Honey Cake

Well this week I'm celebrating, as yesterday I handed-in my PhD thesis for examination. Normally I would have celebrated by baking some delicious cake or other, and then maybe heading off to the pub. The problem is, as I'm in the process of moving house, all my baking things have been packed away. Even sadder, I was just too tired to go to the pub, so had a quiet evening in instead.

However, even though I currently can't bake, I can still write about my past projects. This particular recipe was featured in the Comic Relief version of the Great British Bake Off, and ever since I saw it I wanted to have a go at making it. This was the Hive Cake as made by Martha Kearney. For my first attempt at the recipe, I decided to make just one layer of the cake in a simple round cake tin, just to try out the cake recipe and see if it worked as well as it did on the programme.

All the lovely ingredients.

The honey I used came from Haddon Hall, and had a beautiful flavour, so therefore I thought it was perfect for this particular cake. I didn't have any lemon juice, so I decided to use lemon flavouring instead, which seemed to work just as well, although I'm sure the flavouring from real lemon juice would be superior.

I was a little apprehensive with this recipe, as it called for self-raising flour, whereas I tend to use plain flour and a separate raising agent in my cake recipes. My fears were founded to some extent, as the cake did not rise as much as I thought it would. However, this did not prove to be detrimental to the flavour of the cake, which was lovely.

Honey cake = deliciousness.

I also experimented with some fondant icing, and made some cute little bees to stick on top of the honey-flavoured buttercream icing. Whilst I did not have an almond slices to use as the bee wings (as suggested in the recipe), I did have some meringues left over from my last meringue-making session. I crumbled the meringue up into the necessary shapes, and used them as the wings.

 

Bees!

The flavour of the cake and the icing was absolutely delicious. The icing in particular proved to be very nice indeed, which meant that I ate too much of it straight out of the bowl instead of putting it on the cake. Luckily for me, there was just enough to cover the top of the cake.

This was another recipe that went down very well with my friends, the cute little icing bees in particular proving to be a hit.

 

Lovely cake inside and out!

Beckie.

Introducing the Chocamak!

My next big project was a very special cake that was designed for L's boyfriend. The story behind this is that L's boyfriend was about to take his PhD viva, and L wanted to make him a cake to present him with immediately after he completed his viva, either as a "Yay! Well done! Congratulations!", or a "Commiserations, sorry dude, never mind, PhDs are highly overrated".

L decided a long time ago that she really wanted to have a go at making a Tokamak cake, which would be known as the Chocamak. Therefore we thought this would be the perfect cake to make for her boyfriend. So I looked around on the Internet, and I found this picture of a Tokamak which we thought would do as the basis for our cake design.

A Tokamak (apparently).

Before we could even think about the outside decoration we had decided that we wanted to attempt to replicate the plasma usually found inside of a Tokamak. Therefore I turned to yet another recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book, and I decided to use and adapt the marbled cupcakes recipe that they had written. Basically what I did was I doubled up on the quantity of the ingredients in the recipe. I decided to use the ring cake tin that I had previously used for the Guinness and chocolate cake, and I basically made two ring cakes and then the placed one on top of the other, sealing them together with a simple buttercream icing. As with the Guinness and chocolate cake, some of the cake was actually stuck to the cake tin, and therefore L and I made use of some apricot jam in order to stick some bits of the cake back together.

Once the cake cooled, it was time to ice it. Therefore, we covered the cake in apricot jam and then we delicately placed some ready rolled white fondant icing over it, and then moulded the icing around the cake. Extra bits of icing were stuck on using a combination of the apricot jam, and some more of the buttercream icing. Once the fondant icing was in place, we sprayed it with them edible silver glitter spray. For the coils, the horizontal lines were done with some red icing, from a preprepared tube of icing, and then the vertical coils were actually created using strawberry laces. The laces were glued on using buttercream icing.

Behold the Chocamak!

Chocamak Awesomeness (best tokamak cake ever).

I'm very pleased to say that L's boyfriend passed his viva with minor corrections, and I am even more pleased to say that the cake went down extremely well. As you can see from the photo below, the marbling effect worked very well, and the cake proved to be very popular with a lot of the physicists. I'm definitely calling this one a success.

Woohoo! Plasma!

Beckie.

