Category Archives: nom nom nom

Hazelnut Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

MrB is *mumblemumble* years old today, so it’s as good a reason as any to make cake. My little sister bought me the book for Christmas and this is the first outing it’s had, because I have been oh-so-good for the past month and not had a crumb of cakey goodness to eat. But the sugar, fat and chocolate in these should make up for it! They’re slightly not quite right because the mousse filling is actually on top of the cakes and I’ve omitted the chocolate ganache on top because I ran out of chocolate and there’s more chance of it raining Wollmeise than finding 70% cocoa chocolate at my corner shop. I blame the fact that the book is American and uses ounces. I mean, how can six ounces be more than a hundred grammes? Those ounces are huge!

And of course MrB loved his socks. He was impressed with the stranding after I waved the socks under his nose gently pointed it out to him, although I am fully aware that he doesn’t quite get just how fiddly they were. But I do and can feel chuffed with myself. They are on his feet today, which is the most important thing!

Have a good weekend, everyone!

This week has been hectic. No knitting, but lots of tidying, wrapping presents and baking instead.

My Delia inspired Christmas cake is done:

The top of my cake isn’t as flat as Delia’s, so it looks a bit mountainous, and I didn’t have any special snowflake cutters, so used stars instead. The end result looks good, though, and the cake itself is the most important part!

I have also made gingerbread for the first time:

Gingerbread Cut-Out Cookies, recipe available here

and even had a stab at making my own writing icing because the whole of the south of England apparently also want to use ready-made white icing in tubes. My favourite cookie is The Christmas Snail.

And for the final instalment in this rather calorific post, a pie for the boys to eat tomorrow as they hate Christmas Pudding.

Old Fashioned Chocolate Pudding Pie, recipe available here

I think Rose wasn’t that keen either last year, when she had her first taste, but will try again. My children are very odd.

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and I’ll hopefully be back knitting in a week or so when the baking frenzy is over!

I haven’t made a Christmas cake since 2008, so this year I decided it was time I got back into the habit.

The recipe is available here – a new one for me, and I hope that it tastes okay. Although every fruit cake is improved with a bit of feeding! And I am stealing Delia’s decoration ideas:

I am much cheered by the fact that she only decorates the top of the cake. Hers by design, mine because of laziness, but the end result is the same.

Lemon Cake, recipe available here

Oscar is 11 today, and requested a lemon birthday cake, not a squidgy, chocolately explosion of calories that his brother would have picked.

I am trying very hard not to feel ancient, even when I had to sort out his secondary school application this week, ready for him joining Henry at Big School in September next year. Ah well, they were small once…

*is evil parent*

In our garden is an apple tree. It was there when we moved in. Sometimes it has apples on it. Sometimes it doesn’t. I am not a gardener – I kill houseplants just by looking sideways at them – so I generally leave trees and other growing things alone. But there are apples on the tree, it’s raining, it’s cold and I needed comfort food. So I made an apple crumble…

…and the crumble was good.

Cinnamon Coffee Cake and Chocolate Cupcakes from The Joy of Vegan Baking

Because you can never have too much cake. Especially if you’re going to be doing a lot of knitting very soon.

Vanilla Cake from The Joy of Vegan Baking

Well, I’m settling in for an afternoon of tennis with a bit of cake. Whatever your plans for this weekend, have a good one!

Egads. It only seems like three years ago that I was posting about Henry’s tenth birthday. Now there’s a teenager in the house. Where do the years go to? If I didn’t have my finished projects to look over, I’d think I did nothing all year.

* * * * *

In technical computer-related news, my pc is back to (almost) normal. It was the graphics card. So after putting all my important files on a giant memory stick, it was a good opportunity to have a complete reinstall of everything and now the pc is super-fast and working beautifully. Thank you all so much for your suggestions for file storage. I am looking into those as I type and once I have at least 3 copies of everything saved in various places I will finally relax.

Firstly, a warm hello if you’re coming to this blog as a result of reading the Simply Knitting website. Regular readers: I was only their Blog of the Week on Friday!

And now, as promised, cake photos!

I really, really wanted to make a cream cheese frosting which is apparently the de facto icing for a red velvet cake, but Mr B is a cheeseophobe (if there is such a word; the spell check in my browser says no) so I went with a household favourite of chocolate fudge instead. Which was very nice, if not traditional.

The redness mellowed to a maroon sort of colour, but it still contrasted beautifully with the icing. It tasted just like a slightly chocolately sponge cake, but with the added excitement of turning everyone’s tongue pink.

the tough get baking. As my knitting brain appears to be leaking out of my ears this week, it’s nice to have a reason to play at being a domestic goddess and leave the yarn to sort itself out. Mr B has a Very Significant Birthday tomorrow, so he needs a Very Special Cake.

Back when Rose was very tiny and I found myself glued to the sofa, I got addicted to watching American cake programmes on TV with BIG cakes in INTERESTING shapes. Through watching these, I discovered red velvet cake, which makes a plain English Victoria sandwich look a bit lightweight, so decided that this must to be the cake of choice for the VSB.

I had hunted down some American recipes on the internet, but then Nigella put a recipe in her new book and it saved having to convert the measurements *lazy* so I went with that one.

It seems authentic enough; I had to add an entire pot of food colouring paste:

and mix it in

and it is indeed Very Red. Because I have a piddling small oven, I’m baking the two 9 inch cakes separately which is a pain. But the first one has come out and is not quite so scarily red, but it’s definitely not your average sponge.

However, I will be scrubbing my hands later before the school run as I do look like I’ve been involved in something quite violent and probably fatal… finished cake pictures in the next day or two!

