Chocolate Cola Cake

January 27th was National Chocolate Cake day, what nationality I'm not sure, America probably, but it takes very little prompting to bake a chocolate cake right? I decided to try a chocolate cola cake using the recipe from the BBC as a base but modified slightly to make it gluten free. I was using plain gluten free flour so added xanthan gum to help with binding and baking powder for rising.

Ingredients
250g/9oz gluten-free flour
300g/10½oz golden caster sugar
3 heaped tbsp cocoa
generous pinch bicarbonate of soda
250g/9oz butter
250ml/8½fl oz cola drink
125ml/4¼fl oz milk
2 eggs, beaten
5ml/ltsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp xanthan gum
1 heaped tsp gluten free baking powder

For the frosting
100g/3½oz butter
2 tbsp cola drink
2 tbsp cocoa
200g/7oz icing sugar

Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa, xantham gum, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl.
Heat the cola and butter over a low heat until melted but NOT hot.
Combine with the dry ingredients and milk, eggs and vanilla.

At this point the batter is EXTREMELY watery, this is ok.

Pour the batter into a cake pan and bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean at 180C\350F. I have a fan oven so I take the temperature down 20 degrees to 160C.

When the cake is out of the oven heat the butter, cola and cocoa over a low heat and then whack it up to boiling. When the mixture is bubbling (it will get thicker) pour over the icing sugar and beat until smooth. Pour over the cake while still warm and let it all cool in the pan.

I baked the cake in a 9 inch square pan (the original recipe calls for a 9 inch round pan) and while the cake was fine I found that I could have done with a bit more frosting. I think next time I'll add half again to the measurements for the frosting.

Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of the finished cake, it was amazingly moist and tasty and it didn't last very long at all. I brought it as dessert for Sunday dinner, but most of it was eaten before dinner. Here's a pic of the empty pan.

update: halloween cupcakes

yeah, yeah, only 3 months later. But I actually found some pics of the finished Red Velvet cupcakes I made for halloween. Here they are in all their finished gory (glory)

Princess Peach

'Hey' I texted my sister on Monday. 'Do you want me to bake the kids birthday cakes? Let me know!'
I didn't catch the reply until Monday evening.

'Yeah, that would be great, C wants a princess cake, I'm having a tea party for her on Wednesday'

!!!!!!

Which left me one day to bake and design an appropriately pink and pretty princess cake. yoiks!
Tuesday morning found me up an early down at the top of Grafton st in the cake shops getting pink icing, pink food colouring and basically any other pink thing I could find. I'd lain in bed that morning doing google image searches for 'pink princess' and I had decided on either Princess Aurora or Princess Peach. It would depend on how skillful I was with a tracing wheel really.

The cake baking part of the process didn't go so well, the first cake was pure dough when it cooled. The second cake worked out and the third cake (supposed to be the next layer) fell to pieces when I took it out of the pan while it was still too warm. doh! AT this point I just said fuck it, and cut the one cake I had in half to make a sandwich. It was only a small tea party for family so I didn't need a full 9 inch square.

To fill up the space on the cake board I cut out some extra daisies, and a couple of butterflies and embossed the letters of my nieces name in pink stars. As you can see I went with Princess Peach - although her lips are black as I forgot to get pink edible marker and I didn't trust my free hand painting skills.

The niece was thrilled with the cake, luckily 6 year olds are easily impressed. I didn't get any shots of the cake when it was cut, but yes of COURSE the cake was pink - the only part of the cake that wasn't pink was the buttercream in the sandwich.

Next week I have to start the prep for my nephews birthday cake. HINT: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Marshmallows!

Yes I used an exclamation mark in the title, because if you can't get excited about home-made marshmallows then you have no soul. This is another recipe I spotted on Pinterest which piqued my interest. It is not a beginners recipe as at one point there are 2 bowls and one pan of sugar syrup on the go at the same time but I'm proud to say I managed to get everything to come together properly. The only thing I kinda messed up with the 'marbleizing' technique, which looks pretty on top, but as you can see from the picture below didn't go all the way through the marshmallow. I let everything set overnight and dusted an icing sugar \ cornflour mix over the cut up pieces the next day. These are lovely, very like those 'Princess' mallows you can buy, but fluffier. This is definitely a recipe I'll try again, but next time I'll do a better job on the marbleizing.

Christmas Cards 2011

Just a quick one today - these were my Christmas cards for this year. Everything seems to have started a bit late this year as regards getting ready for Christmas, so I threw these together out of the bits and pieces I had in my crafty boxes.

Lemon Bites

Where do I start with these things? They should be easier than candy because there isn't any special temperatures or fiddly syrups that can burn. However, whether I was just doing too much I don't know, but I managed to miss the part of the recipe that said to grease a 9x9 pan and instead I threw everything into a round pizza pan. This resulted in the 'lemon bars' (because that is what they were supposed to be) cooking in half the time and turning out about half as thick as they should have been. I won't even get started on the blinding pain of lemon juice squirting in my eyes when I was squeezing enough lemons to make up 1 (american) cup of fresh lemon juice.
When the pan came out of the oven I was tempted to throw it all in the bin and try again, but it actually tasted really good, so I dumped a load of icing sugar on top and cut them into little 'bites' for finger food. Next time I'll be sure to use the correct pan size, but at least now I know that if I do mess up these little things are easy to recover and serve up.

cookie dough truffles

I found this recipe a while ago on Pinterest and it appealed to me as it was egg free because I'm always wary of raw eggs in a recipe. This one was dead simple, flour, butter and brown sugar creamed into a thickish batter \ dough. I threw in a couple handfuls of chocolate chips to give the 'batter' some texture and then chill it for a while (I left if overnight in the fridge) shape it into balls and chill it again. The recipe said for an hour or so, but I wasn't in a rush so I left it overnight again before dipping it in chocolate.

The one thing I noted and worried a bit about when making these was they tasted of raw flour when first mixed, but the ingredients combined well once they'd been left for a while.I made about 60 dough balls from the recipe and dipped 40 or so. There are still 20 in my fridge that need to be done, but as I'm still new to working with chocolate I'll do those a couple of days before Christmas so the chocolate doesn't bloom.
I served up the truffles at a small party I had last week and they were so good my sister took a bag home. Now I just need to perfect the whole dip and drain thing with the chocolate.