Chocolate and salted caramel chiffon cake

I very much enjoyed this years Great British Bake Off and I thought Frances was definitely a worthy winner, I didn't think this years series was a patch on last years tho. In homage to last years winner I decided to make john's salted caramel and chocolate chiffon cake for my brothers girlfriends birthday!!

This is a chocolate cake with a salted caramel filling and a chocolate ganache icing. The cake is a chiffon cake so there are a lot of eggs and you use the eggs to make a meringue and keep as much air as possible in to keep the cake as light and fluffy as possible. Here is the recipe.

The cake is a little complicated as their are three components, the caramel, chocolate ganache and the cake itself so you definitely need quite a bit of time free to make this!! I started off by separating the eggs, then make the meringue, mix everything else together and get the cake into the oven. I followed the recipe exactly and the cake turned out pretty well. With hindsight, I think it could have been a little lighter so I probably could have done with doing a bit more gentle folding of the meringue into the mixture. It also says to knock the tin onto the work surface a couple of times to get rid of any air bubbles, I probably got a bit excited doing this so again, this probably knocked out quite a bit of the air. Here is a picture of my cake just before it went into the oven!

Then this is a picture of it when it came out. It rose really nicely but it did have quite a few cracks on the top.

The chocolate ganache is super easy to make. You just heat the cream and pour it over the until the chocolate melts. I mixed it all together to make a lovely smooth shiny ganache, then put it in the fridge to cool and thicken. 

The salted caramel filling is a little more difficult to make. I think I probably should have heated the mixture a little longer as it tasted a little grainy and I think this was the unmelted sugar.


The other problem I ended up having was over time.  It took ages for the cake to cool so it meant that I had to wait ages to fill it, and in the end I had to fill it when it was still slightly warm.You also have to cool both the salted caramel filling and the ganache, so you need to make sure that you have plenty of space in the fridge! As I ended up filling the cake slightly warm, this meant that by the time I had transported it some of the filling had oozed out a bit, but oh well... :) It was a lovely cake, my husband said that it was one of the nicest cakes that I had ever made and he liked the texture which is quite 'bouncy'.

As its one big cake, to fill it you have to slice it in half, which I actually managed to do fairly evenly. Here is the final cake just with the salted caramel filling.

Then here it is with the chocolate ganache decoration. This looks lovely, but it is really simple. Although you are supposed to spike up the ganache in the recipe but all my spikes seemed to fall over so I ended up with smaller little roses almost. It still looked pretty tho!

And here is a slice of the cake. As you can see the bottom part of the cake was a little denser than the top. I'm not sure if I needed to make it in two tins, or if I just knocked too much air out of the meringue but it still tasted lovely and the chocolate ganache was great.

Julia Child's French Strawberry Tart

A friend of mine sent me a message on facebook saying they were making a strawberry tart and asking how to make the sweet pastry.. I gave a bit of advice, its fine to use caster sugar in the pastry rather than icing sugar, and also to generally not to handle the pastry too much. I then felt a bit guilty as I've never actually made a strawberry tart and then wondered if I had given the correct advice!

I decided that I'd better correct this and started through my cookery books. I struggled to find exactly what I wanted until I remembered that I have the Mastering the Art of French Cookery which I bought after I watched Julie et Julia. This has a classic french strawberry tart recipe, pastry, creme patisserie and strawberries with a light glaze. There are two options in the book for pastry of either a flan case or a sweet pastry, so I decided to opt for a sweet pastry. The recipe in the book is for one large tart, but as I have some small individual tart tins, I decided to do four individual ones and just halve the recipe.

First of all you need to make the pastry. My recipe book is quite old and I guess American in style given its Julia Child's recipe so the recipe is in old school ounces!

It then needs to be chilled before being rolled out, so whilst it was in the fridge I moved on to the creme pat.

The first and only other time I have attempted a creme pat it did not work at all so I was pretty nervous about making this. However, Julia Child's recipe book made it seem pretty easy so I followed the instructions exactly, et voila! A perfect creme patissiere! I put some cling film straight onto the creme pat and then popped it in the fridge to cool, whilst I got on with my pastry.

I quickly rolled it out and filled the tart tins. I always have problems with pastry shrinking and I remember that I saw a tv show where they blind bake the pastry and leave it overhanging the edge then cut if off later when the pastry is part baked so I thought I'd give this a bash!

The tart case is completely baked, as once its cooled you fill it with the creme pat and pop the strawberries on top then glaze it, then serve. There is no second bake.

