Week 8 – Cobbling it together…

Apple and Blueberry Cobbler

Initially I thought for this week’s bake I’d have to randomly select something from the recipe book, however, yet again, the reduced section of a supermarket came to my rescue, in the guise of blueberries!  I looked in the Index under Blueberries, and found 3 entries – Blueberry Loaf, Blueberry and Amaretto Trifle Cupcakes, and Apple and Blueberry Cobbler.  I immediately discarded the thought of the cupcakes, as I don’t like Amaretto.  I was all set to attempt the Blueberry Loaf – although bread making scares me, the point of this experience is to try new baking experiences.  However upon reading the recipe it looked a little fiddly, so I thought I’d look at the Cobbler recipe.  Being British I’m not used to the concept of Cobbler, however it seems to be a cross between a pie and a crumble.  I decided to plump for that, as I had everything except for the apples.  Also the recipe is super simple!  Facing my fear of making bread will have to wait another week (at least…).

The Bake

As noted above, I acquired the blueberries from the reduced to clear section.  Blueberries are normally quite expensive, so I snapped them up.  However I only bought one 125g packet of them, and the recipe called for 200 grams.  So I thought the best thing to do was halve the quantities.  This did work out better really as I have a small Le Creuset flan dish, and a massive Pyrex dish, but nothing really in-between, so making a smaller Cobbler would allow me to use the flame orange Le Creuset.

The first step is to peel and chop the apples (Bramley and Granny Smith), and add them, along with sugar and mixed spice, to a saucepan of melted butter, and allowing to soften.  I put the lid on as well to speed up the process.  Once softened, you stir the blueberries through, then put the mixture into the pie/flan dish.

 

Meanwhile, I made the dough.  It’s initially a standard crumble/breadcrumb consistency, but then you add boiling water, which immediately turns it into quite a gooey dough.  You then completely cover the fruit mixture with it, by adding balls of mixture to the top.  I was a little worried that as I had used half the amount of ingredients, it wouldn’t cover the fruit, so I had to spread it out a bit.  You then sprinkle brown sugar on top, and into the oven it goes.  I stuck to the stated cooking time of 35 minutes despite halving the quantities, as with my oven I normally need to increase the cooking time.

I could smell that it was ready before the timer went off, as the sweet aroma of the mixed spice filtered through the house.  And voilà - simple!  I think it looks great; like a tasty, homely dessert.  And it tastes homely too, and delicious.  The fruit is soft, and sweet, and the blueberries give the mixture a nice colour.  The dough/crust is quite surprising; it almost tastes like fried batter, crossed with crumble topping.  In a good way!  I still had some double cream left over from the Chocolate Malt Cake, so I ate it warm with some double cream.  Bliss.

Who knows what next week will throw up, but until then, Happy Baking!

Week 7 – Well, just…

Chocolate Malt Cake

This week I wanted to combine my blog post with making my mother’s birthday cake, which was on Friday, but wasn’t required until Saturday, and I am writing/publishing on Sunday night.  Eeshk.  Anyway, luckily Home Sweet Home has a cakes section, and has a few pretty impressive looking celebration cakes.  My sister and I decided on the Chocolate Malt Cake, as it looked impressive, and my fussy-eater sister had no qualms about the ingredients.  This is a multi-step, multi-page recipe (even the ingredients go over the page!) and I only really had 3 hours to make it in.  The 3 main stages are making the fudge sauce, making the sponge, and making the frosting.  Three hours sounds like a lot, but it did mean I had to make sure I stuck to half hour segments – 30 minutes to make the fudge sauce, 30 minutes to make the sponge, 35 minutes for the cake to cook, 30 minutes to let the cake cool and prepare the frosting, 30 minutes to assemble.  This regiment meant there was less time wasted, but maybe things were a bit rushed…

The Bake

I have used all the correct ingredients this time, which resulted in quite a pricey supermarket shop actually.  However as I only have two sandwich tins, I couldn’t make it a three layered cake without having to wait for one tin to cook first, so I only used two thirds of the ingredients required – i.e if it said 120g, I used 80g, et cetera, et cetera. 

