Expectation vs Reality

As I continue on my baking quest, I'm beginning to notice how cross I get with myself at times when something doesn't quite go according to plan.  Just the other week I made the Hummingbird Bakery Chocolate and Guinness cake for a lovely friend of mine who had invited me over for dinner.  I saw an opportunity to practise my baking skills, which have been neglected a little since I moved back home.  The two photos below show the finished product.  It looks OK, I like to think.  However, there had been no end of stress before the final product.

Chocolate and Guinness Cake Mark II.

Quite nice palette knife work.

Well, the recipe calls for the cake to be in oven for 45 minutes at 170°C.  So after 45 minutes I opened the oven door and started to pull the cake out of the oven.  It was at this stage that I realised the cake was nowhere near done.  So I put it back in the oven and played the waiting game.  Unfortunately, I had just caused some damage to my cake.  Because the cake tin had been moved, it meant that the mixture had basically been knocked around a wee bit, and this resulted in the inevitable collapse of the centre of the cake.  Cue wailing and general remonstrations about my incredible stupidity.  However, I overcame this minor disaster by simply flipping the cake over once it had cooled.  As the base was perfectly flat and even, I had a perfect new top to my cake.  Luckily the lovely thick cream cheese frosting covered up the fact that the top of the cake was in fact the base.  I think I would have gotten away with the whole thing if my 'Anglican Guilt' (the guilt that stems from making a sub-par cake that would certainly not be good enough for the church fête) hadn't got to me, forcing me to confess to my friend the disaster that had befallen my cake.  Still, my friend and her family seemed to enjoy it nevertheless.

This plays perfectly into my next baking attempt.  My parent both absolutely love the Lemon Drizzle Cake that is made at the fantastic Seedhouse Restaurant at Ned Yates Garden Centre in Wilmslow, Cheshire.  Therefore, one afternoon whilst they were at work, I decided to have a go at making a version of Lemon Drizzle Cake for my parents as a nice surprise.  The recipe I went for was one that I adapted slightly from the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book - the Lemon and Thyme Loaf.  

Now, my parents are not the most adventurous people when it comes to cake, so I decided to leave out the thyme, and instead add an extra teaspoon of lemon zest.  I also, on top of the beautiful lemon soaking syrup, decided to make a traditional Lemon Drizzle icing, which was made by simply mixing icing sugar with lemon juice.  This baking attempt brought out more of my usual baking anguish.  The next two photos below demonstrate how I pictured the cake in my mind.  They are two beautiful examples of Lemon Drizzle cakes.  These are the 'expectation'.

Gorgeous Lemon Drizzle Cake from 'bake with me!'

Another beautiful example, this time from Baking By Numbers.

The next two photos below display the 'reality'.

My attempt. Sigh.

Not great from this angle either...

By now, I have accepted that this isn't that bad, but at the time I was really very disappointed in the finished product.  It looked untidy, the lemon icing looked a bit too thin and it didn't 'drizzle' as nicely as I had wanted it to.  Obviously the main job of the cake is to taste nice (which it did indeed!), but I am beginning to get frustrated at my severe lack of presentation skills.  So my aim is to now attempt to develop said lacking presentation skills.  Wish me luck!

Beckie.

Chocolate Fondant Cupcakes

A couple of months ago I was invited to a leaving party for a member of staff from the York Plasma Institute.  I knew that I had to bring something delicious with me, so yet again there was another attempt at a Hummingbird Bakery recipe from the Cake Days book.

This time I thought I'd try individual cupcakes, and luckily for me I had all the ingredients in for the Chocolate Fondant Cupcakes.

Lovely, chocolatey ingredients.

For what can seem like a daunting recipe, this was actually relatively simple.  The trickiest bit for me was not the bake itself (although I did yet again overfill a couple of the cake cases a little, which meant one or two cupcakes overflowed during the baking process; these ones I just ate there and then), but the fear over cutting out the sections of cake to fill with the fondant.

Ready for the fondant filling.

However, this seemed to go off without a hitch, and I was then onto making the fondant whilst the cakes cooled further.  This wonderful combination of double cream and chocolate tasted absolutely divine, and you have no idea how happy I was when there was some fondant left over after filling all the cakes.  I grabbed a spoon and happily dug in.

 

Mmmmmm, fondant.