As I decided to make 4 smaller tarts rather than one large tart, I was a bit unsure of the baking time so I decided I'd blind bake the tarts for 10mins with baking beans, then trim down the pastry, remove the beans and put it back in the oven until it was cooked. With hindsight, I'd suggest I should have baked it for less time before taking out the beans as the pastry didn't look as good as I'd have liked it to be.

I then waited for the pastry to cool, and got on with the strawberries. I washed and hulled the strawberries and left them whole. Then I left them to dry nicely and warmed some jam and a drop of water. I just popped it in the microwave rather than warmed it on the stove! I then assembled the tarts. I filled them up with creme pat then put the strawberries on top. I attempted to put a big one in the middle, and some smaller ones around the sides then I used a pastry brush and brushed in the hot jam to give it a nice glaze.

And here is the finished tart!!

Key Lime Pie

Just in time for the new series of the Great British Bake Off, I thought I'd resurrect my blog!!

This weekend I was invited to a friends barbecue and asked to provide a dessert! I got myself on the Internet and decided on something new, Key Lime Pie! One of my friends is allergic to eggs so I had to find a recipe without meringue on the top and decided to go with a Nigella Lawson recipe. Here it is!


This one requires no baking as it has a digestive biscuit base, it's a pretty easy recipe really. I just put the digestives with some butter and chocolate chips in the food processor and then pressed it into the bottom of my loose bottomed tart tin. Normally with cheesecake bases I melt the butter and mix in the digestives but this recipe was a bit different. I pressed the base together and put it into the fridge while I made the filling. First job, zest four limes, then squeeze out the juice. Some of the limes were a bit hard so used a trick I learned from Jamie Oliver's tv show and just stabbed them once and popped them in the microwave for 10 secs. Lots more juice comes out if you do this! Reserve the zest for decorating the pie. Then I just popped open a can of condensed milk, and whisked in the juice of the limes, then I poured in the cream and kept whisking in my K-Mix it started to thicken up like normal whipped cream, so I took the base out of the fridge and poured in the filling and smoothed out the top as best I could!

Then it went back in the fridge until it was BBQ time! 

To decorate the pie, I sprinkled over the lime zest, and grated over some dark chocolate. Et voila!!


It tasted lovely, perfectly tart, not too sweet and very light. The only problem was the biscuit base was a touch too crumbly. I don't think I'd have this problem next time if I melt the butter instead of just putting it in the food mixer. But it was really nice and so simple to make so long as you have the refrigerator time!! I'd highly recommend this to anyone looking for a dinner party dessert!!!

Tonight Matthew.... I'll be making a Malt Loaf!

Last week a new cookery show started on the BBC. Paul Hollywood from the Great British Bake Off has a new Bread show. Awesome! So during the show he made loads of cool things, but the one that stuck out to me was Malt Loaf! A favourite from my childhood he made two loaves in last week's show and it looked loads more appetising than the standard Soreen style loaf that I know and love. Much lighter in colour and lighter in texture I thought this would do nicely for this weekends baking challenge.

The recipe is available on the BBC website here.

First of all I had to go out to buy Malt Extract, luckily they sell it in Holland and Barrett and other shops like this. You can also order it online, but I managed to find a nice jar just around the corner from work. Sorted! Then on to the recipe.

First of all I discovered you need two 1lb loaf tins, unfortunately I only have one 2lb tin. I decided that I might as well just make one big loaf, rather than try to split the mixture without the required tins! The recipe is reasonably easy to follow and it doesn't need a massive amount of kneading, just enough to bring the mixture together and get a smooth enough dough. I worked it using the method Paul used in the show of just folding up the dough until it was quite springy and appeared smooth. I then shaped it into a rectangle as best I could and popped it into the loaf tin. I pushed the dough down into the corners and flattened it out a bit by poking it with my fingers, and left it to rise for about an hour and a half in my kitchen. I was baking another cake whilst the malt loaf proved so I left it nearish the oven and it was reasonably warm in my kitchen!


After an hour and a half the dough had risen nicely! It had popped out of the tin until it was quite big actually and I decided it could go straight into the oven. I was a bit worried about how long to leave it in for given it was twice the size of the one on the tv, but I left it in for about 40 mins, checked it and left it for 5 more minutes then decided it was done! Here's my finished cake and a slice! It doesn't look that big in the picture, but actually its about the size of a small loaf of bread, which I don't think is quite right. But I quite liked it! Just means you only have to one slice instead of two! ;)

 
Having tried the loaf it was really nice, especially warm fresh out of the oven with a bit of butter. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough to try the malt loaf bread and butter pudding as that looked even nicer! Its a much lighter bread than the malt loaf you buy in the supermarket but still had the malty flavour and the slightly dense chewiness I normally like!

