Unless you live literally under a rock, you’ll know that last week marked the start of this year’s Great British Bake Off – one hour every week of pure loveliness, all drizzled in lemony syrup and dusted with icing sugar. (This year I plan to be prepared, and buy appropriate snacks in advance, so that I’m not left in that awful situation of watching 128 cup cakes being made, and only having rice cakes and bananas to eat.)
The Colossal Cake Sale – how to use the power of cake to change lives
First questions: do you love cakes?
(If you said no then just leave now. Come on.)
Second question: do you like being charitable?
This is a trick question as clearly it’s not really OK to answer no to this one.
You will be pleased to know that this year you can combine these two loves to help provide vital support to those who have suffered life changing injuries and their families, for life. All you have to do is take part in the Colossal Cake Sale, which has been set up by Help for Heroes, the charity which help those who have been wounded in Britain’s current conflicts.
Help For Heroes are asking every community to get together between 19th April and 5th May to raise money by holding a cake sale, either at their local school or shopping centre or just making cakes to sell around the office or to friends and family. This year the event is being sponsored by Whitworths sugar and they have loads of recipes on their website to get you started. View Post
Oh-so-simple puff pastry swirls
I made these mincemeat puff pastry swirls last weekend and just had to share them as they are so simple yet so impressive looking. They’re perfect if you’ve got friends coming round and need to whip up a tasty hot treat, so long as you don’t mind a bit of pastry on the carpet.
Firstly, you need a packet of ready rolled puff pastry. Unroll it, but leave it on the baking parchment. Spread it with whatever you fancy – jam, mincemeat, or perhaps even some of my home-made lemon curd? We went for mincemeat as I have been planning my #WinChristmas giveaway this week and it has been making me feel rather festive. View Post
RECIPE: Chocolate and peanut butter cookies
If you enjoy these chocolate and peanut butter cookies why not try my homemade bourbon biscuits?
Belle is a bit of an entrepreneurial baker. Quite often, if she’s feeling a bit short of cash, she’ll whip up a batch of cookies and go door to door around the square selling them to our neighbours. She hasn’t quite grasped the idea of the costs involved, preferring to see the ingredients in the cupboard as fair game, but I admire her spirit.
This weekend we had friends coming over, so I set Belle to work. We decided to make chocolate and peanut butter cookies, a recipe we found on the Flora website. A few people I know have started using Flora Cuisine for baking lately, and singing its praises, so we thought we’d give it a go. It’s basically runny margarine, so is ideal for kids to use in cakes, biscuits and flapjacks as it’s already nice and soft. View Post
Apricot and almond cookies
Today my very funny and clever daughter Bee is guest posting for me. (I’m not just saying that so she’ll keep making me apricot and almond cookies. Honest). If you enjoy these, try our chocolate and peanut butter cookies.
…
I am quite good at baking. I also really want people to like me. Luckily the two go hand in hand – as Homer Simpson says, “you don’t make friends with salad”.
As I’m quite new to baking things other than sloppily made fairy cakes, I’m finding I don’t have a lot of the right equipment or ingredients needed for some of the more advanced bakes. I don’t even have a cooling rack, I have to take one of the shelves out of the oven, wait for it to cool down, and then use that.
However, I have found one product that gives great results every time. We were sent a parcel from Whitworth’s that contained all the types of sugar I could think of and more. I was starting to feel like a real baker, with at least 8 different types of sugar in my baking cupboard. View Post
WIN a Whitworths Sugar goody bag
‘Ay up.
(That was me experimenting with accents. I don’t think it went well. I won’t do it again.)
Today I’m giving a bit of a plug to a whole month of competitions that Whitworths Sugar are running over on Twitter during February. As you know, I’ve been getting my bake on with Whitworths lately, so thought I would help you to win your own Whitworths Sugar goody bag, so you can make delicious pear and ginger cake too.