The first step was to make the chocolate fudge icing, which would be poured over the sponges.  This seemed like the most complicated part, and the bit that was most likely to go wrong, as it involved heating golden syrup, caster sugar and double cream in a saucepan, and letting it come to the boil, before adding it to a bowl of chocolate and cocoa powder.  I’m always apprehensive when things have to be heated this way, as there’s such a fine line between under heating and burning.  However, I think I got it right, as when adding the heated mixture to the dry ingredients, after a while it turned into a nice fudge sauce:

While the fudge mixture cooled, it was on to the sponge.  This was essentially a chocolate sponge mix, but with buttermilk – simple enough, and went into the oven and came out without problem.  After cooking for approximately 35 minutes, I allowed the cakes to cool a bit, and then poured the fudge sauce over both, before allowing to cool completely.

While they cooled, I made the frosting.  Now, whereas with the fudge sauce and sponge I used a third less than required, ingredients-wise, for the frosting I used half what was required.  I know from past experience with Hummingbird recipes that there’s always way too much icing, and as I was also using one less layer, I took my chances.  The recipe in the book called for 900 grams of icing sugar!  And even 450g seemed a lot.  When making the frosting, I was first to cream the icing sugar and butter, before adding a little cream cheese to loosen the mixture, before adding the remainder.  However, as my mixing bowl is quite shallow, and there was so much icing sugar, it wasn’t really incorporating the butter, so I added the cream cheese and then started mixing properly.  It then took on an icing consistency, yay.  It’s at this point that the ‘malt’ part of the cake’s title comes into play, as in a separate bowl you mix double cream with…malt powder!  Once it’s a thick mixture you fold it into the buttercream, and voilà, malt icing!  By now the sponges were cooled, buttercream frosting was ready, so time for assembly.

It was at the assembly point that I started to become a bit unstuck.  The sponges seemed cool, and the fudge sauce seemed to have set, but when I spread some frosting onto the first layer, it seemed to push the fudge sauce to the sides, and that and the frosting started oozing over the edges.  I heaped some crushed Maltesers onto the frosting, before approaching the upper layer.  I was afraid the same would happen with the top layer, so I put the top layer onto the bottom layer fudge sauce side down.  I think this might have worsened the oozing situation between the layers, but it did stop the fudge sauce and frosting mixing together on top and thus ruining the look of the cake.  I heaped the frosting on top, spread it along the edges, sprinkled the rest of the crushed Maltesers on top, and added a border of whole Maltesers.  I also tidied up the edges, which by now had quite a pool of frosting/fudge sauce.

In hindsight, maybe I should’ve let the sponges cool for a little longer, or even refrigerate them for a bit to allow the sauce to set.  However, to be honest, truly in hindsight, I don’t think I would add the fudge sauce at all.  It doesn’t really add to the taste, but did affect the overall aesthetic and effort required.  The cake did still look really impressive once completed, and talking of taste, it tastes great!  Although it is really rich, so have small slices!  It’s the frosting that really gives it the malt-ness, and makes you think ‘ooh this cake tastes like a Malteser!’  The sponge is moist, and the fudge sauce does lend a smoothness, although as already mentioned, I feel the cake would work just as well without it.

It’s back to being a completely random choice next week, so anticipation all around – happy baking!

Week 6 – Exotic Rainy-Day Bake!

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

*Please note I normally write this blog after finishing the bake, so everything’s in the past tense.  This week due to organisation and extended cooking time I am writing before, during and after the bake, so please excuse the different tenses!*

Today is a perfect baking day, as it is pouring down with rain outside.  Come to think of it though, living in Wales means that there are lots of perfect baking days.  As noted at the end of last week’s blog, this week I am making the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, as I have a pineapple that I picked up for a heavily discounted price.  The recipe asks for pineapple juice and pineapple slices, but I hope my fresher way will work.  I’m hoping that when I cut the pineapple some juice will emerge… Stay tuned to see whether I rue not just throwing it in a blender with a banana to make a smoothie (although, come to think of it, my blender is broken).

The Bake

As you know, I have been caught out a couple of times in the past by not reading the recipe in its entirety before embarking on it.  So this time I read it all the way through.  However I needn’t, as it’s only 5 steps!  As noted above, my variations on Hummingbird’s recipe involve using an actual, fresh (ish) pineapple rather than slices and juice from a tin.  First things first, preparing the pineapple slices.  I armed myself with a sharp knife and started prepping.  I cut off both ends, and the sides.  Half of the pineapple was bruised but I only needed 6 slices, so I cut the bruised part, put it to one side, and cut 6 slices with the ‘good’ bit.  I cut out the middles, and with the bruised half, I made the pineapple juice.  I did this by basically squeezing it in my hand, over a jug.  And, you know what, it worked pretty well!  I had pretty much the 90ml the recipe asks for.

