Free From Cocoa Cake

Recipe Based on Not Quite Nigella: LINK

I recently made some BanBan Bread, and felt there was something missing. Not with the bake; the cake was a trusted one, and didn't fail to deliver. No, the disappointment came from another source. When I make banana cake, my Scottish colleague would often come up to me and say, after an appreciative and perfectly timed pause, 'that banana bread'. It was something I came to expect as part and parcel with me making this type of cake.

When my most favourite comment was not forthcoming, I went to seek it out, and demand its presence. It turns out that the comment's owner had recently changed his lifestyle and was cutting out lactose and gluten. Well! This put a spanner in the works. I live off droplets of perceived praise, and I couldn't let a reliable source run dry. I immediately started researching gluten free, lactose free recipes. I stumbled across a couple, however rather than being flourless, they tended to use gluten free flours. I am currently reluctant to invest in them, mainly because I am reluctant to go to a shop in the opposite direction from my home.

One glorious day, an email came into my inbox with a powerful headline. I was ordered to make this cake. a gluten free, dairy and lactose free, nut free, and most shockingly, chocolate free cake! The base of the cake was quinoa, Surprise!

Now I know very little about quinoa. I can identify it, I know its texture, but not much else. I managed to eventually locate it in the supermarket, prepared it the day before so it was nice and cold, and off I went. Into Egg Oblivion, where I did not realise I was one egg short. I decided to freestyle, and replace an egg with a mashed banana, as I was too far gone to turn back.

Now it could be the egg substitution, it could be the fact it had only cooled for 1 hour, but the poor bundt collapsed upon turning it out of its tin. After all that effort, I wasn't giving up, so I hastily transferred the cake pieces to cupcake cases, topped them with the coconut cream icing to make puddings.

Puddin's

Now even though the cake did not turn out as I expected, I loved the ease of it, and I genuinely liked the flavour and unusual texture. So much so, I will try it again when I can devote three evenings to its creation.

Salted Caramel Chocolate Cupcakes

Recipe base: LINK

I have a problem. If I see an interesting ingredient AND it's on some kind of promotion, I get filled with an increasing need to purchase said ingredient.

This happened with a jar of Dulce de Leche on offer in my local supermarket. Keeping in mind that I live in Sweden, whose grocery prices are pretty lofty, and whose price saving promotions are few and far between in my humble opinion. Even when there are offers, the price saving is not usually that great. However! You mustn't look a gift horse in the mouth regardless of the size of the gift, so covet it I did. Well I coveted two. Crafty producers offered two variations: Baking, and Classic. How could I choose?! I decided that as I wanted to use it with cake, I would opt for the baking option.

I went home, found a recipe, made it, was suitably disappointed, yada yada, more about that later.

You would think that the purchase would satisfy my needs, if not dampen them. Well, no, it did not. I am all about possession, and as with Pokémon, I gotta catch them all! The price promotion was still on at least three weeks later! They were really tempting me. I managed to talk myself down from the ledge of hopelessness, and put the jar down. I didn't really need it. Turns out, I had already bought the Classic jar in some sort of Supermarket Sweep blackout. I really didn't know, and happened upon the sneaky pot nestled behind a box of cocoa. Kerazy.

Anyhoo, so I was desperate to justify my initial purchase of the Baking Dulce de Leche so I scoured my usual suspects that I could search by ingredient with, and stumbled across a recipe for iced cupcakes. Huzzahs all around, everybody.

It seemed fairly straightforward except for the coring, filling, de-coring (is that a word?) of the cupcakes. Fiddly, monotonous stuff that I really had no time for, but beggars cannot be choosers: I had selected this recipe based on the limited ingredients at home, so I plowed on.

From memory, the cupcake mixture seemed nice and smooth, however proved to be heavy and close textured after baking. Big disappointment. Still edible nonetheless.

The Army

Reflection: add equivalent of bicarbonate of soda to baking powder for extra lift.

