White Chocolate Cake - Jenn

I volunteer at a charity shop and we found out that there is a rash of birthdays this week (including mine) so we decided to have a party!  I said I'd bring the cake, this is my go-to cake when I have to make one big enough to feed a horde.  Making the batter so easy that I do it by hand which means no washing up the stand mixer equipment, there's no creaming or folding so it's stress free and it's also really quick to mix up.  Since it's a white cake people aren't expecting the level of richness that all that creamy white chocolate provides.  While white chocolate doesn't have much flavour on its own it does impart something to the cake so everyone always asks what is responsible for the flavour, they know there's something special in it but they can't quite pinpoint it on their own, which means as the baker you get to brag about your creation.

It's based on a recipe from one of my favourite dessert TV chefs James Martin.  He's actually a full repertoire chef who has earned Michelin stars and all sorts of other accolades but I'm not very fond of his cooking on TV, I'm just a huge fan of his desserts.  He is a man who loves his desserts, you can tell most chefs on TV don't actually like desserts, but James does, a lot.  You can tell he loves them when you start looking at his cake recipes, this cake recommends serving 10 people at a whopping 770 kcals and 50g fat per slice!  There's no "light and refreshing end to your meal" with James Martin.  I've never managed to slice this cake into less than 18 servings and I've reduced the amount of butter and sugar and it's still a beast of a cake that deceptively cuts into narrow slices that are still huge when you lift them onto plates.  When I start cutting down on things like fat and sugar in a recipe and serving smaller portions than recommended you can rest assured that the original was decadent beyond all manageable capacities.


White Chocolate Cake

Pre-heat the oven to 160^C (140^C for a fan oven)

In a double boiler over simmering water put

170 grams unsalted butter
140 grams white chocolate broken into pieces
250 ml milk (you can use low fat or skim milk - look at the first two ingredients, it's not losing richness)
1 tsp vanilla
leave it until everything melts - no stirring, you'll mess up the chocolate

While you're waiting for the melting, grease and flour two 8 inch (20cm) round layer cake tins and wrap with cake strips (I'll explain later).

In your mixing bowl, measure out

250 grams self raising flour
1/4 tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) for extra oomph against all the fat
250 grams sugar
pinch of salt
whisk them up so they're evenly mixed

Once the liquid ingredients are melted take them off the heat and let them cool a little bit, then give it a whisk so that it's all smooth.  Then mix in

2 eggs lightly beaten

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry and whisk until smooth.

Then pour half the batter into each pan and pop in the oven.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until a skewer poked in the middle comes out clean.  I switch  the pans about 2/3 of the way through the cooking time to bake them more evenly.  Leave to cool before icing.

I frost the cake with cream cheese icing because it's lighter than butter-cream icing and the slight tang of the cream cheese cuts against the richness of the cake, I decorate with fruit for the same reason.

Cake Strips
I used to have problems with this cake rising too much as it bakes and getting some crazy mountain action going on in the middle of the cake (think pyramid on a round base, really yes).  At first I thought I could get away with not adding that extra bit of baking soda but it came out unpleasantly heavy in texture, so the batter needs that extra oomph.  But I  wasn't going to cut 40% of the cake away to get a flat top on the layers, if you spend this much on chocolate for the cake you're serving the whole thing, so I did a bit of research into getting cakes to rise evenly and found this old trick that was probably used before oven temperatures could be regulated more accurately.  If you wrap the pan in a wet strip of old terry towel and secure with a safety pin it'll keep the outside of the pan a little bit cooler at the start of the baking time so the sides don't set too early in the bake.  The first time I tried it I sat in front of the oven watching the cakes the whole time completely terrified that they'd catch fire, they didn't, and they worked a treat, the cakes came out much more level.  You can buy cake strips made from high-tech insulating fibres that you don't have to dampen (they're all fancy with velcro to fit them round your pans) but if you have an old towel that you're going to throw away and some safety pins and a pair of scissors you can experiment for free!

Chocolate Fans

Did you notice that the recipe calls for the funny amount of 140 grams of chocolate?  Since I had to buy it in bars I bought 200 grams, which meant I had 60 grams leftover.  I'm not the biggest fan of white chocolate for eating so I thought I'd use it for decorating the cake, I drew up a little schematic of a stylized fan and placed it under a strip of baking paper then used it as a template to pipe out some white chocolate fans - simple to do but retro-chic impressive to look at!  If you're wondering where the long strip of paper came from, when I have to cut off an edge of baking paper to fit in a pan I save it and then either use it for lining the upright edges of baking pans at another time or for little projects like this.

Icing Technique

If you've been on pinterest you'll most likely have seen this technique from Lisa at Sockerrus, check out her blog for instructions, it's in Swedish but it translates easily with google, although her pictures explain it all very clearly.  Her decorating skills are far superior to mine and I love looking at her cakes.