Whitworths is holding a different competition every week, with three winners being picked at random every week. Here’s what you have to do: View Post
Ginger and pear cake with toffee sauce
Ginger and pear cake recipe in association with Whitworths
Is it OK to have cake for breakfast? I’m not sure, but I just did it anyway, because I’m a grown-up and I can.
Ha!
The cake in question was the Whitworths’ ‘Scrummy Ginger and Pear Cake with Toffee Sauce’. I made it last night, so if tomorrow you want to be having cake for breakfast, here’s what you need to do:
Ginger and pear cake – Ingredients
- 150g ready to eat dates
- 250ml boiling water
- 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 150g Whitworths for baking fine caster sugar
- 50g Whitworths for baking dark soft brown sugar
- 125g butter at room temperature
- 1 large egg
- 225g self-raising flour
- 1tsp ground ginger
- 3 ripe pears, peeled, cored and cut into 2cm pieces
For the toffee sauce:
- 100g Whitworths for baking light soft brown sugar
- 100g butter
- 150ml double cream
- Whitworths for baking twist and sprinkle icing sugar
Ginger and pear cake – Method
Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas Mark 4. Line a round 22cm cake tin with non-stick baking paper. (Or if like me you realise you don’t have any, greasing the pan and then covering it with flour works well.)
Coarsley chop the dates, place in a heatproof bowl and add the boiling water and bicarbonate of soda. Set aside to cool and then coarsley mash with a fork.
Beat the caster sugar and dark soft brown sugar and butter in a large bowl until pale and creamy. NB This takes longer if you can only find one of the whisks:
Add the egg and continue to beat for one minute.
Sift the flour and ground ginger into the bowl with the date mixture and pears. Using a large metal spoon fold until well-combined.
Pour your ginger and pear cake mix into the tin and bake for one hour ten minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Check the cake after 50 minutes and if the top is browning too quickly cover with a piece of foil and continue to cook.
For the toffee sauce:
Place the cream, light soft brown sugar and butter into a small saucepan over a medium heat. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Serve the warm cake with a drizzle of toffee sauce and decorate with icing sugar. Or simply on a plate with a cup of tea at 9am.
Delicious!
Giant beehive cake
Bee is a bit of a dab hand in the kitchen when she wants to be, and after giving her recipe books as Christmas and birthday presents for the last two or three years, she has recently finally got the hint and started making me some cakes.
“Hooray!” I cheered.
“Is that why you’ve been buying me cake books all this time?” she asks, eyeing me suspiciously.
Well dur.
For ages now I’ve been wanting her to try out the giant silicone beehive cake mould we got from Betterware. I thought it would be cute, a Bee baking bees, so this week she gave it a go.
This is the mould, and this is what you’re aiming for in the end:
She used this recipe, taken from the Betterware blog, created especially for the mould:
You will need
- 170g Clear Honey
- 140g Unsalted Butter
- 85g Light Muscovado Sugar
- 2 Medium eggs
- 200g Self Raising Flour
- Bee Hive Silicone Mould
Inside the cake
- 55g Icing Sugar
- 1 tablespoon Clear Honey
- Hot Water
To decorate
- 75g Icing Sugar
- Water
Here’s what you do
- First up pre heat the oven to 180c/350f/Gas 3
- Grease the inside of your mould lightly with butter or cake release. Make sure you grease every crease and fold to ensure your cake is easily removed once baked. This is a really crucial bit, so I stood and watched over Bee’s shoulder as she greased, saying really unhelpful and annoying things like ‘make sure you grease everywhere really well’.
- Add the honey, muscovado sugar, butter and a tablespoon of water into a large pan. Gently heat until the mixture is melted
- Beat eggs and sieve flour Everything seemed to be going well at this point, so I retired to the lounge for a little sit down.
