WARNING! This cake contains your monthly calorie allowance (probably).

On Saturday my good friend George came to visit. It was the first time we had seen each other for two and a half years. Such occasions I decided, deserve a cake. A really yummy and fattening cake. After flicking through my recipe cook entitled 'Chocolate', I settled on the White Chocolate Truffle Cake.

The sponge base is made by whisking eggs and sugar until really light and fluffy and then sifting and folding in plain flour. A small amount of melted white chocolate is then folded in and the mixture is baked in a springform tin for about 25 minutes. I don't know if i was too rough with my folding, but it came out a pretty flat base. If I were to make this again, i'd just make a regular sponge base. 

The topping is...wait for it....

300ml double cream
350g of melted white chocolate

AND

250g of mascarpone cheese

Bring the cream to the boil, add the chocolate (broken up into small pieces, it'll melt in the cream), once this is all melty and smooth, leave to cool a bit then mix through the cheese. Pour onto your sponge base and leave to chill in the fridge for at least a couple of hours. Decorate as you wish. I chose to peel chocolate with a veg peeler and scatter it over. 

The result is a very rich, sweet but yummy cake. George liked it. 

Pie.

For a long time I have been nervous about making pastry. Mrs Marsland made us do it at school and I sucked at it. I can now say however, that this is not not the case! I'm not amazing at it yet but I can stop buying the ready made stuff.

The pie above is a mince and onion pie from The Great British Book of Baking. I followed the recipe to the letter and while I really liked the pastry (it has cheese in it) the filling wasn't great. It was a bit dry and bland. It would be much better with proper steak bits in an aley gravy. I have also since invested in a proper pie dish as that little roasting dish was not ideal.

I have also been practising making my cupcakes prettier and I fixed my home made cake stand. This was the result. 

Sweet and Savoury.

On Saturday the house of MoshJohn had a joint birthday party. Because we are brilliant hosts John and I baked. John made lovely scones and I made cupcakes. I was initially going to make thirtysomething sweet cupcakes but because our lovely friend Elise made us a 5 TIER CHOCOLATE/PRALINE/ALMOND CAKE! I decided to try making savoury cupcakes to even out the sugar to savoury ratio. 


The results were as follows. 

The savoury cupcakes are pine nut and red pepper, I think they don't look very appetising but they tasted pretty good. Their texture is more bready than cakey, but that's fine with me. 


If you would like to make them. Here's how. 

• In butter gently fry for about 5 minutes, 2 finely chopped shallots, 2 diced red peppers and 2 cloves of garlic. Remove from pan and leave to cool. Gently toast 100g of pine nuts in the pan. 
• In a large bowl mix 125g of butter with 125g of plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 125g ground almonds, lots of pepper and 4 beaten eggs. 
• Add the red pepper mixture and pine nuts. Mix well. 
• Divide into cupcake cases and bake for 30 minutes at 180 Celsius. 

The recipe says it makes 12 but I think I got 17 in the end. If you wish you can pop a bay leaf in the top before baking for prettiness. 

Cup Cakes 2.0

I learnt from all my previous mistakes and this was the outcome. Pretty cupcakes on a cake stand made by yours truly. Here's hoping I can recreate them for Saturday's party. 

Pretty Cupcakes Test 1.

I have probably said before (at least in person if you have met me) that I am not creative or artistic. I have never been good at drawing, painting and all of my clay things at school just looked like lumps with holes prodded into it. I am trying however, to make my cakes look pretty and I think cupcakes are probably the best starting point for me because they don't have to have lots of intricate icing work to look great. 

Previous attempts at decorating my cupcakes have always ended pretty poorly and for this I have always blamed not having a wide enough nozzle to pipe with. 

You can see here that the lines are not defined and it's all a red splodgy mess. 

Today I tried once again to make my cupcakes look pretty and this time with my 1M star tipped piping nozzle. From what I could find out it seems to be the best one for getting the big swirly swirls to top delicious sponginess. This is what mine ended up like. 

I don't think they are a terrible first attempt, they certainly taste good. But I have learnt a few things. 

1. My butter cream was too wet. This led to gloopy peaks. 
2. I piped at an angle, I think you are supposed to hold the bag completely upright. 
3. Cake glitter needs to be in some kind of shaking device. It stains your fingers and does not give an even sparkle if you just pinch and scatter with your finger. 
4. Make double the amount of butter cream you usually would. What normally covers 12+ cupcakes only did 7 today. 
5. I started from the outside and worked my way in. I should of just watched this lady first. 

