The penultimate week of the baking challenge has been an
action packed quadruple bake week, two were the main event and two were cheeky
add-ons. On Wednesday I made a classic Victoria sponge for one of my colleagues’
birthdays which warmed me up nicely to do two bakes on Saturday for my husband
and brother-in-law’s birthdays (they are identical twins!). With their birthdays
being so close to Christmas they coined the term Birthmas many years ago which usually
involves a fun filled long weekend of birthday and Christmas celebrations all
in one and this year was one of the best yet. We had Dave’s parents, bother,
sister and sister-in-law visiting us in bonnie Scotland for the weekend and to
get everyone ready for a packed day of birthday fun we started the celebrations
with an Apple Tart, a Tunis Cake and a bottle of fizz.
Seeing as Dave has been such a great support during the
baking challenge by editing my blog, giving me helpful feedback on my bakes and
eating VAST quantities of cake every week for the last 50 weeks (it’s a hard
life) I thought it was only fair he got to choose his own birthday bake.
Slightly randomly he chose an apple tart, not your traditional birthday cake
but it actually turned out to be a great choice. I wanted to make something
more cake-like to give Dave’s brother Nick a treat as well. Mary Berry came up with the answer yet again,
this time during this week’s Great
British Bake Off Christmas Special. One of Mary’s recipes was for a Tunis Cake
which is apparently a traditional Christmas time bake (no one I have mentioned
this to has ever heard of it, mind you) so I thought this might make a good
birthmas compromise.
Apple tart
Ingredients
- 375g pack puff pastry, preferably all-butter
- 5 large eating apples - Cox's, russets or Elstar
- juice of 1 lemon
- 25g butter, cut into small pieces
- 3 tsp vanilla sugar or 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tbsp caster sugar
- 3 rounded tbsp apricot conserve
Method
- Heat
oven to 220C/fan 200C/gas 7. Roll out the pastry and trim to a round about
35cm across (I just rolled out the pastry in a
rectangle shape because it was just easier to fit it onto the baking sheet).
Transfer to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
- Peel,
core and thinly slice the apples and toss in the lemon juice. Spread over
the pastry to within 2cm of the edges. Curl up the edges slightly to stop
the juices running off.
- Dot the top with the butter and sprinkle with vanilla and caster sugar. Bake for 15-20 mins until the apples are tender and the pastry crisp. I put the baking tray on top of another tray which had been heating in the oven. A colleague years ago told me you should always do that when cooking with puff pastry to help it cook underneath and avoid the dreaded soggy bottom.
- Warm the conserve and brush over the apples and pastry edge. Serve hot with vanilla ice cream or crème fraîche. I served it with either double cream or ice cream and it was delicious!
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| Before.... |
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| After... |
Tunis cake
Ingredients
Cake
- 225g/8oz softened butter
- 225g/8oz caster sugar
- 225g/8oz self-raising
flour
- 70g/2½oz ground almonds
- 4 large free-range eggs
- 1 large lemon, finely grated
zest only
Topping
- 300ml/10fl oz double cream
- 400g/14oz plain chocolate, broken
into small pieces
- 200g/7oz natural marzipan (I don’t like marzipan so just used fondant icing
for the birthmas decorations... see the photos below)
- gel food colouring, in
red and green (these weren’t
required for our artistic vision!)
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4 (fan
160C). Grease and line a 20cm/8in deep cake tin with baking parchment (the baking paper needs to come up high above the
top of the tin to create a collar for the topping to set in - see the photo below).
- Add
the butter, sugar, flour, ground almonds, eggs and lemon zest to the bowl
of a freestanding electric mixer (alternatively use a sturdy bowl and a
hand-held mixer). Beat on high speed for a minute. Spoon the batter into
the prepared cake tin and level the surface with a palette knife or
spatula (the batter was
quite stiff so I added a few drops of milk to try to loosen it up).
- Bake for 45 minutes, then cover with
foil to prevent the top from browning and cook for a further 15 minutes (I couldn’t imagine how it could take this long to
bake but it did... don’t doubt Mary B), or until a skewer inserted
into the centre comes out clean. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a
wire rack.
- For the topping, pour the cream into a
small pan and bring almost to the boil. Remove from the heat, add the
chocolate and stir until melted. When cool but not setting, pour the
chocolate mixture in an even coat over the cooled cake (that is still in
the tin) and put aside to set.
- To
decorate, colour 175g/6oz of the marzipan with green food colouring to
turn it the colour of holly leaves. Using a holly leaf shaped cutter, cut
out 20 holly leaves. Mark the veins with a knife, lay over a rolling pin
and leave to dry (this curls the leaves slightly). Colour the remaining
marzipan with the red food colouring and roll into 30 ‘holly berry’ size
balls. Leave to dry. I had
Dave and my sister-in-law Tori (of last week’s bake) as artistic directors
of the decorations and they well and truly went off-piste with this one.
As Nick has two cats and LOVES them loads they decided that there was
nothing he would love more for his birthday than a cat cake!!!
- To serve, remove the cake from the tin and carefully peel off the parchment paper so that you get a clean line between the cake and the chocolate layer. Arrange the holly leaves and berries in a wreath around the edge of the cake.
Birthmas was a triumph and the birthday boys really enjoyed their
cakes/bakes and a fun filled day.
I was a bit reluctant to make the apple tart at first
because it involved puff pastry and I knew that would take a lot of skill and time to make so I would have to buy it ready
made. This kind of went against the grain because in the previous 50 weeks of
the challenge I have tried to make as much as possible from scratch. But in the
end I listened to many great bakers - professional and amateur alike - who
quite rightly said that life is far too short to make puff pastry, you should just
buy it!!
As for the Tunis Cake I wouldn’t have thought that the
combination of lemon and chocolate flavours would work but it was surprisingly
fresh and would be a great alternative to a Christmas cake if you want
something lighter than the usual dried fruit fest. The cake itself was a bit
dense and went dry the next day but the chocolate topping makes up for that and
it was served with double cream which always helps!!
The week was rounded off with a fourth bake for our Birthmas
Christmas dinner on Sunday. With a LOT of help from sous-chefs Dave and Tori we
(I mean they really) whipped up a panetone bread and butter pudding which was
delicious. I would strongly recommend you use panetone for all bread and butter pudding desires in future, it is fabulous. This blog post was already far too long to put
the recipe in as well but you can find it here http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1358/panettone-pudding.
We just ignored the bit about the water bath set up, far too complicated on a
day full of Christmas cooking.
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| Birthday boys Dave and Nick with their cakes |
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| Erin (sister-in-law) and Jo (mother-in-law) |
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| Tori (sister-in-law) and Phil (father-in-law) |
Happy baking everyone, see you next week for the final instalment
(sniff sniff) of the baking challenge,
X Linds x
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