Hey there internet folks, welcome to my fledgling blog! This is a project that I have started and deleted and then started and deleted quite a few times and I’m hoping this time I will live up to my new year’s resolution and actually stick at it! I’m hoping to keep you posted on my life and baking mini adventures and I’m also hoping that you’ll enjoy reading about them! OK, so here goes…
Seeing as baking is my passion and I’m pretty sure that I will bang on about it on more than occasion, it’s fitting, really, that my first post should involve cake, and lots of it.
When I was at university, I had the most excellent idea of holding a bake sale for charity in the foyer of the library. After all, I wanted to bake and my house mates had started to complain that I was making them fat. This combined with the knowledge that a hungry student doing coursework or studying for exams will want and need cake. With this in mind, I started to brainstorm what I was going to bake and roped in friends to help. And then a Dissertation-shaped bomb landed slap bang on top of me and didn’t budge for several months. What I needed was for someone else to hold a charity bake sale to feed my hungry brain… unfortunately, no one did so instead I ate share bags of sweets to myself and no money was raised.
About a month ago, once again faced with the dilemma of wanting to bake but, it being January, I had friends and family attempting to make it through the month without breaking their new-years diets, the idea of holding a bake sale at my office struck me. With Red Nose Day looming and Comic Relief being such a fantastic and worthy cause, I decided it was the ideal time to hold a cake sale.
I knew that employees of Capita in Trowbridge were an office of cake lovers, thanks to the almost daily emails entitled ‘It’s my birthday!’ followed by an invitation to come and go and help myself to some baked goodies. With this knowledge, I sent out a mass email requesting for help in the cake baking department- and was a little concerned when I only receive two or three emails back… I was going to have to do some hard-core baking.
It was the day before the sale. I’d spent £18.00 on ingredients and I had the afternoon off. It was go time. 4 different cakes to make, bake and decorate and around about 7 hours to do this in. First to make was lemon drizzle tray bake, courtesy of my mum’s battered Mary Berry Ultimate Cake Book, bought about 15 years before the Bake Off was even conceived. It’s a deliciously tangy cake, which I love because there’s no point in lemon cake if you can’t taste the lemon! For some unknown reason, I didn’t take a picture of this, so you’ll just have to use your imaginations I’m afraid.
To make this zesty cake for yourself, you will need:
225g (8oz) soft margarine (e.g. Stork)
225g(8oz) caster suger
275g (10oz) self raising flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 eggs
4 tablespoons milk
grated rind of 2 large lemons
For the icing
juice of 1 lemon
100g (4oz) granulated sugar
And here’s how you do it:
1) Pre-heat your oven to 160⁰C (fan oven)/Gas 4. Grease and line a 30×23 cm (12×9 in) roasting tin with greaseproof paper.
2) Measure all of the ingredients into a large bowl/ stand mixer and beat well/ on a medium speed for 2 minutes until the ingredients are well blended. Turn this mix into you lined tin.
3) Bake in your pre-heated oven for 34 – 40 minutes or until the cake begins to shrink from the sides of the tin and springs back when pressed in the middle.
4) Whilst the cake is in the oven, make the crunchy top. Measure the lemon juice and sugar and stir until blended. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, spread the lemon and sugar mix on the top of the cake.
5) Cut into slices and enjoy!
Second on the agenda was a personal favourite creation of mine, banofee cupcakes! Based on a basic banana cupcake recipe, I have adapted them so that they have a gooey caramel centre, a swirl of toffee icing and a drizzle of chocolate on the top. I’m not going to lie to you, they’re rather scrum.
175g (6oz) ripe bananas
125g (4oz) soft margerine
75g (3oz) caster sugar
1 tbsp milk
2 eggs
115g (8oz) plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 can Coronation caramel
For the icing
140g (5oz) unsalted butter
280g (10oz) icing sugar
3 tbsp Coronation caramel
some chocolate (for drizzling)
some chocolate buttons
And… Go!
1) Pre-heat your oven to 160⁰C (fan oven)/ gas 4. Line a 12-hole muffin tray with pretty paper muffin cases.
2) Peel and mash the bananas and put in a large bowl or stand mixer and add the margarine, sugar, milk and eggs, and mix on a medium speed or until blended. Sift in the flour and the baking powder and beat until smooth.
3) Fill each muffin case up to 1 third full. Spoon in 1tsp of caramel onto the top and then fill with more mix until the cases are 2/3 full. Place in the pre-heated oven for about 20 minutes until golden and firm.
4) When cool enough, place the cakes on a wire rack and leave until cold.
5) Beat together using a hand or stand mixer the soft butter and icing sugar. Swirl the caramel into icing until you get a marbled effect.
6) Put the icing in a piping bag fitted with a large star nozzle. Swirl the icing onto the cake. Melt some milk chocolate and drizzle onto the cake. Put a button on each cake.
And voila! Eat at your leisure.
I also made Red Velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting using the famous Hummingbird Bakery recipe (http://www.redonline.co.uk/food/recipes/hummingbird-bakery-s-red-velvet-cupcakes) and carrot cupcakes with orange cream cheese frosting, topped with homemade sugar paste carrots. For the carrot cakes, I used an excellent recipe from the Primrose Bakery (the recipe for which can be found at http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/492570/carrot-cupcakes).
Despite my initial worries about having enough cake, I came in on the Friday to find that I was inundated with cake – from rocky roads to heart-shaped chocolate cake to chocolate traybake and peanut butter cookies. I was then concerned that we has too much cake- I needn’t have worried.
To further improve matters, my friend Louise brought in the most fantastic monster cake resembling this year’s red noses, which we decided was far to special to simply cut up and sell. We raffled him off, discovering in the process that there are far more people working at Capita than first realized. Thanks to this, we almost doubled the amount raised!
In the end, I managed to raise a whopping £232.50 for Comic Relief, something that I’m really quite proud of! I know that the money will go on to make a difference to someone’s life, which makes all those hours of sweating it out (not literally) in the kitchen totally worth the effort.
There’s so many ways to raise money this year, be it holding a bake sale like mine, or partaking in the #twittermillion or simply donating! Go on- Do Something Funny For Money – you know you want to!
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