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Category Archive: Baking
Subcategories: Baking with Julia Biscuits Tuesdays with Dorie
Clandestine Cake-a-long Returns – Torta Columbina & Homemade Orange Curd Recipe
We’ve had a few weeks break from the Cake-a-long but its back raring to go! It seems that with every cake I’ve made from the Clandestine Cake Collection, I’ve learnt a new skill and developed a new addiction. This time it is a delicious orange curd – when I came to make the Cake-a-long bake I discovered I didn’t have any orange curd in so undeterred made my own. Delicious! And so easy in the microwave. All the way through, I was convinced I’d mess it up, my eggs would curdle and it would taste awful – but NO – IT WAS A HUGE SUCCESS! We are now eating Homemade Orange Curd with everything – the kids might draw the line at Orange Curd Tuna Pasta however. I’ve never heard of a Torta Columbina before – I have googled and found Tarta Columbiana which sounds very similar. This cake was the brainwave of Euan Greig who blogs over at Signor Biscotti, a lovely blog that will have your mouth watering. Euan’s version of the cake looks so much better than mine and you can find the recipe here. I’m going to try to interview Euan in time for the next more »
Cake of the Week: Swiss Roll – A revelation!
How have I gone 39 years without making a swiss roll? Even more to the point, how didn’t I know that they were so easy and so satisfying to make? Last Sunday we were having a family getogether as we do every year around the time of our Dad’s anniversary and Mum’s birthday. As usual, I had been mad busy during the run up to the day. I had every intention of producing a masterpiece but thought it would end up being a Mr Kipling/Costco special. On Sunday morning though, 4 of us did the Swimathon raising money for Marie Curie. Amazing how a swim can leave you feeling energised and utterly needing cake! I came home and thought Swiss Roll like you do. A quick nosy round at old cookbooks and I came up with a recipe of my own. I was wanting to go for HUGE while we were expecting 13 of us. Print Swiss Roll – A revelation! Rating: 51 Prep Time: 14 minutesCook Time: 11 minutesTotal Time: 25 minutes Yield: At least 8-10 generous pieces Ingredients3 large eggs 125g caster sugar Splash of vanilla extract 125g plain flour Plenty of strawberry jam Punnet of strawberries Tub more »
Violet Meringue Kisses
I’m well known for my love of all things violet. You may remember a few weeks ago I was waiting on a delivery of some much coveted violet syrup. Well, the syrup arrived and smells divine so I have set out experimenting with recipes. I’m big into making homemade gifts and saw several pics of meringue kisses in lovely gift bags and sellophane. I’ve never even tried to colour meringue before never mind flavouring it but will give anything a go. Fair to say, my first attempt was a complete disaster. Underterred, but a little short on time, I decided to have another go and actually follow the rules of meringue this time – and they worked!! I only gave the meringue kisses a mild taste of violet as I wasn’t sure how much of the syrup, the beaten egg white could tolerate. I reckon if I did it again, I could get away with slightly more violet syrup. Print Violet Meringue Kisses Rating: 51 Prep Time: 20 minutesCook Time: 2 hoursTotal Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Yield: 60-80 depending on how big you pipe themServing Size: Individual Mini Bites Really really take your time adding the sugar – the more »
Featherlight Cake: Clandestine Cake-a-long 3
Helen Jones, you are a genius! This cake is a revelation. A fat-free sponge that comes together ultra quickly and feels somehow luxurious but not guilt ridden to eat. (even with a shed load of fresh cream in the middle). Our cake for the Cake-a-long this fortnight is the magnificent Featherlight Cake on page 15 of the Clandestine Cake Cookbook. We actually made and ate this cake early last week for a late Mother’s Day treat but it has taken me forever to get to the laptop to post about it. Never fear, the Cake-a-long is back on track – I actually was away with Millie’s synchro this weekend and I didn’t want to advertise to the whole world that the house was empty. Back now – burglars, you snooze, you lose and all that! I’m sure that this recipe will be one that I will go back to over and over again. I can’t stress enough how refreshing this cake was to an ordinary sponge. I was tempted to add a splash of vanilla extract but decided not to mess with Helen’s design. It was fine without the vanilla in the end but I may try experimenting with other more »
Toffee Shock Cake RoundUp: Cake-a-long 2
I need to apologise – I’m a week late with the round up and the next bake for the Cake-a-long. Life once again just got in the way. We had a good turnout once more for the second in our Cake-a-long marathon – Hands up who enjoyed the Toffee Shock Cake? Me Me ME!!! There was certainly plenty of this cake to go round so if you happened to visit the Costello residence you would have received a generous slab of it. Lovely to see our bakers stuck with the 4 tiers – Rhonda even gave us a peek at the inside of her cake! Katy certainly didn’t hold back with her toffee toppings on her cake – No shortage of calories in this cake but isn’t it so neat? Cassandra’s cake is super tall – she had the opposite problem to me with the topping and had to warm hers up as it had set too hard! And last but not least, we have Victoria who had the genius idea of adding some chocolate stars to her cake. Thanks for joining in everyone. If you would like to join us in more »