At the coring stage, I had a twinkling of a doubt that seeing as I was not baking the Dulce de Leche, I should have bought the other one, but I figured it wouldn't be much different. Kämpa kämpa. It turns out, I'm a mean corer; I could definitely have left more space for the gooey filling, but I retrospectively justified my actions by figuring that these were not results I could waste expensive ingredients on.

The icing was a bit grainy, maybe because I used the wrong sugar, but I don't quite remember. They were impressively uniform looking once they were frosted, so I surprised myself with my passable icing skills. Alas I did not think this through, so my transportation methods resulted in a few sad squashed fellows. Boo.

Cupcake

I have since invested in a 24-cupcake carrier. It is certainly a beast, however somehow more comfortable to carry than my old case.

Better luck next time... watch out for attempt 2!

Coffee Cake... 2nd attempt

Recipe base from Hummingbird Bakery Book.

So I have returned to the scene of the crime.

I really have no rational reason as to why I decided to try doing this cake again... after a hiatus of many months, I have been trying to motivate myself into baking and thought it would be a cop-out to make an old reliable like Spiced Pound Cake, and instead do something that I am yet to perfect.

Please let it be noted that I dislike coffee flavoured foods.

Amendments/Mistakes made to the recipe:

• Replaced approximately 200g of unsalted butter with Milda (which I believe is like Stork). Reason? To use it up.
• Doubled the number of teaspoons of instant coffee granules* for the essence as last time the coffee taste was barely noticeable.
• Forgot to reserve a tablespoon of aforementioned coffee essence for the icing.
• In a bid to soften the butter for the icing more hastily, I ended up melting it
• Thinking the icing was too stiff, I added spray cream to it. Only to remember later that it needed milk. Which I then also added.
• Still not making chocolate shavings, so used chocolate drops.

The Making

I softened the butter for about 15 seconds on the low heating setting in the microwave.

The fact is that I need to buy a larger mixing bowl. Using my largest bowl to mix such a voluminous mixture is an exercise in futility, which I discovered when spooning out the mixture into the tin, and finding a 'section' of inadequately unmixed batter.

I only have one shelf in my oven, so ended up leaving the cupcakes for over an hour before they went in the oven. Next time, I will consider using one of the roasting tin shelves as well, although I am wary of using a 'solid' shelf, and not entirely sure if it has a (negative) effect on the bake.

The big ring cake itself took - what I deem to be - an unreasonably long time to bake when compared to the instructions. The colour came on well, however there was far too much wobble, so I had to use my beloved foil hat to protect it from burning, and bake for at least a further 30 minutes, if not more. I cannot blame the size of the cake for this either; the cupcakes took around 30 minutes to bake as opposed to the usual 20.

When cooling, I left the cake for around 10-15 minutes in its tin, the right way up, then for a further 20 minutes or so upside down in its tin, before eventually turning out.

The Verdict

The texture was actually quite good, and I was suitably impressed by the fact that the cake was still fairly moist, despite having to bake it for at least 30 minutes longer than recommended. 

The Happily Ever After?

I could probably add some cream to the batter to keep the cake less crumbly, especially with the longer bake.

Result of Procrastination

.

Sticky Peach Cupcakes

Based on the Peaches and Cream Cupcakes recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery book.

These were fairly straightforward to make, nothing overly complicated.

I opted to not ice them as it was too soon after the Ginger Cupcakes debacle, and I couldn't face making another batch of icing. Instead I used vanillinsocker, which is essentially vanilla flavoured icing sugar, and sprinkled it over the top.

I renamed them 'Sticky Peach' cupcakes, as they did become very sticky, even before they had been dusted with the vanilla sugar; this may have been because I stowed them away into a tub when they were not completely cool (although they were pretty much cool). Also as there is no cream in the mixture, this part of the name must come from the icing, so I would have been slightly fraudulent if I had stuck with the original title.

I am personally not a fan of fruity cakes, whether the fruit is incorporated in the batter, or on the bottom/top. I like them even less when they make a layer, as there is that slightly sticky residue that occurs where the batter meets the fruit, so I was not overly impressed by these cakes, however as per usual, they were eaten by my ever willing colleagues - mainly because they were cakes, rather than that they were good.

