12th April 2011 – Dinosaur cake

So iv been busy recently, namely assignments, exams and moving house and so I havent had much chance to update this, but impressed myself with this cake so thought that even though it was a while ago i would still share it. It was my sister’s 24th birthday on the 9th of May, so I thought about making her a cake again. I've made 1 for my mum and my sister for the last couple of years and usually I make just a round chocolate cake, put cream in the middle, cover the top in melted chocolate and decorate it with smarties, flakes, etc, but this year I wanted to try something a bit different, but was unsure what to do. My sister loves dinosaurs, stegosaurus’s being her favourite, and I saw on another blog I follow (called “cakecuccino”) that she had made a 3d dinosaur cake, which looked amazing, but I felt it was a little bit ambitious for my first attempt at a shaped cake, so I searched for a simpler dinosaur design. I decided that I ought to practice it first to see how big it would be, how easy it was, if I was happy with how it will look and just to have an experiment basically. So after a trip to town to get some sweets and other bits I had a go that afternoon.

Usually I would make my own cake, chocolate of course, but as it was just a test run and it was the shape of the dinosaur and the decorating part I really wanted to have a play with I decided to save some time and effort by buying a couple of cake mixes from Asda. I’m also not very good at icing, I’ve tried a couple of times and it’s never quite right, it usually ends up being too runny so it goes everywhere and takes hours to dry or its not very spreadable, so I decided to try some Betty Crocker vanilla butter cream icing instead. I have to say it was a good idea as it tastes lovely, is easy to work with and guarantees perfect icing, which, at £1.70, is a small price to pay to make things a little bit easier for myself.

           

Cake Ingredients

♥       Water

♥       Butter

♥       2 Eggs

♥       2 Asda chosen by you chocolate cake mix

 

Method

1. Make the cake mixes according to the packet instructions (did it a while ago so can’t remember this particular packet mix instructions but each packet mix will be different anyway).  
2.  Put cakes in oven for the specified time, then remove from oven and test with a knife inserted in the middle, which should come out clean, then place on a wire rack to cool.  

 To decorate

♥       Betty Crocker vanilla buttercream

♥       Orange food colouring

♥       2 Toblerones

♥       Chocolate chips

♥       Cadburys buttons

♥       Silver balls

♥       Tubes of icing

1. Cut straight across the bottom of 1 cake and then cut out a U at the bottom as well and that will give you the main body and legs of the dinosaur. Put some icing on the underneath of the cake then place in the centre of the cake board, nearer the bottom than the middle. I couldn’t find a proper cake board that I thought would be big enough and couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money to get one online, so I bought a large white chopping board from wilko’s instead, it does the job fine though and could even be covered if preferred.
2. Use the other cake for the tail and the neck & head. You can use a stencil but I didn’t find it too difficult to cut them out without one. I cut the bottom of the neck a bit narrow so it looked a little odd at first, so just used some of the leftover cake to put a triangle of cake at the neck/body join to make it look right.
3. You can eat the rest of the leftover cake, either on its own or with a little bit of the icing (well you have to test the cake before you can give it away as you don’t want to give them bad cake).
4. Once you have placed the head and tail where you want it to be then put a bit of the buttercream on the underneath to attach it to the board and then you can do the crumb coating. A crumb coating is a layer of icing/buttercream over the cake to make sure all the crumbs are covered and won’t be getting into the proper icing layer. Once you have spread the icing over it all then place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes to let the buttercream set.
5. I coloured the buttercream with orange food colouring, applied the crumb coating and left it for 30 minutes in my fridge. The crumb coating was a bit tricky, especially the parts where I had cut it as that was very crumby but for a first attempt it went ok.
6. After it was set I applied another coat, thicker this time of the buttercream, which was tricky trying to get it smooth and it still had a few crumbs, but I quite liked the look it gave.
7. I then got onto the fun job of decorating it. As my sister loves the stegosaurus more than the other dinosaurs I decided that was the direction I should go in so I used Toblerone pieces to make the spikes along its back and tail, and chocolate chips over its head and neck as little spikes.
8. I placed chocolate buttons on the body to make it a spotty dinosaur and used little silver balls for the legs to indicate the toes. I finished it off with a little red icing for the mouth and eyes.
9. While it was quite a tricky cake to decorate at some points I did feel that for a first attempt at a “character” cake it turned out pretty good and looked quite cute actually. Tasted really nice too.
10. The people who have seen pictures of it have been pretty impressed with it, but unfortunately I wont be able to transport it very well if I was to make another one, as getting it to my sister requires about 2 buses and 2 trains and as I don’t have a box big enough to transport it safely I am unfortunately unable to make her one for her birthday next week, so I settled on making her and our friends some cupcakes instead.

