Autumn Baking

Yes, yes, I am one of those people who love Autumn. Any season that makes it ok for me to get out my hot water bottle and drink hot chocolate in bed is alright by me. And the Autumn colours, obviously! My place of work looks like this in Autumn:

Image copyright English Heritage

If that's not a good enough excuse to get up for work on a dark morning, I don't know what is!

So as Autumn is slowly slipping away from us and the time for sloe gin and Christmas cake is nigh (actually, I don't like Christmas cake so I'll just have extra gin,) let's have a look at what I did with Autumn goodies.

The Food

Brambles, apples, plums & pumpkins. Three of those things I got for free right of the bush/tree! Amazing. 

The brambles came from my own back garden. We discovered the bush last year after we got very little gardening done due to the bad weather; this thing just started taking over the garden and then produce some lovely brambles. It turns out my Mum had taken a cutting from my auntie's garden years ago and forgot about it and had been cutting it back for a number of years, meaning we had no idea it was going to produce some delicious fruit until last year. This year we didn't dare cut it through fear of losing the berries. It is in the corner of the garden affectionately called 'the wild area'.

The plums came from work; we have a small orchard in the grounds that's made up of plum, apple and pear trees and bounty this year has been amazing.

My apples didn't come from the Priory but from a castle! Nearby Richmond Castle was also enjoying a fruitful September and I sweet talked our gardeners into acquiring me some. (When I made a visit to Richmond the branches were far too high for me to get them myself!)

Richmond Castle - Image copyright English Heritage

Sadly I don't have access to a pumpkin patch so my pumpkins came from Tesco.

Hagrid's Pumpkin Patch

The drink

Plum liqueur

After a successful bash at making sloe gin last year, I knew I was going to make more liqueurs this year, and because we had such an abundance of fruit I was able to make a couple.

Blackberry liqueur

I used this recipe for the plum liqueur and this one for the blackberry one. (Note: if you get minute have a look through The Boy's Club site - their cocktails are inspirational!) Nothing to report here as I just followed the recipes and both are still doing their thing! I did run out of vodka for the blackberry so topped it up with white rum. I'm sure it'll be fine...

The Sweet

One word: crumble. In our house the fruit is a necessary evil. We would quite happily (and have been known to) eat a bowl of crumble with some custard. I used James Martin's recipe for the crumble (110g/4oz butter, softened - 110g/4oz demerera sugar - 180-200g/6-7oz plain flour just lightly rubbed together and baked on a baking sheet for 15 mins at 190/170/gas 5) and then I used this BBC Good Food recipe for the fruit. Delicious! I love warm brambles - they remind me of when my Nanna used to make bramble pie. Even the smell gives me that nostalgia. Yum! She should get on that again.

Plum, chocolate & hazelnut cake

Next was this recipe also from BBC Good Food. Can you see I haven't done anything ground breaking? I am afraid using other peoples' recipes was the best I could come up with! I was unsure about the plum, chocolate & hazelnut combo of this cake but it actually was surprisingly lovely. The ground hazelnuts really came though and the texture of the plum was a nice contrast. I would recommend giving this a try for something different.

The Savoury 

Image copyright BBC Good Food

Pumpkin soup!! I have memories of eating pumpkin soup ata German Christmas market around a barrel after a few too many Gluhweins. Perhaps that is why I remember the soup tasting so delicious but it also came in a bowl made out of bread! Uh! Amazing! It was mindblowing.

I had to eat my soup out of a bowl and one day I had to eat it with Ryvita because I didn't have any bread. Not. On.

Guess where I went for my soup recipes? Well done - BBC Good Food. The first one was a little but onion and cream heavy  - maybe it only needed one onion but the onion taste is why my mum liked it so much so each to there own. The Thai one had such an amazing fragrance - it just smelled of Thai  It was little thinner than the first one but I think that's just the style of Thai soup but it certainly had a lot more flavour and a definite kick from the red curry paste but was maybe lacking in the taste of the ginger, although I think that might be my own fault.

So I might not be winning any awards for culinary originality but I have enjoyed baking and eating things that I have foraged for. Ok, so very little foraging took place but I found the process of baking things that I knew to come directly from the source extremely satisfying. And I just can't wait to get my hands on the sloes in a couple of weeks time!

Vicky xx

Weekend Bakes: Banoffee Pie Cupcakes

Banoffee pie is one of my favourite desserts and I have been meaning to get them into cupcake form for a while. So when Kat Buckley , aka The Baking Explorer made a batch of delicious looking banoffee cupcakes and we happened to have a few over ripe bananas I knew how I was going to spend my afternoon.

We seem to have had a bit of a run of bananas that were ripening far too quickly, hence the two weeks running of banana-related recipes!

Having made the banana loaf the week before, I already had a good idea of what was going to go into my mix and used light brown sugar and butter as opposed to caster sugar and margarine.

