Cake 10 - Peach, Yoghurt and Almond Cake

After last week's attempt at emergency scones from my sick bed, I decided that this week I owed it to my loyal followers to make a spectacular comeback on a grand scale. I'm thinking Tony Christie, except with cake.

In case you were wondering about my health, the foot is improving, but I'm not able to walk very far. My ugly orthepedic boot wasn't made for walking, oh no. Therefore I have had another week of 1000 piece jigsaws, reading vampire novels, and pondering the meaning of life. The highlight of today was when Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door. I was so excited to have company I offered them cake, and we talked at length about the prospect of an apocalypse. Uplifting stuff. Eventually they got bored, and made excuses to leave.

This week the featured cake is Peach, Almond, and Yoghurt Cake. I thought I would struggle to get fresh peaches this early on in the season, but Asda must have heard I was baking up a storm for my famous blog, and flew them all the way from Ghana for me. Good for the cake, bad for the carbon footprint.

The clue for the main ingredients for this cake are in the name. However, the secret ingredient in this recipe is amaretto liqueur. Just a dash of this in the cake mixture adds a hint of richness!

As luck would have it, Amaretto is the only liqueur I have in my cupboard - somewhere between the Strongbow and sweet sherry that expired in 2008. The amaretto was an expensive joke present from Tobey after the Disserano advert had us in stitches every time it was on telly. What really cracked us up was the gormless look on the bartender's face, as the beautiful woman gives him a wistful look as if to say “Oy Luv, Giz a refill of that Amaretto.” In the real world the bartender would not be so easily enchanted, and it would be a binge drinker pointing an acrylic nail in the direction of the WKD. Anyway, who am I to criticize - the ad worked on us, we bought the stuff!

The cake making process went according to plan, and the cake batter was the consistency of whipped cream. After I threw in the roughly chopped peaches, I poured into a lined tin (which took me forever to line) and sprinkled with flaked almonds. It was baked in just over an hour, and I left to cool.

When refrigerated for a few hours, the sponge took on a superb squidgy texture, with a little a bit of peach here and there. The crunch of the flaked almonds finished it off beautifully. For that real peaches and cream experience, I served with vanilla ice cream.

And now for a taste of what's to come. Currently cooling in the kitchen, and coming soon to a blog near you are Mint & Chocolate Muffins. We are about to enter the realms of baking with chocolate!

Cake 9 - Raisin and Sultana Scones

For the nine people in the big wide world who are avidly watching my blog, you may have noticed that last weekend 'What Bridie Baked' was a big fat zero. No one was more disappointed than me, and I kept having pangs of guilt from my sick bed thinking I had let my nine cake loving disciples down. I thought that I could probably bake most things sitting down, but if my foot wasn't elevated after having my foot operation, I would surely be in pain. I'm a bit of a messy baker too, and I was bound to end up dropping cake mixture on my bandaged foot or fall over my crutches on the way to the oven. Even my pain killers advised not to operate heavy machinery.......so I thought I'd better leave the hand whisk safely in the drawer, and hang up my oven glove for the time being.

Mid week, things were much improved pain wise, but boredom had well and truly set in. After clicking the refresh button on the facebook home page repeatedly, hoping for the latest news from other people’s status updates, I decided that my life was beyond sad. There was only one thing for it, I was going to drag my ugly orthopedic shoe into the kitchen, and by God I was going to bake something if it killed me.

As I hadn't bought ingredients in for a specific recipe, I had to work with the staple items I had on hand in the cupboards. Flour, tick. Raisins and sultanas, tick. Margarine, tick. The recipe was staring me in the face - SCONES!!!!
I love a good scone. It evokes memories of cream teas in Cornwall, and a wasp that wouldn't leave me alone. A wasp that met its sticky end in a pot of the finest strawberry jam I have ever tasted.

The best thing about a scone is its simplicity; you can rustle it up in no time. They don't call it the fastest cake in the world for nothing (get it? 'scone'). When put on a cake stand you could be having afternoon tea at the Ritz! Served with butter, jam, and clotted cream a scone makes you feel like royalty, but they also taste good scoffed straight from the oven making crumbs on the floor! It's also the law that any spare dough that you have left, you have to fashion into an unusual shape and bake along with the rest.

