Baking For A Birthday

The Middle Miss had a birthday this week. She helped me make her birthday cake. She is very good at this kind of thing as she has been well trained by both her Dad and Grandma. It was a treat for me to have her on her own, for a change, while Grandma had the boys. She was so excited by the whole process, but the best bit was adding food colouring to make pink swirls in the mixture.

This was the cake we were aiming for. It’s from a book by the very talented Debbie Brown called Enchanting Magical Cakes. I haven’t made many cakes from this book but I’ve drooled over it for a very long time. The attention to detail in the cakes is what makes them so attractive. That and the liberal use of edible glitter.

Baking the three cakes that this design required took ten eggs and the best part of the morning. In the afternoon Grandma and I did a child swap. I loaned her The Middle Miss and she returned Son Number One. He took over the baking duties. We decided to make the name of each child that was coming to the party. While he rolled and cut and counted letters, I worked on the cake.

It turned out to be a long day. Things weren’t helped by Babykins refusing to go to bed. He eventually fell asleep on The Husband’s knee at about 10pm. At that point the supper pots were still lying around, the cake was very much ‘in progress’ and I hadn’t wrapped the birthday present. In fact, it was still hiding in the loft. I finally turned the light out at about quarter to one in the morning. I think it was worth it, even though I had to retire to a darkened room for a lie down after the actual party!

Joyce’s Easy Fruit Cake

I’ve been meaning to make one of these fruit cakes for weeks. My local supermarket has recently taken to stocking the crucial ingredient: crushed pineapple. Every time I’m in the tinned fruit section and I see these tins I think “I must get one of those, they don’t have them in here very often”. So now I have several tins sitting in the back of my cupboard, waiting to get used up.As far as I know this is a proper ‘farm house’ recipe. It was given to me by my sister-in-law’s, mother-in-law, a woman who spent her whole married life on Cumbrian farms. If you’re not familiar with farm house life, you may not realise what a big deal afternoon tea is. I don’t mean a delicate, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts-cut-off kind of afternoon tea. No, no, this is the kind of tea to put hairs on your chest and give you the energy to get back out among the ‘beasts’ (that’s Cumbrian for cows) whatever the weather.

Making this cake always takes me back to my final Easter vacation from university. I’m sure I must have had revision to do, but I don’t remember doing it. I had a completely idyllic four weeks on the edge of the Lake District, even the weather was great.

I went to stay with the Husband (when he was still just the Boyfriend) and together, we went to stay with his sister, at her farm. We had been drafted in to help with lambing time because she was in the early stages of pregnancy and her husband had to go into hospital for minor surgery. Her mother and father-in-law were also helping out and that is how I came to know Joyce and her cake. Joyce and Doug had fairly recently vacated the farm house in favour of a nice semi in town, so she still felt at home in the kitchen. Every afternoon she would lay out about five different kinds of cake or biscuit and make a cuppa for us all. She must have made a few of these fruit cakes in advance because there was often a good sized slab of it on offer. Later, when I moved to the area, I was able to call on her at home and nab the recipe. Joyce passed away a few years ago but now her cake is going to be immortalised on the World Wide Web. I wonder what she would have made of that?

Like my No Fail Muffins, the thing that makes this cake easy is that there is no creaming involved. You simply put all the ingredients except the eggs and flour into a large pan, heat gently, mixing all the time until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved.  At this stage you should have a pan full of glossy looking dried fruit.

If your mixture is very hot, allow it cool for a while before mixing in the flour and beaten eggs, otherwise you may end up with scrambled egg cake.

The final mixture is sloppier than a traditional fruit cake would be.

I baked mine in an eight inch square tin, lined with greaseproof paper. I think it would have worked out ok in a slightly bigger tin as the resulting cake was quite deep. I seem to remember getting good results by splitting the mixture between two (or maybe three) fairly decent size loaf tins. It does rise a little so be prepared.

So here are the ingredients:

1 432g can of crushed pineapple

12oz soft brown sugar

8oz butter or margarine

4-6oz of chopped cherries

1 1/2 lb of mixed fruit

1 tsp cinnamon

1tsp mixed spice

4 eggs

1 lb self raising flour

Now, about the baking time etc. According to my recipe this cake needs the following baking times and temperatures:

1st hour – gas 2/300F/150C

then

1 1/2 to 2 hours -gas 1/2 /250F/120C

I made a big mistake when I cooked mine last night. I only gave it half an hour at the higher temperature. No wonder it was nowhere near cooked after the second stage. In the end, my cake had half an hour at 150C, followed by 2 hours and 20 minutes at 120C. Then, as it was approaching midnight, I left it in the oven after I switched it off, in the hope that the last bit of residual heat finish off the cooking. Luckily for me, it seemed to do the trick.

