Saturday's grilled apple cake

A bit of a long blog today (but there are two totally different bakes), so I have split it in two in case you want to read it in parts.

Part 1

The arrival of visitors, even if just for a passing visit on their way to deepest (and based on the weather forecast possibly darkest) Cornwall was a good excuse to spend the morning baking. The alternative was doing chores so there wasn’t really much contest.

That I would be baking a cake of some description was not in question – Sarah and Andrew’s (our visitors) son is a big cake fan and far be it for me to disappoint a toddler. What sort of cake it would be was not clear.

I also wanted to do something savoury for lunch. I had a bit of a browse of my recipes books and cuttings but found nothing suitable. There were plenty of tasty sounding things but I didn’t have the ingredients. Again, a long time has elapsed since we last did a “proper” shop and I was not about to go to the supermarket on a Saturday morning out of choice. So a bit of improvisation would be called for. I decided that I would venture to make some sort of pastry filled bake. It would be a quiche or a flan, the boundaries between which are not clear to me.

I have never made a quiche or a flan before. Therefore I thought it wise to address this first before making the cake. I found a basic sort of recipe in a trusted old cook book and set to work on the pastry. I mixed the flour and butter and then added enough water to bring it together and it resembled pretty much what I thought pastry should resemble. I knew that you’re supposed to chill pastry before cooking but not was not sure whether you were supposed to do this before or after rolling. I went for the chill first option – during which time I relented and did a few chores, mainly to make our house a little less hazardous for the imminent arrival of a toddler.

I removed my ball of pastry from the fridge and began to roll. At which point it all fell apart. I was able to rescue it with my (clean) apron to prevent it from falling on the floor. I toyed with the idea of adding a bit more water but have a vague notion that pastry is ruined by too much water. So opted instead to add an egg yolk. I think I did this because my mum once told me that I could add an egg yolk to my granny’s cheese straw recipe and I saw this pastry as not too different, plus egg is sticky so should hold it all together. I managed to reform my ball.

I couldn’t be bothered to chill it again now so rolled my pastry out. I was amused that without any effort on my part it assumed the form of the Iberian Peninsula.

I sort of managed to line my quiche / flan tin, this required quite a bit of patching up and I decided to rechill it for a while to facilitate pastry bonding. 

So back to the cake. I was tempted to go for marmalade cake but had made this for Sarah and Andrew on our most recent visit to them so thought I should try something different. Chocolate was another option but I’d enjoyed chocolate cake at work (that my friend had brought in for her birthday) for 2 days in a row preceding this. So it was back to browsing through my recipes. I finally settled on an apple and cinnamon cake, the recipe for which I’d picked up at a property conservation charity's tea-room. The recipe stated that I should use 2 apples. But I had 4 small ones that were going a bit wrinkly so would need peeling and thought it could probably take all those. It also called for 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. But I love cinnamon and the volume of the rest of the recipe seemed sufficient that it could take a bigger slug than that (I probably added 2-3 teaspoons). It would also need apple juice. But I only had apple and pear juice and failed to see how this would do any harm. I mixed all up as directed and it seemed ok, kind of like a muffin mixture rather than a sponge mixture but that was to be expected as it uses oil rather than butter.

Still, it was rather sloppy so I put my spring form cake tin on top of another tray just in case of the event of leakage before pouring the mixture into it.

Whilst looking through my recipes I had been intrigued by some of them that were “crumble” cakes. I decided to augment this apple and cinnamon cake with a crumble topping. For this I decided to use the 3 parts flour, 2 parts sugar, 1 part fat recipe that my mum gave me. On this occasion I used the formula where:

one part = 25g

because I had 75g of plain flour to use up (this is a useful use of algebra if ever there was one). I sprinkled the crumble mixture over the cake and put it into the oven to bake.

Part 2

I had blind-baked the quiche / flan case whilst getting on with the cake which was a risky strategy because I had adulterated the pastry recipe so wasn’t sure how long it would have to cook for. Fortunately it seemed to come out ok. Only ok, because there were some small cracks in it where I had done the patching up. Clearly chilling does not facilitate the bonding of pastry but there was no going back now. For the filling I was planning on using leek, mushroom and tomato. I began by chopping 3 leeks and sautéing them to soften. I would normally use olive oil but since this was in the bedroom (Matt, my husband, has been anointing my ear) I used normal vegetable oil. While they were softening (the leeks, not my ear) I prepared my mushrooms but it soon became evident that the leeks were not going to reduce in volume by very much and the volume of the case would be insufficient to accommodate mushrooms as well. In actual fact 2 leeks would have been quite sufficient. We would have the mushrooms raw in our salad.

