St Catherine's cakes

People who know me will know that I am not in the least bit religious. But I do like cake, a lot. So the other week, I dug out an old recipe book and gave these St Catherine's cakes a try.

 

I assume they're named after St Catherine of Alexandria, in which case naming a pretty little patisserie cake after the wheel-shaped rack she was tortured on seems a bit morbid. They're little pinwheel shaped cakes. The other alternative is St Catherine of Siena though, and this would appear to be even less appropriate as her life appeared to be mainly categorised by fasting, anorexia, and bulimia. Anyway, whichever they are named after, the fact of the matter is that I spent a few minutes researching the various Saint Catherines whilst these were baking. Learning through cake.

Anyway, these are tasty, not overly sweet little crossovers between biscuits and cake. I spread a little bi of glitter over them once they were done to add a little bit of glamour. I didn't really put that much effort into presentation, to be honest, but I think with patience and a little bit more effort these could be really pretty and dainty.

Ingredients:

350g plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon mixed spice

25g ground almonds

225g caster sugar

225g butter/margarine

50g currants or mixed fruit

1 egg, beaten

25g Demerara or granulated sugar.

Instructions: 

Sift flour, bicarb and mixed spice into a bowl and add the almonds ad caster sugar.

Rub in the butter, then stir in the currants.

Add the egg and mix to a dough. Knead and roll out into a rectangular shape about 30cm x 20cm. Trim the edges so they are straight.

Cut into long strips, about 1cm thick. 

Brush each strip with water, then sprinkle with the Demerara sugar. Roll each strip up into a coil and space them out on a baking tray, with plenty of room in between each roll.

Bake at 200 oC for about 12-15 minutes or until browned.

Walking in Glasse Slippers- Chapter Two

So, the first step in modernising Hannah's recipe was conversion. Her recipes include huge quantities, presumably because they would be feeding a large household for banquets. A quick glance at the recipe made me panic slightly... what on earth is a peck? a pennyworth? aaargh!

So the only solution was to grab a calculator, do some googling for conversions, and make a table.

I found the following conversions:

1 peck= 9.09 litres
1 pound= 453.6 grams
1 ounce = 28.3 grams
1 quart= 946.4 mls

So this was my starting point. And from , the Grand Table Of Ingredients was born. I thought I would divide the whole thing by 4 to make a reasonable sized cake.

Ingredient	Original recipe	Original recipe- metric	Metric/4
Fine flour	¼ of a peck	2.27 l	0.56L
Butter	1 ½ pounds	0.68kg	170g
Carraway seeds	3 ounces	0.085kg	21.25g
Eggs	6	6	1.5
Cloves	1/8 ounce	0.07087kg	17.5g
Mace	1/8 ounce	0.07087kg	17.5g
Cinnamon	Pennyworth	?	?
Sugar	1 pound	0.45 kg	112.5
Rose water	Pennyworth	?	?
Saffron	Pennyworth	?	?
Yeast	1 ½ pints	1.5pints	1.5 tsp baking powder
Milk	Quart	946.6mls	236.6mls

 ....to be continued....

Cream Tea Scone Cake

I wasn't intending on going to last month's cake club, partly due to the diet but mainly due to my lack of organisation which meant i didn't get my name down on the list in time.

However, I bumped into Nelly (of Nelly's Cupcakes fame) on the way into work one morning and we had a bit of a chat about cake club. Then it turned out that her guest cancelled on her so i could go as her non-baking guest- Hoorah!

The theme was An English Country Garden. Although i was a non-baking guest, I wasn't doing anything the night before so i thought i would bake a cake, see how it turned out, and bring it along if it was ok. It was a nice feeling, as i didn't have any cake-based pressure. If it didn't work, I just wouldn't bring it, and no one would ever know of the failure, yay!

This begged the question: What am i going to bake? Well I thought about the sort of ingredients you might find in an English Country Garden, but i thought that would be the sort of tactics everyone else would be using. So then i thought- what would you do in an English Country Garden? Well the obvious answer is afternoon tea. So I struck upon the idea of making a giant scone with cream and strawberries.

I managed to find a recipe from good old BBC Good Food, which is here. And the cake turned out beautifully.

I assembled it when i got to cake club, added a couple of fresh strawberries, sugar daisies, and patriotic picks as it was nearly the Jubilee weekend. It sounds daft, but because it was cake sized i expected it just to taste of cake, even though it was made using different techniques. However, it really did taste like a scone, a really massive one. I got quite a few complements from the other bakers, which is always really flattering considering how they are all such good bakers. And, the most pleasing of all was the fact that there was NONE leftover AT ALL by the end.