In a nutshell, this is the whole short process of perfect scone making. Rub the margarine into the flour and baking soda, add a spoon full of sugar, add raisins, milk to form a dough, roll out, cut into rounds, and bake for 10-15 minutes.
These particular scones were a delight. I always roll out the dough slightly thicker than recommended so I get scones like sky scrapers. They have provided me with lunch for the latter part of the week. Not exactly balanced I know, but hey cut me some slack...I am nursing a bad foot and an ugly ass shoe :)

Just to share my future plans with you, I am thinking of posting the recipes for everything I make on this blog. Let me know your thoughts!

Cake 8 - Bridie's Famous Apple Pie

This week’s addition has special meaning to me, because it is the first thing I ever baked for Tobey. I invited him round for dinner, which consisted of chicken fajitas, salad, and my famous apple pie. We ate it in front of the telly, watching some channel 4 programme about space. That's romance for you. I remember he really loved the pie, and was impressed that I made it myself. His praise made me think for the first time, that I might have a bit of a flare for baking. “It started with a pie…never thought it would come to this” – isn’t that the lyric?!

The first thing I did for this week's pie was to cook cooking apple with sugar, until soft. Not too soft mind, I didn't want apple sauce on my hands - or in my pie for that matter.

While this was cooling I moved onto the pastry. Making the pastry is an integral part of any pie, and I am going to tell you my secret for perfect pastry. My Dad once joked that I am genetically programmed to make great pastry, as both my Mum and Dad make it especially well. Over the years, I helped my Mum with her baking, and if there was one thing I learned it was (in my Mum's own words), "The less you mess with pastry, the better it is."

The half fat to flour method is the one I usually use, and I favour stork margarine over butter. It's a lot healthier, and tastes just as good. After you have rubbed the margarine into the flour so it resembles breadcrumbs, you then add water or milk and stir with a knife until it forms a ball. At this point you can use your preferably cold hands, to transfer the pastry to a floured work surface.

Try and roll the pastry out in one go, as a second attempt is usually, in a word - a 'faf'. I also try to roll the pastry lid at the same time as the base, so when I add the apples to the pastry case I can put the lid on in a jiffy, and return straight to the oven. I also used my new daisy cutter, to make some cute motifs for the top of the pie.

When the pastry base was safely in the pie dish, it was time to blind bake. I put the pie case in the oven, and turned a blind eye for roughly 10 minutes. I then removed the pie case from the oven, and added the prepared apple mixture. I sprinkled ground cinnamon over the scrummy apple filling, put the pastry lid on, followed by some strategically placed daisies, and returned to the oven for a further 20 minutes.... during which time the smell of apple pie filled the house!

This particular pie could not be eaten straight from the oven. It first had to make the 180 mile journey to Jen’s house in Bristol, and sleep in the fridge overnight. We had a slice straight from the fridge, after a rainy shopping trip to Bristol on Saturday afternoon. Every rainy shopping trip should be followed by apple pie. Jen and Tobey thought the pie tasted lovely, and Mutley the dog was only too happy to lick the crumbs off my knee. That was the biggest compliment of all - no one has ever gone that far before.

Cake 7 - Coconut Indian Sweet

This week's addition to the blog has been specifically requested by my Mum, and is non other than 'Coconut Indian Sweet.' We first made this Indian style sweet over ten tears ago, when we first started to visit Rusholme in Manchester on a regular basis, for all our Indian cooking supplies.

Most Saturdays we would go there to do our shopping, followed by a curry, and a trip to the Indian Sweet Shop. Rows of multi-coloured sweets filled the windows, and the wonderful smell of cardamom and sugar filled the air. It wasn't long before we wanted our weekend fix on say, a Wednesday. This is where we started to get creative.

This recipe is one that I remember very well from an Indian cookbook, and even though I hadn't cooked it for years it came back to me as soon as I started to melt the butter in the pan. Once done, you simply pour in dessicated coconut and stir, until it takes on the yellow tint of the butter. I then added condensed milk, and kept stiring for about ten minutes when the mixture starts to stick together...a lot like a fudge. I then proceeded to empty the coconut mixture in to a lined baking tray, and press down with a back of a spoon.

Once the cooling process was completed, all I had to do was cut the pieces into little rectangles and display. I chose to keep the coconut sweet in its original colour, although you can put a few drops of pink food colouring to half the mixture for variety.

The finished result was impressive without a lot of effort! It didn't taste exactly like the Indian sweets that you get on the curry mile in Manchester, but then it never did. What it did taste like was pure yummy coconut flavoured nostalgia! In the future I would like to have a go at making some Indian sweets that taste more authentic, but I imagine this takes years of practice. For a mid week Indian sweet fix though, this recipe scores very highly.

Next week I will attempting something more complex, as I will be back to my kitchen comforts in the UK.