Cherryade Bundt Cake for Comic Relief

A red cake for Red Nose Day!

A massive hat tip to Rachel from DollyBakes for this cake who graciously allowed me to use her idea and recipe - and I think hers looks better than mine too (I need that bundt tin!).

As soon as I saw this on Rachel's website I knew it would be perfect for Comic Relief - a charity event that is also known as Red Nose Day. We are having a bake sale at work and I've made two cakes - I kind of felt I had to, as I'm now on the social committee and responsible for organising the bake sales now!

This cake uses Cherryade which is a lovely retro idea, though the colour does also come from food colouring. It's really easy to make.

I did make just over half the quantity given in Rachel's recipe as I had a feeling her bundt tin was a lot bigger than mine. In the end there was space for the cake to rise more - so I could have used a greater quantity of mixture - and if you do use the full quantities and have some left over, you could also make cupcakes.

Please visit Dollybakes for the exact ingredients and quantities.

Here's what I did:

Weigh out the butter and sugar (I used butter alone rather than vegetable fat as well)

Cream together and add the eggs

Add the vanilla and the dry ingredients

Cherryade! I did wonder if perhaps I shouldn't have bought the sugar-free variety as it seemed somehow thinner, but the cake turned out fine in the end.

Mix in the cherryade, which goes all frothy

Here's my trusty ruby red food colouring

It seemed to turn the batter a hot pink rather than ruby red...

... so I added some more until I was happy with the colour. I spooned it into my silicon bundt case.

As mine was half the quantity of Rachel's it needed less than half the time to bake. I think ovens can be temperamental anyway so the best thing to do is keep an eye on it and test with a skewer until it's done.

I was impressed the cake kept its lovely red colour! Here it is after turning out of the bundt case.

To make the glaze, mix icing sugar, cherryade and red food colouring. It needs to be runny but still reasonably thick.

Pour over the cake and allow the icing to drip down the sides.

I decorated it with Haribo cherry sweets

The cake is a lovely red colour when you cut into it which is really cool.

I am sending this to Bookmarked Recipes, hosted by Jacqueline from Tinned Tomatoes. The idea is to encourage food bloggers to revisit recipes they have bookmarked on websites, in books or magazines.

Lamb in Cherryade Glaze - Meal from How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days

I've recently come across the Food 'n' Flix blog challenge where a film is chosen every month and the participants cook something inspired by that film. I took part in January with the Hunger Games and was quite pleased with the meal from the film and book that I recreated.

This month's film, chosen by Tina from SquirrelHead Manor, is the Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey romantic comedy How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days. I'd seen the film before - in fact I have it on DVD - so I settled down one Sunday night to watch it again. There are only a few key food scenes but also lots of other little moments where you see people eating. When Andie and Ben first meet, they go out to dinner and eat lobster (which I am not going to attempt to cook!) and the other main food scene is when Ben cooks Andie dinner at his house. He makes an amazing rack of lamb with a cherry glaze... and Andie tells him she's vegetarian.

However, Heather - the brains behind this challenge -explained to me that the challenge doesn't only centre around recreating food that actually features in the film. She said: "You can draw inspiration from a town or a setting...from a memory or a reference...from a color or a building.  I see food in everything - usually where others do not.  Sometimes you have to draw inspiration from the tiniest of a spark.  What we head into the kitchen to make inspired by a film does not have to come directly from the screen."

I like the way she thinks - and as the film is all about dating, one way of approaching this challenge would be to cook a romantic meal suitable for a first date or special occasion - like this Valentine's day dessert here, or this New Year's eve meal here. Another way to approach it is taking the film's title literally.... When Ben cooks the lamb he doesn't know Andie is vegetarian (in fact she isn't, if you haven't seen the film this won't make much sense - she is writing a magazine column on how to drive a man away). Cooking something your date doesn't like never gets an evening off to a good start.... As I can confirm! I remember one of the first meals I cooked for my boyfriend was boeuf bourguignon, having checked in advance if he ate beef - but he probably thought I meant steak, as he really didn't like the boeuf bourguignon, and I also put onion and diced carrot in it, both of which he hates! And I think if I cook any more cakes with bacon in our relationship might be on shaky ground... I made these bacon brownies on the basis that sweet and salty flavours are supposed to work well together, but let's just say they didn't. And now whenever I present my boyfriend with a cake, he eyes it suspiciously and asks if it has got bacon in it! It's become something of a running joke so he probably thought I was kidding when I said I was going to make these Elvis cakes - but I did anyway, and they were very nice (though I gave him one without bacon!).

In the end however, I decided that rather than cook a romantic meal suitable for a date, or make something that would make my boyfriend want to dump me (or at least not eat dinner at my house again), I would stick to a faithful recreation from the film. Which left me with only one real option: the lamb in cherry glaze that Ben cooks for Andie. He uses a rack of lamb, which looks great, but as I was only making this for myself I decided it would be a bit much for one person. Also, I don't eat cherries, and had the idea of adapting the recipe to use some fizzy Cherryade that I had from another recipe.

I pretty much made it up as I went along; for the glaze you need:
half an onion
1 tsp dried sage
100ml red wine
100ml cherryade
1 tbsp Splenda sweetener/ 2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp cornflour

Chop the onion and sweat it in Fry-Light

Add the sage, then the red wine and bring to the boil

Add the cherryade and simmer until the mixture starts to thicken

I decided to strain the sauce to remove the onion, which I kept to one side, then used a little cornflour to thicken the sauce a little more. Finally add a splash of balsamic vinegar.

I was in too much of a hurry to eat and served the sauce before it had properly thickened. I oven cooked the lamb, served the onion from the sauce on the side, and had this with roasted new potatoes and vegetables (which I was too impatient to eat to photograph!). The sauce had a lovely flavour and was perfect with the lamb. The leftover sauce that I had left in the pan (though not on the heat) had thickened beautifully by the time I had finished my dinner, but I'm afraid you'll just have to take my word for it!

I'm hosting this challenge in August and have already picked out the film I'm going to use - When Harry Met Sally. It's a very foodie-theme - and I don't just mean the 'I'll have what she's having' scene! Check out the main Food n' Flix page to see the other challenges in the meantime.