Lemon Meringue Celebration Cake

This cake was easier than it looks to make, and a dream to eat - it looks really impressive and trust me, it tastes even better!

The recipe comes from Fiona Cairns’ Birthday Cake book but is also available online here.

 

Making meringues is sometimes a bit hit and miss; I followed Fiona Cairns’ recipe mixing egg whites with icing sugar, which was a first – I normally use caster sugar. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my egg whites to form soft peaks – the mixture was still quite runny. It may have been that there was some grease in the bowl or on my whisk but I thought they were clean – eventually I gave up and decided to make the meringues with caster sugar, which worked fine!
 

 

 

I followed the recipe for making the cake batter and the cake turned out really well. I forget how good crème fraiche can be in a cake – it’s delicious, though you need to be careful about leaving the cake out too long on a hot day (I’d rather not refrigerate cake if I can help it).

 

 

 

I found it tricky to make the almonds around the sides look neat but I still like the effect. With the meringues placed on top this is a pretty cake, and one that looks a bit special without needing to go to a lot of effort with decorations or covering it in fondant. A lovely cake for a birthday or a summer's afternoon tea.

 

 

 

 

 

Lemon and Mascarpone Mothers' Day Cake with Painted Flowers

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about painting flowers using food colouring, which we did in my cake decorating class - though we did it on a covered cake board, not on an actual cake. I'd seen a few pictures of wedding cakes online - when I was researching what to do for my own - that were covered in painted flowers or designs and thought it looked really nice, so when it came to making a cake for my mum for Mother's Day today my starting point was that I wanted to paint flowers on it!

Since the cake was going to look floral and spring-like I wanted a lighter flavoured cake. I found a recipe for a Finnish lemon Mothers' Day cake that used mascarpone cheese and looked really tasty. The cake is covered with a piped mascarpone buttercream but in order to paint on mine I needed to cover it with sugarpaste. I also decided the cake would benefit from the addition of some cloudy lemonade to the mixture! In fact I changed the recipe quite a lot in the end as it also called for 4 tbsp. potato flour which I didn't have, and after I added the lemonade I decided it needed a bit more flour. And I used self-raising flour rather than plain flour and baking powder! So here's what I did:

5 eggs
200g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
150ml no-added sugar cloudy lemonade

for the syrup:
juice of 2 lemons
150g icing sugar

for the filling:
200ml double cream
200g mascarpone cheese
2 tbsp. icing sugar
6 tbsp. lemon curd

Preheat oven to 180C and grease a deep 8-inch cake tin - if your tins aren't deep enough you could use two as I did.

Whisk the eggs with the caster sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the lemonade then fold in the flour.

Pour into your cake tin(s) and bake for 35-45 minutes (more like 45 if you have a deeper cake in one tin, less if you are splitting the mixture across two tins).

Meanwhile make the syrup - heat the lemon juice and icing sugar in a small pan, stirring until the icing sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool.

Remove the cake(s) from the oven and allow to cool. If you have made one large cake, cut into two or even three layers. Soak the cakes with the lemon syrup.

To make the filling, whisk the cream until thick, then add the mascarpone and icing sugar and whip again. Spread a layer of lemon curd then a layer of cream over the bottom layer of your cake and place the other layer on top. Repeat if you have three layers.

This looks really nice and I'd have been happy just to serve it like this!

Spread a thin layer of the cream over the top and around the sides of the cake.

Roll out about 500g of fondant on a surface dusted with icing sugar until it is in a large enough sheet to cover your cake - an easy way to check is to measure both sides and the top of your cake against your rolling pin, so I know for instance my fondant needs to be as wide as 3/4 of my rolling pin.

Lift the fondant using the rolling pin and drape over the cake. Pat down the sides and cut off the excess, then smooth the top and sides using a smoother or the side of your hand and trim off any more excess.

To do the painting, it's best to leave the fondant to dry but it doesn't need to be completely hard to do this. See this post for full painting instructions. Essentially all you do is mix one or two drops of clear alcohol (the little bottles you get on planes are perfect for this) with some gel food colour. The best way I found to do this is to get some colour on a toothpick or cocktail stick, place the cocktail stick in a bowl or in an artist's palette, and pour a drop or two of alcohol onto it. Use your paintbrush to scrap the colour into the liquid, mixing until you have a liquid colour that isn't too runny. You can tell when you start to paint on the cake if it's too runny or pale, in both cases just add a bit more colour in the same way.

