Easy Christmas Cake

I have already posted this recipe along with a slightly more complicated one near the start of this blog.

I made my Christmas cake a bit late this year a couple of weeks ago so I went for the easy recipe. 

Now we are 'feeding' it - a shot glass of brandy every couple of weeks.  It doesn't need it. and never got this treatment when my Mum made it, but then we don't have any youngsters around our Christmas table.
 Easy Christmas Cake


Put 3 lb mixed dried fruit in a pot with

8 oz brown sugar,
8 oz butter,
1 Tb glycerine and
1 cup water.
Boil 10 minutes and leave to cool.

Separate 4 eggs and beat the white and yolk separately. Add the beaten egg components time about with

1 lb flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
2 tsp pMixed Spice

Bake in a lined 9" deep tin in a slow oven (about 130C) for 3.5 hours

 

Post on icing it coming soon.

No. 50 - Hummingbird Cake

Hummingbird cake was a dessert standard in a place I where worked over 20 years ago.  I looked up Hummingbird Cake on the internet recently and discovered there is loads of variety in the combinations of fruit used, and speculation about the name.  I suspect the name is some sort of nod to the range of tropical fruit that appears in these recipes ...that people (rightly or wrongly) associate hummingbirds and tropics.

This one uses mashed banana and crushed pineapple in the cake mix and sliced kiwifruit with the cream cheese filling between the layers.

Hummingbird Cake

3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
3 beaten eggs
1.5 cups oil
2 tsp vanilla
1 x 250 gram tin of crushed pineapple & juice
2 cups mashed banana (about 6 average bananas)

Mix the dry ingredients, beat the eggs and oil together and add them to the dry stuff, add the vanilla and fruit.  Do not beat this mixture, blend is gently by hand until just mixed.

Divide the mix between 3 greased and papered 9" (23cm) round baking tins, and bake 20-25 minutes at 170-180 degrees C.  Cool a few minutes in the tins before turning these out on to racks to cool completely.

Icing and Filling

100 grams soft butter, 200 grams cream cheese, about 12 heaped tablespoons of fine icing sugar - beat all together well, spread 1/3 on each cake, put fine slices of peeled kiwifruit (or mango, or even tinned peaches if you like) on each and then stack them up.

Voila - hummingbird cake.   You might need a fork to eat this cake - it's not one to eat with one hand, wielding your coffee cup in the other, while contemplating the latest office emails.

No 48 - Parsnip Cake

 

Nearing the end of this 50 baking challenge I threw the recipe book aside for this one and scoured around for more recipes for cakes with vegetables in them – parsnips for instance.  It turns out that there are loads of parsnip cake recipes, so I started with this one from http://www.bakingmad.com/recipes/cake-recipes 

You’ll love this website, and my colleagues just raved about this cake.

 

 

 

Parsnip and Ginger Cake with Ginger ButterCream

 

250 grams self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground ginger
125 grams golden caster sugar
125 grams light Muscovado sugar
2 stem ginger balls finely chopped
3 large eggs
200 grams finely grated parsnip
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
125 grams butter (melted and cooled slightly)

Preheat the over to 170 degrees C (fan oven), and line and grease 2 x 20cm round baking tins.

The original recipe says to sift the flour, leavening, ground ginger, and sugars and stir in the chopped stem ginger to coat it.  Then mix the eggs, grated parsnip, vanilla, and butter and pour it into the dry ingredients and mix gently.

My own experience is that Muscovado sugar does not sift, so I beat the eggs and Muscovado together before adding the butter and beating again.  I mixed the grated parsnip into the flour and then tipped in the wet mix.  It seemed to work. 

Divide the mix between two tins and bake for 25 minutes.

Let them cool a few minutes in the tins before turning them out.

Sandwich them together and ice the top with ginger butter cream:  150 grams softened butter, 300 grams icing sugar and 3 Tb syrup from the stem ginger.

Decorate the top with chopped crystallized ginger.

 

I have offered to help Sarah G with a couple of cakes for her RNLI fundraiser this weekend, so this is going on the 'to bake' list.  I think I'll double it, cook it in 3 x 23cm tins, and make a triple decker sandwich. 

