Week 38 - Chocolate bread and butter pudding

Another week, another choc fest! After last week’s Mississippi mud pie I was planning to go for something a little more on the savoury end of the spectrum for this week’s bake but we had a celebration planned and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate was requested!

Our good friends James and Lotte got engaged a few weeks ago and this past Friday we finally got the chance to celebrate with them. As it was such a special occasion I asked the happy couple what they would like me to make for them and James being a huge chocolate fan requested anything chocolaty. I decided that as there has been a turn in the weather recently it was time to break out the autumnal recipes and try a hot pudding, bread and butter to be exact. For this I had to look no further than the cooking/baking legend that is Delia Smith and we all agreed this recipe did her proud.

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/sweet/chocolate-bread-and-butter-pudding.html

Ingredients

• 9 slices of good quality white bread, one day old, taken from a large, medium sliced loaf. My bread was a day old but could really have done with being a bit more stale, it was a bit soft and squidgy, being a bit harder would have been better I think, it would have given the pudding extra crunch.  

•  5 oz (150 g) dark chocolate (70-75% cocoa solids), broken into small pieces. I did my usual and mixed milk and dark chocolate, 50g milk to 100g dark.

•  3 oz (75 g) butter

•  15 fl oz (425 ml) whipping cream

• 4 tablespoons dark rum

•  4 oz (110 g) caster sugar

•  good pinch cinnamon

•  3 large eggs

To serve

•  well chilled pouring cream

Method

1. Begin by removing the crusts from the slices of bread, which should leave you with 9 pieces about 4 inches (10 cm) square. So now cut each slice into 4 triangles. Next, place the chocolate, whipping cream, rum, sugar, butter and cinnamon in a bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water, being careful not to let the bowl touch the water, then wait until the butter and chocolate have melted and the sugar has completely dissolved. I have never really bothered doing this proper method of melting chocolate and butter before, I usually just stick them in the microwave but seeing as though this is a Delia recipe I thought I better do things properly or she might jump out of the laptop and tell me off!!
2. Next, remove the bowl from the heat and give it a really good stir to amalgamate all the ingredients.Now in a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and then pour the chocolate mixture over them and whisk again very thoroughly to blend them together.
3. Then spoon about a ½ inch (1 cm) layer of the chocolate mixture into the base of the dish and arrange half the bread triangles over the chocolate in overlapping rows. Now, pour half the remaining chocolate mixture all over the bread as evenly as possible, then arrange the rest of the triangles over that, finishing off with a layer of chocolate. Use a fork to press the bread gently down so that it gets covered very evenly with the liquid as it cools.
4. Cover the dish with clingfilm and allow to stand at room temperature for 2 hours before transferring it to the fridge for a minimum of 24 (I left it for 24 hours to soak) (but preferably 48) hours before cooking.
5. When you're ready to cook the pudding, pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4, 350°F (180°C). Remove the clingfilm and bake in the oven on a high shelf for 30-35 minutes, by which time the top will be crunchy and the inside soft and squidgy. Leave it to stand for 10 minutes before serving with well-chilled pouring cream poured over.

The votes are in and the future Mr and Mrs LOVED it!! They also said I could make their wedding cake...in the shape of an elephant...not sure if they were serious about either me making the cake or it being an elephant (they had both had a few drinks by this point.....) but I am happy to give it a whirl!!

I have to say the pudding didn’t look super appealing before it went in the oven, I thought it looked like I had poured Bisto gravy over some leftover sandwiches but I should have trusted Delia, she is a baking institution and sure enough after 35 minutes in the oven it was crispy, gooey, chocolaty goodness. It was the perfect treat to warm your cockles as the autumn nights have started to draw in. We not only got the chance to try a new bake this week but also a new type of cutlery, the spoonfork (a spoon on one end, fork on the other), which Lotte ‘liberated’ from a conference in Maastricht. This proved to be most useful for the bread and butter pudding as you could use the spoon for the gooey bits and fork end for the crunchy bits, it was fantastic. Good find Lotte!!

Let’s see if I can have a chocolate free week next week......

