Cauliflower Cake, Lamb & Sesame Stirfry and more. A Week of Meals 003

Week 3 of the meal planning odyssey and to be honest I'm surprised that I've made it this far.  As far as new year's resolutions go, this has lasted twice as long as my other resolutions, go running 3 days a week (I'm blaming that one on the snow), cut down on the alcohol (I'm blaming that one on the fact it tastes too nice) and build a robot sidekick (I'm working on that one...)

So without further distractions, on with the list...

 Friday - Chickpea and Chorizo Stew

This one was a quick and simple meal as there are many more important things to do on a Friday evening, and I always like something a bit mediteranean every now and then.  This is a Nigella recipe, which made me inclined not to cook it as I really do not like her TV shows.  However, woman can cook, and this was rather amazing for something that took 15 minutes to prepare...

Should you wish to cook this (and you won't regret it), here is linkage

Sunday - Lamb and Sesame Stir fry

This was my pick from the book Mrs Soup chose, as per the rules of Recipe Club (Well, the second rule actually.  The first rule is do not talk about Recipe Clu... oh drat)  The book was 'What's Cooking - Chinese' by Jenny Stacey, and whilst it was nice, Im not sure how authentic a lot of the dishes are - alarm bells always ring when cook books don't include the name of the dish in the original language (or am I just being a food snob?)

Anyway, I chose it because I don't think I've ever encountered lamb on a chinese restaurant menu before, so I thought I'd give it a go.  It turned out nice, as George Formby might have said, if he'd eaten it...

Monday - Leek and Goats Cheese Tart / Poached Pears

Mrs Soup's pick of the week, from a book called 'Farmer's Market Cookbook'.  Because of another new year's resolution - i.e. the whole healthy eating thing, we swapped out the shortcrust pastry for layers of filo pastry - a tip that the Hairy Bikers did on one of their recent shows.  It made the whole thing a lot lighter and rather nice, although it could have done with some bacon or similar to give it a bit more kick.

Tuesday - Ezogelin Soup

This week's soup.  See blog post below

Wednesday - Cauliflower and Cheese Cake

The weekly veg box delivery left us with a couple of Cauliflowers which I had absolutley no idea what to do with, having grown bored of Cauliflower curry and Koftas, so I did what all sensible people do in the 21st Century - ask twitter.  I got some amazing suggestions, including fritters, making them into a pizza base and a tasty soup which may appear on the blog next time I have cauliflowers.

However, the one that caught my eye was a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi for a cake!  It was an experiment, to say the least, and I didn't have high hopes - especially with my aversion to all things baking related.  However, the end result was something of a triumph.  I highly recommend it if you have no idea what to do with the brain shaped vegetable lurking in your cupboard...

The recipe is here

Clandestine Cake Club - Olde Sweet Shop

Well, this is almost a month late, but the most recent Clandestine Cake Club I attended was themed 'Ye Olde Sweet Shop'. You can see Sharon's post with all the attending cakes here. My contribution was a Strawberry marshmallow cheesecake. I wanted to make something that included sweets and used sweets as decoration on top, and I'm really happy with the result - this would be fantastic for a kid's party (perhaps in green!) and what you can't tell from the picture is how light this was - definitely light enough (and tasty enough!) to go back for seconds. I based the recipe on my memories of a pudding called pink fluff (most people know this under a variety of names!), which involves mixing jelly and Ideal milk, beating until it's really fluffy, then allowing it to set. This is the same thing, only without the bubbles.

This is a real show-stopper of a cake - and the only limitation with decorations is your imagination (and how well stocked your sweet shop is!)

Ingredients :

200g digestive biscuits (crushed)
100g butter

2/3 packets jelly (pick your flavour/colour!)
500ml greek yogurt
Packet mini-marshmallows (optional)
Sweets to decorate

Melt the butter and mix with the biscuits. Press into the bottom of a deep loose bottomed / springformed tin.

Make up 2 packets of jelly using about 1/3 volume of boiling water specified. Allow to cool a bit (catch it before it sets) and then make up to the full volume with yogurt. Mix in the marshmallows (if you are using them), pour into the tin on top of the base and allow to set. 

Once the yogurt layer has set, make up the remaining jelly using water, allow to cool until just before setting (you don't want to pour it onto the previous layer until it's quite cool otherwise you can melt the yogurt layer a bit). Pour it gently onto the previous layer, and position your sweets in the layer, or wait till it's set and position them on top (I used white chocolate buttons and waited till the layer was almost set and just pushed them in gently so the were slightly immersed, but not completely.)