 

No 46 - Zucchini Bread

A bit of a misnomer because it is not bread - more cake or sweet 'loaf'.  However I harvested the first zucchini of this season on Saturday, so I'm getting in the mindset to be over-run by them (which to be frank would be preferable to last year's impoverished harvest).

I love zucchini in cakes and muffins; lots of lovely moistness without much impact on flavour.

Zucchini Bread

1 cup oil

3 eggs

1 ½  cups sugar (I use light brown sugar)

3 tsp vanilla

2 cups grated zucchini

3 cups plain flour
2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

¾ tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp salt (optional)

1 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds

Pre-heat the oven to 160^o C (325^o F) and prep a large loaf tin (or two small ones).

Beat the first 4 ingredients together until the mixture is thick and fluffy.  Stir in the grated zucchini.  Fold in the sifted dry ingredients, and seeds.

Even it out in your loaf tin and bake for about an hour (until a skewer comes out clean).

 

or try a round one.....

No 45 - Upside Down Citrus Cake

'Birds on Bikes', a group of local women, had their annual tour of the Hayling Art Trail last weekend.  It was followed by a meal and social gathering at the large and very welcoming home of one of the organizers of Birds on Bikes.  The invitation to join them was accepted with delight, and as the main course was to be curry, I had no problem deciding what to make to contribute to deserts; there are still jars of my unset marmalade lurking on my top shelf.... 

So in addition to the Lime Marmalade Cheesecake (see No 36), I made this marmalade cake with oranges and lime marmalade.  (Lime so goes with curry.)  This looks like the sort of thing that could easily weld itself to a baking tin, so I hauled out the silicon bakeware.  

(I hate this stuff, it's rubbish for cooking a Christmas cake in, but for cakes that weld to the tin, this turned out to be just the ticket.)   This is a 23cm cake pan.   If you want a deeper cake use a smaller pan.

Upside Down Citrus & Marmalade Cake

Grease the bottom and sides of the cake pan with a heavy layer of unsalted butter.  Sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of demerrara sugar and arrange thinly sliced oranges in there.

Pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees C.

Cream 200 grams of unsalted butter & 200 grams of golden caster sugar until it is the colour of french vanila ice-cream.

Beat in 4 large eggs, 1 at a time with lots of beating in between.

Add the zest and juice of an orange and zest off a lemon, and 3 generous tablespoons of lime marmalade.

More beating.

Fold in 200 grams of self-raising flour and 50 grams of ground almonds.

Dollop the mix on top of the arranged orange slices, swipe your spatula round the top a bit to even it out, and bake it for about half an hour (in your pre-heated oven).

When it has cooled a bit, tip it onto the serving plate and dress the top with 3-4 tablespoons of marmlade.  Your marmalade won't be an unset disaster like mine so you might need to warm it up first to make it runny.

Et voila...

....marmalade cake

Sorry about the pink cake-carrying understorey.  That colour combination was just so 'in-your-face' I had to photograph it like that.

And the astute among you will have noticed that the photgraphs are two different cakes - of course they are; one of them had to come to work to count for the blog.

No 41 - German Plum Cake

The inspiration for baking something new often comes (in my kitchen at least) from having something I want to use up before it wastes.  So it was with plums I had bought cheaply and in large quantity a couple of years back.  The answer was Plum Cake, and although I suspect it is meant to be made in a shallow rectangular baking tin, and cut into squares (a 'slice' I suppose), it works well for us like this - particularly if we intend to spoon it out still warm and eat it for pudding with lashings of custard.


The plums are a refreshing tart contrast to sweet cake, and the ground almonds ensure a moist firm texture.

German Plum Cake

150g golden caster sugar
150g butter
3 large eggs
75g sifted plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds
75g chopped walnuts
16 plums (depends on size - use 8 of those big ones we get in supermarkets these days)

Cut the plums into quarter and remove the stones.  (I slice the really big plums into smaller pieces than quarters.)

