Storecupboard Apple Sauce and Cinnamon Cake

This cake is made from ingredients you probably already have at home - or you might only need to buy one extra ingredient - so is great for those last-minute 'I need to make a cake' moments. It's also incredibly moist and really tasty so I think this is something I will be making again!

I made this cake when my parents came to visit - we'd had a busy weekend and I hadn't really thought about what food we would eat until two days before, so quickly did an online shop. I thought it would be nice to have some cake while they were here but hadn't thought about it in time to add anything to my shopping list, so decided to find a recipe using what I had in the house.

I have a recipe book I love called United Cakes of America, which has a different cake or pie representing every state, which I haven't used for a little while. It has a recipe from West Virginia for apple butter cake which I decided to adapt.



Apple butter is like apple sauce but creamier and more concentrated in flavour and more like a spread. I didn't have any and while you can get it in the UK, it's not something you can just pick up in Tesco. I did have a jar of apple sauce in the fridge so decided to use that, and the cake turned out really well. I also added more cinnamon to the mixture as the recipe only called for a quarter of a teaspoon which I didn't think was very much.

The filling for this cake also looked very elaborate - a buttercream that involved using milk, flour and sugar, heated in a pan -I usually just mix butter and icing sugar! I didn't have a lot of time so decided to make my usual easy buttercream but flavoured with cinnamon, as in the recipe, but also add a splash of apple juice.

The top of this cake would look nice decorated with sliced apple but again as I was only using storecupboard ingredients I didn't have any. Here's what I did - I'm calling this an original recipe as it was so far removed from the one in the book!

This makes a pretty deep 8 inch cake.

140g butter or margarine, softened
425g caster sugar
3 eggs
340g self-raising flour
pinch of salt
1 level teaspoon ground cinnamon
60ml milk
270g jar apple sauce
1 tsp vanilla flavouring

for the buttercream:
400g icing sugar, sifted
200g butter or margarine, softened
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp. apple juice

Preheat oven to 180C and grease two 8-inch or 9-inch cake tins.

Cream together the butter and sugar then beat in the eggs one at a time.

Fold in the flour, along with the salt and cinnamon.

Carefully fold in the milk, and then the apple sauce and vanilla flavouring until the mixture is well combined.

Spoon into the two cake tins and bake for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the pans, then turn onto a baking rack to finish cooling.

To make the buttercream, cream together the butter and icing sugar with the cinnamon and apple juice.

When the cakes are cool, spread the filling in between the two layers and also on the top if you like (you will need to increase the quantity if you also want to ice the top and sides of the cake).

This cake kept beautifully moist for a few days and I really enjoyed it - you can taste both the cinnamon and the apple.

I'm sending this to Baking Crumbs hosted by Only Crumbs Remain
Love Cake at Jibber Jabber UK
CookBlogShare hosted by the Peachicks Bakery

 

Spiced Biscuit Bundt Cake

You know the little packets of biscuits you get in cafes with a cup of coffee? Often they are Lotus biscuits  - and they are so popular you can actually buy the lovely caramelised biscuit taste in a spread! I had some at home which all got eaten with a spoon used up before I could do any baking with it, and then I was in Lidl and saw they had an equivalent spread so bought some of that.

I had a look on the internet to see if I could find any suitable recipes - there are plenty on the Lotus website - but ended up making this one from Rachel McGrath aka Dollybakes.

Her cake looks amazing with a glossy icing made from the Lotus biscuit spread - but as you can see, mine doesn't look so good! I have the exact same Nordicware tin as Rachel but my cake stuck in the tin - I guess I didn't grease it enough, even though I thought I had used plenty of PME Cake Release.

It started out so well....

This is the tin I baked the mixture in - the Nordicware Heritage bundt pan

It smelt so good while it was baking in the oven, but I had too much mixture and it spilled over the top.

Here's the cake that I eventually managed to get out of the pan. The swirls on top should be sharply defined with neat crisp edges, and you can see the shape of it but a fair amount stuck in the pan!

Here's what I couldn't get out - next time I will use more grease. Has anyone else had this problem with a tin like this?