Weekly Bake Off - Apricot loaf cake

After several weeks of not participating in the Weekly Bake Off, I was raring to go with this week's bake : Apricot loaf cake. The only ingredient I needed to buy were the dried apricots, and so after picking them up on the way home on Thursday I threw this together after dinner on Thursday night. It is a very simple recipe - everything get put into 1 bowl, mixed and then poured into the loaf tin, so it is very low-stress. It smelt lovely while baking, and we dived straight into it almost as soon as it was out of the oven. 

Mr Soup loves fruit loaf, and this didn't disappoint, being full of apricots, cherries and raisins. I don't think that the icing added much, though it was a nice touch to be able to sprinkle some more apricots on top. I probably wouldn't make this again, but only because I have other recipes for darker fruitloafs, but probably will be adding dried apricots to other fruit cakes in the future.

Herman the German

We've had a house guest the last couple of weeks - I was the lucky recipient of a portion of a work friend's Friendship cake. Apparently Herman is quite famous, and most of the baking world seems to have had him to stay at some point or other, growing him a bit, then dividing him into a portion to bake with, and giving the rest away to friends. At this rate, I would estimate that the world would be drowning (quite literally) in Herman beofre too long.

Obviously some people are not passing on their Herman as expected (evidenced by the continuing lack of a yeasty smelly tide swallowing Britain), but I found 3 lucky recipients, and baby Hermans were distributed round Leeds, and one even made it all the way to Hull, where apparently there is a waiting list for his offspring!

Having spent plenty of time growing all sorts of single celled organisms in the lab, I probably wasn't as intimidated by Herman as I know a few people have been. He is essentially a live yeast culture, and so I didn't stick too carefully to the care instructions - he was stirred every day, but feeding might have occurred at slightly less regular intervals than suggested, and when it came time to bake him, I made sure he was fed the day before, and then just used a cup of him as one of the ingredients in the cake mix. I've kept the remaining mix, and will have a go at freezing him and bringing him back to life - it should work - I'll update at a later point if it does. I'm also rather keen to see if Herman can be adapted into a bread culture - I'll be tring that over the next couple of weeks too and see if he's any good at using for sourdough bread. While Herman was apparently started with dry yeast, I am guessing he's been around for so long that he's more wild yeast (in a domesticated form) than commercially available stuff, and that's one of the things that makes sourdough so tasty. Again, I'll report back with the results, but for now, here is the result of my baking with Herman.

Ingredients:

1 cup plain flour
1 cup Herman
1/2 cup brown sugar (I used brown cane sugar, but light muscovado would be good too)
1/4 cup oil
2Tbsp butter
1 egg
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla essence

and then add whatever you like ... I used a baking apple, some dried dates (you could use some raisins), mixed spice and cinnamon.

I mixed all the base ingredients together, and then added the extra ingredients by feel/look - that's one of the good things about Herman - you can add as much or as little as you want. Next time I make a Herman I'll probably add a lot more spice and try an almost ginger loaf kind of cake.

Herman get put in a cake tin (whatever shape you fancy, though try not to have him too thin), and bake at 180ºC for about 45 minutes - check after half an hour using a toothpick/clean knife and test every 10 minutes until it comes out clean. I used a bit of butter and sugar as a glaze just by sprinking the sugar on top, and pouring some melted butter over about 15 minutes before the end of baking to make a crunchy topping. 
 

Ginger and Treacle Spiced Traybake

After not participating in last week's Weekly Bake Off thanks to cake overload (Lemon and Lavender Battenberg for work and an Opera Cake for Clandestine Cake Club), I was really happy to see that this week's bake was something I really fancied baking and eating!

I love the addition of chopped preserved ginger on top of this cake

I love ginger in virtually any form - ginger nuts are one of my favorite biscuits, and my first creative baking attempt (which prompted the blog hijack) was chocolate and ginger biscotti (yum!). (I also enjoy ginger in a savoury form - salmon with soy and ginger is a regular feature in the Soup household). This recipe also is a very good way to use up some of the black treacle you might haveleft over from Christmas.

In addition to the allspice and mixed spice I added some extra ginger powder. The chunks of preserved ginger in the cake are a lovely surprise!

