Slimming World Low Fat Valentine's Strawberry Heart Cake

It's almost Valentine's Day and if you are watching your weight but want to spoil a loved one, how about making this low fat strawberry heart cake?

I got the basic recipe from the Slimming World website though I changed it a fair bit. I made this for a food tasting session we were having at my Slimming World group, and since it was only a few days before Valentine's Day I thought it would be a great idea. The cake is meant to serve 6 and would be 5 syns per slice though at our tasting sessions everyone just has a mouthful or small piece of everything that is on offer.

You need:
4 eggs
50g artificial sweetener eg Splenda
90ml boiling water
Pink food colouring
2 tsp baking powder
150g plain flour
Cake Release spray
250g Quark
25g sweetener eg Splenda
punnet of strawberries

Preheat oven to 180C. Mix the eggs and the sweetener.

 Add the boiling water then the flour and baking powder

This wasn't in the recipe but I then decided to add a dot of pink Sugarflair food colouring and mixed again

I've got two heart-shaped cake tins that I've had for years and can't remember where they came from, but I knew they would be perfect for this! I sprayed each tin with cake release.

Pour half the mixture in each tin and bake for 20-25 minutes until cooked.

I wasn't sure how easy these cakes would be to get out of the tins but the cake slightly shrank away from the sides as it cooked and they were very easy to lift out.

Allow the cakes to completely cool.

Mix 1 250g tub of Quark (a kind of curd cheese with a very mild taste that is low fat and can be used in all sorts of dishes) with 25g sweetener.

Pile half the sweetened Quark onto each cake and spread out. Save a little to spread on the bottom of what will be the top cake.

Slice the strawberries and arrange over the cake.

I placed one cake on top of the other. The actual cakes are relatively thin (did you notice the recipe doesn't contain butter, and doesn't have all that much flour either?) so the strawberries give it a lot of additional height. You could use jam or make a strawberry coulis instead for the middle; I don't know how easy this will actually be to eat but I do think it looks good.

As well as taking this along to my Slimming World group tomorrow, I am sending this to Homemade by Fleur's Valentines BakeOff.

I am also sending this to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel of Dollybakes and Laura of Laura Loves Cakes, as their theme this month is Valentine's.

Honey Beehive cake

Here's a sweet cake (rather poorly decorated I admit....) that you could even make for your 'honey' on Valentine's Day!

I actually made this to take to a friend's house recently; it was the first time I had visited her new home and didn't want to go empty handed. She isn't one for eating a lot of sugar so I knew whatever I made couldn't have a lot of frosting. This cake is perfect as some of the sweetness comes from honey. I also wanted to try out a new silicon baking mould my boyfriend gave me for Christmas, so when I saw a recipe for honey cake - even though the cake in the picture was cut into cubes - I decided it would be perfect to use my new mould.

The cake recipe is adapted slightly from Marian Keyes' Saved By Cake.

You need:

5 eggs, separated

100g caster sugar

100ml oil

100ml honey

200g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

50g chopped mixed nuts

Preheat the oven to 180C. Separate the eggs and beat the yolks with the sugar, then add the oil and honey



Then add the flour and baking powder

Finally add the nuts

Whisk the egg whites in a separate bowl until stiff, then fold into the cake mix

Here's the silicon baking mould - to make a three dimensional beehive! It came from Betterware and I was really excited about using it.

Unfortunately silicon moulds are very floppy! I overfilled the mould - because this recipe was intended for a full size cake tin and the moulds are actually relatively small. It was OK until I tried to pick it up by holding each end of the mould - it sagged in the middle and all the mixture ran into the centre! I cleaned it up and tried again, and this time stood the mould in a small baking tray so I could pick up the baking tray rather than the mould to put it in the oven.

Strangely, the cake was browning on the top and still uncooked in the middle, so I'm really not sure what the best time or temperature would be for this.

Another problem I found was that because the moulds weren't rigid, they didn't entirely hold their shape in the oven, and the two cakes came out slightly differently. The idea is to sandwich the two halves together to make a three-dimensional beehive, so it isn't great if the two pieces aren't exactly the same size and shape.

In the end one half of the cake was still a little undercooked - this cake didn't turn out particularly well in the end, though it did taste great - you could really taste the honey.

I decided to just decorate one half, and as I had to transport this in an overnight bag into work and then on the train to my friend's house, I didn't want to cover it with buttercream. I decorated it with marzipan, and made some strips following the design of the cake mould. I also made some little bees,  again from marzipan, using flaked almonds for the wings. The stripes are drawn on with chocolate piping icing,

This is a very versatile cake that you could make for any occasion- even Valentine's day as there's no rule to say that you have to stick to hearts and chocolate! And this cake would be a good way to say "honey, I love you"!

So I am sending this to Homemade by Fleur's  Virtual Valentine Bake Off.

For the same reason I am sending this to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Laura at Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel at DollyBakes, as their theme this month is Valentine's Day.

Jammy Flapjacks

I'm sure I'm not alone in having half-empty packets and jars at the back of the cupboard, whether it is an ingredient I bought for a particular recipe or something I've simply forgotten I had... so I was pleased when I saw this month's Random Recipe challenge from Dom at Belleau Kitchen. What's more, it's a thrifty challenge which is always a good thing!

He asked us to "open up the cupboard door, reach in deep and pull out the first thing you touch", and then choose a recipe using that ingredient. Now, I knew that I had neglected ingredients languishing at the back of the larder, and in the cupboard where I keep baking supplies, and in the fridge, and that if I had to choose one cupboard to root around in, I would be making a conscious decision already about what kind of ingredient to use (eg baking or savoury). So instead, I went through all my cupboards and made a list of all the long-forgotten ingredients I felt I ought to use up, and numbered them one to 31 (which made me feel quite guilty!). I then used a random number generator to pick one out, and discovered my random ingredient for this month was..... jam!