A highly recommended recipe, if only we could get the weather to match.

Apple Streusel Cake

I'm a lazy, lazy person. Occasionally, I like to have very lazy days where i barely leave the house (I don't think a trip to the bins is classed as an expedition these days, especially when the bins are about 2 metres away from your flat). Usually on these days i am suffering from that most terrible of ailments The Hangover.

One thing i do like to do on these days, except for watching full DVD box sets of Dexter or House MD, is to bake. So then I have to attempt to find something to bake for which i already have all of the ingredients in the house.

So, the other week I had some cooking apples left over from the toffee apple cider pie I made for Private Pie Club (I will post about this sometime soon). I also had some pecans and bits and pieces leftover from the not-so-vegan-vegan-tart, so i decided to make an apple cake.

Of course, good old BBC Good Food obliged me with a recipe, and a-baking i went.

The result:

Apparently I have a lop-sided cake tin :-S

It looks pretty rustic, and it collapsed a bit in the middle, but it smelt of spicy appley goodness. To be honest, I've no idea how it tastes as it's now all wrapped up in freezer awaiting a last minute cake emergency situation.

Chocolate fudge cake

Just browsing though my photos and i realised I haven't posted about our foray into the world of chocolate fudge cake baking.

Boyf and I made this ages ago, and it was delightful. I'm not going to say much else, except that this is the recipe for it, and that it tasted luscious. Nom nom nom.

That is all

Hayley xxx

Gin & Tonic Cake Mark 2

You may recall that my offering for my very first Clandestine Cake Club visit was a gin and tonic cake, and its safe to say there was scope for a lot of improvement in the recipe.

Well, when I heard that the theme for this month's Newcastle Clandestine Cake Club was Baking With Beverages, I knew that this was the perfect opportunity to give it another shot (haha, see what I did there?).

Last time, I thought the sponge was a very dense odd texture, the topping was too runny, and it just didn't taste of enough gin for my liking.

So i did a bit more research, and i found this blog by BakerGal. As you can see from the link, she tried a lime based sponge recipe, with the gin and tonic syrup, and a cream cheese cream topping, with gin in it of course. However, she also had a few improvements to make, so I used her recipe as a basis, did the suggested tweaks, and made the odd change here and there as i saw fit.

The result? Well, the cakes turned out fine. I put a smallish (probably actually quite large) dash of gin into the cake mixture to go along with the zesty lime sponge. It smelt rather nice and seemed to have a good texture when it came out of the oven.

As BakerGal suggested, I omitted the water from the gin syrup, and added about 50mls extra.

I fed the cake, then fed the cake again, then, when it was clearly at saturation point thought to myself "You can never have too much gin, even if you are a cake" so I sloshed another load on, only to have a huge crisis of panic that the cake was going to turn into a gin-flavoured mush. I spread a layer of lime marmalade, then went on to deal with the topping.

Again, I went along with the suggestion of BakerGal and substituted the whipping cream for sour cream. I also used half mascapone and half cream cheese. But the topping ended up being a total disaster, to be honest. Admittedly, it was a nice tasting disaster, but it ended up looking awful.  In a deja vu moment, the topping ended up far too runny, so it dripped, squidged, and flopped all over, producing a not-so-attractive totally miserable effect. If I were to make this again, I think I'd just omit the cream from the topping. I put less in than the recipe asked for anyway so goodness only knows what it would have turned out like had i put the full amount it. Without, it was a stiff, cream cheese butter frosting with a dash of G&T syrup, which probably would have been totally fine on it's own.

drip, drip, drip :(

But, never fear, for I had to hand a) some edible glitter b) some writing icing c) a variety of cocktail based tat.

NB: The cocktail picks around the outside are cleverly disguised as decorative, but are actually there in a desperate bid to keep the cake from completely disintegrating.

And so, with only a moderate amount of shame, and quite a lot of concern about the fact that it may entirely disintegrate on the way, I took along my cake to this month's Clandestine Cake Club, where it was promptly adorned with even more glitter and cocktail tat.

Cocktail umbrellas make everything better.

It made it in one, rather sloppy piece, but on cutting was actually surprisingly resilient, with quite a good texture. It had a very pleasing gin and tonic taste- you could tell that there was gin in it, which was what i wanted. None of this subtle flavouring malarkey for me, I want to know that there is GIN in my CAKE, dammit!

