Weekly Bake-Off : Cappuccino Cake

Cake, we've missed you!

After a summer-holiday induced hiatus, we're back this week with the Weekly Bake-Off! This is a Good Thing, as there had been a couple of comments at work about it being a while since there had been cake!

As I'm now cycling to work, and a ride on a bike is not particularly conducive to cake-staying-togetherness, I made this on Tuesday evening to take in on the bus on Wednesday (after my Orange Wednesday movie night I prefer not to cycle home). The recipe for this week was Cappuccino Cake (p20), and it was very easy to throw together on a work night - the mix was made all in one bowl, and baked in 2 deep 20cm tins (I only have 1 deep tin, so did 2 batches, but I think just making 1 deep cake and slicing it would have worked as well).

I'm not a big fan of cream for icing, but decided not to mess with the recipe - and am very glad I didn't! Flavouring the cream with coffee (no sugar added) made for a light, tasty, slightly bitter (to offset the sweet cake) icing without the heaviness I normally associate with cream cake. The cake itself was light and moist - this might become my go-to chocolate sponge recipe in fact.

Mr Soup is more of a savoury man but even he absolutely loved this cake - when I was getting ready to take it to work I was told to leave 2 slices for him! Everyone at work enjoyed it too - a very good introduction back into the Weekly Bake Off routine.

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.

How I almost killed someone with cake...

This week's Weekly Bake Off was a Madeira cake. I don't think I've ever actually had a Madeira cake before, and so I was keen to try it out.

The recipe is very straightforward - a variation on a basic sponge, with ground almonds and lemon zest givin it the distinctive madeira taste. Instead of icing, you sprinkle some citron peel (I used standard candied peel) on the top of the cake partway through baking.

Pretty and tasty, but potentially lethal!

This is quite a pretty cake, once you get over the fact that there is no icing, and the ground almonds give the cake a denser, moister feel than a normal sponge. I made the cake on Thursday night to take to a regular event we attend with a big group of friends on Friday night.

Needless to say, in addition to 3 cakes, a fair amount of alcohol was consumed, and it was sheer luck that someone asked me what goes into a madeira cake as the cakes were being cut. It turns out that one of our friends is allergic to nuts, and if he hadn't heard me saying their were ground almonds in the cake, he may very well have had a slice! (eek!) I didn't ask just how bad his reaction could have been but this serves as a reminder that when baking with nuts, especially 'hidden' nuts, you should always warn everyone that might eat your baked goods!

Dark Indulgent Chocolate and Cherry Brownies

This week's Weekly Bake Off choice was a chocolate and walnut brownie recipe. Not being a big fan of walnuts, I was initially just going to replace them with pecan nuts, and I'm sure that would have been a very nice substitution. However, I recently made some chocolate biscuits with sour, dried cherries in them, and they were probably the nicest biscuits I've ever made! So the choice was made - chocolate and cherry brownies it would be.

I halved the ingredients specified in the book after seeing just how much chocolate was involved - MB is not shy with the size of her bakes! I did a direct substitution for the walnuts, and used the same weight of cherries as I would have walnuts.

The recipe was fairly straightforward - I was a bit worried by the rather small amount of flour in the recipe, but the brownies turned out really well - they are a good moist bake, and the bitter cherries set off the chocolate very well (this may have been a bit too sweet otherwise I think). And even though the cherries are dried, they become moist during the baking. 

Strawberry Ripple Cheesecake - Weekly Bake Off and Clandestine Cake Club

I'm having trouble not sitting down and eating this right now!

This week's Weekly Bake Off recipe was the American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake, which I actually made a couple of months ago for my first Clandestine Cake Club outing. It was absolutely gorgeous and I felt it ticked all the boxes of my cheesecake requirements - tangy, sweet and sticky. I did feel that there was too little biscuit for the base, and so doubled the amount - I also used half ginger biscuits, half digestive for a nice tangy base.

Now coincidentally this week I have another Clandestine Cake Club event. I also have a Herman to bake (another post tomorrow!), and so I decided that rather than making 3 cakes, I'd recycle the recipe for the American Ripple cheesecake, but modify it for the CCC theme - Favourite Tipple, using some homemade strawberry jam and strawberry vodka.

Last year I really got into making jams and the Soup kitchen saw strawberry, bramble and port, spiced plum and bilberry jams, and an assortment of jellies (crab apple and chilli is my favourite). I made the strawberry jam using a very similar recipe to the bramble and port jelly - (just without the port!). The strawberry vodka was made by soaking strawberries in a bottle of vodka with a cup of sugar. After about a month, the vodka was drained off the strawberries and passed through a filter into a clean bottle.