- Remove from the heat and mix in the eggs and flour
- Spoon mixture evenly into both sides of the mould and bake for 40 to 45 minutes. Your cake should be springy to touch. Poke a sharp knife through the cake, if it comes out clean your cake is ready. I’d been sitting down for some time, and was getting concerned that the spooning stage was lasting quite a long time. I went into the kitchen, where I found Bee looking grumpy. “It’s rubbish,” she said, “you can’t put it in the oven because it just flops all over the place.” I gave her one of the looks I always mean to be sympathetic but which tend to come out as patronising, got out a baking tray to put it on, and we were back on track.
- Leave to cool on a wire rack before gently removing the cake from the mould
It was at the ‘bake for 40-45mins’ bit that things went a bit wrong. 40 -45mins is a long time, and after 30 minutes, our beehive was already blackening around the edges. Whether it was user or designer error I don’t know, but the mould had bent out of shape, weighed down with cake mixture, meaning it didn’t rise evenly. I think we’d need to practise this a bit.
On the plus side, the pattern looked really good when you turned it out, but the way it had risen just wasn’t conducive to constructing a beehive. We tried trimming it, to create flat surfaces that we could stick together, but the amount we had to trim meant we were really just left with a 2D drawing of a beehive.
I asked Bee to sum up her beehive baking experience, and here’s what she said:
Pros
- Recipe was easy to do
- Mould was easy to grease
- Pattern came out nicely
Cons
- Mould was a bit flimsy
- Rose weirdly
- Wasn’t the tastiest cake ever
- Couldn’t stick together
- Got annoyed with it a lot
So there you go, that sums it up pretty nicely I think.
Easter cookery for kids
Belle is a massive fan of all things wholesome. She loves crafts, painting, and especially baking. I on the other hand, do not. I’m much more a nice quiet trip to the cinema type of parent.
So yesterday, in the spirit of the Easter holidays, I outsourced my parenting, and booked Belle into a cookery class. It was the perfect solution – she enjoyed herself, and I did some work in the adjoining cafe, looking up and waving now and again.
I was a little bit disappointed with the class in general, as the promise of ‘making easter biscuits and carrot cakes’ was really more ‘decorating easter biscuits and carrot cakes’, but Belle did her best to pretend to enjoy herself, and to block out the rather annoying boy at the table next to her who kept shouting ‘does anyone know any jokes?’ if the group were quiet for more than 30 seconds.
After half an hour let loose with the icing-in-a-tube, Belle produced these two rather lovely biscuits:
Biscuits duly iced and pre-prepared carrot cakes spread with icing, she then decided to go off-piste, and to come up with her own Easter ideas. She had a rather furtive look about her, clearly concerned that any sort of unplanned fun would be frowned upon.
Here’s what she made. I think it’s quite adorable.
Parenting duties complete – albeit by someone else – we went home to enjoy an afternoon tea of milkshakes and marzipan bunnies.
Will you be partaking in/paying for any Easter craft activities this weekend? Do let us know…
Guest post: talking with teens
Today is guest post day, courtesy of a mystery draw over at Little Mummy. I was thrilled to find out I was swapping with Eggs, Cream and Honey, as obviously I love cake. I was less thrilled than when I found out she is up against me in the MAD blog awards, as her blog is as scrummy as her name suggests.
If you want the other half of the swap, you’ll find me over there today talking about my (cough) love of all things baking. So let’s give it up for Eggs, Cream and Honey! (Welcoming round of applause)…
Chances are if you’re the parent of a teenager, you may have heard the “everyone else” phrase shouted back at you more times than you care to remember. This is the catchphrase adopted by your teen in response to the “no you can’t” line us parents feel the right to exert on occasion. They say it to make us feel guilty, inept and generally out of touch with the mass of other parents who are saying “yes”.
Here are some of the privileges everyone else might be getting:
- a laptop of their own
- a bedtime/curfew of midnight
- unlimited texts and calls on their mobile phone
- co-ed sleepovers
- 18 and over games on their X-box
- access to Facebook whenever they want
- both Friday and Saturday nights out (sometimes Thursday too and don’t get me started on Orange Wednesdays)