CHOCOLATE FUDGE CAKE

After my recent marathon baking session for the cake stall we held at work in aid of Children in Need, I found myself with almost a full tin of Carnation caramel sitting in the fridge.  There were only a couple of tablespoons missing.  (I will tell you what I used them for later.)

Having made 8 cakes only three days before I didn’t really feel much like making another one but something special was coming up, so I did.

My dad has been out of sorts ever since my mum died nearly ten years ago.  Now, at the age of 84, he is courting.  After four months of seeing his lady friend he decided that today was the day we should meet her and arranged to bring her round for a cup of tea and a piece of cake.  Chocolate cake is her favourite, apparently. 

There were quite a few pieces of cake from the cake stall left over and they would have looked and tasted perfectly fine on a pretty cake stand, served up for tea.

But for my dad’s girlfriend, serving up leftover cake just didn’t seem right.  Apparently she’s 80 and they are just good friends.  Hmmmmm………..I tried that one myself, many years ago.  My dad didn’t believe it then, either.

I looked at the Carnation website and found a recipe for chocolate fudge cake.  It looked easy and quick to make, which would fit the bill on a day when I needed to produce a nice cake but was feeling pretty much caked out.

It was indeed very quick and easy to make.  There was no creaming of butter either for the cake or the icing, and the icing was especially delicious.  You simply melt chocolate and beat in the caramel with a little icing sugar.

The cake was light and even, well risen too.  With the glossy icing on top it looked gorgeous and it tasted every bit as good as it looked.  This could easily become my new first choice recipe for a cake that has maximum flavour and good looks for minimum effort.

I couldn’t make my mind up whether I should feel nervous or not.  It’s not every day that you are introduced to your father’s girlfriend.  I was also worried that she would feel nervous and I wanted to put her at ease.  I wonder if this is how my parents felt the first time I brought a boyfriend home.  There would have been cake for tea then too, I expect.

As it turned out, she didn’t have any.  They had been out for lunch and were full up, they said.  Oh well, more for us.  She’s a very nice person, too.

Chocolate fudge cake – originally on the Carnation website but has since disappeared!

Ingredients

For the cake

175g self-raising flour

2½ tblsp cocoa powder

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

150g caster sugar

2 eggs

150ml corn oil

150ml milk

1tsp vanilla extract

1 tblsp Carnation caramel

For the icing

125g dark chocolate, 70%cocoa solids

1 can Carnation caramel, less the tablespoon used for the cake

1tsp vanilla extract

1 tblsp icing sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°fan/gas mk 4.  Grease two 7” sponge tins and line the bases with circles of parchment.

Sift the flour, bicarb and cocoa powder into a large bowl.  Add the sugar and stir together.

In a separate bowl, beat together the oil, milk, eggs and one tablespoon of the caramel until smooth.

Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well.  Pour into the prepared tins and bake for 20-25 minutes.

Cool in the tins for a few minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.

To make the icing, melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water.  Beat in the rest of the tin of caramel and the vanilla.  Sift in the icing sugar and combine.

Use to fill and top the cake.  You could spread over the sides if you like, but the icing is quite sticky and this would make the cake difficult to eat without a fork I think.

Cuts into 8-10 slices.

TRIFLE AND CAKE – TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE !!

When Ruth of the blog Makey-Cakey announced another ingredient swap I signed up immediately.  You can see the invitation here.  I really enjoyed the last one I did – receiving a parcel of mystery ingredients and making something with them was great fun.  (You can read about my first time here.)

This time I was paired with Sally of the blog Recipe Junkie and she sent me this collection of ingredients.

Dried cranberries, macadamia nuts, amaretti biscuits and a Santa Claus.  I have no idea why, but the first thing that came into my mind was trifle !!

I did a bit of research into how I could use cranberries in a trifle and nothing much popped up.  But I did find a reference to a Nigella Lawson trifle that has cherries and amaretti biscuits in it so I based my trifle loosely on that.  It comes from the book “Forever Summer” and you can see the original recipe here.

