5th Anniversary Wooden Log Celebration Cake

The theme for a fifth wedding anniversary is wood so when my husband and I were celebrating that particular milestone recently I decided to make a cake based on the theme. There are a lot of ways you could interpret ‘wood’ - after all a lot of different things are made of wood - but to me the obvious choice was a woodland theme and a wooden tree stump!

This cake has vertical layers running through it which makes it a bit different - because it’s actually a Swiss roll cake on its side!

The recipe and general design came from a blog called Top with Cinnamon. It’s actually very easy to make this delicious cake - you make two Swiss rolls, cut them vertically so you have four strips, and roll them all up around each other with frosting in between. 

I didn’t make the coffee frosting in this recipe and instead added some cocoa powder as I wanted my daughter to have it and she’s too young for coffee (and probably wouldn’t like the taste anyway). I spread the ganache around the outside and on top and marked it with a fork to look like a tree trunk.

If I had more time to decorate I would have made woodland creatures out of icing but instead I used some mushroom shaped sweets (you can get these in most grocery shops) and made a ladybird, leaves and some tiny flowers out of icing (a flower plunger cutter made that last part very easy). Finally I added a ‘happy anniversary’ cake pick.

You can see the vertical layers when you slice into the cake - overall I’m really pleased with how the cake matches our anniversary theme!

40th Birthday Showstopper Chocolate Drip Cake With All the Chocolate

This was my husband's second birthday cake - well, it was his 40th!

We spent his birthday with some of his family then saw other family the following weekend, so I wanted to make a cake for both occasions. For his birthday itself I made this chocolate R2D2 cake (a throwback to his childhood) and the following weekend I wanted to make more of a serious classic cake - but at the same time I wanted it to be a showstopper.

My husband loves chocolate so I decided to celebrate his love of chocolate by making something I'd seen a few (or more than a few) times on the internet. It's a 'drip cake' which means a chocolate cake with a chocolate glaze or ganache that is dripping down the sides of the cake; it's also something of an 'explosion' cake with various chocolate bars and types of chocolate sticking out of the top. They are intended to look as if they have been placed in a fairly haphazard fashion but are actually carefully arranged with pieces of different heights to create interest and balance and the appearance of a lot of chocolate bursting out of the cake!

For the cake itself, I actually had enough mixture leftover from the R2D2 cake (as the cake mould just said it took an 8-egg batter, but the recipe I used gave me far too much) to make a normal round sponge cake which I froze, and defrosted in time to make this.

For the other layer, I made the chocolate cake from this Konditor and Cook Curly Whirly cake as I remembered it being really good before (and it was).

To make the chocolate ganache on top, I used:
200ml double cream
200g plain chocolate, chopped

Heat the cream in a small pan and when it is just simmering, remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate until it has melted. Allow to cool until it is still a thick pouring consistency.

Here's a nice pic of some cake batter... I do like the before and after photos!

The cake, sliced through the middle - with the one I had in the freezer I ended up with four layers. For a drip cake you do want it to be quite tall.

 

 Like this - four layers of chocolate cake

I coated the top and sides of the cake in chocolate buttercream then poured the chocolate ganache over the top, encouraging it to drip down the sides. I stuck various chocolate bars and pieces of chocolate in the top, sprinkled over some giant chocolate buttons, and added some red stars (made of icing, which I bought from a cake decorating website) and a diamante '40' pick I bought from the same website.

 

 My husband's family seemed quite impressed and my husband loved it - though he had better not get used to having two birthday cakes!

 

 

Easter Meringue Nest with Passion fruit Coulis and Cadbury Creme Egg

Passion fruit - indeed fruit of any kind - and Cadbury Creme Egg are two things that I wouldn't have thought particularly go together, but I have been proven wrong.


Cadbury sent me several Creme Eggs just in time for Easter, along with four recipes where they have teamed up with the Rinkoff bakery. I already made these mini s'more brownie cupcakes with Cadbury Creme Eggs which were really good, and I mean really good.


On Easter Sunday I had my mother- and father-in-law over for lunch and cooked a delicious roast lamb... plus chicken for my husband as he doesn't eat lamb, and butternut squash for my mother-in-law who is vegetarian. So with all that, I needed an easy dessert!


The Cadbury/Rinkoff recipe for meringue nests with passion fruit coulis and Cadbury Creme Egg was just the thing as I could prepare most of it in advance. This is the recipe - I will explain afterwards a few tweaks I made. The recipe below says it makes eight meringue nests but they would be pretty small I think as I had to double the quantity of ingredients to make eight.


You need:
For the meringue:
2 large egg whites at room temperature
100g caster sugar


For the passion fruit coulis:
250ml passion fruit puree (thaw if frozen)
240g sugar


For the ganache:
5 Cadbury Creme Eggs, melted
100g butter
8 Cadbury Creme Eggs, cut into small pieces


Method
For the meringue:
Pre-heat your oven to 120C. Put the egg whites into a large clean bowl and whisk on a medium speed. Keep whisking until they form stiff peaks.


