07/09/13 - Treacle tart

I have a tendency to go into kitchen shops looking for one thing and come out with several other things I didn't know I needed... This happened the other day, when I was looking for some measuring spoons as my current set needs replacing.
I couldn't find any measuring spoons but I did find a Useful Thing - a pastry rolling mat which is marked so you know how big you've rolled out your pastry! Also a thing I've been meaning to get for ages - a lemon juicing device which catches the pips so you don't get crunchy bits in your pie.

So I needed something to bake to practise using these things, and I couldn't think what to make for a while and then I remembered how good the treacle tarts looked on last year's Great British Bake Off.
Here's the recipe. It even has lemon juice in it!

It took me a few days to get around to buying the ingredients, of course. But this evening I finally tried to make one.

The rolling mat it quite good, but it's hard to tell which  line is which when you're not next to the numbers - it might have been better to have stripes than just circles. It's still good to have a flat surface big enough to roll out lots of pastry on though - I used to use a bread board. The lemon juicer got lots more juice from my lemons that my normal method of chopping in half and squeezing them by hand, but it didn't catch all the pips - perhaps I was holding it slanting downwards or something as I was at the kitchen table rather than a worktop.
So here's some pictures:

Pastry case ready for filling

Treacle mix to fill the pastry

Tart filled up to the brim!

Lattice on top 

Just out of the oven

Tasty tasty treacle tart... if I'd realised how simple the recipe was, I'd have made one ages ago.

Here's some I made earlier: the year so far in cakes

I do actually make cake more often than I write about them, because I am bad at remembering to write up my cakes. So here's a few I've made and forgotten to write about.
Start with the Christmas Cake. Okay that was really last year but I did forget to write about it!
Here in Ireland there is a bank holiday at the end of October, and I wanted to make my Christmas cake early so it could mature a bit so I decided to make it then.
The maturing didn't really work because I forgot to feed the cake but anyway I decorated it and we ate quite a lot of it (though not much got eaten on Christmas day on account of us eating too much dinner!)
Here it is:

Cake!

Closer look at the top

I decided to do a blue cake with bells and stars on it. Some of the silver dust went everywhere and the blue colouring stay on my hands for a few days but you get the general idea.

It took a while to get through the Christmas cake and all the mince pies so I didn't do much more baking till the end of January, when there was another Magic tournament to make cake for - the Gatecrash Prerelease. This cake was quite similar to the one I made in September for Return to Ravnica, except that the guild symbols were different. I don't have a picture of the finished cake, but here's one of the guild symbols all together:

 And some close ups of each guild symbol:

Boros - Red and White

Orzhov - White and Black

Dimir - Black and Blue

Simic - Blue and Green

Gruul - Green and Red

February is birthday month so I made a ginger cake (again I forgot to take a picture!)
The recipe is from one of my mum's recipe books and it's super tasty so here goes:
Ingredients
1/4 pint (150ml) milk 
1 teaspoon (5ml)bicarbonate of soda 
4 oz (100g) butter 
4 oz (100g) golden syrup 
4 oz (100g) treacle 
3 oz (75g) soft brown sugar 
1 tablespoon (15ml) orange marmalade 
4 oz (100g) self-raising flour 
4 oz (100g) wholemeal flour 
1 teaspoon (5ml) mixed spice 
2 teaspoons (10ml) ground ginger 
2 small eggs, beaten 

(Instead of the wholemeal flour you can substitute 8 oz SR flour if you don't have wholemeal)

Method
Grease and line an 8 inch (20cm) round or 7 inch (18cm) square cake tin. Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the bicarbonate of soda and heat gently until tepid. Place the butter, syrup, treacle, sugar and marmalade in another saucepan and heat gently, stirring until the ingredients are combined and the sugar dissolved. Place the flours, mixed spice,ginger and a pinch of salt in a bowl and mix together thoroughly. Stir the treacle mixture into the dry ingredients, then add the warmed milk and beat well to a smooth batter. Beat in the eggs. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in a warm oven (160°C or 325°F or Gas mark 3) for 1 hour or until a fine skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely and remove the greaseproof paper.