Now it doesn't particularly help that I don't like jam, which explains why I had a jar hanging around in the fridge drawer! I was racking my brains about what I could make using jam, and also whether there was another blogging challenge I could enter it in, to kill two birds with one stone. I then remembered that Homemade by Fleur is running a flapjack competition this month and I figured this would be a good way to use the jam.

I found a basic flapjack recipe on the internet to make sure I had the rough quantities right. To begin, I mixed 100g rolled oats, 30g plain flour and 50g ground almonds - another half-empty packet I had in the back of the cupboard!

Melt 75g butter and stir in, along with 1 tbsp golden syrup, mixing everything well.

Press about half the mixture into a greased and lined cake tin

Then spread over a thin layer of jam - I used strawberry.

Sprinkle the rest of the flapjack mix on the top and gently press down.

Bake in the oven at 180C for about 20 mins then cut into pieces. I had wanted to sprinkle some flaked almonds over the top but I couldn't find any. I'm sure I have a packet in the back of the cupboard which probably means I'll find them in six months time!

I did find the flapjacks didn't hold together quite as well as I'd hoped and next time I'd probably use more golden syrup but they didn't turn out too badly at all.

So I'm sending this to Belleau Kitchen for Random Recipes...

and to Homemade by Fleur's Challenge Flapjack

 

I am also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked. Their theme for October is jam and preserves, and I originally thought that meant I would have to make jam or curd of some sort - which I've never done before, don't really like eating and haven't had time to do this month! But I tweeted and asked if a recipe including jam would count, even if I hadn't made the jam myself, and they very kindly said yes. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else made for this challenge!

 

 

Diamond Jubilee Crown Cake

I wanted to bake something to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and my mum's birthday which was the same weekend. I had an idea of a royal crown cake and browsed a few images online until I came up with an idea and a plan. Then a week later, the Mail on Sunday magazine only went and published a 'how to make a Jubilee crown cake' guide... damn it! In the end it was a handy reference guide anyway so I can't complain.

I found this butter in the supermarket and thought it was very appropriate for some Jubilee baking.

I had decided to make a Victoria sponge for the cake itself and that happened to be the one given in the Mail on Sunday article as well, so I decided to just follow their quantities, even though I wasn't following their instructions on how to assemble the cake.

450g butter, softened
450g caster sugar
450g self-raising flour
8 eggs
2 tsp vanilla flavouring
2 tsp baking powder

Cream the butter and the sugar... have I mentioned how much I love my Kitchenaid? :-)

Add eggs

Add flour, vanilla and baking powder

Here are the first two cakes after they came out of the oven. They sank a little in the middle which was strange, but in the end quite helpful as it made them easier to stack with the cakes that rose more.

The other two cakes

So to assemble the crown, I sandwiched all four cakes together with buttercream

 Then I carved the cakes at a downward diagonal to make a shape that was wider at the top than at the bottom

I decided that purple was a suitable regal colour (and annoyingly so did the Mail on Sunday... I promise I wasn't copying their cake!) and so coloured a kilogram of sugarpaste.

I rolled out some more fondant and cut it into long strips to go up the sides and over the top of the cake. I sprayed it with silver lustre spray and left it to dry. The Mail on Sunday article recommended using gold edible lustre which you mix with vodka to make a kind of paint - but I think the spray is a lot easier! And I wanted to make mine silver rather than gold.

 Oops, a bit of stray buttercream to clean off...

The Mail on Sunday piece also suggested using jelly diamonds, which come in different colours - I wanted to stick with the silver theme so I found these edible jelly diamonds online instead. They're proper 3D diamond shape and made of a clear jelly - they were a little fiddly to use but I think they worked really well.

I also wanted to make a ball and cross to go on top of the crown, so I started by rolling out a small piece of sugarpaste...

Which I then cut into a cross like this

Out came the silver spray again!

I also bought a diamond plunger cutter and used it to cut small diamonds out of the leftover sugarpaste

I made a ball out of fondant and sprayed that gold as well, and placed the cross on top. I think it looks quite good on top of the cake (shame about the rest of the cake....!)

I stuck the jelly diamonds with some edible glue on the strips on the sides and top of the cake, and stuck the fondant diamonds I had cut out around the side.

One idea in the Mail on Sunday piece which I really liked suggested crushing a packet of Fox's glacier mints and arranging the pieces around the edge of the cake like a fur trim

But as usual, my sugarpaste skills are far from perfect... my confidence was knocked a little recently by a rather nasty comment on a previous post, so I feel like I should point out here that I'm a complete amateur, I never pretended to be perfect and as long as I am enjoying what I do, why should it matter? :-)

It didn't look as good as the one in the magazine, but then these things never do.. at least not when I'm concerned! I still quite like the way it turned out, anyway. It would have been better to use a darker purple and make the silver strips a bit wider, and as usual the fondant tore a bit when I put it over the cake so I did have to do a repair job on one side. Never mind!

As a finishing touch, I arranged the jubilee cake balls and corgi cake balls around the edge.

Happy Diamond Jubilee, and happy birthday mum!

The letter for June's Alphabakes challenge - hosted this month by Ros - is V, and since this cake is a Victoria sponge I'm making it my first entry for the month (I'm sure I'll do at least one more!)

I am also entering this in Homemade by Fleur's Blogging Jubilee Baking Competition.  The competiton is sponsored by Appliances Online and the deadline is tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's entries and already have spotted a few that I think are potential winners!