Category Archives: Cakes etc

I’m still trawling through approximately one billion photos from our wedding and honeymoon, so none of those yet. Instead, I have been taking further steps towards full domesticity by attempting to make marmalade.

When I was a kid, my mum and I would make marmalade using a handy pre-prepared tin of peel and pulp (Ma-Made, still available today) – I remember fun afternoons fogging up the kitchen windows and getting everything covered with a sticky layer of boiled sugar. But I thought I’d test out my lovely new Lakeland maslin pan by making the real deal – Nigel Slater’s seville orange marmalade.

It turns out there’s a really good reason to use the pre-prepared cans – making marmalade properly is a complete pain in the balls. The recipe starts off by telling you to “peel 1.3kg of seville oranges”. That’s about 14 oranges, and a potato peeler doesn’t work (I tried). Then you have to juice them.

That sounded like a right faff so instead I got out my Kenwood chef and found the juicer attachment. I juiced the lot, then used a grapefruit spoon (with a serrated edge) to scoop out the pith, then sliced the peel.

Next, you’re meant to put the pips in a “muslin bag” to boil up with the peel. I don’t have any muslin, so I put them in a (clean!) footsock and tied it up. It didn’t look pretty, but it did work:

You then boil the peel and pips gently for about an hour or so, then stir in a load of sugar and the juice of 2 lemons. I also added in about 6 lumps of stem ginger, chopped up fairly small, and a good slug of Scotch.

Nigel then says to boil it for 15 minutes until it’s at setting point. In reality, it took at least 45 minutes to get there, so the moral of the story is to keep testing. Or get a jam thermometer, which I don’t have.

I put in a bit more whsky and poured it neatly into jars without spilling it all over the kitchen (hurrah for jam funnels!), but it turns out I was too impatient and should have waited a few minutes more, as the peel rose to the surface. I’ll also need to wait till tomorrow to see if it’s set properly, but my taste tests along the way tell me it is delicious.

I’ve made variations on these before, but I finally properly anglicised the recipe (originally the Katharine Hepburn brownies from the excellent Dorrie Greenspan’s Baking from My Home to Yours), and baked some for my housemate Duck’s birthday at the weekend. Yummy!

Brownies for Duck

• 230g butter, cut into pieces
• 50g cocoa powder
• 2tsp espresso powder
• 2 large eggs at room temperature
• 210g caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 40g plain flour
• 100g plain chocolate, chopped into small pieces

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a 20cmx20cm tin with baking liner, or grease it well.

Gently melt the butter in a heavy saucepan. Mix in the cocoa powder and espresso powder, stirring out any lumps. Leave to cool for a few minutes.

Stir in the sugar and vanilla extract, then the eggs (beat them in a cup first), and then the flour. Hopefully it should all come together to make a smooth glossy (and delicious!) batter. Stir in the chopped chocolate and pour into the tin.

Bake for 30 minutes, until the surface looks papery. Leave to cool in the tin for at least a couple of hours before slicing into pieces and scoffing. Candle and out-of-tune rendition of “Happy Birthday” optional.

Later we went out to the totally brilliant Simmons bar near Kings Cross for drinks and dancing:

Tasty margaritas served in teacups - cute!

Old-school sweeties for those midnight munchies

NOM!

I made these for the Sunday Driver gig at the Good Ship in Kilburn last weekend (more of that later), along with a batch of the now-legendary choc-chip-fudge cookies.

The original recipe came from work colleague who brought some of these into work a while ago. I pestered her so relentlessly for the recipe she finally gave in, and I thank her whole-heartedly for it.

I think I overcooked them slightly – they could have done with being a wee bit soggier in the middle, but it’s a super-simple method and they’re absolutely delicious. You could also replace the white chocolate chips with chopped nuts if you fancied it. Due to nut allergies in members of both my bands –  and the fact we’re just handing them out randomly at gigs –  I tend to avoid them completely when I bake.

White chocolate butterscotch brownies

• 115g butter
• 300g dark brown sugar
• 2 large eggs (ideally at room temperature)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 210g plain flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 100g white chocolate chips or chunks

Preheat the oven to 180C. Line an 8 inch square pan with non-stick liner. Or just grease the hell out of it and take your chances.

Gently melt the butter in a large saucepan over a low heat. When melted, take off the heat and stir in the brown sugar until well-mixed.

Carefully stir in the flour, baking powder, eggs, salt and vanilla. I just chuck them all in (flour in first) and hope for the best.

Leave to cool for a few minutes then stir in the white chocolate chips.

Spread the mixture into the lined tin and bake for 30-40 mins until firm to the touch and dry on top. Leave to cool in the tin before cutting into however many squares you like. I usually go for 16.

Stuff in your face. The middle ones are the best.

Yummy!