The time was up for the cake so I took it out of the oven but the skewer test suggested that it wasn’t cooked so I but it back in and got on with the flan / quiche filling. The basic recipe I had required:

• 2 eggs; I also added the egg white I had left over from rescuing my pastry so save it from going to waste
• 75ml of milk which I could do
• 150ml of single cream; I substituted 150g of reduced fat crème fraiche (although this is one of those recipes where it seems pointless to use anything reduced fat but this is what we had left over from our Friday night fajitas)
• No cheese; this would not do so I added about 100g of grated mature cheese (I am not a fan of things that taste eggy and I thought that the addition of plenty of cheese would minimise this risk)
• Salt and pepper; I omitted the salt since I thought the cheese would provide enough saltiness.

Once I’d whisked that all up I skewer tested the cake again. Now it was cooked through, but the crumble on top wasn’t looking very crumbly. Rather than risk over-cooking the cake I decided that this could be remedied by sticking it under the grill for a bit. Unfortunately I got so engrossed with filling my flan / quiche case and decorating it with cherry tomatoes

that I forgot about the cake until the smell of burning sugar hit my nostrils. Based on the amount of smoke that was coming from cake I think that we may only have been moments away from a full on fire (which reminds me that I must get a domestic fire extinguisher).

So now whilst the quiche / flan cooked I attempted to rescue the cake by scraping the burnt bits from the top. I managed to make it look ok but it wouldn’t be until later whether the taste of burning had infused the rest of the cake.

 

In my panicked state following the burning cake I had forgotten to take note of when I put the quiche / flan in the oven. Fortunately I was not so panicked that I didn’t keep a reasonably good eye on it and got away with just a minor bit of cheese crisping (which I love anyway).

Even if these two bakes ended up tasting dreadful I would take a certain amount of satisfaction from the fact that I was able to

extract both of them from their tins and onto cake stands without any disintegration. And there wasn’t any leakage through the cracks in the pastry either.

A certain toddler (and probably the rest of us for that matter) didn’t want to wait until after lunch to try the cake. But we managed. We had lunch in the garden in the intermittent sunshine. The quiche / flan went down very well, with all the grown-ups having seconds. I was particularly pleased because it didn’t taste at all eggy.

We let our flan / quiche (and bread and cheese and salad and crisps) go down before progressing to the cake. It didn’t taste burnt at all. In fact it tasted rather good. 24 hours later it’s nearly all gone – there’s just one piece left; and that’s for Matt as a reward when he’s successfully finished the current phase of his DIY. (We finished the quiche / flan off for tea last night!)

Sunday's topsy turvy cake

My parents arrived for the weekend on Friday night. The culinary inevitabilities would include pizza (always when there are guests), soup (Dad loves this and it probably explains his envy inducing slimness) and bread and cheese (the rest of us love this and it probably explains our non-slimness). And the temporary swelling of household numbers would also be a good excuse for a nice piece of cake.

Saturday was a busy day in the garden, and by the time we had cleaned it and ourselves up and taken my mother-in-law’s Yorkshire terrier for an evening walk at the beach (once all the tourists had gone home), there was no time for cake making. Especially as I wanted to indulge a bit in my favourite fruit based word game.

By the time Sunday came around cake was very clearly on mine and my husband Matt’s mind. We prepared ourselves with a swim, our first since holiday. I felt very out of shape and if I’m going to make a habit of cake making I’m going to need to put a bit more vigour into my lengths than I did yesterday.

Matt was keen that I use up:

1) a large quantity of desiccated coconut. I have no idea how we’ve got so much as I don’t ever remember buying any

2) some cherries preserved in some sort of continental spirit which were opened a while ago in error and have since been sat unused in the fridge

Both were well past their “best-before” dates. I inspected the cherries. As predicted they were fine, they are after all preserved in alcohol and will probably last almost forever. I tasted the coconut. I have no idea what gone-off coconut would taste like, but it too seemed fine. So I was left with the dilemma of whether to try and combine these two ingredients (there must be weirder combinations than coconut and cherry), use one of them (and save the other for another day), or bake something entirely unrelated to either.

My preferred thought to deploy the cherries in a Black Forest gateau. I’ve always wanted to go there to eat this in situ, although I think I might actually be disappointed and find that the Black Forest gateau is something invented in England in the 1970s and has nothing to do with the Black Forest. But at 7pm on a Sunday there was no whipping cream to be had in our local convenience store (not so convenient if you need whipping cream) and I thought that spray cream wouldn’t create the desired effect. So I decided to keep the cherries for another day and use the coconut.