Have a tasty week xx Linds xx

P.S I also made my second cake for Free Cakes for Kids this week, another Princess Cake, this time I was lucky enough to be able to deliver it to the family’s home which was lovely. 

Week 37 - Mississippi Mud Pie

This week’s bake was a full-on chocfest and luckily I had a band of merry testers to try out the results to let me know if it was up to scratch. This weekend I popped down to Kent for a family party with my husband Dave and when we arrived back this afternoon I set about quickly whipping up this week’s bake which was Mississippi mud pie. This is a recipe I have been wanting to try for a while, I found it back in July when I was looking for American recipes to try whilst we were on holiday in ‘the south’ of the USA with our good friends Karlie and Neil. It was about time that I finally got round to making it and letting them try it. This recipe came from the main BBC website (not my usual BBC Good Food site but it is still a fab resource) and was originally featured by Simon Rimmer on the TV programme ‘Something for the Weekend’. http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mississippimudpie_93659

Ingredients

For the base

• 300g/10½oz bourbon biscuits, crushed
• 75g/2½oz butter, melted (I didn’t feel this was enough butter to make the biscuit mixture stick together so I added a bit more, probably about 95g in total)

For the filling

• 85g/3oz dark chocolate, minimum 70 per cent cocoa solids (I used milk chocolate instead because as you probably already know I prefer it)
• 85g/3oz butter
• 2 free-range eggs
• 85g/3oz muscovado sugar
• 100ml/3½oz double cream

For the fudge sauce

• 150g/5½oz dark chocolate, minimum 70 per cent cocoa solids (I used 100g dark, 50g milk)
• 150ml/5½fl oz double cream, plus extra to serve
• 3 tbsp golden syrup
• 175g/6oz icing sugar, sieved

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/365F/Gas 4.
2. Mix the biscuits and melted butter together in a bowl. Press the mixture into the base and sides of a 23cm/9in springform tin. Chill in the fridge for 10 minutes.
3. For the filling, melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water. (Do not let the base of the bowl touch the water). I know this is probably a much better way to do it but I just put the chocolate and butter in the microwave on a low setting to melt instead.
4. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs and sugar together in a bowl for 5-6 minutes, or until thick and creamy. Fold in the cream and melted chocolate mixture. Pour into the chilled springform tin and bake in the oven for 40-50 minutes, or until just set. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool completely.
5. Meanwhile, for the fudge sauce, heat all of the fudge sauce ingredients in a saucepan, stirring regularly, over a medium heat until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Set aside to cool for 5 minutes.
6. Spread the sauce over the cooled pie and chill in the fridge for 20 minutes. Serve with double cream. We were all a bit keen to try the pie so I didn’t really let the cake cool before adding the fudge and putting it in the fridge.
   
   
   
   Karlie and Neil popped over for the official taste testing and brought Karlie’s brother Tom and his girlfriend Josie with them too. Luckily they all brought their sweet teeth with them because while they all agreed it was a winner, it was SERIOUSLY chocolaty and sugary, so much so that Karlie had to stop eating for a break because she thought she might be getting the sugar shakes!! Everyone also agreed that even though it was already horribly calorific it was better with the suggested double cream served on top as well.

Josie and Karlie - pre sugar rush

Dave and Neil

Tom on his first of several slices...

Also, I think the fact that I didn’t actually let it cool properly before serving it was actually a good thing because the pie was still a bit warm and gooey in the middle which was a nice touch.

I would say if you are a serious chocolate lover and are looking for an alternative to a chocolate fudge cake then this is the pie for you. It certainly left my taste testers satisfied.

I might have to try something savoury next week to counteract all the sugar!

