Halloween Chocolate Bark

If your children have been trick or treating, or you stocked up on goodies to hand out yourself, you might find you have an excess of chocolate and sweets left over come November. While it’s perfectly acceptable to still be eating it come January, with Christmas not that far off you might be looking for ways to use up this leftover chocolate and candy. 

Chocolate bark is a good option as it’s easy to make, and fun to do with kids, plus it makes fairly banal sweets or chocolates into something a bit more interesting.

Simply melt some chocolate, spread it over a piece of baking paper in a square cake tin or rectangular baking tray, sprinkle with sweets, chocolates (M&Ms and Smarties work well), popcorn, even broken biscuit pieces, and leave to set in the fridge. When set, break into slabs (you may need to carefully stab with a knife) and enjoy.

For mine I used a baking tray and 200g white chocolate and 100g milk chocolate. I melted both types of chocolate separately in the microwaved and coloured half the white chocolate purple and the other half orange. I swirled the three colours together in the tray and sprinkled over some M&S Hallow-Scream Munch Mix, £3.50 for 300g (I used about 100g). The mix contains mini pretzel pieces, chocolate covered pretzels, green and orange crispies (like little biscuit pieces in a candy coating), popcorn pieces covered in white chocolate and milk chocolate pretzel clusters - though I didn’t use the latter in my chocolate bark as the pieces were a lot larger than the others.

This could be enjoyed as part of a Halloween party or nibbled on while watching your favourite scary movie!

The recipe can be adapted easily for other times of the year such as Christmas, or Valentine’s Day as I did here (this is my other blog if you are interested in parenting posts)! 

Valentine's Chocolate Bark

Chocolate bark is a flat slab of chocolate covered with things like nuts, dried fruit, sweets or with a different colour chocolate swirled through it. I decided to make some chocolate bark with my daughter for Valentine’s Day and made up a recipe as I went along (with a nod to Marks & Spencer’s Percy Pig Choc Corn which I had at Christmas). This makes plenty for a family to enjoy or to give to three or four people in little gift bags.

You need:

300g white chocolate

Pink food colouring

Handful of gummy sweets - I used Haribo Heart Throbs which are usually part of their star mix but you can buy them separately especially at this time of year - I got a box in Poundland Handful of Smarties or M&Ms. I was going to just pick out the pink smarties from a sharing bag I had but my daughter ate most of them!

Handful of popcorn

Handful of marshmallows - I used heart shaped marshmallows that I got from Flying Tiger

Line a small square baking pan with greaseproof paper. Melt the chocolate in a Bain Marie or in the microwave and stir in a couple of drops of pink food colouring.

Pour the melted chocolate into your prepared tin and sprinkle liberally with sweets, marshmallows and popcorn. Put in the fridge until set.

When the chocolate has set hard, remove from the pan and peel off the greaseproof paper. Carefully cut into chunks - I found the easiest way was inserting the point of a dinner knife and pressing down and the chocolate broke itself into random shaped chunks. We ended up giving these as a gift to my daughter’s nursery teachers!

Bertie Bassett Liquorice Allsorts Cake

 

 

This Bertie Bassett Liquorice Allsorts cake was made for my boyfriend's dad's birthday last summer. I asked his family what his favourite candy bar or sweet was, thinking it would be a good basis for a cake. They told me he doesn't really eat sweets but does like liquorice allsorts - unfortunately, a lot of people don't like the taste of liquorice! I decided instead to decorate the cake with liquorice allsorts and to make a model of the Bertie Bassett character that is used to advertise Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts.

 

 

I baked a simple chocolate cake in a large square tin - as it was quite a few months ago I can't remember the recipe, but you can make any flavour cake that you like. If you are brave you could even flavour the cake with liquorice!

 

 I sandwiched two layers of cake together with chocolate buttercream and placed it on a cake board.

 

Carefully cover the cake with fondant (white roll-out icing)

 



 

To make Bertie Bassett I used Renshaw ready-to-roll icing; this multi-pack had most of the colours I needed and I also had a separate pack of pink icing.

 I used the picture on the box of liquorice allsorts as a guide. First  made the feet and hat, which was the most time consuming part, as this particular sweet is made up of what looks like tiny little sprinkles. I made a flattened ball for the base and then lots of tiny balls which I rolled between my fingers, mainly blue but some white (if you look at the picture there is a mixture of both). I then used a little water to stick them all over the base.

Next I made a square of white for the body with a thin layer of black and yellow on the bottom; a pink ball for the head, then made eyes, nose and mouth; two thick yellow cylinders for the trousers and thinner black cylinders for the legs and arms, and finally some pink hands. It was pretty easy to assemble though I made Bertie sitting down so he could sit on the cake and also to give him more stability as I'm not sure his legs could have held him up!

I sat Bertie on the cake and then placed a few liquorice allsorts sweets in the corners for decoration.

Here you can see the finished cake. I was really pleased with the way it looked, and it tasted good too!

 

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is L.

