Weekly bake off - Apple and cinnamon cake.

Sunday is a good day for baking and that was my plan,  that was my first mistake .... making a plan.    I forgot about the clock thing and was up at 5.30!  Once daylight arrived and and everyone else emerged,  it was looking like a lovely day so I spent the morning gardening.   I came in at lunchtime to drop hubby at the station and get going with my cake.  hubby dropped and cooking apples purchased i headed home to do the cake.  son was waiting on the doorstep to turn me back round ... there was a problem with the train and back I went to drive hubby to glasgow airport - 2 hours later I was able to finally get going on the cake,  at this stage I was quite tired but there was no turning back, my brood had been promised Mary Berry's apple and cinnamon cake.  You can get the recipe on  Amy's blog (and  while you're there take a look at what the weekly bake off is all about).

Heres the first layer with the grated apple,

All in the tin!

And in the oven .... I put it in the oven and then remembered I was supposed to sprinkle nuts and sugar.....oopsy

The finished cake, partially cooled because middle daughter couldn't wait

and sliced 

It does taste very yummy, but then you can't really go wrong with apple and cinnamon, it's such a perfect combination.

Strathaven Ethical fair.

On saturday I took my fair trade goodies to a fair at Strathaven Academy. It was very poorly attended so I didn't sell much ..... which is always a bit disappointing! .  But,  I love going to their events as they are very supportive of fair trade and don't charge a stall fee .... so even if you don't sell anything  it's essentially a great opportunity to sit and chat with other fair traders and the lovely ladies who run the event.

As usual I spent nearly as much as I earned and came away with some wrapping paper from Neema fair trade and ethical gifts.  This paper is gorgeous and i'm not sure if I'll be able to cut it up for wrapping.  I may have to save it for crafting.

  A beautiful handmade basket from Rwanda

and a tea towel from India.  I love this pattern.  We have a picture in a similar style, clay painting from Gujerat.

These traders will be at the Kyle Academy Fair trade christmas fair, so if you also like what you see, I'll be putting out some more information soon.

Weekly bake off callenge

I recently came accross Amy's weekly bake off challenge and decided to give it ago, I like the idea of baking with people sharing disasters, triumphs and tips.

The challenge aims to bake its way through all the recipes in mary berrys 100 bakes and cakes. I don't have that book, but do have her Baking Bible hopefully that will suffice! I've arrived on the scene a bit late, they are already on bake 9 luckily, still 91 to go! 

So the bake this week is Raspberry meringue roulade, page 360 in my book.    I had similar problems to Amy, the roulade seemed to be buring with the temperatures and times given.  I turned to oven to bottom heat only and that seemed to help.  It would be useful if cookery books said something about the different oven option!

Here it is out of the oven

and turned on it's back

and the finished roulade

As it was all puffing up in the oven, I did wonder how I was going to roll it, but with a little poking and prodding, it came out ok in the end.

Like amy, I used frozen raspberry's and combined with the whipping cream,  the inside is a bit sloppy.  Next time I think I'll try whipped double cream and fresh raspberry's.

As an update to a previous blog on the GBBO technical challenges .... the pork pies were not a huge success, the pastry was really difficult and did't come out of the tin easily.   So ...... full of holes I didn't get to do the jelly thing.  Next time!  However, it's not all bad, they did taste absolutely delicious.

Great British bake off and the technical challenges

Love it or not bothered about it the Great british bake off has a lot of people talking, baking and blogging!   I personally have found it fab and really enjoy trying out some of the technical challenges.  It's not always possible to fit some of these tricky bakes into a busy family life.   They can be quite time consuming and things I wouldn't normally bother with, but the programme has the effect of encouraging you to indulge yourself and find the time to take on the challenges.

I've successfully made lemon tart before and also the odd Focaccia ..... but I can see from GBBO that the Foccaia in particular could be so much nicer and so will try that again.    So thats another reason I like the programme, us amateurs love to try something new,  but we also like to try and do it better.  We don't mind if it doesn't turn out exactly as the professionals say it should, but we've tried, are always appreciated for our effort and highly praised on the occasion it all goes to plan.

Here are a few of my technical challenges

The first one I tried was battenburg.  I didn't use the recipe from the show but  from Mary Berry's book

Next I tried macaroons - This effort, I am sad to say was a complete disaster.   My daughter was very taken by the very pretty ones made by all the contestants and so had been particuarly keen for me to try this.  We scrapped them off the baking parchment, filled them with cream and they tasted delicious,

I'm not sure what I did wrong but that recipe is on the back burner for another day.  