Add the 100g caster sugar a tablespoon at a time and whisk until combined. The meringue should be nice and glossy.


Line a flat baking tray with greaseproof paper or a non-stick baking sheet. If necessary use a bit of butter to make it stick to the tray.


Place a star nozzle into a piping bag and spoon in the meringue. Start by piping a dot in the centre of your meringue nest then in one continuous motion go around the dot twice to make a bigger circle, then go round again on top of the outer circle to make the sides. Repeat until you've piped all nests.

NB The recipe didn't state the cooking time so this is what worked for me Place the baking sheet into the pre-heated oven and bake for one hour until the meringues are crisp. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before removing from the greaseproof paper and baking sheet.

For the passion fruit coulis:
In a medium-sized saucepan mix the passion fruit and sugar together. Bring to the boil on a medium heat and simmer for 3-5 minutes. Put aside to cool.

For the ganache:

In a saucepan heat up a small amount of water and place a glass bowl on top (like a bain marie). Place 4 Cadbury Creme Eggs (yes I know the ingredients list says 5.... perhaps they expect you to eat one while cooking) and butter in a glass bowl and stir until all the ingredients have melted (this should take approximately four or five minutes). The mixture should have a slight gloss and be quite runny.

Leave to cool for a minute or two. Drizzle the ganache and coulis over the nest and top with broken pieces of Cadbury Creme Egg.

Here are my tweaks:

• I doubled the quantity so each person had two meringues
• I couldn't find my star piping nozzle so the sides of the meringue are smooth, which doesn't look as good
• I actually forgot to build up the sides of the meringues so they are flat which isn't as good either!
• The recipe didn't give a cooking time, I recommend one hour
• Instead of making the fruit coulis, as I couldn't find passion fruit puree, I bought Sainsbury's mango and passion fruit coulis and used that in the recipe
• I layered two meringue nests with passion fruit coulis and Creme Egg ganache, then put half a crushed Creme Egg on top of each portion, so using six Creme Eggs in total.

The chocolate and fruit flavours went together surprisingly well, and I loved the chewy meringue and the smooth chocolate. This made a really good Easter dessert!

Coconut Dacquoise with Chocolate Ganache Filling

I attempted to make my own mayonnaise recently and it was a disaster - I tried once before and both times I haven't been able to get the mixture to thicken. Does anyone have any advice?

Since I'd used egg yolks for this recipe - three, as the recipe said two and it wouldn't thicken so I added another, which helped a little but not enough - I also had three egg whites to use up. I thought about making meringue but didn't want anything that sugary, and I'd just seen something on television where a chef was making a dacquoise - a cake made with layers of almond and hazelnut meringue.

I had some dessicated coconut I'd bought for another recipe and wondered if I could make the same sort of nutty meringue bake. Turns out you can!

I based my recipe on the coconut dacquoise element of this recipe, but changed it slightly to use coconut flour instead of almond meal (I assume by 'meal' you could use ground almonds). I also halved the quantities, and found it made seven.

Coconut flour is produced from dried coconuts; it's gluten-free and a protein-rich alternative to ordinary flour. Coconut flour also has fibre and fat (as coconuts contain fat) which makes it very filling - I bought it for a recipe I was making from a book called I Quit Sugar. I found lots of other interesting facts about coconut flour on the Nourished Kitchen website including a warning that you can't just substitute it for plain flour in baking. It can also go a bit clumpy which I discovered making this recipe, but it worked well otherwise in this mixture - I just might think twice before using it in a cake.

I toasted the coconut in the oven for a few minutes to start, and allowed it to cool.

Then for the dacquoise I whisked the egg whites and added the sugar, then folded in the dessicated coconut, coconut flour and icing sugar.

I piped circles out onto an oven tray -I realised I'd run out of baking paper so had to line it with foil.

Bake for 8-10 minutes then allow to cool.

For the filling I brought some cream to a simmer then added some chocolate and stirred until melted, then put into the fridge until set. I sandwiched the dacquoise together with the chocolate - even though my fiancé doesn't like coconut he did enjoy these!

I'm sharing this with Perfecting Patisserie, hosted by Lucy at BakingQueen74.

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.

Aston Martin supercar birthday cake

This year my boyfriend bought himself a new car which for obvious reasons is his pride and joy. So when it came to his birthday I thought he would appreciate the idea of a cake in honour of his car – and it would give me another opportunity to use my airbrush kit.

 

I’ve made a car cake before which was OK in terms of learning how to carve the cake; it ended up a bit messy as I wasn’t particularly good at covering cakes, and cutting out the shapes for the windscreen etc was a little awkward, but I liked the overall effect. This time I found an excellent tutorial online by Paul Delaney and tried to follow it but I didn’t have quite all the necessary tools or skills, or indeed time! Still, I am quite pleased with how this turned out.

 

My boyfriend loves chocolate cake and I knew the cake needed to be fairly dense to make it easy to carve, so I found this recipe on Lindy’s Cakes for a chocolate fudge cake and followed the instructions. I had a bit too much batter for the loaf tin so I used the rest to make some cupcakes.