 

 

 

Rhubarb And Custard Cake

This month's Food 'n' Flix selection is Babette's Feast, which was chosen by Camilla at Culinary Adventures with Camilla. It's a 1987 Danish drama with English subtitles which in itself was enough to put me off - but it won the Oscar for best foreign film and was actually very good. The film begins with two elderly Danish sisters who have a French servant/cook called Babette, which we soon realise is strange given the remote location and their frugal lives. The film then goes back to the sisters' youth to explain how this came about and how Babette came to live with them. [Spoiler alert] she is essentially a refugee and spends decades living with the sisters, her only link to France a lottery ticket that a friend in Paris buys for her every year. One day Babette wins 10,000 francs on the lottery, and the sisters expect her to return to France in style and resume her life there. Instead, Babette decides to thank the community that has taken her in and become her friend, by spending the money on a feast for everyone. She prepares several courses of an exquisite French meal, and her friends only discover later that she has spent every centime of her winnings on the food for 12 of her friends. What's more, as they are eating, one diner - the only one who is particularly well travelled, having worked as an attache in Paris - comments that several of the dishes remind him of the famous Cafe Anglais in Paris. He waxes lyrical about the food - which funnily enough cost 10,000 francs for a meal for 12. Babette has successfully made some of the Cafe Anglais's signature dishes and what do you know, the chef at the Cafe Anglais was female and disappeared at the start of the war... I almost gasped aloud when I realised where the story was going and that Babette was of course the chef at the Cafe Anglais. At the end when her friends realise she has spent all her winnings and is now poor again, Babette says: "an artist is never poor".



It really is a lovely film and food takes centre stage; from the austerity of the sisters' lives to the preparations Babette makes for her feast, where the film literally becomes more vibrant and colourful. I wanted to recreate something that Babette makes for her feast, but she doesn't make it easy! She buys a very expensive red wine and makes turtle soup (from real live turtles!), quails in puff pastry, caviar on blinis with sour cream and a decorated bundt cake for dessert.

I started by thinking about what flavours I like, and I have seen a few bloggers recently recreate favourite desserts or chocolate bars in cake form, which got me thinking. I used to love rhubarb and custard sweets, and I had a tin of rhubarb in the cupboard which I bought for another recipe and never used, so I decided to make a rhubarb and custard bundt and decorate the top with rhubarb and custard sweets.

Rhubarb and Custard Bundt - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

This makes quite a big cake - my Nordicware bundt tin is quite large and deep. As it is a bundt rather than a layer cake, there is a layer of custard baked into the middle of the cake.

For the cake:
400g butter
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
400g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
60g custard powder
50ml milk
539g tin rhubarb in light syrup

For the custard:
4 tbsp custard powder
4 tbsp caster sugar
500ml milk

To decorate:
about 100g rhubarb and custard sweets

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a bundt tin; I used PME Cake Release. First make the custard: whisk the custard powder and sugar with a little of the milk, then mix in the rest of the milk. Bring to the boil and simmer, stirring, until thickened. Leave to cool; cover the pan with clingfilm so the custard doesn't form a skin.

For the cake, cream the butter andthe sugar in a large bowl. Gradually add the eggs then fold in the flour, baking powder and the custard powder.

Gently mix in the milk, and 50ml of the syrup from the tin of rhubarb. Spoon half the cake mixture into the bundt tin.

Spoon the cooled custard on top.

Spoon the rest of the cake mixture into the tin, and spread out the rhubarb pieces on top. I had been expecting the rhubarb to sink into the cake when it was cooking, but it stayed on the top -which of course will be the bottom of the cake.

Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour. Cover with foil if the top is getting too brown.

Allow to cool in the tin then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.  I love the swirled effect from my Nordicware bundt tin.

I bought some rhubarb and custard sweets, which I originally intended to crush and sprinkle over the top, but try as I might, I couldn't make so much as a dent in them! I didn't want to use my food processor in case it damaged the blades. So then I had another idea...

... melt the sweets in the microwave! This worked really well, though you do have to be very careful as the sugar reaches boiling point.

Use a teaspoon to drizzle the melted sweets over the top of the cake. The sugar cools very quickly and forms very thin strands which looks pretty and gives a crunchy texture without eating large pieces of sweets.

 Here's a side view of the finished cake so you can see the shape

And here's the view from the top

 The best thing about this cake is that it really does recreate the flavour of the sweets. You can see from this cross-section that the rhubarb is at the bottom, and there is a distinct layer of custard in the middle, which has kept its texture despite being baked in the oven, and the melted sweets give a sweet and sticky crunchy topping.

Here you can see the layer of custard a little better, running through the middle of the cake.

 I am sending this to Food 'n' Flix, hosted by Culinary Adventures with Camilla.

Yema (Custard Candy)

We are coming to the end of the alphabet for the Alphabakes challenge and there are only a few letters left - which seem to be the hard ones! My co-host Ros has chosen the letter Y this month and I immediately thought of yogurt - which I think will be most people's entry this month! So I wanted to see if I could find something a bit different, and after a little Googling came up with ..... yema.

Yema is a traditional Filipino sweet made from condensed milk and egg yolks, and sometimes flavoured with crushed peanuts. I used this recipe that I found online; it only uses two ingredients, condensed milk and egg yolks. It didn't give a size for the tin of condensed milk so I did this a little through trial and error. I had three quarters of a tin of condensed milk in the fridge left over from another recipe, which would be about 300g. I initially used three egg yolks then added a fourth.

The recipe I used told me to heat the condensed milk and egg yolks in a bain marie, but no matter how long I boiled the water for, the mixture would not thicken, even after I added the fourth egg yolk. So I transferred the mixture straight to a saucepan and brought it back to the boil, stirring, and found it thickened very quickly.

 

When the mixture was really stodgy I left it to cool and then rolled small balls of the mixture.

I decided not to add any other flavours like crushed peanuts but I did want to jazz the sweets up a little bit. I had a container of yellow and orange sprinkles in the cupboard with different sections and I used the remainder of it up for this recipe. I poured the sprinkles into a bowl and rolled the yema in it, then refridgerated them overnight.

These were incredibly sweet but pretty good - you wouldn't want to eat more than one at a time but they are easy to make and fun as well. And it's definitely an unusual Y entry for Alphabakes!

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.