A PINK CASTLE BIRTHDAY CAKE

A few months ago a friend asked me if I would make a cake for her granddaughter’s fourth birthday.  I sent along some pictures from a book I've had for ages, hoping that something simple like a rabbit or cat shaped cake would be chosen.  The message came back that the pink fairytale castle was the favourite.  Having never, ever made anything like it before I had to put my thinking cap on!

The cake chosen from the book!

I did a mock up of the design using the cookbook as a guide.  Creating the turrets seemed to be the tricky bit.  There were lots of ideas on the internet suggesting using cardboard tubes covered in fondant icing for the turrets but I rejected that idea.  What little girl wants to cut into a cake and find it’s made of cardboard?

My first idea was to bake the turrets in two rings joined together with foil but decided that might not work if they came apart as the sponge mixture rose.  The next idea was to use small pilchard tins but what to do with all those pilchards?! In the end I opted for joining the sponges together with buttercream.  They were then covered in pink fondant icing which more or less concealed any bumps or wonkiness.

The base was a 15cm madeira cake plus a little mixture used for a smaller one for the top .  The turrets were made using a basic four egg sponge recipe that came with the pack of 2” cake rings. As a precaution I used some of that mixture to make some mini madeleines and in the final design one of those was used for the top turret to display the pink number 4 candle.  

The turret roofs were ice cream cones brushed with warmed apricot jam then sprinkled with pink glimmer sugar.  The base cake was covered in a generous amount of pink buttercream, reserving plenty for fixing decorations to the cake.  The turrets were secured to the base with cocktail sticks and after that it was just a matter of chucking as many decorations at it as we dared !!

It was enormous fun to make and took the three of us two hours to decorate!  

SCOTCH PIES

In a moment of  madness I proposed that we should host a Burns Supper.  

The missing ingredient was the haggis.  

Haggis is not to everyone’s taste but I have enjoyed it in the past.  It’s now one of the items we are no longer permitted to bring into France post Brexit.  All meat and dairy products are banned so those expats who used to buy a couple of haggis during their Christmas UK visit to bring back to France for their Burns Suppers have to either smuggle them in their luggage or get creative.  In a moment of pure insanity I proposed that I should make Scotch pies.  How hard can they be?!

There is a recipe on the BBC Good Food website by Paul Hollywood which comes from his TV series "Pies and Puds". You can see the recipe here. It includes a video of how to construct the pies but I can’t view it from outside of the UK! ** Luckily I also have a copy of the book from the TV series, a charity shop find, and there’s a couple of pages of helpful photos.

To say they are fiddly is a gross understatement!

I practised two days before the event using some leftover roast pork from our Sunday lunch, scaling down the ingredients to make just two of them.  I had never made hot water crust pastry before and the two pies took me about an hour to make, plus baking time.  BUT they looked the part and were delicious! I was very proud of them.  However, it dawned on me that at the rate of production it could literally take me all day to make the six I needed for the evening’s festivities and there was also the tatties, neeps, cock-a-leekie soup and cranachan to make!

I decided that the way to go was to cook the lamb the day before and mince it for the filling "shepherd’s pie" fashion.  No risk of serving undercooked meat to our guests.  I also decided I would make them in the morning and reheat for dinner.  No risk of me still being up to my elbows in flour and pastry when the guests arrived!

I set to early, deciding to make the pies one by one as I thought that would be easier than rolling out such a huge amount of pastry.  The website instructions are for four pies and the book for eight so I split the difference and portioned out the pastry for individual pies.

*Moulding the pastry around the filling is immensely fiddly.  I found that for me the quickest way to get them made was to put a ball of filling in the middle of a circle of pastry, pat it down a bit, brush the edge with water and then place a circle of pastry for the lid straight on top.  I then brought the bottom pastry up to meet the lid at four points, north, east, south and west, pinching it together to secure it.  I then gathered up the rest of the pastry, pleating to fit, and pinched the edges together.  This got my production time down to less than ten minutes per pie from rolling out to stringing up!

They were not the prettiest pies you have ever seen but they were really tasty and went down well with our guests.  I have given the quantity of ingredients for six pies and my own adaptions to the recipe but suggest you look it up and work out your own best method!  I have given it three stars in the faff factor but in reality they were about three and a half - incredibly fiddly but very definitely worth it!