 

You then make the batter for the cake, which is essentially a standard sponge mix, but with no vanilla extract.  After creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, then the dry ingredients, you add the pineapple juice.  When I first poured it into the mixing bowl it looked like it had curdled, but once I mixed it, it resembled cake batter again.  I tasted the beaters after I’d finished mixing (as is my right as the baker!) and the batter tasted like a standard sponge, but the pineapple juice gave it an extra bit of sweetness.  Before pouring the batter into the cake tin, you arrange the pineapple slices in a tin that has been greased, dusted with flour and coated with caster sugar.  When putting the slices in I realised 7 slices of pineapple would’ve been better, but 6 looks fine.  The batter is then poured in, and put into the oven for 35-45 minutes.

 

The cake is now in the oven, and will need to cook and cool a bit before I turn it out onto a plate, and hope that it looks and tastes as it should!  While I’m waiting though, thought I’d share with you that I’ve made this cake and written about it whilst listening to a ‘Back to the Nineties’ playlist on Spotify via Emerald Street, and it’s great.  It’s mostly female artists, and listening to it while baking has made me realise that this is what being a 21^st century feminist is all about – it’s perfectly acceptable for me to do traditional domestic activities, on my day off from my job, whilst listening to kick-ass females sing about life, love, and ruling the world.  Girl power.  But I digress…

An hour or so later, and I have now taken the cake out of the oven, and let it cool.  While it’s been cooling though, it’s slowly been sinking, and once I turned it out onto a plate, it looked really concave.  And when I cut into it to take a slice, some juice/batter hybrid was oozing out the middle.  I’ve never made a fruit upside-down cake before, so I’m not sure if that’s what’s meant to happen, or if it just hasn’t cooked properly in the middle, so I’ve put it back in the oven for a bit, just on the plate.  I’m not worried about eating raw cake, but I don’t want to give anyone else food poisoning!  And, true to that, I have eaten the slice I cut.  It tastes nice – moist, fruity, and cooked, however I think it might be a tad underdone.  So my tip is to cook it for longer than it says, maybe 50-55 minutes.  I am a little disappointed, however I don’t normally cook with fruit, chocolate’s more my bag, so it’s been a learning experience.  Which is what this journey’s all about!

I'm not sure what I'll be making next week, but as it's my mother's birthday I think I'll try and make a celebration cake of sorts!  Happy Baking!

Week 5 - Cookies!

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies

This week I was back to looking through Home Sweet Home to find the first thing that popped out at me.  The book is divided into 7 chapters – Cupcakes; Cakes, Cheesecakes and Roulades; Cookies and Biscuits; Pies and Cobblers; Traybakes; Sweet Treats & Classic Puds; and Savouries.  I’ve cooked cupcakes and cakes, and the shortbreads I made in week 1 do come under the Cookies and Biscuits section, however the cookies were calling out to me.  Cookies seem simple enough, but I’ve had a few occasions where I haven’t spaced them far enough apart, and they’ve merged into one mega-cookie while cooking. So when I landed on the Peanut Butter & Chocolate Cookies recipe, I thought jackpot!  I still don’t have a rolling pin so the draw of this recipe was that as well as sounding delicious, it doesn’t require rolling out the cookie dough, you just roll the dough into balls by hand.  There’s a similar method in the Cake Days book for Snickerdoodles, which I highly recommend trying/baking, although they’re really moreish.  But back to this bake…

 

The Bake

The recipe doesn’t require anything too complicated this week, so I haven’t changed any of the quantities/ingredients.  Once again I learnt that I should really read the entire recipe before beginning, as the first instruction was to sieve the dry ingredients, so I added them all to the scales, however the recipe then tells you to cream the butter, peanut butter and sugar in a bowl.  How was I meant to measure out the butter, peanut butter and sugars when the scales bowl was in use?!  So I niftily put a plastic container on top of the weighing scales, and had to do some mental arithmetic.  Once the mixture was creamed, I added the egg (I also added the vanilla extract at this point, however I noticed that the recipe doesn’t say when to do this), mixed, then slowly added the dry ingredients.  The mixture at this point was way too dry to carry on using the hand mixer, so I moved to a wooden spoon.  The mixture was looking too dry full stop to be honest, so I added a little bit of water.  I then took little balls of the dough, rolled them in caster sugar, and laid them out evenly on a lined baking tray:

