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.

Cake 6 - Chinese Style Custard Tarts

Baking a cake Malaysian style is entering into the unknown for me. With ingredients ranging from pandan leaves to glutinous rice flour, and cooking methods including steaming, it was never going to be a straight forward task. Shopping for ingredients is an experience in itself. Everything you struggle to find in the UK for your oriental recipes is here in abundance, whereas finding something like vanilla extract becomes like the quest for the Holy Grail! Anyway, after a week of looking for recipes and asking advice from Malaysian friends, I decided to start off with an East meets West fusion – something to ease me in gently before I start messing around with banana leaves or agar agar.

I chose to bake Chinese Style Custard Tarts. “Chinese?” I hear you say, “That’s not a Malaysian recipe!” Well, as it happens, Malaysia is a melting pot of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and the Chinese influence here is huge. In most bakeries in Malaysia you will find these little custard tarts, and they are enjoyed by all. So, history lesson over – now onto the baking itself.

The first thing to do was to make the pastry which unlike English style custard tart pastry, contained sugar and an exceedingly large quantity of butter. English pastry is usually half fat to flour, but this was probably three quarters fat. I feel like I'm committing a sin just writing this, that much butter is so decadent and wrong...but let's not dwell on that too much.

Once I had mixed the butter and sugar in a bowl, I had to add an egg along with the flour, and stir it all together. I felt like I had broken every rule of making pastry in one go. Anyone who has made pastry knows that you don't just stir it all together, and you certainly don't make it in a kitchen at 35 degrees. Just leaving the butter out on the work surface for 2 minutes resulted in an oil slick. To avoid disaster I wrapped the finished ball of stirred together pastry in tinfoil, and put in the fridge to keep cool. It was then time to turn my attention to the filling.

The first thing you notice about a Chinese custard tart is that it is considerably more yellow than an English one. I thought this was probably due to the addition of yellow food colouring, seeing as most of the desserts here are brightly coloured. As it turns out, I was wrong - it’s because Chinese custards use a lot more egg. Nine in fact. It's official, I have never used as many eggs in a recipe!

The method for making the custard was as different as that of the crust. I boiled water and sugar in a pan on the stove, and then allowed to cool back to room temperature - which was probably almost as hot as the pan. I then added the nine whisked eggs, and poured these into the water along with a dash of milk. The recipe did recommend that you strain the mixture, but after a feeble attempt at pouring the liquid through a sieve the size of a tea strain I decided I didn't have the tools for the job.

Having avoided the inevitable for some time now, I decided to take a deep breath and turn--on--the--oven. Gasp.

I brought the pastry back out of the fridge and quickly set about pressing balls of the mixture into the cake moulds. The trick is to roll a ball of pastry, and press into the mould with your fingers, starting in the middle so that the pastry is automatically pushed up at the sides. I had never used this method before, but it worked wonders! When this was done, I poured the bright yellow custard mixture into the pastry cases, put into the oven to bake, and retreated to a safe distance away from the heat.

When baked, they looked like little sunshines, all sparkly and yellow in the middle, with lightly browned crisp and buttery pastry cases. Taste wise, the sweet egg custard filling lived up to its name, with the egg being a lot more prominent than in a custard of western origin. The pastry crust was just melt in your mouth gorgeous, and reminded me a lot of shortbread. Once again, I used the security guards as my taste panel – which I must point out is not because my parents are under house arrest, they guard the condo in which they live! All agreed that the Chinese Style Custard Tarts were a worthy tribute to the Malaysian favourite.

Cake 5 - Lemon and Ginger Cheesecake

This week's cake was brought to you all the way from my Mum's kitchen in the beautiful city that is Kuala Lumpur - which means my blog has now become international! Cue round of applause.

As a source of inspiration, I turned to the only cookery book which made the journey from their house in Chester, all the way across the 7 seas to their Malaysian Condo. This is none other than the ledgendary Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook published circa 1970. This cook book is the source of some fantasticly strange retro creations including Turkey in Aspic and Salmon Mousse, but would I find a dessert suitable for this tropical climate and cooking utensils available? After toying with the idea of a pineapple upsidedown cake, I instead turned to another well known source of inspiration.......the meal on the plane!