Have a yummy week x Linds x

Week 36 - Princess Castle Cake

This week’s bake was probably the most stressful of the year but by far the most rewarding and it was only a Victoria sponge!!! A few weeks ago a friend of mine Rebecca sent me a link to a charity called Free Cakes for Kids that she thought I might be interested in. Just days after I logged on to look at it another friend Kathryn was round for dinner with her husband and mentioned that she had started to volunteer with the Edinburgh branch of Free Cakes https://www.facebook.com/FreeCakesForKidsEdinburgh?fref=ts! Small world, huh? She put me in touch with the coordinator Lesley so I could find out more. Basically the organisation works in local networks around the UK and the coordinators take referrals from organisations who know of children who, for whatever reason will not be getting a birthday cake this year. Then one of the loyal, dedicated volunteers in the network whips up a tasty cake, usually with a theme relating to the child’s favourite thing (such as One Direction, Smurfs, pirates, princesses and other things that don’t necessarily lend themselves to cake!) and delivers it to the referring organisation for them to pass onto the child. So, this week was my initiation... my task was to make a birthday cake for Phoebe who was turning 6 years old and who would like ‘something Princess themed or anything girly’.

After lots of searching on Pinterest, and creative planning discussions with my husband Dave I finally decided to try to make a Princess Castle. This was followed by a fairly expensive, lengthy trip to Lakeland to get appropriate sized cake tins, fondant icing, edible glitter, a cake board etc. etc. etc. but it was worth it and hopefully I will get the chance to do lots more cakes for Free Cakes Edinburgh so it will all come in handy again. With all the right equipment it was time to start the creation. I have to say I really was quite nervous, as I don’t have any children of my own I’ve never made a kids’ novelty cake before and I don’t have much experience with fondant icing so it was going to be a steep learning curve. I also kept thinking about little Phoebe and what she was going think, it was so much pressure making cakes for other people. I remember my mum making me amazing novelty cakes when I was a child, I was so worried about messing it up and her being traumatised for life by my dodgy turrets or a princess toppling over the wall that was falling down!! But I got a huge list of hints and tips from Kathryn and some help from my good friend Jen so it was time to bite the bullet and get on with it...

Jen gets to work!

I decided to keep the cake itself quite basic because the decorating was going to take a while and I also thought a Victoria sponge with strawberry jam and butter cream was probably a safe choice for a wee girl. So my usual Vicky sponge recipe it would be. I doubled the quantities of everything below (I left them here just in case you want to use the normal recipe) to make enough to fill a 10inch, a 6inch and 4 ice cream cones filled with cake batter.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1997/classic-victoria-sandwich

Ingredients

For the cake

• 200g caster sugar
• 200g softened butter
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 200g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp milk

For the filling

• 100g butter, softened
• 140g icing sugar, sifted
• drop vanilla extract (optional)
• 340g jar good-quality strawberry jam

Method

1. Heat oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5. Butter two 20cm sandwich tins and line with non-stick baking paper. In a large bowl, beat all the cake ingredients together until you have a smooth, soft batter.
2. Divide the mixture between the tins, smooth the surface with a spatula or the back of a spoon, then bake for about 20 mins until golden and the cake springs back when pressed. Turn onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely.
3. To make the filling, beat the butter until smooth and creamy, then gradually beat in icing sugar. Beat in vanilla extract if you’re using it. Spread the butter cream over the bottom of one of the sponges, top it with jam and sandwich the second sponge on top. Dust with a little icing sugar before serving. Keep in an airtight container and eat within 2 days.

     Decoration

• 1kg white fondant roll icing – rolled out as per the packet instructions to approximately 4-5mm
• 500g pink fondant icing – doors, windows, walls all stuck onto the white fondant using ‘fondant glue’ which is just a block of fondant glue warmed up with a drop of water in the microwave. Thanks for the tip Kat!!
• 1 tub of edible pink glitter
• 1 tub of hundreds and thousands
• 4 flat bottomed ice cream cones and 4 standard ice cream cones
• LOADs of icing sugar
• Apricot jam for sticking the fondant icing to the cake
• Writing icing tubes for the name

In the end I was quite pleased with the result, it took several hours, a few mishaps along the way, total carnage in our kitchen and quite a lot of anxiety but in the end the cake vaguely resembled a princess castle. I also learnt LOADS for next time I do a Free Cakes for Kids cake so fingers crossed I will get a bit quicker.

Kitchen warzone

Kathryn kindly and safely delivered the castle and her amazing Smurf cake to the referring organisation Mentor http://www.mentoruk.org.uk/blog/ and got some lovely feedback to say how excited the children would be to receive them which was nice.

