Apple and Cinnamon Cake for Diabetics

 

My father-in-law isn’t allowed to eat sugar any more so when it approached his birthday, I decided to make him a sugar-free cake. I wasn’t sure such a thing existed, or would taste good, but I thought it was worth a try if it was that or nothing – and I was actually quite pleased with the result.

 

I found a recipe for an apple and cinnamon cake on the Diabetes UK website it uses just 1 tbsp artificial sweetener (I used xylitol which I bought from Tesco) and the flavour comes from the cinnamon and the fact that there is more apple than cake! It’s a very simple recipe: you just mix the flour, sweetener, baking powder and cinnamon, then mix in the eggs and milk and the melted butter.

 

Peel and slice the apples and add them to the mixture, pour into a cake tin and bake in the oven for 35 minutes.

 

I used the recommended size cake tin and my cake turned out to be a bit flatter than the one in the picture, but it tasted really good. I was pleasantly surprised that the lack of sugar didn’t spoil the taste or texture and this is definitely something I would make again. It went down well with the birthday boy too!

 

 

 

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage.

 

 

Mary Berry's Lemon Drizzle Traybake Cake for Picnics

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to Castle Combe in Wiltshire, where there is a racing circuit. This was a special event where you could drive your own car around the track - it's not like some events where you can go as fast as you like and need a helmet and special race day insurance, as there is a pace car that sets the speed, no overtaking is allowed and you stay in the order you start in.

Once or twice we got up to 90mph in my husband's Aston Martin - we were there with the local branch of the Aston Martin Members Club - but we were following behind a lady who sometimes drove at 90mph and sometimes at 25mph. Which might have been understandable on the corners, but this was on the straight. She was very erratic which didn't make for a pleasant drive!

The next time we got to do a few laps, the Lotus car club went first, and then just after we started, I wondered aloud why there was a Lotus at the front of the group of Astons. My husband said it had been part of the group in front but was so slow, they had all finished and it was now sat in front of our group, holding everyone up. The Lotus did a nice sedate 30mph all the way around the track for three laps. I'm not a speed freak and was gripping the side of my seat as we got up to 90mph earlier, s the fact that even I was frustrated and shouting at the car to hurry up - since nobody was allowed to overtake - was saying something!

As I knew it would be a long day out I had taken some food with us, and the day before baked this lemon drizzle cake from a Mary Berry recipe.

 

The recipe is available on the BBC Good Food website and is very easy to follow. You only have to mix a few ingredients...

 

Spread it in a tin and bake.....

Make a lemon and sugar syrup which you then drizzle over the cake while it is still warm

The drizzle meant the cake was incredibly moist and very lemony; I don't think I've ever made a simple lemon traybake before and I can't understand why not as it was so good!

 

I'm sharing this with Treat Petite, hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat the Baking Explorer as 'anything goes' this month.

 

 

I'm also sending it to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as the theme is afternoon tea.

 

 

August is national afternoon tea week so I'm also sending this to Charlotte's Lively Kitchen as she hosts The Food Calendar linkup.

 



Mini Kentish Pudding Pies

Back in the winter I was looking for a dessert that my fiancé would like that didn't involve chocolate, but where I could make individual puddings rather than something big like a sticky toffee pudding. I have a book called Desserts by James Martin and found in it a recipe for a Kentish pudding pie - an old fashioned  English dish consisting of a shortcrust pastry base, filled with a set custard made of ground rice and often citrus flavoured and topped with dried fruit and ground nutmeg. It's served cold, often at Easter.

The recipe is available online here.

Here I've brought the cream and milk to the boil and added the whisked eggs and sugar. It looks a little lumpy but it got better as it thickened!

Lining the tarts with the pastry to bake them blind. I got some great little loose-bottomed tart tins from Amazon.