The first thing I did was to soak my cranberries in something alcoholic – a bottle of rum came out of the booze cupboard first so I thought “why not”.  (In fact rum is what Nigella suggests as an alternative to the limoncello that she uses.)   I put half the cranberries into a jar, covered them with the lovely rum and left them to plump up alcoholically for a day or two.

I used bought trifle sponges for the base, splitting them in half and spreading them with cranberry sauce, then sprinkled crushed amaretti biscuits on top.  Instead of making the Italian trifle version using eggs and mascarpone cheese I used a carton of read-made custard and topped it with double cream. 

I anguished for some time about the addition of jelly.  Trifle always comes with jelly in my mind but somehow it didn’t seem quite appropriate.  This was going to be a very grown-up trifle, with the tart chewiness of the cranberries and the very adult rum – not your nursery version with raspberries, a splash of sherry and hundreds and thousands – oh no, much more sophisticated than that !!  (Not that there’s anything very sophisticated about bought custard !!)

Anyway, it worked.  The cranberries were chewy and noticeably boozy.  They contrasted well with the sweetness of the cake and custard and the addition of proper thick whipped cream, crushed amaretti biscuits and chopped macadamia nuts to decorate just finished it off perfectly. 

In fact it would be a perfect alternative pudding for Christmas !!

Here’s the general idea:

Put 100g of dried cranberries in a jar, cover with rum and press down.  Put the lid on and leave it for a day or two.

Take enough trifle sponges to cover the bottom of your dish, cut them in half horizontally and spread with cranberry sauce, sandwich-fashion.  Sprinkle a layer of crushed amaretti biscuits on top. 

Tip the soaked cranberries on top of the cake and add more rum if you think necessary (!) to make sure the sponges are properly soaked.  Pour a carton of ready-made custard on top, spreading out evenly to fill any gaps.

Cover the custard with whipped double cream.  Sprinkle some more crushed amaretti biscuits and some chopped macadamia nuts on top to decorate.  Chill for several hours or even overnight – the longer the better as this always seems to improve a trifle.  Place your Santa Claus in the middle and serve !!  Mine made about six servings.

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As it happens, my trifle only needed about half the cranberries and only a few nuts and amaretti biscuits so I had lots left to make into something else.  So I made these:

Cranberry, macadamia nut and orange squares.

I used the recipe for white chocolate and cherry squares which you can see here.  I simply substituted the cranberries and chopped macadamia nuts for the quantity of chocolate and cherries in the recipe and I also added the rind of one orange.  Then I added some crushed amaretti biscuits to the demerara sugar that was sprinkled on top. 

They were yummy and made a nice addition to our table of goodies at our Children in Need cake sale:

More about that later !!

PUMPKIN SPICE CAKE

Late last year I spotted a beautiful bundt tin in a blog (used for a lemon and poppy seed cake recipe as it happens) and fell in love.  With some birthday and Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket I decided this was what I wanted to spend it on more than anything else.  I tracked one down at Amazon and could hardly contain myself until it arrived.

I put it in my cupboard with all the other baking tins and there it stayed.  I was almost afraid of it.  Its beauty taunted me every time I reached for an ordinary round cake tin or a muffin tin, especially if I had to move it out of the way to get to the tin I wanted.

The truth is, I didn’t quite know what to do with it.  I have never made a bundt cake in my life and didn’t know if I could just use any old cake recipe – imagine how disappointed I would feel if the cake stuck to the tin, or sank, or didn’t work for some reason, perhaps because bundt cake mixture is different from other cake mixtures. 

Then the tin made another appearance in the same blog*, this time used for a pumpkin spice cake – and the spell was broken.  I couldn’t wait to bake one for myself.

I greased and floured the tin lovingly, followed the recipe precisely, and to my absolute relief and delight, the cake came out of the tin perfectly !! 

It was simplicity itself to make, the only tricky part being getting hold of all the ingredients.  The recipe uses a tin of pumpkin purée.  I searched in all my local supermarkets; Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s and the Co-op.  None of them had it, or had even heard of it.

