PUMPKIN & GINGER TRAYBAKE

I first spotted this recipe in a lovely blog written by Snowy, called “Cookbooks Galore” and couldn’t wait to have a go at it myself.  When I was mixing it I suddenly decided to bake it as a traybake rather than in a loaf tin.  I called it “Halloween cake” and Nick took some to work to try out on his colleagues on October 31st, telling them it was made of pumpkin, toad and broomstick !! 

They were not put off and it was a big success !!

So  when Ruth announced that the Pink Whisk baking challenge in November was for traybakes to raise money for charity,  I decided to make it again for our annual cake stall for “Children in Need”.  Snowy made hers with butternut squash so I did too.  The recipe originally came from Good Food magazine and I found it on the website here.  (It’s also in the “101 cakes and bakes” recipe book.)

 

The butternut squash was such a glorious colour that grating it was a feast for the eyes.  The colour, combined with the warmth of the ginger, meant the cake looked and smelled lovely when it came out of the oven.  In fact the whole house smelled wonderful ~ mind you, I did bake seven cakes that day so the smell of baking was pretty much full on throughout the house !!

As I mentioned before, the cakes that sell the best at our cake stall are the ones slathered in loads of gooey icing and decoration, so I decided to drizzle a simple icing on it and decorate it with a few gold sprinkles to make it more appealing. 

It wasn’t the best seller but it was absolutely scrumptious.  The plus side of having cakes leftover is that I can take them home to enjoy myself or, as in this case, sell them to the milkman when he called to collect his money ~ more in the pot for Children in Need !!

Ingredients

175g butter, melted

140g clear runny honey

1 large egg, beaten

250g raw peeled pumpkin or butternut squash

100g light muscovado sugar

350g self raising flour

1 tablespoon ground ginger

2 tablespoons demerara sugar (optional for sprinkling over the cake)*

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/ 160°fan

Grease and line the base of a large traybake or roasting tin, approx 30x20 cm.  Make the lining paper long enough to overhang at each end to make it easier to lift out the cake when baked.

Grate the peeled pumpkin or butternut squash.  In a large bowl, mix the melted butter, honey and egg.  Stir in the pumpkin or squash.  Add the flour, ginger and muscovado sugar.  Mix until well combined.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and level the top.  If you are not going to ice the cake, sprinkle the demerara sugar on top*.

Bake for 40-50 minutes until golden brown and risen.  Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.  Sprinkle a little more demerara sugar on top whilst the cake is still warm if you like*.

When cool, cut into about 24 pieces or squares, depending on how big you like them.

*Alternatively, leave out the demerara sugar and when the cake is cool, drizzle over some icing made with icing sugar and water or lemon juice.  Add gold sprinkles or anything else you fancy to decorate.

Makes 24-30 squares

APPLE CAKE IN A NUTSHELL

Last week we had our usual charity cake stall at work for BBC Children in Need.

There is always a huge amount of cake for sale and every year I like to make something I haven’t done before.  This time I chose a cake called “apple cake in a nutshell” from “Good Food 101 Cakes and Bakes”, an excellent little  book full of lovely recipes.  Every one I have tried so far works.

The most popular cake by far at our cake stall is always a chocolate Guinness cake made to Nigella Lawson’s famous recipe.  Year after year we are asked to make sure one is on offer and it usually sells out pretty quickly.

We also discovered years ago that the cakes that sell the best are the large ones with lots of decoration or icing on them.  Perhaps people like having a slice cut from a large and gorgeous cake just for them.    Individual cakes, buns and traybakes are not as popular ~ but the scones and sausage rolls sell very well.  They also prefer the cakes with no surprises in the ingredients ~ perish the thought that there should be anything healthy in them !!

For this apple, date and nut cake I used a bag of whole hazelnuts I already had in the cupboard, shelling and blanching them myself.  It was fiddly to do and fairly time consuming.  After shelling, you put the nuts in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes and the theory is that the skins then rub off fairly easily.  It was not that easy and there were quite a few bits of skin still left on mine but I ran out of patience and thought that would probably be ok for the cake.  They tasted divine after being in the oven ~ a few less went into the cake than I started out with!

 

You place apple rings and chopped hazelnuts on top of the cake before baking and I was thrilled with how it looked when it came out of the oven.  But it did take quite a few minutes longer than stated in the recipe before it seemed to be cooked.

It looked even better with its apricot glaze on top.  In fact it looked a million dollars and sat very well alongside all the gooey chocolate cakes and, of course, the chocolate Guinness cake.  I was dying to see what it was like when it was cut ~ and to taste a slice for myself ~ for which I would pay my £1 just like anyone else as the whole idea is to raise money for the charity.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance.  At 9.30 in the morning someone handed over £20 for the collection and took the whole cake !!  However, they did phone back the next day to say it was delicious and could they have the recipe, please !!  So I will just have to make another one some day.

