Saturday's carrot cake

My intention had sort of been to make Christmas cakes / Christmas puddings today. Enough of an intention that I had got as far as calling my mum to ask for recipes. She agreed to email me. But I didn't have enough of an intention to purchase a slow cooker for the puddings, especially when it transpires that mum has two spare ones (who needs two spare slow cookers?) and I'm going to see her in a few weeks so can acquire one of these then. And it appears that I am a little premature for Christmas cake (up to 4 weeks in advance the recipe says). So it was off with the Christmas baking and on with the carrot cake.

I have often thought about making a carrot cake, ever since Matt, my husband, bought me a food processor a couple of years ago. You may wonder why the advent of a food processor would mean that I would think about making carrot cake. Well, one of the things that has always put me off before is the amount of manual carrot grating that I had envisaged. Since getting the food processor the thing that has been putting me off making carrot cake is my mum. Her carrot cake is so good that I really think I don't stand a chance of living up to it and all who eat it (who have previously tasted hers) will be disappointed. I have however made a number of successful batches of carrot muffins and was feeling confident enough now to extend my skills to a full on cake.

I've had mum's carrot cake recipe written on a scrap of paper since my university days but decided that rather than a direct comparison I'd try something different. So I selected a different recipe from my box. As well as carrots this also featured sultanas (also in mum's) and coconut which I thought sounded nice. In the end it turns out that for the required 175g of grated carrot you only need 2 carrots – so maybe I could have managed the manual grating after all. It was a pleasingly simple recipe: beat together 75ml sunflower oil and 100g dark brown soft sugar (I used light brown as this was all there was in the cupboard). Then beat in 2 eggs, then stir in everything else.

Unable to resist I decided to add a few more ingredients – as well as the carrot, 100g self-raising flour, cinnamon and nutmeg, 50g sultanas and 50g desiccated coconut, I also added 50g chopped dried apple (I've had carrot and apple soup before which was very nice). I tried to chop the apple in the food processor but it was having none of it (maybe I was using the wrong attachment) so had to chop manually. Then I got a bit worried that there wouldn't be enough moisture to deal with all the dry ingredients so I added a tablespoon of ginger syrup (I've been looking for a use for this since I used the balls of stem ginger in a big gingerbread).

Then you just pour it into a “prepared” 18cm square tin and bake at 180ºC for about half an hour (maybe just under – keep an eye on it). One thing that I have never got the hang of (to be honest I haven't ever really tried very hard) is lining cake tins. With square tins it isn't too bad though – I just stick a bit of greaseproof paper in it and poke a bit at the corners. The worst that happens is slightly untidy corners. I think that before I make Christmas cake(s) using lots of (relatively) expensive ingredients I should try to learn how to line the tins properly. Perhaps mum will have some tips.

In terms of icing I take after my mum i.e. we'd rather not. I was positively amazed that she had full on decorated a cake for my 30^th birthday. So something I could do to increase my chances of a good carrot cake taste comparison would be to ice this one. In general I don't really like the taste or texture of icing but I do like the cream cheese one traditional with carrot cake. In the absence of any oranges in our house, or in the local shop, I made do with the zest of a couple of clementines. Despite assiduously (wow, that word just came to me, I hope it's the one I'm after) sticking to the recipe (apart from the clementine substitution) the icing seemed to be quite runny but it tasted really nice (it would have been remiss not to test it) and I was loath to change the taste with the addition of more icing sugar. Once the cake had fully cooled I transferred it to my chosen tin (one that had previously contained biscuits celebrating a rather big wedding from last year) and spooned over the icing. The trick is to put the cake on the lid of the tin then you don't have to do any manoeuvring to ice or serve it. The icing did pour over the sides quite a bit but I wasn't too bothered, I just cleaned it up with my little finger.

We resisted until after our curry to try the cake out. And I must say I wasn't disappointed. Matt described it as having a good cakiness about it. I was particularly pleased by the apple which I think gave it a satisfying tanginess. Must try it out on my mum.

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”

Saturday's cake marathon

After a late arrival at my mum and dad’s, a later pizza (my dad is now legendary for these) and an even later night I was not likely to be getting up early to complete this morning’s culinary tasks.

My athletic friend Alex had organised a bake sale to raise money for Farm Africa who she is running the London Marathon for next month. I had possibly been overambitious in my promised offerings: ginger muffins, lemon muffins, marmalade cake and chocolate brownies. Plus a quiz. And some reconstructed “vintage” cake stands.

