A weft yarn

HCB - English Gingerbread Cake

It is fete season in Canberra. Spring and autumn are the big seasons for schools, preschools, local charities and churches to run fetes. We love them. There are always bargains to check out at the plant stalls, cake stalls, craft stalls, second hand books. Lots of them run really good international food stalls and some are still working in the spirit of the olden times, and offer the children some great activities. Some have lost that joyous part of a fete and are just about shopping....Anyway, on the weekend we went to the Miles Franklin School fete and the Orana school fete (and we don't attend either of those schools and both are outside our local area ...they are just really good).

The reason I introduce this post with a story about fetes is that I always go to the cake stall and try and buy a cake or plate of slices, biscuits that kind of thing. I've even been known to purchase multiple items at the cake stalls. So, get to the point Melissa! I would not buy this cake at a cake stall and yet, I'd be missing out on a piece of heaven.

My cake has an alarming dip in the middle of it. What's going on there? I wonder if it's because I overfilled the pan? And it's really hard for a drab, brown, un-iced cake to compete with the glamourous girls of chocolate icing, sprinkles, cream cheese icing, banana cakes, marble cakes, chocolate cakes with chocolate icing, vanilla cakes with chocolate icing. You get the picture. When you are standing at the cake stall, winsomely choosing your selection, little Miss English Gingerbread Cake is probably not going to catch your eye.

What's not to love about this cake though? I think the ratio is about half sugar/half other ingredients. And that sugar comes in the form of Golden Syrup. Yes. Golden Syrup. 425g of it. I thought at first it was a typo. Don't panic though. Press on and include it and you will be rewarded with a cake that has a remarkably balanced set of flavours. The sweetness of the sugar is balanced with the spicy tang of the other ingredients. It makes up into a beautiful caramelised, treacly, moist cake. The other flavours are the ginger, cinnamon and citrus tang.  The cake includes orange marmalade in the batter and then lemon syrup drizzled over it on completion.

I might not buy this at a school fete...but....that would be my loss entirely.

HCB - Pure Pumpkin Cheesecake

This cheesecake came highly recommended (just check out the comments from my post on the Golden Lemon Almond cake). They were right! This is a delicious cheesecake. Having said that, we are fans of cheesecake and we do eat a fair bit of pumpkin (well at least the adults do). So you might be tempted to think we are easy to please on this front. Well....maybe...but I think objectively this is a really good cheesecake.

The crust is made from gingernut biscuits and toasted pecans, so that adds a lovely flavour. The pumpkin is lightly mixed with cream, cream cheese, eggs and raw sugar, which gives it a golden look and a soft, rich, caramel pumpkin taste. The topping is a deeply amber-coloured caramel - all runny and sweet and gooey. It just all works so well together. Ginger, pecans, creamy soft pumpkin and sweet caramel.

It seems that early on in my brief time in the bake-along, we made some tricky cakes with lots of stages. Well, this one only has three stages and only uses the food processor (not every bowl and appliance in the kitchen). So, on my scale of easy-to-hard, I'd rate it down at the easy end. "Make me again, again" - it is calling to me. We gobbled this down for breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea.

During this week of pumpkin cheesecake baking we nearly finished our renovation. We recently had our whole house recarpetted, which involved packing everything and moving it out to the garage. Now that is over, we have unpacked all the essential furniture and possessions (first priority: beds, second priority:computers), all that remains is putting back all the books, glassware, bits and pieces, nick nacks and then call it a day. No more renovations for 2011. We still need to paint a few rooms and fix up a few things, but that's pretty much it.

If I get around to it, I'll show you my before and after shots of the kitchen and new deck.

At times, I've felt it was a madness to join a bake-along while renovating a house/kitchen but you know, I've really loved it and at times it helped keep me sane. I have loved focusing on something creative and delicious and sharing it with my family, friends and with you all. I have loved being part of something across the world, but shared. I've loved all the baking skills I've developed and (sheepish) I've acquired a number of fantastic new cake pans (gotta love that!). Certainly there were weeks where I struggled to participate and once I baked but forgot to photograph and then knittybaker told me that I didn't need tons of photos or even any photo..just let us know you've baked. Thanks for easing me in, Knittybaker. It's been a great experience. Thanks also you fellow bakers and readers (and my family who have tried all and loved most of what I do).

We finish up in a few weeks. Only three more cakes to go.

I think I need one of those Christmas wreath pans....as a parting gift to myself maybe....santa baby...I don't need a condominium or diamonds...

