Make this vast – 30cm – chocolate cake for Jan’s birthday party, which I helped do the catering for along with Dom and Fran.

Traditionally, large-scale cakes for events tend to be fruit cakes, as they’re solid and hold their structure well. However, fruit cakes are dull, nay yucky. Thankfully, I’ve discovered this recipe, which is a variation on an original from The Moosewood Cookbook and works really well as an alternative. The original recipe is for a “Cardamon coffee cake”; I’ve already posted my metric conversion of that recipe, over here when I used it for a wedding cake that.

For Jan’s do though, as we also did a Madeira cake which Fran did a fancy icing job on, the second cake had to be something different – chocolate!

So here’s my chocolate variation recipe. This quantity will suit a cake tin 23-25cm wide.

Cake batter:
450g soft butter
400g light brown sugar
4 eggs
2 t vanilla essence
450ml sour cream
400g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
2 t baking powder
2 1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt

Nut mix
25g light brown sugar
1 t cinnamon
30g chopped walnuts
30g chopped dark chocolate

Ganache
250g dark choc (min 60% cocoa solids), chopped
250ml double cream

Preheat the oven to 150C. Grease and line the tin.

Make the nut mix by simply combining the sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and chocolate then set aside.

Make the sponge by creaming together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then the vanilla.

Sift together all the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, raising agents), then add this to the creamed mixture a bit at a time, alternating with additions of the sour cream. Fold in gently – don’t beat or over-mix. Start and end with the flour mix.

Put half of the sponge mix into the prepared tin, then sprinkle over the nut mix. Dollop the other half on top.

Bake for for one and a half hours. If your oven is cooler, it’ll take longer. Test with by inserting a skewer. Leave to cool in the tin, then turn out and cool completely.

For Jan’s cake, once cooled, I brushed it with warmed and strained apricot jam, then covered it with ganache. To make the ganache, simply heat the cream until it’s starting to simmer then pour it over the chocolate and whisk. Keep whisking until well combined. Cool until it’s nicely thickened. You might want to do this in the fridge – but don’t leave too long, or it’ll get too stiff to spread on the cake.

For the 30cm cake, I did 4x quantities, and it had to bake for an awful long time…

These are from the rather gorgeous Rose Bakery cookbook Breakfast Lunch Tea, which our friend Jude gave us as a present (not using the royal we there – we as in me and Fran, the wife, as it was our wedding anniversary).

Founded by Rose Carrarini, who co-founded Villandry in London, the bakery/cafe looks like a great place; I’d love to visit one of these days. It’s basically doing something that Fran’s talked about for years – selling English teashop type goodies (and beyond) to the French, who apparently love that kind of thing.

The main emphasis seems to be on wholesome, simple snacks and “little meals” – granola to soup, by way of tartlets, mini-pizzas, cookies and scones. In fact, the sort of thing I’d love to sell in a cafe-bakery if I ever owned one!

This is the second recipe I tried. And rather delicious it is too.

Scones. I love scones, but mostly I just make plain ones. These, however, include that irresistible ingredient – maple syrup.

They are v tasty, with the maple a fairly subtle factor. Mostly, they’re defined by being very short and crumbly. Too short and crumbly arguably, as they fall to bits a bit too easily while cooking. But definitely a recipe to return to.

Here’s the recipe, to make 12 scones, using a 50mm round cutter.

Preheat the oven to 200C (or 180 if you have a hot fan oven).

260g plain flour
80g wholemeal flour
35g rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking powder (”very heaped” Carrarini writes)
1 teaspoon caster sugar (ditto)
1/2 teaspoon salt
160g unsalted butter, diced up
4 tablespoons maple syrup
4 tablespoons milk

Sift together the flours, add the salt and oats, and mix.
Crumb in the butter.
Mix the maple syrup and milk in a separate bowl or jug, then pour that into the dry ingredients and mix with fork (I like to use those old, bone-handled palette knives)
Bring together to a moist but not sticky dough, adding a little more milk or flour accordingly.
Do not over-knead the dough.
Roll out to about 30mm thick, stamp out scones, place on greased baking sheet, brush with beaten egg.
Bake for 20 minutes.

“Serve warm” apparently. I had mine with plenty of butter and homemade apple and blackberry jam and they were yum.

Feel a strong bond with this cookbook already. (It helps that it’s a nice object too; only quibble is the presence of a few too many pics of cute kids when they could be showing us more pics of, you know, the results of the actual recipes.)

I’ve had a block of tamarind pulp hanging around in the fridge, from some curry or other a while back, so this seemed a perfect opportunity to use some of it up. It’s another delicious Dan Lepard recipe, from the Guardian Weekend. Here’s the recipe.

Thing is, pulp ain’t paste – it’s still got the stones in it, so I increased the quantities, then laboriously picked up the stones. In the Dan Lepard forums here, they discuss paste and he links the brand he used, which is concentrated.