And now onto the cheesecake - I've changed the recipe quite a bit, so will be listing the ingredients and method in a bit more detail than I normally do for the Weekly Bake Off posts.

Ingredients

Base
200g digestive biscuits
100g melted butter

Filling :
600g cream cheese
100g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 large eggs
100g strawberry jam
50ml strawberry vodka

Topping :
150g strawberry jam
100ml strawberry vodka

Method

Grease a sprung tin (mine is a 23cm tin)

Crush the biscuits and mix with the melted butter. Layer the biscuits on the bottom of the tin and press down. Put in the fridge while preparing the filling to allow to set.

Beat the cream cheese and caster sugar together, then mix in the vanilla essence and eggs.
Spoon half the mixture onto the biscuit base in big dollops.
Puree the strawberry jam and vodka together in a blender (my jam had great big chunks of fruit in it so this was really important!)
Mix the jammy mix into the remaining filling, then pour this onto the rest of the filling. Swirl together.
Bake in a preheated oven at 160ºC for about 30 minutes (you should be able to see the edges pulling away from the sides of the tin slightly).
Cool completely.
Blend together the topping ingredients - not as much as the filling - it's nice to keep some chunks of strawberries in the topping.
Pour the topping over the cheesecake, cover the tin with clingfilm and refigerate until ready for serving.
Release the sides of the tin, transfer off the base and onto a plate, and serve.
Enjoy!

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!

Happy Easter! Simnel Cake

After last week's successful Hot Cross Buns, I was very happy to see that this week's Weekly Bake Off was a Simnel Cake. I only discovered Simnel Cake a couple of years ago, and am very much in favour of the idea - Easter is generally about a month after the Christmas Cake runs out, and with Spring in full bloom, this lighter fruit cake, with the addition of marzipan matches the season perfectly.

My round sprung cake tin is unfortunately a 23cm tin, not the 20cm that Mary Berry suggests, but having heard a few other Weekly Bakers discussing their 20cm tins overflowing during the bake, that probably wasn't a bad thing! It did mean that my marzipan for the middle was a bit thinner than I would have liked (likewise the marzipan on the top), but it seems to have oozed into the cake nicely. (In fact you can see the difference between the top and the bottom in the picture of the slice - I flipped the cake over to ice it, so the top layer in the picture was actually the bottom as the cake baked, with the marzipan oozing it's way into the batter as the cake baked.)

This was my first attempt working with marzipan as decoration, and not just a layer beneath royal icing (and to be honest I've only done that once!), so I used shop-bought, and apart from some initial issues with the middle layer sticking and the fact that I had to roll it quite thin to cover the larger surface of the cake, it went quite smoothly - I'm feeling a bit more confident about my upcoming Battenberg for a work challenge.

Instead of putting the cake under the grill to turn the marzipan golden I used one of my birthday presents instead, and had a bit of fun with my handheld blowtorch - I'm going to have to get around to making creme brulee soon - having seen how effective the blowtorch was on the marzipan I can't wait to try it out on sugar!

The final decoration of 11 marzipan balls went on, but unfortunately the apostles' numbers were quickly reduced by Mr Soup and I having 2 slices! I really enjoyed making this cake and am looking forward to my next slice with a cup of tea tomorrow morning!

Weekly Bake Off - Hot Cross Buns

With Easter rapidly approaching I've shown great restraint (mostly inspired by the huge amount of cake there has been in the house) in not buying any hot cross buns yet. Mr Soup and I are big fans, and quite capable of eating a pack together in the space of a day, so it's better not to have the temptation there...
But after this week's Weekly Bake Off challenge, I suspect that while Hot Cross Buns will remain on the menu, shop-bought ones won't, as they simply don't measure up to this tasty recipe.

 Having seen everyone else's pictures start to go up through the week, I was rather keen on having some Hot Cross Buns for breakfast on Saturday morning. In order to get the timings right, I made the mix, and left it to rise for the first time overnight in a warmed oven (reasoning that the oven would cool after an hour or so, and the yeast would not get completely out of control). This strategy worked, and on Saturday morning I woke to a big bowl full of risen dough. This was kneaded for a few minutes, and then I made the buns and put them to rise for a second time. Abking was only about 15 minutes, so about an hour after getting up, we had hot, fresh Hot Cross Buns - pure indulgence.

About the only thing I will change when making these again is to add a bit more spice.

Weekly Bake Off - Jammy Swiss Cakes and Clandestine Cake Club

I've fallen a little behind with blogging, but with 2 bakes last week, I had to prioritise!