Another week, another four gigs – and that means baking! I’ve gone off cupcakes a bit lately. It’s such a performance to make and ice them, and I’ve been really pushed for time.

I made another batch of choc chip cookies for the Shadow Orchestra gig on Tuesday (more of that later…), seeing as the ones I whipped up for our Favela Chic gig vanished in a matter of seconds.

This time I bunged in some mini fudge chunks that I spotted in Waitrose (God, I love that shop. I shall be in the poor house by Christmas). And they were so totally delicious I think I’ll probably do them again for Saturday’s gig at the Good Ship with Sunday Driver (we’re on at 9pm – come on down!)

Here’s the recipe, adapted and anglicised from Dorrie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours.

• 225g butter, at room temperature
• 220g caster sugar
• 120g light brown sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs, beaten in a cup
• 320g plain flour
• 3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1tsp salt
• Either 300-350g plain chocolate chips, or 250g choc chips plus 100g mini fudge chunks (from Waitrose)

Preheat your oven to 180C.

Beat the butter in a freestanding mixer for a few minutes (or you could do it by hand the hard way…), then cream in both the brown and caster sugar until very light and fluffy. This takes ages.

Briefly beat in the vanilla extract, then the beaten eggs, a little at a time.

Mix the bicarb and salt into the flour, then beat into the wet mixture in three batches. Son’t overmix – they just need to be combined.

Stir in the choc chips and fudge chunks, if using.

Line baking sheets with non-stick liner, or grease them really well. Put dollops of the mixture (roughly a dessert-spoonful) onto the baking sheets, spaced well apart. I get about 8 per sheet, which makes cookies that are roughly 2 and a half inches in diameter.

Cook until golden brown and more darkly browned at the edges – probably around 10-12 minutes but keep an eye on them.

Take the baking sheet out of the oven, wait a few minutes for the cookies to firm up, then transfer onto a wire rack to cool. Give out to hungry fans.

Makes 35-40 cookies.

I don’t tend to make cakes on request – for a start, I’m wary of over-promising and then running out of time. But when I got this email from my mum, I couldn’t resist:

“I asked your father what he wanted for his birthday dinner today and he said a crossword piece shaped cake.”

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, establishing that he actually wanted a jigsaw piece-shaped cake and not a crossword cake (he’s a big fan of both types of puzzle), I set to work.

I picked a chocolate cake recipe from my rather battered and batter-smeared copy of The Complete Book of Baking, multiplying it by half and throwing in a tub of Waitrose “Cooks’ Ingredients” fudge chunks for good measure (recipe at the bottom of this post) and baked it in a square tin.

Mmmmmmmmmmm

It made a dense, fudgey cake that smelled amazing while it was baking. Next came the butchery. I cut two notches out of the sides, using the pieces for the ‘knobs’ on the sides:

I then put on a crumb coat of vanilla buttercream, making a right bloody mess in the process. Handy hint: I assembled the caked on a 12 inch record shipping sleeve covered in tin foil as an improvised cake board. To save it from getting absolutely covered in buttercream, I slipped strips of baking paper around the edges:

Finally, the sugarpaste. My Dad loves jigsaw puzzles – the more difficult the better – so I decided to make a piece of sky.

I coloured most of a box of sugarpaste sky blue, using food colouring paste, and rolled it out to cover the cake. It was pretty difficult to get the paste to fit neatly in the notches, and if you look closely you’ll see it’s a right dog’s dinner in there.  In retrospect, I should have taken a bit more time and effort to mould it carefully into the spaces.

I cut out clouds with the remaining white sugarpaste and attached them into place with a bit of water. Et voila!

Don't look too closely...

Following an adventurous journey involving two buses, a train, a rainstorm and a domestic argument, I made it home to my parents’ house with the cake intact. Happy birthday, Dad!

Happy birthday, Dad!

Chocolate jigsaw fudge cake

Makes one rather hefty 8 to 9 inch square cake. Ingredients should all be at room temperature before you start.

• 135g plain chocolate
• 90 ml (6 tablespoons) runny honey
• 180g butter
• 135g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 225g self-raising flour
• 75g cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 225ml milk
• 1 tub Waitrose Cooks’ Ingredients fudge chunks

Preheat the oven to 175C (350F, gas mark 4). Grease and line your tin of choice with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate and honey together, either using a double-boiler or the microwave (gently!)

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Beat in the choc/honey mixture, then the eggs.

Sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder. Stir in a third of this to the main wet mix, alternating with a third of the milk (with the vanilla extract added to it). Stir in the fudge chunks.

Flop the batter into the tin. Level the top and bake for about 45 mins, or until a skewer comes out clean.  Heave it out carefully onto a rack to cool. Mine rose dramatically and cracked everywhere, but settled down to a lovely dense, moist, fudgey cake after cooling. The fudge pieces melted into the cake, leaving some rather strange air pockets but making it really delicious in the process.