Next time I think I would try to make them a bit smaller!

Ingredients 

For the filling

900g cooked lamb

A pinch of mace

1 onion, cooked.  Mine had been roasted under the joint of lamb

For the pastry

540g Plain flour

180g Lard or other white cooking fat.  I used Trex.

240ml Water

A pinch of salt 

1 egg, beaten, for egg wash

Method 

Begin by choosing a small plate of about 18cm diameter and a saucer or jar of about 10cm diameter.  These will be used as templates to cut the circles of pastry.  Cut six strips of baking paper about 30cm long and 10cm deep, folded over lengthways.  These will be used to encase the pies so they keep their shape while baking. Also cut six pieces of string long enough to tie around the pies.

Mince the lamb coarsely in a food processor.  Add the onion and mace and process for a few seconds until blended in.

Tip the lamb onto a board and mould into a ball.  Divide into six even portions and roll each one into a smaller ball.  Place on a tray or dish and chill in the fridge while you make the pastry.

Put the flour into a large bowl.  Put the fat, salt and water into a saucepan on medium heat and bring to the boil.  Pour this liquid onto the flour and mix in with a spoon.  (The flour will fizz briefly as you add the liquid.) 

When the pastry starts to come together and is cool enough to handle tip it onto a floured surface and knead until smooth.  (This took longer than I expected.)

Mould the pastry into a patty and cut into quarters, setting one aside for the lids.  Divide each of the three remaining quarters into two giving you six equal portions of pastry.  Divide the first quarter into six equal smaller portions.

On a floured surface roll a portion of pastry into a circle of about 18cm using your plate to cut it out.  Roll one of the lid portions using your jar or saucer template.

Place a ball of meat on the large pastry and flatten slightly. Moisten the edges of the pastry with water and with your hands bring the sides up around the meat.  Place a lid on top and pinch them together.  (*See text for how I found the best way of doing this.)

Wrap a strip of paper around the pie and secure with string.  Place on a baking sheet lined with baking paper.  Repeat with the remaining pies.

Make a hole in the top of each pie and brush with the beaten egg.  Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Bake for 35-40 minutes at 200°C / 180° fan / gas mk 6 until golden brown.  Serve hot.

Makes 6 pies.

** I have since been able to watch the video on a different device and it's for a single large pie, so nothing like PH's recipe and instructions!  However, if I ever want to make a large pork pie, I'll definitely give it a try!

AFTERNOON TEA

With all the Queen's Jubilee celebrations for being on the throne for 70 years there has been much talk of street parties and afternoon teas.  In fact in our part of France friends held their own afternoon tea party to celebrate but unfortunately I was unable to attend.  I'm back home in the UK because my father is in hospital and his future care is again under debate.  

So instead I decided it was time I posted about the afternoon tea I held for a friend's birthday just a couple of months ago.  That was in France too.

I used my three tier glass cake stand which I acquired at a brocante a couple of years ago for just 2€.  It matches some dessert plates and a regular one tier cake stand that were also collected for next to nothing from brocantes over the years.  My best white tablecloth doesn't come out very often but with that and real cups and saucers the table looked the business, even if I say so myself! 

The bottom layer was a selection of sandwiches with the crusts cut off (of course!).  There were home made egg mayonnaise and rocket on brown bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese and cucumber on brown and smoked ham with tomato and cucumber on white.

You can see the recipe for egg mayonnaise here.  I have never seen cress for sale in France so opted for rocket instead.  It was a good substitute.

Being in France, the sliced bread available is not quite like in the UK.  Generally the texture is nice but it always seems to me to be slightly sweet.  We toyed with the idea of making our own bread but as it was only a few days after we had arrived and we were still dealing with all the usual problems of being away from the house for so long decided it was a step too far.

The middle layer was Victoria scones.  For such an important occasion I didn't trust myself to make ordinary scones, my success with those being variable.  The Victoria scones are easy to make from the Be-Ro book recipe and for me they work every time.  They looked cute on the stand although someone who saw the pictures on Facebook said they looked like fat rascals!  

I can't say I've ever eaten a fat rascal so wouldn't know but they sound like fun so will add them to my ever lengthening bucket list of thing to bake!  You can see the recipe for Victoria scones here or look it up in the Be-Ro book - it's in all the recent editions.

