It was our nephew Ruben’s 1st birthday party at the weekend, His mum Riette made a huge amount of wonderful cakes and I contributed with some very sugary blondies for the adults and jam muffins (which I’ve made before but with cranberry).

This recipe is from the More from Magnolia cookbook that Riette bought me one Christmas. It’s very American and the ingredients often include things like ‘canned cherry pie filling’ or ‘graham cracker crumbs’?! Some are decipherable however and these blondies were delicious and will have you on a sugar high all day.

Ingredients:
(all converted from American cups)
225g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
130g (aprox or 4.5 oz) butter
225g firmly packed light brown sugar
112g or 4oz granulated sugar
2 large eggs at room temperature (I used 3 small ones)
2 tsps vanilla extract
110g/4oz chopped walnuts
130g/4.5oz coarsely chopped white chocolate
88g/3oz coarsely chopped dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Grease and light flour (I lined the base too) 13 x 9-inch baking pan.

In a small bowl combine the flour, bp and salt, set aside.
In a large bowl cream the butter and sugars until smooth, for about 2 minutes. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat well. Add the dry ingredients and mix r. Stir in the walnuts and chocolate chunks and spread even over the pan. Bake for 35-40 minutes the books says but check after 20 – mine cooked very quickly and you want them to be a little gooey in the middle.

I was thinking that I should buy some American cups to make life easier. I like that method of measuring rather than weighing – I wish I could just use my eye – not that skilled yet!

The drizzled white chocolate isn’t as elegant as it probably should be, but this was still quite a handsome cake. Especially in this nice pic, c/o Fran.

The source recipe used fresh fruit on top, but as I had some freeze-dried raspberries, I used some of them instead – and added a handful to the batter too.

Grease and base-line a 2lb loaf tin and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

In a bowl, mix together:
150ml natural yogurt
75ml corn oil
3 eggs

In another, large bowl, sieve together:
175g plain flour
2 t baking powder
Then stir in:
75g ground almonds
160g caster sugar

Add the liquid to the dry and beat till combined.

Stir in:
25g poppy seeds
And a handful of freeze-dried raspberries, if you have such a thing…
You could also add white choc chips.

Bake for an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Cool in the tin for 10 mins, then take out and cool fully on a wire rack.

Melt 65g white chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, then drizzle that onto the cooled cake. With berries – fresh or freeze-dried.

Nice. But not as nice as Jo’s lemon drizzle cake.

Another delicious Dan Lepard recipe, originally published in The Guardian Weekend magazine in October 2007. This is a pale cousin to brownie, utilising the reliable flavour combination of white chocolate and banana, and also including a delicious Brazil nut praline.

Here’s the recipe, on Dan’s forums.

I disagree with a few of the instructions in his recipe though. For example, I don’t like to chop up the praline “finely” – seems a shame to not have nice chunks of nut in the finished result.

I find it easier to blend the mix if you mash the bananas first.

Also, he says line the tin with foil – huh? That baffles me, as foil sticks and tears. Line the tin with baking parchment to make life a lot easier.

And finally, watch that baking time – 35 mins is a too long for my oven, even when it’s set to 170C; it dries it out too much. You want that nice chewy, slightly under-baked texture like with a good brownie. (Yep, this batch is slightly over-baked!).

My fellow baking enthusiast at work, Ms Hannah Mearns, lent me The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf.

I made these. They were delicious. I ordered the book from Amazon. Home Delivery Network were crap… and I’ve still not got it! I want to make some more goodies from it. Among other things, I want to make both its chocolate cupcake and its chocolate muffin recipes, to indulge in the never-ending debate about what distinguishes the two.

Anyway, these cookies used a nifty technique where you make the dough, roll it into a sausage, then freeze the sausage for an hour. You then cut rounds and bake ‘em. It gives the finished biscuit a nice, almost production-liney regularity. Kinda.

Pecan and white choc is a quality combo, but this basic recipe is probably fairly versatile, so I’ll try some other variations… when HDN delivery my flippin’ Amazon order. Hmph.

So after all the experiments and tweaking and worrying, the big day for Dan and Fran arrived and I think it worked out ok! I made the base and the middle layer on the Tuesday before and the top on Wednesday night after having my cast taken off (hooray).  I think the cakes sitting for a couple of days meant they condensed a little again (this was evident after the wedding too – the remaining cake seemed to be more dense each day) but I don’t think it was a problem.I iced the cake the day before the wedding down in Devon and loved taking advantage of the huge country house kitchen complete with Aga of course.

