baking

Easy Chocolate Cake

- Alex 4 Comments

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The world’s cookbooks (and the internet) are awash with recipes for complicated cakes that look stunning and will take a good couple of hours to put together.

Those cakes are fantastic for events where you might want to showcase some baking talent but they won’t do if you want a slice of cake to take for lunch, or if you need to whip up a cake quickly without a trip to the supermarket.

This cake fills that slot perfectly.  It’s quick and if you cook or bake regularly you should have the ingredients to hand.  The recipe comes from a friend of my grandmother and this was the first cake I ever made ‘on my own’.   It is my contribution to this month’s Family Recipes hosted by the Life and Loves of Grumpy’s Honeybunch.

I always bake the cake in a kugelhopf tin but I’m sure a 20cm springform tin would do just as well.

Preheat the oven to 180C bake and grease your tin well.

Cream 50g of butter and 1 cup of caster sugar.  When well combined, add 2 eggs and beat well.  Then add 1 1/2 cups of self raising flour and 2 tbsp of cocoa.  The mixture will be quite stiff.  Mix 1/2 tsp of baking powder (or bicarb) with 1/2 cup of milk and add to the batter.  Beat until combined and finish by beating in 2 tbsp of boiling water.

Pour into your cake tin and bake for about half an hour – the cake should be well risen and a skewer should come out clean.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for 5 or so minutes before tipping out on a rack.  When the cake is completely cool ice with your favourite icing or just dust with icing sugar.

If you’re lazy (like me!) and use a food processor like a Magimix the whole process, including the cleaning up, will take under an hour.  To me, that is the perfect emergency cake!

Cupcakes for Cupcake Camp

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

Cupcake Camp is coming to Adelaide on Sunday 22 November.  This means it’s time for me to start practising baking (and decorating) cupcakes.  What a trial!

Since I like messing around with recipes, I dug out my 1920s Handbook for Bakers by Albert F Gerhard.  All the recipes are given in commercial quantities, in imperial, using 1920s American ingredients … so there’s quite a lot of work that needs to be done before hitting the kitchen.  I decided to start with the first cup cake recipe and scale down from 12 dozen to just … one.

The result was a cupcake recipe that made good cupcakes with a fine, moist crumb.  That said – there’s nothing outrageous about the recipe!

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan).

Cream 100g of caster sugar with 75g of unsalted butter.  Add 2 eggs and combine well before adding 175g of self raising flour.  Flavour with 1 tsp of vanilla essence and finish by adding 1 tsp of baking powder dissolved in 1/2 cup of milk.

When everything is well combined, spoon the mixture into cupcake cases and bake … until done.  I had a massive fail with the oven so I can’t actually tell you how long the baking took!  The recipe suggests you’ll need to bake for about 10 minutes – but after 10 minutes the cakes weren’t cooked.  The oven then turned itself off.  About 10 minutes later, perplexed by the cakes still not being cooked, I realised this and turned the oven back on.

So … if you don’t know how to operate your oven, baking will take about half an hour.  Still, it gave me plenty of time to do the dishes!

Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing

Once cool, I iced the cakes with a simple chocolate icing and finished with chocolate sprinkles.

And there are now none left!

Melting Moments

- Alex Leave a comment

I borrowed the book Cooking:  A Commonsense Guide from the library while waiting for my container load of cookbooks to arrive from the UK.  The book is full of sensible, familiar recipes so I was, obviously, going to try out some sensible familiar biscuits!

The recipe alleges it makes 40 biscuits so I decided to reduce measures by a half:  after all, 40 biscuits is quite a lot for anyone for afternoon tea (and I only had about 100g of butter).  This recipe is given two ‘saucepans’ (the book’s way of grading difficulty) – thus requiring “a little more care and time”.  Thanks to the power of the Magimix, this recipe quickly becomes within the grasp of the nervous baker.  I did not have a piping bag and fluted nozzle, so my biscuits were just generous teaspoon sized blobs, slightly flattened with a damp fork.

These are very quick to put together and use store cupboard standards, so this is an ideal recipe if you ever find yourself in a biscuit emergency (and yes, such a thing does exist).

Melting Moments

For 15-20 biscuits.

90 g unsalted butter
1/6 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/6 cup cornflour
1/2 cup plain flour

decoration (optional):  glace cherries, blanched or slivered almonds …

Preheat oven to 180C.  Line a baking tray with baking paper.

If using a food processor, beat butter, sugar and vanilla essence together until light and fluffy.  Add cornflour (if doing this by hand, sift the cornflour first) and mix until just combined.

The mixture will be quite stiff.  Spoon (or pipe) onto the baking sheet.  Top with topping of choice (or leave plain) and bake at 15 minutes, until lightly golden and crisp.  Leave to cool on wire rack.  Be aware that, when hot, the biscuits will be very fragile.  Even after they’ve cooled, they are very short so plates may well be the order of the day.

Cooking:  A Commonsense Guide is available from Fishpond for $AU28.97, from Amazon UK for £6.53 and from Amazon US, used from just 44c!