The reception at Cake Club was mixed. People were either "OMG GIN IN A CAKE" or responded with a slightly queasy "ummmm, I don't drink gin", evidently in most part due to memories of epic hangovers of days past. The general gist from those that tried it was that it was nice, it most definitely did taste of gin, and that the texture of the sponge was MUCH improved compared to the previous attempt at gin cake. However, it wasn't a show-stopper, or a life-changer, and there is still definite room for improvement where the topping is involved.

There is really only one explanation for this high failure rate in gin and tonic cake technology. And I think that is physics. allow me to explain:

gin + tonic+ cake= pleasing treat
gin + tonic+cake+prettiness= something so amazing a wormhole will open and the universe will eat itself in a blaze of sulphurous fury.

Allow me to apologise right now by the way, but I have NO pics at all from this month's cake club. I forgot my camera, and my little Blackberry is severely lacking in the camera states. The Venue was the amazing dining room at Blackfriars. It was a really brilliant room, with two long banqueting tables just perfect for displaying such a huge range of cakes. But alas, the lighting in there was quite dim, and my little flashless Blackberry just couldn't cope. I shall let you know when some other cake clubbers add some posts to their blogs, so you can peruse their beautiful pictures of this cakey heaven. It was great to see and meet some new faces, and to catch up with some familiar faces.

Clandestine Cake Club- Inspired by the Silver Screen

Well, it's taken me so long to get round to writing this up that I think i'll mainly just let the pictures do the talking:

January's Cake club was in the Knit Studio, in the Blackfriar's area of Newcastle. The great thing about this venue was that we had a great big table for all the cakes to be deposited on, which meant we could all stand around and mingle and have a good old natter while eating a whole load of cake.

I didn't get pics of everyone's cakes unfortunately but you can also read all about it in a few other places also:

-Lisa's blog- The Wonderful World of @loopygirl
-Kate's blog- Cakepoppins

These guy's blogs are always interesting, so get yourself over there and get following them!

Hayley xxx

Blue Velvet Cake

Hi again,

So as you know, My cake for the January Clandestine Cake Club meeting was a Blue Velvet cake.

I was quite worried, given the disastrous attempt at blue velvet cupcakes, about how this cake would turn out. But it turned out to be very fun to make (although not quite as fun to clean up the kitchen afterwards)

Mixing the blue and violet colouring with the cocoa

the mixture in the tins waiting to go in the oven... The colour is really quite disconcerting.

I cut each cake into half to make 4 layers

And some little sugarpaste robins to decorate the top of the cake.

And a piped quotation from the film...

And the finished article is complete:

In case you haven't seen Blue Velvet, and you're wondering "why robins after Christmas?" it's because of a famous key moment in the film, where Laura Dern says to Kyle Machlan

I had a dream. In fact, it was on the night I met you. In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren't any robins and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed that love would make any difference, and it did. So, I guess it means that there is trouble until the robins come


At the end of the film, of course the robins do appear.


Moe cake clubs pics to follow...

Black Forest Bake-Off

Those of you who have been following the blog for a while will know that, on weekends when we're not together, boyf and I will often have baking competitions, which are then judged by picture alone by independent judges.

We couldn't decide what to bake, but the lovely Lisa suggested black forest gateau. Neither of us have ever made black forest gateau so it seemed like a good challenge.

I chose a recipe out of one of my reliable old cookbooks and away we went to produce our masterpieces. Mine ended up looking like this:

I learnt 2 main things in the process: 1. applying chocolate sprinkles to the outside of a cake is hard and 2. Kirsch is very tasty. 

And here is boyf's effort, a very worthy affair with some expert piping. And particularly worthy considering he later admitted to never even having seen or tasted a black forest gateau.

The independent judges (my mum and dad and grandma, and boyf's mum and dad) agreed that mine was more "black forest gateau"-like and mine was therefore pronounced the winner :D

Hooray! 

Tonight is Cake Club!

Tonight's the night folks,

It seems like ages since the last Clandestine Cake Club. But now, the cake is baked, the venue is known, and in a few hours I shall be in a gluttonous sugar- induced coma of cakey joy.

I have many blog posts to catch up on, as per usual. A Black Forest Gateau Bake off is not least of these... They will *hopefully* not take me too long to get uploaded.

Speak soon,

Hayley xxx

Greige Velvet Cakes

Hi folks,

So this month's Clandestine Cake Club's theme is "inspired by the silver screen"

So, a while ago I got to thinking about cake inspired by film. It seemed to me that you either had to do something clever including cake in a film name, or find a film in which a cake is prominent and attempt to copy said cake. As a self-professed film snob, I also had to make sure that it was something that the Good Dr Mark Kermode would be proud of.