I then tried Iced buns .....OMG, they were so delicious and are definately on the family favourites list.  

Next I tried Sachertorte 

The cake and it's shape were the business but the icing didn't quite come right.  Since watching Mary's masterclass ... perhaps it was overheated.  I also made the mistake of using cooking 70% dark chocolate, which made the icing a wee bit bitter .... thats important because otherwise my chief cake eaters leave it all to me and thats not good!

Going to try Pork pies tomorrow, so watch this space.

Cake decoration week 5

After all that moaning, what a fun evening I had this week

We started with a basic sponge recipe (given in a previous post) adding 30g of cocoa powder to make chocolate cake.  Whilst that was in the oven we made Ganache to ice it with.

This is the recipe

250g chocolate, chopped into small pieces
100 ml cream
50g butter.

Heat the cream and butter until boiling,  pour over the chopped chocolate and leave for 10 minutes until melted.  Maybe i stirred too soon, but I found my chocolate hadn't quite melted so I needed to heat it slightly to melt the remainder.  The problem with this is that as you stir, air bubbles get trapped . more about that later.

While we were waiting for all this to cool, we had a quick tutorial in making piping bags from greaseprrof paper.

Make a square of greaseproof paper by folding the bottom corner over to the opposite edge discarding the excess

Tear diagonally to make two triangles

With the straight edge along the top, draw one of the top corners down to the bottom point turning as you bring it down so that the underside is facing up - thats a difficult action to describe, but I hope you can see what I mean from the picture

now bring the other corner down to the bottom point by wrapping it around the back

I've turned it upside down here to get a better view.  lastly you'll need to secure the edges by folding them over towards the inside of the bag.  The tutor suggests stappling!.

These are useful for small amounts of icing or drizzling.

So ...... cake out of the oven and cooled, we poured over the chocolate lettting it drip down and over the sides.  At this stage it's best to leave the cake on it's cooling rack so that the excess ganache can drip down onto the tray or greaseproof paper.  Using our piping bags and melted chocolate we decorated our cakes.  I went for the cobweb look!  Is there a name for that technique?  using white chocolate and starting in the centre, I made a spiral and using a toothpick dragged the point from the middle to the outside.

It's not clear from the photo, but those bubbles were still there ..... easily removed by popping with toothpick!

Here are some of the others.

Next week, tempering chocolate and chocolate modelling.

Cake decoration 3 and 4!

Oh dear, having decided to blog about my classes I'm not being very consistant about keeping it up.  To tell the truth I'm a bit disapointed!   It's not been motivating me to blog! We are doing a lot of cake making and not an awful lot of cake decorating.

So week 3 we made buttercream icing ... again, the purpose being to practice piping.   We'd been advised to buy a nozzle and set I'd got one from Amazon, paying what I though was a very reasonable  £28 for 56 pieces.    Bindu, who you may remember was standing next to me.  had the very same set, purchased for her by her sister the las time she visited Inida .... for £4!......  made mental note to self that  next time I'm there I should remember cake decorating supplies  amounsgt all the other lovely things I could fill my suticase with!

Week 4 we made a a victoria sponge so we could water ice it!  We also practiced suger coating fruit.  This involved bushing fruit with egg white and then dusting with caster sugar.  Very tricky trying to get the right amount of egg wash on and stop it going all gloopy.  It didn't help that we each had about 10 pieces of fruit to cover and one station to do it at, so with a queue of 10 people behind you, looking over your shoulder waiting for their turn is not good for concentration or achieving perfection!

It was a bit of an all round disaster, Sponge, separeted by jam, covered in icing, and then sugared fruit ... not even my kids would eat it,  I'm afraid that it ended up in the bin.  We love sugar in our house but this was just overkill! It did look quite pretty though.

Now that doesn't look to bad does it, nice and colourful.  take a look at the close up!

See what I mean about all that sugary gloopiness!  Now,  I'm sure if I practiced lots, I could get the right consistency and make it look very attractive ....... but fruit covered in sugar doesn't do it for me.... I like my fruit and my sugar straight!  I liken it to putting sultanas in a curry!

Off now to class no.5 ...... feeling a wee bit unhappy that i'll be missing the great british bake off final.