I was considering ordering it from Amazon when I mentioned it to a colleague at work and she said she had one at home that she got from Waitrose.  I immediately sent an email to Nick, who works in Sheffield where there is now a large Waitrose store, and off he toddled in his lunch break to grab the last two tins on the shelf. 

I took the cake to a Macmillan coffee morning.  There were lots of other yummy cakes on sale, plus scones to die for, but my pumpkin cake won me the star baker award. It just goes to show what a difference a posh tin will make !

Not only did the cake look good, it tasted wonderful too.  

(*The original blog that the recipe comes from now allows access to invited readers only.)

Ingredients

200g plain flour
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
250g soft brown sugar
50g Brazil nuts, chopped
3 eggs, lightly beaten
190ml vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 x 400g tin pumpkin purée

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 175°C/155° fan.  Grease and flour your bundt tin*.

In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarb, salt and spices.

In a large bowl, mix together the beaten eggs, oil, sugar vanilla extract and pumpkin purée, until well combined.  Stir in the chopped brazil nuts.

Tip the flour mixture into the bowl and fold in, making sure everything is well combined.  Pour the mixture into the bundt tin and level the top.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until the cake passes the usual tests.  Cool in the tin for ten minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.

Cuts into 12-16 slices.

*If you haven’t got a bundt tin, use a 25cm square tin.  

CHICKEN THIGHS WITH TARRAGON

This has become a favourite recipe in our house for a quick, delicious and satisfying meal.  The whole thing is on the table in less than an hour, making it an ideal midweek dinner,  and it also looks good enough to serve to guests too. 

It is based on a recipe from the book “Easy Meals” by Rachel Allen and you will find the original version on her website here.

I tend to vary how I make it, depending on how big the chicken thighs are and how many people I expect to feed.  Four small thighs and a few veg will feed two nicely.  Good plump thighs and a few more veg in the pot will feed four easily.  Thickly sliced parsnips work well instead of potatoes, as do courgettes.

You can also make a gluten free version, replacing the chicken stock with dry white wine, which works really well and is just as delicious.

Here’s my version of the recipe:

Ingredients

4 chicken thighs, skin on

a handful of unpeeled small new potatoes, or larger ones cut in half

2 leeks, washed and cut into thick slices

olive oil for frying

250 ml chicken stock, made using a stock cube, or dry white wine

fresh or dried tarragon

the juice of one lemon

1 tblsp Dijon mustard

Method

Preheat the oven to 220°C/200°fan/gas mk 7.  Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large frying pan or ovenproof baking pan (such as a cast iron one).

Cut off and discard the flappy bits of skin from the chicken thighs.  Season with salt and pepper and place them skin side down in the hot oil.  Cook for 4-5 minutes until nicely browned.

Turn them over and add the leeks and potatoes.  Cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Add the stock and a sprig of tarragon (or a good sprinkling of dried tarragon). 

If you have used a cast iron or similar pan this can then go straight in the oven, or if you have used a frying pan, transfer to an ovenproof dish or casserole, making sure the chicken stays skin side up.

Cook uncovered for about 30 minutes until the potatoes are soft and the chicken is cooked.  Stir in another sprinkling of tarragon, the lemon juice and mustard before serving.

Serves 4.

LEMON CURD MACAROONS

When we were on holiday in France in August, I invited my two young friends, Isabella and Amélie, round for a baking session.  We baked a whole load of stuff and these lemon curd macaroons were among the favourites.

The tarts are based on the old Be-ro book recipe that I used to make nearly every week with my mother when I was a little girl.  This is how I learned to make pastry with my mum, rubbing the lard into the flour by hand and rolling the pastry out – my mother always used lard, not butter or margarine, in her pastry and it was always delicious.  Maybe it’s what you get used to.

You can find the Be-ro recipe on their website here, in the pastry section.

However, in France I used a pack of ready-made, ready-rolled shortcrust pastry, the sweet version called paté sablée, which you can get in all the supermarkets.  Amélie cut the circles of pastry and I showed her how to crimp the edges by hand.  She’s a very smart little girl and was keen to do a good job.