Oooh, it was nice with my morning coffee. With that much fruit in it, it’s almost healthy too. How many slices do you think I’d have to eat for it to count as one of five a day?

The Joy Of Toast: part one

Toast, one one of my daily rituals.

It gets covered in some basic spread

and dabbed with marmite.

Then I cram it in, fast enough to give me hiccups. How unladylike.

Babykins shares this ritual with me (without the cramming) and I love that he likes marmite. To me, it’s a family essential, my children will be brought up to like it.

Once upon a time, all my bread came out of my bread making machine. We used to bake a seed and nut loaf every other day. I gave up on that when Son Number One was at his sickest, way back in 2008. The husband thinks it’s pathetic, but I just couldn’t deal with the amount of crumbs it was generating. It was hard enough keeping up with basic housekeeping and a sick boy. Extra crumbs were the last straw.

So at the moment, sliced bread is the best thing since, well, sliced bread.

Quick, comforting and you can even pretend it’s healthy when it’s covered in marmite.

Edited to add:: Son Number One has just come in from school requesting slices of DRY toast. Weird.

No Fail Muffins

This muffin recipe was given to me when I worked as a teaching assistant in a secondary school ‘food technology’ department. The head of department told me she’d tried lots of different muffin recipes and this one had never let her down. I have to agree with her, it’s never let me down either. I’ve made it many, many times and in many different flavours, usually in a hurry. It has no fancy ingredients and you can jazz it up with whatever you have around. When I was teaching antenatal yoga, this was what I used to give to the attendees after class. I’m sure quite a few of my clients only kept coming for the cake at the end.

Muffins are one of the easiest things you can bake. There is no creaming of butter and sugar; no gradually adding egg, being careful to avoid curdling; no gently folding in flour. Muffins are straightforward: Mix your dry ingredients, mix your wet ingredients, mix both wet and dry together until sloppy, plop into paper cases and bake. That’s it.

This is what you need according to my original basic recipe:

275g self raising flour

100g caster sugar

125ml vegetable/sunflower oil/melted margarine or butter

175ml milk

1 egg, beaten

Flavouring: 2 apples or bananas, chopped or 125g blueberries or other berries such as raspberries or 100g of chocolate chips, vanilla essence. Really the possibilities are endless here. You don’t have to be too fastidious about the quantities either.

Here is how I made  Spiced Cranberry and Orange Muffins, the method is the same for any other flavours:

Preheat your oven to between 160 degrees C (fan) to 180 degrees C (conventional)

Prepare your muffin tray or small cake tray by adding the paper cases. This will make 12 standard fairy cake size cakes or 9-10 muffin size cakes.

Sieve 275g of SR flour into a large bowl, add 50g of caster sugar, 50g of soft dark brown sugar and two teaspoons of mixed spice.

Add about 100g sweetened, dried cranberries and mix everything up (I must confess, I didn’t weigh these, it’s not critical). The picture below shows them in a cereal bowl. I would have weighed them for you now but my scales have just gone on the blink. This would also be nice with juicy mixed fruit such as sultanas and raisins, just like a Christmas cake.

Mmmmmm, shall we take a closer look (turns on macro setting on camera)…

Measure 125ml of oil or butter into a jug.

Zest an orange or two and add the zest to the dry mixture. Squeeze the juice from one orange and add it to the jug with the oil.

Top up the liquid in the jug with milk until it reaches 300ml. I still love how oil and water mixtures separate. This is a good opportunity for a kitchen science lesson if you are baking with children. Of course you all know that they separate because of their different densities, oil being less dense than milk or orange juice.

Whisk an egg and add it to the jug with the milk, orange juice and oil. Okay, Okay, I whisked after I’d plopped it into the wet mixture, it really doesn’t matter unless you get unlucky and crack a rotten egg into your lovely oily/milky/juicy jug.

Give your jug of wet ingredients one more good mix up and then slosh it into the bowl of dry ingredients. More science coming up – look how you have now formed an emulsion by mixing the oil, milk and juice together. The oil is now in little droplets throughout the mixture.

Start mixing straight away.

Mix some more.

Keep mixing until all the wet and dry ingredients are mixed into a batter that is fairly sloppy, as below.

Fill up your paper cases. You can be pretty generous with how you fill them. The original recipe said fill them to the top. I probably would if I was using standard size fairy cake cases but I leave a little gap with muffin cases. As I said, it usually makes 9 to 10 muffins, depending on how chunky your flavouring is.

Bake for 15 minutes for smaller paper cases 20 to 25 minutes for muffins. In any case, they are done when risen, nicely browned and springy to touch.

Cool on a wire rack.

That’s it – now eat. You must eat them when they are fresh. They really do not keep well at all.