This traybake was incredibly easy to make - everything weighed into the same bowl and then mixed and poured into the lined tin. The icing was equally straightforward (and a nice use of the syrup the preserved ginger is kept in). I was worried it might be a bit heavy with the black treacle, but the cake is moist and light.

I just couldn't wait for the icing to set all the way, but quite like the look of the icing oozing down the side of the cake. These slices didn't last long after this picture was taken.

We were very happy with this cake, and it came at a good time - a nice warming spiced cake (I added some extra ginger powder to the batter) on a cold, rainy afternoon when one of the Soups is all bunged up with cold - a healthy dose of ginger was just what the doctor ordered!

Lavender and Lemon Battenberg

A few months ago a friend at work proposed a baking challenge - she picked something most people wouldn't normally bake and that would be a bit technically challenging. Despite this, 16 of us signed up for it, and since we decided that we'd take turns with the tin (specially bought for the challenge, and provided as the prize), this means we're in for 4 months of eating battenberg!

This is my entry - look at me giving away the final outcome and killing the suspense!

Some people have gone for a traditional approach, but there have also been some very exciting combinations - the most exotic colour combination so far was yellow and (very bright) blue (vanilla and blueberry), and the very first contribution was coated (all four sides!) in chocolate. (I happen to know there's something even more exotic and stylish on the cards and am very excited to see next week's cake!)

The other thing that has characterised this challenge has been the level of stress. In some ways it's been more of a Battenberg Break-Down than a Bake-Off! I know several people have scapped their first attempt and remade it, and the tin (link to Amazon because I forgot to take a picture of it!) presented endless problems too. It doesn't have a non-stick coating, and once you've baked your cake, it can be very hard to get the pieces out without a problem. I had my own mini-crisis when applying the marzipan at 11pm the night before when all I wanted to do was forget the cake and go to bed! Luckily the marzipan coating wasn't too difficult and I didn't end up throwing cake all over the kitchen!

I decided to go with a traditional-look Battenberg, but with a non-traditional flavour, and used lavender for the pink quarters and lemon for the yellow quarters.  I'd been playing with the idea of a lavender sponge for a while, and almost made a lavender opera cake for the Headingley Clandestine Cake Club event last week, so had some ideas about how best to flavour the cake, and was almost very please with how it turned out... (you'll see why it was 'almost' at the end!)

Sponge - standard recipe (I was surprised when speaking to people how few people know this very easy technique for making a sponge!) :
Break your eggs into a bowl and weigh them (I used 3 for the size of the tin I was using and that's about right for a medium cake)
In a separate bowl weigh out an equal quantity of butter (at room temperature - if it's chilled oyu might want to pop it in the microwave for a few seconds to soften it)
Add an equal weight of caster sugar.
Cream the butter and sugar together until light
Add an equal quantity of self raising flour - I weigh mine separately and then add a bit of flour and an egg, beat, then a bit more flour and another egg etc.


Then pour into a greased, lined tin and bake at 180 ºC until a toothpick/knife comes out clean

 

For the lavender sponge I used lavender infused caster sugar prepared by adding 2tsp lavender flowers (dried or fresh) to 100g caster sugar, and leaving to infuse (shaking every few days) for a week or longer. Sieve before using to remove the lavender flowers - those that pass through the sieve are fine to include in the cake, you just don't want big chunks! I also used a liquid food colouring, in liberal quantities, having been warned that it might fade when baking. When it went into the oven it was a very dark pink...

 

Once the cake had cooled, I prepared a lemon syrup (1/4 cup each of caster sugar and water heated till boiling in a panwith the juice of half a lemon). I repeated the process for a lavender syrup and boiled lavender flowers with the water, caster sugar and lemon juice, then passed the syrup through a sieve to remove the lavender flowers. 

I poured the syrups over the cake quarters, and then assembled the cake. First I stuck the quarters together with apricot jam. I then rolled out the marzipan using icing sugar on the counter to stop it sticking. I flipped the marzipan over, clean side down onto a sheet of baking paper, and smoothed a layer of apricot jam over the inside. I placed the sponge onto the marzipan at one end, and trimmed the marzipan to about 2cm from the edge (to form the seam). I then used the baking paper to roll the battenberg up in the marzipan - this worked really effectively and I can add instructions if anyone is interested! (Another trick is to keep your marzipan cool). Once it was rolled up I trimmed the edges, and scored the top, and there it was.