The top layer, the crowning glory, was of small cakes.  The raspberry sponges were cut from a traybake recipe for a jam and coconut sponge, otherwise known as "school cake" and which I have been hankering after making for some time!  I used a recipe on the Asda website which you can see here.  It is very quick and easy and the little squares looked very pretty when topped with fresh raspberries.  You can also see the recipe here.

The little chocolate cakes were to a recipe from one of the collection of slim volumes that Delia Smith put out many years ago called "Baking".  They are chocolate, prune and Armagnac mini muffins and I topped them with an excellent chocolate icing from Lynn Hill's website Traditional Home Baking.  You can see the icing recipe here and I added a few decorations including halved glacé cherries, halved chocolate covered raisins and choclate vermicelli.  They were delicious!

No afternoon tea would be complete without an actual slice of cake so for that I made a lemon layer cake filled with lemon curd to another Delia recipe from the same book.  You can see that here.  I didn't make my own lemon curd but used a Bon Maman jar which I brought over from the UK.  Bizarrely you can buy lemon curd in France but not the Bon Maman one!

I had never made this cake before but had eaten it several times as it's a family favourite of Nick's sisters.  It was easy to make and, of course, yummy!

Our birthday guests enjoyed the afternoon tea and so did we.  Being Americans they had only ever had afternoon tea a couple of times before when in London.  It was fun to make and fun to eat.  It does involve a lot of preparation and baking with all the different elements but it's well worth the effort.

You can see my lemon curd layer cake here.

The prune and chocolate mini muffins are here.

The little raspberry cakes are here.

The egg mayonnaise recipe is here.

POACHED PEAR AND GINGER CAKE

I made this cake for the cake club meeting in October.  The theme was “autumn” and for me that always means ginger - and lots of it.  My mum had a very small repertoire of cakes and her ginger cake was my favourite.  The recipe probably came from her ancient, battered copy of the Be-Ro book and I remember the joy of coming home from school to the smell of a ginger cake in the oven.

For this cake club meeting I was hoping to do much better than the last two where my offerings were, sadly, disappointing to say the least.  This is the risk you take when you use a recipe for the first time – you have no idea how it’s going to turn out until it’s done.  This time I was keen to prove (if only to myself) that I can make a good cake and I chose a recipe that I had had my eye on for a long time, just waiting for the right occasion to make it.  It comes from a book called “tea with Bea”.

We like pears poached in red wine, cooking them for hours so that they become ruby red all the way through.  For this recipe you poach them just until they are tender which means the wine has coloured just the outer part of the pears, making them look very pretty when they’re sliced.

The cake was not difficult to make but had more steps than I can usually be bothered with.  The recipe suggests baking one 23cm cake and cutting it into three layers.  I’m not fond of cutting a cake into layers once it’s done – it’s far too nerve wracking for my liking.  And all the three layer cakes I have made have ended up a bit wonky, unwieldly and hard to slice.  So I decided to make two 23cm cakes and sandwich them together.  Consequently I amended the original recipe to allow for the reduced amount of filling required, also for the ingredients I had available.

I have to say it looked fabulous and was well worth the effort.  You can read about the rest of the bakes at the meeting here.

Ingredients

For the ginger cake

250ml Guinness

250g black treacle

1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

280g plain flour

1½ tsp baking powder

3 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cinnamon

¼ tsp ground allspice

¼ tsp grated nutmeg

¼ tsp ground cardamom

¼ tsp ground cloves

3 eggs

100g caster sugar

100g soft dark brown sugar

3 balls of preserved ginger

200ml sunflower oil

For the poached pears

4 firm pears, peeled

½ bottle Merlot or other red wine

350ml water (approx)

350g caster sugar

zest of 1 orange

1 star anise

1 vanilla pod, split

1 clove

1 cinnamon stick

2 crushed cardamom pods

For the cream cheese icing

70g unsalted butter

95g icing sugar

1 tblsp golden syrup

300g cream cheese (full fat)

½ tsp vanilla extract

2 tblsp apricot or ginger preserve to glaze

chopped crystallised ginger to decorate.

Method

The first task is to poach the pears and this can be done the day before if that helps.

Put all the ingredients except for the pears into a large saucepan, bring to the boil and when the sugar has dissolved add the pears.  Put a circle of baking parchment on top, weighted down with a plate or saucer, and simmer for about 30 minutes until the pears are tender.