Cream the butter and sugar until it looks like french vanilla ice cream.  Beat the eggs lightly and add them bit by bit to the creamed buter/sugar mixture and beat in well.

Sift in the flour and baking powder and fold it in with a metal spoon.  Fold in the ground almonds and walnuts chopped to about pea-sized pieces.

Spread the mixture into your chosen baking tin (well greased beforehand of course), and throw the plum pieces on top.  The mixture rises up through the plums as it cooks.

Bake 40-45 minutes at 170-180 degrees C (depending on fan or conventional oven).

PS. I also put a dash of vanilla in the mix

No 38 - Mudcake

While I was as University I worked nearly full time 5 nights a week in a local restaurant.  The owners were head cook and maitre d' together and ran one of the most 'hip' restaurants in town.  They eschewed formal 'cheffing' qualifications and pulled together everyday dishes from a wide range of ultures and countries where they had travelled.  Dishes on the black board menu hailed from around the Mediterranean, Middle East, North and West Africa, Mexico, Indonesia & Japan - and anything else that was tasty, unfussy, fresh & personal.

Daily changes in the blackboard menu reflected that which was seasonally available and as much as possible was purchased from local producers. (And this was the 1980's)

Sue grew a wide range of herbs, and fresh herbs featured abundantly.  My own garden supplemented this on occasion.  We sometimes used quient afternoons when all 'prep' forthe evening was complete, to make up jars of colourful preserves that were displayed on open shelves between the otherwise open kitchen andthe dining room: salted lemons, spiced mandarins, red capsicum jelly, asparagus and red pepper strips, pickled carrot sticks for the antipasti platters, pickled qualis eggs, feta cheese in herbed olive oil & garlic......

Only the desserts and puddings were relatively unchanging -homemade icecreams, cakes, special mousses, and guest appearances using seasonal fruit.

This mud cake was a standard.  I don't recall it ever going off the menu, and it was always in demand.

Mud Cake

Sift together:

2 cups flour

1/2 cup cocoa

1 and 3/4 cups raw sugar (I use golden sugar in UK)

1 tsp baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

then whisk in

2 large eggs

2 cups water

1/2 up oil

And really whisk it lots.  Introduce lots of air.  Give your whisking arm a work out.

This is a really runny mix - don't be alarmed by that.

Line he base of a 9 inch loose botton tin and grease the sides.  Pour in the mix and bake at 180 degrees C (fan oven) for 1 hour. 

Let it cool in the tin.

When it is cold use a large knife to slice it into 3 layers horizontally.  Put raspberry jam generously between the bottom and middle layer.  Put raspberry jam AND some of the icing between the middle and top.  Put icing all over the top and sides.

The Icing:

1.5 cups icing sugar

1 cup cocoa

125 g butter

juice of 1 lemon

100 g sour cream.

Sift the dry ingredients, soften the butter and beat all the ingredients together.  I make this in advance, put it in the fridge for a while, then microwave it just before I use it - that seems to improve the texture, makes it  easier to spread, and makes it go really glossy.

No 37 - Lime Marmalade and Pear Cake

As promised I have been working on using up lime and ginger marmalade.  And there were some pears looking neglected in the fruit bowl that went into this cake  (pears and ginger always seem to go well together don't you find?)- so it was very moist, slightly gritty as pear cakes are (as pears tend to be) and was very popular at work - even without icing, which tends to just get stuck all over the place on the trip up to London.

Lime and Ginger Marmalade & Pear Cake

6 oz butter

2 oz butter

1/4 cup golden syrup

2 eggs

5 ox marmalade

10 oz flour (wholemeal if you like texture and believe in making cakes a bit more healthful)

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ginger (if your marmalade doesn't have it already - or you like extra)

2 grated pears

1 tsp soda disolved in 1/4 milk

Cream the butter sugar and golden syrup, beat in the eggs, then the marmalade.  Sift in the dry ingredients, addn the grated pears and lastly stir in the soda and milk.

I useda 9" ring tin for this cake - so that it cooks slightly faster.  Grease it well.