Gorgeous Guinness Cake

The next recipe I tried has become one of my absolute favourites - a Chocolate and Guinness Cake. Unsurprisingly perhaps this is yet another recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery cake book but this really is one of the best. I have always loved the flavour combination of stout and chocolate, so this recipe certainly seemed like something that I would be interested in. As you can see from the photo below there is a huge number of ingredients that go into this cake mixture.

Ingredients l-r: Flour, Cocoa Powder, Sugar, Guinness, Butter, Baking Powder, Bicarbonate of Soda, Buttermilk, Eggs.

Something that is terrifying, however, is the sheer amount of butter that goes into this cake as evidenced by the photograph below:

That is a lot of butter swimming in Guinness...

The cake mixture created is a beautifully rich chocolatey mixture which poured into the cake tin very nicely. I was a little pessimistic when I saw how the mixture only filled about half the tin.

Very nice cake mixture.

I was shown at the error of my ways, however, when I eventually pulled the tin out of the oven and saw just how much the cake mixture have risen during the bake.

Ok, so that rose quite well.

One of the trickiest parts actually of the whole recipe was getting the cake out of the tin after baking. This is the first time I've used one of theses ring tins, and I soon found that I haven't quite greased it enough with the butter, and a small amount of the cake was left stuck to that in itself. This did not deter me though, and I sallied on with the recipe.

It's fine, frosting can cover a multitude of sins.

Next was making a type of frosting I have never tried before: cream cheese frosting. I must admit I was not sold on this whole idea of cream cheese frosting but I gave it a go anyway, and using my lovely new palette knife I managed to cover the entire cake very easily.

Lovely frosting, using the wonderful palette knife :-)

The results when you have a proper palette knife for icing, rather than making do with a spoon.

Once the cake was covered, it was simply a matter of dusting it is likely with some cocoa powder (or in my case smothering one section completely in Cocoa powder). As you can see from the photos, this produced a beautiful cake. And I was certainly proved wrong with my doubts regarding the cream cheese frosting. It is an absolutely beautifully tasting frosting, and it goes very nicely with the rich Guinness and chocolate sponge.

Yum! A really lovely, rich and tasty cake.

This has become another favourite recipe, and yet another success from the Hummingbird Bakery recipe book. It also went down extremely well with the physicists of the York Plasma Institute, with more than one person asking me for the recipe. That makes it a definite success in my book.

Beckie.

Apple Streusel Cake

This is a recipe that I have been wanting to try for a while now, and this is one of the recipes from the Hummingbird Bakery book that I have used so much for my recent baking. This recipe combines three of my absolute favourite things: 1) cake 2) apples 3) crumble - it's a cinnamon crumble as well which I absolutely adore. The sponge recipe is actually a really simple vanilla sponge which was fairly easy to make. L very kindly offered her assistance, and chopped up two apples into slices for me. I then made the cinnamon crumble topping, and then took some time to carefully assemble the components of the cake itself. It all then went in the oven, and then there was an anxious wait whilst the cake was baking.

Apple Streusel Cake.

In the end, I had mixed success with this recipe. One thing I can definitely recommend right now is to only have one layer of the apples. When I make this cake, I actually had two layers of apple slices, and it turned out that this was far too much, which meant that the centre of the sponge didn't cook fully. What this basically meant was that most of the sponge had cooked perfectly and tasted very nice. However the centre was still quite liquid, which wasn't great. That being said, most of the cake was absolutely fine and tasted lovely, getting approval from both L and her boyfriend. The combination of the cinnamon crumble topping, the apple, and the vanilla sponge was really very nice indeed, and I will definitely be having another go at this recipe. I'm hoping to have more success next time.

Beckie. 


Update 06/03/2013:

After re-reading this post, I decided to have another go at making this cake this morning. Luckily I just so happened to have in all the necessary ingredients (thank goodness for having a well-stocked baking cupboard!), and made the attempt whilst catching up on some NCIS. So was it successful?

Second attempt: Perfection!

In fact, it turned out perfectly (perhaps Gibbs inspired me !). Ensuring that there was only one layer of apples meant that the sponge was not overwhelmed by too much moisture, and the sponge was beautifully light and fluffy. The combination of cinnamon, apple and vanilla sponge is absolutely fantastic, and I do believe that this may well become one of my favourite recipes.

Beckie.