Red velvet birthday cake

It was my brother's girlfriends birthday this weekend so, as I use any excuse to bake, I volunteered to make her a cake. As we're Chinese I thought a red cake would be a great idea as the colour red is a lucky colour to us! Happy Birthday Christine!

I decided to make the red velvet cake from the hummingbird bakery cook book, which is a recipe for cupcakes that you double for a three tier cake.

It's reasonably simple as a recipe to follow although I couldn't buy any buttermilk so I just googled for a buttermilk substitute, and mixed some plain yoghurt with milk in a ratio of 3:1. I also didn't have the liquid food colouring the recipe requests, so I used some red food paste instead, this was a different consistency so this was a bit of a test!

First job was to cream the butter and sugar, then add in the eggs. Then in a separate bowl I was supposed to mix the food colouring, cocoa and vanilla extract into a smooth paste. There wasn't really enough liquid to do this as I used paste not liquid colouring so I just made do, in hindsight I think I should have added a touch of the buttermilk to this just so I could have added in a smoother paste as the cocoa went in a bit lumpy and could have been smoother. Anyway, I then added in my 'paste' followed by half the buttermilk, then half the flour, then the rest of the buttermilk and the rest of the flour. Finally I added in the salt, bicarbonate of soda and white wine vinegar. Mixed it until it was smooth, I then divided this between my three tins and put them in the oven for 25 mins. They had cooked perfectly at this point so I took them out and let them cool before icing.

This was quite tricky and I have made this cream cheese frosting before for the carrot cake and it was far too runny. Looked like a cat had thrown up on my cake... Anyway I was a bit nervous, but decided to stick faithfully to the recipe. The recipe does say to mix it, in the icing sugar and butter, then put all of the cream cheese in in one go. Then you put it on high in the mixer for 5 mins but not too long as it can go runny. So this time as soon as the frosting mixture was smooth, I stopped mixing. This worked loads better, the cream cheese frosting was still thick and would not run down the cake at all.

First I leveled the cakes, the bottom and middle layer I had to slice the top off in order to get quite a level surface to balance the next layer on. Then I sandwiched the cakes with the icing and them had to ice the outside. I tried to do a thin layer of icing first to get rid of the all the small crumbs of cake then a thicker layer of icing on the top to cover this as the final finish. This did work a bit better but not as well as I hoped, there were still a few crumbs that I could see in the icing. To try and get a bit of a finish to the iciny I used a palette knife around the sides from bottom to top, and swirled it across the top as well. I also used some of the scraps of cake to get some crumbs to decorate across the top and here it is!

Its a very sweet cake as both the cake and the icing are super sweet, but its very moist and a nice celebration cake. Here you can see the three layers and the frosting*:

And here is a picture of the whole cake with the crumbled red velvet on the top and my attempt at icing!

* Unfortunately I keep forgetting to take pictures during the earlier stages to post, must try harder next time!

Danish Pastry

Haven't posted in a while as I've been away on holiday so this is my first weekend back in my normal routine....So I decided to buy the new Paul Hollywood cook book and on the front cover is a picture of a baking tray filled with pain aux raisin, and they looked so delicious I just had to try and make them.

Making danish pastry is a much longer process than most of the other baking I've done, but the instructions in the book are fairly self explanatory. The pastry requires a WHOLE pack of butter and quite a lot of folding and chilling in the fridge. It also requires you to be quite good at rolling pastry into a nice standard even shape. I found it quite hard to keep the butter from melting in my kitchen as it is quite a warm room.. First of all you mix the basic pastry mix in the food mixer. Then you roll out the pastry and add in the butter. You then need to fold it up so you get layers of butter and pastry. The instructions in the cook book are great for this and there are plenty of illustrations so you can work out how to do it. But basically you should have a layer of pastry then butter, then pastry, then butter, and a final layer of pastry. You then chill this for an hour, then roll it out to the original size and re-fold the pastry as above creating the layers you want for Danish pastry. You have to keep doing this for 3 hours, then finally you leave the pastry in the fridge overnight.

I took out this huge piece of pastry out the next morning!

Then back to my cook book and I discovered that the same pastry can be used for more than pain aux raisins so I decided to divide this in half and use half for raspberry danish as well!

On to the creme patissiere.. this requires 4 egg yolks, sugar and milk and a lot of stirring on the heat preventing the mixture from catching. I was very nervous about burning the milk as this is soo easy to do and I think I took it off the heat a touch too early so my creme pat ended up being a touch to runny. I think its supposed to be quite solid but mine was touch too liquid, but rather than risk burning it as I didn't have any spare milk I decided to use it anyway! The recipe says it takes 20 minutes to make this creme patisserie, and it took me nearly an hour and a half!!

I then got on with the pastry. I divided my massive pack in half and decided to go for the raspberry stars first. This was a bit fiddly and I ended up with quite a range of sizes of stars trying to maximise my pastry usage. You make the stars first then leave them to rise, before adding a tablespoon of creme pat and a few raspberries to the middle.

On to the pain aux raisins, this was much simpler, roll out the pastry spread over the creme pat leaving a gap on one length then sprinkle with the raisins. I did made the mistake of not double checking the recipe and rolled the pastry in the wrong direction and instead of the empty end being on the outside of the roll it was in the middle and I effectively ended up squashing a load of the creme pat and raisins out of the end. I tried to poke as much of this back in to the middle as I could!

You then need to rest everything again for 2 hours and I realised that my slowness on the creme pat had meant I had run out of time. I needed to go out before my two hours was up! DIS-AAASTER!

Ok, not really, however, my only choice was to totally over-prove my pastries. When I returned six hours later, they had definitely risen!! But they still turned out pretty well. 20 minutes in the oven and this is what I ended up with!

A raspberry danish:

  

A pain aux raisins:

And one cut in half so you can see the structure of the cooked dough!

They weren't perfect. It doesn't quite have the defined layers to the dough that I am hoping is due to the over proving. So next time I will allow myself plenty more time to make the creme pat and prove the dough and see what it looks like.