Helpful notes from my mum on the method:
I mix the dry stuff first, then start the treacle mixture on the stove, then do the milk last so it doesn't go cold - it only needs to be slightly warm, you can test with your finger. You don't want it getting too hot as not only would it take ages to cool down but would probably do something dramatic to the bicarb! The mixture will be very runny (pretty much liquid) when you pour it into the tin. I leave the greaseproof paper round to keep it in shape until it was quite cold. I remember it was quite difficult to get a good shape and sometimes the sides of cake were bit funny where there were folds of greaseproof. But it needs to be all one piece of greaseproof (i.e. not separate sides & base) otherwise runny mixture will go through gaps when you pour it in. If you've got a silicone cake tin or cake tin shaped baking parchment liners that would be much better.

As for March baking, I covered most of that in my post at Easter.

April comes round, and another Magic cake to bake - this one for the Dragon's Maze Prerelease.
I spent a while thinking about making a cake with a maze on top, but in the end I made a cake with a dragon on instead.Apparently people were disappointed that it was fruit cake. Admittedly it was a bit dry (I was using gluten free flour which apparently needs more liquid than wheat flour) but I like fruit cake normally.

Red dragons are the best kind!

In May I didn't get much baking done so here's some pictures of striking bus drivers stopping me (and the rest of Irish commuters) from getting to work:

Walking picket line

There should be buses here!

The departure screens at the bus station lying about whether there would be buses

However that all got sorted out eventually (hooray) so now it is June and I made some more Magic cakes as there were more tournaments.
First of all I made a 'colour pie' for the five colours that there are in Magic.This is based on the fruit tarts you get in french patisseries (except I used a flan case instead of making a pastry one). I got the creme patissiere recipe from Nish Bakes blog. The creme patissiere is not too hard to make as long as you don't stop whisking until it's done! Mine was a bit runny in the end so perhaps I took it off the heat too soon.

Clockwise from top: green kiwi fruit, white banana, blackberries, red strawberries, and blueberries.

Then I made a chocolate cake as I'd been asked for one. I made my chocolate earl grey tea cake which i first made two years ago, and I iced it with buttercream and decorated it with mini marshmallows :

Marshmallows form the planeswalker symbol (again from Magic)

Oh and in case you didn't have enough pictures already, here are some of my friends baking cupcakes at my house. Well, eating cupcakes we had just baked.

Tasty cakes get eaten fast!

Very excited to have cakes!

Easter baking, and reading recipes properly

It's not that I haven't been baking lately, I just haven't written about it.
So here's a post about some buns and messy kitchens.

Today being Good Friday, I decided to make some hot cross buns. (Organised people bake them the day before, but I am far from organised at the moment).
Now I've made hot cross buns before, to the recipe my mum uses, but I'd found another recipe (it's here) I wanted to try out (though they're all quite similar!)
So, as I've made them before, I don't really read through the recipe properly just the ingredient list, and checked how long they take to rise (for hot cross buns are made with yeast). It says 2 hours, and I have the afternoon off, so i think 'that's fine i can mix the dough now and bake them later before tea'
So I'm working away, following the recipe, kneading the dough, when I think 'that's funny hot cross buns have dried fruit in and i haven't added those yet'. Check the recipe, and it turns out this one is 'double proved' which means you knead it, let it rise a while, then knead it again and let it rise more before you bake it. So they will actually need 4 hours to rise, not 2. This screws with my meal-timetable slightly (not normally a problem but I have family visiting so I need to be eating at a normal time)

For tea I've planned to have Good Friday Fish (aka smoked haddock) with another recipe I've not read properly. But I look at it and it seems ok... till I notice there's poached eggs in the middle. By this time I'm using about 3 different pans anyway so we decide to leave out the eggs. The recipe says to steam the fish but my 'tiered steamer' consists of a colander over a saucepan so we decide poaching will be quicker to cook the fish properly.
At which point I remember the buns need baking....
So while the fish is poaching and the potatoes are cooking, we split the nicely risen dough into buns (whoops, I should have done that before the second lot of proving. Not that it makes a huge difference but again failing to read words on a page). I put the buns into the oven so that they can bake while tea's being eaten, and check the recipe for how long they need to bake for...