Citizen Cake? Then, along came some inspiration... Blue Velvet.

That's right people. I am going to recreate the 1986 David Lynch neo-noir film about sexual violence in cake form. Obviously, by producing a blue velvet cake with some sugarpaste robins and possibly a sugarpaste human ear.

As I've never made any form of velvet cake, I thought I'd better have a bit of a practice. So, as it was my friend Hesther's birthday party, I thought we could have a go at making some blue velvet cupcakes to have a try at some different colour combinations.

However, disaster struck as the paste food colourings I'd ordered (as recommended by every recipe i'd looked at) hadn't arrived. So I had to make do with liquid food colouring, which i don't really like using.

Still, two bottles should do it, right?

WRONG!

Not even a turquoise appeared. Instead, the mixture just because a mushroomy colour which I can only describe as "greige". Not the most appetizing of  tints, I must admit.

I don't even have a picture of them at the moment. I think i'm too embarrassed to show you. We did pull it back however with a clever covering of bright blue buttercream. With cupcakes, copious buttercream covers a multitude of sins.

We now just have to hope and pray that the actual cake turns out rather better.

Winter Wonderland Cake Club

What a great Clandestine Cake Club the November one was.

Detail from Lisa's snowball cake

First off, my friend Frankie and her mum were there. Frankie is awesome, and her mum is just fabulous. She's so funny and lovely. They brought along a very lovely egg nogg cake.

Secondly, having my cake photographed again for Appetite magazine. for all I whinge about not having a chance to do my hair beforehand, it really is flattering and exciting to have my cake chosen again to appear in the press. 

Thirdly was having the chance to tell everyone about Private Pie Club. Everyone was so positive and excited about the idea, and we signed a few people up. There were also lots of people who were busy on the day, but who said they really wanted to go to future meetings. 

Fourthly, was the lovely selection of cakes there were. this event had proved really popular and there were some new bakers there who it was lovely to meet.

Fifthly, and most definitely not last, was the presence of Lynne Hill, the founder of Clandestine Cake Club. I felt like I was meeting cake royalty! It was lovely to meet her, and to see how proud she was that her idea was bringing so many people together. 

Anyway, I shall now shut up, and let the pictures of cake do the talking. Apologies to anyone who's cake doesn't get a picture here. The cameras in my battery gave up half way through :(

Kate's cranberry and dark chocolate panettone

Alison's sugar plum fairy cake

Julia's Pear and mincemeat crumble cake- my favourite cake of the night.

Lisa's Snowball cake (which Frankie's mum adored, bordering on the obsessive)

Sarah's chocolate and mulled wine cake

Julie's Spiced orange cake

Frankie's eggnog cake

That Old Chestnut

It's nearly CHHHHHRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSTTTTMMMMAAAAASSSSSSSS!!!!!

No, I don't think it's too early to be getting in the festive mood. No, I don't get sick of christmas songs in a loop. Yes, I did have my first mince pie in September and no, it didn't feel wrong.

In a nutshell: I BLUMMIN' LOVE CHRISTMAS!

So of course I was excited for November's Clandestine Cake Club, which had a "Winter Wonderland" theme.

I decided to make a chestnut cake, from an old cake recipe book that i have. The way the cake was decorated in the book, however, left a lot to be desired. It was all very 80's, with swirly bits of cream everywhere. So I decided to go with a snowy wintry scene that i had seen in another cake decorating book, which was actually supposed to be a wedding cake.

Making the cake mixture was almost the same technique as making sachertorte, but with chestnut puree instead of chocolate. I had to separate 9 eggs and whisk up the whites, then fold the eggs whites carefully into the mixture. Then came the exciting bit...

The cake was filled with a (very delicious) chestnut and rum cream. This tasted... potent, and rather pleasant if i may say so myself (yes, I admit that i did eat quite a bit off a spoon once the cake was finished). I am starting to worry that the CCC may end up organising an AA intervention at some point for me, as i seem to be building a reputation for bringing alcoholic cakes!