I think the middle Chocolate and Creme de Cassis layer was my favourite, very much like a luxurious chocolate brownie, very rich. I may have overdosed on the white chocolate mud cake however!

What I enjoyed most, apart from seeing my two dear friends get married, was decorating it with real roses and foliage. I found the process rather cathartic before rushing off to bridesmaid duties (mainly painting nails and drinking champagne, tough). The ‘figures’ on the top are customised cinema tickets: Admit Dan, Admit Fran, significant because they met during their film MA. Oh, and yes… that is a sword.

So, congratulations Dan and Fran and it was honour to bake your cake!

This cake is certainly for the brave, especially when you read the ingredients. It is my first attempt at the base layer for Dan and Fran’s wedding cake, basically triple the quantity of this cake I made for Dan’s birthday last year. It’s not quite right yet, you can visually see the difference – a bit dense in the middle, stodgy even. Baking such a huge cake (30cm tin) which is very liquidy when you put it in the oven, takes some tweaking. I covered the cake with foil for the first two hours and then removed the foil and baked for another  hour and a half. I think I could have left it in for another half hour and considering advice from Dan and people on Dan Lepard’s forum, perhaps increase the temperature at the beginning then lower it.

Well, I’ll just have to make another and somehow the huge beast will be consumed. I need a birthday in May – any takers?!

Here’s the ingredients – hold on to your hats:

750g butter
450g white chocolate
1,320g caster sugar
750ml milk
675g plain flour
225g self-raising flour
6 eggs (lightly beaten)
3 tsp vanilla essence

Combine the butter (chopped), chocolate, sugar and milk in a large saucepan and heat gently until smooth – stir with a wooden spoon. Transfer to a large bowl and leave to cool for 15 minutes.

Whisk in the flour, essence and egg, pour into a lined 30cm cake tin and then experiment with the baking time! I had the oven at 180 and covered it as I said but will try a warmer oven next time and then reduce the heat half way through.

It seems to have got the thumbs up from those who’ve tried it so far but i think it needs to be less sticky in the middle. Mainly because it actually sunk a little which would be no good for the base. Well hopefully the next lorry load of ingredients will produce a successful cake, wish me luck!

Technically this is called a “White chocolate mud cake”, but, well, ick. “Mud” and “cake” doesn’t seem like a nice combo to me.

Jo made a delicious one for my birthday in 2008 and on her post included a link to a similar recipe from an Australian food blog. That’s the  I tried here. I undercooked it a bit unfortunately (rushing to go out), but it was still delicious.

Like Jo’s earlier version, it was very rich and dense. 300g of white chocolate in the cake alone for this one, and I made it in a fairly small cake tin (20cm square).

The ganach in this recipe called for another 200g of white chocolate, melted over a low heat in a saucepan, then mixed with sour cream (rather than the usual method of heating cream and adding it to choc). White choc seems to seize even more easily than dark, so I did it in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water instead.

Half a kilo of white chocolate. You can’t really argue with that.

…I have managed to write a post since the birth of Ivy (only seven weeks ago mind you). This doesn’t mean I’ve not been baking, somehow between the madness I’ve managed a crumble, an apple cake and this White Chocolate Mud Cake for fellow cake-offer Dan on his birthday. I’ve never made a ganache before – dead simple, just hot cream poured over chocolate and stirred a bit. I always thought it was more complicated – just a posh sounding name i guess!

Anyway, this recipe was from a little Women’s Weekly booklet my sister gave me in Australia. It includes every possible chocolate cake there is (well, that might not be accurate). The cake was hideously delicious – only a small slice needed unless you’re Dan or I of course.

I will attempt to post the recipe at some point – right now i have a small window of opportunity! This is a similar recipe but not quite the same ingredients.

aka White chocolate and strawberry tart
aka White chocolate and strawberry tart with a few strawberries for good measure.

This one was from a Good Housekeeping magazine. Fran loves white chocolate so it was a must for her birthday.

The case called for ground hazelnuts, but I used almonds. Made for a crumbly pastry that was hard to handle (hence slightly raggedly edge. Really must work on my pastry skills), but nice to eat.

The filling was white chocolate melted together with mascarpone, plus a bit of whipped cream. Yum. Seriously yum, if rich. But hey, rich + a bit of fruit is good right?

It was rather nice, but I stupidly forget to take the recipe.