Bake at 160 degrees C for 1 hour to 75 minutes.  Cool it in the tin for about 15 minutes.

You could ice it with icing made from icing sugar and  lemon or lime juice - and sprinkle on chopped toasted walnuts if you like some class to your cake.  We just like cake - and this one is quite good as a pudding - still warm with lashings of custard......

Gooseberry Shortcake

This one doesn't have a number because it never made it to work. 

The gooseberries were ripe enough to pick last week.  Mr B had to pick them while I was at work and I came home on Friday to find a bowl of them in the fridge.  They were ripe enough to eat just like that but I managed to restrain myself.

Last year I ate them straight off the bush.  The bush is right next to the bee-hive, but with only one beehive that wasn't really a problem; they were extremely well behaved bees.  This year we have 4 beehives at the end of the garden, and at least 2 of them have a tendency to stroppiness.  At least the gooseberry bushes are well guarded by day.

Shortcake

4 oz butter
4 oz sugar
2 beaten eggs
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder

Cream the butter and sugar, add eggs, then sifted flour and baking powder.  Roll holf of the dough to fit a 9 inch diameter straight sided cake tin.  At this point I put the base in the oven (170 - 180 degrees C) while I roll out the top half.  That bit of extra cooking avoids the soggy-base risk once the fruit goes on.

Anyway - top that with a generous layer of stewed fruit sweetened to taste, or fresh berry fruit (works well with backberries, gooseberries etc) uncooked, and some sugar.  Put the other half of dough on top (I roll it out between two layers of plastic wrap, peel off the top, tip it onto the pie and then peel the second bit off.)

20 minutes to half an hour in the 170-180 degree oven.  Serve hot with cream, or cold in slices as a cake.

Pre-cooked fruit will give you a nice rounded top, the bumps come with using fresh uncooked fruit.....

No 27 - Honey Fruit Cake

The bees have been looking for new homes.  We ran out of hives to put them in.  Meanwhile someone from Mr B’s beekeeping class, having had a run of bad luck with his bees, decided that perhaps this was not for him and offered us his three hives – sans bees of course, but still laden with stores that his bees had put away before departing his ‘care and control’ (if bees could ever be said to be within anyone’s control; as we have discovered).

The honey contained in these frames was set completely solid so the only way to ‘extract’ it was to cut the whole lot from the frames, pile it into a cauldron and heat it very gently.  At about the halfway mark I have bottled up about 6-8lb of very dark rich honey, and set aside a couple of good sized slabs of wax for soap making.  Because the honey has been heated I will keep it all at home for baking and making mueslei.

I thought I had a recipe somewhere for a fruit cake that used a lb (454gm) honey but I can’t find it, so searched the web and found a great selection of honey recipes on this website. I like to promote beekeeping and beekeeping websites, so you will find this in my list of links as well.

I modified this recipe to use only Mixed Dried Fruit, then doubled it, and I boiled my fruit (which was a bit hard and dry) in a whole 440ml can of Guinness, and proceeded from there.  The cake is definitely rich, with strong honey flavours and just a hint of Guinness.  Even sliced up and packed in a large plastic box it survived the motorbike ride in my backpack.

Honey Rich Fruit Cake

4oz. Mixed Dried Fruit

4oz. Sultanas

4oz. Dates

2oz. Dried Apricots

2oz. Cherries

 ¼ Pint Beer

4oz. Butter

6oz. Honey

2 Eggs

4oz. Plain Flour

4oz. Whole Self-Raising Flour

½ Tsp Spice

Cream butter and honey together. Beat eggs and add alternatively with sifted flour and salt to creamed mixture. Add fruit and enough beer if necessary to give a dropping consistency.

Turn into well greased 7 inch round tin (or 2lb. loaf tin) and bake on middle shelf for about 1¼ - 1½ hours in a pre-heated oven (300°F/150°C)

Allow to cool a little then turn out onto wire cake stand and leave to cool.

