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.

Choux Pastry

When I was home for Christmas a couple of months ago, I was by myself in the house one afternoon, and was very bored. So, as I often do, on a whim I decided I'd finally have a go at making choux pastry for the first time. Having seen it the most amazing choux gateaus on the Great British Bake Off this time, these examples from Brendan and John, I knew that this is probably a bit beyond me at this stage; so I thought I would start with something slightly easier.

Heading yet again to the BBC Food website I found this recipe by James Martin and this one by Nigella Lawson. Both of these looked like they were relatively straightforward to have a go at, so I decided start with Nigella's recipe, making a couple of tiny alterations (such as adding 4tsp of caster sugar to the choux pastry mix), and using a homemade piping bag (basically I cut a small corner off a sandwich bag - actually made a great piping bag) to pipe out the pastry mix instead of simply spooning it out.

This recipe takes a lot of time, patience and energy - stirring in the beaten eggs gradually actually takes a lot out of you, and my arm muscles were definitely aching by the end. However I can say that the end results were definitely worth it. For the first 10 to 15 minutes that the profiteroles were in the oven they didn't change at all; basically they still looked like the piped-out choux pastry batter, which I wasn't very happy about. I started to think that I had definitely messed up somewhere along the way, possibly in mixing the eggs into the batter. Then in the final five minutes they suddenly changed beyond recognition. They puffed up and they actually looked like profiteroles - it was amazing.

Profiteroles!!

I was pretty chuffed as this is my very first attempt at choux pastry. Now obviously they were not completely perfect; some of the profiteroles around the edges of the layout of the tray had not quite browned as much as I wanted them to, and two of them, when I attempted to take them off the baking paper, actually came away leaving the base of the profiteroles behind. Still, that left me with plenty more profiteroles to fill with the sugared cream and then to top with some melted chocolate. Testing them myself, I thought that they actually tasted quite nice, but I am never a very good judge of my own cooking and my neurotic brain means that I always have to have someone else say that it's actually okay. Therefore, I took some of the profiteroles over to my friend S, and was delighted when she and her family really liked them as well. I have since made these for my housemate L and her boyfriend, who both seemed to rather enjoy them, so I'll mark these down as another success.

Beckie.

Tarte au Citron

Once again I must admit to being influenced by The Great British Bake Off. As an adoring admirer of Mary Berry, I finally bit the bullet and attempted her Tarte au Citron for the first time. I was very interested in the idea of trying out a new sweet shortcrust pastry recipe having relied on the Crazy Kitchen shortcrust recipe for so long.

Having watched the episode of the Great British Bake Off where they made the Tarte au Citron, I was very conscious of the fact that it would be very, very easy to over-bake the lemon filling. In fact this was very much the case for my first attempt at making this tarte. As you can see from the photo, the filling has started to separate from the pastry, and in fact in the centre of the tart there was a fairly large crack in the filling. This is a wonderfully tart and flavoursome lemon filling, which is one of the tastiest recipes I've ever tried.

Mildly successful Tarte au Citron

Again undeterred I decided to keep trying to make this tarte successfully. It is really easy to over-bake this tarte and I have done so several times. I have also come across problems with pouring the filling into the pastry case; sometimes it just overflows and other times simply sliding the tarte into the oven causes some filling to spill over and to make the pastry soggy, which can cause the pastry to collapse. This means that you can lose some of the tarte when you try to remove it from the tin after baking. However, this doesn't take away from the delicious flavour of the tarte, and it has always gone down very well with L, my housemate, and several other friends of mine.

Beckie.

Pfeffernusse/Lebkuchen

I have very strong memories from when I was young going to visit my Granny in Bristol. Being from Germany, she was very fond of these yummy little spicy icing-coated biscuits which I now know are called either Pfeffernusse or Lebkuchen, and she always had some in whenever we visited her. Around Christmas time, Sainsbury's sell packets of Lebkuchen which I buy in bulk, but then this year I decided that along with buying the Sainsbury's ones I should actually have a go at making my own.

So once again I made use of my broadband connection and hunted around for some recipes. I found these two recipes online (from Channel 4 and All Recipes), and decided to go for a combination of the two, mainly using the Channel 4 recipe but adding in the molasses (treacle) from the All Recipes page. I used pomegranate molasses in this recipe, but I did not use the plum jam or the chocolate suggested in the Channel 4 recipe, preferring instead to simply cover the biscuits in icing.

Pfeffernusse

These little biscuits turned out really well, although I had to halve some of them as I'd made them far too big. I also foolishly ran out of icing part way through, so some biscuits only had two coats of the icing, but they still tasted suitably sweet and spicy. The only issue I came across was that there was just too much of the ground black pepper in these for my own personal preference, so I think next time I'll halve the amount of black pepper that I add.

I like to think that my Granny would have been proud of me for making these.

Beckie.