So far we have made over £700 for Children in Need.  Not bad for just five ladies baking and a few husbands and other helpers chipping in.  We had made a list of all the cakes that were on sale and there were 35 different choices, including the sausage rolls and other savouries.  We are going to highlight and colour code the best and second-best sellers so we know what to make again next year.

APPLE CAKE IN A NUTSHELL

Ingredients

3 eggs

175g butter

350g self raising flour

2tsp ground cinnamon

175g light muscovado sugar

3 medium eating apples

100g chopped dates

100 blanched hazelnuts, roughly chopped

3 dessertspoons apricot jam

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/ 160°fan. Butter and line the base of a 20cm cake tin.

Melt the butter and leave to cool.

Peel two of the apples, core and cut into chunks. Core the third apple and cut into thin rings, peel left on.

Combine the flour, cinnamon and sugar in a large bowl.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs into the melted butter.

Stir the apple chunks, dates and HALF the hazelnuts into the flour mixture and mix well. Add the egg and butter mixture and stir in gently. (I added about 1tblsp milk here as the mixture seemed very stiff.)

Spoon the mixture into the tin and level the top.

Arrange the apple slices on top and sprinkle over the other half of the hazelnuts.

Bake for 50-60 minutes until browned and a cake tester/skewer comes out clean. (I had to give the cake an extra 10 minutes for it to be cooked.)

Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack.

Heat the apricot jam gently in a small saucepan until runny. Brush over the cake whilst it is still warm. Leave to cool completely.

Cuts into 8-10 slices

SPICED ROOT SOUP

As soon as the hour changes, and the evenings get longer and darker, I feel compelled to make soup. November’s Random Recipe Challenge from Dom at Bellau Kitchen is a joint exercise with another lovely blog called Tinned Tomatoes and happily for me it is for soup !!

Before I had even started to explore my own cookbook collection, I popped into the local library to see if they had anything new and found this book. I flipped the pages and turned up a recipe for “spiced root soup with crisp spiced onions”. Perfect.

As usual, when I decided to make the soup I didn’t quite have all the necessary ingredients in the house so I improvised and it worked really well. Instead of cumin seeds and curry paste I used cumin powder and curry powder.

The recipe followed the basic principles of other soups I have made: fry the onions, add the other vegetables and herbs/spices and the stock and cook until the veg are tender then blend and season to taste. Deliciously simple and one of the most rewarding things you can cook. I adore the glorious aromas drifting out of the kitchen when soup is on the stove.

When the recipe says to transfer the soup to a liquidiser in batches to purée it, I use my stick blender instead ~ just putting it in the pan and whizzing until the soup is the kind of consistency that we like ~ with a few lumpy bits of vegetables left in it.

I served it with some fresh chopped coriander sprinkled on top, which looked and tasted lovely, and with Nick’s home-made granary bread which had come out of the oven just minutes before. Bless him.

My version of the soup.

I didn’t have any natural yoghurt in the house to swirl on the top and I didn’t make the crisp spiced onions to add, like croutons, either…….. but the soup was absolutely scrumptious without them !!

Spiced root soup (with optional crisp spiced onions)

Ingredients
1 onion

2 tblsp vegetable oil

1 tsp mustard seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds (or 1tsp ground cumin)

2 leeks

3 carrots

2 medium potatoes

2 parsnips

2-3 tsp curry paste (or 1tsp curry powder)

1.2 litres vegetable stock (from granules or powder)

250 g natural yoghurt

chopped coriander or parsley to garnish

Method

Peel and chop the onion. Heat the oil in a large pan and fry until just beginning to colour. Add the cumin and mustard seeds and fry until the onion is browned.

Peel and roughly chop the other vegetables. Add to the pan with the curry powder or paste and stir until well mixed.

Add the stock and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for about 30 minutes or until the veg are tender.

Purée the soup by transferring it in batches to a liquidiser, or blend in the pan using a stick blender. Blend until smooth or slightly lumpy, just as you like. Season and stir in all but a couple of tablespoons of the yoghurt.

If you like the idea of the crisp spiced onions, peel and slice an onion lengthways and fry quickly in a little vegetable oil until crisp. Drain on kitchen paper. (The recipe makes no mention of how they should become spiced as well as crisp but you can us your initiative I suppose. I left them out altogether.)

Serve the soup with a swirl of the remaining yoghurt and a sprinkling of coriander or parsley on top. Add the crisp onions if you are using them.

Serves 4-6

As with all the “Good Food 101” recipe series, you can find the recipe on the web here.

LEMON DRIZZLE TRAYBAKE

It is almost time for our annual charity cake stall at work so I was browsing through my many recipe books and came across a recipe for lemon drizzle traybake in Mary Berry’s Baking Bible.

(The recipe also appears on several websites, including the Good Food Channel here.)

Now, I realise that lemon drizzle cake isn’t exactly exciting or exotic as a baking adventure, but I don’t make it very often so it was exciting for me. 