Remove the pears and allow to cool.

To make the cake, first put the Guinness and treacle into a tall saucepan and bring to the boil over high heat.  Remove from the heat and add the bicarb – which will make the liquid fizz and bubble up, hence the need for a tall pan.  Set aside to cool completely – which takes quite some time.

Preheat the oven to 170° C / 150° fan / gas mk 5.  Butter two 23cm round springform tins and line the bases with baking paper.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and spices.

In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, sugars and chopped ginger, beat in the oil, add the Guinness liquid and combine thoroughly.

Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.  Divide between the two prepared tins and bake for about 40 minutes or until done.  After a few minutes remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

To make the cream cheese icing, using an electric whisk beat the butter, icing sugar and golden syrup together until light and fluffy.  Add the cream cheese and vanilla and beat well.

To assemble the cake, cut the pears in half, remove the cores and cut each half into four wedges.

Put one cake on a plate or cake stand and spread thickly with the cream cheese icing.  Arrange half of the pear wedges on top and add the second cake. 

Brush the top of the cake with the warmed apricot or ginger preserve and arrange the remaining pear wedges over it.  Decorate with the chunks of crystallised ginger.

Cuts into 8-10 slices.  Keep in the fridge.

QUINCE TARTE TATIN WITH DULCE DE LECHE ICE CREAM

Last week my friend Gaynor gave me some quince.  I have been intrigued by this fruit for a long time and was excited to get my hands on some and do something with them. 

I knew they could be challenging to cook with and the only home made dish I had tried so far was quince jelly – made by another friend, not me.  Occasionally they turn up on a restaurant menu and I have eaten them in both sweet and savoury dishes.

This is how they grow.  This tree in the next village was positively dripping with fruit, not quite ripe yet.  I thought I would see how I got on with cooking them before I considered sneaking back to scrump some of the ones dangling outside the owner’s garden….

I have to say that they are the devil’s own job to prepare.  I decided to use two recipes by David Lebovitz and he warns about the dangers of grappling with them.  The peel comes off quite easily and the flesh is firm like an unripe pear.  The core however is very woody and puts up a hell of a fight.  It took me the best part of an hour to core this lot.  Consequently I have given the recipe a faff factor *** as it is not for the faint hearted!

First I poached the pears using the recipe that you can see here, although I changed the quantities to suit the number of pears I had.  To make the tarte tatin I reduced some of the poaching liquid in the tatin tin until it began to caramelise then arranged the pears on top.  You can see the recipe here.

I used a pack of ready made, ready rolled puff pastry for the crust rather than make my own – to save time, having already spent much longer than I expected on preparing the fruit!

The quince changed colour spectacularly when they were cooking in the oven and on turning out the tarte this fabulous pink creation emerged like a butterfly from its chrysalis. 

While it was baking in the oven I got on with making the ice cream.  I had spotted this recipe on Phil’s blog called As Strong as Soup and had a strong desire to make it immediately!  I had to wait until Nick and I had found all the various parts of our ice cream machine and then let the bowl chill in the freezer for twenty four hours before I could start.

The ice cream was utterly delicious.  I used a whole jar of Bon Maman “confiture du lait” and it made a good sized box of ice cream that continued to delight us long after the tarte tatin was finished.  The tarte was also delicious, a great hit and a very impressive dessert when both are served together.

For the poached pears

5 large quince, peeled, cored and quartered

1.5 litres of water

150g sugar

100g honey

1 lemon, halved

1 cinnamon stick

3 cloves

1 vanilla bean, split lengthways

Method

Bring the water, sugar, honey, lemon and spices to a gentle boil and add the quince.  Cover with a circle of baking parchment with a walnut-sized hole in the middle and simmer gently until they are tender.  Mine took an hour.

Remove the fruit from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside.  Strain and reserve all the liquid, discarding the lemon and spices.  The poached fruit will keep for about a week in their liquid in a sealed container in the fridge.

For the tarte tatin

Preheat the oven to 190C / 170 fan.

Put 300 ml of the strained poaching liquid into a tatin dish or ovenproof frying pan and cook on the hob until it is reduced and thickened.  Mine took quite a long time to reach this point and suddenly bubbled up like caramel.  At that point I quickly removed it from the heat.

Arrange the pears cut side up in the pan, packing tightly and filling any gaps with pieces of pear.