Adding the ground rice, nutmeg and lemon zest and juice to the filling mixture

Ready to go in the oven: the cooled pastry cases filled with the lemon and cream mixture, topped with currants

They only take a few minutes to bake and can be served hot or cold - I preferred them hot

I didn't find these particularly sweet and they certainly weren't my favourite dessert, but an interesting change and a good English classic.

I'm sharing these with Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Janie from Hedgecombers. Their theme this month is local and regional recipes - and these originate from Kent, the "garden of England" (and not very far from Surrey where I live).

Floating Anti-Gravity Mini Egg White Chocolate and Lemon Cake

I was really pleased with this Easter cake apart from one thing - I ran out of Mini Eggs!

I had this cake in mind for a long time after I got Lakeland's pouring cake kit for Christmas. I made a white chocolate and lemon cake, filled it with buttercream and lemon curd, and stuck Cadbury's white chocolate fingers around the outside. I used the Lakeland kit to make it look as if a packet of Cadbury Mini Eggs was pouring onto the cake, and I filled the top of the cake with buttercream and Mini Eggs - or tried to until I ran out, and added a few Cadbury's Oreo mini eggs to fill in some gaps.

It would have looked better with more Mini Eggs - I bought a couple of packets in the run-up to Easter and hid them in the garage (last year my boyfriend kept finding them in the larder and eating them!) but right before the Easter weekend wondered if I might actually need some more Mini Eggs. I ordered some from Tesco along with my online grocery delivery but they ran out, and when my dad went to buy a newspaper he had a look in the corner shop he had a look but they didn't have any either. So I had to make do with what I had, but it would definitely have looked better with more Mini Eggs.

I used a recipe from Lemony Loves Baking for the white chocolate and lemon mud cake but as the quantities were for a 6 layer cake I decided it was too big, so used two thirds of the quantities for all the ingredients.



I realised I didn't have any cream so just made a standard buttercream and used it with lemon curd in the cake. The cake was really moist and you could taste both the white chocolate and the lemon which was brilliant. So a big hat tip to Anna at Lemony Loves Baking for the recipe!



As for the Lakeland pouring kit - have you come across these before? I was a bit dubious that it was really necessary to spend £9.99 on a kit which is little more than a plastic base and a couple of rods, when I made this floating Malteser cake last year just using a plastic straw.

While the equipment cost pennies, it was a bit tricky to stick the Maltesers to the straw and they kept sliding off, so I had to do just a couple at a time and then put the whole cake in the fridge to set, and then do a few more, so the whole thing took hours and I needed a lot of space in the fridge - which I had at the time as we had not long before got a new American style fridge freezer and not yet gotten rid of our built-in larder fridge.

This year however the larder fridge has been removed and turned into an actual larder with pull-out shelving and my other fridge wouldn't have the space for a large and tall cake so I was a bit worried about what I would do if I needed to put the cake in the fridge. But I needn't have worried as it worked perfectly.

 

To start with, you decide if you want your floating element off to one side or in the middle, and screw the base rod into the appropriate hole and cover the other holes with blanking plates. Place the cake over the rod so it goes through the cake - it worked fine but it would probably have been more sensible to do this before I filled the cake, ie put one layer of cake over the rod, then spread over the filling and put the other cake on top, rather than put the entire cake over the rod!

Then screw the other part of the rod on top - you can either have it taller or longer depending on where you put the 'joint'.

I melted some milk chocolate in the microwave and put it in the fridge until it was very thick but still spreadable. I covered the top of the cake with buttercream and added the Mini Eggs, and then put the empty packet over the top of the bent part of the rod. Then all I had to do was put a dot of chocolate onto a Mini Egg and stick it to the rod and repeat. The eggs stuck fast right away and I didn't need to put it in the fridge at all.

As the final touch I spread the remaining buttercream around the edge of the cake and stuck white chocolate fingers around the sides, and then stuck a yellow polka dot ribbon around the base. A very nice Easter cake!

I'm sharing this as yet another entry with Alphabakes, the challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is C and this cake has plenty of white chocolate.

I'm also sharing this with Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen.