This is a cake made by melting the butter, and beating everything together – yet it’s surprisingly light. It’s delicious. Mine probably wasn’t not tamarind-y enough, but it’s given a lovely extra tang by the icing – made with lemon juice and freshly-ground cardamon (one of my fave spices for sweets). Oh, and my icing was made with Billington’s Natural Golden Icing unrefined cane sugar, hence it’s brown-ish colour, which I think quite suited the wholesome style of cake.

Another Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian. Find it here.

These are very handsome, tasty cookies. Not the usual massive monsters I make. Dan L says “place round, teaspoon-sized balls” on the baking sheets, but I just got teaspoon fulls and rolled them between my palms to the size of a small walnut in an effort to achieve some sort of regularity of size.

The dominant flavour here is from muscovado sugar and black treacle (or molasses – TBH, I’m not sure I could tell the two apart if I ate a spoonful of each in a blind test), along with a slight saltiness from the peanuts. The recipe also includes some lemon zest, which Dan L says “brightens the flavour on first bite”, but I find it also stays on the palette pleasantly.

I’m not sure about the inclusion of a tablespoon of cocoa though. He says it helps “to push the aftertaste towards chocolate”, but is it really necessary? The flavours of unrefined sugar and peanut are quite dominant,  and cocoa is arguably overcomplicating it. Plus, if I want my cookies to taste of chocolate, I’ll make chocolate cookies. But hey, that’s just me. Oh, and I knocked back the sugar a bit too.

Such a silly name. They originate from the Pennsylvania Amish, apparently, and one theory suggests they name comes from the utterance made by a hard-working farmer when he found one in his packed lunch. Or something.

Anyway, supposedly they’re trendy. Like cupcakes. Or trendier than cupcakes. There’s a whole feature about their rise to fame here in the New York Times, from March 2009 (a feature that may well disappear behind a paywall in the near future).

Well, they’ve made that transition to Britain now too. Briefly, a whoopie pie consists of two soft layers that are half-way between a cookie and a sponge cake, sandwiched with a sweet filling. I first tried one from the Hummingbird Bakery, and in truth the cookie/cake bit was a bit dry and hard, so when you bit it, it just squished all the filling out, making it a bit of a challenge to eat with any decorum.

These ones I made were a chocolate variety from a recipe from The Times, which also ran this story (that may likewise be disappearing behind a paywall soon). The recipe was a bit vague and some of the quantities were iffy, so here it is slightly revised.

115g unsalted butter, softened
200g soft light brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla essence
225ml buttermilk (or yogurt/milk blend)
60g cocoa powder
5g bicarbonate of soda
190g plain flour

Filling:
200g cream cheese (Philadelphia or similar)
75g butter
150g sifted icing sugar
1 t vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 200C and line three baking trays with greaseproof paper. Give the paper a quick wipe with butter.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the egg. You can do this with an electric hand-blender.

Add the vanilla essence to the buttermilk. If you can’t get buttermilk, blend a few tablespoons of yogurt with (whole) milk.

Sift the cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda and flour into another bowl.

Add half the flour in to the creamed butter mix, and blend. Then add half the buttermilk (or yogurt/milk). Add the rest of the flour and mix. Then the rest of the buttermilk, and mix under it’s all well-combined.

Put 6 desert spoonfuls onto each baking sheet, well-spaced as they spread a bit.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, then remove, allow to cool for a few minutes on the trays, then transfer to a rack and leave until totally cool.

Make the filling by creaming together the softened butter and icing sugar, then blending in the cream cheese and vanilla. You can do this with an electric hand blender, but don’t over-mix.

Sandwich the cookie/cakes generously with the filling.

Some people can still be a little put-off by vegetable-based cakes, but carrot cake is pretty commonplace, and beetroot goes decidedly well with with dark chocolate, so I thought it was about time to play around with parsnip.

Parsnip is a very sweet, aromatic root veg anyway, so I think it needed something to complement that. Maple syrup seemed ideal. Found this recipe, which is nice and simple – as long as you don’t grate your fingertips…

You add the filling at the last minute – it’s just mascarpone, with a few tablespoons of maple syrup stirred in. The result is slight dense, very moist, lovely and maple-y, with the slight crunch of the pecans, and a faintly parsnip aroma. Though it’s one of those cakes that, if you didn’t tell people it contained parsnips, they probably wouldn’t guess immediately.

EDIT: I finished this up yesterday, and in retrospect, it’s a bit too “parsnippy” for my liking. The parsnip is just such a pungently aromatic veg, it’s slightly too strong. I might try this same recipe with carrot, as it tends to be milder and less stridently flavourful in cakes.

Discovered this recipe a few years back, as I’m not a huge fan of beetroot and was looking for palatable ways of using it up when we got it our veg box. The muffins are surprisingly light and using the beetroot makes such sense as, like carrots, they’re a high-sugar root vegetable. It’s from Jill Dupleix originally, but I’ve made a few minor adjustments. In fact, with this batch I used buttermilk as we had some hanging around in the fridge, and it worked well…. but I’ll give the more standard recipe here.

Preheat the over 180C (or 160C fan). Put 12 paper cases in a muffin tin.