The finished castle

I will never meet Phoebe, or know if she really likes Victoria sponge or edible glitter but that doesn’t matter, it still feels rewarding to have done something as simple as bake for a great cause. I really hope she enjoyed her cake and maybe, just maybe in 20 years’ time she will be making a cake for her kids and remember the slightly dodgy turrets and sparkly castle cake that someone made her once...

Happy baking 

xx Linds xx

Week 34 and 35 - Orange and white chocolate cake AND Boozy raspberry victoria sponge

Well last week was a double header for cakes because there were two very important occasions...the prize giving/final of the inter office bake off and my lovely friend Claire's hen party so there was nothing else for it, I simply had to do a double bake week!

Bake 34

Orange and white chocolate cake

You will remember from week 29 that my work were having a weekly inter office cake off bake off and this past week was the prize giving for the winners which obviously had to be cake! I offered to help out my colleague Gemma who organised the competition by baking the prize, and being a sporting organisation the only thing appropriate was to make a winners podium cake. I made the first position (a triple layer cake) while Gemma made the second (a two layer chocolate cake) and a single layer victoria sponge for the third position. All three were topped with cream coloured icing (traditional butter cream for Gems and white chocolate crème fraîche for mine) and then sprayed gold with edible cake glitter.

The final touch was the ginger bread athletes made by Gemma, decorated with their medals, proudly standing on top of their winners podium.

The results were announced in Eurovision style reverse order and slightly embarrassingly for me as I was reading them out my team won! The medical and anti-doping cakes were victorious!!

So importantly though how do you make a winners podium cake....

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5524/orange-and-white-chocolate-sponge

Ingredients

(I used double of all of these quantities because I was making a triple layer cake, I kept the fourth cake for us to enjoy at home but I thought I would leave the quantities as standard here in case you want to try it for your self)

• 175g butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
• 175g golden caster sugar
• finely grated zest 4 orange and juice of 1
• 4 egg, separated
• 100g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 100g ground almonds (a member of the team at work is allergic to nuts so I was going to try to take the almonds out but some of the comments on the recipe said you have to replace this with flour because it can impact on the rise so I decided against trying to take it out on the first attempt. I had to disappoint my colleague but I thought it was best to follow Mary Berry’s advice to never change a recipe before you have tried it the traditional way the first time).

For the icing

• 200g white chocolate
• 200ml crème fraîche

Method

1. Heat oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Butter two 20cm round sandwich tins and line the bases with baking parchment. Tip the sugar into a mixing bowl and add the softened butter and orange zest. Beat for 1 min or so until pale and fluffy, then beat in the egg yolks. Sift the flour and baking powder over the cake mixture and fold in lightly. Finally, fold in the almonds and orange juice. Whisk the egg whites until they just hold their shape. Fold one-third of the egg white into the cake mix, using the whisk. Repeat with another third, then the final third. Take care not to over-mix or you will lose the lightness of the egg whites.
2. Divide the cake mix between the prepared tins and bake for 30-35 mins. Cool in the tin for 5 mins, then turn out onto a wire rack, peel off the lining paper and leave to cool.
3. To make the icing, melt the chocolate over a pan of barely simmering water or in the microwave on High for 1½ mins, stirring every 30 secs, then leave to cool. Whip the crème fraîche until thick, then fold in the white chocolate. Set one cake on a serving plate or cake stand. Spoon half the icing onto the cake and top with the other cake. Spread with the rest of the icing, then allow to set in the fridge for at least 1 hr.
4. If you want to make the decorative curls, melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water or in a microwave and spread thinly over a baking tray. Leave the tray in the fridge for the chocolate to harden a bit, then use a fish slice or angled knife blade to scrape chocolate curls. Pile the curls in the middle of the cake and serve cut into slices.

As I had to double the recipe to get the triple layers I did have to spend quite a long time zesting the 8 oranges which was less than ideal but other than that it was relatively straightforward. The cakes didn't really rise very much though so I think if you did just have the two standard layers then it might be a bit small looking.

