Obsession

Third time's the charm. I gave in and bought cake-release from the dreaded Lakeland. I love it. But I hate it as well. Love hate Lakeland. So commercial. But so necessary. It never has quite as specialist a gear that I need, but it still has more than the regular high street and more over, I have to go to odd places to get it!! Still, this concoction of hydrogenated fat allowed me to turn out a perfect bundt cake without any digging at all! *pop* cake. The recipe itself also was a winner. Dorie Greenspan's recipe, I do not believe I've made her before but boy does it rock. The recipe repeated here so I don't lose the yummy recipe which I did not change for once (although using my usual subs for sugar when I ran out) is as follows: 2 cups flour 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 2 sticks (220g ish) unsalted butter, softened 1 3/4 cups sugar (used 1 golden caster, 3/4 granulated white) 2 large eggs 2 tsp vanilla extract (used one) 1 cup sour cream 3 Tbsp jam, optional 1. P...

It's that time... yes I need to use the slightly out of date leftover stuff from the weekend. The glup of buttermilk and the sour cream. Unfortunately there is still a half cup of sour cream I have to find a use for, but! To the Banana Cake Batman! The recipe is from Betty Crocker, free application on the ipod touch. It's one of those pigging annoying recipe books where 99% of the recipes use a mix created by... Betty Crocker!! However, it has a recipe search where I looked up buttermilk and so, made banana cake. If you are doing this, one assumes you'd actually have buttermilk. I used my glup and made the difference up with sour cream. Please note that Frau Crocker also grossly underestimates the baking time. Mine took an hour or more using a 9 inch pan? Don't let it put you off though (apart from the gas bill I guess) because putting the cake itself together took less than ten minutes. I admit though, I had my brother mash the bananas for me, and being my brother he c...

Buttermilk cupcakes. It's my fault. Trains were awful this morning so I turned myself round at the station and asked for the day off as holiday. In my quest to bake I bought buttermilk and sour cream because all my recipes call for that? Right? Wrong. Why is it that all those recipes suddenly disappear? So I looked online and found a recipe for buttermilk cake. Which I made into little cupcakes because I cba to grease a pan and because my cousin said to . Buttermilk cupcake 100 g margerine 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 2 cups self-raising flour 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) pinch salt 1 cup buttermilk 1. Cream marge and sugar, add eggs and vanilla. 2. Alternate buttermilk and dried goods. 3. Gas Mark 4 for 30 minutes. They came out very flat - expected really since the recipe has an insane demand for self-raising AND added raising agents, must have been compensating for something. But they were delightfully ...

My cake stuff arrived!!! Very happy. Forked out some chi-ching money for some nordic bakeware which I've always been a bit dubious about - it may be gorgeous but it weighs a ton and will it/won't it come out the tin like it does on tv? Worry not! The cakes came out really easy, and when I say easy, I flipped them out with my fingers. You can see that the shapes came out nicely, although because I wasn't using a pound cake/bundt cake type recipe, there are some little air bubbles in the design. The recipe I used was for easy yellow cupcakes from Cupcakes! And it was a surprise to me how they turned out because, well, I always make them as the base of the vanilla cheesecake cupcakes, hence I've never seen what they ACTUALLY look like. All in all, very nice but I'd definitely try these out with some spice cake mix or apple sauce cake. Oh the excitement! Mother dearest naturally flinched when I told her the cost - but I'm ill so it's not like she can actually y...

It has to be said, this baby isn't pretty. It did look absolutely gorgeous till I heaped the brown mess of streusel on top. Think next time, we'll opt for my usual sugar streusel with white sugar. This brown stuff... looks like something you scrape off a shoe. Like I said before, we had sour cream in the fridge, a glut of apples, and so I created this little number from a recipe online . The picture they had was slightly better and retrospectively that might have been because I was rough and ready with the measuring of the butter, plus I melted it rather than make crumbs from it - fridge cold, microwaving it seemed easier. Therefore there was actually butter to pour OFF the pie before it finished. Still tasted yummy and family are actually eating it. Bit OTT given the JustRol had TWO rounds of pastry. The other round I made in to a banana, apple sauce and custard topped pie. It looks as random as it sounds but very edible. However, for the picture above the recipe went like thi...