Sift together:
75g cocoa powder
180g plain flour
2 t baking powder
Stir in:
200g caster sugar

With a food processor, blend 250g cooked beetroot until as smooth as possible.
Add:
3 eggs, one at a time
1 t vanilla essence
200ml corn oil

Pour the wet beetroot mix into the dry mix. Mix until smooth and combined.

Divide between the muffin cases and bake for 30 mins.

Cool on a rack, then dust with icing sugar for serving. Or not.

This is the partner cake to Jo’s “Eggsperiment”, as we got stuck into both side-by-side. Thanks to Jo or Lawrence for the pic too!

It’s another Dan Lepard. The sponge itself is made in a marginally convoluted fashion (separating eggs, making a kind of meringue mix with the whites), but it’s nice – with a crumbly, even texture not unlike a Madeira (according to Jo). The best part of this recipe is the icing, which is a bit like a ganache, but using crème fraîche. This gives it an almost citrussy tang, which is rather nice.

Here’s the recipe.

Shonky phone photo I’m afraid. Here are the cupcakes we made for Jude’s birthday. (Plus some supermarket interlopers. Hmph.)

Ours are the yellow ones with a mini-egg (lemon), the ones with white icing and dark chocolate gratings, and the ones with pink icing with white chocolate gratings (these latter two are all chocolate/”red velvet”).

For the lemon ones, I risked another Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook recipe. I feel pretty certain the quantity of baking powder in the Black bottom cupcakes is wrong now. Most of the Hummingbird cupcake recipes have similar quantities of butter, sugar, flour (40g, 140g, 120g ish), and all have 1 and half teaspoons of baking powder – except the black bottom, which has half a teaspoon. Duh.

Anyway, the lemon ones – the method is of course a shambles for the home kitchen, but the results are good with some tweaking.

Soften 40g unsalted butter, then blend it into 140g of caster sugar. You won’t be able to cream it per se, as there’s not enough fat in proportion to sugar. Add 1 egg and 120ml of whole milk and beat – you can do this with a handheld electric mixer. Sift in 150g of flour and 1 and half teaspoons of baking powder, and beat slowly by hand to stop the powdery ingredients spraying all over the shop. Once it’s all combined and moist, hit it with the mixer again to blend nicely.

Another flaw with the Hummingbird recipes is they all say “spoon the mixture into paper cases until two-thirds full”, then claim they’ll make 12. Well, if you use standard muffin cases, and fill them 2/3rds, they actually make 8. Bake for 20 mins in oven pre-heated to 170C.

For the “red velvet” ones we used a recipe Fran found online a while back, and previously posted here. Here’s a tweaked version of the recipe, to make 12:
Soften 60g of unsalted butter then mix with 140g caster sugar; again, you can’t quite cream it, but blend. Then beat in 1 egg, using handheld mixer.
In a separate bowl, sift together:
145g plain flour
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
Pinch salt
1/2 T cocoa powder
Then in another bowl, or jug, mix:
120ml buttermilk
1 1/2 T red food colouring (natural, naturally)
1/2 t vanilla essence
1/2 t distilled white vinegar

Add quarter of the dry ingredients to the beaten butter/sugar/egg mix, and beat; then add a third of the wet ingredients and beat. Keep adding alternatively, ending with the dry mix. Beat until well combined.

Half fix 12 muffin cases, then bake for 20 mins at 170C, or until the cakes are springy.

We iced all the cakes with variations of cream-cheese icing, using 300g of icing sugar, sifted; 50g of unsalted butter, softened; 125g of cream cheese.
Add around 100g of the sugar to the butter, and slowly beat in by hand, until well combined, then add more sugar a little at a time; add the cheese, and blend by hand until the powder is no longer powdery. Then beat with electric mix until well combined. For lemon, we added some zest and yellow colouring.

(Another, slightly sharper, pic here.)

I’m not particularly a fan of hot cross buns, or fruity breads in general, but I am a fan of goodies that are traditionally baked on particular feast days. Hot cross buns are associated with the Christian Good Friday – the cross symbolising the machine of Christ’s torture and execution. Good old Wikipedia also adds some information about buns with a cross symbol also being eaten in pre-Christian times to honour to goddess Eostre, who may have given the name to Easter. Fascinating!

I made my a week before the traditional Good Friday. So sue me.The blasted supermarkets stock them for about 2 months before Easter.

These were based on another splendid recipe by Mr Dan Lepard. Here’s the recipe. It uses stout; I used Wychwood Brewery’s Hobgoblin instead, as it’s a nice dark ale, and it’s what we had in the house. You mix it with the yeast, spices and some of the flour, and make a sponge, which you leave to ferment overnight. You also mix peel and raisins with black tea. Dark ale? Black tea? Spices? You can’t argue with that.

Now it’s time for a song:

“Hot cross buns!
Hot cross buns!
One ha’ penny, two ha’ penny,
Hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters,
Give them to your sons
One ha’ penny,
Two ha’ penny,
Hot Cross Buns!”