Happy Birthday To Me!

Today is my 19th birthday, and though I did get a few lovely presents from my parents they were kind enough to go halves with me on an amazing KitchenAid mixer! I'm certainly not against kneading and mixing by hand, although I do tend to use a hand mixer for making cupcakes. But in Paul Hollywood's baking book there are several recipes where the dough is so wet you apparently need to use a mixer with a dough attachment. It's quite big and does take up a fair bit of kitchen space, but I love it and will definitely get a lot of use out of it!

Oh Christmas Cake, Oh Christmas Cake!

My family has never had christmas cake at christmas before, because as far as i'd ever known it was horrible and alcoholic and only grandad liked it. However this year mum and I wanted to be more traditional and focus on food, so just over a month before christmas we decided to make our own christmas cake. My mum hates citrus peel so at least by making our own we were able to leave that out! We used a Mary Berry recipe and just changed the ingredients slightly to suit our own tastes; for the dried fruit we used currants, raisins, sultanas and apricots, as well as some chopped blanched almonds.

At this point I think I should let you in on a little secret...we didn't actually eat this cake for Christmas! That was definitely the plan, but there's so much food anyway that we didn't really want a rich fruit cake, so instead I covered it in leftover cream cheese frosting (from my next post) and used it for my birthday cake- that's today!

It was delicious but you don't want too much of it; our challenge now is to eat it all before the frosting goes off!

Mary Berry's original Christmas Cake Recipe

For the sponge:
175g raisins
350g glace cherries, rinsed, thoroughly dried and quartered (I omitted these and threw some dried apricots in instead)
500g currants
350g sultanas
150ml sherry, plus extra for feeding (I used port instead)
Finely grated zest of 2 oranges (mum hates orange so although we put this in originally, later on we rinsed the fruit to get rid of it!)
250g butter, softened
250g light muscovado sugar
4 eggs
1 tbsp black treacle
75g blanched almonds, chopped
75g self- raising flour
175g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp mixed spice

To finish and decorate: (as you know I didn't do this)
Around 3 tbsp apricot jam, sieved and warmed
Icing sugar
675g shop bought almond paste
Packet royal icing mix to cover 23cm/9inch cake

Method:

• Put all the dried fruit in a container, pour over the sherry and stir in the orange zest. Cover with a lid, and leave to soak for 3 days, stirring daily. Grease and line a 23cm (9in) deep round tin with a double layer of greased greaseproof paper. Preheat the oven to 140ºC/Fan 120ºC/Gas Mark 1.
• Measure the butter, sugar, eggs, treacle and almonds into a very large bowl and beat well. Add the flours and mixed spice and mix thoroughly until blended. Stir in the soaked fruit. Spoon into the prepared cake tin and level the surface.
• Bake in the centre of the preheated oven for 4-4½ hours or until the cake feels firm to the touch and is a rich golden brown. Check after 2 hours, and, if the cake is a perfect colour, cover with foil. A skewer inserted into the centre of the cake should come out clean. Leave the cake to cool in the tin.
• When cool, pierce the cake at intervals with a fine skewer and feed with a little extra sherry. Wrap the completely cold cake in a double layer of greaseproof paper and again in foil and store in a cool place for up to 3 months, feeding at intervals with more sherry. (Don't remove the lining paper when storing as this helps to keep the cake moist.)
• Decorate with almond paste and royal icing.

To prepare the Christmas cake ahead: Prepare the fruit and soak in sherry 3 days ahead - this is essential to plump up and flavour the fruit. Make the cake and wrap as in stage 4. Store in a cool place for up to 3 months, following stage 4. You could also freeze the cake before decorating, for up to 3 months; defrost at room temperature. 

Christmas Spiced Cupcakes

I can't believe it's only just over week until christmas! All of the festive cooking shows on TV (I have an unhealthy addiction to cooking shows FYI) got me in the mood to create a christmassy baking recipe. After the success of my bakewell cupcakes I thought i'd try another cupcake variation, as they are easy and also what I have the most experience with so all being well there's less that could go wrong!

 To create a festive smell and taste I added a small amount of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and ground cloves into the batter; I guessed with how much would give  a good balance and I don't think it went too badly. I also put a little bit of grated clementine peel and a few drops of clementine juice into the buttercream icing, which added a bit of citrus flavour without being too sharp as none of my family likes orange or lemon.