But all was not lost. Here's the spiced biscuit spread from Lidl:

I heated the jar in the microwave and poured it over the cake. It didn't look great initially...

 

But once the whole thing was covered it did look better.

When the cake is warm and the icing is runny it's lovely - a bit like eating a sticky toffee pudding with sauce. When the icing has cooled and set, the cake is still really moist and it tastes delicious.

This is a really good cake and recipe which is why I'm posting about it even though mine looks a bit of a disaster - hopefully you will have better luck making it than I did, and I advise trying a silicon bundt pan rather than a metal one!

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.

 

 

Cinnamon French Toast with Caramelised Peaches

I love picking up free magazines from supermarkets, and often get the Tesco magazine, which is packed with features, snippets about new products and recipes. I decided to make a few things from the latest issue, starting with French toast with caramelised peaches. In the recipe, it was served with rum-spiked mascarpone but I decided to do this for brunch and decided the mascarpone would be a bit much. It would have been a nice touch but if you are counting the calories it’s still a really nice dish on its own.

 

I bought a loaf of pre-sliced brioche which made the recipe very easy. To serve two people, you just need to mix 1 egg, 50ml milk, a dash of vanilla essence, a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar and the zest of one orange in a wide shallow bowl, and dip each slice of bread in.

 

Heat a little butter in a frying pan and fry each slice of bread on both sides until browned. I put the oven on low (100C) to keep the slices of brioche warm as I was doing a few rounds in the frying pan. This way, you can also do the peaches in the same pan to save on washing up.

Peel and halve a fresh peach, removing the stone (one per person is about right) and heat a little more butter in the pan. Mix brown sugar and cinnamon and press onto the cut side of each peach. Fry in the frying pan on both sides until softened, and serve with the French toast.

 

 

If you want to serve with mascarpone you just beat 75g mascarpone cheese with 1/2 tbsp. rum and 1/2 tbsp. icing sugar and serve.

 

Mardi Gras King Cake

Mardi Gras in February is celebrated in different ways all over the world, but the festival is perhaps most synonymous with New Orleans. I visited New Orleans as part of a US road trip in September - you can read my travel review here - but while we missed Mardi Gras, we were able to see behind the scenes at Mardi Gras World.

Essentially a factory tour, we were able to see the floats and giant centrepieces of the parade being built and painted. Our visit began by watching a film explaining the origins and workings of the parade and we were able to try on some costumes, and eat some King Cake.

King Cake, we were told, is eaten from epiphany until Mardi Gras, and represents the three kings who went to visit the baby Jesus. It is made from a sweet dough that is sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and rolled up into a ring or crown shape, then always decorated with the same three colours - purple, which symbolises justice, green, which represents faith, and gold for power.

I found it quite amusing that in the same way that traditional English Christmas puddings contain a silver sixpence, bringing luck to the person who finds it in their portion, King Cake for the same reason contains.. a little plastic baby Jesus. I saw packet mixes for the cake which proclaimed on the front of the box "complete with plastic baby". Quite.

I decided to make a King Cake this month for Mardi Gras and to remind myself of my trip to New Orleans, but I was a bit delayed as I ordered the sanding sugar in the correct colours online - from different sellers - and the gold never turned up! I found I had some yellow at home already but it was about 10 days after Mardi Gras by the time I got around to making this.

Mardi Gras World

You know how your mother or school teacher always said "make sure you read the recipe properly first?" Mary Berry always advises that on the Great British Bake Off technical challenge as well. I feel that I've properly learnt my lesson  after searching for a King Cake recipe online and choosing this one from My Recipes.com. It was only as I added the flour - one of the last ingredients - that I thought the quantity of ingredients seemed a lot, and went back and looked at the recipe again. And saw at the top it said "makes two cakes".

Why? Why would you do that? This isn't a cake where you bake two layers and sandwich them together - you literally end up with two separate cakes. One for you, and one for a friend I guess! By the time I realised it was too late, so I did indeed end up with two cakes.

