Week 30 – Banoffee Pie

This weekend I went to the place that is my ultimate baking inspiration, the most civilised, elegant place in the world to go for tea and cake, Betty’s Tea Room! I grew up in Yorkshire and on Saturday I took a flying visit back down to Harrogate to see two old school friends Alex and Julia. Alex is getting married in 6 weeks' time so I wanted to take her out for a special pre-wedding treat and Julia has just completed the most ridiculous cycling challenge, the Tour De Force for an amazing cause, DBMT (you can read more about her adventure and still have the chance to donate http://www.bmycharity.com/juliakeenlyside), so these girls deserved the best cakes in town!

Exquisite!

Betty’s is an oldie woldie tea room which offers every baked good you could imagine, in beautiful surroundings, with old fashioned service. As the girls and I had a long overdue catch up we tucked in to finger sandwiches, scones with jam and clotted cream and exquisite, delicate pastries and cakes. Looking at the beautiful raspberry tart made me think that it was about time I tried out my newly purchased pie tin and made a pie or tart.

I really would like to have braved it and made pastry from scratch this week, but with having to travel back from Yorkshire and then going to a 3 hour choir rehearsal on Sunday morning time didn’t really allow me to be too adventurous - maybe next week. So instead I opted to make a Banoffee Pie, which was more of an assembly job rather than a bake, but it turned out well in the end. The recipe came from the ever-reliable BBC Good Food, here’s the link:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/8183/banoffee-pie

Ingredients

• 300g oaty biscuits (Hob Nobs are good)
• 60g butter, melted
• 397g tin Nestlé Carnation Caramel
• 3 large bananas, sliced
• 350ml double cream
• 1 tbsp icing sugar
• 100g dark chocolate (I am not a huge dark chocolate fan so I used Cadbury’s milk chocolate flakes instead, which meant I could just crumble it over the pie instead of having to melt it)

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Crush the biscuits in a food processor then add the melted butter and pulse to combine. I don’t have a food processor much to the amazement of many of my friends after so many weeks of baking!!  Anyway, I just put the biscuits in a sandwich bag, wrapped a tea towel around the bag and bashed it with a rolling pin until the biscuits were crushed into small pieces. Then I just poured it all into a bowl and mixed in the butter. A few people commented on the recipe’s webpage that the base was too crumbly, so I put in more butter than the recipe suggested: probably about 100grams rather than 60. Press the mixture into a 24cm tart tin, with a removable base, in an even layer. Transfer the tin to a baking sheet and cook for 10-12 minutes, until lightly toasted and set. Leave to cool then gently release from the tin and put on a serving plate.
   
   
2. Spread the caramel over the biscuit base and chill for 1 hour. Arrange the banana slices over the toffee. Whip the cream and sugar together to form soft peaks (I got a bit carried away and over whipped my cream, I was trying to make a cup of tea at the same time as using my electric hand whisk which probably wasn’t wise...anyway, it just meant the cream was a bit tricky to spread and was a bit flatter than planned!) and spread over the bananas. Melt the chocolate in a microwave or in a bowl set over, not in, a pan of simmering water. Allow to cool slightly, before drizzling over the cream. As I said in the ingredients list I prefer milk chocolate so I bought Cadbury’s flakes and just crumbled them over instead of melting dark chocolate. More importantly this saved me having another bowl to wash up which is critical because I don’t have a dishwasher so every little helps!!

Mmmm...

Overall the pie was very tasty but very sweet so I would suggest serving a small slice at a time. It did get the thumbs up and the ‘amazeballs’ rating from my husband Dave so that’s got to be good I guess! I think this would be a great bake to make if you have people coming for dinner or are going round to eat with friends because it’s super easy but looks quite impressive and serves loads of people.

See you next week, happy baking!

Xx Linds xx

Week 29 - Lemon curd and blueberry loaf cake

In searching for a recipe for this week's bake I was not only looking for something that met my two usual criteria of 1) a recipe I haven’t tried before 2) a recipe that has roughly 15 ingredients or less (I have found that any more than this that the recipe is probably going to be too complicated which reduces the fun factor of the baking experience!), but also an additional third criteria: a cake with the right structural composition that it could be shaped into an exact replica of an Ambulance... Yes that’s right, this week I made an Ambulance cake. Let me set the scene...

My relentless baking over the last 29 weeks has proven too much for myself and my husband Dave to eat at home, so I often take my baked goods into work to share with my colleagues. A couple of months ago whilst sharing one of my bakes, a colleague suggested an inter-office “Great British Bake Off” style weekly competition. Every Friday one of our teams brings work-themed baked goods into the office and at the end of the series we all get to vote for our favourite, judged in terms of bake, presentation and theme. I work for an organisation which is delivering a major sporting event in Glasgow next year, so needless to say I work with a whole host of sporty people and sporty people are competitive people - even it seems when it comes to cakes!! Those of you who know me know that I am the least sporty and the least competitive person around hence my surprise that people's competitive spirit can extend to the seemingly basic task of eggs and flour being mixed together!!!

