Project Christmas Cake

The evenings are drawing in, leaves are collecting in the gutters and the magpies are doing a splendid, if noisy, job of clearing them; plus the first Christmas advert is on TV (Argos in case you hadn't noticed) so it must be time to buy currants. Lots of things I bake over the year call for sultanas, raisins or other dried fruit, but none, other than Christmas cake, need currants.

I decided this year to go with Mary Berry's recipe. Simply because I bought her latest book awhile ago and it was at the forefront of my mind. I have a wonderful rich fruit cake recipe that I use to take into work as it doesn't contain nuts or need booze, but the alcohol content of this one (or my liberal interpretation of the recipe) means it can be made in advance. The downside is the forward planning needed in order to soak the fruit overnight, but Sunday mornings usually start early for me so a couple of Saturdays ago I checked the drinks cabinet for brandy, popped off to Waitrose to buy currants and got out the kitchen scales. Mary's recipe has a great section where she scales the recipe to accommodate various tin sizes. I wanted to make an 8" square and also some smaller ones as gifts. Good old Lakeland sell bakers moulds which are great if you're making cakes to give as gifts so I doubled the recipe for the 8" square tin and managed to make five of the medium sized moulds. The moulds took just over two two hours to cook through (with three in one oven and two in another) but the large one took over five! Good job I woke early and had no plans for the day.

This last Saturday I repeated the whole exercise all over again for another five small cakes. There's not enough time to make more before Christmas but I plan to make the rich fruit cake nearer the time to take into work. I have no photos at the moment due to ongoing laptop issues, but hope to add some soon.

Other than the pre-soaking of the fruit the recipe comes together really quickly. I left out the candied peel (nasty stuff) and just increased each of the other dried fruits. I've also decided not to ice the cakes* so have put nuts and cherries on the top and will glaze them nearer the time, they do need some kind of adornment as these are not pretty cakes when plain. However the smell as they're baking is just divine. There really is no other smell like it, better even than fresh bread I think and with the aroma of Christmas in the air I could even forgive Argos for starting their campaign in October.

Mary Berry's Classic Rich Christmas Cake

Ingredients for 23 cm (9") round or 23 (8") square tin

• Glace Cherries 150g
• Ready to eat dried apricots 150g
• Currents 400g
• Sultanas 225g
• Raisins 225g
• Candied Peel 65g (I added extra of each of the other dried fruits)
• Brandy 4 tbsp (and then some!)
• Plain Flour 275g
• Grated Nutmeg scant 1/2 tsp
• Ground mixed spice 3/4 tsp
• Softened butter 275g
• Dark muscavado sugar 275g
• Large eggs 5
• Chopped almonds (I used flaked) 65g
• Black treacle 1tbsp
• Rind lemon 1 1/2
• Rind orange 1 1/2
• Baking times (aprox) 4 3/4 hrs

140C (Fan) 120 Gas Mark 1

• The night before you want to make the cake, rinse the cherries in water, drain, dry and cut into quaters. Cut/chop apricots and put all fruits in large bowl, add brandy, cover and leave.
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• Preheat oven, grease and double line tin.

• Measure flour, spices, butter, sugar, eggs, almonds, treacle and rinds into large bowl, beat well (good workout for the upper arms) and then fold in the fruits.

• Spoon in to tin and spread out evenly with back of spoon (if decorating with whole blanched almonds or brazil nuts and cherries now is the time to add them). Cover loosely with a double layer of baking parchment.

• Bake until firm and skewer comes out clean. Leave cake to cool in tin.

• When cool, pierce at intervals with a fine skewer and feed with a little brandy. Wrap completely cold cake in double layer of parchment and then again with foil.

• If you're icing etc do so a week before serving (like you won't have enough to do on the 18th December)

*I really don't like marzipan or icing so even though these are for others I decided not to bother, plus I'm a little bit scared of the process, plus I really couldn't be bothered!

Bring on the Soups

So, the clocks go back this weekend, the evenings are drawing in and if the Today programme are debating us Brits (or perhaps just the English and Welsh, depending on where in the argument you fall) joining European time once again, then it must be time for soup.

I've had a nasty bout of gastric flu which is lingering as I'm unable to stop eating and stick to clear fluids (gin doesn't count, I checked). Today I was a bit better and also bored, so following a bowl of the most amazing minestrone soup at the Glebe Cairn Cafe at the Kilmartin House Museum on my recent trip to Scotland I felt now was the time to try and move into soup season. A search through my recipes and a brief Google led me to this version from the River Cafe. I substituted the onion with a leek, left out the garlic (not a fan) added runner beans and used up a pointed cabbage (in two stages) instead of the chard and cavolo nero. Whatever recipe I found I would leave out any pasta, but this had none. Next time I make it (and there will be a next time) I will add more beans, and maybe some tomato puree to add a little more depth. It also needed more stock than was called for, but I liked it stew-like. I can't wait until tomorrow to see if the comments are right about it being better on the second day.

