Home Farm Cakes

Oh dear, poor old blog.  This time last year I said I was going to start blogging again... and now, a year later, I still keep telling myself I should.  I'm just checking in, really.  I'm still here.  I've been busy, and many many crappy things have happened this year, but the year is nearly over and I'm hopeful that 2014 will be a much better year.  Maybe I'll even find time to blog properly again, who knows? 

In the meantime, I happened to have a spare five minutes and set up a little Facebook page for the celebration cakes and cupcakes I make and decorate.  I don't do it as a business, just as a hobby for friends and family, and I certainly don't claim to be any good, but I do enjoy it.  Check it out, if you have a minute - the address is www.facebook.com/homefarmcakes (named after where we live).  

Cake class

I just found these photos on a memory card and thought I'd share them with you, even though they're really rather poor.  

A month or two ago I attended a class at Sugar Celebrations in Swindon, which was a belated Christmas present to myself.  It was an all day class where we learned how to carve a cake, stack it up with dowels and buttercream, decorate it with sugarpaste/fondant as well as some royal icing, and do a bit of modelling.  Lots of techniques in one day.  I was quite pleased with the results; I just wish I had a close up of the little people to show you because I really liked their little faces!  I had to buy a 30cm tin from Lakeland to bake the cake in because I didn't have one big enough, but hopefully I'll get plenty of use from it.

The cake accompanied my husband to work on the Monday morning where it was devoured by his colleagues!

I've done plenty of very simple one-tier cakes, but now I have a better idea of how to stack them, I really fancy doing a wedding cake or multi-layer birthday cake.  Perhaps I should throw a party just to have an excuse to make a big, awesome cake - what do you think?

Fat-free chocolate espresso brownies - for Coffee Set Match

As you may have seen from my previous post, I'm currently following Weight Watchers and have so far lost two stone. Now I have no intention of only creating Weight Watchers-friendly recipes for the Coffee Set Match challenge, but I thought I'd kick off with something a little bit less guilt-inducing than usual, so we can all save a few extra calories for when we really need them! It's our friend Mike's birthday on Monday and we are going for a yummy Indian meal so I'm trying to be good for a few days beforehand and save myself... anyway do give these a try, they don't taste anything like diet food whatsoever! 

Ingredients:

100g self raising flour

60g cocoa powder (I like Bourneville)

Pinch of salt

75g soft brown sugar

2 whole eggs, beaten

2 egg whites

1 shot of espresso (I used a Lavazza Appassionatamente capsule), left to cool a bit

Preheat the oven to 180ºC and grease and flour a square 18cm tin. I've been using Dr Oetker Cake Release Spray recently which is very good indeed and can be found in Tesco etc.

Sieve the flour, cocoa powder and salt together (or if you're lazy, like me, tip it all into a bowl and use a whisk to mix it all together which will get rid of 95% of the lumps). Mix in the two beaten eggs with a big spoon, followed by the shot of espresso. The mixture will be very thick.

Take a separate bowl and make sure it is free of grease. Rubbing a cut lemon over the inside is a good way to make sure there's no trace of grease - a little tip for you! Whisk the two egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Tip in the sugar and continue to whisk until the stiff peaks look lovely and glossy. Resist the temptation to eat the lovely beige-coloured raw meringue, difficult though it may be.

Add a third of the meringue to the rest of the mixture and fold it in gently. This will loosen up the mixture. Fold in the remaining two thirds, nice and gently, being careful not to overmix as this will knock all the air out of the meringue.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 14-15 minutes. The top should be set but still just slightly squidgey. Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out and cut into squares. 

These are yummiest when still warm from the oven, but do try and eat them on the same day as you make them (yes, I'm sure you can manage this difficult task) as they do stale quite quickly. However they freeze extremely well, wrapped in cling film, and if you zap a frozen brownie in the microwave for thirty seconds it will be defrosted and warmed to perfection.

I hope you enjoy these brownies, but check back soon as I also plan to make some cappuccino brownies next week that are most definitely not diet friendly!

Don't forget to enter Lavazza's competition to win some fab prizes!

Boiled fruit cake - an oldie but a goodie

Lurpak recently got in touch to ask me to come up with a recipe for their website - they wanted an alternative to the traditional Christmas cake. So I thought of my favourite boiled fruit cake recipe - the recipe is years old (I think it was originally my mum's) and I've tinkered with it, and it's a great one for using up whatever you've got in your cupboards!