My team, which looks after Medical and Anti-Doping services, were up this week and the stakes were high. The teams over the last five weeks had put in an impressive array of sport themed cakes so we needed to raise the bar with our entries. The lemon curd and blueberry loaf cake turned out to be the perfect choice for making my Ambulance. The recipe was from the reliably wonderful BBC Good Food website, by far the best place I have found to get easy baking recipes from.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/358609/lemon-curd-and-blueberry-loaf-cake

Ingredients
·         175g softened butter, plus extra for greasing
·         500ml tub Greek yoghurt (you need 100ml/3½ fl oz in the cake, the rest to serve)
·         300g jar good lemon curd (you need 2 tbsp in the cake, the rest to serve)
·         3 eggs
·         zest and juice 1 lemon, plus extra zest to serve, if you like
·         200g self-raising flour
·         175g golden caster sugar
·         200g punnet of blueberries (you need 85g/3oz in the cake, the rest to serve)
·         140g icing sugar

Method

• Heat oven to 160C (my oven is fan assisted but seems to run a bit cool so I had the temperature at 180C)/140C fan/gas 3.
  
• Grease a 2lb loaf tin and line with a long strip of baking parchment. Put 100g yoghurt, 2 tbsp lemon curd, the softened butter, eggs, lemon zest, flour and caster sugar into a large mixing bowl. Quickly mix with an electric whisk until the batter just comes together. Scrape half into the prepared tin.
  
• Weigh 85g blueberries from the punnet and sprinkle half into the tin (a few people had commented on the recipe that the blueberries tended to sink to the bottom of the cake so I borrow one of the tips and      rolled the blueberries in a little bit of self raising flour before I put them into the mixture and sure enough the berries stayed right at the top), scrape the rest of the batter on top, then scatter the other half of the 85g berries on top. Bake for 1 hr 10 mins-1 hr 15 mins until golden, and a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean. Like a few others who commented on the recipe the cake took about an extra 10 minutes to cook than the recipe suggested and I also turned up my oven towards the end to try to speed things up because I was keen to get the second of the two loafs needed for the Ambulance in the oven!
  
• Cool in the tin, then carefully lift onto a serving plate to ice. Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and stir in enough lemon juice to make a thick, smooth icing. Spread over the top of the cake, then decorate with lemon zest and edible flowers, if you like. Serve in slices with extra lemon curd, Greek yoghurt and blueberries.

Clearly I didn't follow the recommended serving suggestions in this case but I would make the cake again. The small slice I managed to wrestle away from my hungry colleagues was fresh and tangy, which was a nice treat in this unusually warm Scottish weather and I agree that it would be yummy served with extra Greek yoghurt and/or lemon curd.

Fingers crossed my workmates thought the Ambulance and the other cakes (made by my amazing colleagues Liz, Katya, Jeanette, Sarah, Nuala and Jonny's wife Jules) made the grade in terms of taste and presentation. You can see the whole ensemble below, along with the team in their appropriate uniforms for delivering and serving the cakes!! I think you will agree that we might have gone a little over the top but it will all be worth it when we are crowned office Bake Off champions!!

Loaf number one before its transformation...

The Ambulance from above, blueberries for the blue flashing lights

The Ambulance from the side, Oreo cookie wheels, pomegranate lights and Lego Paramedic.

The Ambulance from the side, Oreo cookie wheels, pomegranate lights and Lego Paramedic.  

Anti-Doping cake, complete with lemon jelly urine samples!

First Aid cake with fondant plasters.

Polyclinic (hospital) cake with patient in a pink wafer bed, x-ray man and edible optometry, podiatry and dental departments!

Recovery cake with jelly baby athletes in marshmallow ice baths and fondant icing  towels. 

The surgical team ready to start the cutting of the cakes procedure!

See you next week for what I am sure will be a slightly less competitive but equally yummy bake.

Xx Linds xx

The story so far...

So what does 28 weeks of baking look like, well this is what I have baked so far...

• Banana bread
• Mary Berry's chocolate and vanilla marble loaf
• Lemon drizzle cake
• Victoria sandwich
• Berry buttermilk muffins
• Triple chocolate chunk muffins
• Buttermilk scones
• Red velvet cake

Red velvet cake

Scones

• Naughty chocolate fudge cake
• Cheese scones
• Nutella swirl banana muffins
• All American chocolate chunk cookies

All American cookies

• Carrot cupcakes
• Apples loaf
• Apricot flapjack
• Double chocolate flapjack
• Amazing chocolate cupcakes
• Banana, brown sugar and pecan muffins
• Raspberry muffins
• Guinness Cake

Guinness cake

Raspberry muffins

• Profiteroles
• Nigella Nutella cheesecake
• Ice cream cupcakes

Ice cream cupcakes

• Apple and cinnamon struesel cake
• Crunchy apple and raspberry crumble
• Banana peanut butter muffins
• Best-ever brownies
• Millionaires shortbread



Millionaires shortbread

As you can imagine I have picked up a few hints and tips along the way from baking this many cakes and having one or two mishaps (which isn't a bad ratio from 28 bakes!). Most of my tips just confirm all those things your Home Economics teacher tried to teach you when you were at school: turn the oven on before you start, wash up as you go, always grease your baking tins blah blah blah - boring but actually useful advice!

Most importantly though, 28 weeks has taught me to not to worry about baking. My friends will tell you that I tend to be a bit of a worrier and I get quite stressed, but not when it comes to baking and this baking challenge. It really doesn't matter if you put in a bit too much flour, forget the sugar or you muffins don't rise properly because at the end of the day it's just cake!! 

From now on I'm going to try to post once a week with a photo of the weekend's achievements (or otherwise). I'm always looking for good recipes for new things so feel free to suggest bakes! As long as they have 'easy' in the title... I don't do complicated...

Have a yummy week!

Linds xx