 

 

 

I made the cake in a loaf tin this time – last time I used a round tin, and cut off the sides and placed them on top of the cake to make the body of the car. But my boyfriend has an Aston Martin which is a low, wide car, so I didn’t want to make it in the same way as last time. Instead I made the cake in a loaf tin and when it was cool, I carved the front and back to create the bonnet and boot and a slope up to the roof.

 

 

The car also flares out a bit at the headlights so I shaved a little off the sides of the cake so the outer corners were wider. You can see it starting to take shape here.

 

 

 

 

To cover the cake I made a simple chocolate ganache from plain chocolate and cream, waited until it had cooled and spread it over the car.

I put it in the fridge to set and then covered the cake with rolled-out white fondant. I used white because I was planning to airbrush the cake but if you don’t have an airbrush and don’t want a white car, obviously use coloured fondant at this stage.

 

I marked out the lines where the windows would go – because the car is black and the windows look black I wasn’t going to do them a different colour.

 

My airbrush kit is really easy to use – I’ve described how I used it before in this post about my carrot-shaped carrot cake. It allowed me to spray the whole car black leaving a fairly shiny coating; I was also able to build up the colour in areas where I wanted to make the windscreen look darker for instance.

 

I roughly followed the instructions in the tutorial for making the hub caps. I couldn’t make the wheels the same thickness as it was a relatively small cake – we got about ten slices out of it but I thought if I hollowed out enough space for four wheels there wouldn’t be much cake left! So rather than making the thick black tyre as the tutorial showed, I made it flat. I did make the hub cap element but struggled to cut the star shape neatly as I didn’t have a cutter the right size and it was quite fiddly.

 

 

I made the wheel from a mixture of fondant and flower paste, which I only had in white, so I then sprayed the parts that needed to be black with the airbrush. The silver parts were very small and I’m not sure how easy they would have been to airbrush; besides I didn’t have any silver paint for the airbrush. What I did have however was a little bottle of edible silver paint from a German company called Mein Cupcake, which also has the UK website Cake Mart which was very easy to use and just the right consistency – quite thick and shiny when applied. The only downside is that it doesn’t come with a brush in the bottle and you need to use a small paintbrush, but I guess the plus side is that you get more paint in the bottle that way!

 

I really liked the effect that I got on the hub cap and think that I will definitely be using this kind of edible paint for other projects. It cost £5 and is available from CakeMart, a brilliant website I discovered recently that has pretty much everything you could ever want for baking and cake decorating.

 

To finish the car I cut out triangles from the fondant/flower paste mix to make headlights, and painted these silver as well. I also bought an edible ink pen for a few pounds on Amazon and used that to carefully write in the number plate on a strip of fondant/flower paste; I did two for the front and back of the car. I applied the wheels and the other small parts with edible glue. I placed the cake on a board which I had covered with sugarpaste, and presented it to the birthday boy.

 

I was quite pleased with how this turned out even though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the one in the online tutorial. The cake tasted really good too – even though it was dense enough to carve it was still really light and fluffy. I didn’t think I could split and fill it so relied on the chocolate ganache around the outside to give it the added flavour and texture and it did work really well.

 

 

Thanks to Cake Mart for sending me the metallic silver food paint to review, all opinions are my own.

Double Chocolate Microwave Mug Cake

 

When I made the chocolate and pear mug cake for myself, I couldn't leave out my boyfriend, but he doesn't like pears. So I turned to the same recipe book, Mug Cakes by Mima Sinclair - well, if my dessert wasn't going to involve any washing up apart from a mug, I wasn't going to get out the mixing bowls for his!

I thought he would appreciate the triple chocolate cake from the book; having said that the recipe only seems to use two types of chocolate so I'm going to call it a double chocolate mug cake!

To serve one, you need:
2 tbsp. softened butter plus extra for greasing
40g dark chocolate, finely chopped
1 egg
2 tbsp. semi-skimmed milk
3 tbsp. caster sugar
3 tbsp. self-raising flour
pinch of salt
for the ganache:
6 tbsp. double cream
50g dark chocolate finely chopped

Begin by making the chocolate ganache; place 4 tbsp. of the cream in a mug and microwave on high for 30 seconds. Add the 50g dark chocolate and mix until the chocolate has melted.

Place the butter and 40g chocolate in another mug which must be able to take 350ml of liquid and microwave for 10-20 seconds on high until melted.

Using a fork, carefully mix in the egg and the milk and then the sugar, flour and salt. You then need to spoon this out into a third mug (OK, so this recipe does create a bit more washing up!) which you have greased with a little softened butter. This is important as you want to turn the cake out of the mug later.

Microwave for 2 minutes in an 800 watt microwave; add or subtract 10 seconds for every 100 watt difference. Allow to cool before eating; when you are ready to serve, turn the cake out into a bowl and pour the chocolate ganache over the top. It may not look the most attractive dessert but it tastes pretty good and is ready in a matter of minutes!

I am sending this to Cook Blog Share hosted by Lucy at Supergoldenbakes.