I think that coconut on its own is a bit boring and was thinking about making a pineapple upside down cake with coconut sponge. A kind of baked pina colada. But I also had cake-stand full of almost over ripe nectarines and kiwis that I was no way going to be able to eat in the conventional way before they started to ferment. This called for a multi-fruit topsy turvy cake with coconut sponge.

So I arranged the nectarines and kiwis in the bottom of a big tin. It didn’t look like quite enough fruit so I added some of my bargain tinned strawberries. I was worried that it was all a bit wet so sprinkled over some brown sugar, resisted the urge to add coconut liqueur and put the lot in the oven at a lowish temperature to evaporate and caramelise a bit.

In the meantime I had to make the sponge. Since I could not find a suitable recipe for coconut sponge it would have to be somewhat improvised. It would be an improvisation on my mum’s trusty 6,6,6,3,3,3 cake, only these are in imperial measurements and I prefer metric. So:

1) 150g butter (or butter substitute) and 150g sugar creamed together

2) 3 eggs, beaten and added one at a time with a tablespoon of flour with each one (I’ve no idea if this flour thing is really necessary but recipes always tell you to do this)

3) 150g flour, added gradually so as to make sure it doesn’t get too try (I think maybe the flour you add with the eggs is supposed to come out of the 150g but I forgot to weigh that)

4) 50g desiccated coconut, stirred in. I was cautious with this as I didn’t want to dry the mixture out but 50g didn’t seem to go very far so I added another 50g.

I poured this over the slightly cooked fruit and returned the whole lot to a hotter oven (about 180°C) and baked for about 30 minutes. I didn’t really know how long to bake for but it was looking brown after this long and the skewer test confirmed that it was at least not raw.

My mum declined my offer to drink the syrup that the strawberries had come in but rather than waste is suggested that I could turn it into a sauce. I thought that this might be overly sweet so added some orange juice and zest and set over the hob to reduce. It didn’t appear to be reducing at all and after about 10 minutes I lost patience and threw in a spoonful of corn flour. Mum then gave me a corn flour tip: mix it up with a small amount of water first. But it was too late and I spent the next 15 minutes removing lumps of corn flour. But I added another spoonful in the manner advised by my mum and the sauce duly thickened.

It was one of those bakes that I dread removing from the tin; I was concerned about major cake / fruit separation and didn’t dare risk an intermediate cooling rack between the tin and the serving plate. Amazingly it all held together and looked almost like something out of a French patisserie.

We served it (after soup and bread and cheese) with the sauce, and some spray cream for good measure. It was very delicious and despite all the coconut I had added nice and moist. There’s still half left but because of all the fruit I don’t think it’ll keep very long. Oh well, that’s lunch sorted.

Tuesday's muffins

Having thus far failed in my social obligation to provide sweet treats to my colleagues following my return from holiday over a week ago I had vowed to make amends for this yesterday. Normally people bring back something from wherever they’ve been but despite visiting quite a few places I didn’t see anything inspiring in terms of locally produced goodies (or at least not that I would be able to get back to the UK without being devoured first) so decided to make muffins.

I popped into my favoured local supermarket on the way home from work to get eggs as I’d used a whole box in the weekend’s lemon meringue pie. Seeing that that was all I went in for I did rather well and also got:

• a loaf of sliced bread – cue toasted sandwiches in the new sandwich toaster which I’d got at a bargain price at my favourite continental style discount supermarket last week 
• 4 tins of strawberries in syrup
• 2 snack packs of premium raisins – ideal as emergency rations in my car

All for under £5, which was good as that was all I had in my purse. I have never bought tins of strawberries before but at 25p each they seemed too bargainous to leave behind. I thought that I would probably be able to adapt a recipe to turn some of them into muffins.

Muffin making would have the bonus effect of keeping me out from under the feet of Matt, my husband, whilst he continued with his DIY project.

I found a recipe for summer fruit muffins. This called for fresh or frozen summer berries but surely the tinned strawberries could be put to good use here. So where the recipe stated 240ml milk I used 240ml of the syrup from the tin. Then I added the fruit that I had chopped up using my favourite method of scissors inserted into the tin. There was a little bit of syrup and a little bit of fruit left over and rather than have these go to waste I mixed them in too. My main concerns were over-sweetness and over-wetness, but I thought that this was a risk worth taking.