Ginger Cupcakes

Ginger Cupcakes based on the recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery book.

The amount of ginger to use is a bit confusing as they say to use 200g and then reserve the syrup, so I think you are meant to weigh the ginger with the syrup, and then chop the ginger that is included.

I say this in retrospect, as I decided to weigh 400g of the ginger itself (I was making double the mixture), and when chopping the it, I found the process extremely tedious. Plus it looked like there was a lot of ginger. I ended up only chopping around 300g of the ginger.

The batter seemed very nice and smooth, and when I baked them (each tray was done in 21 minutes), they seemed to have had a nice consistency.

The recipe required the sugar syrup that the stem ginger came in to be mixed with water and then reduced, but this seemed unnecessary to me, so I just spooned over the gingery syrup straight from the jar.

The Icing. This is where it all went wrong. The recipe called for ginger infused milk, to which I thought I should add a bit of vanilla extract. I think this curdled the milk. In the future, when wanting to add vanilla to icing that involves milk, I will make sure I use vanillinsocker or vaniljpulver as they do not have alcohol, and are dry ingredients, so should not curdle it.

As upsetting as the icing was, I think the cakes were good - nice consistency, but I think I would prefer ginger flavour, rather than ginger pieces.

Doubling the quantities yielded 28 cupcakes (my muffin tin is slightly smaller than standard).

Coffee Cake

Base recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery book

The cake is massive! It actually require 450g apiece of sugar, butter, and flour, plus a whopping eight eggs! Once again, I misjudged my little bundt tin, and the cake was far too large. I felt it would be, and prepared a loaf tin for the excess, however still managed to overfill the bundt, and then felt it more appropriate to make 4 cupcakes with the remaining batter.

Note to self: the bundt tin should only be 2/3 full!

I used chocolate frosting (recipe from the same book), however this made far too much icing. Only half is needed. The butter wouldn't incorporate properly with the sugar, so in a desperate bid to save it, I zapped it in the microwave for 30 seconds. This made it more pliable, however I still was not happy with its consistency so I added around 15g of goats' cheese, which didn't affect the taste, but did get it closer to the desired creaminess.

The topping was meant to be finished with chocolate shavings and coffee beans - like I would bother! No; instead I sprinkled liberally with multi-coloured chocolate drops (white, milk, and dark)...before the cake had cooled properly. So they melted. I have renamed the cake 'Erupting Chocolate Coffee Cake', and put it down to artistic licence.

The centre of the cake did not bake properly, so I returned it to the oven sans tin (after its recommended 40-minute bake) for around 20 mins @ 150 deg C with foil around the outer edge and top. This helped it somewhat, but not entirely. I am hoping the icing can disguise any mishaps, however I am not convinced by my own hope!

The cupcakes are delicious, though, so the flavour is right, I just need to get the recommended 25cm ring tin. Ironically I saw it in the shop today, and decided not to buy it as I intended to bake bread tonight rather than cake.

Update: the centre was still a bit squidgy looking, and I put it down to using the bundt tin, so the entire quantity of the cake did not have an opportunity to bake properly. Edible, but I wasn't happy.

EBI: stronger coffee flavour (use 3 tablespoons of coffee for the coffee essence?)

Rating: 6/10 

Dalek on a night out?!

7/12/15

I'm reading this while I am updating my blog, and I am aware that I have written about this at a later point, however I am unsure whether I also mentioned that this cake is intended to be baked in a ring pan rather than a Bundt one! Well that's the case, and explains some of the issues I had with my initial attempt.

Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

Based on Hummingbird Bakery book recipe.

Cakes came out rather moist, a bit too moist for my liking, although they were fully cooked.

I used vaniljpulver rather than the recommended vanilla extract due to availability, however I now have my bottle from the UK, so will use next time!

I only made 12, will definitely make more next time

Note to self:

TWO bottles of Dr Oetker's Red Food Colouring

Vanilla Paste from UK

Rating #1: 9/10