Also, with the icing having crème fraîche in it I wasn't really sure if you were supposed to store the cake in the fridge the whole time?!? I did keep it in the fridge and it was still good but it does take away a bit of the fluffy, lightness of the cake but in general it was zesty and yummy, a bit like carrot cake really.

Victory in the cake off felt sweet but being the gracious winners we are we shared it with the whole team so really everyone who took part were the winners and got to enjoy the cake.

Now for the second bake of the week....officially week 35’s

Boozy raspberry Victoria sponge

After coming down from the high of victory the weekend was spent having a wonderful time making some new friends and celebrating at my old colleague Claire's hen party. It was only fair that I brought her a bake as she is a blog reader and with it being her hen it deserved a little drop of something boozy to liven up the usual mix!! I got the idea from one of my best friends Lydia who writes a wonderful blog called 'Todays the day I....' in which she does something new everyday in New York. A few weeks ago Lydia had alcoholic cupcakes for the first time so I thought I could give the concept a go myself. A bit of google searching didn't really provide many recipes so I thought I would throw caution to the wind and just wing it by adding some liquor and fresh raspberries to a normal victoria sponge recipe .....Well there were mixed results.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1997/classic-victoria-sandwich

Ingredients

For the cake

• 200g caster sugar
• 200g softened butter
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 200g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp milk
• I had no idea if adding these would be a good idea but....
• Handful of fresh raspberries
• 1.5tbsp (ish) Chambord

For the filling

• 200g white chocolate
• 200ml crème fraîche
• 340g jar good-quality raspberry jam
• Fresh raspberries soaked in Chambord
• 3 tsp (ish) Chambord

Method

1. Heat oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5. Butter two 20cm sandwich tins and line with non-stick baking paper. In a large bowl, beat all the cake ingredients together until you have a smooth, soft batter.
2. Divide the mixture between the tins, smooth the surface with a spatula or the back of a spoon, then bake for about 20 mins until golden and the cake springs back when pressed. Turn onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely.
3. To make the filling, beat the butter until smooth and creamy, then gradually beat in icing sugar. Beat in vanilla extract if you’re using it. Spread the butter cream over the bottom of one of the sponges, top it with jam and sandwich the second sponge on top. Dust with a little icing sugar before serving. Keep in an airtight container and eat within 2 days.

The lovely bride to be!

As I was just guessing quantities I had no idea how it would turn out until we cut into it and to be honest I was a bit disappointed with it. The alcoholic raspberries were tasty but the cake turned out a bit heavy which might have been the raspberries in the batter changing the consistency/quantities and making it lose some of its fluffiness.

The icing had a hint if an alcoholic taste but I probably could have been braver with my quantities. It would also have been nice if it had a more of a pink colour so maybe I should have added food colouring to help the alcohol along.

Anyway, all the hens made the right yummy noises but I'm not convinced it was very good. At least we had a super fun weekend and the champagne that went along with the cake went down a treat!

The double bake this week means I have one in the bank for this week so there might be a week off for the blog. See you in two! Linds Xx

Week 33 – Rocky Road

This week’s bake was done at 8.30am this morning, in my p-j’s, accompanied by a nice brew - what a way to start a Sunday hey!? This week I decided to make a fave of mine, Rocky Road. There we loads of recipes out there which were fundamentally very similar, so in the end I opted for Nigella Lawson’s Rocky Road Crunch Bars http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/rocky-road-crunch-bars-25. 

I chose this one because it has rich tea biscuits in it. Now they might be plain, humble biscuits but I love them, yep just can’t get enough of them. This is really because my Papa (our family’s, and many other Scottish families' term for Granddad, in this case my mum’s dad) always used to have them with a cup of tea so whenever I have them I remember him. Anyway, getting to use them in a recipe just gave me the chance to stop and remember him and my Gran who sadly passed away early this year. So Papa biscuits at the ready, (I kept one spare to have with my brew!) I got started.