No 21 - Enormous Banana Chocolate Chip Cake

Banana Cake

At the time I started university in 1987, I had a late-Victorian ‘semi’ divided into 2 flats.  I lived downstairs and my tenant upstairs covered my mortgage.  At one change of tenancy a woman turned up to view who seemed altogether too well dressed to want my scruffy flat in our tired part of town.  She was a manager at the city’s only professional, live, theatre company.  Imagine my surprise when later that year Lyndsey turned up in my law class.  She was studying and holding down a job (like me) and had resolved her housing situation by buying an equally aged and equally impractical home – equally in need of some TLC in a nearby suburb.  We became firm friends, sharing interests in growing food, cooking, and studying law; and she educated me in theatre and travel. 

It is one of my great regrets that I lost contact with Lyndsey when she married and moved to South Australia, and shortly after that I moved to England.  I still have her banana cake recipe, and think of her often.  I know she had two sons but they will be young men by now. 

Like her this recipe has travelled too.  For many years after arriving here I lived in a yacht.  Our boat had no oven and I became adept at improvisation (in true theatrical style): producing all cooked food on 2 Diesel-cooker hot spots with 2 pots, 1 frying pan and a 10 litre pressure cooker.

Working on the principle that steamed pudding can be achieved in the pressure cooker, I decided to experiment with it producing bread and cakes.  Steamed bread is OK but  lacks crust.  We preferred the frying pan bread.  However Lyndsey’s banana cake was a great success by this means and was for years virtually the only cake produced in out ‘mobile’ home.  (I say virtually , corn bread eaten with jam was later discovered and deemed acceptable as cake but had to be eaten really fresh.)

I have adapted it a bit to make this big (birthday) cake, adding pineapple to ensure the large cake stays moist with all the extra baking time needed.

Enormous Banana Chocolate Chip Cake

16 oz oil (weighed)
1 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
12 bananas, mashed with 2/3 cup golden syrup
large tin of pineapple, drained and chopped
6 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
4 tsp baking soda dissolved in 1/4 cup of milk
2 packets of dark chocolate nibs.

Grease and line a roasting tin about 12" x 16" and at least 4" deep.

Beat oil and sugar together.
Add eggs one at a time and beat well.
Add the mashed banana, the pineapple, and choc chips.
Sift in the dry ingredients.
Add the soda and milk.

Bake at 160-170 C, for 1-1.5 hours.  Test with a skewer - it should come out clean.

Cool in the tin.  Turn out onto a large tray and ice with lemon/cream cheese icing (see the carrot cake icing recipe at No 12.)

 

No 16 - Sticky Lemon Cake

This recipe first saw the light in my kitchen for my partner’s 50^th birthday.  There was a huge party, 2 roast shoulders of pork, 2 shoulders of mutton in a Moroccan stew, gallons of chilli beans, and a table groaning under salads and bread, fruit, cheese and a roasting dish sized banana cake.  (I’ll get onto banana cake eventually.)  I wanted something  that was sharp and flavoursome in small servings and settled for this cake.

I love cakes with ground almonds.  I love cakes with yoghurt, and I love lemon sweets (Lemon ice-cream, lemon baked cheesecake) so this ‘ticked all the boxes’.

Sticky Lemon Cake

175 g (6oz) unsalted butter
250 g (9 oz) castor sugar
2 lemons
3 eggs
75 g (2.5 oz) plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
150 g (5.5 oz) ground almonds
150 g (5.5 oz) natural yoghurt

Preheat the overn to 170 C.  Grease and line an 8" deep spring form tin
Cream the butter and 150g (5.5 oz) sugar.  Add grated zest of both lemons.
Gradually beat in the eggs one at a time.
Mix the dry ingredients, then fold in the creamed mix.  Stir in the juiceof one lemon and the yoghurt.
Bake for 40 minutes (till the cake is firm to touch).  Do not open the oven for the first 20 minutes.
Leave the cake to cool.
Heat the remaining sugar and lemon juice, skewer the cake a few times and pour the syrup over the cake.
Leave it to cool completely before removing it from the tin.