And after 15 minutes in the oven, they were done!  Simples.  However, little confession, I actually burnt the first set that went in the oven!  When I’m preheating the oven I tend to turn it right up in the hope it’ll heat to my desired temperature more quickly, however I forgot to turn it down once I’d put the cookies in!  Rookie error.  So the first batch are quite hard, but the second batch taste really good.  They were a bit hard too in my opinion, but I do like my cookies quite soft.  So really I should’ve taken them out earlier.  But chocolate and peanut butter is definitely a good taste combination.  They also look like cow pats in the picture, but that’s the lighting.  Probably.   Notice how I made sure a burnt one is in the picture rather than underneath?  So that you can see that we all make baking mistakes…

 

Now as you know I normally don’t reveal the chosen bake until the blog itself, mostly as I don’t tend to decide until the day I’m baking it, however I can exclusively reveal that next week I intend to make the Pineapple Upside-Down Cake!  When I was in the supermarket getting the ingredients for the cookies, they had a Pineapple Reduced to Clear for 40p (from £1.78!).  So as long as it is still edible next Thursday, that’s what I’ll be making.  Until then, Happy Baking!

Week 4, Part 2 Pasg Hapus / Happy Easter!

Easter Cupcakes

Strictly speaking I am now in week 5 as it’s Monday, but I made these yesterday (Sunday), and I will be baking something else this week.  So please forgive this little incorrect detail!  As noted in Part 1 for Week 4, Easter is here, so I thought I would stray from Home Sweet Home in order to make something more thematic.  So I looked through my other cookbooks, there wasn’t a recipe that seemed to be quite right for the image in my head, so I’m going to take bits from 2 different recipes, by making marble cupcakes, with chocolate icing, and decorated with mini eggs.  I’ve merged two magazine recipes from my recipe scrapbook – marble cupcakes, and the icing/mini eggs element from an Easter chocolate fudge cake.  I went to a friend’s house on Easter Sunday evening, so I thought cupcakes would be a better option than a cake…

The Bake

The advantage of using multiple sources is that I can share the ingredients with you!  So here they are:

Sponge ingredients – makes 12

115g self-raising flour

115g butter/margarine

115g caster sugar

2 eggs

1tsp baking powder

½ tsp vanilla extract

1 tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp milk

Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, add the eggs, then the flour, baking powder and vanilla extract.  It’s all pretty simple.  Divide the mixture in two – I just made a line through the middle of the batter.  Add a generous teaspoon of batter to a side of each cupcake case, then top up to use what’s left of the vanilla half.  I forgot about putting it to the side for the first couple!  Then add the cocoa powder and milk to the remaining batter, and add a teaspoon of that to each cupcake case.  Cook for 15-20 mins on 180°C.

While they cooled, I made the icing:

Icing ingredients

100g milk chocolate (or I think any chocolate would work)

100g very soft unsalted butter

50g icing sugar

1tbsp cocoa powder

36 mini eggs (12x3)

Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl – opinion is divided on this, whether to use the microwave to melt chocolate or put it in a bowl over a pan of hot water.  I find as long as you have it on a medium high heat and check it every minute or so, the microwave is so much easier.  Until you burn the chocolate, anyway.  Once melted, sift the icing sugar and cocoa powder into the chocolate, and mix.  The recipe said to wait until the icing is thick enough then cover the cakes, but as it was very runny, and I didn’t know how quickly it would set, I decided to dip the cakes upside down into the chocolate icing.  This ensured an even coating as well, and a nice finish.  I added three mini eggs to each cake straight away so they would stick.  The chocolate icing set really quickly, however that was a good thing as I needed to take my creations to my friends. There was quite a bit of the icing and mini eggs left over, so I ground a Weetabix biscuit into the mixture, which I stretched to three cupcake cases, and added mini eggs to them.

The verdict on the sponge cakes?  My friends seemed to enjoy.  A light fluffy sponge, with the chocolate icing and mini eggs adding another set of textures.  If you have mini eggs and milk chocolate still lying around after yesterday, this is a quick way to use them in a creative way! 

 

Normal Home Sweet Home cookbook duties will resume later this week, so Happy Easter and Happy Baking!