First was the inaugural meeting of the Pudsey and West Leeds Clandestine Cake Club - this was organised by Sharon Clarkson, and on seeing that the places were going fast I signed up for both the first March meeting and the May meeting (this one booked up in about 2 hours!). Since I didn't sign up to take a guest, and apart from Sharon (twitter friend), I didn't know anyone I was a bit nervous, but I shouldn't have worried - after turning up with my American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake a bit early, the evening went incredibly well. I was stunned by the number of cakes, and will have to go to future meetings with a strategy of only eating the smallest sliver of each to get a taste! One of the best things about the evening (apart from all the new cakey people I met) was at the end of the evening we all piled our cake tins up with leftover cakes - thus benefitting Mr Soup (who had been a bit grumpy about me making cake he wasn't going to get to taste!).

The event made the Yorkshire Evening Post, but I'm really looking forward to the article in a local magazine where the reported/photographer took pictures of all the attendees with their cakes - a far better image of the spirit of the event!

And so on to my Weekly Bake Off entry for this week - Jammy Swiss cakes. The recipe uses apricot jam, but with the vast surplus of homemade jam in the house, I decided to use (my homemade, delicious) blackcurrant jelly and strawberry jam instead. These little cakes wouldn't have caught my eye normally, but I'm very glad I made them. Piping the mixture into the cupcake cases took a bit of work, and negotiation with the piping bag (my nozzles are really for icing and were a bit small for the thickish batter), but once they were cooked, they were little melting parcels of deliciousness - not too sweet biscuity base set off nicely by the jam (they remind me of Viennese whirls). Mr Soup reckons they are a way to his heart, so I'm keeping this recipe on the top of the pile! And despite my rather wonky piping, they did look very pretty once baked and jammified...

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 : Pineapple and Cherry Loaf

I was initially a little dubious about this week's Weekly Bake Off recipe, perhaps because of the pineapples (I'm not sure why - I love pineapple!). For those who aren't big pineapple fans, I left mine as fairly big chunks, and still don't think I could taste them - I think they contribute moisture and sweetness, without being too acidic or noticeably pineappley.

Luckily I decided to stick with it and got everything together by Thursday evening when I had some nervous energy to burn off. Perhaps not the best of ideas as I managed to combine 2 different recipes by accident - I'd already made sure I had enough cherries for this recipe, and only needed to measure out the sultanas, which were bought on the way home. When weighing them out, I looked at the recipe on page 88 instead (Pineapple and sultana cake), and measured out far too many sultanas! Luckily the rest of the recipe is pretty much identical (except the Cherry Loaf has more cherries, so my version just has more fruit in it than either of Mary's). Having read some other comments about this recipe I wasn't fanatical about getting the pineapple dry before including it, and so my loaf turned out nice and moist.

I would definitely advise leaving this cake until the next day before slicing it - I couldn't resist and cut my first slice when it was still warm - it was delicious, but very crumbly, and benefits from sitting in the fridge for a few hours to firm up a bit.

Mr Soup is a big fan of fruit cakes - our first Christmas together his mother told me it was now my responsibility to make him his Christmas cake - she used to make him his own to take home! He really enjoyed this cake, and will be asking for it in the future.

Weekly Bake Off - Cupcakes

I have a confession to make. A dire and dreadful confession...

Despite being an avid baker, I'm just not that into cupcakes. The rest of the world seems cupcake mad, and looking at the other beautiful entries on this week's Weekly Bake Off, I can almost see the appeal. They are lovely little things, but I can't quite get over the feeling that they're not for me. Cakes should be large and substantial, and fill a plate!

That's not to say I don't make cupcakes when the occasion calls for it. It just doesn't call that often.
That's why this week's bake wasn't a huge thrill for me - and with my preference for coffee or chocolate flavours outweighed by the necessity of following MB's recipe exactly, I wasn't terribly excited about the final product, which is why despite making these on Wednesday and having friends round to eat them on Thursday the blog post is only being typed on Sunday evening!

The bake was easy - throw everything in a bowl, mix, spoon into casings and bake. I'd misjudged how much icing sugar I had, so had to scale down my icing to about 1/3 of the quantity, but since the cupcakes were quite sweet anyway, I think a thinner layer of icing worked well.

Any baking book should have a cupcake recipe in it, but I'm glad this is out of the way now. Onto more exciting bakes!

(I made the Orange Scotch Pancakes (p127) this morning for breakfast - no time for a photo as they were scoffed almost as fast as they came out of the frying pan! Will definitely be making them again.)

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!