The batter smelled lovely and banana-y and there was a lovely sugary aroma when they were baking. I was a little disappointed when they came out of the oven because every single one of the cupcakes had sank. The mixture made about 16 cupcakes so I'd put 12 in my gas oven and the rest in the electric oven and, as you can see, they all sank so I think this must have been a problem with the mixture rather than the ovens. I'm thinking maybe the bananas were too heavy for my usual, light sponge mixture?

However, I was not to be deterred: the middles were coming out anyway so I could fill them with lovely sweet toffee sauce. I did cheat a bit on the sauce. We had some ready-made toffee sauce in the cupboard and I opted to use that instead of making my own and perhaps having a lot left over.

The usual topping for a banoffee pie is lovely thick whipped cream but because I wanted the cupcakes to last a few days I chose to top mine with buttercream but I think this worked ok. It gave a different flavour and texture being heavier and sweeter than whipped cream but as it was on a cupcake I think that was allowed.

The cupcakes were then topped with grated chocolate and were ready to eat.

Banana and toffee is such a fantastic combination, so when you take that first bite and you get the lovely moist banana-y cake mixed with the smooth toffee sauce, you know you're on to a winner! I think this would have worked as a 'naked' cupcake with a dollop of whipped cream or buttercream on the side.

The only thing lacking with these cupcakes was the biscuit element. Kat added Speculoos to her batter to get a biscuit flavour. I did think about crumbling some biscuit on the top with the chocolate but I didn't want it to go soft. Maybe I need to experiment with a  biscuit base at the bottom of the cupcake case! After all it is all about the buttery biscuit base... 

Recipe:

For the Cake:

6oz soft light brown sugar

6oz unslated butter, softened

3 eggs

6oz self raising flour

2 ripe bananas, mushed

For the middle:

toffee sauce of your choosing

For the buttercream:

400g icing sugar

100g unsalted butter, softened

a few tablespoons of milk

To top:

- chocolate to grate

Method:

- pre-heat oven to gas mark 4/170 degrees C

- line baking tins with cupcake cases

- cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy

- lightly beat the eggs then add them to the sugar mixture a bit at a time

- add the occasional tablespoon of flour to stop the mixture curdling

- add half of the remaining flour and fold in gently

- add the remaining flour and the mushed up banana, again folding in gently

- spoon into the cupcake cases about 2/3 full and pop in the oven for 15-20 minutes and 

  hope they don't sink!

- in the meantime, make the buttercream by mixing the butter and icing sugar, adding the 

  milk a bit at a time until you get a good piping consistency (soft enough to pipe, firm 

  enough for it to stay piped!)

- when the cupcakes are done, take them out of the oven and leave them to cool

- when fully cool take out the middles of the cupcakes with an apple corer or knife, fill 

  the holes with toffee sauce and then pop the removed cake back in

- top the cake with a swirl of buttercream then sprinkle over some grated chocolate

- stuff your face!

Vicky xx

Cake Time - Noah's Ark Christening Cake

The animals went in 2-by-2, hurrah! Hurrah! 

The animals went in 2-by-2, Hurrah!

Right, lions are boss

Closely followed by the hippos because really who would mess with them?

Oh look some giraffes...

And there are some cheeky monkeys. And there are more than 2 of them... Very cheeky.

Oh man, who let these elephants on? Seriously. They look deranged.

What are these?  Oh, blue bears. Are they a thing?

Yes.

Happy fish

Birds, you know you can fly, right? Fly all away from the water.

Do you know what this cake needs? Red pandas.

Lemme on!

Noah's Ark made for baby Maxwell on his christening. Vanilla sponge with vanilla buttercream (but no jam because we ran out.) Based on the design and instructions of Debbie Brown, novelty cake lady extraordinaire, in Debbie Brown's Baby Cakes.

Vicky xx

Weekend Bakes: Nigel Slater's Black Banana Cake

For a while now I have been meaning to try my hand at making some banana bread. It seems to be everywhere at the minute; just the other morning someone was making it on Lorraine and it made me a bit sad that my breakfast was rather boring. When I was on holiday in Australia the other year I had it for breakfast all the time like it was just a standard thing. I'd get it toasted, smoother it in butter and then just be in a banana, buttery paradise for the duration of breakfast. I think if I started everyday like that it would be pretty sweet; cake that is positively encouraged as breakfast food is fine by me.

We had a bit of a run a couple of weeks ago of getting really bad bananas; they were ripening very quickly and ended up getting wasted. So I decided that was the perfect time to have a go at some banana bread.

Except I didn't.

What I actually ended up making was Nigel Slater's Black Banana Cake made with banana, chocolate chip and hazelnut loaf. (And I didn't even really make that because we didn't have any hazelnuts and I had to use walnuts.) I'm not sure what happened between me looking for banana bread recipes and ending up with a cakey loaf but it happened. The worse thing being I couldn't really get away with eating that for breakfast. Well... maybe not on a daily basis.

But I did end up with a really nice, light loaf full of flavour and texture that was excellent for eating during the day with a cup of tea.

