Category: Cake

Pistachio cupcakes

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I was given a book of cupcake recipes some time ago, but I’ve never made many. Thought I’d rectify that this year. These are pistachio ones – with ground pistachios in them and all.

Icing these involved making two batches of icing, because in making the first one I discovered that my class old-school sieve whose handle I’ve needed to fix for years was rusty when I noticed black spots all through my nice pristinely white icing. Sad.

They’re the beginning of a year of birthday cupcakes. Well, that’s the intention anyway.

Lamingtons

Step 1: make a sponge cake the day before.

I decided to go with Stephanie Alexander’s Genoese sponge, because it looked straightforward and it’s the one she recommends for making lamingtons with. (Dear autocorrect: I really do mean lamington. NOT lamination, nor leamington.)

Problem 1: the recipe just said ‘electric mixer’ for the egg and sugar, so I just used the K blade… wondering the whole time whether it should be the whisk. After 10 minutes, yes it should be the whisk.

OK, done. Add the flour…

Problem 2: I think I stirred it too much. But I kept finding these flour swirls! So I had to get rid of them, right?

Into the oven. Check after 15 minutes. Not quite done. Couple more minutes – out it comes. Turn it out a few minutes later, onto a towel, so it doesn’t stick to the rack (as suggested).

Problem 3: an hour or so later, I turned the cake back over to cover it properly for the night. And discovered that the top of the cake was left on the towel because the cake was not cooked properly. Like, still soggy in the middle. How was that even possible? The poker came out clean!

Back into the oven. For maybe another 20 minutes? perhaps a bit less. This is weird.

Step 2: the next day, cut up the cake and cover it with chocolate and coconut. Happily, this bit didn’t go too badly. Made a lovely mess. But the cake is nowhere near as sponge-a-riffic as I would have hoped.

Possible problems: 1. I used the wrong sized cake tin (20cm not 24cm; is that going to prevent it from rising?); 2. Too much stirring; 3. Too much cooking; 4. I am not a sponge-maker.

Still they taste all right. And I shall not give up.

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Swiss meringue buttercream

IMG_0836When Katherine, at the Sweetfest, mentioned that her swiss meringue buttercream recipe was from Martha Stewart, I wondered whether my Martha Stewart’s CAKES would have the recipe. And it did. And then we were invited to a friend’s house, and I had banana and walnut cake in the freezer already, and so… experiment! (Of course, it’s also online.)

Stewart’s version makes 9 cups’ worth and requires a swoon-worthy amount of eggs and sugar. So I’ve written the halved ingredients into the book itself, and then I realised that I only had 150g of butter anyway so I just figured out how much sugar and so on that required; the answer was 2 whites, and so on.

It’s a very straightforward process to make the frosting, happily. Yes there’s whisking of sugar and whites, but that didn’t take too long. The rest of the process was easy.

I didn’t flavour the buttercream aside from the vanilla, since it was going on a banana cake anyway. It was easy to spread onto the cake, which is an important thing for me. I had enough left over that I could have frosted the edges if I wanted, but decided that that would be a bit of overkill – especially when I discovered that the buttercream will last in the freezer for three months. So into a jar it goes. No idea where it will be used in the future.

Sweetfest

Today I went to Sweetfest and… it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I think that’s mostly my fault; I’ve been to two craft shows this year and for some reason I thought this was going to be like that. I knew there was only going to be 20 or so exhibitors but I didn’t recognise any of the names, really, so I thought there would be a mixture of maybe cafes/food places and places selling useful gear, that sort of thing. But… no. That link earlier takes you to a page listing what each place will be selling; I’m quite sure it didn’t have that info when I bought my ticket. Because it turned out they were all cafes and patisseries, just selling food. So it wasn’t what I was expecting. I had realised there would be a lot of food and had therefore anticipated eating there; I ended up having a chocolate and cashew scroll, which was ok but not awesome, and then gelato: nutella, which was great, and raspberry and rosemary which is an awesome theory but I couldn’t taste the rosemary. It was interesting walking around looking at the pastries etc and I wish I’d been game enough to try one of Naughty Boy’s amazing shakes.

However, I was also going for the sessions, so it wasn’t a total loss. I hadn’t expected to pay attention to Katherine Sabbath’s cake icing demonstration but I was there early and a bit bored by the stalls, so I sat and watched her create this incredible tall cake – two cakes, sliced, turned into about an eight-tier monstrosity with three different coloured icings inside and ‘water-colour’ frosting on the outside (the three different colours basically smudged together). She was a very good presenter – when she said she’d been a teacher for four years, it totally made sense – and it was intriguing that she’s got famous courtesy of Instagram. I don’t get Instagram. But the cake: she was alternating chocolate mud and some sort of vanilla cake, and the frosting was pink, mustard, and violet, and it was Martha Stewart’s swiss meringue buttercream, flavoured with salted caramel. Katherine answered some questions, and she did so very well and in such a way that either she’s a very genuine and exceptionally gifted public speaker or she’s learnt very fast: no “it must be Valhrona couverture chocolate” stuff, it was ‘use what you can afford’ which I appreciated. It was fascinating watching her work – smoothing at the end with her Gyprock concrete scraper! – and it was very much a show.

Secondly, and the reason I went on the Saturday, was Philippa Sibley, apparently the Queen of Desserts although I’d not heard of her before. By comparison with Katherine she came off as almost impatient; she was efficient, a bit abrupt, precise. She did not waffle. I loved her style a lot. I was a bit sad that she didn’t go into a lot of detail about how to make the pastry – I think she was pushed for time because Katherine went way over – but her tips about pushing the pastry into the very edges of the tin, alfoil right into the edges and avoiding any creases at all, and having the overhang of pastry were deeply awesome and made me inspired to try out making tarts. Which was indeed the whole point of going to see the session. I didn’t buy her book at the time but I would consider it in future…. Sibley did not put on a show. She was doing a demonstration.

Overall I think this was a really good idea for a food festival. There needed to be more chairs for the demonstrations (they said on the programming that there was limited seating). I would go again next year with a friend, as long as the presenters sounded interesting.

Mini cakes

This isn’t an original idea by any means, but I love the idea of mini cakes.

Sometimes I just want to bake… but we can’t eat an entire cake at home. Well, we could, but it wouldn’t be a great idea. I do take cake to work, and that’s always welcome, but I don’t always want to! So when a friend of mine mentionedphoto that she was making a cake and putting the batter into small tins – well. Perfect.

photoI have these tins because for my darling’s 30th birthday, he wanted the train cake from the Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book. Instead of cutting up a cake to make the carriages, I divided the batter between these and turned each one into a carriage. A carriage for each person who came to the party (it wasn’t that big a party, but still…). There was a lot of icing. Anyway, now I have the tins! So when I felt like making a carrot cake (with walnuts…), into the tins the batter went and la! Delightful. And then into the freezer they went, so that I have cake for the future.