Oh yes, and don’t forget to ask the children if the baking causes a chemical or physical change to occur (little hint in the italics if you’re not sure). For littlies, just ask them if it is a reversible or non-reversible change, though perhaps you need language a bit more simple than that. You know, “Could we change the cakes back into the starting ingredients?”. “Not without a time machine” they may reply…..

Now – a topping. When I made them for the teachers I was running out of time and ingredients. I made a little icing by mixing a couple of tablespoons of icing sugar with a small drizzle of orange juice. You need to add the orange juice just a teeny tiny bit at a time or you will get a mixture that is WAY too runny. I decided to drizzle mine across in lines so it needed to be a bit more runny than I would usually make it.

They were finished off with a cranberry, a piece of dried, candied peel and a silver ball.

Now I’m wondering about some sort of orangey, buttery type of topping? I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.

Happy baking. Happy Science. Happy Eating. Happy Christmas

 

 

Teacher’s Pet

Being a teacher in a primary school at Christmas is a Good Gig. They get a gift from pretty much every child. I have a friend who timed her maternity leave based around this fact. I bet it kept her in chocolate for the rest of the year. Well, at least until Easter.

I think I have always given a home made gift, usually because I haven’t been organised enough to go to the shop and buy something. This year has been no different. Last week consisted mainly of nursing sick children. Any time I had left over was frantically devoted to (online) Christmas shopping and card writing. Thursday night rolled around and I had only just started to think about the obligatory gifts for teachers. Fortunately, I had a few things to hand….

I raided my preserves store (that sounds so grand doesn’t it – what I mean is a couple of shelves in the garage) and decided on jars of home spiced pickled onions and pumpkin and ginger jam. They needed a bit of perking up and fortunately I had a few checked paper jam pot covers hanging around. A bit of ribbon finished everything off quite nicely, though clearly, I forgot to take a photo of that!

Do you remember the stars I was blocking out the other week? I decided to turn them into tree decorations by adding a few bells, beads and buttons.

What do you think? Not bad for last minute? I seem to be using that expression quite a bit lately.

I always worry that the teaching assistants might get missed out but I also don’t really know which ones work with my children. I did what I usually do and decided to make a cake. At least then cake can be shared out with the right people. By this time it was so late at night that I decided to make my No Fail Muffin recipe and customise it as ‘Spiced Cranberry and Orange’ so that it seemed a bit more festive. No Fail Muffins are great: quick and easy. I’ll share the recipe soon.

This is how they looked when I packaged them up at about 6am the next morning. What was I thinking getting so obsessed with this stuff? I think I had about 4 hours sleep. StUpID! It would have been far more sensible to go to a 24 hour Tesco. I must really not like shopping.

I could only console myself by thinking that somewhere, somebody’s teacher had probably been up for a similar number of hours working on lesson plans and marking. Who knows how long my children’s teachers have worked this term. They deserve a little love.

Under Pressure?

Are we under pressure to create the perfect homemade Christmas? I sincerely hope that anyone landing here doesn’t feel pressured. I like making things, it’s a hobby, a bit of fun (I don’t get out much you know).

I heard Kirsty Allsop talking on this subject a few days ago on the Jeremy Vine show. You might think that she would be all for homemade Christmases. She had obviously been booked because of her ‘Homemade Home‘ programme. In the adversarial nature of the Jeremy Vine show she was clearly expected to oppose the other woman who had been booked. In fact, they both agreed that homemade or home cooked items should be included in Christmas plans only to the extent that you are happy with. For some people that is not at all. It was refreshing to hear two women not attacking each other on this subject.

There are plenty of Christmassy things that I would like to make but can’t or won’t find the time for. When Christmas comes, it’s fairly likely I will have been and bought the stuffing for the turkey. In my BC (before children) days I would have revelled in peeling chestnuts and creating a delicious stuffing (yes I know how sad that sounds). These days, I don’t have  that kind of dedication to dinner. Enjoying time with my family is more important. However, when they are old enough to really help out with Christmas dinner tasks, I will encourage them to get stuck in. For the mean time, they are welcome into the kitchen to ‘help’ in their own way but I have to be realistic about what that means. I don’t think even I can train a four and six year old well enough to peel the sprouts and roast the spuds.

Fourth Generation Fruitcake

Christmas Cake

I started to make a Christmas cake yesterday. I’ve been putting it off for a while because it is a fairly time consuming thing to do. Yesterday it felt like a job that couldn’t be put off much longer. After all, in four weeks, it’ll be the BIG DAY!!!!

I much prefer a homemade Christmas cake. Shop bought ones are not the same. They don’t taste the same, they aren’t the right size and there is just no romance about them. Baking one makes me think of the generations of my family who have made similar cakes through the years.