For the cake in the photo, I used glacé cherries, raisins, sultanas, cranberries, apricots and mixed peel. Best of all, it's incredibly easy and all you will have to wash up afterwards is one saucepan, one wooden spoon and the cake tin! So if you've left it to the last minute and haven't time to make a traditional rich fruit cake, or can't be bothered with the necessary care and feeding involved, this is the recipe for you. I used to make it regularly during my last chef job, and it was always a big seller.

Find it here, on the Lurpak website.

I don't know why boiled fruit cakes aren't more popular, but they really seem to have gone out of fashion, despite Nigella coming up with a chocolate version. They need a revival! Have you ever made one?

Upside Down Cake - about as retro as it gets!

Ages ago I made a pineapple upside down cake at work. The height of 1970s sophistication (or was it 1960s? before my time anyway), the upside down cake is sadly no longer as popular as it once was. Perhaps it's because fewer people eat tinned fruit these days? I don't know. Anyway I found the recipe in an old Good Housekeeping cookbook from the early 70s that used to belong to my boss's mother, and I liked it so much that I snapped a quick iPhone photo of it and was going to share the recipe on my blog.



Except I completely forgot about it.

Until today, when I went to a car boot fair and found a copy of the book (in much better condition, it even still has its dust jacket) for a pound. Obviously I snapped it up, and I remembered that I was supposed to share this lovely recipe with you. So here it is, in its original Imperial measurements because I feel it would be wrong to convert them, and in its original wording with my comments in parenthesis.

Pineapple & Gingerbread Upside Down Cake

Ingredients:

1/2 lb butter
9 oz demerara sugar
1 15oz can pineapple rings (the equivalent size can nowadays is 432g)

2 eggs
10 oz self raising flour
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
4 tbsps milk

Preheat the oven to 350ºF/gas 4/180ºC. Grease a baking tin about 8" square. (I used a 10" round tin. Don't use a loose-based tin because it will leak!)

Melt 2oz butter, add 3oz demerara sugar and dissolve, add 3 tbsp pineapple juice from the tin. Bring to the boil and cook until a thick syrup is formed. (I did this in the microwave, by the way - it only took a couple of minutes.) Pour this into the tin and cover with slices of pineapple. (I also added glacé cherries in the holes in the pineapple ring, which is how I always remember seeing upside down cake.)

Cream the remaining butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs and fold in the dry ingredients to give a soft consistency. Pour this mixture over the pineapple and bake in the centre of the oven for 1 1/4 hours (in fact I found it only took about 50 minutes in a fan oven, so be careful).

This cake smelled absolutely gorgeous while it was baking; I reckon it's worth making just so you can have a sniff!

My boot sale find :)

There are lots of lovely retro recipes in this book, so look out for more of them in future.

We Should Cocoa April challenge - chocolate battenburg

Battenburg, battenberg. How on earth do you spell it? Anyway the theme for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, as hosted by Choclette, was marzipan. I love the stuff. Originally I thought of doing a chocolate stollen but for some reason I just didn't fancy it today, so a chocolate battenburg it was.


Normally I'd have split the mix in half after creaming the butter and sugar and adding the eggs, and added flour to one half and a mixture of flour and cocoa to the other. However I thought that I should probably use proper chocolate in the spirit of the challenge, so I made the whole basic batter, split it in half and added melted chocolate to one half. I don't like it much, I have to admit. I just don't love this cake (although the vanilla bits are lovely!), and for that reason I'm not going to write the recipe, because I don't want anyone to make one of my recipes and be disappointed. Saying that, my husband has gleefully stuffed a slice of it into his mouth and given me a very enthusiastic thumbs up, so perhaps I'm just a bit hard on myself.


I like the little flowers! I made them from the marzipan offcuts with a flower press tool I bought at the Country Living Spring Fair.

So this is my entry and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what everyone else does, because marzipan isn't the very easiest ingredient to pair with chocolate so it should be interesting!

The official birthday cake

Further to the post below, and with apologies to my sister in law's mum for this terrible photo which doesn't do her creation justice, this is the "official" birthday cake for my mum in law's sixtieth birthday yesterday.

I meant to ask for the recipe because the cake underneath was lovely - a really moist, substantial-but-not-too-heavy fruit cake. The little round cake was a plain sponge cake for the fruit cake naysayers.

The icing on the cake

It was my lovely mum in law's 60th birthday yesterday and she had a big party full of family and friends. It was great fun, and we were surprised at just how noisy a bunch of pensioners could be :)

My sister in law's mum made the official birthday cake, and very nice it was - she did a fruit cake, complete with fondant icing and marzipan and lots of cut out decorations. I have a photo on my other camera (a little compact that I never use due to it being a bit rubbish) and I'll share it when I can be bothered to get up and dig it out of my handbag!


