Obsession

This was a post pancake day bake but it turned out WONDERFUL. Basically I have a friend who has a major love of banoffee. So when I had a pancake day gathering we grabbed bananas, toffee and cream. Lots of cream. But come the week after, I'm sitting around with some leftover bananas ripening nicely and half a can of caramel. So I went searching online :) Now this recipe came from the NY Times which I linked here. I made some adjustments to use up the leftover ingredients I had, in particular cutting the sugar content and...well I didn't have enough butter so I did use spread to make up the difference in the crust and the blondie batter and I don't think it suffered significantly even if it was super light Flora (not recommended for baking!) Anyway, I list my adjusted recipe below: 280g unsalted butter 200g Oreos (56p on deal, but any biscuit would be pretty good) 2 bananas 2 large eggs 350g dark brown sugar 1 tsp vanilla (I'd try the rum but we have no...

I've made chocolate cage cakes before, but never brilliantly. In fairness, this isn't brilliant but it did get a lot of attention. The whole process is very, very simple and is very handy for covering up the less than brilliant buttercream smoothing I do on the sides. Did I mention I hate buttercream? Gets sugar everywhere, dries hard and is far, far too sweet. I did  try a cooked flour frosting the week before but my friend complained it wasn't sweet enough. Anyway, let's talk chocolate cage. You have a cake which you've covered with some kind of frosting. Assuming your oven doesn't suck as badly as my current one which messed up even the simple victoria sponge inside this cake, you'll have a cake. By itself, that's fine. To the cage - measure around the cake - and do it AFTER you've frosted it. I did this based on the cake pan and ended up about an inch short. (FYI not an issue, just squiggle some chocolate on a spare bit and patch...

I made one attempt at finessing the chocolate cake, but with no melted chocolate and 50g less cocoa (replaced with flour) it STILL tasted super rich. So when we found out the cake was to serve 40 we figured super rich was fine. Tiny slices, super rich... it all works. So recipe wise, we used the recipe below but made two batches worth in a roasting tin. I actually carried my nice flat based roasting tin home from my house to my mum's to make it. Anyway, it was fairly standard, left it in for about 5-10 minutes more and it was baked through. The only problem is the edges are slightly more crumbly than normal (but that might have something to do with adding twice the required baking powder to one batch because I forgot whether I had added it or not! The Totoro is made of rice krispies and melted marshmallows with a bit of butter. Coated in a little ganache, the icing went over the top. Can I say, this was the BANE of my night. It's the reason that having started bak...

I got a request for a birthday cake for the end of the month and how she put it was  "please make the same chocolate cake [from last year] as everybody loved it".    Gleep.  I tried to move her on to trying something a little new... Oreo buttercream maybe? But I knew she really didn't want it.  "heavenly"  as she described the cake last year.  Gleep two.  Admission time. It took me two days to remember(ish) what her cake was. I did a ninky nonk. That was known. But all I remember was that I thought the cake was dry. Very dry. So I sandwiched it with extra layers of ganache. Three in fact. I am now (post searching online and realising it wasn't there) that I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's cake recipe from her book the Cake Bible. (How bad is that I forgot I actually used my hundred odd books sometimes?!) After wandering the shops I realised I used Galaxy in the ganache rather than dark which is quite bitter and grown up. Afterall, this was a ca...

I bought this transfer ages ago on a whim and finally tried them out for my sister's birthday (faux birthday as we celebrated with Bea's of Bloomsbury cupcakes on the day!) Since they were a bit worse for wear you can see where the transfer was a bit patchy even before we stuck chocolate on it, but it decidedly worked better with a thick coat of milk chocolate than the dark. I assume it's because there's more fat to make the transfer stick but that's a guess. It worked anyway. Pretty simple to use. Put it out with the transfer on the right side. Pour over chocolate. Leave to set. Done. The cake was an oil based sponge which I won't make again (Rachel Ray) but that's because I always know that any sponge that involves a lot of milk in the mix tends to be a bit "tighter" and I don't like that texture. The coating is some chocolate stuff I bought in Brazil. Bear with me, that was a year ago but it worked fine. For some reason when I starte...

How do you follow the farm cake and the Ninky-Nonk? With a Carcrash cake that's what! My nephew's latest obsession is Traffic lights. In fact he ran off with the two spare ones and then complained loudly every time we removed them so he could, you know, eat dinner, get a bath that kind of thing. A bit of a low effort one from me, but I'm studying at the moment. The cake was baked before midday and iced quite quickly in the afternoon. Mum (aka grandma) was disappointed I wasn't going to be making a carved number but personally - study and the prospect of needing a chiropractor after I'd made it... figured I'd wait till he was older. I'm sure car cakes will make an appearance again. Traffic lights made of those sweets called Drumsticks (Poundland!!) dipped in water and wrapped in black fondant with jelly tots dabbed with water and then pressed in. Now that was impressive - I thought they'd fall off pretty quick but they lasted all the running aroun...

This is getting worse than my ACTUAL journal!! When was my last post? Err... best not to ask. Forgive me - I have an excuse. I have many excuses *slaps self*. I moved into my own place. Ergo tiny kitchen, lack of equipment.... who am I kidding? I've baked quite a bit here, but nothing too interesting. The first bake was a rhubarb eve's pudding of sorts, then there was a brownie at my housewarming, lemon curd bread and butter pudding for my neighbour, key lime pie... for my neighbour and my colleague... the list goes on. It's just that there wasn't anything particularly inspiring  as such. Until this. A lemon drizzle. Which I've probably baked a million times before. But this time, I used the Guardian's "perfect" recipe. Which, apart from using normal granulated sugar instead of demerara on top (this is what happens when you leave your purchase on the till in M&S - picking it up tomorrow!) I actually followed the recipe. It was yum. The best to...