 

16th January 2011 ~ Cheese Scones

Recipe taken from the “students’ vegetarian cookbook”

The recipe is just for plain scones, but I always prefer cheese ones so have adapted the recipe by adding cheese to it, though you could also add cherries, dried fruit or honey to the mixture before baking them. If you choose to add honey you should also add a little more flour to maintain the right consistency.

Ingredients

♥       450g self-raising flour

♥       30ml tablespoon baking powder

♥       75g butter/margarine

♥       300ml milk

Method

1. Mix the flour and the baking powder together
2. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
3. Gradually add the milk until the mixture forms a dough.
4. Roll out on a floured surface to about 2.5cm thick.
5. Cut into circles with a cookie cutter.
6. Place on a greased baking tray and bake in a preheated oven at 220°c for about 7 minutes until well risen and golden brown.

This is a fairly simple recipe and they taste fantastic, especially once they have just come out the oven with a bit of butter on them as it starts to melt the butter into them, after all, you have to check they are cooked properly. I have tried a few different scone recipes from various books my mum has (this is actually a rather old book of hers that I seem to have acquired, even though neither of us are actually vegetarians) and have found that these seem to work the best.

This recipe usually makes quite a lot of scones and I have found that they last about a week when in an airtight container, however as I am living alone right now and there is a limit as to how many I can physically eat in a week I have halved the ingredients, which will still produce a fair amount of scones though. The dough can be quite sticky but I find that adding extra flour works this out. The recipe never actually states how much cheese to use so I just use about 150g-300g (basically however much I can knead into it) of grated cheddar cheese, but any type of cheese should work. I knead the cheese in after I have formed the dough, not sure if this is when its supposed to be added but it seems to be working for me so far. Any size cutter is fine, I usually use a round one as most scones are round, but square ones work great too or any shape you like would also work out fine.

Once the scones are cut out and all the dough is used up I put them on a greased baking tray with greaseproof paper on it, this seems to stop them sticking to the tray as much and it also makes it easier to clean by just throwing the sheet of paper away, im all for making things easier. I usually have to bake them in 2 batches as I still only have 1 baking tray (I keep forgetting to get another one) and keep an eye on them while they are cooking as it is easy to leave them a tad too long and them to slightly burn on the bottom (has happened to me on a couple of occasions due to new cookers and just not timing it quite right).

Once the first batch are cooked I checked them by cutting one in half to see if it’s cooked properly before putting the second batch in. As it has already been cooked though it always seems to make sense to pop some butter on it and let it melt slightly then eat it, which is a very effective way of thoroughly checking its cooked and tastes pretty damn awesome too, although this does mean that you have to do the same to one from the other batch just to check those as well, what a shame. 

January 9th 2011 - Fudge Fingers

So today I decided to get back into the whole baking thing and decided to start with a recipe that is pretty much fool-proof by now: fudge fingers, the tried and tested chocolatey treat from way back in year 7 (so about 10 years ago). I’m not sure where the recipe came from originally, I just know that I was told to make them in year 7 at school and they taste pretty good so have carried on making them over the years, god knows where they originally found the recipe. I also chose this as I wanted something I could take to work with me and that wasn’t too hands on as when I started making them earlier today I was a bit sniffly and that seems to have now developed into a full-on cold.

Ingredients

 100g (4 oz) margarine/butter

 200g (8 oz) digestive biscuits

25g (1 oz) walnuts

 50g (2 oz) glace cherries

75g (3 oz) chocolate

1 tbsp cocoa powder/drinking chocolate

1 egg

 Foil

Method

1.   Line a square baking tin with foil.

2.   Crush the digestive biscuits in a bag with a rolling pin.

3.   At this stage you should chop the cherries and the nuts, however I’m not a fan of
       either of them so have never felt the need to include them in this recipe, but again,    
       the choice is yours. 
 4.  Melt the butter in a saucepan, over a medium heat.

 5.  Add the crushed biscuits, nuts, cherries, cocoa powder, sugar and egg to the butter and stir well to combine all the ingredients.

