Mulling spice cake

I had a thought, would it be possible to make a cake that replicates mulled wine? I love mulled wine so today I had a go at making something that, while not quite a mulled wine cake, is still pretty tasty. I based it on the orange and poppyseed cake, mainly because it uses milk, which is the key to getting the flavours into the cake.

Ingredients

120ml sweetened soya milk
170g caster sugar
2 eggs
170g self raising flour
140g soya margarine
Zest of 1 orange
Zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Method

In a small saucepan, add the nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon to the soya milk. Warm for about 1/2 hour without letting it boil, then allow to cool.
Weigh out all the rest of the ingredients, place in a large bowl with the eggs, zests and finally add the strained soya milk.
Use an electric whisk to blend all the ingredients to make a smooth, soft batter.
Pour into a lined loaf tin and bake at 180c for about 50 minutes, until a skewer pushed into the top of the cake comes out clean.
Cool in the tin.

I think I need to do more with this cake, but I'm not sure what at the moment. It should have a syrup, I think, like a lemon drizzle cake. What I will try is to reduce down some mulled wine and sugar to make a syrup, then drizzle that on it.

Orange and poppyseed cupcakes

I am going to my local "World's biggest coffee morning" in aid of Macmillan cancer support tomorrow. Instead of taking a cake that would need cutting up, I decided to make some cupcakes. I normally bake dairy-free, as I like to at least let the children try what I bake, even if they don't like it. It just seems a bit mean to bake something that I know they can't eat. But, they won't be eating these cakes, as they are for grown-ups only, so I could do something I don't normally get the chance to do.

I made up a batch of my orange and poppyseed loaf cake mix, but used cows milk instead of soya. This was split into 16 cupcake cases, with each around 2/3 full and baked at 180c for about 18 minutes. Once cooled, I iced them with vanilla cream cheese frosting (3 tbsp cream cheese, 1 tbsp butter, 1 tsp vanilla and enough icing sugar to make a soft consistency) then sprinkled caramelised orange peel and poppy seeds on top. 

To make the caramelised orange, I carefully peeled an orange so I only took the top layer of the skin and not the white pith underneath. I then sliced each piece into 1mm wide strips and heated them in a frying pan with a couple of tbsp of caster sugar. Once the sugar was melted and bubbling, and the orange peel softened, I turned off the heat. As the orange cooled and the sugar re-solidified, the peel turned crunchy, sweet and very intensely flavoured. 

Orange and poppyseed loaf cake

I mentioned a while back that I love making the orange and poppyseed cake from one of my recipe books. It is made in a baba tin and I was wondering if it would be possible to scale it down a little and make it as a loaf instead.

Here is a picture of it, made correctly in the baba tin.

So here is the new recipe:

Ingredients

30g poppy seeds
120ml sweetened soya milk
170g caster sugar
2 eggs
170g self raising flour
140g soya margarine
1tsp vanilla extract (not necessary, but I love vanilla with orange)
2 oranges

Method

Warm the milk in a cup in the microwave carefully (about 30 seconds with a stir half way), then add the poppy seeds and leave to stand while you do the rest of the preparation.

Zest the 2 oranges and add to a large mixing bowl along with the flour, sugar, margarine, eggs and vanilla. Finally, add the poppy seeds and milk and whisk the whole lot up until it is a smooth, creamy batter.

Pour the batter into a lined loaf tin and bake at 180c for around 50 minutes.

Leave in the tin to cool.

Make a thick icing with orange juice (around 3 tsp.) and icing sugar and spoon over the slightly warm cake and spread to the edges.


I made the icing too thin, so it ran off too quickly, next time I'll make it thicker, like the cake at the top.

Butternut squash day

Butternut squash is a strange vegetable. How many people cook with it regularly? Yet it seems that when introducing foods to a baby, butternut squash is a champion. I know I gave it to my girls as toddlers, but in moderation and roasted, not pureed. We don't eat pureed butternut squash, so why should they?

Anyway, I digress. For some reason, one jumped into my shopping basket this week and has been glaring at me from the fruit bowl, daring me to think up a use for it. I was feeling a bit loathed to just make boring soup, so I decided to try making a cake with it (more likely to be eaten too!). I guessed it would lend itself to mixed spices (the Americans call it pumpkin pie spice, which is a much nicer name, I think) and orange and so I adapted a recipe to come up with something.

Here is the cake, fresh from the oven, to prove that I did in fact make it. It smelled great while it was cooking, but the mix smelled of sweaty horses and I had a few reservations about continuing with the experiment.

It was very thin, so I sliced it in half and placed one semicircle on top of the other to make a sandwich cake.

Here is a slice of the cake, complete with icing and filling. The cake was too dense and the icing too runny. While warm, it would have been fine with custard as a pudding, but as a cake it was a fail.

It also had a slight aftertaste of sweaty horse, so I was right to be worried earlier!

In conclusion, I would probably stick to carrots in future vegetable-based baking, they are tried and tested and don't taste of sweaty horses.

Meringues and custard

I made a resolution at New Year to cook something new every week. Each new food would be something that I had not tried before, to increase my culinary skills. I have spent a lot of time with my nose in the Wagamama cook book, and have been pleasantly surprised by the ease of cooking those dishes. My addiction to baking has meant that most of my new dishes have been sweet ones, often eye-wateringly sweet at that.

I have a fabulous book that my husband bought for me called Homestyle Cookies, Muffins and Cakes which I am working my way through. I have to adapt most recipes to make them dairy-free as Charlotte is allergic to milk protein, and all the recipes I have tried from this book have adapted beautifully. Two of our favourites are the ginger tray bake and the orange and poppy seed cake (my version is below).

Anyway, I realised that I had never tried to make a meringue before. This thought escalated, as my ideas generally do, to incorporate the school bake sale that is happening this friday, themed around St George. White meringues and red fruit, it all seems to be coming together nicely. So I did a practice batch to see if I could do it and voila, the result:

I used natural sugar, not white, so they are a bit brown, but they are fluffy and crunchy so I guess I got the cooking right. A good friend who has chickens dropped some eggs in for me this morning, so I have the ingredients to make some more with white sugar, ready for the sale tomorrow.

All good? Not quite. I tried to make dairy-free custard with the extra egg yolks, and created a bubbly, lumpy, wobbly goo that the children refused to eat for their pudding last night. The flavour was ok, but the texture was so wrong it was untrue. I think I'll stick to Alpro cartons in future.