No 15 - Chocolate Beetroot Brownie

Chocolate Beetroot Brownie

Now this is a brownie worthy of the name.  I love beetroot; it’s one of my favourite vegetables.  It makes great  soup (and not just borscht – perhaps when I’ve finished this baking challenge I’ll just put some of my favourite recipes on here, like beetroot and coconut soup).  I preserve it sliced in a vinegar brine and eat loads in cheese sandwiches (my favourite). And it’s easy to grow if your garden has clay soil.

I spent a year in Denmark a few years ago working in a restaurant kitchen.  Beetroot (rødbeder) is a staple in their food world and I learned preparations and uses for beetroot I never imagined before.

Unfortunately for beetroot, there is nothing subtle or secretive about it; cook it and bright pink splotches appear in every part of the kitchen.  Nothing provides so much evidence of what you’ve splashed and what you have touched as beetroot does.  (Mind you I don’t mind getting my hands in it to skin the cooked beetroot so I might be a bit messier than the averagely stain conscious person).

Before this weeks baking, some beetroot had been languishing in my fridge for a few weeks while I psyched myself up to this recipe.  It turned out to be superbly easy.  I didn’t use the food processor – I flung the cooked skinned beetroot in a blender with all the eggs together and whipped up a delightful pink egg nog.

The rest went by the recipe except that I used plain white flour instead of rice flout (of which I had none).

http://www.riverford.co.uk/feed/in:recipes/chocolate-beetroot-brownies/

This website is so good I have put a link to it in the ‘Try this….’ box of links over there on the right…->

No one spotted the beetroot without being told.  It’s a beautifully moist, smooth brownie.  There’s a hint of beetroot taste to those in the know (well to me anyway), but I had to tell.  Well you know what beetroot does it you eat it.  Even cooked in a cake the pink dye passes  through your kidneys.  So Louise and I figured that knowing they’d consumed beetroot might provide the answer to a puzzle for the cake-testers at work.

No 19 - Squidgy Lemon and Ginger Cake

Squidgy Lemon and Ginger Cake

Another cake I first enjoyed after a session of yacht racing – thanks again to Sarah G.

The recipe is on the internet at http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1711/squidgy-lemonginger-cake and it has everything going for it:

1 – it’s a fabulous tasting cake

2 – it’s moist and keeps well

3 – it’s easy (no ‘cream the butter and sugar’ stuff)

Years ago I spent a summer sailing in the Baltic.  In a Polish port I meta very interesting Finn who’d been sailing to Polish ports for decades; since well before the end of the Communist era there.  This gentleman worked for a famous Finnish telephone manufacturer and entertained us for hours with takes of his travels about the world marketing their technology. 

At some stage the conversation came around, as it often does amongst long-distance sailors, to electronic equipment on board.  The environment, as salt laden as it is, is not conducive to the endless reliable operation of things we have come to rely on. I will never forget our hosts expression for giving up on something that has broken down one time too many: “paint it green and throw it overboard”.

My family’s response to ‘failed’ cakes might be similarly characterised as “cover it in custard and call it pudding”. 

Such was the fate of this fabulous cake the first time I made it for them.  I had probably greased the tin with oil with the result that at least 1/3 of the cake remained firmly attached when I tried to turn it out.  (In my experience nothing greases a cake tin like butter, but then I am Kiwi and we are famous for our association with the stuff.)  Anyway the texture of the cake meant it would rather let go of itself than the walls of the tin.

It got covered in custard and called pudding; so successfully in fact that my family now regard this only as a pudding.

So the lessons are: 1. Grease the tin with butter, 2. Use a spring-form tin, and 3. If all else fails cover it in custard and call it pudding.

No 20 - Sultana Cake

Sultana Cake

Mum was of the school of housekeeping which believed you should always have a selection of baked items in tins available to accompany morning and afternoon teas, whether for guests or for the menfolk working on the farm.

These days I cannot imagine anyone spending one day a week baking (at home) just to fill cake tins; not least because we are all encouraged to eat less sugar and butter and super-refined flour; and not to snack (or at least not snack on cake) between meals.