  Here you can see a slice and the sultana's (and currants) I used. They didn't sink down to the bottom which was good! I had to use some currants in it as well as I didn't have quite the required weight in sultana's, but it still worked nicely!

Hi 2013!

So this is my first post of 2013, not only that but its the evening of my *coughs over the number of years* birthday! I used to celebrate my birthday with a vengeance, and as though I'd never have another birthday again. Once I even celebrated with various events for an entire month, I think it might have been my 21st.... Anyway, its now 9.30pm and I'm writing on my blog. Haven't times changed!?

Anyway, this isn't even a proper post really, just to post a picture show casing some of the baking I did today and some of my birthday and christmas presents. Due to the snow, we cancelled all my other plans and decided to just stay in, in the warmth and make a little afternoon tea for two.

The sandwiches are a variety of cucumber, ham and cheese, and variations of these same ingredients! I made half plain scones and half with sultanas (Mary Berry), then at the top you can just about see the lemon drizzle cake (Nigella Lawson version from How to Be a Domestic Goddess). At the front there is a big tub of clotted cream and some little pots of jam.

Presents wise, the cake stand, tea pot and cups and saucers were all christmas presents (Cath Kidston). Then the orchid was one of my birthday presents. You can only see a reflection in the orchid pot, as its hiding behind the cake stand, but there's also a lovely Jo Malone candle shining brightly as well. Roasted chestnut. Smells absolutely amazing!

Anyway, here you go:

Chocolate and Salted Caramel Cake

Sorry its taken a while for me to post this up as I've had some problems with my internet at home and I couldn't upload any pictures, this is from a couple of weeks ago:

So at a friend's dinner party a month ago, my friend made a chocolate and salted caramel cake from the hummingbird bakery cook book and it was amazing!! So this weekend it was my brothers birthday and we had some friend's staying so I thought I'd give it a try as well!

The recipe is for a huge three tier chocolate cake, with chocolate icing and salted caramel sandwiched between the layers of cake. My friend had previously made the full three tiers but I decided I would use two tiers for a birthday cake and have the last single tier as dessert with friends.

The first part of the process is to make the salted caramel, this was slightly different to the salted caramel ice cream I'd made over the summer but I weighed out my sugar, some golden syrup and some water in a pan. I'm really scared of burning the sugar and also really scared of it crystallising. The method I use is: I swirl the water at the beginning to make sure that it gets all of the sugar wet and there are no dry sugar clumps and I make sure the pan is super clean to start with. I also make no attempt to stir it at any point, apparently you can stir it before the sugar has completely dissolved but I'm always really scared that this will cause the sugar to just clump together so I just stand close guard over the pan and if it looks like the sugar is not melting consistently I swirl the pan. The recipe suggests you boil the sugar for 10 minutes, but does not state the temperature you should heat it too and I do have a sugar thermometer so I stuck that in but I was quite nervous about burning the caramel and also about getting it all the way up to this temperature so I don't think I quite cooked it for the right length of time or to quite the right heat. But it wasn't burnt which was the main thing! You then need to heat the cream and the salt and then pour this into the caramel, off the heat. This bubbled up lots and luckily I poured the cream quite slowly otherwise I think there would have been a lot of mess over my cooker hob. I would definitely recommend you use a high sided pan to cook the caramel in initially as it came pretty close to overflowing! You then just stir this and pour it into a small bowl to cool. Mine was quite runny in the end, although it did thicken as it cooled, but I wonder if I had cooked it for a bit longer and slightly hotter if it would have thickened up a bit more...here is the caramel just cooling in a bowl!

Then on to the chocolate icing, this also needs a caramel base to start with, so I washed up my two pans and went through the same process again without the salt! This time I didn't bother with the thermometer and just timed it for the 10 minutes but had turned down the heat a little. You then pour in the cream again and then leave this to cool for a minute before pouring it over the chocolate! There is so much chocolate in the recipe 450g followed by a whole pack of butter (and a bit more) which does not sound healthy at all, but it tastes AMAZING! So you stir the chocolate and caramel mixture until it is well mixed then you use an electric mixer to mix it for about 10 minutes until the mixture is cool, before adding the butter. I thought I hadn't let this get cool enough as when I added in the butter it started to melt and was gone before I knew it, and the recipe then says to mix this until it is whipped then put it in the fridge to cool for 40-50 minutes. My mixture was pretty liquid so I thought it had all gone horribly wrong and I had no idea how I would be able to ice the cake with liquid... so with little confidence I whisked it for a minute or two then poured it into another bowl and whacked it in the fridge. Here is the frosting just before it went into the fridge.