Baking backlog.

Honey Wholemeal Cake
I've wanted to make this cake for ages, but Josh has never seemed keen when i've suggested it in the past as he prefers the chocolatey variety, but when our lovely F1s (what the hell is one of them?) at work finished their stint with us, it was a great excuse to bake it for them to say goodbye and thanks for not being crap to work with. 

The recipe comes from Hugh's 'River Cottage Everday' (buy here) and is so simple to make and more importantly, delicious. 

• Line/grease a springform tin. Preheat oven to 170 Celsius.
• Beat 300g of butter with 250g of golden caster sugar until light and fluffy.
• Beat in 4 eggs (one at a time, adding a spoonful of flour with each). The flour should be wholemeal self raising flour and you need 150g in total.
• Fold in 150g of ground almonds and then sift in remaining flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder. Fold in gently. 
• Scrape mixture into the tin, sprinkle with flaked almonds.
• Bake for 45 mins.
• When done and still warm, drizzle over 4 tablespoons of runny honey. Leave to cool on a wire rack before turning out.

If you can't get wholemeal self raising flour, just use use ordinary wholemeal flour and double the amount of baking powder.

Christmas!

I really love Christmas and I am not ashamed to say it's mostly because I get presents and I can eat as much as I want, when I want. Admittedly, I do this for most of the year anyway, but at Christmas I can really go for it. Christmas in the MoshJohn household was just Josh and I eating loads, drinking and watching films. For Christmas day we decided we should try to bake an amazing gooey-on-the-inside-chocolate-pudding. This was the result.

Taken from The Great British Book of Baking it is surprisingly easy to make for a pretty impressive pudding. For 6 individual puddings (we used these moulds) simply...

• Heat oven to 200 Celsius and put a baking tray in to heat up.
• Melt 300g of really good dark chocolate. Leave to cool until you need it.
• Beat until creamy 75g of butter. Beat in 125g of caster sugar with 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence. Beat until light and fluffy.
• Beat in 4 eggs, one at a time.
• Sift in 50g of plain flour. Pour in melted chocolate. Mix in very gently. Finally, mix in 4 tablespoons of milk.
• Divide equally into the pots and bake for 10-11 minutes.
• Serve immediately. We found that Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough goes perfectly as a side to them. Nom.

The recipe in the book says they can be kept chilled in the fridge for up to 4 hours if you want to prepare them in advance. We found (seeing as there was only 2 of us and 6 puddings) that they keep and bake perfectly well for 2 days in the fridge. Just bake for a minute longer if they have been chilled.

On a final Christmassy topic, I received these baking/cooking related pressies, so expect lots of chocolatey posts and veggie posts in the future (the Princess book was a jokey present from my Mum).

Eat my cakeing Birthday Cake!

On the 18th of November it was my lovely (but very hyper) friend's 23rd birthday. Seeing as she made me a delicious praline chocolate cake for my 23rd and a giant blue cookie, it seemed only right that i baked her a cake in return. 


I thought I would try to be a little more adventurous than my signature chocolate fudge cake and attempt a tiered cake. The recipe I found was this:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5819/white-and-dark-chocolate-cake


It seemed that it would be straight forward enough that an amateur like me could manage it but that it would be impressive enough for a birthday celebration.


Overall it was pretty simple to make, the only difficulty I found was in accurately halving my white chocolate sponge mixture to create the two white chocolate layers. Only one of my white chocolate sponges were usable, so my four tiered cake became a three tiered cake. 


Cake decorating is definitely not yet my strong point, but chocolate ganache can cover even the biggest cracks in badly cut sponge and after melted white chocolate is piped over, I don't think in the end that it looked too bad.

Taste wise, I prefer my signature chocolate fudge cake, it has a lighter sponge, whereas this one was quite dense and the amount of ganache made with plain chocolate meant it was quite bitter, which I guess it a subjective thing. I prefer sweeter chocolate. The important thing was that the birthday girl liked it and that it was not a complete disaster.


Next blog- samosas for a vegan bride and altering a dress that I bought from ebay that was no where like what the description said.