 

HCB - Golden Lemon Almond Cake

Despite family conversations to the contrary, I'm pretty sure it was my turn to pick the free choice cake. Good to have a blog so that I can prove that on previous free choice weeks Nick picked the Chocolate Genoise with Peanut Butter Ganache, Tess picked the White Velvet Butter Cupcakes (in rose form), and Tim's choice was the Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake. All of which are now on the 'make again' list. So, could I live up to the standard set by the family and pick another successful cake? It's a tough gig. But yes...4 for 4. We all loved this cake. It's a keeper.

It has a sour cream base and is mixed with lemon zest and almond and then after baking, a lemon syrup is poured over the cake. It is moist and light at the same time. It has a lovely balance of tangy and sweet. And I love the shape of this cake (sheepishly confesses to another new cake pan).

 

I'm not sure if I captured it in the photos, but like Rose, I managed to have little crystallized bits of sugar that haven't completely dissolved in the sugar syrup, so they sit on top of the cake, catching bits of light. Love that.

This photo doesn't quite do justice to the cake crumb. I think it looks a bit stodgy in the photo but in real life it is soft and delicate (but yet still moist). I love this cake. I think, in fact, it is my favourite so far. It's really nice for breakfast, with a cup of tea. Nick and I had it for breakfast two days in a row!

HCB - Peanut butter ingots

I was grateful this week's Heavenly Cake baking wasn't a complicated cake. We had interstate visitors drop in on us for the weekend, somewhat unexpectedly. We had warning a few days in advance but not much more than that. At work, I'm entering into the part of our annual cycle where deadlines start to press and every day is full of things that have to be accomplished in order to meet our long-term goal. At present, when I make it through to the weekend, I'm really craving some peace and routines and some quiet time. To add to all of that I had quite a disturbed night, with little sleep, on Friday night, as I mulled over some interpersonal conflict that had happened at work. I was not at the core of the conflict, merely a bystander but as usual I wondered were there things I could have done differently to help my colleagues avert the crisis. Anyway, long story short, I'm glad it isn't difficult to bake Peanut Butter Ingots. I certainly wasn't up to a Chocolate Raspberry Genoise that Evil Cake Lady made last week.

I had made the Plum Ingots, though it was mid-winter when I did, so I used frozen blueberries instead of plums. I hadn't really liked the consistency of those ingots. Maybe I did something wrong in that batter because the consistency was kind of rubbery.

Anyway, general kind of "unwellness" over the weekend and trepidation over the rubberyness of an almond-beurre noisette batter were banished after I whipped these up.

First of all, you make the beurre noisette (which we've done before). You melt the butter until the solids have browned. Then you toast almonds and grind them up with powdered sugar (icing sugar), then add a scant amount of plain flour. Whip the four egg whites until they are foamy, add the almond/flour mixture and the strained browned butter. Then the final touch is the peanut butter. They don't take long to cook (another bonus).

When they came out of the oven they smelt fantastic - warm and buttery, with wafts of peanuts. They were crunchy on the outside and crumbly and moist on the inside. I could make these again for a quick afternoon tea treat for the kids.

I'm sorry I didn't put a better effort into photographing them. But hey, given the life issues at present, at least I made something!

HCB - White Velvet Butter Cupcakes

I know I was meant to make some molten lava chocolate explosion thing, and really I would have loved it, however, my daughter was having a 4th grade class party at school this week and asked for little vanilla rose cupcakes. I was happy to oblige. I do understand that I am not fulfilling the bake-along this week but I thought you might like to see what we got up to! They were a big success at the class party.

We followed the White Velvet Butter Cupcakes recipe and everyone in the family had a little scoop of batter before we baked the rose cakes. 'Yum' was the universal expression. As they were for a party, we couldn't sample the actual cakes so we made a few little extras. Tess and I each ate one of the little round discs (the boys were gone to school and work so we wern't being deliberately selfish). The cupcakes were fantastic and I could easily use this as my "go to" Vanilla cupcake recipe. Then we decorated the little roses and packed them up ready to go. Tess was also meant to bring along a "surprise", which she interpreted as lollies.

One thing we learnt about decorating these little rose cakes....it looks slightly better if you put the icing gel into the groove of the rose, rather than trying to highlight the ridge of the groove (if you know what I mean). Tess then added little sprinkles of flowers, leaves, hearts. Personally, I prefer the cakes undecorated but I'm not a 9-year-old and she had a lovely time and the 9-year-olds in her class loved them. So there. Not sure about those lurid, red lolly things though. They are called 'clouds' but look like 'lips' to me. They are soft and chewy and tangy and even though they are clearly NOT food, you do find yourself trying just one more.