Have Courgettes - Will Bake (and make breakfast)

I'm not a fan of courgettes, they were a staple of my student years, added to every stir fry, pasta sauce or bake that a limited student budget could conceive. There was also a scrumptuous courgette cake, sweet and moist from sultanas, filled with tart lemon curd and topped with cream cheese this was oft requested for special occaisions, but I'd stopped making it years ago.

A trip to the monthly Moseley Farmer's Market in late summer coincided with lots of inspiration from other blogs and I bought lots. Unfortunately having them in my fridge exerted some kind of pressure on my psyche and I couldn't bring myself to bake that weekend. However, I did discover a recipe for Zucchini Bread Oatmeal from Diet Dessert and Dogs and gave that a try the next morning - what a revelation! I have porridge every morning, I make up my own mix using Rude Health fruity date porridge as a base and adding my own mix of seeds, a bit of extra oat bran and germ , a little more cinnamon with a mixture of water and semi-skimmed milk. I didn't think some grated courgettes would add much to the flavour, but it really is delicious - go on, try it.

The addition of a bit of grated courgette in my breakfast wasn't going to make much of a dent in the enormous specimens occupying the drawer at the bottom of my fridge so I went through the recipes I'd flagged and came up with two that I thought would put them to good use.

The Chocolate Zucchini cake from Simply Recipes is one Elise adapted from the appropriately named Chocolate and Zucchini and I toggled between the two recipes and mine is an amalgam of the two. It's not the prettiest and is predominately a chocolate cake but with a lovely moistness that comes from all that veg. No one at work believed that there were courgettes in there, but all enjoyed it.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Adapted from Simply Recipes and Chocolate and Zucchini

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups of plain flour
• 1 cup wholemeal flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 2 1/2 Tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 Tsp bicarbinate of soda
• 1 Tsp salt
• 1 Tsp cinnamon
• 3/4 cup soft butter
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1 cup soft brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 Tsp vanilla extract
• Grated zest of one orange
• 2 cups coarsely grated courgettes
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 100g chocolate chips (I used dark chocolate)

I didn't bother with a glaze but there's one should you wish to add it.

Method

• Heat Oven to 350F
• Mix the flours, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb, salt and cinnamon
• Beat the butter and sugars until smooth
• Add eggs to butter and sugar beating well
• Stir in vanilla, orange zest and courgettes
• Add the flour mixture and the buttermilk in three batches
• Spoon into a greased and flour coated bundt pan and bake for 45 minutes until a skewer comes out clean - if you don't have a bundt tin, firstly get one because they are great, secondly this mixture should make two loaf tins, check after 30 mins.
• Cool for about 15 mins in the tin before turning out to cool completely on a rack

To contrast the safe, hidden (but delicious) use of the courgettes in chocolate cake recipe enough I also made Special Zucchini Bread from 101 Cookbooks. I adored this, the combination of spices, citrus, nuts and ginger was just delicious, the texture too was so moreish, a little something different in each mouthful. I used soft brown sugar I left out the poppy seeds as I didn't have any but I did have a jar of Raz el Hanout so used that, as suggested, in place of the curry powder. The smells from the oven while this was baking were amazing, and whilst it was cooling I spent a fair amount of time picking off bits of toasted walnut to eat - just to check you inderstand. Pop over to the site for the recipe - you won't regret it.

Victoria Sandwich Challenge

I am a bad blogger, I have such a backlog of posts and recipes to post on here, I'm going through the jottings in my notebook and pictures on my laptop to try and match them up - this should have been posted months ago.

On one of my recent cake distributions at work I was asked by a colleague if I had any tips for Victoria Sandwiches as he was due to enter a competition at a local horticultural society show and had, after six years of entries, yet to place. I had to confess that I'd never attempted one and after a brief conversation about the merits of double sifting flour and the use of margarine over butter he jotted down the required recipe (6oz each of SR flour, butter and sugar and 3 eggs to be baked in two 7" or 8" tins) and off I went to bake. I made several cakes over the following weeks (thanks/apologies to neighbours and colleagues for consuming them all).

The trouble with a Victoria Sandwich is there's nowhere to hide. The competition rules are clear - only jam inside, SR flour and no additional raising agents - it really all is about the lightness of the crumb.

