Category Archives: Cakes

Blueberry Muffins here too!

In the best (worst?) tradition of see something and want it now a post from Sally BR at the Bewitching Kitchen hit my inbox last night. Some not so sublimal message went straight to my brain…..

Copycat muffins

‘Oh yes!’ , I thought, ‘Blueberry muffins, I want them and I want them now!’ – (after a virtuous light supper of broadbeans and tomato passata on pasta). Thank you Sally! Sometimes reading my friends’ blogs is just what I need to prompt getting out the mixing bowl!

I went outside and inspected my very small blueberry plant, there were exactly 6 ripe blueberries on it. Not quite enough for a batch of these, in fact, let’s be honest, I have never grown more than a handful of these and the dogs have a habit of hoovering them off the plant anyway when they think I’m not looking.

As I have a mild phobia about translating cups to grams, I made them this way…

and I made them very fast.
250 grams plain flour
170 grams golden caster sugar
2 tsps baking powder

2 eggs
150 grams full fat yoghurt
grated fresh lemon zest
100 ml unsweetened soya milk
50 grams melted butter (as used full fat yoghurt reduced the butter- but you could use more like 100 grams if you are using low fat yoghurt I guess)

200 grams big fat blueberries

I sieved the dry ingredients together.

Beat the eggs, yoghurt, and soya milk together gently. Didn’t have buttermilk or much yoghurt left so added soya milk which seemed to work fine.

Added the lemon zest.

Melted the butter in another pan.

Then mixed the dry ingredients with the eggy/milk/yoghurt mix, drizzled the cooling butter in on top, gave that a quick stir, till the butter was just mixed in, folded the blueberries in. Plopped it into 11 muffin cases. I’ve realised that if you use one less muffin case, you get bigger muffins and they look more convincing.
Baked them at 160 C on Fan setting for 25 minutes.

Eaten approx 15 minutes after they came out of the oven.

Watered the veg bed, admired the rainbow, went to bed.

Rainbow at bedtime

Rant, rave, rant

Skip this post if you don’t want to read a grumbly rant….or just check the pictures and move on…..

Too hot for Zeb

One of the biggest challenges for home bakers in this ‘connected age’ is trying to figure out whether the recipe they read on a website on the other side of the world will actually work out translated to their own kitchen. I know some of you out there are brilliant at adapting recipes, but it is not my strong point I will freely admit.

Translating technique and methods are relatively easy, but types of flour, sugars, flavourings, not to mention cuts of rye grain, salts, butters and other fats, vary so much that it gives rise to a lot of discussion. All the forums are full of posts on this subject. Hunting around on the internet for someone who supplies einkorn is a harmless way to spend an evening and I suppose it is educational to try and work out just what is the difference between farro and spelt and pondering the mysteries of OO flour. Is it soft, is it hard, are there different sorts. I suspect there are….

And then a lovely visit to one of these restored mills where you buy a bag of their flour, get it home and realise there is no info at all on the bag to give you a clue about its composition, does this strike a familiar chord?

So I salute home bakers everywhere, who struggle to overcome these obstacles and I offer my heart felt encouragement to those who are just starting out. It does get easier, and most people manage to make a damn good loaf by their second or third go. Keep the faith. Like learning to dance, everyone gets better with practice, and bread is no different.

In breadmaking it seems as if each country has not only different names for their flours, but also different ways of describing them, ash content in Germany, protein levels in England, W and P in Italy (no idea at all what that refers to) and for the most part, the aspiring home baker has to make their best guess, scour the internet for advice, and then close their eyes and just jump in.

Bread though is relatively forgiving; unlike cake. This brings me to my rant:

I’ve just been testing some cake recipes for an American baking book, and realise that I am far from being a professional tester and that I don’t really like doing it. Hmmm.

I have managed to produce, with one exception, rather horrible looking, oversweet and dense cakes, some of which I have turned into crumbs; the rest sliced up and shoved in the freezer, vaguely thinking that I can use them for trifle or something, one day in the future. I could blame the recipe writer but that’s a bit too easy.

One reason for my failure is I don’t have cake flour, special American bleached low protein stuff.

And before you comment that it is possible to make cake flour in the microwave, or substitute cornflour for part of the flour, I have read all that too, and, Dear Reader, I don’t want to play.

I realise what I really want is recipes written for me, here where I live, using ingredients that are easily available and preferably already in my cupboard. I might go across town to get some seasonal mangoes, or to a specialist butcher for marsh-raised lamb, but I am not spending hours with flour exploding in my oven, nor do I want to feel deflated when cakes emerge from the oven and look as if an invisible imp has sat on them ten minutes later. There, got that off my chest!

I also have to learn to look at a recipe more critically before I even start and say, 130% sugar to flour – no way is that going to make me happy. My teeth are furring up just at the memory of that particular cake.