This sultana cake was one of Mum’s specialties; a slightly old-fashioned cake even then and somehow very ‘English’.  It suggested to me recipes from an age of employed cooks in country house kitchens with a very basic range of plentiful local ingredients, enhanced by carefully meted out stores of the exotic or hard to obtain; for us this was the sultanas.

I have no idea of the actual origin of the recipe, it probably came from Mum’s mother, and it was regarded as a luxury in our household; second only to Christmas cake.  It was treated as being expensive and we would get a severe telling off if, having come home from school to find no one indoors, we raided the cake tins and ate any sultana cake.  We weren’t encouraged to raid the cake tins – full stop – but sneaking bits of sultana cake was tantamount to a hanging offence.  It was probably the quantity of sultanas that go into it that stretched my mother’s delicately balanced household budget and made it the object of special status for us kids.  Sultanas were ‘off-limits’, kept on a top shelf, and only for use in special baked items and puddings.

Sultana Cake

½ lb butter

½ lb sugar

3 eggs

¾ lb flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 lb sultanas

Lemon essence (optional)

a sauce made of 1 heaped dsp of cornflour in a small cup of water – & cooled

Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, add sultanas and sift in flour and BP.  Finally add the gloop made of cooked cornflour and water.

Bake in a lined, greased 8” round tin, 170 C for 1¼ to 1½ hours.

No 12 - Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake – it’s a coffee shop staple isn’t it?  I can remember carrot cake appearing on the radar in my early teens.  Carrots?!  In a cake?! That’s mad!  Looking back, what was in fact mad was that as soaked in butter as we were we’d had no experiences of cooking with oil (for anything).  The choice of oil wasn’t great and I suspect we used some really ropey ones.  I do recall those early carrot cakes being greasy;  moist, but oozing oil, - and greasy.

And cream cheese icing – what a revelation that was.  Carrot cake was possible an epiphany in my life, the point that sparked my interest in a world of food and cooking.

I think this particular carrot cake recipe came form one of those websites that advocates and provides suggestions for using up left-overs.  The idea is admirable and I subscribe to it whole-heartedly but am I alone in finding the suggestions regularly verge on daft?  Who has left-over cooked carrots?  We all know how much the family will eat, especially of such standard everyday vegetables as carrots.

Having said that it is easy to cook extra with a carrot cake in mind (but that isn’t using up left-overs is it?).  What is genuinely crazy is the notion that there’s a stray pineapple just lurking around because no one knows what to do with it.  Eat it.  Eat the thing.  Pineapple isn’t that common that we’d kick one aside in favour of a plate of kale, or a cheese sandwich.

My paternal grandfather was a grocer during WWII.  My father and his two brothers were young lads.  One of the advantages of living at the grocer’s shop was that you stood a better chance than most of getting your hands on something exotic and/or rationed from time to time.  For the boys, when asked what they wanted for a birthday the answer was simple – a pineapple.  They knew they’d have to share it with absolutely everyone if said pineapple could be sourced, and it meant forgoing any other gift, but that was it, the pinnacle of having it all; a single pineapple.

On top of that there are absolutely no criteria by which this cake might be regarded as a frugal on ingredients.  It is however a really great cake so gather up your left-over cooked carrots and that spare pineapple which just happens to have over-lingered in your fruit bowl and make this cake.

Carrot Cake

225g self-raising flour

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp baking soda

4 eggs

225g soft brown sugar

½ tsp vanilla essence

100g cooked mashed carrot

75g over-ripe pineapple (puréed)

75g chopped walnuts

75g desiccated coconut

125ml sunflower oil

Beat eggs and sugar together until fluffy, add oil, carrots, pineapple, essences, walnuts and coconut. Pour the wet ingredients into the sifted dry ingredients and mix.  Pour into greased, lined 8” spring-form tin.  Bake 45 -50 minutes in moderate oven (170C to 180C)

Cool in the tin and ice with

75g cream cheese

175g icing sugar

Vanilla or lemon essence.

That photo in the “Mr B’s cake decorating class” (below) is a double recipe made in a big gugelhuf mould; the hole is stuffed full of chocolate brazil nuts and the décor is exactly what it appears to be.  He made it for his daughter – and it definitely wouldn’t pass the motorbike ride test.