My mum always made the tarts with Robertson’s strawberry jam, the one where you could send off for a golliwog using a coupon from the label on the jar.  This was in the 1950’s, when it never occurred to most of us that such a thing could be offensive to anyone.  I had quite a collection of the golliwogs – I wonder what happened to them.

I decided to make the tarts using lemon curd and some lemon rind in the almond filling.  We also sprinkled some Perles de Sucre, crushed sugar cubes, on top for decoration.

The tarts were a big hit with everyone and soon disappeared off the plate.

 

Isabella was creative with the pastry trimmings.  I told her that we usually make them into biscuits for Lulu so she decided to make them into a miniature Lulu.  Being a dog, Lulu scoffed it in one go, but I’m sure she appreciated the aesthetics really !!

This month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, proposed by the lovely Kate of What Kate Baked, and Karen of Lavender and Lovage, is for preserves.  Lemon curd is a kind of preserve, in the sense that it comes in a jar and you use it for tarts, hence I am entering our lemon curd macaroons.

Here’s how we made them:

Ingredients

150g shortcrust pastry (either shop-bought or home-made)

50g caster sugar

50g ground almonds

1 egg, beaten

grated rind of ½ a lemon

lemon curd

1 tblsp perles de sucre

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°fan/gas mk 6.  Grease a 12-hole patty tin.

Roll out the pastry and cut into 7.5cm (3”) rounds.  Line each hole in the tin.

Mix the almonds, sugar, lemon rind and egg together.

Put about half a teaspoon of lemon curd in to each tart.  Drop a spoonful of almond mixture on top of each one, dividing it equally between the tarts.

Sprinkle a few perles de sucre on each tart.

Bake for 15 minutes or until risen and golden brown.  Cool in the tin for a few minutes then remove and cool completely on a wire rack.

(You could also dust with icing sugar or drizzle a little lemon water icing on top and sprinkle with yellow sugar crystals if you like.)

Makes 12 tarts.

COURGETTE, LEMON AND POPPYSEED CAKE

When we are on holiday in France the generosity of our friends and neighbours never ceases to amaze and delight us.  After five years of having our holiday home you would think it should no longer surprise us, but it always does, and it’s such a complete joy.

Our friends will bring us the surplus from their vegetable gardens when they come to visit, we come away from their homes with armfuls of fruit and veg, and our neighbour just leaves little parcels of it on the doorstep for us to find.  This holiday has been no exception and although gardening has been challenging in France this year, just like it has at home, our friends have still been kind to us and passed on some of their goodies. 

So, with a basketful of beautiful tomatoes and squash in our cellar, I was looking through my folder of recipes for something to make with courgettes and came across a recipe for courgette and lemon cake.  I first saw the recipe on my friend Diane’s blog, so printed it out from the website – you can see the original here.

However, I was rummaging through the cupboards in my little French kitchen to see whether I had all of the ingredients and found this part used packet of poppy seeds lurking at the back:

Which reminded me of this month’s Random Recipe Challenge, “store cupboard finds” – the brainchild of the lovely Dom at Bellau Kitchen, which was to cook with some long forgotten ingredient found at the back of the cupboard. 

 

I had actually already done this rummaging exercise in my English kitchen before we came on holiday and brought some ancient tins of foodstuffs on holiday with me, knowing I would have more time to do something with them on holiday than at home.  But somehow I never got around to using them.  No doubt they will be returned to the back of the same cupboard, having crossed the English Channel in both directions !!  But I certainly did not want to waste my lovely round courgette so I walked down the hill from our little cottage to the Thursday morning market in the village to buy a lemon.  Poppy seeds often appear teamed with lemons in a cake so I thought I would add some to this recipe and see what happened.

 

 Ça marche !! 

The cake was really easy to make, the flavour of the lemon and cinnamon were lovely and it was not too sweet.  The courgettes made it nice and moist and the poppy seeds made the texture more interesting.  It was not the most glamorous looking cake I have ever made but I will definitely be making it again.  It’s a great way to use up a glut of courgettes too.