Ingredients

• 125 grams soft butter
• 300 grams best-quality dark chocolate - broken into pieces (As I have said before I am not a huge dark chocolate fan so I used 200g of milk chocolate and 100g of dark)
• 3 tablespoons golden syrup
• 200 grams rich tea biscuits
• 100 grams mini marshmallows (I know all marshmallows are a bit strange and artificial-tasting but I think the mini ones are particularly weird, so I just used normal pink and white marshmallows and cut them up with scissors)
• I added 2 handfuls of dried cranberries, I just thought it might be a nice addition! Sorry Nigella, don’t mean to step on your toes or suggest it’s not a great recipe I just thought I could do with a bit of something extra!
• 2 teaspoons icing sugar (for dusting)

Method

1.    Melt the butter, chocolate and golden syrup in a heavy-based saucepan. Scoop out about 125ml / ½ cup of this melted mixture and put to one side.

2.    Put the biscuits into a freezer bag and then bash them with a rolling pin. You are aiming for both crumbs and pieces of biscuits.

3.    Fold the biscuit pieces and crumbs into the melted chocolate mixture in the saucepan, and then add the marshmallows. (Having the chopped up marshmallows meant they sort of melted a bit at this stage which I think made the mixture a bit gooier than expected but it still turned out OK)

4.    Tip into a foil tray (24cm / 9 inch square); flatten as best you can with a spatula. Pour the reserved 125ml / ½ cup of melted chocolate mixture over the marshmallow mixture and smooth the top.

5.    Refrigerate for about 2 hours or overnight. (2 hours was long enough, so thank goodness you don’t have to wait too long for the tasty treat!)

6.    Cut into 24 fingers and dust with icing sugar by pushing it gently through a tea strainer or small sieve.

Mmmm

 As Nigella says herself these would make a great snack to add to a lunchbox. I proved that they do travel well because I took a couple of slices for my friend Rachel and her husband Alex this afternoon and have just had a text to say they were delicious! It was a super quick tray bake to whip up and a nice way to start a Sunday thinking about my Papa.

Have a happy, baking full week,

Xx Linds xx

Week 32 – Baked lemon cheesecake with baked plums and blackberries

Ingredients looking promising.

Well another busy week and weekend has flown by. Between visits to the Edinburgh fringe and the UCI Juniors Track World Championship cycling at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow I yet again didn't have time to try to make pastry! One of these days... But I did venture into the new world of pairing cakes with wine.

This past weekend I had my in-laws visiting and as they are avid readers of the blog I felt the need to make something quite impressive!! The BBC Good Food magazine came up trumps with a baked lemon cheesecake with blackberry and plum topping.

Ingredients

200g shortbread biscuits
25g melted butter
600g full-fat cream cheese
75g golden caster sugar
4 large eggs
3 tsp vanilla extract
100ml soured cream

For the baked fruit:
8 plums, halved, stone removed, then cut into wedges
300g blackberries
100g light muscavado sugar

Method

1. Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 2. Line base of a 22cm round, springform tin with baking parchment. Put the biscuits in a food processor and whizz to fine crumbs. Tip into a bowl, add the melted butter and mix well. Press the biscuits into the base of the cake tin and put in the fridge to chill.

2. Beat together the cream cheese and sugar with an electric hand whisk until smooth. Carefully add the eggs, one at a time, with the lemon zest and vanilla extract until well mixed, but don't overwhisk (I really hate it when recipes say this, how are you supposed to know if you have overwhisked it if you are not a master baker? And if you do overwhisk, what will happen?!?!?) Pour the mixture onto the chilled biscuit base and bake in the middle of the oven for 50 mins until just set (I baked mine for 60 minutes). Set aside to cool for 10 mins, the remove from the tin and allow to cool completely.

3. Meanwhile, turn the oven up to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. Put the plums, blackberries and sugar in a large roasting tin and toss together well. Bake in the oven for 10-12 mins until the fruits have collapsed and the sauce is syrupy. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.

4. When the cheescake is completely cooled, spoon the soured cream over the top and spread in a thin layer. Serve in wedges topped with some of the baked plums and blackerries, and the rest of the side.