 6.  Transfer the mixture to the foil-lined baking tin, press the mixture level and leave to 1 side for a bit.

        7.  Break up the chocolate into a heat-proof bowl. 

        8.  Melt the chocolate over a pan of hot water, then spoon or pour the chocolate over the

              fudge mixture in the tin, and spread it over so it is completely covered.

        9.  Put the tin in the fridge to set and then cut into fingers.

 I choose to use chocolate digestives as I prefer them to normal digestives. There will be some leftover from the packet and chocolate ones are much nicer than plain ones, but its completely up to you as to which you decide to go for.
 

 

While the recipe says 75g of chocolate, when I originally did it with that amount it didn’t seem to spread that far so I usually use a larger bar of chocolate and just go with what looks right.

 

  To make it easier to cut into fingers you could cut it before placing it in the fridge, then going back over those cuts when set then enjoy :-)

 



new years resolution...bake more :-)

Hi. Not been on for a while, partly due to being ill and a very busy couple of months at uni. I haven't really baked for a while now - I did make some cheese scones a few weeks ago but didnt have my camera with me at the time and therefore was unable to take photos, so it seemed kinda pointless including it on here, I shall bake them again at some point though as they tasted pretty damn good. Also, as I wasnt at my house over christmas (only just got back to mine today) I couldnt really bake much either. I had a great christmas with my family and friends though. My dad knows I like baking things so as part of my christmas present he and my step-mum bought me a big top cupcake mould to make giant cupcakes with, some sillicone cupcake cases (never used sillicone bakeware before so will be interesting I imagine) and a set of 3 "ninjabread man" cutters to make gingerbread ninja's, which I'm super excited about for some reason, especially as they were actually on my amazon wishlist of what to get with my christmas money.

At the moment though I am unable to do any baking as my kitchen is a mess due to a problematic and apparently very leaky water tank in the bathroom upstairs, which when left unattended for just over 2 weeks had decided to soak my kitchen, leaving the plug sockets unuseable (and have actually been removed from the wall completely by an electrition who came to look at the problem) and no hot water so will see when i can have my kitchen back to some semblance of normality, supposedly tomorrow but you never know.I'ts also far too cold to do any baking in there due to no heating (when you can see your breath you know you have a problem) so i am curled up on the sofa with my quilt, hot water bottle, mug of hot chocolate and a fan heater pointed in my direction. Hope to get back to baking soon though, its been far too long.

chocolate fairy cakes - 29/09/10

Today was my day off from uni so decided to finally use my new book (1001 cookies, cupcakes and other tempting treats) as I bought it a few weeks ago but didn’t have time to use it before I moved. I decided that as I am planning on working my way through it I should start at the beginning and try recipe number 1. While it says there are 1001 recipes, it’s actually not quite 1001 as there are variations of quite a few of the recipes so instead of just making plain fairy cakes I decided to go for variation number 4 and make them chocolatey.

                           

                           Iced fairy cakes (makes 16)

4 oz butter

4 oz caster sugar

4 oz self-raising flour

2 eggs, lightly beaten

Cocoa powder

Decorations – silver balls and chocolate sprinkles

Icing

I decided to cheat a bit as im not great at making icing and saw some pink piping icing in Asda so thought I would try using that instead, it did not work well but you’ll see why later.

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190c
2. Line 2 bun tins with 16 cake cases.
3. Beat the butter and the sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy then gradually beat in the eggs. 
4. Sift in the flour and fold it into the mixture.
5. Add the cocoa powder.
6. Spoon the mixture into the cake cases and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

As I was making them chocolatey I was supposed to replace 1 oz of the flour with 2 tablespoons of the cocoa powder, but I forgot to do that so just added the cocoa powder after the flour, don’t think it made much of a difference to be honest.

Having recently moved into my house I haven’t really used the oven much and this was my first time baking in it so wasn’t sure about the temperature and how quickly they would cook so checked after 10 minutes and they weren’t quite done so left them a couple of minutes more, but was maybe a minute too long as they had started to burn a little bit, but as it was my first time with a new oven I didn’t think it was that bad and once decorated it wouldn’t be that noticeable anyway.

I left them a few minutes to cool down while I sorted out my icing. I have never used piping icing before so was a new experience for me. I quite liked it but it went kinda wrong so for the first one I decorated I used a knife to spread the icing around the cake, didn’t look that good. The second one went slightly better and the 4^th one I did was much improved, but still wasn’t 100% pleased with it so decided to give up with the icing for the time being and try it again another day.

 As I still had 11 cakes left to decorate I decided to use the Galaxy chocolate I had so melted it in a bowl over a pan of water on the stove.

