Marble Loaf Cake - The Weekly Bake Off

Last weeks bake was Mary's marble loaf cake. I haven't taken part in the weekly bake off for a while mainly due to moving and losing my baking mojo.

However when the football came on the TV on Sunday I decided to spend my time baking instead.

Anyway back to the cake. A fairly easy one to make the mixture is one of those where you just slap bang all the ingredients in the bowl together and whisk it up. Mary Berry's cake in the picture is very elegant and has a particular pattern to it, however she doesn't seem to want to share how to make this pattern.

Once in the oven you're told it will take 50-60 mins and mine pushed the top end of that. My cake tin I fear was a little too small as it rose quite a lot (I had to move a shelf half way through baking) and struggled to get it out when it was finished.

I didn't heat my butter in a pan to melt it as it had been sat in a hot kitchen all day and was very soft so I just gave it a bit of a whisk with a fork and blended the cocoa icing sugar and milk with the fork still in the bowl.

I popped my cake in the fridge for a while and then melted some white chocolate. I used more than recommended as 25g seemed a little stingy and I went for pretty much most of the large bar.

So here is my bake!

Happy Birthday Mum

It's my mums birthday today and one of her requests for her special birthday was a cake. She doesn't ask for much my mum, so I thought this would be a really good opportunity to spoil her.

I had seen this cake on another bloggers page, Jo Wheatley,  she is also the winner of the Great British Bake Off so you know it's going to be a good cake. This cake grabs you as soon as you set your eyes on it, and as soon as I saw it I knew that was the cake I was going to make for my mum.

There were a few alterations to my own cake mainly in regards to the decoration. My collar was slightly taller, but in the end I preferred this as it looked a little more Art Nouveau and the '50' on Jo's cake was replaced by a '60' for my mums cake.

You can find the original post and recipe here.

Looks impressive right? Looks incredibly hard and complicated to make yes? Well maybe.. but if I can do so can anyone! It just takes a lot of patience and good timing.

So here's how my construction of this epic cake went.

This cake requires four 7 inch sponge layers. I only have two 7 inch sandwich tins, so patience comes in to play already whilst I wait for the first pair to bake and then put the second pair in to the oven. (Lots of tea was consumed in the making of this cake).

I measured out the strawberries on one of the cakes to make sure I had enough to fit around the top before I diced the rest of them for the strawberry cream and strawberry layers.

Then once the cakes were cooled I made the cream and sandwiched them altogether.

Cream-a-licious!

I thought that the cake might actually collapse as I transported it to the fridge but it was, despite it's weight, rather sturdy.

So whilst the cake was chilling in the fridge I set out to make that chocolate collar, the bit I was dreading the most. I melted the chocolate in a pan (for some reason I can't do the chocolate over a pan of boiling water so I just stick it in a pan over a low heat and let it melt, it always works out okay) then attempted to put it in my icing tube... melted chocolate is a lot thinner than icing and so it started squirting out all over the place, managing eventually to get it under control, and covering myself in chocolate I started to drip it over my pre-placed baking parchment. Because of the weight in the bottom of the tubing if you hold it at the top and gently rock it, it moves in a pendulum fashion.

I arranged 4 pieces of parchment on my table, the centre piece of parchment which would hold my collar, and pieces at the bottom and the ends so I could peel these away later and get an absolutely straight edge for the bottom of my cake.

Here timing is essential, you have to judge it just right. Too early and the chocolate will just run down the paper when you lift it, too late and the chocolate wont stick to the cake and the chocolate might crack too.

I had to rearrange the whole of my fridge and take two shelves out to put it in there and let the chocolate cool.

Once cold hard and set I took it out of the fridge and peeled away the paper.

and....

Ta Da!

Here are some more pictures of this very special cake.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!!!

Mini Creme Egg Brownies

I wanted to make an Easter treat that I could take in to work for my co-workers (sorry for spoiling the surprise if you're reading this before I spring them on you!) and I thought about making mini egg brownies but then one of my co-workers said how much she loved creme eggs...

So I decided to make mini creme egg brownies!

They actually turned out incredibly well! I was a little nervous that they would just explode in the brownie mixture and all the goo would seep out of the bottom. I let them cool down for about an hour after I had baked them in the hope that the eggs would harden a little before I cut in to the brownie square.

The eggs made the brownie even more gooey and chewy than they normally are. They are incredibly chocolaty! Definitely one for the chocoholics out there. Some of the eggs which I stirred in to the mixture burst and sunk to the bottom, but I also popped some on top of the mixture right before putting them in to the oven and these ones managed to contain their goo.

I used a simple brownie recipe and substituted the broken chocolate for the same amount of mini creme eggs, with a few extra dotted in the top.

Ingredients

150g of unsalted butter
300g light brown muscovado sugar
75g cocoa powder
1tsp of bicarbonate of soda
150g plain flour
pinch of salt
4 eggs
1tsp of vanilla extract
2 packets of mini creme eggs

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees (fan assisted).

2. Melt the butter over a low heat in a saucepan that need to big enough to fill with brownie mixture. Once the butter has melted stir in the sugar until completely bonded and a little glossy.