Here’s my version of the recipe:

Ingredients

200g grated courgette

150g caster sugar

1 egg

125 ml vegetable oil

200g plain flour

½ tsp salt

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

¼ tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

the finely grated zest of one lemon

1 tblsp poppy seeds

Method

Preheat the oven to 160°C/150°fan/gas mk 3.  Grease a small loaf tin and line with a strip of baking paper that goes along the bottom and up both sides (this helps you to lift the cake out when it is cooked).  If you are using a fan oven it may help to fix the paper to the ends of the tin with paper clips or bulldog clips, to stop it wafting onto the top of the cake.

In a large bowl, beat the courgette, sugar, egg and oil together.

Sift in the flour, salt, bicarb and baking powder.  Add the lemon zest, poppy seeds and cinnamon.  Stir together until just combined.  Pour the mixture into the tin.

Bake for 45-50 minutes until firm and golden and the cake passes the skewer test.  Cool in the tin for ten minutes then remove and place on a wire rack to cool completely.

When cold cut into thick slices.

Serves 10-12.

CHOCOLATE MARGARITA CAKE

When I first looked at the We Should Cocoa challenge for this month, organised by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot, which is for something with a cocktail theme, I knew straight away what I would like to make.

There is only one cocktail that I ever drink – a margarita.

We developed a taste for margaritas when we were on holiday in America a few years ago.  We spent three nights in Las Vegas (three nights is more than enough for anyone I think!) and although it was the first week in October it was baking hot.

One very sultry afternoon, the Strip was heaving with perspiring tourists and we were getting tired and suffering from sensory overload.  Las Vegas is that kind of place.  Too much gosh factor for my little country girl’s brain to take in.  So we dived into the nearest bar, which happened to be Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. 

We tasted our first margaritas and from that moment we were hooked.  We spent the rest of the holiday sampling margaritas at every opportunity.  Everybody does them and they’re all different.  A bit like a sherry trifle !! 

When we got home we did some intensive research to find the perfect margarita recipe and Jimmy Buffet’s turned out to be the one we liked the most.  We even managed to get a set of those rather naff cactus stem margarita glasses to serve them in !!  Believe me, when you get home from work, you’ve had a really bad day, it’s cold and raining, there’s nothing exciting for dinner and you desperately need a boost, there’s nothing beats a margarita to do just that.  My theory is it’s the limes !!  The high zing factor of the cocktail puts the sparkle back into a Tuesday evening and even makes sausage and mash look interesting !!

I didn’t have to look far for a recipe combining chocolate and margaritas.  In Nigella’s book “Kitchen” she has “flourless chocolate lime cake with margarita cream”.

 

This is another recipe for a flourless chocolate torte kind of cake.  It’s also gluten free if you use the right kind of baking powder (or cream of tartar and bicarb instead).  It was easy to make and for some reason Lulu got very excited.  Maybe she associates the smell of lime juice with a very pleasant evening and the possibility of a left-over sausage – who knows what goes on in a dog’s mind ??!!

I had trouble deciding whether the cake was cooked, as you can tell from the number of holes poked in the top.  In the end I took it out of the oven when the maximum baking time was up, even though my tester was still coming out of the cake with mixture stuck to it.  I reasoned that it was meant to be a moist cake and I didn’t want it to be too dry.

The cake is served with a margarita cream, made by whisking together double cream, icing sugar, tequila, triple sec and lime juice. 

The whole thing was divine.  The cake was beautifully moist with just the right amount of chocolate and a hint of lime.  The cream was light, fluffy and fragrant.  It made a fabulous dessert to serve to our guests.

The cake itself is now my joint favourite of its type.  I have made several flourless chocolate tortes and some are far too rich and intensely chocolatey for my taste.  This one is just right.  (My other favourite is the Linda Collister recipe which I wrote about here.)

The interesting thing is, I don’t cook that many of Nigella’s recipes but I often go back to them over and over again.  This is going to be one of those I think.  I followed it to the letter and you can see it here.