The cake is loaded with rum cream :)

Then it was time for decorating. I used royal icing, and placed pine cones, bay leaves, and rosemary on top to make a bit of a wintry woodland floor type scene. Then added a few tea lights to bring a nice warm wintry glow to the cake when lit. Then a sprinkling of sugar lumps to look like little lumps of snow, and some generous handfuls of icing sugar and caster sugar to make it look super snowy, and ta-da! a wintry, snowy chestnut cake:

I had a minor panic just before the CCC. I had to go there straight from work so the cake had to sit in the fridge at work for the day, which is a danger in itself with the gannets that i work with. Then I realised that most of the "snow" icing sugar had melted, so i had to detour for some extra icing sugar on the way to the meeting. Once the candles were lit though, it did look pretty impressive, and it caught the eye of a photographer and journalist who were there for appetite magazine, so I ended up having to have another post-work, messy hair and rubbish make-up photo-shoot :-S

The inside of the cake was strange, kind of pinky and pate-ish in colour. The cake itself didn't taste of a huge amount, but the chestnut and rum cream was lovely.

More on cake club soon!

Quick Catch-up

Hi my lovelies,

Just a quick post to say that i promise i will be doing a decent post soon. I've been fairly busy lately, ironically mainly baking, to get down to writing any proper posts.

It's the Winter themed Clandestine Cake Club tomorrow though, and it's going to be a busy one! There are so many really exciting cakes on the list, and i'm quite pleased with how mine has turned out this time.

You will hear all about it soon, I promise,

Oceans of love,

Hayley xxx

The Long and Rocky Road

Oh. My. Goodness. How excited am I about telling you about this cake? Very! In pharmacy terms, there is a type of drug interaction where two drugs add together to create an effect which is greater than the sum of each drug alone, which is known as potentiation.

Chocolate cake is good.

Rocky Road is good.

Chocolate cake + Rocky Road = OMG THIS IS HEAVEN AND ITS THE BEST THING EVAR!!!!

A friend at work gave me a baking calendar for next year. I just couldn't wait to make this rocky road chocolate cake so Boyf and I gave it a go this weekend.

First, we melted some Stork, and stirred in the sugar (I'm going to post the recipe onto the recipes page so check that out if you're wanting to give this cake a go. And frankly, I don't see how you could possibly not want to give it a go)

... Then we folded in the flour and cocoa powder, poured the mixture into a tin, and baked for about 30 mins. In the meantime, we made a huge batch of chocolate brownies as well...

...Then when the cake had cooled, Boyf carefully and precisely (as is his way) arranged the marshamallows...

... Then we covered the whole lot in a massive amount of chocolatey- Malteser-y-walnut-ty goop, and popped it in the fridge to set.

The result is a layer of chocolate cake covered in a big thick layer of rocky road. I need say no more. GO MAKE IT! you know you want to!

Overdosing on cake part two

Hi all,

Much to report to my little corner of bloggyland at the moment so bear with me while i catch up with you all.

First off, is my report from my second time at the Clandestine Cake Club Newcastle. This meeting's theme? A National Cake (as it was National Cake Week last week, and the cake club meet fell on the Wednesday). I was also very excited to find out that this time, Cake Club would be meeting at the Tyneside Cinema, a place which is very dear to my heart and one of my favourite places in this wonderful city.

So, I thought about my cake that I would make. Well, in actual fact, my friend Nancy and I had many very lengthy conversations, panics, and discussions about the cakes we would make. And I settled on a White Russian cake, mainly because the recipe contained a whole load of alcohol (kahlua and vodka) and there isn't much better in life that a combination of alcohol and cake.

The really interesting about this cake club, was the fact that everyone seemed to have a tale of a cake-based disaster to tell. There were cake cracks, cake disintegrations, cakes dipping in the middle, cakes with saggy frosting, and in my case, slightly burnt cakes and curdled cream due to too much alcohol being added. All these disasters made us all feel a bit better and meant that good conversation flowed freely and made us all feel much better about our cake stresses. My way of dealing with my curdled vodka kahlua cream was to remember that well known old proverb "If your cake goes a bit wrong, put s**t loads of gold dust, cherries, and chocolate on top to hide it".

All that glitters tastes rather nice

Well, this seems to have worked, as there was a journalist and a photographer there that night who were wanting to report on the cake club, and the photographer seemed quite taken with my cake. In fact, he seemed quite taken with the whole idea "What, so you meet up every month, and bring cake and eat cake? Wow!". So, before i knew it, i was whisked off into the alleyway outside the cinema for some photographs with my cake. Despite a minor panic attack about the state of my make-up and hair, and demands for extreme air-brushing, I'm actually not as horrified at the results as I thought i would be. Here it is in situ, in the Sunday Sun:

I know what you're thinking! Hotel Rooms for just £10!!

And you can see the article online here: Secret Cake Making Club Cooking up a Frenzy. I'm so pleased to see it doing so well, and would like to say many congratulations and thanks to Lisa for organising such a great event. Check out her blog The Wonderful World of @loopygirl whenever you get a moment.