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Brush the buns with a little beaten egg. Mix the remaining flour with enough water to make a thick paste, then transfer to a piping bag fitted with a small round nozzle, or use a sandwich bag and snip off one corner. Use the paste to pipe crosses over the buns - this is easiest if you pipe in one big circle, then put a line across the middle of each bun. Bake for 25 mins until golden and cooked through.

Hmm... so the crosses were supposed to go on BEFORE I baked them? and the glaze too? whoops.

I blame my mum's recipe for the forgetting to glaze as her buns get glazed after they are baked (with sugar glaze not raw egg), but even hers put the crosses on before they get baked. As the buns had already gone into the oven, and dinner needed eating, I decided to used icing for the crosses instead and the sugar glaze.
Final buns look like this:

They aren't in a ring, either. But that was deliberate.

Tasty tasty buns

Which isn't too bad for not having baked them  for three years or so, and failing to read the recipe right!

In more successful baking news, last week I made a Simnel cherry tart. I followed the recipe and it was lovely! (Kind of like a bakewell tart with a bit more marzipan). So it's not that I can't follow instructions! I forgot to take any pictures of that before it was eaten though.

Unhealthy oranges - 15/10/12

So the tale begins a couple of weekends ago, when I was in Kinsale with family. We happened to go into a chocolate shop called Koko, and someone nice bought me chocolate covered orange slices.
 As we were exchanging mooney for tasty chocolate, the man in the shop said 'I've just crystallised those oranges the other day, so they're nice and fresh'

And I ate the chocolate orange slices, and they were tasty, and I fancied some more, only I don't go to Kinsale very often.
So I thought, 'maybe I could crystallise some orange slices? Sure it's only sugar'
I found some useful instructions on this blog post on how to crystallise the oranges.
(The conversion I used gave 1.5 cups water to be 350ml, half a cup granulated sugar to be 95g. Those amounts are for one orange but you'd probably only want to do one orange at a time unless you owned a chocolate shop!)

And so I bought an orange, some tasty chocolate and some sugar and had a go.

The water & sugar took longer to come to the boil than I thought, and I probably should have used a flatter frying pan rather than a big saucepan to make it easier to turn the slices over, but here are some tasty sugary orange slices after they've cooled:

The house smells of oranges!

They are very sticky

 Then today (I crystallised the oranges yesterday) I melted some tasty Green & Black's Maya Gold (which already is orangey & spicy & tasty) and dipped the oranges in it, then dipped them in sugar to stop them being so sticky.

One tasty chocolate orange slice

Lots of tasty chocolate orange slices

 So here is how to make oranges unhealthy! Just add 100g sugar, 350ml water, and about 70g chocolate. Hopefully they're as tasty as I think they will be.

29/9/12 - Ravnicake

While my main hobbies are making cake and sewiing and girly things, Mr Marzipan (as I call the husband) is a big geek. One of his hobbies is playing Magic: the Gathering and last year he persuaded me to come to the prerelease event for the new set (they release four new sets of cards a year and a week before the release of each set there is a 'pre release' event where you can play ing a tournament building a deck using the new cards). Anyway a year later I'm addicted to playing Magic quite a lot. We were looking forward to the release of the new set 'Return to Ravnica' (Ravnica being the setting for a previous set of cards a few years ago). Anyway one day i was talking about how I like making cake and someone suggested I make a cake for the prerelease event. I'm not sure they were actually expecting me to make one!

Final cake

 The design was based on the art for one of the cards in the set, Tablet of the Guilds, which they were using for advertising prior to the release of the set. The main theme of Ravnica is that it is a city dominated by ten guilds which each use two of the five colours of mana for their magic. Five of the guilds are in this set, and the other five will be in the set which is released in the new year.
I decided to put the symbol for each of the five guilds around the edge of the cake, but how to make the symbols look good (I'm no good at freehand drawing with icing!)
I got the images for each of the five guilds from the website for this set , GuildsofRavnica.com and I used paint.net image editing software to turn the art into a black and white stencil image. I traced the outline of the symbols from the stencil onto the circles of sugarpaste icing with the end of a pin, and I used the outline to help me draw the symbols with writing icing.