Knowing that there would be a lot of cake to come this afternoon I skipped breakfast, topped up with caffeine and set to work on the cakes. Today’s bakes were to be tried and tested recipes, not wanting to be too adventurous in someone else’s kitchen. The limited time available, using my mum’s kitchen and her inevitable “help” would be challenge enough. (In fairness my mum’s seemingly continuous washing up was immensely helpful.)

The marmalade cake had to be done early as it needed to cool before icing. I first made this a few weeks ago in response to my glut of marmalade and it was certified a success by my friends Sarah and Andrew, and particularly by their 22 month old son. All went according to plan until it came to line the tin (recipes always say to do this first but I find it boring so don’t bother until just before cooking) and discovered that mum didn’t have the right size cake tin. This is a woman who has two, not insubstantial, cupboards dedicated to bakeware and an extensive baking history. It was not unreasonable for me to assume that she would have a 20cm round tin. We engaged my in some rudimentary mathematics and I was persuaded that I could bake the same volume of cake in two loaf tins.

Two cakes for the price of one into the oven.

While they were cooking I set to work on the lemon muffins. At which point I discovered I didn’t have the ideal ingredients. The basic was possible but I like to add poppy seeds for texture and lemon extract for turbo lemon flavour. So I despatched my husband, Matt, off to the shops.

And meanwhile I put the finishing touches to my cryptic bakes picture quiz. First devised on Thursday evening it needed modifying (apparently some clues were much too hard), adding too (you can never have too many cryptic bake quiz clues), and the answers putting into a visually agreeable format (the cryptic bake quiz makes a very pleasing PowerPoint® presentation). It was just like an assignment where you think that you’ve finished and nearly submit it when you realise that all your references are in a right mess.

Cakes out. Muffins in (but only just with poppy seeds as someone in the shop overheard Matt on the phone telling me that he couldn’t find any and kindly placed some in his basket). Quiz work on-going.

The excellent chocolate brownie recipe was given to me by a friend who doesn’t eat wheat and uses ground almonds rather than flour. It requires four separated eggs. I do not class egg separation as one of my skills. My success rate is usually about 50%. I often enlist Matt to do it for me but he was busy with glue and crockery so I went for it myself. And had 100% success.

Muffins out, brownies in. Quiz work on-going.

I had made two cake stands at home with top of the range super glue but had brought the rest to finish here. Unfortunately I forgot to bring the top of the range super glue. Cue crockery and glue fiasco. Suffice to say only the original two cake stands went to the bake sale.

I delegated Matt the task of icing, which as you know is not something that I relish. He completed this with aplomb whilst I did the next batch of muffins. Mum had baked some gingerbread and I thought that to avoid repetition I ought to go for a different flavour. In a moment of inspiration I decided on white chocolate and cranberry, never tried these before but the muffin recipe is very versatile and it’s usually a good flavour combination. Fortuitously both were available in mum’s randomly stocked kitchen.

Brownies out (smelling divine). Muffins in. Quiz work on-going.

Somehow it was now lunchtime. Still in anticipation of an afternoon of cakey goodness I just had a small mug of soup (I didn’t even have any cheese which is always such a treat at mum and dad’s as there is such a vast selection available). 

Muffins out. Quiz work complete with a little help from dad with the printing. Mad rush to get to the bake sale on.

It was great. Loads of people turned up and I was able to catch up with quite a few friends. And as planned eat lots of cake. I had some almond slice, chocolate biscuit cake, chocolate brownie and I’m sure something else but it slips my mind just now. All delicious. We won an embarrassing number of raffle prizes (but there were loads of prizes). The quiz seemed to be enjoyed and two small boys (who had been keenly selling raffle tickets) certainly enjoyed pressing the buttons for the PowerPoint® presentation. And I got a new spider plant. We used to have a fantastic one with lots of baby spider plants but it died some time ago so hopefully this one will fill that void in my life.

Apparently the event raised nearly £500 – fantastic and really helps Alex on the way to her fundraising target. So inspiring I think I might just plan a bake sale of my own.

Here's the link if you'd like to contribute to Alex's fundraising:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserPage.action?userUrl=AlexGrounds&faId=281414&isTeam=false

Sunday's unintentional sauce

It being Mothering Sunday we had invited my mother-in-law, Barbara, around for tea; my own mum apparently spending most of the day travelling across South East England on various forms of public transport.