 

HCB - Chocolate Genoise with Peanut Butter Whipped Ganache

This week is free choice week and I asked my son to choose a cake. He wanted to know how Rose's Heavenly Cakes were grouped so I showed him the Contents page with: Butter and Oil cakes, Sponge Cakes, Mostly Flourless Cakes & Cheesecakes, and Baby Cakes. He went straight away to Sponge cakes and chose the Chocolate cake with Peanut butter icing. We've been on a bit of a Reese's Peanut Butter cups binge lately so I wasn't surprised when he picked this cake. A Costco supermarket has just opened in Canberra and someone from work went out and came back with a huge bag of Reese's Peanut butter cups. So, the love was shared and I got a handful, which I brought home, and the children quickly scoffed them. Reese's aren't super rare in Australia these days, not like when I was growing up. But still, they are a novelty item around here and everyone in this abode agrees: Peanut butter and chocolate is a winning combination.

I feel like I've made this Genoise batter a few times now and I do love it, the way the warmed eggs froth up and quadruple in volume. After the cake came out of the oven, my daughter helped with painting the syrup on the cake. I insisted that we take more care this time and we used up almost every last drop. When I did the Passionfruit Genoise cake I didn't syrup it enough and it went hard and dry after a few days. What a waste. I didn't want that to happen again. Lessons learnt were: (1) eat the cake more quickly, and (2) syrup it up a bit more.

We took Rose's advice and let the iced, syruped cake sit for a day in the fridge. When we cut into the cake it was suitably soft and moist, and the icing was perfect. Everyone loved it. Definitely on the 'make again' list. And thankfully, the peanut butter softens the bitter taste of the ganache, so it was popular with the young ones.

If anyone out there is familiar with Costco....do you know if they stock Wondra, Cake flour, and Graham crackers? I'd be a bit tempted to pay the $60 annual fee if I thought I could get some American baking products (and Reese's...of course....big bags of them apparently).

And one final comment, we are heading off for a family holiday on Saturday so I'll miss at least one week of the bake-along. Enjoy the next cake....forgotten...remind me...Angel food? I was scared of that one.

HCB - Individual Pineapple Upside-down cakes

We are big fans of upside-down cakes in this house. Before I started on the Heavenly Cake Bakers adventure I used to plan one fruit-based cooked dessert each week. Often they were pies or cobblers or crumbles and if they were cakes - they'd almost always be upside-down cakes. The Rustic Fruit Desserts cookbook was my favourite cookbook for fruit based desserts. Now, I'll be adding Roses' Heavenly Cakes to the list.

Rose's version of the Pineapple Upside-down cake is wonderful and was well received around here. The tangy, lime caramel sauce cooked nicely into the fresh pineapple and cherry and created crunchy toffee like bits on the edges. I have only one complaint about this recipe, the cake part was a bit small. As I put the batter into the pan, I noticed it only came half way up the pan. Sometimes this isn't a problem because it rises a lot, but on this occasion it didn't really do that. There just didn't seem to be enough "cake" for my liking. I wonder if it would cook well enough if I doubled the cake part of the recipe.

I used a fresh pineapple, as suggested in the recipe. Then because I didn't get the core out in one straight go, I needed to core it twice, so I ended up with two holes in some slices. No problems. I included two cherries. These are morello cherries from Aldi that are bottled and allowed to dry out slightly on a paper towel.

I again succumbed to the speciality pan - suggestible child that I am. But like the last one, I do love it and as hinted above, I think I'll get plenty use from it.

And like the earlier Nordic Ware pan for the Rosebuds, I was amazed at how well it unmoulded. Nothing left behind. All the cakes had their appropriate shape and I thought it was pretty the way the cherries kind of bled into the pineapple. I do love the little pineapple fronds of cake at the top of the shape. This was a pretty easy cake and I'd put this on the "make again" list.

p.s. hopefully no one has read down this far...cause Jenn was pretty firm sounding last week ;-). Shhh. I didn't make the pineapple caramel drizzle (sounded nice but unnecessary and maybe would have sent us into a sugar coma).

HCB - Ginger cheesecake with gingerbread crust

I was looking forward to making this weeks' cake as the photo in the book looked so inviting with the little gingerbread people dancing around the outside of the cheesecake. However, I was feeling a bit pressed for time and decided to skip making the gingerbread people. The making of the cheesecake was interesting enough as it transpired.