 

And the 'almost' happy bit... was down to the colour! It's not as obvious in the pictures (though the one below comes close...), but my dark pink batter turned into a bright orange sponge! I decided to go ahead with it as I didn't have any other food colouring to use, but it did look like it might be a carrot battenberg! (Apparently paste colouring is far more reliable and less likely to fade/change colour.) The taste was incredible - a really light, delicate flavour and I was very happy with the combination of lavender, lemon and marzipan - will definitely use it again!  

Doesn't this look like it might be a carrot or orange flavoured cake?!

Opera Cake - Clandestine Cake Club Headingley

This is a cake for a Clandestine Cake Club event. The theme was 'Je Ne Sais Quoi - all things French' and after a bit of research, I decided to make an Opera Cake. This is the first cake recipe I feel I truly 'own' having adapted, merged and quite frankly, just winged it in places to create this cake (all based on the general principles of an Opera cake). I think there is a parallel that can be drawn with the work I used to do, in lab-based research. Once you understand the principles behind a protocol (or recipe) and why each step is there, that's when you can start to modify it for your own purposes. (Also for anyone familiar with lab work - if you can put together a Western blot, an Opera cake is, well, a piece of cake!)

This Clandestine Cake Club meeting was held at The Bowery in Headingley, and was quite a bit smaller than the last event I attended (I'm sure the truly horrible weather contributed to several cancellations, but an evening with coffee and cake in a snug coffeeshop was perfect!). 6 cakes, and 8 people in total meant we all got to try each cake, so I didn't have any regrets about being too full with 10 cakes still to try this time!

The spread of cakes - a cake version of a Tarte Tatin arrived still warm a few minutes after I took this picture, bringing the total to 6 cakes. The quite unusual Dan Lepard fig, red wine and honey loaf was probably my favorite, though the profiterole cake was lovely, and the other chocolate cakes were both gorgeous!

Opera cakes are quite impressive, and I was rather surprised by how easy it actually was - each individual element is something most people who bake will have made before, and assembling it is not as fiddly as you might think - the trick is in cutting the edge off the cake at the end, leaving a lovely neat profile, and eliminating untidy edges.

Don't be put off by the long list of ingredients/elements of the cake - the syrup and buttercream can both be made while the sponge is baking, and the ganache is very quick to make too.

Chocolate/almond sponge

4 eggs
220g butter
220g caster sugar
55g ground almonds
165g self raising flour
1tsp baking powder
4 Tbsp cocoa powder

Spoon a thin layer of the mixture into a greased, lined square/rectangular cake tin. You want this to be about 5mm thick or so - I used about 1/3 of the mix in a 10 x 6.5 inches (25x16cm). Try to get the top as smooth as possible, and the layer of batter as evenly spread - otherwise you will end up with a wonky cake! Bake at 180ºC for about 8-10 minutes - once the top looks cooked, you're probably about right - keep an eye on it and use a toothpick to check. I only have one tin the right size, so cooked the 3 layers one after the other, and that worked well. Once you take a layer out of the oven, use the greasproof paper to lift it out of the tin, and leave on a wire rack to cool.

Coffee syrup
150ml caster sugar
150ml water
2 heaped teaspoons instant coffee

Boil sugar and water together in a pan until the sugar has dissolved, add coffee powder and allow to cool. Reserve a little syrup for the buttercream.
Turn the cooled sponge layers over and remove the greaseproof paper, then pour the syrup over the sponge layers - the better coverage you can get the better.

Didn't quite manage to cover the entire cake - pretty pattern though! I'd turned the cake over, but left it on the paper to catch any run-through of syrup.

Coffee buttercream
150g Icing sugar
150g Butter
3 Tbsp Coffee Syrup

Cream the butter and sugar together in a mixing bowl. Add a little of the coffee syrup until the buttercream is the right flavour for you. Allow to cool in the fridge for a bit if too runny to spread on the cake. Put your first layer of sponge onto your serving plate (if you're serving it as a whole cake). Spread about half the buttercream over the sponge, and place the second layer on top of the buttercream. This is the fiddliest part of the process, and it helps to have someone else on hand to help if you're stuck with both hands full of cake and need something positioning! Spread the rest of the buttercream over this layer, and then place the final layer of sponge on top.

At this stage it looks a bit messy - not to worry though! Use the buttercream to get the layers as level as possible.

