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).