I won't type out the whole recipe here as it can be found here. It varies on a normal sponge by using butter and light brown sugar instead or margarine and caster sugar. I love baking anything that uses brown sugar instead of caster sugar; the smell when it is in the oven is a delicious caramel-type smell that makes your mouth water. I also think that anything that smells like that lends itself to be eaten when warm and melty.

Look at all that chocolate!

Only problem with the recipe was maybe the cooking temperature could have been a touch lower; I was surprised at how quickly I had to cover the loaf because the top was browning very fast but the middle still wasn't anywhere near ready. I think this explains why my loaf came out sunken because I'd had to open the oven door sooner than I would  have liked.

It was also quite crumbly which is fine, I guess, when you are just going to eat it, but it made it really difficult to cut up into nice slices.

Crumbly goodness

There was no frills and bows with this one, just the cake as it was and that was all that was needed. There was enough moisture in the cake from the bananas that it wasn't dry to eat on its own and there was a lovely sweetness from the chocolate and a crunch from the walnuts. My next door neighbour and chief taste tester, Uncle Ian, said he didn't think it needed the chocolate but I think banana and chocolate is such a wonderful combination.

My favourite part of the taste test was when my mum claimed that it was a shame when you use apples in baking that it makes the cake look like it's not cooked... Two thumbs from her then: bananas that taste like apples and a stodgy looking loaf.

This one is definitely worth having a go at, and I won't shout if you eat it for breakfast!

Vicky xx

Cake Time: Monday Morning Monsters

Morning All! Hope you have all had a lovely weekend. I enjoyed a rare weekend off and I'm only back for one day before I'm off again. It just makes Monday a little more bearable! 

I am working really hard at the minute to make sure I have lots of lovely things to post on here and to make sure I keep up to date with the cakes I have been doing. That's why you have been treated to cake posts two days in a row!

These are some cutie little monsters done for a little boy's birthday a few weeks* ago. All cupcakes were vanilla sponge and decorated with buttercream, fondant and royal icing.

*months

We had to make 30 cupcakes. Do you know how hard it is to make 30 monster cupcakes? It's pretty hard! You have to be truly inspired. It was suggested that I should be doing 30 completely different ones but I think I'd still be doing them now...

Despite having to work hard thinking of enough good ideas, I enjoyed creating these monsters and monsterettess and we managed good levels of both brightness and silliness. Perfectly appropriate for a fun children's party.

Awww, you wouldn't mind finding such monsters under the bed, would you? :)

Vicky xx

Things I love Thursday: Baking Books

I probably don't have the biggest cook book collection in the world (although the way my Mum goes on you'd think I did.) But I have to admit I probably have more than I need... They are piled up on my shelves full of recipes and projects that I would love to try but just can't find the time to do.

The Vintage Tea Party is my absolute favourite - I just want to live in its beautiful pages

But when I bought my friend the Clandestine Cake Book as a birthday present, I found it very difficult to part with. It was quite hard to wrap it up and write someone else's address on the envelope. So when I heard the book calling to me from the shelves in Tesco at a fraction of its retail price (damn you, Waterstones, and your full prices!) it might have just fallen into my trolley and made it all the way to the checkout and then home.

I won't go on about the Clandestine Cake Club here as I think most people who are interested in baking are now aware of the concept. It was set up by Lynn Hill in 2010 and is basically groups of people meeting up all over the world and bringing along delicious homemade cakes to a pre-decided theme. The one rule being it has to be a cake. Currently there isn't one local to me and it's definitely something I would love to get involved in setting up. I think it would be a huge step for me and would do wonders for my confidence. My excuse is my odd working days but I realise that's a lame cop out.

You can find all the info you need about the CCC here

The book is fantastic: there is so much lovely looking stuff in there. The thing that caught my eye straight away was the lemon, parsnip and hazelnut cake. Yum! I love the sweetness of roasted parsnips and can't wait to try them in a cake. The blue velvet cake is amazingly striking and I can't wait to fake an occasion so I can give that a go. The book has also made me see how much I need a bundt tin in my life! Maybe even a heart shaped one. A heart shaped cake covered in glacé icing and glitter?! What! Amazing.

I have already had a go at the toffee cake (I bought dates to make a date & walnut loaf for the nice gentleman who brings me eggs at work and thought I would never use them again!) but more on that soon.

The only problem with the book is that it's not helping me work on other sides of baking like bread or pastry and is just helping me continue my cake obsession but if those are the rules...

Vicky xx

I love: wearing gloves to colour fondant *squish* pilates  Super Mario Bros Wii  House (I always love House)  red lipstick headscarves  early morning pre-work jogs  cringing over so-bad-they're-good films, I'm lookign at you Pitch Perfect (loved it!)  train trips to Newcastle eating biscuits with my favourite people parmentier potatoes a cold glass of wine on a sunny evening  summer dresses  watermelon  making plans for visitors  The Temptations