I decided to do different types of flowers in different colours and painted them on the top of the cake and around the sides, then mixed up some green and added stems connecting similar flowers and added leaves. I left some white space but I think with the green giving a connecting detail it looks quite nice - sort of chintzy but that was the look I was going for!

I'm sharing this cake (not literally...) with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, my co-host for Alphabakes as the letter she has chosen this month is C and I've used cream in this cake as well as mascarpone cheese.

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

Finally I'm sending it to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's Mothers' Day this month (in the UK anyway!).

Mini Lemon Meringue Tarts

I love lemon meringue pie and these tarts are a great little twist – they are bite-sized, quick to make and would be lovely for afternoon tea. I made them when we had friends dropping by a few weekends ago. I used shop-bought lemon curd though you can make your own; for me though the great thing about these are that they are so quick to make.

  

To make about 8, you need:

225g plain flour plus extra for flouring the work surface

110g butter

80g caster sugar

1 egg

8-16 tbsp lemon curd (about half a large jar)

4 egg whites (I used Two Chicks egg white that comes in a carton so I didn’t have yolks to use up)

100g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180C.

In a bowl, cream together the flour and butter then work in the caster sugar and egg until you have a dough. Knead on a lightly floured work surface and roll out. Cut out small rounds with a circular cutter, and place in a greased muffin tin. This is the base of the tart; cut a strip of dough and place this around the side of the muffin hole, and press together with the base piece so they are joined. Alternatively if you have a big enough cutter, cut a circle that is large enough to place into the muffin tin so that as well as covering the bottom, it comes up the sides.

Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes depending on the thickness of your pastry. When cool, place 1-2 tbsp lemon curd inside each pastry case.

Beat the egg whites until stiff and gradually add the sugar; continue beating until thick and glossy. Spoon the meringue onto the top of each tart.

You can then either brown these under the grill or use a cook’s blowtorch as I did, to caramelize the top. Allow to cool before eating.

I'm sending these to the Pastry Challenge, hosted by Jen's Food; this month she is looking for pastry-based recipes that are quick to make.

 

I'm also sending them to Treat Petite, hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat aka The Baking Explorer, as they are hosting a 'summertime special'.

 

 

How to make Marshmallows from scratch

 

Did you know it’s actually quite easy to make marshmallows? You need an ingredient you probably won’t have in your store cupboard – liquid glucose – and you need a thermometer, because you have to heat the sugar to a precise temperature. You have to be very careful as well, because the sugar gets very hot – this is not really one to be making with children -  but other than that, it’s actually quite straightforward!

 

I recently took a marshmallows and meringues class at Cakes 4 Fun in Putney, a lovely little cake decorating shop with a classroom space underneath. There were 8 of us and the tutor, Sarah, was very good at explaining what we needed to do, lending a hand where it was needed, and answering questions about all aspects of the process. It was a lovely sunny day and I felt very happy leaving with my huge box of meringues and marshmallows, even though the marshmallows weren’t quite set so I had to pop them straight in the fridge at home and cut into squares the next day.

  

We were given handouts with information and recipes but I don’t have their permission to reproduce the recipe, so instead I will give a general description of what we did and a few tips – there are plenty of marshmallow recipes available on the internet.

 

Place sugar and water into a saucepan and add the liquid glucose – you can buy this in tubes in large supermarkets (e.g. Dr Oetker) as well as on specialist cake decorating websites and shops. If you wet a spoon and your finger it’s easier to push the glucose into the pan as it is extremely sticky – think a clear version of golden syrup.

 

Heat the saucepan and it’s very important not to stir the contents at all. You need a thermometer as the mixture has to be heated to precisely 114C.

 

I had a sugar thermometer already – I can’t remember where I bought it – but it’s a glass thermometer with mercury inside, so it’s pretty hard to tell the precise temperature – and it’s quite hard to read the level when you are holding the thermometer in a saucepan so you either have to figure out an angle to hold it and tilt your head, or keep taking it out to check – at which point the temperature reading drops again. So it was  a very welcome coincidence when last week I was sent an Epica Ultra-Fast digital thermometer to review!

 

 

 
It’s so easy to use and the only setting is whether you want the temperature in Centigrade or Fahrenheit; otherwise you just turn it on. It has a long tip so can reach right down into a saucepan safely, and also has a pointed tip so you could insert it into a joint of meat to test whether it is cooked in the middle. The digital display is easy to use and very clear to see, so I was able to test the temperature of my sugar and easily read the result. It even measures temperatures in decimal points so you can see as it climbs – in other words, rather than going from 100 to 101, you can see it tick up from 100.4 to 100.6 to 100.8…. which is helpful if you really need to be precise.