I know that a lot of people don't like fruit cake (why though?a good fruit cake is one of the best things in the world) so I thought I'd make a couple of sponge cakes and bring them along, so nobody had to miss out on cake. I did a very traditional Victoria sandwich, with buttercream and raspberry jam, and a chocolate fudge cake, which was just a chocolate sponge with chocolate fudge icing. I'm not going to bore you with the recipes for the cakes themselves; anyone with half a brain can make a sponge cake. I do however want to share the recipes for the icing, because the icing can turn a mediocre cake into something lovely, or a fantastic cake into a disaster. I hope mine just made a good cake even better!

For both of these recipes, use a big bowl if you're using an electric hand whisk, it stops the icing sugar going all over the kitchen.

Vanilla buttercream (makes enough to fill a cake about 8-10")

100g unsalted butter, softened
150g icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp GOOD vanilla extract (no horrible vanilla essence, please)
a few tablespoons of milk

Use an electric hand whisk or a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, and beat the butter until it's really soft and fluffy. Add the vanilla and icing sugar and beat it all together. Add enough milk to make the mixture soft enough to spread easily - start with about 2 tbsp and add a bit more if necessary, beating after each addition to mix it in thoroughly.


You can make up a big batch of this and keep it in the fridge for a week or so. Just take it out of the fridge an hour or two before you want it, to let it soften up enough to spread. You can also use food colouring to dye it whatever colour you fancy.

Chocolate fudge icing (makes enough to fill and cover an 8" cake quite generously)

60g good quality dark chocolate
1 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp boiling water
90g unsalted butter, softened
250g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate in the microwave or over a pan of hot water.

In a jug, dissolve the cocoa powder in the boiling water. Add this to the melted chocolate and mix together well (it will go a bit grainy, this is normal.)

In a BIG bowl, cream the butter with an electric hand whisk. Add the icing sugar, vanilla and chocolate mixture and beat together really well for 2-3 minutes. I found I needed to add a drop of milk as my mixture was very thick.



Both of these icings would be fantastic on cupcakes too, of course. Or, if you're feeling both greedy and lazy, spread it on a digestive or rich tea biscuit!



The buttercream recipe is mine; the chocolate fudge icing is from Peyton & Byrne British Baking, a book I just acquired a few days ago and which is really, really gorgeous. The typeface reminds me of vintage London Underground posters, the design and layout is absolutely beautiful, the photos make me hungry and the recipes are mostly traditional but all very interesting. It was a £6.99 bargain from the Book People and if you're even slightly interested in baking, this is definitely a book you need to add to your collection.

Stem ginger cake will make me thin

Yesterday, I came to a decision. I am going on a diet.

Today I celebrated that decision by baking a cake.

No, it's ok. Really. Because this is a low fat cake. In fact the original recipe (which, of course, I've tinkered with) came from a Weightwatchers cookbook. It's a bit obsolete now, because they've totally changed the Weightwatchers points system, but it's still a nice book with recipes that work and don't taste like cardboard, like most food aimed at dieters. It also has my favourite madeleine recipe, which is only low fat because they're quite tiny but is still made with proper butter, and I'll share that with you one of these days.

But for today, here's my recipe for stem ginger cake for people who would like to be thinner but still eat baked products.

Ingredients:

175g porridge oats
175g self raising flour (or use plain flour with 1 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp bicarb)
75g low fat margarine (Flora Light etc)
4 pieces of stem ginger, chopped finely
2 tbsp syrup from the ginger jar
1 tsp ground ginger
6 tbsp powdered artificial sweetener, eg Splenda
2 tbsp honey
1 egg, beaten lightly
150ml skimmed milk
zest and juice of 1 nice fat lemon

(If you're not on a diet, bake this cake anyway, but use butter instead of margarine, and caster sugar instead of the horrid artificial sweetener)

Method:

Preheat the oven to 160º. Grease and flour an 8" round tin. I just use low fat cooking spray, which works fine, it's not a particularly sticky cake.

Put the flour and oats into a bowl and mix it together (plus baking powder and bicarb, if using). Rub the margarine into the dry mixture until it looks like breadcrumbs.

Put everything else into the bowl, give it a good mix until it's all combined, and pour it into the prepared cake tin. Bake for an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.



I thought this might have turned out quite dry, but it's really not at all. In fact it's a nice moist cake, perfect to go with your 3pm coffee, and you won't feel guilty afterwards.

(Unless, that is, you've scoffed the entire cake in one sitting. Which really isn't that diet-friendly at all.)