I baked them for a little longer than the recipe suggested, hoping to mitigate the risk of over-wetness. They came out of the oven and appeared to be muffin formed rather than one soggy mess. My muffin recipe book is one of the most reliable that I have but since this was an improvised creation the strawberry muffin would need testing. Fortunately Matt was only too happy to help. The feedback was not overwhelming. Adequate but not overwhelming, so these muffins would have to be improved with icing.

In the meantime I moved onto the next batch of muffins: carrot at the special request of my colleague Jan. This is a tried and tested recipe, enhanced by the addition of lots of cinnamon and raisins.

And then the next batch: lemon. Also tried and tested and one of my personal favourites. I find the given recipe not to be lemony enough so I added so lemon juice to the mixture as well as the zest. It suggests that you use lemon essence but since you have to denigrate a lemon to get the zest and then use some of the juice for icing it seemed only logical to use the rest of the juice in the muffins. These have to be iced as soon as they are out of the oven. It’s a simple lemon glacé icing, but I frequently mess it up. This is because when I start to mix it looks like there’s too much icing sugar, so I add more lemon juice, and then it gets too liquid and I lose patience and I just end up pouring this runny lemony syrup all over the muffins. But yesterday I showed an uncommon level of patience and/ or skill and they were rather successfully iced. The only slight problem was that there wasn’t quite enough icing so there were 2 un-iced ones. I didn’t see this as too much of a problem as there are always some people who don’t like icing.

And then the next batch. I went for the relatively safe option of chocolate (for any fussier eaters) but jazzed them up a bit by adding some experimental orange.  Since I’d not done this combination before I used just the zest but I was informed after some more testing (again, Matt didn’t need any encouragement) that they could be more orangey so will add some juice next time. Or maybe make an orangey icing.

At this point I should have got on with making some dinner (well, toasting some sandwiches) but was in the baking frame of mind and wanted to do more icing. I decided that the best thing for the strawberry muffins would be some vanilla icing so had a bit of a trawl on the interweb and found one that looked likely. Determined not to mess this up (icing is not a strong skill) I applied some of the things that I have learnt from previous efforts (this could almost be a CPD entry). The recipe told me to whisk the stuff together. Rather than make a cloud of icing sugar all over the kitchen I mostly blended with a spoon and gave it a quick whisk by hand at the end – I got a nice smooth icing. The recipe told me to use 2 tablespoons of milk. Not wanting to end up with a runny vanilla mess I used only 1 tablespoon – I got a suitably stiff icing. In fact it was of such a consistency that I even ventured to use my icing set. This was only the second time ever that I had used this. On the first occasion it was an absolute disaster so I was a bit nervous but kind of excited at the same time. I chose my nozzle from the selection of 8, loaded the icing bag and then went for it. Even if I say so myself, it was much more successful than the first occasion and I feel rather try rather encouraged to practise a bit more. Maybe I might even use some food colouring. I enhanced the decoration further on a few of the muffins by adding some freeze-dried strawberries.

 

But the icing bag was an absolute mess and I was not in the mood for cleaning it last night so the icing for the carrot cake muffins would have to be spooned on. This was a classic carrot cake icing with cream cheese and is really yummy. I should have made it even better by putting a bit of orange zest into it. But it was still really yummy – I know this because I personally cleaned out the bowl.

That should have been it for the evening. The sandwich toaster had still not been deployed. But Matt emerged from his DIY and suggested that I could make a batch of muffins with some chocolate caramel sweets. We have quite a few packets of these as Matt’s grandad gives them to him when he cuts his toe-nails. So I chopped up the chocolate caramel sweets (easier said than done even with a really sharp knife), added these to a mixture of “basic” muffin, reheated the oven and located another packet of muffin cases. It was pretty obvious that these would taste okay but by the time they were cooked I was hungry (sandwiches still untoasted) and tired so thought it perfectly acceptable to test one myself. It was good.

I was too tired though to risk any more icing. So I sort of cleaned up. Matt made the toasted sandwiches – they were delicious. Much more delicious than if I had made them because he was very generous with the cheese.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the whole exercise was packing all the muffins into boxes for transfer to mine and Matt’s places of work. This required extraction and redeployment of the camping box (the big plastic box with miniature supplies of tea, coffee, sugar, salt, ketchup etc. from hotels, motorway services etc.).

We divvied up the muffins between us and took them off to work this morning. And the results of this multi-centre, non-placebo controlled, non-blinded muffin trial?:

• our colleagues like muffins
• one participant described the strawberry muffin as “a mouthful of loveliness”
• the chocolate caramel sweet muffins could have done with more chocolate caramel sweets
• the carrot cake muffins were the most popular in all locations. Matt informed me that they had been met with “great acclaim”