On to the easy part, the sponge. I mixed together all of the dry ingredients with the butter then added the eggs and buttermilk mix. Split the mixture into three lined sandwich tins and whacked it in the oven. DONE! I let the cakes cool down a bit then took them out of the tins and left them on a wire rack.

Now on to assembling the cake. I took out my cooled frosting from the fridge, and I was so surprised. It had completely set and was solid but easily spread over the cake. Like the consistency of Nutella!

I got my first layer of cake, then spread three tables of the salted caramel mixture over the top followed by the frosting then sandwiched on the second layer. Here is a picture of just the salted caramel before the rest of the frosting. As you can see the caramel is quite runny and could do with being slightly thicker...

I then covered the cake in the frosting, as an aside there is loads of spare frosting that I just ended up throwing in the bin as I didn't know what to do with it, and thats even after I iced the single tier cake as well. I also added lots more of the salted caramel to the single tier as there was lots left and this was really nice. I think it does need quite a lot of salted caramel, as the salt adds a really nice dimension to the sweet cake.

Here is a final picture of the cake with a few salt flakes dusted over the top:

And here is a picture of the structure of the cake after we all had a slice! 

 

Chocolate Torte

This weekend we went to a fireworks party and had dinner with some friends! My task was to bring dessert that would go with home made orange ice-cream! I decided that chocolate torte would be the best option!

I looked through a few recipes online and decided to go with this Gordon Ramsey torte.

So I started by making the pastry. The recipe makes quite a lot of pastry and there were quite a few people to cater for, so I decided to use a larger tart tin and make a slightly shallower torte than the picture on the website! The pastry was relatively simple to make, it came together quite nicely and I was careful not to overwork it. I chilled it in the fridge for an hour before rolling it out. I rolled out the pastry and in hindsight I think I should have rolled it a bit thinner, but it wasn't too bad. I think it needs to be no thicker than a £1 coin and I think in some places it was probably a bit thicker than this. A trick I've picked up for getting the pastry nicely into the tin is to take out the loose bottom then place the pastry on top of this and fold in the sides so that the bottom of the tin can then be placed back into the tin and the pastry unfolded back over the top (Thanks Mary Berry!). This always seems to work better for me than rolling out the pastry and trying to lay it over the top of the tin. I then got a bit carried away and instead of reading the recipe properly, I used the edge of the tin to trim the pastry. The recipe said I should leave the pastry about a cm over the edge then blind bake it for 20 mins, then trim the sides. WHOOPS! So my shallower torte ended up being EVEN shallower as the pastry then shrank away from the sides. I also pricked the bottom of my torte case which it didn't mention to do!

I then popped the case in the oven for 20 mins with some uncooked rice in the bottom, then took out the rice and baked it for another 6 minutes to get the bottom brown. The first 20 mins of cooking with the rice in stops the bottom of the case from rising up, then after 20 minutes its cooked enough that the bottom won't rise up any more so you are safe to take up the beans/rice and get the surface of the tart a bit brown.


I took the case out of the oven to cool, and got on with making the chocolate filling. This was also really easy. I just whisked together the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract, broke up all of the chocolate into a separate bowl. Then heated up the milk and cream to boiling and poured this over the chocolate. This melted the chocolate, I then whisked in the egg and sugar mix and got ready to pour it into the torte case. This was probably the hardest part of the process as my torte case was so shallow.
 Here is the filled case in the oven:

And here it is after about 30mins in the oven. Nicely set with a lovely shiny top! I left it to cool in the tin over night then the next morning had a look at it!

I grated some dark chocolate over the top to decorate. Instead of using a grater, I use a potato peeler and just 'peel' the chocolate down the side of the bar to do this which is a bit easier than grating!

I then left the cake for a few hours and finally took it out of the tin just before serving. As you can see in the slightly blurry picture below that the torte is quite thin but in the end this was ok as it is very rich and not that sweet as its mainly dark chocolate. It definitely went well with the homemade ice cream which added a nice fresh tang with the lime and orange. TA - DAH! Finished chocolate torte!