This is where it got a bit messy, as my cakes had risen to a point so weren’t flat, which meant the melted chocolate ran a little bit but they still looked good. I then decided that as I was using melted chocolate, the chocolate sprinkles I had bought wouldn’t look very good so decided to use some silver balls instead and dropped some randomly on half of the cakes, leaving the other half plain chocolate. I did decide that I wanted to use the sprinkles, but they didn’t stick well to the pink icing so got more on the worktop than I did on the cakes.

 I tried one of the pink ones and they tasted fantastic! So despite the slight technical problems I had when decorating them it was definitely worth it. They will now be left in the kitchen so that other people I live with can help themselves to them as well, except the remaining 3 pink ones which I have kept for myselfJ

chocolate, sweetie and alice in wonderland afternoon: Monday 14th June 2010

while i have some recipes i want to try soon, i wont be able to do them for a few days yet so thought i would start with something me and a friend made a few months back, while not technically baking, it was still fun to make and eat.

About a week earlier me and my friend got talking about the fact we didn’t like trifle. I then mentioned my Nosh 4 Students cookbook has a boozy chocolate trifle, which in my opinion is nothing like a trifle, and my mum agrees on this. We then started talking about what a chocolate trifle should entail and came up with a very sickly sounding version of it. Anyway… As i had the house to myself for a few days it seemed a good time to attempt this so decided to do it this afternoon. After a brief trip to the local shop we had everything we needed for our chocolate, sweetie and alice in wonderland  afternoon.

I already had the chocolate ice cream in my freezer and it never actually got used, as we were unsure of where it should go.

So next we found a suitable sized bowl, which just happened to be the biggest glass mixing bowl we have and I put the kettle on to boil some water in order to melt the chocolate.

Dipping the marshmallows into the chocolate was fun, but rather messy, especially trying to stand them up on the plate proved tricky without getting some chocolate on you. Anyway we managed this and then moved onto crushing the biscuits with a rolling pin and I was given this happy job J though we probably made far too much noise in doing this, but it was damn fun.

After rather violently crushing the biscuits it was time to start assembling our trifle. We put the crushed biscuits in the bowl then added the jelly layer, cause I'm told that all good trifles have to have a jelly layer and ours consisted of haribo starmix, jelly tots and tooti fruiti’s. I then used the melted chocolate to make a drizzled chocolate layer over the jelly sweets and we popped it in the fridge to set for a bit while we watched some of Tim burtons Alice in wonderland.

We then sliced the mini-rolls in half and arranged them around the edge so they were tasty yet decorative, arranged the teacakes in a ring inside the mini roll circle then tipped the mini eggs into the space left inside the mini roll teacake circle which made it extra tasty as well as looking extra pretty and colourful.

As we had quite a few marshmallows left we decided to put some around the edges on top of the mini rolls and then placed them chocolate covered marshmallows in between and placed a Cadburys button on the top of the chocolate (like a little hat).

We then used the smarties to decorate the trifle and fill in the gaps between the teacakes and marshmallows.
Next came the fun part of trying to dish it up. As it had many layers it proved a little tricky. I just managed to get one of the big serving spoons down to the bottom layer and no way was I gonna be able to properly dish it up the way a proper trifle gets dished up so it required a little bit of thinking.
We decided to be a bit smarter about it. I decided to use a couple of ice cream tubs with lids as that way it would be easier to dish it up into because of its size and also the fact that if we couldn’t finish it all in one go we could then put lid on it and save it for later, and he could easily take it home with him if needed. First of all we divided the teacakes between us and each arranged them in the box how we felt was best. We then divided up the marshmallows and then the mini rolls. Due to the melted chocolate that we used it caused quite a few of the sweets to stick together, which did make it a bit easier to get the sweets.

We each dug in with a ladle/serving spoon of choice until most of the sweets were divided up and as there were some sweets hidden amongst the biscuit crumbs I used the slotted draining spoon to get the remaining sweets, leaving the crumbs in the bowl.  
     We both felt it worked very well, even though neither of us could finish our tubs because it was majorly filling. Wasn’t as sickly as I was expecting though but I guess that’s a good thing. As it was really good he decided to make me one for my 21st birthday, with a few minor alterations: biscuit layer was replaced with a big Rice Krispie layer and there were a lot of new sweet additions to it (malteasers, white chocolate, tangfastics, etc) and he also put a mound of mousse at the top as well (which is where the ice-cream was originally gonna go.