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. 

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.