Go to the link above for the full recipe - it's quite long but pretty straightforward. Here I'm melting the butter with sour cream

I used my Kitchenaid to knead the dough

It was very easy to roll out - pliable but not too sticky. I sprinkled the top with sugar and cinnamon though in retrospect I would have used more.

Roll up and form into a ring

After baking in the oven it is very puffed up!

I mixed up some icing and spread it over the cake

Adding the coloured sugars in sections

The King Cake in all its glory, complete with Mardi Gras necklaces and a mask I bought in New Orleans. The cake was delicious - it reminded me more of an iced bun as it's a milky sweet pastry rather than a cake really. I didn't put a plastic baby into mine but I think it's none the worse for it!

I'm sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK.

I'm also sharing it with the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

Cinnamon Puff Pastry Twists

These are super easy and quick to make so if you are catering for a crowd or throwing a party, or just need something sweet that won't take long, they are just the thing.

It's not a recipe as such but a few very simple instructions. Roll out some puff pastry to a rectangle on a lightly floured surface.

Preheat the oven to 180C and line a baking tray with grease proof paper.

Mix 2 tbsp melted butter, 1 tbsp brown sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon and spread over the puff pastry, pressing down.

Cut the pastry into strips then holding each end, twist it a few times.

I'm sending these to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at The Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage.

Place each twist on the baking tray and bake for about 15 minutes. Serve either warm or cold.

Christmas Cupcakes

 The company that I work for has a Christmas party every year for employees' children. I've wound up co-organising it this year and doing everything from booking an entertainer (who twisted his ankle the night before, luckily they sent a replacement!) to buying and wrapping presents for Santa to hand out to the kids. I was also tasked with getting some food from Tesco - sausage rolls and sandwiches for the kids, mince pies for the adults, that sort of thing - and decided this was also a good opportunity to do some baking.

I bought this cupcake set from Wilkinson in the January sales last year, so it was reduced from £2 to just 50p. You don't get a whole lot in it - 16 cupcake cases and 16 cake picks, cardboard pictures of Christmassy creatures (Santa, snowmen, gingerbread men and reindeer) to stick into each cake. The cupcake cases are also very small - I am used to baking in muffin cases - which I thought would be ideal for small children.

  

I wanted to find a Christmassy cupcake recipe that was still fairly plain, as I didn't think children would necessarily like sophisticated or strong flavours. I came up trumps in a little book from Marks & Spencer called Easy Cupcakes. The recipe is called Gold star cupcakes, as that is how they are decorated, but I liked the flavour of the cake itself - brown sugar and cinnamon. I adapted the recipe as I didn't use their decorating recipe and I also doubled the quantities.

For 16 small or a dozen larger cupcakes you need:

170g butter, softened

170g brown sugar

2 eggs

170g self-raising flour

1 tsp ground cinnamon

2 tbsp milk

For the buttercream

About 150g butter

300g icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and the sugar then add the egg. Then fold in the flour and cinnamon and a splash of milk to loosen the mixture.

 Spoon into cupcake cases. Bake for about 10 minutes- cakes this size won't take long, but if you make larger muffin-size cakes, give them a couple of minutes longer.

 Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

I made a simple buttercream by creaming softened butter with icing sugar and piped the buttercream on top of the cakes. I only piped on a small amount because I thought small children might not want a lot of frosting and their parents would probably appreciate not too much of a sugar rush either!

Finally I added the festive cake picks. This is a simple recipe but that's what I wanted for small children, and the brown sugar and cinnamon flavour does give a festive feel.

I'm sending these Xmas cupcakes to Alphabakes - poor Ros will be overwhelmed with entries this month I think!

The December challenge for Four Seasons Food is party and these cupcakes were made for a children's party. The challenge is hosted by Anneli at Delicieux and Louisa at Eat Your Veg.

Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at DollyBakes and Laura at Laura Loves Cakes has 'jingle bell rock' as its theme this month and so I will send them my Christmas cupcakes.

I'm also sending this to Cakeyboi's Treat Petite as the theme this month is happy holidays, and these bitesized cupcakes fit right in.

Finally I am sending this to the Spice Trail challenge as this month's ingredient is cinnamon. The challenge is hosted by Bangers & Mash. 

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