Chocoholic Birthday Cake with Cadbury Twirl

My fiancé is a total chocoholic so for his birthday this month I wanted to make him an awesome chocolate cake. I have a lot of baking books and they pretty much all have chocolate cake recipes - so where to start?

I realised I hadn't baked anything from my Outsider Tart book, Baked in America, for a little while. Outsider Tart is a bakery in Chiswick that is meant to be amazing, though I've never actually been there (even though I live in a different London borough it would take me about an hour and a half to get there - but I'm starting to think it might be worth the trip!). The bakery is run by two Americans who have brought a lot of new techniques to their baking and new ideas to 'bridge the culinary divide'. What they have also done is provide some amazingly decadent, delicious recipes that approach baking in ways that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of.

The cake I made is called "Coke layers" and is on p175 of their book Baked in America. I know that it's possible to reproduce a recipe on a blog, because the original author can copyright the ingredients but not the way they have described the method, but in a way this cake is as much about the method as the ingredients so I wouldn't feel quite right reproducing it without their permission (if I get around to asking and getting permission I will update this post!). After all, have you ever made a chocolate cake using buttermilk, oil, AND butter and 5 eggs.... but more to the point, using marshmallows and Coca-Cola?

I'm going to share with you some of the process I went through. The recipe makes three layers of cake, and half way through adding the ingredients I realised I was going to end up with a LOT of cake -far too much in fact as I was only catering for a meal with my fiancé's parents, not a huge party (that will come next year, when he's 40!).

Starting off by melting butter with the Coca Cola

adding marshmallows and chocolate

Mixing the sugar, oil and vanilla

Here it is after adding the eggs - all 5 of them

Now adding in the cooled chocolate mixture

Two layers about to go in the oven

After baking - three giant layers of cake!

I made a ganache from melted chocolate and sour cream and spread it between two layers

I spread more on top and decorated the top with Twirl Bites

I then decided it needed ganache around the side and more Twirl Bites on top!

I actually ended up with all three layers of the cake baked and decided it was just too big and put one layer in the freezer! I also used self-raising flour rather than plain flour and raising agents, and milk chocolate rather than plain - which would have made the cake sweeter but actually it wasn't an incredibly sweet cake in itself, but the icing was. Mmm, the icing....

I made the chocolate sour cream fudge frosting from the same book to spread in between the layers and on the to, then ran out of sour cream so made a chocolate ganache with double cream which I spread around the sides. I then decorated the top with Cadbury Twirl bites as they were the perfect little chunks of chocolate - slightly unevenly shaped and 'rock' like which appealed to me for this cake.

My fiancé absolutely loved the cake and said it was one of the best I've ever made and I'm inclined to agree. It was light and moist; the cake itself wasn't too sweet but the icing was deliciously decadent.

As I used Twirl on top I'm sharing this with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker as the letter I've chosen is T.

I'm also sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK. Her chosen ingredient this month is things you can drink, and this cake includes Coca-Cola.

Slow Cooker Ham in Cherry Coke

I've made a ham in Coca-Cola in the slow cooker before and thought it would be a good dinner in the week before Christmas - quite festive and also easy as you just put it in the slow cooker and forget about it.

 

I only had Coca-Cola though but I figured that would work - but this time rather than adding cloves, onion, carrots and bay leaves to the cola 'stock' I decided to just do it straight, in nothing but the cola, but then make a glaze from brown sugar and honey at the end.

So essentially that's all I did - I used two small gammon joints as I wanted this to do a second meal as well - I made ham soup the following day which was really good (recipe to follow!) and covered them in Cherry Coke. I put the slow cooker on high for 3-4 hours and when the joints were cooked, I removed them from the stock and put them in a roasting pan.

I mixed brown sugar with honey which I spread over the ham and then baked it in a hot oven for 20 minutes. I served it with a mixture of mashed and boiled potatoes and vegetables - the ham was very good and had a slightly sweet flavour from the stock and the glaze, and fell apart at the touch of a fork, in texture a lot like pulled pork.

I know for a lot of families it's traditional to have a ham at Christmas either alongside the turkey or to serve cold on Boxing Day so I highly recommend this recipe!

I'm sending this to the Slow Cooker Challenge, hosted by Lucy aka Baking Queen 74, as the theme is Christmas.

 

 

I'm also sending this to Cook Once Eat Twice, hosted by Corina at Searching for Spice, as I made soup from this the following day.



Slow Cooker Ham in Coca-Cola

This is a great winter warmer of a recipe, that you can make in a casserole dish in the oven if you don't have a slow cooker. I got a slow cooker for my birthday this year - they use a lot less energy to cook than an oven, and you can put something on in the morning and come home to a cooked dinner, which is great if you are out at work all day.

I've made ham in Coca Cola before from a Nigella recipe but this recipe is adapted from the Hamlyn book "200 slow cooker recipes".

To serve 4, you need:

1.25kg boneless gammon joint

8 cloves

1 onion, cut into wedges or use baby onions

2 carrots, thickly sliced

2 bay leaves

900ml Coca Cola

1 tbsp. brown sugar

1 tbsp. tomato puree

2 tsp English mustard

First stud the onion with the cloves

Place the gammon in the slow cooker and surround with the vegetables and bay leaves

Pour the cola into a saucepan, add the sugar, tomato puree and mustard and bring to the boil, stirring.

Pour over the gammon, place the lid on the slow cooker and turn it on according to the manufacturer's instructions - this takes about 6-7 hours to cook on high, but as I am out of the house for longer than that, I had my slow cooker then switch to its 'keep warm' mode.