Roll on Dan Lepard’s British Baking book, I hope it’s full of wonderful, overlooked and neglected British breads, cakes and buns. And Mick Hartley‘s first book too! I can’t wait to read the recipes for his awesome flatbreads and other extraordinary creations. Breads with a hint of spice, redolent with fruits, studded with chocolate, a twisted shape here, a glistening crust there, a splodge of jam, savoury, oats, barley, and rye, full of beer, I don’t care – bring them on – I’m waiting!

In the meantime here, with many thanks to Suelle and all the other kind people who made suggestions, is my alternative Battenburg. The chocolate part sank a little and the pistachio part is a bit crumbly and I guess the recipe needs some fine tuning way beyond my capabilities, as I am not going to make the same cake over and over.

I could have souped up the green colour but this is how it came out!

But I have tried and now I am going back to bread, where I belong. See you in the sourdough corner soon!

Battenburg Revival

I might horrify you here. I scared myself a little – I had an important mission to undertake: I was asked to make a Battenburg cake last week. My memories of these are of pink and white sawdust cake, eaten to be polite, the cake that could not be refused. But we found two packets of old marzipan left over from Christmas in the garage and Brian suggested this, adding the killer line,

My Gran used to make this for me, and it’s my favourite.

Lego cake

…. here is my first attempt – tasteful, natural colouring, extremely fashionable looking isn’t it? Note lack of pinpoint precision and razor sharp lines too :) Because I can’t resist looking these things up this is what Wiki has to say

The origin of the name is not clear, but one theory claims that the cake was created in honour of the marriage in 1884 of Queen Victoria‘s granddaughter to Prince Louis of Battenberg, with the four squares representing the four Battenberg princes: Louis, Alexander, Henry and Francis Joseph.

OK, probably a bit heavy on the pink stuff, but the sponge worked beautifully
and I used these two Matfer tins that I had, one of which I got for a song in Cheltenham the other week. 25 cm long x 7 wide approx (the tin doesn’t need to be very deep) more like a couple of inches so you could use any two shallow tins. I got lucky this time.

So now what I want to do is make a brown and green one, that red food colouring is just a bit much. Though if you close your eyes and eat the cake it is actually melty delicious, soft light sponge, and sweet with apricots and marzipan and home made is definitely better than anything you can buy. Assembling the thing has a certain lego like quality of silliness that made me feel very happy. Who can be sad looking at a cake like that?

But to my reason for writing this post – can anyone suggest how to make

this sponge mix into chocolate and pistachio ????

175 g self raising flour
175 g caster sugar
175 g butter
3 eggs
and of course red food colouring (only use a couple of drops, not like me who used a teaspoonful!)

for the two sponges

You also need

small jar of apricot or raspberry jam
old packet of leftover marzipan from Christmas

Cream soft unsalted butter and sugar till really really white and fluffy
Add eggs one at at time
Fold in the flour gently.

Nothing complicated until you have to decide how much food colouring, don’t use as much as I did (!) and how to divide the batter between the two lightly greased tins.

I cooked these at 170 C in an ordinary oven for 27 minutes, might take less or more depending on your oven. Felt soft and delicate when I pressed with finger but the skewer came out clean so took them out.

Leave to sit in tin for a couple of minutes then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely before cutting each sponge in half into 2 square profiled logs with a serrated knife.

You can cut away till you get them more or less the same and eat the bits as you go along.

Assemble the cake from your four logs, white on pink, using warmed jam as the mortar on the inside surfaces, don’t put jam on the outside at this point. The logs don’t have to be perfect, the cake is quite forgiving as you assemble it.

When putting the marzipan on, you need to roll it out quite thinly to about 1/4 inch deep. You need to do a bit of measuring to make sure you have a piece that will wrap all the way round the cake. Then you brush some warmed jam on the top of the cake Pick the cake up and place it jam side down on the marzipan sheet.

Then cover the sides and the top with a layer of jam and gently bring the marzipan up round the sides, pressing and smoothing as you go and across the top.

Trim off the ends with a sharp knife and turn upside down again so the seam is on the bottom of the cake.

It’s a good idea to chill the whole thing in the fridge for an hour to help it firm up once you have put the marzipan on.

So…
what sort of chocolate/cocoa would I need to add and how much ?

ditto if I chopped up pistachios and toasted them a bit, how much would I need to add?

And if anyone wants to have a go at it and show me how it should be done, that would be great! If you send me a picture, (or if you blog, a link to your post that would be fun too) – and I’ll add them on to this post if you want me to.

Oh, and was it like his Gran’s? I have no idea, he’s eaten most of it, so lets hope so :)

To see Lynne’s and be inspired to have a go click here. Do send me a picture if you feel like sharing it here. Email zebbakes at gmail.com

Edit: Since I wrote this post I have had a go at a chocolate version using Suelle’s suggestions of adding 1 tbsp of cocoa and 50 g of melted chocolate to one half of the mixture and 50 grams of ground pistachios and a smidgen of green food colour to the other half. Here’s a picture: I really like the chocolate marzipan which was 2 tbsps cocoa worked into a packet of white marzipan….