup strained Greek yoghurt
1 cup frozen mixed berries (blueberries, raspberries and blackberries in this mix)
Finely grated zest of a lemon
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup demerera sugar

Cream the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy with a wooden spoon, add the eggs one at a time, beating each one in well. Add the yoghurt and vanilla and mix well.

Add the sifted flour and baking powder and mix until just blended. Fold in the berries and lemon zest (I over-mixed at this point - ignoring common sense - and the cake went an odd purple colour).

Pour into a greased 21cm x 11cm loaf tin and bake in a 180C oven for 70 minutes or until the cake is golden and a skewer comes out clean.

Mix the lemon juice and demerera sugar, and pour evenly over the hot cake. Allow to cool in the tin before turning onto a wire rack.

Keeps really well - I had the last slice today and it was still moist and delicious 8 days after baking.

Marmalade Cake

To break up the flow of pieces about meat, I thought I'd talk cake. I used to bake quite a lot, but I don't have many opportunities to now. My socialising tends to be more focused on a couple of drinks and dinners out, rather than afternoon tea. So when I get an invitation to afternoon tea I get all excited about the possibilities. I thought baked lemon cheesecake, I thought friands (but they take too many eggwhites), Spanish orange and almond cake, a nice sponge with strawberries and cream...

And then I settled on this recipe from Nigel Slater. Frosted marmalade cake - it sounded fragrant and moist and delicious (as well as using a good amount of marmalade). Best of all, the only ingredient I needed to buy was some icing sugar for the frosting.

Being a bit of a nervous baker (I'm not confident to improvise) I followed the recipe very closely. It took about 15 minutes more baking than the recipe said, but that I put down to my oven. The only variation I made was using a slosh of cointreau in the frosting as well as some of the reserved orange juice.

It was superb. An absolutely magnificent cake! Not too sweet, the nice shreds of the good bitter orange marmalade I used were an excellent addition. I look forward to another opportunity to make this one! And the variations - lime and lime marmalade, blood orange for lurid colour, grapefruit. So many options!