Black Forest Gateau - GBBO 80s Week

It was the time of Kylie and Jason and Bros, drop-waist dresses with puff ball sleeves, Butlins holidays, Queen and Vanilla Ice, My Little Pony and Care Bears, candy necklaces and fizzy cola bottles, and what felt like endless summers running around outside with friends from your estate, running home just in time to watch 80 Days Around the World with Willy Fog or to beg mum for a coin p as you heard the ice cream van music playing.

In other words, I was a child of the 80s and so was really looking forward to Great British Bake Off’s 80s themed week. I wondered beforehand what they could be asked to make - these are the foods I most remember!

• Viennetta
• Vol au vents
• Chicken kiev
• Battenburg
• Frozen pizza (deep pan, served with chips)
• Black Forest Gateau
• Melon slices with cherries on cocktail sticks
• Speaking of which, cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks
• Angel delight
• Space invaders crisps
• Panda pops

The list goes on.... if you remember the 80s, what were your favourites?

The actual challenges in GBBO were quiche, custard doughnuts and ice cream cake. I didn’t realise quiche was an 80s trend, though I do remember seeing one for the first time in the local bakery when I was a child and reading the label, getting the pronunciation wrong as I’d never seen the word before and asking my mum what a ‘quickie’ was, to her mortification! Though as someone with a modern languages degree I’m quite impressed that eight or nine-year old me read ‘quiche’ as ‘quickie’!

I didn’t think those kind of doughnuts were particularly associated with the 80s either, and other than Viennetta I don’t think I ever saw an ice cream cake in the 80s - and Viennetta isn’t really cake, it’s ice cream and thin layers of chocolate.

So when it came to my own bakealong I decided to make something different. I have strong memories of going to a couple of aunts’ weddings in the 80s and Black Forest gateau featuring prominently on the buffet table. I absolutely loved Black Forest gateau apart from one thing - I didn’t like cherries. But the cake was so moist, so chocolatey, I couldn’t resist - so I would always have a slice if it was on offer and carefully prise apart the layers and scrape the cherry filling out, then scrape the cherry off the top, then deposit both on my mum’s plate and wipe my fork with her napkin!

I still don’t like cherries and haven’t eaten Black Forest gateau for years - and have never made one, so it seemed a good idea to make for my GBBO bake along!

I used this Eric Lanlard recipe but didn’t use kirsch as I wanted my daughter to be able to eat the cake; instead I brushed the cake layers with cherry juice. I also didn’t want to use black cherries so bought a tin of black cherry pie filling, which did contain whole cherries but also a thick syrup that I used to sandwich between the layers of the cake. I saved the actual cherries to decorate the top of the cake - and of course picked them off when I came to eat it!

I think I might have forgotten to add the sugar to the cream and I didn’t think I could actually taste any cherry in the cake either from the juice or the filling! Which essentially made it quite a lot of faff for a chocolate cake with a fresh cream filling. But the grated chocolate around the outside and the cherries on top made it feel very 1980s! So I was fairly happy with this cake but if I made it again I might just use the cake recipe and skip the cherries entirely and fill it with chocolate instead!

 

 

Meal Planning Monday 2017 Week 23

The weather has reverted to not being so warm again so I don’t think we will barbecue this week – unless we can’t use the kitchen as our windows and patio doors are being replaced at some point! As I write on Monday evening it's chucking it down with rain which is good for the garden I suppose - very different from the blazing sunshine we had on the London to Brighton classic and sports car rally yesterday

 

   

Monday

Lunch - chicken salad

Dinner - Lasagne with veg

 

Tuesday  - working from home

Lunch - baked potato

Dinner - at circuits class til 8.30 so need a quick dinner, it might have to be a ready meal or instant risotto or something on toast

 

Wednesday – my husband is off as our double glazing is being done. I don’t know which day this week or next they are doing the kitchen and whether that will affect my ability to cook!

 Lunch - sandwich as I'm doing my fortnightly school volunteering and have only got ten minutes for lunch

Dinner - spaghetti carbonara

 

Thursday

Lunch- chicken salad or leftover spaghetti

Dinner - chilli and ginger glazed cod for me and my mother in law, chicken for my husband (from Weightwatchers Delicious p130)

 

Friday

Lunch- salad

Dinner- sausage and chips

 

Saturday

Lunch- Findus crispy pancakes - bit of a blast from the past

Dinner- chicken breast marinated in garlic, lemon juice and olive oil, with a baked sweet potato and salad, I was going to do last week but didn't

 

Sunday

Lunch- crumpets with eggs, bacon etc

Dinner - roast chicken thighs

 

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An InLinkz Link-up

Back to the Future: 1.21 Gigawatts Wake-Up Juice

 

 

There’s one 80s movie that consistently comes top of the ‘100 greatest’ lists. It was never one of my favourites – the male leads, sci-fi theme and plot that revolved essentially around a car – never really appealed to me as a little girl. But I always enjoyed it when the film came on TV and conjured up a picture of the future, where we had self-tying trainers, self-drying clothes and hoverboards.

 

That movie is of course Back to the Future, and do you know what day it is today? October 21, 2015 is the day in the second movie that Marty went forward to…. In the future. Well, we may not have all the things the film predicted, but in some cases, we are not that far off.  Lexus has managed to invent a hoverboard (of sorts),

 

 

  

mobile tablets and wearable technology is here to stay and Pepsi has launched a limited edition Pepsi Perfect to tie in with the film today.

  

I wanted to make something based on the film, and struggled a little – I’d love to make a cake in the shape of the Delorean but time is not on my side. Instead, one detail stood out – in the first movie, the Delorean needed 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to make the return trip. That much power can only be generated by a nuclear plant, or a bolt of lightening, which is how the movie culminates in a race to connect a wire from the clock tower during a storm.