I don’t know if it’s a peculiarly British thing, but I do love bread sauce with my Christmas dinner. Proper, homemade bread sauce, mind, not the stuff in a packet. I usually make it at the beginning of December and then freeze it until needed. But this year I am completely disorganised, so it wasn’t until this morning that I girded my loins and set to and made it.

It’s probably the least appetising-looking sauce you can imagine, akin to a mixture of porridge and baby food mush, but it tastes divine. I just have to hope that the cold weather doesn’t stop us getting a turkey to go with it.

I don’t know. It’s coming to something when a girl has to bake her own birthday cakes! But it means I get to choose the exact flavour and as it’s my birthday, no one is allowed to complain.

Smallest person has a cake sale at school tomorrow so I spent today making cookie dough and then cutting out and baking about fifty Daleks. Of course now I have fifty Daleks to ice in various colours. It’s going to be a late night.

On the plus side, I have my extra ball of Kauni and can now knit the second sleeve! I’m off on holiday next week, so will take the Tomten Jacket with me, along with the manly socks (about half a sock left of the pair to finish) and something else, just on the off chance that the weather is crappy and I get to spend a lot of time indoors playing with yarn!

If I don’t post before I go, see you all in a week’s time.

Torta alla Gianduia, aka Nutella Cake, from How to be a Domestic Goddess

A final slice of cakey goodness before I disappear for a few days.

Next week I will be back blogging, possibly with lovely gifts to share and definitely a couple of pounds heavier. All this baking has to be eaten by someone, after all… Happy Christmas to everyone!

I cheerfully admit that for a cake decorator, I’d make a good bricklayer. One day I’d like to do a fancy sugarcraft course and make dainty flowers and swans and do painfully smooth royal icing and stuff, but for now, my hamfisted approach works fine, especially when the cake inside is what I’m *most* interested in.

My “decoration” is made up of blobs of ready-to-roll icing in various colours and a bit of writing icing for the features. Note the fetching “handknitted” scarf and hat. Even penguins can’t escape my festive knits.

Chocolate Christmas Cookies from Nigella Christmas

After cooking for eight people on Sunday, I’ve been left with the washing up; Mr B having escaped by conveniently working away from home for the next few days. So I figured I may as well add to the mountain. These cookies are for the small people to nibble while the rest of us enjoy the mince pies.

Fifty-eight Fifty-seven tiny mince pies (well, I had to try one!), each one barely a mouthful and therefore calorie-free, possibly.

The mincemeat comes from a jar, but the pastry recipe is from an old Sainsbury’s magazine and makes the BEST pastry for mince pies: slightly sweet and crumbly.

Now I just have to freeze them before Mr B comes home and wants to have his own taste sample.

I’m a little late this year, but yesterday I finally got around to making a Christmas cake. For the entire day, the scent of warm fruit and brandy spread through the house and I was almost whistling Jingle Bells by bedtime.

I wish I could say that the recipe was handed down my family through the generations, but this one comes from a Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Cookbook published in 1998. But what is most important is that the recipe makes the BEST Christmas cake. One year I strayed and used Nigella’s recipe and much as I love her cupcakes, muffins, cookies and general chocolately goodness, the cake was a disappointment. I have never strayed again.

The cake has been bathed in brandy and is now sitting wrapped in the back of the larder until I decide that maybe it needs a bit more feeding in the run up to the Big Day.

Add together an army of Dalek cookies…

…a plate of caramel crispy cakes made with melted Mars bars…

…and Malteser flavour cake covered with Maltesters, and you have sixteen happy children, sent home to their parents full of sugar.

(All recipes from Feast by Nigella Lawson)

I’ve been baking again. This time it’s because the smallest of the small people did not approve of chocolate and cherry cupcakes.

These are basic sponge buns with chocolate drops in, which *do* meet with approval. It’s a recipe given to me by my grandma, and it’s my fallback recipe whenever I need to whip up cakes without having to buy fancy ingredients. You can use the same recipe baked in two sandwich tins to make a Victoria sponge (preferably filled with whipped cream and fresh strawberries) but buns are best for small people. The recipe’s main advantage is that as long as you remember the ingredients and method, you never need to remember quantities.

So, because chocolate and cake are proven to help when puzzling over a complicated stitch pattern, I present the recipe in all its glory.

Ingredients:
2 large or 3 medium free-range happy eggs
Self-raising flour
Unsalted butter
Sugar
Vanilla extract (optional)
Chocolate chips
12-cup bun tin lined with paper cases

Method:
Weigh the eggs. Weigh out the same weight in the flour, butter and sugar. Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and soft and fluffy.

Beat in the eggs one at a time with a little of the flour. Add a teaspoonful, or as much as you want, of the vanilla extract, if using. I didn’t, because I couldn’t find it in the cupboard and I might not actually have any… Fold in the rest of the flour with a metal spoon.

Mix in as many chocolate chips as you want (just one packet is considered a bit miserly in this house) and spoon the mixture into the cases, remembering to scrape out all the excess with a spatula so there’s no reason for any arguments about who gets to lick the bowl.

I prefer the contrast of plain chocolate with the sponge, but my corner shop only has milk chocolate drops, so that’s what I’ve used.

Note: I use larger than average cake cases because they come decorated with dinosaurs and footballs and other things. If you’re using the regular white Supercook bun cases from the supermarket, you’ll probably be able to make around 18 buns. The mixture will be fairly thick, so just dollop it into the cases; it spreads out when it’s in the oven.

Bake at 190ºc/gas mark 5 for 15 to 20 minutes, turning tin around halfway through this time if you have a crappy oven like mine. Turn cakes out of tin and leave to cool on a wire rack for as long as possible. Add icing and sprinkles and other doodads if you can be bothered, but they’re quite interesting just as they are.

Chocolate cherry cupcakes from How to be a Domestic Goddess, including one special one for someone’s birthday tomorrow…