Once the fondant was in the little scooped-out holes, it was time to replace the cake that had been cut out.  This was like fitting the cupcakes with little cakey hats.

Cake hats!

After putting the 'cake hats' on, it was time to smother the tops of the cupcakes with yet more fondant, which made them look absolutely mouth-watering.  The beautiful, shiny tops were very enticing indeed.

 

Finished!

Just a few hours later, it was time to take the cupcakes to the party.  They were all set out on a table, and soon enough several physicists (including one slightly shifty Professor) were circling around.  The cupcakes disappeared fairly quickly, which was very gratifying for me, and I did get many compliments on them, even from the shifty Professor.  The main point made was that they were very rich and choclately, but without being overly sweet, which meant that they were pretty much the perfect chocolate cupcake recipe.

I would definitely recommend making these, as it really is yet another lovely recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery. 

Beckie.

Chocolate-Glazed Chocolate Tart

Apologies again for yet another delay in my posting.  I have just gone through the rather arduous process of moving house, so things were a little hectic recently.  Still, I haven't forgotten about my love of baking, and I have a particularly lovely and delicious recipe to discuss here.

I actually came across this recipe on BuzzFeed when I read the article "71 Reasons Candy Hearts Are Stupid".  Several of the delicious-looking desserts called out to me, and I finally picked this chocolate tart to have a go at making.

Now the recipe calls for the use of something called 'graham crackers' for the tart base.  I believe that these are an American biscuit, so as they are not readily available in the UK I substituted them with good old Bourbon biscuits.  This had worked nicely in the American pies I'd previously made, so I thought they'd be just the thing.

As ever, I had a great deal of fun bashing the biscuits into tiny pieces:

So many crushed biscuits!

After these were combined with the sugar and the butter, they were then pressed into the tart tin, and then baked in the oven.  I'd never baked this type of tart base before (previously I'd left it to set in the fridge), so I was interested to see how it would turn out.  My main worry was it collapsing in the oven, or when it was taken out of the tin.  However, aside from a little bit of the butter seeping out of the base and the tin, it turned out quite nicely:

Baked biscuit base.

So then came time to make the filling.  A two-stage process, I was concerned about getting the texture of the truffle-like filling right.  Luckily, the process of the truffle filling was not too dissimilar to the custard tart filling I've made before, although obviously this one had the addition of some rather lovely chocolate.  This was then very carefully baked in the oven until it was just set:

Truffle-y goodness.

The only (very small) issue I came across here was the emergence of a few bubbles on the top of the filling.  I simply popped them, and hoped that they would be adequately covered by the chocolate glaze that I would make next.

So after a suitable cooling period, it was then onto making the chocolate glaze to go on top of the filling.  I'd had a go at making a chocolate ganache before, and it had not worked out well at all, but I was determined to have another go.  Obviously the recipe calls for the use of corn syrup, which is again not widely available here in the UK.  Therefore I used golden syrup instead.  This seemed to work incredibly well, and did not affect the flavour of the glaze at all.  The glaze appeared to have the perfect texture once everything had been stirred together, so I bit the bullet and poured it on top of the tart filling.

A rather nice chocolate glaze on top.

Well, it looked rather good to me, and it also covered up the air bubble holes very nice and quite evenly as well.  Yes, there were a couple of wobbles in it, but as a whole I was quite pleased with the results.  I then left the glaze for about an hour to set (sat on the counter top, not in the fridge, which is very important to know).  Once everything had set, the final result was rather pleasing.

The finished tart!

Not only did the tart come out of the tin nicely (the tart crust held perfectly), but it also cut beautifully as well.  The tart held it's structure perfectly, and looked incredible when slices were cut out.

Yum!

This proved to be one of my most popular recipes yet.  The tart filling was not too sweet, and had a rich, luxurious flavour that was an absolute delight to eat.  One thing I will mention, the glaze soon loses its glossiness if the tart is put in the fridge, so be prepared for this is you have to store it in the fridge for some reason.  If this is the case, I have found that the gloss can be brought back if you very carefully heat the glaze by using a hairdryer on a low setting (yet another trick seen on The Great British Bake Off).

I can definitely recommend this recipe - it is a fantastic tart, and well worth making, particularly for a special occasion (although I'll make it anytime).

Beckie.

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.