Cake of the Week: Parma Violet Cake
For one night only this cake was also known as The Violet Mary Costello Cake. (see photo!) I have a new addiction – crushing up sweets and concocting various cake recipes. This was my offering to our latest Clandestine Cake Club held in St Helens last week. Our theme was Spring and I thought spring flowers and pastel colours would suit the theme. Off I tottered to Amazon and duly ordered some Violet Syrup – I was going to go the whole hog and order crystalised violets but quite frankly, they were deeply ugly so I didn’t bother. Days went by and no sign of the violet syrup (I am in fact a week after the CCC still waiting for it to arrive and may be having a Parma Violet Cocktail night when it eventually does!) Not one to be deterred, I thought how best can I get a violet taste and so started the search for Parma Violets. Turns out that they are considered quite a delicacy in St Helens – I was under no illusion previously that we were a Mecca for unusual ingredients but blinking hek, Parma Violets!?! Many a shopkeeper looked at me like I’d lost more »
Lime & Pistachio Round-Up: Clandestine Cake-a-long 1
Source: picmonkey.com via Helen on Pinterest Wow! What a fabulous start to the Clandestine Cake-a-long. Our first bake seems to have been a great success with many more people saying they hope to take part. The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook was published almost 2 weeks ago now and everywhere I go people are talking about it. I came across it in Costco last week when I was shopping with the 3 mini Costellos – we may have left it open on my recipe page for all to see ahem! Anyhow, back to the Lime and Pistachio cake – I thought it would be an idea to do a round up of all the bakes submitted to the Cake-a-long. I have added them all to the Clandestine Cake-a-long Pinterest board too. Feel free to visit the pics and leave comments. For our first recipe, we had bakes from Katy Hough, Rhonda Kirby, Cassandra Simpson and Victoria Murray. We have had a fortnight of getting to grips with Pinterest aswell as a new recipe so we’ve all learnt something. I hope to add a Clandestine Cake-a-long Facebook page in the next few days to make it easier for FB diehards to add more »
Clandestine Cake-A-Long
Calling all bakers! Do you fancy joining in with a new Cake challenge? Let me introduce to you the Clandestine Cake-A-Long. I will be baking my way through the new and fantastic Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook and would love if you joined me. A fortnightly baking group where we all bake from a set recipe – All the recipes are from the fabulous new book – The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook. The book itself is jam-packed full of 120 cake recipes all from members of the Clandestine Cake Club. I’ve talked about the Clandestine Cake Club many times before – a chance to get together with other cake lovers whilst eating and talking about cake. The book arrived on my doorstep last week and I was delighted to be included as one of the recipe contributors (Page 242 Oreo Rosette Cake if you’re interested!) I cannot wait to get started on baking my way through the book – there are sooo many that I want to do NOW! I have been chatting with the Clandestine Cake Guru, Lynn Hill this week about my plans to bake all of the recipes in the book. We would also like to focus on more »
Top 120 Recipes for 2013
Our house has a LOT of cookbooks, no even more than a lot, nearly hundreds! We use them a lot but I’m finding increasingly that we are turning to the iPad for quick how-tos. At any one time though, I have a huge list of recipes I’d like to make out of the books – well, this will be the year that the list gets some attention. I’ve tried to reduce it too ‘just’ a 100 but there’s just so much I want to get through. Since giving up the cake business last summer, we have really worked hard to eat well and cook from scratch – I have to be honest that we were a jar family eating a lot of convenience food when we were constantly surrounded by food. We concentrated on the basics first conquering risottos, yorkshire puddings, homemade pizza dough, palovas, lasagne sauces, shepherds pies and basic pasta dishes during the last year so we are ready to move onto to some more challenging dishes. I’m not promising to get through the whole list in a year (nearly 2.5 new dishes a week might be a step too far for the kids and the budget) but more »
Tagged top recipes of 2013
Win a week’s worth of dinners for 4 with Flora plus Apple Cakes
Remember the marzipan apples, I blogged about at the weekend? Well, here are the cakes that I made them to go with. I was recently sent some baking goodies courtesy of Flora Cuisine and asked to bake a recipe out of their new cookbook, Lets Get Cooking. I’ll admit to being a little nervous of baking with a liquid form of butter and including fruit too but happily the recipe came off without a hitch. Flora’s cookbook is rammed full of recipes supplied by Mums and Dads on Facebook. The apple cake recipe in particular was sent in by Sian Hallewell. The recipe itself was really quick and easy to make. An ideal recipe for baking with the children I’d say. Once I’d got my head round measuring out the liquid Flora and looking through the little window on the bottle, I was all systems go and it was SO quick! If you fancy a go at making apple cakes, the recipe is here Me, being me, I had to go one step further and added Cinnamon Frosting. I was too intrigued to see how the liquid Flora Cuisine coped with buttercream/frosting not to have a go. One tip I more »