Chocolate ganache
100g Chocolate
45g Salted Butter
A few Tbsp smooth apricot jam, heated

Melt chocolate and butter together very gently in a double boiler (I use a plastic bowl that fits loosely over a pan of hot water without touching the water). Spread a thin layer of the heated apricot jam over the top of the cake, to ensure the ganache spreads evenly. Once the butter and chocolate are melted, stir together gently, allow to cool slightly, then pour over the cake. You may need to spread the ganache a little to ensure you cover the top of the cake completely. Dont' worry about drips down the side being untidy - this will be fixed in the next step!

Put the cake in the fridge for a few hours to allow the ganache to set.

Heat a sharp knife (preferably something like a butcher's knife) by running under some hot water. (Repeat between cuts). Slice off the edges of the cake, to leave a clean edge (you could cut into individual portions at this stage if required). Transfer the cake to the serving dish, and keep refigerated (in a sealed container if necessary) until about an hour before serving.

The final product! I think for presentation in the future I would do individual slices, which looked incredible (none survived long enough to photograph...).

And then sit back and enjoy all the compliments on your cake! 

Weekly Bake Off - Lemon Yogurt Cake

Yogurt is one of those words whose pronounciation divides people, rather like scone and data. I tend to flip between the two - having grown up in a culture with equal parts American and British influence, I have a confused vocabulary - after 5 years in the UK I still forget myself at times and refer to trousers as pants!

However you choose to pronounce it, this week's Weekly Bake Off recipe is a lovely cake. The yogurt does make it rather dense, especially if, like me, you don't bake it for quite long enough, but it has a lovely springy texture, and is beautifully moist.

Having learnt to not mess with Mary's recipes, the only modification I made was adding a squeeze of lemon juice to the cake batter to ensure a good lemony flavour to the cake. I also only had a 23cm diameter deep cake tin, so my cake is a bit thinner than it should be (and also explains why I slightly undercooked it - I should have gone for the 1hr15min, but got nervous about overcooking it at 1hr05min, so pulled it out early). As a result it sank a bit in the middle, and I ended up with a puddle of icing in the middle.

However, a day later, and we've already had a slice each for pudding after dinner, and a slice with tea this afternoon, so I'd judge this cake a success, and a nice moist change from a normal lemon sponge.
In other news, this Thursday I'll be attending my first Clandestine Cake Club meeting in Pudsey - I'm very excited to be meeting at least one other Weekly Baker, and many other cake-lovers!

Weekly Bake Off : Hokey-Pokey Coffee Cake

This week's Weekly Bake Off was a Hokey Pokey coffee cake. For those that aren't in the know (like me a week ago), Hokey Pokey is a praline made with nuts. The recipe specified walnuts, but I much prefer pecan nuts, and will use any excuse to eat them, so pecan nuts it was!

As with most of the recipes in the book, the cake was very easy to bake - another one bowl batter, and as my sanwich tins aren't quite 4cm deep, I used a bit less of the batter.

The praline was a bit more exciting - I made mine while the cake was in the oven, and was very nervous about it burning, but managed to get a lovely brown colour.

 Having watched people working with sugar and read quite a few blog posts with people's attempts at sugar craft, I knew not to stir the sugar/water while it was heating, and just swirled it in the pan.

Once it had turned the right colour, I tipped in the nuts, and that's the point where I wish I'd had a bit of warning about how fast the mixture would set - I barely had time to mix the nuts in and get them onto the greased baking tray before the sugar had completely hardened.

I had a few fun moments pulling long strands of sugar and thinking that it might be worth experimenting with some spun sugar in the future!

The cake was lovely and moist, with the nuts adding a nice texture, and the addition of the praline to the middle layer of icing was a very nice touch. This is definitely a cake to make when you want to impress someone (without too much work!)

Weekly Bake Off : Blueberry and Lemon Austrian Curd Cheesecake

Well, this week's Weekly Bake Off bake turned out to be sheer torture! We are meeting up with friends this evening for a regular music-related activity, and being rather useless at creating music, my contribution is normally cake related.