I was pleasantly surprised by the dessert on the aeroplane, which I think in the absence of a menu was a ginger cheesecake. It went some way in compensating for the sorry excuse for an omlette served at breakfast, the bread rolls the texture of tennis balls, and the air hostess who told me off for being noisy. I thought to myself as I ate the dessert out of its little plastic coffin at 30,000 feet, “I could do a version of this!”

After visiting the local grocery shop and selecting my ingredients, I set to work in my Mums 34 degree kitchen finding the utensils and lining an oval tin with a removable bottom. I then moved on to making the base. For this I had to turn ginger biscuits into crumbs and mix with butter on the hob. My Mum does not own a food processor, so I ended up putting the biscuits in an empty bread bag and battering them within an inch of their lives with a rolling pin. The result was acceptable, so after mixing with the melted butter, I set about pressing the crunchy ginger base in the cake tin.

For the topping, I mixed mascarpone cheese with grated lemon zest, lemon juice, and sugar. I had selected another local cream cheese to mix with my expensive imported mascarpone, but upon tasting it realised that it contained more salt than you would find in haloumi! I was glad I tasted it before I mixed it in with the rest of the topping. The heat of the kitchen meant that the mixture went runny very quickly, and I was a bit worried that it wouldn't set.....but I poured it onto the now chilled base, refrigerated, and hoped for the best.

After a couple of hours by the pool the lemon and ginger cheesecake was ready. To my relief, it had set beautifully. I cut into slices and served to my Mum and Dad, and also the security guards who looked like they could do with a cake break. The lemon and ginger was so refreshing in the hot climate, and the crunch of the ginger biscuits worked really well against the smooth creaminess of the mascarpone. Mum suggested we put some tinned oranges on the side, which although I was not at all sure about definitely added something!

Now I am signing off and going to the seaside town of Kuantan, where I hope to get some ideas for next week's cake. I may try something Malaysian inspired......until next week.

Cake 4 - Chocolate Rice Crispy Cakes

Picture the situation. You've woken up late, you have a plane to catch, a case to pack, and your best underwear to root out of the ironing basket. Your head is saying "Pack the case" and your heart is saying "Bake a cake." When faced with this dilemma, compromise is the only way forward. This blog is about real life, and sometimes you just don't have time to make a black forest gateau. This is when the crispy cake provides you with a get out of jail free card. For the amount of work and preparation that goes into this creation, it really shouldn't taste as good as it does. If you have kids, you can even get them to help, so long as you don't mind your kitchen walls being pebble dashed with rice crispies.

I don't have any children, so I enlisted the help of my boyfriend Tobey. I would have got Miffy the rabbit involved, but due to the amount of fur she has on her hands she would no way pass a basic food hygiene test. Sorry Miffy :(

First melt the chocolate. I like to use both milk and dark chocolate together, but it's personal preference. Maybe you have some left over Easter eggs? Food boffins will tell you to melt the chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of hot water, but when time is short I like to use a microwave. Just be careful not to leave it in too long. Then pour the melted chocolate over a large bowl of rice crispies, and stir until all the rice crispies are covered.

Now I am going to tell you a secret to make your rice crispy cakes extra special. I discovered this when I had run out of golden syrup, and had to improvise fast in order to bind the crispies together successfully. To give the cakes a stickiness that both keeps them in the desired shape, and creates a 'toffee crisp' effect add some honey to the mixture. The result is fantastic, but not overpowering. You can add golden syrup if preferred...the choice is yours!

When putting into cake cases, you can push a mini egg into the centre to make a nest. Always make sure you have a little bit left in the bowl to eat while its still warm, and it tastes even better if you get it all over your face in the process!

Next weeks cake will be brought to you from my parents kitchen in Malaysia.