3. Sift in the cocoa powder, bicarb, pinch of salt and flour in to the pan keeping it on the heat and mix it all together.

4. Whisk your eggs and vanilla extract together until a little fluffy. Take the pan off the heat and fold in to your eggs until completely absorbed and starting to look like a brownie mixture.

5. Then add 150g of the creme eggs to the mixture quickly stir them in, trying not to let them melt and then tip into the tin. Then dot the remaining eggs in to the mixture.

6. Put your brownies in the oven for 25 minutes, when you poke a stick/skewer in to the mixture it should still be gooey in the middle.

7. Let your brownies cool for about an hour on a cooling rack before dividing them up.

Then enjoy! After about an hour mine were still fairly warm in the middle, which added to the gooey chocolateness was absolute heaven.

*Chicks are optional.

This little guy looks a bit sad...

The Magic Faraway Tree Toffee Shock Cake

Originally posted on 22/10/2010 on Breadsticklers.

Last month I discovered a new blog.. awannabefoodie.wordpress.com and I loved what I found.

This is the Magic Faraway Tree Toffee Shock Cake....

I decided after reading @wannabefoodie76's blog that I NEEDED to make this cake.


So I did.

This is how it turned out.



I did accidentally put the cakes in the wrong order but I quite like the zebra affect too.

It's such a big cake I probably put on half a stone from the amount I ate... and I had to give a lot away to some very eager volunteers... and they all loved it too. The sounds coming from people whilst eating it were bordering on pornographic.

Want to make this cake? You really should! Here's the recipe on @wannabefoodie76's original blog post.

FABULOUS!!!!

Fruitful Baking - The Weekly Bake Off & Valentines Bakes

Previously Posted 05/02/2012 on Breadsticklers.

I hate wasting food, but I also like my fruit to be just ripe not overly ripe. I like bananas but they don't seem to last very long before they start to go brown and spotty. To accompany this weeks Weekly Bake off entry I thought I'd follow the theme of fruit in cake and make chocolate and banana heart shaped cakes... Valentines day is not far away after all.

Firstly though... here is my entry in this weeks bake off.

Farmhouse Orange Victoria Sandwich.

I think I should have let my cake cool a little longer, or perhaps put the cream on the bottom layer then put it in the fridge to let it harden before I put the top layer on? It seemed a bit sloppy but still tasted awesome. There isn't a massive amount of cream but you really don't need a thick layer of it (in my opinion) as the cream was really rich. I deviated from the recipe a little bit by spreading a layer of the fine cut marmalade on the base before adding any cream.

The cake has gone down very well in my house, I only made it a few hours ago and there is less than half of it left!

Here's some more pictures of my cake. I will definitely make this cake in future as it is truly delicious.

Pre-cut..

If your interested in trying out the weekly bake off see the website here. Mary Berry's 100 Cake and Bakes where this recipe was taken from is available from Amazon for a bargain price of £4.

Happy Birthday to Me.... The Weekly Bake Off

Originally Posted on Breadsticklers 29/01/2012

It was my birthday this week, I had just received my copy of Mary Berry's 100 Cakes and Bakes so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to join in with The Weekly Bake Off.

I found out about the weekly bake off a couple of weeks ago through another blog I follow. It seemed like a really cute idea, every week there is a new bake from the book (only £4 on Amazon... bargain!) the bake is announced on Monday and everyone has to submit a picture of their bake by Sunday via twitter @WeeklyBakeOff. Each bake is judged (sometimes there is a guest judge) and a winner is announced! It's great to see how other people have fared and each person's own interpretation of the bake.

I let it slip that it was my first time taking part and that whatever the bake was that week was going to ultimately end up being my birthday cake! So the lovely organiser (Amy) of the Weekly Bake Off said she would dedicate this bake off to me *blushes* and the bake for this week would be Divine Chocolate Birthday Cake.

If you haven't got the book the recipe is posted online here.

I didn't follow the recipe to the letter... instead of adding coffee granules (I don't like coffee) I just mixed some cocoa with a teaspoon of vanilla essence to make it EXTRA chocolatey! Also the recipe recommends you use 39% cocoa solid plain chocolate for the icing... well, I couldn't find 39% in my crappy local supermarket (they don't even sell buttermilk!) so I had to make do with 44%. Every thing was laid out on the work tops ready for me to ice it... a couple of hours later I returned to find that some cheeky unknown person within my household had decided to have a nibble of my chocolate. The only thing I had in the cupboard was some milk chocolate, so my icing has about 10% milk chocolate in it too....

The edges of my cake weren't the neatest and I tried to neaten them up with the icing but in a cold kitchen it sets very quickly!

As it was my birthday I decided to add a bit of sparkle with gold and silver balls with matching candles.

So this is my bake!

First stage....

Miss a few...

Cake in the pan ready for the preheated oven...

Et Voila!

For my first flourless cake I think it turned out rather well. The book says the cake should be 'fudgey' in consistency and I feel it is, I probably need to work on my decorating skills however! Tastes yummy... so yummy that I had to have a piece whilst writing this post!

I'm looking forward to the many more weekly bake offs!

UPDATED: The results came out 30.01.2012... and I won! Whoooooop!!!