 

 

When I made marshmallow again at home thanks to the thermometer I knew when to start beating my egg whites; a Kitchenaid or similar is brilliant for this as you can start whisking and go back to the saucepan. I learned one interesting tip for beating egg whites which is actually the opposite of what I thought. I normally whisk egg whites until they are stiff, so for quite a long time at quite a high speed, and then add the sugar which I fold in gently. Apparently that’s completely wrong, and what you should do is whisk the egg whites on a slow speed, gradually increasing to medium, but stop when they can form soft peaks – not stiff peaks. Then add the sugar gradually, whisking each time, and then whisk at high speed until the mixture forms stiff peaks.

 

For the marshmallow we had also soaked gelatine in water and now squeezed out the water and added the gelatine to the hot sugar mixture, and carefully stirred in until it had melted. While the egg whites were being whisked, we turned the mixer down to low and very carefully poured the hot sugar and gelatine mixture into the eggs. Then we turned the mixer up to high and whisked until the eggs were stiff and glossy.

 

We lined small baking tins with clingfilm and dusted them with a  50/50 mixture of icing sugar and cornflour. We then chose to add flavours to our marshmallows; I added two spoonfuls of lemon curd to mine, while other people added cocoa powder. We spooned the marshmallow mixture into the tin and put it in the freezer to set – you can use the fridge but we were hoping to speed ours up.

 

 

They weren’t quite set by the time we wanted to take them home, but weren’t far off. It came out of the tin as one piece so I put it in the fridge at home and the next day cut into squares. The pieces are still very sticky once they are cut so you need to toss them in the same 50/50 mixture of icing sugar and cornflour. Mine were still good almost a week later; they were soft and pillowy, noticeably different to shop-bought marshmallows but at the same time still familiar as marshmallows, and the lemon flavour gave a lovely kick (though next time I might use one spoonful of lemon curd, not two). I had fun making these and really like the finished product!

 

 

 

These are really nice to parcel up in a pretty box and give for Mother’s Day – so I am sharing them with Treat Petite, the blog challenge hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat at the Baking Explorer, as their theme this month is mums.

 

 

 

Eggs are a key ingredient in marshmallows so I am also sending these to Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen.

 

 

 

The other key ingredient of course is sugar, and since the letter for my Alphabakes challenge this month is S, I am entering them in that challenge as well! Ros at the More Than Occasional Baker who runs the challenge together with me is hosting this month.

 

 

Thanks to Epica for sending me the thermometer to review. All opinions are my own.

Lemon Curd Swirl Cake

I made this cake for a picnic I went on yesterday; it was easy to make and travelled fairly well too. I based it partly on a recipe from Weightwatchers magazine but doubled the quantity and used different frosting.

To serve 8-10, you need:

225g butter or reduced fat margarine

150g caster sugar

4 eggs

225g self-raising flour

finely grated zest of 1 lemon

150g cream cheese

3 tbsp lemon curd

Preheat oven to 175C fan. Grease a loaf tin with cake release - or two tins if you have them. (You can either make two cakes and sandwich them together, or one big cake and slice it in half).

Cream the butter and sugar together.

Add the eggs and beat, then fold in the flour and the lemon zest.

 Spoon half the mixture into a loaf tin and repeat, or if you prefer, put all the mixture into one tin.

I baked my cake for 25 minutes then did the same again with the other half of the cake mixture. If you are making one cake with the whole mixture it will take longer to cook.

The recipe I used instructed me to mix 150g of 0% Greek yogurt with 1 tsp icing sugar to make the filling. It may have been because I was using Tesco Light Greek Yogurt but my mixture was extremely thin and runny and I didn't think I would be able to use it to fill the cake. Instead I made some cream cheese frosting using Philadelphia and icing sugar with a few drops of lemon juice.

I levelled off the top of the cake as it had risen a little too much.

Spread the cream cheese frosting on one half of the cake. I then warmed a couple of tablespoons of lemon curd in the microwave until it was runny, and swirled it through the cream cheese.

I then sandwiched the cakes together and used some of the same frosting and lemon curd on top, though I spread it in quite a thin layer as I was going to wrap the whole cake in tin foil to take to the picnic - I had quite a long way to go by public transport and on foot and had a lot to carry, so I decided this was the easiest way to transport the cake!

I'm sending this to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel of DollyBakes and Laura of Laura Loves Cakes, as their theme this month is "pump up the jam" and they have asked for bakes using jam and curds. As I used lemon curd for the filling I am sending them this cake.