Actually, I did once make a lime and coconut loaf from the Be-Ro book a few years ago, which is similar in a way.  The cake had lime zest in it and lime juice drizzled over it.  I made it for a charity baking event at work and that’s where I learned the important lesson that the larger cakes with lots of icing slathered all over them are the ones that sell the best.  My lime and coconut cake was still hanging around when everything else had gone so me and my dad had to eat it all between us.  It was fabulously delicious, but didn’t look much.

Anyway, I also recently bought a larger traybake tin, with our cake stall in mind.  I found that my ready-cut squares of baking paper from Lakeland were just the right size if you put two in and overlapped them.  Then I had the bright idea of cutting one square in half so that they fitted perfectly with no overlapping ~ you can see the effect in the picture of ingredients.  This was a big mistake.

The cake was dead easy to make, using an all-in-one method, and baked perfectly.  But it was a big cake and when I tried to turn it out of the tin, it split roughly where the break in the baking paper was.  Rats !!

Next time, I will not be so clever (or thrifty, as I saved the other half of the square for use later) and use an extra long piece of paper that overhangs the ends of the tin as well, making it much easier to turn out.  

Luckily, the split was roughly where I wanted to cut the cake into squares, so I only lost a few pieces and you know what, the bits made an excellent treat to go with my cup of tea. 

The flavour and texture were excellent.  I will definitely make it again.  My dad took the boxful of cake to his model engineering club where it was devoured within minutes of him arriving and someone saying “time to put the kettle on”. 

Lemon drizzle traybake

Ingredients

for the cake

225g butter

225g caster sugar

275g self raising flour

2 level tsp baking powder

4 large eggs

4 tblsp milk

finely grated rind of 2 lemons

for the topping

juice of 2 lemons

175g granulated sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to 160°C / 140°fan.  Grease and line the base of a 12” x 9” baking tin.

Put all the cake ingredients into a large bowl and beat until well mixed together.  This takes hardly any time at all in a food mixer.

Transfer the mixture to the baking tin and level the top.  Bake for 35-40 minutes until golden brown.

Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack.

Mix the lemon juice and granulated sugar together and spoon it over the cake whilst it is still warm.  As lots of it will inevitably dribble over the edge onto the worktop, it helps to put a large tray underneath.

When cold, cut into 24 squares.

(The recipe said it makes 30 squares but I preferred them slightly larger!)

THURSDAY GRATIN

Okay, so it’s Thursday, you have eaten everything you bought last weekend, you haven’t had time to revisit the  dreaded supermarket, it’s raining, you’re late home from work and hungry…….

A gratin is the answer.  This is exactly what we had for dinner yesterday.

All you need is the last few remaining vegetables in your fridge or veg drawer, some grateable cheese, a bit of bacon or chorizo and dinner will be on the table in thirty minutes. 

The variations are endless.  Just use any vegetables and cheese you have.  If you don’t have cheese suitable for grating but you have some goats cheese, brie or similar, just leave it out of the sauce and put slices of it on top of the gratin before you put it in the oven.  If you don’t have any bacon it’s nice with some chopped ham mixed in, or just with the veg and no meat at all.  A few prawns or a bit of smoked fish cut into pieces also works well.

Ingredients (roughly)

1 carrot

1 parsnip

½ a head of broccoli

¼ swede or 1 turnip

1 or 2 leeks

¼ cabbage

a few mushrooms

1 onion, sliced

a few slices of chorizo

2-4 rashers of bacon, cut into large strips or diced

50g or however much cheese you like, grated

a large knob of butter

1 dessertspoon of plain flour

½ pint milk

salt and pepper

a splash of vegetable oil

Method (thereabouts)

Preheat the oven to 180°C

Peel and roughly chop all the vegetables into medium chunks.  Put in a large pan of boiling water and cook until almost cooked, still slightly firm or just as you like to eat them.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a frying pan, add the onions, bacon, mushrooms and chorizo and fry until the onions have softened and the bacon is browned.

Next, put the butter, flour and milk in a saucepan.  Heat gently and stir with a whisk until a white sauce miraculously forms ~ this is the Delia Smith all-in-one method which you can find here.  Add most of the grated cheese and stir until smooth and season with salt and pepper.  If it’s a bit too thick, stir in a little more milk.  If it’s too thin, add a teaspoon of flour blended with mik.

Drain the cooked vegetables and return to the pan.  Tip in the contents of the frying pan and mix together.

Tip everything into an ovenproof dish.  Pour the cheese sauce on top to coat the veg.  Sprinkle the remaining grated cheese over the top and bake for 20 minutes until golden brown and bubbling.

Whilst it’s in the oven you can set the table, open a bottle of something suitable for a Thursday and wash up the three pans you have used.

Serve on its own, with bread, with chips, with jacket potato, salad, or anything you fancy.  We had ours just by itself and it was a hearty meal for two.

Serves 2 as a main course or 4 as a side dish.