No 17 - Ginger Cake

Ginger Cake

Sunday this week was spent in a classroom.  I’d planned this some weeks ago so I knew that I had to do my baking on Saturday night if I was doing any this week.  It also meant the poor cake was going to be dragged about in a box in my backpack on Sunday which potentially was not going to do it any favours.  It was going to have to be a fairly solid cake and I decided on a Ginger cake.  This recipe came off the internet a few years back after a colleague had complained that my cakes inevitably had either fruit or chocolate – neither of which she was prepared to eat – and why didn’t I make a nice ginger cake instead.

So I did, and I used this recipe, and it was voted a great cake and it was only in sharing the recipe that I realized that I’d left out the leavening.  I never have self-raising flour about as very few of my recipes require it so I just make up my own.  On that occasion I’d forgotten to add leavening and only realized when I was copying the recipe out.  Oops!  Still no one noticed and the cake was voted pretty damned good actually.

Ginger Cake

225g (8 oz)self-raising flour

175g (6 oz) butter

175g (6 oz) caster sugar

4-6 pieces preserved stem ginger in syrup, chopped

3 large eggs

2 TB ginger syrup (from the jar)

2 Tb milk

1 TB black syrup (treacle)

1 Tb ground almonds

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp grated fresh ginger

Pre-heat oven to 170C.

Grease and line a 15 x 25 cm tin (6" x 10")

Cream butter and sugar, add beaten eggs with a little flour.  Fold in the ginger syrup and black syrup.  Gradually add sifted flour and ground ginger.

Fold in the almonds, milk, and grated and chopped ginger.

Bake 40-45 mins.

Suggestion - iced with lemon icing.

Saturday’s ginger cake was a complete disappointment.  I remembered the leavening........ and it came out of the oven collapsed in the middle.  That never happens to me.  Ok it has happened to me once before and it was, now let me see, oh yes it was a ginger cake!  (Different recipe.)  In a phone call home I mentioned to my Mum how disappointed I was with this cake and she remarked that she never makes ginger cake because they always collapsed in the middle.  Now that is strange – either we have a genetic predisposition to messing up ginger cake, or ginger has a weird effect on cake.   I’ve got the answer of course – use a baking tin with a hole in the middle.

Here is another ginger cake recipe I have used.  Apart from the middle being slightly lower than the edges (my first ginger cake ‘disaster’)  it was exactly as described, crisp on top, beautifully light, moist and delicately gingery.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2003/nov/23/foodanddrink.shopping

No 10 - Ngaire Clarke's Easy Fruit Cake

Ngaire Clarke’s Easy Fruit Cake

Ngaire (or her husband) was some distant cousin of my maternal grandmother.  When I left home aged 16 and started work in the NZ Forest Service, Ngaire and Roy were people I could call on in the nearest town to our forestry camp.  Roy regaled me with takes of his days as an engineer working on hydro-electric dam construction and Ngaire fed me tea and cake.

This one is a beauty, best eaten really fresh.  Loved, it was recently adopted by one of my French colleagues who tells me that the  French don’t have a tradition of heavy fruit cakes, but that she would tell her family this was an English Xmas cake and they’d love it too.

‘Shame to mislead them like that but if an essentially English style cake makes a hit in France, then “good ol’ Ngaire” I say.

Easy Fruit Cake

1 lb (450-500 gms) mixed dried fruit
8 oz (225 gms)butter
3 eggs
1.5 cups sugar
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp each of mixed spicve and cinnamon

Prepare a 9 inch (23cm) cake baking tin.

Boil 1 lb of mixed dried fruit in enough water to cover for 15 minutes.

Drain and chop in 8 oz butter

Beat together 3 eggs and 1 1/2 cups  sugar until fluffy.

Add the egg mix to the fruit with 2 cups flour,  2 tsp Baking Powder, 1 tsp ground mixed spice and 1 tsp cinnamon.

Bake at 170C (160C fan oven) for 1.25 to 1.5 hours  (9" tin)