The texture of a baked cheesecake always surprises me because I feel like its sort of cheesecake but also sort of a firm sweet omelette/scrambled egg concoction which I’m just not sure about. I was worried that it wouldn't be lemony enough with only the zest of one lemon but to my surprise it was quite zingy. Fortunately we happened to open a bottle of red wine (that we found in the back of a cupboard) after dinner which turned out to be a lovely accompaniment to the berry/plum topping and the freshness of the cake. I have heard of pairing wines with meats/fish/cheese but not really cakes and bakes so maybe this is an untapped market and one I need to explore further, maybe with a Saturday morning TV show?? Could this be my next career move??

Overall it looked impressive, it had a nice flavour but it wasn't my favourite bake, I'm just not sure the baked cheesecake is the way to go over the traditional variety. Anyway, worth a try!

Happy baking, see you next week for another tasty treat!

Linds xx

Week 31 – Beer Bread

This last week culminated with a very busy but fun weekend: my brother-in-law Nick and his wife Erin came up from Oxford to visit and we took a lovely trip to one of my absolute favourite places in the world, St Andrews. And what better to do in the home of golf than watch some top class competition, the Women's British Open to be exact (won by American Stacy Lewis).

With the baking challenge in mind my first instinct was to try to make something golf related or themed and I found some amazing looking golf ball ‘cake pops’ on the food and drink section of Pinterest http://pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=golf%20cake%20pop .If you haven't heard of or been on Pinterest it's just like a big online version of an old fashioned notice board where you can 'pin' your fave photos of things. Every pinned photo is linked to the relevant website where the image/product/recipe etc. came from, it's super fun and quite addictive. I haven't made cake pops yet and they seem to be the trendy thing in the cake world at the moment so I was quite keen, but sadly I couldn't seem to get hold of the golf ball moulds anywhere in the UK so that was off the cards.

Back on the quest of a new recipe I continued to browse on Pinterest and found a few bread recipes and decided I would give it a go! I have long been saying I need to try to expand my savoury range and bread seemed like a good way to go. The recipe that caught my eye was for beer bread, it was from an American website food.com and it had some seriously good reviews from people who had made before it so I thought I would give it a whirl. Brilliantly it only had 4 ingredients, I think it is probably the fewest number of ingredients I've ever baked with which made it incredibly straightforward.
http://www.food.com/recipe/sweet-beer-bread-70366?mode=metric&scaleto=1.0&st=null

Ingredients

• 3 cups self-raising flour

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 x (12 ounce) bottle beer (Non-Alcoholic or Light Beer may be substituted) I used Kronenbourg 1664, because that’s what we had in the house. I saw on another recipe that its best to use a warm beer for beer bread so I did that and then popped what was left in the fridge for Dave to enjoy later!

• 1/4 cup butter or 1/4 cup margarine, melted. I used salted butter which seemed to add a nice salty/sweet taste to the crust.

All these ingredients are measured in the American cups measures. I happen to have a set of cups from my time living in the US (you can buy them over here relatively cheaply so it’s probably worth the investment for a few pounds if you want to use a few American recipes) but if you don’t you can google the conversion to ml’s/grams quite easily on websites like

http://allrecipes.com/howto/cup-to-gram-conversions/

Method

1.  Stir together first 3 ingredients; pour into a lightly greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.

2.  Bake at 350 for 35 minutes.
3.  Pour melted butter over top.
4.  Bake 10 more minutes. I took my loaf out after the 45 minutes and noticed it had a slightly soggy bottom (tut tut tut Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry would not be happy) and was a bit doughy when I cut a slice so I popped it back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes until it was a little bit more firmer and crispy. 

Well I have to say the bread went down a treat according to Dave, Nick and Erin who all had several slices over the weekend! It tasted a bit like corn bread in that it was sweet and salty at the same time, there was a slight hint of beer but it wasn’t overwhelming which was good because I’m not a big beer drinker.  You could use it with savoury things like paté but it toasted well so we enjoyed it for breakfast with jam.

All in all for my first adventure into the world of bread it went remarkably well. I’m not sure Paul Hollywood would really call it bread because you didn’t have to use yeast (that’s because you can cheat with the beer) and there is no kneading but it looked like bread and had a surprisingly bready texture so I say it is bread! 

See you next week for another yummy bake x

Linds xx