When the gammon has cooked it will be lovely and tender and the sauce will have reduced though I find that liquids in slow cookers don't really thicken.

The gammon fell apart at the touch it was so tender, and it tasted lovely 

I served this with new potatoes, vegetables and some leftover cauliflower cheese but you can serve it with whatever you like.

Coca-Cola Cupcakes

While I was doing an online shop on a cake decorating website I came across a pot of Coca-Cola flavoured sugar and added it to my basket. I had seen recipes for Coca-Cola cake before so thought this would taste nice on top. I've tried a Nigella recipe for a Coca-Cola cake before but this time used one from United Cakes of America, which I adapted slightly.

You need:

2 cups plain flour

3 tbsp. cocoa powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup Coca-Cola

1/4 cup milk

1 1/2 sticks butter

2 cups caster sugar

2 eggs

butter and icing sugar to make buttercream

To decorate, cola-flavoured sugar crystals



Cream the butter and the sugar

Add the eggs, flour and salt and mix well

I decided to use Coke Zero, which seemed to work fine in this recipe.

Add the Coca-Cola and milk and mix well

The mixture will be quite runny; carefully pour into cupcake cases

Cook for around 12 minutes at 180C until a skewer comes out clean

I decided to make plain buttercream then add the cola-flavoured sugar on top, so I creamed butter and sugar, spread buttercream on top of the cupcakes and dipped each one in the cola sugar.

The cola sugar made the cakes look grey which was a bit strange, but they tasted good - the cake definitely had a Coke flavour though it was quite subtle, and the cola sugar on top was like eating fizzy cola bottles!

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker as the letter this month is C. I wonder if anyone else will use Coca-Cola as their ingredient?

Coca-Cola Bayou Gumbo

 

As I've mentioned before, I bought a recipe book called "Cooking with Coca-Cola" when I was on holiday in America last year. I've already made this "Perfect Brisket" and wanted to try another savoury recipe, and this time went for fish.

 

Bayou gumbo is traditionally a Cajan dish; a bayou, for those who don't know, is a body of water in a low-lying area and are common to the area around the Mississippi and Louisiana in particular. A gumbo is a kind of stew, that can be meat but is often shellfish; it originated in Louisiana. This recipe uses Coca-Cola to flavour the broth; I adapted the recipe however to use the fish that I had available - it asks for 'fish fillets' and crabmeat, so I used tinned crab, a white fish fillet from the freezer and a piece of salmon. The recipe also needed a cup of clam broth - I have no idea if you can get hold of that in the UK - and okra, which I've never eaten and didn't fancy trying on this particular occasion! So here's my version of the recipe:

 

To serve two:

1 white fish fillet

1 salmon fillet

1 small tin crabmeat

1 cup chicken stock

1/2 cup Coca-Cola

tin of chopped tomatoes

3 cups cooked rice- or one pouch of microwaveable rice!

1/2 onion, chopped

 

 

Cut the fish into pieces



 

Put the fish and all the other ingredients in a deep pan, apart from the rice.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 10-20 minutes.  Season.

Serve with rice - and that's it!

This was a tasty and easy dinner; I couldn't particularly taste the cola but I guess that's the idea!

"Perfect Brisket" - Beef in Coca-Cola

I visited Las Vegas for a few days last September and had a wonderful time. I wasn't there for the gambling or the partying but rather spent my whole time marvelling at the sights - everything from the dolphins in the Mirage to the Bellagio fountain. The shops were also something - I wasn't interested in the designer outlets but loved the weird and wonderful stores I came across. One in particular stood out - the Coca-Cola shop.

It sold every type of Coke merchandise you could imagine, and had a cafe where you could taste different Coca-Cola Schweppes products from around the world (some of which I thought were disgusting!). I bought some cool Coke can-style drinking glasses as a gift and couldn't resist treating myself to an intriguing little cookery book - Classic Cooking with Coca-Cola. The book is written by the great-great-granddaughter of the founder of Coca-Cola and contains all kinds of sweet and savoury recipes, all using one of the company's products - so not all Coke; some use Sprite, others use Minute Maid orange juice and so on.

I decided to try a recipe that was fairly straightforward and fairly standard, as I have already made Nigella's ham in Coca-Cola before. So the one I chose was called "Perfect Brisket" - basically beef in Coca-Cola.

I had a massive piece of beef - I'd ordered a small joint from Asda costing around £4 and they substituted it with a much larger one and charged me the full price because apparently it wasn't a substitution as such, just a bigger version of something I'd ordered. I ended up with lots of leftovers!

I also ordered a packet of onion soup mix, which was one of the main ingredients in the recipe, and Asda didn't have that either (sigh). But as I had no room in my freezer for such a massive piece of beef, I decided to make the recipe anyway and adapt it as well as I could. So instead of the packet soup mix, I mixed some beef stock with some onions.

This is a very simple recipe - you combine the soup mix with a can of Coke (or 330ml equivalent from a bottle)

The final instruction is to add a bottle of chili sauce. The recipe doesn't state a quantity; I bought a small bottle of Nando's medium peri-peri sauce and added the entire contents to the sauce.

Score the beef; I added some large pieces of onion to the casserole dish as well, and pour all the liquid over the top.

Cook in a hot oven for about 3 hours until the beef is tender.

The stock gave the beef a really nice flavour though I'm not really a fan of spice, so if I made this again I would probably buy the mild version of the sauce. It made a nice change from a normal roast beef joint anyway, and I'm looking forward to trying out some more recipes from this book.