(And by music related - this video might give you an idea of what we do - record cover versions of songs, get drunk and then listen to them - below is a slightly un-seasonal example - if you look hard enough, you might spot Mr. Soup)

Having bought all my ingredients (and boy did it take a while to track down semolina in my supermarket - finally found it in the 'International' section!), I settled in on my own last night to get a bit of baking done. I'd decided to use blueberries instead of raisins, and since my ricotta came in 250g tubs, I scaled the recipe down ever so slightly to compensate for using 500g instead of 550g - fairly straightforward, and I just used 4 medium eggs instead of large ones. Other than that I followed the recipe to the letter, and once it was popped into the oven I got stuck into some TV.

After about 30 minutes, the smell was absolutely gorgeous! I rapidly started making plans to slice the cake as soon as it came out of the oven 'for photos', rather than this evening, and then of course, having cut it, I'd need to test it... A quick peek in the oven while putting some silver foil over to stop the top burning showed a promising looking top, and it brimming almost to the top of my (rather deep) cake tin. And then... I read the rest of the recipe! After baking, you turn the oven off and leave the cheesecake in for another hour. Then you take it out and allow it to cool completely. Obviously I was not going to be eating cheesecake last night - and yet I still had to sit and smell it for the rest of the evening!

Here's the picture I took after it came out of the oven - it turned out to be too hot to take the bottom of the tin off, even after an hour cooling in the oven, and another hour out of the oven, so I've left it in the tin (it's also easier to transport that way!) (sides removed for the picture).

After the cake was transported from Soup HQ to the secret location where the music event took place, it was served up to a hungry crowd who were very appreciative - even a non-cheesecake lover (yes, there are such people in this world...) had to admit that it was a rather nice cake.  Another convert to the cause of the cheesecake?  Only time will tell, but when the cake tastes so good and looks his nice, I think we can count them as won over...

Weekly Bake Off : Apple and Almond Dessert Cake

This is a very late and rather short entry for this week's Bake-Off as Mr Soup and I have been away since Thursday in a cosy little cottage in North Yorkshire, celebrating my birthday.

As this recipe is more of a pudding than a tea accompaniment, I decided to make individual sized cakes, and jazz it up a little with toffee-coated apples in the middle. (Inspired by a lovely sticky toffee pudding eaten this weekend). To do this I melted equal quantities of sugar and butter in a frying pan until it went a nice golden colour, added the sliced apples, tossed them in the syrupy mix and cooked for a couple of minutes. I allowed the caramelised apples to cool, and then layered them as specified in the recipe. This meant that the middle of the spongey pudding had a gorgeous toffee-apple flavour.

I misjudged the depth of the sponge in the individual ramekins I used to bake them in, so had a few overflowing puddings, but a few turned out alright - just the thing for a Sunday evening treat!
That's Jack Ryan in the background - he wants cake! (and an end to the drug trafficking and high level corruption, but mostly cake.)

Weekly Bake Off : Farmhouse Orange Victoria Sandwich

After last week's fantastic chocolate cake I decided to follow this week's Weekly Bake Off recipe to the letter, and was very pleased with the result. Before Christmas I made a rather large batch of Orange, Lemon and Brandy marmalade (a big hit in Christmas parcels), and so I had a good supply of marmalade on hand.

The sponge was very easy, and my new 18cm cake tins were the right size (they looked rather teeny next to my deep 23cm tin, and I was a little worried that there might be overflowing cake, but they were just right).

I was generous with the marmalade in the icing, and found the tang of the oranges and lemons a good contrast to the sweetness of the cake.

All in all a good, moist sponge cake with minimal fuss - I'd recommend the recipe if you're in a hurry but still want to impress with something a little different!

Weekly Bake Off : Divine Chocolate Birthday Cake

Well, my birthday is still a couple of weeks off, but I had no objections to the choice of cake this week for the Weekly-Bake-Off. In my opinion, any recipe that has a 300(ish) grams of chocolate, 6 eggs, sugar, almonds and coffee, can't go wrong!

I used a mix of dark and milk chocolate to get an average cocoa solid percentage of about 42%. Having watched Heston Blumenthal's chocolate masterclass episode a couple of weeks ago, I treated my chocolate gently. I was a bit concerned about the recipe's instructions to add the coffee directly to the melted chocolate (Heston's demonstration of how chocolate seizes when water is added to it had me panicking a bit!), so I instead added it to the choclate/almond/eggy mixture as I folded that together. I didn't make any other changes to the recipe, and baked it for exactly 50 minutes, with only a quick peek at about 45 minutes.

The top seemed a bit crispy and had risen slightly lopsided, so I trimmed it, flipped it upside down and iced it that way up.