There were also a few sultanas in the sponge to add texture; in this photo it looks as though they have all sunk to the bottom but I promise they didn't!

Something else which I haven't mentioned but which might be quite exciting is that I applied to be on the Great British Bake Off series four! Entries don't close until the end of January so it will be a while before I hear back, if I do at all, but i'm still looking forward to the possibility of taking part in my favourite TV show (along with Doctor Who of course).

Bakewell Cupcakes

One thing that I have been baking for ages and which always go down well are cupcakes; plain, simple ones with buttercream on top. But I wanted to experiment a bit with different flavours, because as tasty as they are anything will get boring if you have it too often. Since I made a bakewell tart recently I thought why not try to combine the two?! I planned to sub some of the flour for ground almonds, and put a bit of almond extract in the icing, plus obviously putting jam in there somehow. 

Unfortunately I then went to do some research into ground almonds in case they affect cooking time, and found out that someone already made a recipe for bakewell cupcakes :( It was actually someone off the Great British Bake Off (not the most recent series), so maybe part of my subconscious remembered it! 

The recipe I found called for lemon icing, but nobody in my family likes lemon so I halved my plain icing and flavoured half with lemon, and half with almond. As I suspected the almond went down much better! I found that the lemon juice completely overpowered the almond flavour of the sponge so didn't really taste like a bakewell tart at all.

I also tried a few different ways of putting the jam in! I don't have an apple corer so to start with I tried gouging out the top of the cake and filling that with jam, then replacing some of the sponge 'lid' and covering with icing. This worked ok but wasn't particularly elegant, so I decided to make them more like mini victoria sponges by cutting them in half, hollowing out the top and filling it with jam. I also used a little bit of icing to 'glue' the two halves back together.
These went down really well with my family, and my dad said they taste just like a bakewell tart which was the whole point!

Bakewell Cupcake Recipe- makes 12
For the sponge:

110g caster sugar

110g unsalted butter, softened
2 medium eggs, beaten
70g self raising flour
40g ground almonds
1tsp baking powder
few drops of almond extract

For the filling and topping (I didn't realise measure these accurately, so experiment):
Strawberry jam- roughly 1/2-1tsp per cupcake
Icing sugar- probably a few tablespoons
Water
1-2 drops almond extract
A few sliced almonds

Method:

• Using an electric whisk, beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy, then gradually add the eggs. Tip- if you're worried about the mixture curdling, add a spoonful of flour with each addition of egg
• Fold in the flour and baking powder, then mix in the almond extract. Spoon the mixture between 12 cupcake cases and bake at 180° (for a fan oven) for 13 minutes, or until golden and a skewer inserted into the sponge comes out clean. Allow to cool

At this point it's up to you how you insert the jam and decorate the cakes, but this is how I did it:

• Mix the icing sugar and water to form a relatively thick glace icing; you want it to drip off a spoon, but not slide off the sponge. Add a drop or two of almond extract to enhance the Bakewell-y flavours!
• Take a cupcake from its case and slice in half horizontally. Use the knife to scoop a small amount of sponge from inside the cake, and fill this new hole with jam. Spread a little bit of the icing on the inside of the other half of cake, and 'glue' the pieces back together. 
• Placing the cake on a plate, use a spoon to drizzle lines of icing across the cupcake, and place a few almonds on top to decorate

Bakewell Loveliness

As you know I love baking and I could literally do it all day, every day (as least for a while, until I ran out of recipes!), however I also don't want to become obese because of my hobby. Therefore it's important for me to consider what my family like and will eat whenever i'm looking at recipes. 'Usually' (like a couple of years ago) we would get individual cherry bakewell tarts, but none of us liked the cherry on top and the icing was just a bit too sticky and sweet.

 I find that one large tart is much better, and the bonus is that you can have a slice as small- or large(!) - as you like.

 With this recipe I also got the chance to try out my new ceramic baking beans, when I blind baked the pastry before adding the filling. I was really pleased with my pastry, no soggy bottoms here! The one thing that I would do differently next time is leave out the grated lemon rind in the sponge as it overpowered the almond a little too much.