Carefully lay an unrolled circle of puff pastry over the pan, tucking in the edges, remembering that the tin will be hot so be very careful not to burn yourself.  Prick the pastry with a fork and bake for about 45 minutes until the pastry is golden brown.

Remove from the oven and rest on a cooling rack for a few minutes before placing a serving plate upside down on top of the tarte and carefully turning out.  If any fruit is left behind in the pan it’s an easy job to replace it in the tart.  Spoon any syrup left behind in the pan over the tart as you don’t want to miss any of its deliciousness.

Serve warm or at room temperature with the dulce de leche ice cream.  Or of course any ice cream of your choice but you really should try this one.

Serves 8.

For the ice cream

See Phil’s recipe here.

FISH AND CHIPS BIRTHDAY CAKE

I was recently asked to bake a birthday cake in the shape of a plate of fish and chips for someone whose favourite meal was…..fish and chips.

Naturally I was pleased to be asked and began planning how I could do it.  As it happens I had a fish cake tin, bought from a French brocante a couple of years ago.  I used my easy lemon drizzle cake recipe and it turned out just right. 

Of course, the fish would have to be covered in batter to look authentic.  Getting the colour of the buttercream right proved to be tricky, especially here in France where baking supplies such as food colouring can be hard to find.  In the end I used a combination of apricot jam, prune jam and a tiny dash of gravy browning to get something approaching the right shade!

I baked another batch of the lemon cake in a swiss roll tin and cut it into strips to resemble the chips.  For the peas I used marzipan coloured green with food colouring.  The vinegar was apple juice darkened with a little dark rum, the salt pot contained caster sugar and for ketchup I added a little pot of strawberry jam.

With the lights dimmed and the birthday candle lit, the birthday boy really did think for a moment that he was getting a plate of fish and chips.  He loved it, and I really enjoyed making it.

TREACLE AND GINGER SPICE / EIFFEL TOWER CAKE (forgotten cakes and bakes of 2015)

Last summer I asked the friend who had offered her house as a venue for a cake club meeting if she would like to choose the theme.  She chose “Novelty Cakes”.  I have to say my first thought was “oh heck” as personally I have never made a novelty cake of any kind (unless you count the cakes that turned out looking rather peculiar).  Having never had children or grandchildren to bake for I have never made a cake shaped like a teddy bear or fire engine.  I’m not even very good at icing – I can slather butter cream over a cake or drizzle fairly neatly but as for fondant or piping………

I decided to make a cake that resembled the Eiffel Tower and thought the easiest way was to make a nice, ordinary, round cake and plonk a model or ornament of the Eiffel Tower on top – a bit of a cop-out I know.  So the weekend before the meeting I went to a local vide-grenier where I thought I would have loads of Eiffel Towers to choose from.  For those who don’t know, a vide-grenier, or brocante, is the French equivalent of the UK car boot sale.  There is usually a mix of dealers selling antiques or bric-a-brac and local people selling their unwanted stuff – “vide-grenier” means “empty the attic”.  There are usually plenty of Eiffel Tower ornaments or souvenirs for sale.

This particular vide-grenier takes place every year in a nearby village and is huge, with hundreds of stalls.  On the day it was raining on and off but undeterred I scoured every stall and there was not a single Eiffel Tower to be seen.  Oh heck.  Back to the drawing board.

I anguished over how to make a cake look like the Eiffel Tower and quickly rejected the notion of making one that stood up.  Instead I went for a cake that lies down and is shaped and decorated to look like the Eiffel Tower.  I chose a Mary Berry tray bake recipe as I thought it would be firm enough and big enough to cut into shape.  My GCSE dressmaking skills finally came in handy in cutting the shape and with a bit of internet research I came up with a way to make the cake look vaguely like the iconic structure.

The cake itself was delicious and I have made it a few more times since then.  You can see the recipe here or here.   Other club members also had to dig deep for inspiration in order to bake something that complied with the theme and the resulting show on the table was amazing.  You can read all about it here.

In case you’re puzzled about the champagne bottle tops at the bottom of the cake…..I was pondering how to represent the grass around the base of the tower and was reminded of the New Year’s Eve we spent in Paris for our honeymoon, all those years ago.  We went to the Eiffel Tower on New Year’s Day and the grass around the base was covered in a sea of discarded champagne bottles.