 

There’s another scene where two characters give a drink called “wake-up juice” to Doc after he has drunk too much in a saloon in the 1800s, which revitalizes him quickly (and unpleasantly).

 

I decided to combine these two things into my own recipe, for what I’m calling:

 

1.21 Gigawatts Wake-Up Juice

An original recipe by Caroline Makes

 

Half a can of Red Bull

1 shot Raspberry vodka (Absolut is good)

1 shot tequila

Blue Bols foam - this is something I bought ages ago online and forgot until now I had. It comes in different flavours - I have cassis - and it comes with a pump you insert into the bottle. It turns the liquid into a foam so you can get it to sit on top of the drink, but it still tastes alcoholic, which is really cool - and I think makes this drink a bit futuristic!

 

Before the foam is added...

and after!

Cheers!

 

Jareth's Temptation - Peaches, Cream, Meringue and Pomegranate Dessert

Not to be confused with Jansson's Temptation, which is something different entirely - this dessert is inspired by my favourite 80s movie.

Labyrinth came out when I was seven years old and a friend of mine had it on VHS - my family didn't even have a video recorder at that time. I absolutely loved the film, mainly for the songs - the animated characters were on the whole a bit irritating for my liking (anyone else find Hoggle really annoying?) but the idea of the quest to find the baby brother was the sort of thing I couldn't get enough of.

Best of all though were the two leads, Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie. I don't think I even knew who David Bowie was at that point but he was mesmerising (and looking back now, very overtly sexual though I was blissfully ignorant of that sort of thing at the time!).

Connelly was only 16 when she played the role and she was breathtakingly beautiful in her ball gown in the scene where Hoggle has given Sarah (Connelly) a peach, enchanted by Jareth (Bowie) so she will lose her memories and will forget she is looking for her brother. That's probably my favourite scene in the movie.

I decided to make a dessert inspired by that scene, so peaches had to be the main ingredient. I also wanted something that would conjure up the white ballgown that Sarah wore, hence whipped cream and meringue. Finally, I decided the sharpness of pomegranate would cut through in the way that Jareth's intentions behind giving Sarah the peach are malicious - and pomegranate seeds are a symbol of fertility which adds the sexual overtones. All that in a dessert!

The recipe is very simple as I bought a shop-bought meringue due to lack of time. Slice up a fresh peach and drizzle over some honey; grill or roast them until softened and slightly browned. Pile on top of the meringue, top with whipped cream and drizzle with pomegranate molasses and pomegranate seeds as well if desired.

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is J. I hope she doesn't mind this entry - I've given it the name of Jareth's Temptation though none of the ingredients actually begin with J! I've been away on holiday and for work for most of this month so this is the best I could do....

 

Battenburg and the inaugural meeting of the Sutton Clandestine Cake Club

I've wanted to go to a Clandestine Cake Club event for a while but could never make any of them. When I read that a new CCC had started in Sutton, just a couple of miles from where I live, I decided I should really make the effort - and I'm glad I did!

The theme of the cake club was "vintage". First I thought of flowers and chintz but then realised that vintage could also mean retro; essentially anything old. When I was a child in the 80s I remember having battenburg cake (shop-bought) for Sunday tea, and always eating the pink squares before the vanilla ones. I've never made a battenburg so thought it would be a great opportunity to try. I used the recipe from the official Clandestine Cake Club cookery book as well - I won it in a competition a little while ago and hadn't baked anything from it yet, and this was the perfect occasion.

The CCC was really fun and the organiser Hayley did a really good job- though it was a shame not many people came, hopefully there will be more next time! The venue was a pub conservatory where we had bunting across the windows and a table laden with cake stands and fresh flowers - it was lovely. Hayley made a red velvet cake with buttercream frosting, Maureen made a passionfruit and strawberry cake and Gemma made a lemon meringue pie cake. I was really impressed by all three cakes; the textures were incredibly light and the fillings delicious. I don't think my battenburg looked all that great in comparison - the hot weather had made the marzipan split - but it was definitely in keeping with the theme, and seemed to go down well!

Battenburg recipe, by Sally Harvey from the Clandestine Cake Club cookbook. The description of the method is my own, as I didn't follow the instructions given in the recipe, which involved folding a piece of greaseproof paper to cook the yellow and pink layers at the same time - I decided this was too complicated for 9pm on a Friday night so I made the layers separately.

Ingredients

175g butter, softened

175g caster sugar

3 eggs

125g self raising flour

1 tsp vanilla flavouring

1/4 tsp almond extract

50g ground almonds

pink food colouring

apricot jam

500g marzipan

icing sugar to roll out the marzipan

Cream the butter and sugar and add the eggs

Fold in the flour and the ground almonds. Add the vanilla and almond flavourings.

Separate the mixture in two, and spoon half into a greased and lined loaf tin.

Cook at 175C for about 20-25 minutes.

Then add the pink food colouring to the other half of the mixture (I always use a gel colouring) and spoon that into a greased and lined loaf tin.

The pink cake keeps its colour really nicely even after it is cooked

I had to level the tops of the cakes a little so they would be flat.

Slice each half down the middle and place a pink strip on top of a vanilla strip. Next to it, place a vanilla strip on top of a pink strip.

Use apricot jam to sandwich all four strips together.

Roll out the marzipan and cover the whole cake. I found this really hard - I think because of the heat, as no matter how much icing sugar I used, the marzipan kept sticking to the worktop and I found it unmanageable. In the end I split the packet of marzipan in two, rolled out each part and covered the cake in two sections. It was a shame as you could see the join but I don't recommend working with marzipan when it's a really hot day!

When you slice the cake through, you can see the checkerboard effect - just like the battenburgs I used to have as a child!