I experimented with butter (best for taste), margarine, which did give a better rise but resulted in a greasy, paler cake and I also tried a 'spreadable' butter which apparently gives the rise of marg with the superior butter taste, but I still felt was greasy. In the end I decided to be a purist and went with butter in a 7" tin to get a deeper sponge.

There was no rosette for me this year, (you can see my entry, and the competition here) but I'll share a few tips I picked up along the way:

• Double sifting flour - it really does make a difference and enables you to reduce the amount you have to work the batter to incorporate the flour, which will help with lightness.

• Beating the eggs before adding - this also helps if you decide to weigh the eggs and measure the other ingredients this way i.e. if 3 eggs out of their shells weigh 174g then you should add that amount of flour, fat and sugar *

• If the mixture starts to curdle when adding the eggs add a tbsp of the flour to bring it back together

• Turn your tins - depending on your oven of course but I found that rotating the cakes with about 7 minutes to go resulted in an even even colour on top.

• Raspberry jam is easier to spread than strawberry and means a neater finish at the edges (I used Bon Maman).

• A dusting of caster sugar is supposedly acceptable for the competition.

Finally, a week after the competition it was Miss M's 14th birthday and of all the cakes she could have requested she went with a VS. So, after weeks of sticking to various rules and regulations I really went for it, behold The Scooby Doo Cake

*sometime after the competition, said colleague reported that beating the egg whites separately might add even more lightness, after swearing off these cakes for at least a year I had to go straight home and give it a go ... no difference that I could see.

Sunday Bakathon

On the same Sunday morning that saw me conquer the lemon drizzle disaster I also needed to use up a carton of buttermilk. Most of the buttermilk recipes I've collected are bundt cake ones which I adore. I never tire of looking at (and picking at)the cracked top as it cools in the tin before turning it out and marvelling at the smooth underside. Plus they're dream cakes for slicing and sharing.

A mixture of fresh and frozen blueberries along with just enough lemons left from the nemesis cake and I was good to go with this recipe from Bonappetit. This cake is delicious and was a hit with everyone. Don't forget to coat the blueberries in flour to distribute them evenly throughout the batter.

And, because I can never bake just one cake I also attempted these apple muffins from Smitten Kitchen (there was also a Victoria Sandwich, but more on that another time).

I'm not won over by these muffins. I think the memory of the apple and date cake is still too wondrously fresh for another apple based recipe. I didn't help by not chopping the apple into small enough pieces - again my lack of forward thinking meant I didn't fully consider the end muffin sized product. However, the crumb was lovely and light and the smell alone whilst they were baking was wonderful

The Cake That Nearly Beat Me

I couple of months ago I bought the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook and one of the first cakes I made (due to a fruit bowl full of lemons and a shiny new loaf tin - thank you Lakeland) was the Lemon Loaf. The recipe calls for whole milk which I didn't have so I substituted with buttermilk - that's allowed isn't it?

The cake was an unmitigated disaster.

I can't remember how long it actually took to bake but I know I had to reset the timer in five, then ten minute intervals several times before the skewer had any hope of testing clean. The cake was so heavy that a section of the top sheared off straight from the oven revealing a centre so stodgy that I just stood staring in disbelief.

After cooling it was obvious this was not fit to be dished up, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. I donated it to a colleague under the guise of a potential trifle ingredient, but accept that it probably ended up in her bin rather than mine.

I really didn't think that making such a minor substitution would've had such a disastrous effect, but in the end it was my novice baking status, rather than instinct, that let me down. There's an error in the original recipe; 560g of flour should actually read 350g. I imagine this error would be a glaring one to someone with more experience but it passed me by, it was only a chance visit to their website and a click on the innocuous sounding link for 'further tips and revisions' (ahem!) lead me to a PDF document with a page of tips and revisions to three of their recipes. A proof reader is in trouble somewhere I fear.

So, a Sunday waking of 4am meant several hours of baking time and the Lemon Drizzle was in my sights.

I was tempted to try again with the buttermilk substitution just to see exactly where the blame for the original failing lay, but decided that the frustration of another cake fail would be too much to bare, especially at that ungodly hour.

The baking time is 1hour 15 minutes, which is a little on the long side for a loaf tin and should've made me think ahead a bit, but I'm not that good at seeing the bigger picture and so placed the tin into the oven, set the timer, and popped off to clean the bathroom, as you do. I came back downstairs about 40 minutes into baking to a concerning hint of 'burnt' in the air. The cake had risen way above the top of the tin and was touching the element at the top of the oven. A few minutes of panic later and I'd extracted the cake with only minor damage to it and myself (and it's never a proper baking session without an injury of some sort). After picking the smoking debris off the element and repositioning the shelf the cake was returned to finish cooking. I couldn't believe this bloody recipe had nearly beaten me again.