Guild

Colour image

Black & white stencil

Final icing

Rakdos - black and red

Selesnya - green and white

Izzet - red and blue

Golgari - green and black

Azorius - blue and white

All final icing symbols

The cake itself was also important, as brian who organises the tournament can't eat gluten so I needed to make a gluten-free cake so that he could eat some too. My chocolate and tea leaf cake is gluten free, but I've made so many chocolate cakes lately I wanted to make a plain sponge as it would be easier to ice as well. I found a recipe for Orange and Almond cake which seemed tasty and not too complicated, so I decided to make that. I made the guild symbols while the oranges were boiling and the cake was baking, and then in the morning I made some buttercream to spread over the top of the cake.

Cake with buttercream swirled over the top

Final cake with symbols on it

Everyone said it was super tasty! The only problem was I couldn't cut it into more than 16 slices, and there were about 40 people there. Luckily by the end most people had already eaten lots of food in between rounds so I think the people that wanted some got some! The next challenge is to make one with less sugar in for the diabetic gamers...

ETA: Copyright information 
Magic: the Gathering® and Return to Ravnica™ are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the USA and other countries.
All guild symbols are copyright © 2012 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

16/9/12 - A cake with a name

A while ago my friends had a baby, and I made them a quilt as a present. Well now the baby is a bit bigger (she's still very small though!), they were having a baby-welcoming party (like a baby shower, but after the birth) Obviously they've already had their present, but I was asked to make a tasty cake so I made a cake with the baby's name on it. It's a chocolate cake similar to the birthday cake I made in August, but with raspberry jam instead of cherry for the sandwich-joining.
For some reason the cake rose very unevenly in the oven but i managed to fill in the dips with jam and chocolate icing. The small lumpy bits on the icing are where I didn't quite melt the chocolate in the ganache because my cream wasn't hot enough. Ah well.

The flowers are chocolate floodwork, similar to the floodwork flowers I made here but made out of melted white and milk chocolate instead of runny icing. The white chocolate for the outlining went a bit lumpy so some of the flowers were not very good - these are the best ones! The milk chocolate melted much better so filling the flowers was easier than the outlines. I kept the flowers in the fridge until I was ready to attach them to the cake, so they wouldn't melt.
The name is iced directly onto the cake, I practised a couple of times on greasproof paper to get the letters the right size and I made small marks in the icing with a skewer to keep the writing even (the marks were covered up by the writing)

Cakes for a birthday party - 11/8/12

 You may have noticed that I like baking with my friends. One of those friends is Esther, who has her own recipe blog at 'La Recette du Misther' (as long as you can read french!)
So for her birthday she decided to have an afternoon tea party, and asked me to bake a cake.

Well I looked through my recipe books, and couldn't decide which cake to make so I baked three:

Chocolate cherry cake, bara brith, lemon cheesecake

They're actually three cakes I haven't baked before! They're all Good Food magazine recipes so I can post links for you.
The chocolate cherry cake is a variation on the chocolate raspberry cake I made for a friend's birthday last year (here) - I just replaced the raspberries with cherries. (original recipe here)

E is for Esther!

The lemon cheesecake (recipe here) is quite similar to a vanilla cheesecake I made around christmas time, though that had chocolate digestives as a base instead of plain, and white chocolate grated into the cheesy bit instead of lemons. I accidentally bought two lemons and a lime instead of three lemons, so it's technically a lemon & lime cheesecake. I found citrus flavoured sprinkles in the shop and couldn't resist them to decorate it!

Tasty cheesecake!

 Finally the bara brith (recipe here).My previous attempts at bara brith involved yeast and went terribly wrong, but this one has self-raising flour instead so it's basically a more interesting tea loaf.

Lovely sugary bara brith

It has sugar crystals on top of it for added crunchy tooth rotting goodness!

So I made toomuch cake, there's lots left. Oh well!