It called for 50mls of ginger and by that I mean take a large piece of ginger root and grate it, and then squeeze the juice out of the grated ginger and then weigh it and add it to the cheesecake mix. We aren't talking about powdered ginger, we are talking about fresh ginger. To be frank, I was nervous. Raw ginger is a pretty intense taste and much as we love ginger in this house, I just wasn't sure if 50mls would be too strong. Oh yee of little faith. I did taste it before adding it and sure enough it burned the end of my tongue. But when you add the greenish, burny liquid to a bowl full of creamy cheesy, sour creamy, eggy mix it transforms it. Again, Rose makes it all worthwhile. It was beautiful.

I did, unfortunately, have a bit of decorating disaster. There were three holes in the top of the cake when I unmoulded it and my usually very easy going husband gently suggested when he saw it that "perhaps it needs something". I thought maybe I could use the little tiny bit of whipped cream, leftover from a previous eating adventure, to mask the offending part of the cake. In the end, I think it just looks odd. Like an old ladies unfinished sentence...but it does hide the holes...so..there it is.

Next time though - going with the gingerbread people.

HCB - Deep chocolate rosebuds

Ok - so we all know I love chocolate. And who could resist something called a baby cake and shaped like a small flower? Apparently my husband can! Last night, I suggested he try one as they were warm, just out of the oven. He reluctantly walked over to where they rested on the kitchen counter and said "Hmm, they smell too chocolately from here. No, thanks".

What can I say? He has his preferences, I have Rose's Heavenly Cakes and Deep Chocolate Rosebuds.

These were wonderful and my son and I loved them with a glass of milk. They are fudgy, soft and delicate, with a bite of bitter chocolate from the dollop of ganache added before baking.

And I love, love my new pan. I was amazed and thrilled at how well it worked. The cakes just dropped out and left only small stickiness behind. All of the beautiful detail of the flower was transferred to the cake shape. Magic. I might try this pan with the Yellow Butter Cupcakes as my daughter said she'd love to ice them with pinks and reds and greens. Sounds fun. Maybe not as elegant and end-of-grand-dinner-party sophisticated as Rose's presentation implies, but maybe more us. And that, after all, is the point of life - to inhabit the space that is right for you. Though, if we ever did have a grand dinner party - these chocolate flower morsels would be perfect, and as they are easy to make, I could imagine a number of giving opportunities.

 

 

HCB - Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake

It is free choice week and so a few weeks ago, I asked my husband to choose some cakes he liked from Rose's Heavenly Cakes. It was really interesting watching him go through the book. I had some preconceived views about what he would like, given I've lived with him for 18 years. However, these little exercises in picking and choosing are never completely predictable.

That he chose an apple cake was NO surprise. Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake. An apple is a desert island fruit to my husband. He grew up in an apple growing area of Victoria and his parents still talk about growing up with Tim and finding apple cores all over the house.

That he didn't choose a cheesecake was a HUGE surprise - but perhaps he's been typecast in the role of cheesecake lover all these years and given an opportunity to redefine himself....See you really should ask...

That he only chose 4 cakes was NO surprise. As a point of context - of the 99 cakes - I probably love the sound of 70 of them. Don't get me wrong, each week he's more than happy to see what I'm making, to share a slice and to provide feedback. He just isn't lying on his back, staring at the ceiling and day dreaming about cakes (not that we know anyone like that).

That he chose a 'fun' cake was NO surprise. He has always loved helping with the children's birthday cakes (Thomas the tank engine, the lion, the princess mushroom fairy cake, the old lady in the shoe...). He chose Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream. For those without the book....hint....it is the shape of a pumpkin. I love that one too.

That he chose a cake that was romantic and dramatic was also NO surprise. After all, the cake is shaped like a heart - Rose Red Velvet Cake. After the priest blessed us and told us we were married, he held my hand walking down the aisle and I'm sure this man will be calmly holding my hand and telling me he loves me when I'm on my death bed.

That his final cake was the English Gingerbread Cake was also NO surprise. He has always loved ginger. And given that he comes from a long line of Anglo Australians (no Italian, Irish or American heritage like myself) it isn't surprising that his tastes run to puddings, roast dinners and gingerbread cake.

So, perhaps after all, the only big surprise was the rejection of the typecast cheesecake-lover. Though I actually think if we did the exercise again, one or two would sneak in. The cheesecakes are towards the back of the book and he just may need a bit more cookbook training...you know the kind of training you do when you learn to read cookbooks in bed. It's hard to believe that for the last eighteen hundred years that I've been baking him cheesecakes, he hasn't loved them....nah. cant be true. must try again with cookbook. but in a few months time.

Anyway, HAPPY FATHER's DAY Tim. We love you. And you love Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake. p.s. I loved it too.