 

I'm sending this as well to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as their theme is Easter and spring.

And finally I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

Homemade hand-decorated Easter Eggs

I made my own Easter eggs for the first time this year! They did take a bit longer than I thought and I didn't exactly plan elaborate designs for decorating them but I was still quite pleased with them.

I made some small Easter eggs last year using a silicon mould, which I filled with soft fondant. For a long time now I've wanted to make full-size Easter eggs so recently bought myself a mould from Hobbycraft, as it was only £1. I was a bit worried as it was rigid plastic rather than silicone so it was a bit difficult to get the chocolate out of the moulds but I did manage it - and I will explain how further down!

I made three eggs, two milk chocolate and one white.

To begin, I melted 250g milk chocolate in a bowl in the microwave and poured about half of it into both parts of the Easter egg mould. You don't need to spread it with a spoon - instead, tip the mould to swirl the chocolate around, making sure it goes right up to the edges. Put in the fridge for 10-15 minutes.

At this point, the thinner chocolate around the sides will have set and the melted chocolate will have pooled at the bottom of the mould; this will be cooler and thicker but still not quite set. Using the back of a teaspoon spread this chocolate, and some more from the melting bowl, up the sides of the mould and return to the fridge to set again. After another 15 minutes or so take the egg out of the fridge and add a little more melted chocolate; keep some in the bowl for sticking on the decorations. Put the egg moulds in the freezer for 10-15 minutes for a final chance to set.

Getting the egg out of the mould wasn't as easy as if I had a silicone mould but it did work eventually. You have to pull opposite corners of the mould, then turn it over and gently push - you can see as the chocolate slowly starts to separate from the mould and eventually it will just pop out. I made three eggs so that should have been six halves but I ended up having to make eight as two halves broke - one of the milk chocolate and one of the white chocolate halves. Just pop the chocolate back in a bowl in the microwave and start over again!

To decorate the first egg, I used the leftover melted chocolate to stick a mixture of milk chocolate buttons, white chocolate buttons and some 'jazzies' - white chocolate circles with hundreds and thousands stuck on. On the other side of the egg I stuck some Tesco chocolate dotties (basically like Smarties) and some mini Jazzies which came in a little tube from Sainsbury's, in a chevron pattern. Leave for a little while to set.

If you are going to put anything inside the egg now is the time to do it - I used a mini packet of Maltesers and a mini packet of white chocolate buttons. I used a small paintbrush to brush the meltd chocolate along the edges of both halves of the egg, and carefully stuck them together. I left the egg for a little while to start to set then put it in the fridge to fully harden.

I made two more eggs - another one with milk chocolate, where I used a writing pen of white chocolate from Sainsbury's to draw chevons and stuck on some mini Jazzies. On the other half, I used the same writing pen to draw flower petals, using a large Jazzie as the centre of each petal, and stuck on a Dr. Oetker wafer butterfly. I put a packet of mini Maltesers and a packet of Tesco mini eggs inside the egg and glued it closed with melted chocolate as before.

I also made a white chocolate egg for my mum, and spooned a little melted white chocolate onto the shell so I could sprinkle over some freeze-dried raspberry pieces from Sainsbury's. I added some Dr. Oetker wafer daisies and some wafer butterflies, and did the same on both halves of the egg. My mum really likes flying saucer sweets so I filled the egg with them - the pastel colours look just the thing for Easter. I sealed it shut with some melted white chocolate.

 Here are some photos of the finished eggs (taken from both sides):

I packaged them up in cellophane to give as Easter gifts.

I was really pleased with these - if I'd had more time I would have made some chocolates to go inside, maybe next time!

I'm sending these to We Should Cocoa, as the theme is chocolate and eggs. It's hosted this month by Linzi at Lancashire Food on behalf of Choclette at Tin and Thyme.

Easter and spring is  the theme for Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage.

I'm sharing these with Alphabakes, hosted by myself and Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is C.

And finally because it's Easter I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.