Visitors are always an excuse for something yummy. Matt, my husband, had declared (after a week of attempting to fix skirting board in our front room) that this occasion would require him to spend most of the day in the kitchen. I did not argue. I think the alternative would have been another trip to the DIY store to acquire another tool. Probably a noisy tool. Matt’s special is pizza and he wanted to do some sort choclately thing for afterwards.

I chose to lurk around in my pyjamas. I made considerable progress in knitting three French hens, as well as some superglue and second hand crockery based craft.

After lunch (yesterday’s stuffed cabbage leftovers), and with this evening’s potentially extravagant tea in mind I decided that I really ought to get dressed and get myself to the pool. Thus far Matt had looked through some recipes but not made any decision on what he would like to bake for his mum. And as I was about to leave he put on his best “pretty angel face” and asked if I would mind making the cake. Which of course I wouldn’t as I love baking!

I narrowed down my options to a choclately ginger thing or a chocolately berry thing. The chocolate was in aid of Mothering Sunday, otherwise the cake would have featured marmalade since I have more than 3kg taking up valuable space in our store cupboard. I pondered over the choice whilst swimming (another good session but the superglue didn’t come off my hand despite an hour of chlorine treatment) but the decision was made for me as there were no appropriate berries available. So ginger it would be.

The recipe I chose was a rich chocolate and ginger beer cake. This was high risk from the start because it featured icing. I am not good at icing so tend to opt for cakes with interesting things in them rather than on them. But I am never going to get better at icing if I always avoid it. And Barbara likes it so it seemed like the right thing to do.

After deciding what type of ginger beer to use (there were at least 5 different varieties in the drinks cupboard), the cake mix itself was fairly straightforward, using one more bowl than I would prefer as I had to melt the chocolate into the ginger beer before adding to the flour, sugar, eggs and butter (although I did substitute with some branded buttery spread).

I have recently discovered the significant advantages of lining cake tins. I am yet to figure out if there is a right side and wrong side of the baking paper. So today I conducted a simple experiment and put it one way round in the first cake tin and the other way round in the second. I can share with you my conclusion that for the baking of chocolate ginger beer cake it makes no difference what way round you put the baking paper. It is not yet clear whether this conclusion can be extrapolated to other types of cake but I am looking forward to finding out.

And while the cake was in the oven I set to on the icing. The recipe required mascarpone and since Matt had to pop up to the shop to get mozzarella for the pizza I asked him to pick some up. He came back without mascarpone (not stocked) but they did have a good offer on loo roll. So I was going to have to improvise. So into my bowl went a tub of low fat soft cheese and some icing sugar. And then I heard “ooh, that was nice that ginger beer”: Matt had just enjoyed the 30ml or so that I had reserved for the icing. I was not keen on opening another bottle just for this so instead added a glug of the syrup from the preserved ginger in the fridge and whisked the whole lot up. And it was very runny. This is one of the problems that I frequently encounter with icing.

Unsure of the appropriate remedial action (it tasted quite nice so even if I had had some more icing sugar (which I didn’t) I wouldn’t have really wanted to add any more for fear of making it too sweet) I phoned my mum who is an essential source of cookery salvage tips. I first discovered this when I was at university and making an apple cake. I was sufficiently knowledgeable to realise that something wasn’t quite right before I put the mixture in the oven but insufficiently experienced to have any clue what had gone wrong. Mum managed to deduce that I had failed to use any eggs, which I duly mixed in and cake disaster was averted. Today she warned me off adding double cream (I thought it might whisk it up a bit more) but suggested I try adding in a bit of “marg” or blitz up some caster sugar in the food processor to turn it into something resembling icing sugar if I did want to go down that route. Not wanting to make any more washing up I opted for the “marg” option and added a lump of branded buttery before giving it all another whisk up. This actually did thicken it up a bit and it still tasted quite nice. I decided for good measure to add some glace ginger and then left it in the naïve hope that it would set a bit more before the time came to ice the cake (which by now had been removed from the oven and smelt amazing).

We all tucked into Matt’s delicious pizza and then I ventured back to the kitchen to assemble the cake. The icing was still way too runny but I could just about use it to sandwich the two layers together and cover the top and sides. The sides of the cake that is, as well as the sides of the kitchen. I had vastly overestimated the amount of icing that would be required but Barbara very generously suggested that it could be used as a sauce.

This was an occasion for the musical cake slice. To which Matt improvised some Mothering Sunday themed lyrics to the tune of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.

As they say proof of the pudding is in the eating. And the eating proved to be very good. Very sweet and rich but washed down perfectly with a cup of tea. There are some lucky people out there who are going to get to sample it tomorrow.