I remember my Mum confusing me one September morning by announcing that she was baking a Christmas cake. That must have been a super organised year. My child’s brain couldn’t compute the idea of baking a cake and not eating it for three months. Mum always made the effort, despite the fact that she also had a full time job. Inevitably, cake baking was a weekend activity so I could get involved too. My jobs were greasing the tin and then holding the string as she tied the brown paper around. I also helped with blanching the almonds. I still get a feeling of satisfaction from fishing them out of near boiling water and popping the wrinkled skins off.

We had a neighbour who made beautiful rich fruitcakes. My Mum was always envious of the flat, un-cracked surface that he always seemed able to produce. The fact that he was an old widower was yet another source of confusion to me. What was an old man doing baking perfect cakes? Wasn’t that what wives were for?

My Mum’s maternal Grandmother also baked cakes. However, it was her husband’s role to ice them in crisp, white, piped royal icing. It wasn’t his main trade, he was a joiner/carpenter in everyday life. Apparently he somehow acquired his icing skills by watching an army chef during his time serving in the first world war. It seems like a strange use of time in such a conflict but who am I to argue with the testimony of my oldest living relative – Aunty Betty. When I asked her about Christmas cake traditions in her childhood she told me that her maternal Grandmother used to pay for the ingredients for a small fruit cake (1/4 lb of butter in each, I guess it would be approximately 5-6 inches) for each of her grandchildren. Betty’s Mother would bake them and her Dad did the icing. It was a skill that he passed on to her. She said she used to always have a ‘headache’ when he was icing so that she could stay op and watch. In my childhood, whenever there was an important family celebration, Aunty Betty was called upon to create an iced sensation. I think our wedding cake was probably one of the last ones she did and that was back in 2000. She will be 90 next year and has not quite got the strength to hold and squeeze an icing bag for long enough.

These days royal icing has gone slightly out of fashion. I still love it, partly for the nostalgia and partly because it tastes about a million percent better than ready roll fondant. It’s not really as versatile but it can be extremely beautiful in the hands of an expert. The trouble is that it takes a lot of practice to become an expert.

Anyway, I think I’d rather have no Christmas cake than a shop bought one.

These days, I rarely have enough time to make a large fruit cake in one go. There is always a child that needs attention. Stage one involves measuring out all the dry(ish) ingredients: weigh and sieve the flour, sugar and spices, mix up the fruit, chop the cherries and nuts, grate the lemon rind. I also measure out the butter and prepare the tin. Often I do this in the evening, after the children have gone to bed.

Mmmm, how yummy does that look?

Next day I can get on with stage two, the actual mixing. If I’m making a particularly large cake just cracking and mixing the eggs takes a little while. I learnt by painful experience never to add the eggs directly to those that have already been opened. Each egg gets cracked into a cup and then added to a bigger jug ready to be beaten. I once cracked the last of about 15 eggs into the previous 14, only to discover it was bad. Eeuurggh. An expensive mistake! Mum didn’t teach me that tip.

My (well used) recipe of choice

I have a Kenwood Chef mixer that can cope with the complete mixture for an eight inch round fruitcake. Any bigger than that and I only beat the butter and sugar in it and maybe as much egg as I dare. Then I tip everything into a big plastic trug for folding in the flour, fruit and nuts. For very big cakes I often use my hands at this stage. My husband went to catering college and that was the way he was taught. It really is the easiest way when you are working with such big quantities of mixture.

Teapot at the ready – it’s thirsty work baking cakes

Finally there is the baking. Smallish cakes are not too much of a commitment, only taking a couple of hours. Once you start to get into big cakes you have to make sure you’re not going to have to get up in the night to check on them! At this time of year it is a pleasure to have the oven on all day, wafting the smell of Christmas into the air. It’s not so much fun in the summer. I know. Last year I made four fruit cakes of various sizes in one June weekend.

In our house there are a lot of birthdays (three) over the festive period so in reality, the Christmas cake can often double up as a birthday cake. This year we will be celebrating babykins first birthday between Christmas and New Year so I am intending to make (at least) two small rich fruitcakes. One will be available for a Christmas day supper snack, round about the time the first turkey sandwiches appear and the other one can be a reserve. It might even end up as a gift.

Done, though slightly sunk so perhaps another baking day is in order

I never really leave myself enough time to cover them in almond paste and ice them in the style I would like. Some years we just eat them, as they are, un-iced. Some years I manage a covering on the top (the ubiquitous ‘snow scene’) and a ribbon around the sides. Very occasionally I get myself into gear and ice them all around with proper piping and everything. Whatever I manage, Christmas cake always tastes better with a lump of Wensleydale cheese. Mmmmmmm, I can almost taste it.