I only had salted butter for the icing, but that turned out to be A Very Good Thing (again, Mr Blumenthal had mentioned that salt accentuates the taste of chocolate), and the icing has a lovely, super chocolately taste, as well as being beautifully glossy. I'd decided to use some fresh cherries to decorate the cake, and dipped these in the melted chocolate (before the butter was added) and set them onto baking paper to set slightly. Once the chocolate icing was poured onto the cake, I placed the cherries - I'm very pleased with the way they look like they're half immersed in a chocolate sea!

The cake tastes wonderful, has a good, dense texture and is very indulgent. I'll be making this again when something special is called for. This first picture was taken with my phone's camera.

A better resolution one was taken once the camera's batteries were charged, but by that point quite a bit of the cake was missing! I stored the cake in the fridge, but would suggest before serving taking it out and letting it come to room temperature as the texture of the icing is much nicer.

Weekly Bake-Off : Maple Syrup Cake

I won't be writing much about this week's Weekly Bake Off bake, mostly because I'm typing this in the last 10 minutes of my lunch hour! This cake really illustrated to me the value of participating in the Bake-Off - I wouldn't ever have picked this to bake myself, but it was a spectacularly lovely tasting cake, with the flavours of orange, pecan nuts and maple syrup balanced beautifully (I was under the impression right up to writing my shopping list that the recipe called for walnuts and was thrilled to see it was pecan nuts - my favorite). My cake didn't rise quite as much as everyone else's, and had a bit of a dip in the middle - I blame peeking at 1hour to check its' progress (my oven doesn't have a light)!

I decided to use an orange butter icing instead of the cream icing, as I am not the biggest fan of cream cakes and was very happy with the result, even though you can't see the middle layers, there's a nice bit of orangey sweetness as a highlight.

Experimenting a bit with photos taken on my iPod using Instamatic (background is a lovely green chopping board from Ikea!).

Weekly Bake Off - Devil's Food Cake

I recently discovered a fantastic online community challenge - the Weekly Bake Off. This is a weekly challenge to bake a recipe (announced on a Monday) from Mary Berry's 100 Cakes and Bakes. Unfortunately I found out about it halfway through December, during the break for the Christmas holidays, so had to wait till the New Year to participate. (Though after receiving the book for Christmas I couldn't wait, and did make one recipe from a previous Bake-Off - Meringue roulade.)

This week's recipe was Devil's Food Cake. Since it was my first bake, I decided to stick (almost) exactly to the recipe. The cake part was fairly straightforward - when mixing the butter/sugar mix with the dry and wet ingredients I was a bit worried that the texture was quite runny (started off almost moussey). I added a heaped spoonful of coffee to the cocoa but kept the liquid volume the same - next time I'll add more as I could taste coffee in the batter, but not really in the final cake. I did need the full 45 minutes to cook them, and the texture of the sponges when they came out of the oven seemed very light and fluffy. My cake tins are closer to 25cm than 20cm, so they were a little thin.

The icing was the most exciting bit of this bake - I've never made American frosting before (in fact I didn't know it existed - the recipe does remind me of Italian meringue - anyone know if there is a difference?) Despite that I did alter the recipe slightly - added a pinch of cream of tartar, and a little vanilla extract the sugar syrup. This gave me a chance to try out my new sugar thermometer (I was really spoilt this Christmas!), and I'm pleased to report it went fairly smoothly. Mr Soup helped pouring in the syrup, and we both ended up splattered with sticky meringue (so much so that we stuck together after a hug!). The instructions said to ice the cake quickly as the mixture sets quite fast, but I think I would have had a better result waiting for a little while for it to start getting a little stickier. (or perhaps it was because I hadn't got the mix stiff enough?)

So here is the final product :

As you can see, the icing was a bit runny and slid a bit - not too much, there was still a good thick layer on top, but nothing like the picture in the book! It set crispy on the outside, but stayed gooey underneath, so after slicing it the next day, it oozed down even more (though not as much as it looks in the picture - the top layer of cake is the same thickness as the bottom). I think the mixture probably needed to be whipped even stiffer, or perhaps the sugar syrup needed to be slightly hotter.

Final verdict on taste - the icing was a bit too sweet for my taste, but had a lovely sticky marshmallowy feel. The cake itself was gorgeous - lovely and light and chocolatey. I'll make this again, but will probably use a different icing - probably a coffee flavoured one!