The end result was a little on the ugly side because of the damage to the top, luckily it was destined to be sliced and distributed at work rather than presented whole - good job too.

An additional tip - should you want to bake this for yourself - is that I remembered from disaster no 1 that pouring the syrup over the cake resulted in a lot of the syrup being lost of pooling around the sides, so I made good use of a skewer and spent a long time drizzling slowly in intervals to ensure as much of the syrup as possible got into the cake.

Was the whole thing worth it? Well, I can't see beyond the second near miss, and I feel that the authors couldn't been more detailed in their instructions (error aside) but the resulting cake was moist and tart and seemed to go down well. It keeps, wrapped, for a coupled of days and would no doubt make an excellent base for a trifle!

The Perfect Project For a Sunday Afternoon

Jumping from blog link to blog link I came across Dinner with Julie and a browse through her recipe index lead me to an intriguing sounding Brown Rice Muesli. My favourite meal of the day is breakfast, I often go to bed thinking of my morning porridge and would eat breakfast foods for every meal if I could. Stays in hotels are all about the selection of goodies on offer in the morning - you can keep your eggs and bacon, pastries and muffins no matter how decadent or perfectly cooked, for me it's all about the cereals on offer, the selection of dried and fresh fruit and if there is the possibility of mixing my own combination, piling the ingredients high and adding plenty of yoghurt then I'm the happiest girl in the room. The Brown Rice Muesli didn't take my fancy but the recipe was coupled with one for Fleur de Sel Caramels. I've been treated recently to some wonderful salted caramel ice cream but have never made anything like it myself.

After the ganache disaster of the previous post that necessitated a mad dash to the shops for extra ingredients, I was left with a fair amount of spare double cream and the caramels were a perfect way to use it up, I had plenty of golden syrup and it seemed like a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I'm not sure that I managed the recipe successfully as I had nothing to compare it to, I aimed for the 'firmer chewy caramels' but still found them quite soft. They also melted easily at room temperature (although the afternoon I took them into work was warm) I struggled to remove the foil so popped them in the fridge overnight and it came off fairly easily in the morning, the chilling also helped when cutting them into bite size chunks. I think I underplayed the salt, I'm an absolute salt fiend and was wary of making them to my taste. I didn't do the second dusting as suggested in the recipe and think I was a little conservative overall. There was no way I was going to wrap each one in greaseproof paper but mini muffin cases were a perfect alternative to pop them into. The feedback was good and they were great fun to make - fascinating to watch the caramel boil away and the smell was divine!

Fleur de Sel Caramels

1 cup golden syrup

2 cups sugar

1/2 tsp. fine sea salt

2 cups whipping (heavy) cream

2 Tbsp. butter

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

fleur de sel or flaky sea salt (such as Maldon)

Line the bottom and sides of a 9″x9″ baking pan with aluminum foil and lightly grease the foil.

Combine the syrup, sugar, and salt in a heavy saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves completely and the mixture begins to simmer around the edges. (If you like, add a couple drops of lemon juice to prevent crystallization - I was fine without.)

Wash any sugar and syrup from the sides of the pan with a pastry brush dipped in water. Cover and cook for about 3 minutes.

Uncover the pan and wash down the sides once more if it needs it. Attach a candy thermometer to the pan, without letting it touch the bottom of the pan, and cook uncovered, without stirring, until the mixture reaches 305°F.

Meanwhile, bring the cream to a simmer in a small saucepan (add grated nutmeg first if you’re making the nutmeg version); turn off the heat and set aside.

When the sugar mixture reaches 305°F, turn off the heat and stir in the butter.

Gradually stir in the hot cream; it will bubble up and steam dramatically, so be careful.

Turn the burner back on and adjust it so that the mixture boils energetically but not violently. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally at the beginning to more frequently at the end, until the mixture reaches 260°F for soft, chewy caramels or 265°F for firmer chewy caramels.

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract, if using it. Pour the caramel into the lined pan. Let set for an hour or so, until slightly firm but still tacky. Sprinkle the surface lightly with flaky salt, pressing gently to help it adhere if you need to. Leave for another 3-4 hours, or until firm.

Invert the sheet of caramel onto a dry cutting board or sheet of parchment paper. Peel off the foil and if you like, sprinkle the other side with more salt. Cut the caramels with a large, sharp knife. Wrap each caramel individually in wax paper or cellophane.