Christmas Cherry Cake - Mom

Here's another inefficient Christmas treat that bit the dust fairly early in my childhood.  I understand why this one was crossed off the list, it's fiddly like you wouldn't believe.  Normally I pull ingredients out of the cupboard and measure them as I bake, that's why I note the ingredients in between the instructions, I don't have to go jumping back and forth between ingredients and instructions just start at the top and work down.  I don't think that casual attitude would have worked with this recipe, so I have listed the ingredients first then written out my recipe as I would normally have done.  I have never felt so compelled to have everything assembled and some bits even pre-measured before beginning a baking session in my life.  Shortly after starting I thought it was worth commemorating the scene with a picture.  I also want to apologise for the lack of progress pictures, I like seeing what things should look like along the way when I'm making a new recipe so I like to include them but I was feeling the stress of this recipe.

This cake is most likely single-handedly responsible for my curious love of those sickly-sweet glacé cherries.  It might just be the only Christmas cake I have ever eaten with eager zeal, most of the time I have the mantra "be polite, just chew quickly and swallow, stay polite, don't pull that face, smile nicely" running through my head.  I have to do a lot of that around Christmas food in England.

I don't mean to be down on my adopted country, truthfully Christmas in England is magical in so many ways, people will stand outside in the cold for tree lighting ceremonies and first night of the high-street lights display and smile with awe in the spirit of the season rather than complain about their frozen feet.  They have silly  crackers to make your dinner festive and panto to make you feel like a kid again so you're sure to get a few good laughs somewhere, carollers make the rounds far more often than you can imagine and they even keep alive sneaky pagan rituals that have been sanitized into something fun rather than dangerous.  And unlike the foreign perception of British cuisine there's actually lots of good foods, like chocolate yule logs and potatoes roasted in goose fat and mulled cider and great big wedges of Stilton.  I don't want to be down on Canada either but I don't think I could go back to a culture that doesn't have such a unified idea of Christmas tradition, even if I moved back I'd want English Christmas.  But I can't in good conscience glorify it too much, English Christmas is full of culinary pitfalls for the outsider because for some reason people have this obsessive attachment to historical foods.  Like the Medieval mincemeat in my recurring nightmare of a food - mince pies* - which everyone claims to love but then pulls a face when eating them - don't think I don't notice and I know what that face means.  Or Victorian recipes for pudding that always include candied peel and other ingredients that (once baked and fed brandy for a month) have a semi-soft texture that make you think it's gone mildewy.  And don't forget the food of the devil - sprouts** - if they're so wonderful why do most people only eat them once a year?

Tellingly, the English are always trying to come up with new ways to cook these foods, which makes me think everyone secretly hates them, but no one will make a version without the objectionable and offending ingredients because that would deviate too far from tradition.  With the fourteen billion wonderful Christmas traditions in this country you'd think people would be willing to let go of the few they secretly hate.  So don't make a Tudor era Christmas cake full of weird spice combinations, soggy almonds, and the bits of oranges you normally throw away, make a Cherry Cake instead and have a happier Christmas.


Christmas Cherry Cake

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups sifted all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup milk

Recipe as per usual:

Pre-heat the oven to 350^F (176^C)

Separate
3 eggs
Whisk the egg whites until stiff, reserve the egg yolks for later

Sift the flour before measuring
1 3/4 cups sifted all purpose flour

Sift the flour again but this time with the baking powder, salt and nutmeg.
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
Put the flour mixture aside but reserve 1/2 cup of the flour separately to be mixed in with the cherries.

Cream butter and sugar well.
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar

Mix in and beat well
3 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla

Add and mix in alternately in two turns
Flour mixture
1/2 cup milk
Start and end with flour and beat smooth after each addition (1/3 the flour mixture-beat, then 1/4 cup milk-beat, then second 1/3 flour-beat, then 1/4 cup milk-beat, then the last 1/3 flour-beat)

Fold in the beaten egg whites (I have trouble folding stiff egg whites but my whisk was in the dishwasher waiting to be cleaned and I foolishly put my mixer whisk in the sink and it was touching other things.  I just know one of these stubborn little marshmallowy lumps of egg white is going to turn up as scrambled egg in the finished cake.  This is not a finished folding picture, keep going.)

Sprinkle over the batter half the reserved 1/2 cup of flour (that's 1/4 cup of flour)
1 cup glacé cherries (1/2 lb) cut in halves (I did not cut mine in half, I wanted whole circles of cherry in the slices of my finished cake not half moons.)
Sprinkle the remaining flour over the cherries - rattle those cherries round in their flour dusting to make sure the are well coated before folding through.

Fold the cherries into the batter until all is well blended.

Bake in a well greased and floured 5" x 9" loaf pan for about 1 - 1 1/2 hours or until done, but be sure to check after an hour.

Results:
Good
It tastes golden+ and buttery just like my childhood memories of it, really, really yummy.  The texture is light and soft and moist all at the same time, and I think with some practice it wouldn't be as stressful to make it in future.  I also have to think the buttery flavour is very impressive given the proportion of butter to other ingredients.  Lastly I didn't find any lumps of scrambled egg white - so far.  I would consider this cake worth making even without the cherries - which brings me to...
Not-So-Good
I had major cherry sink-age and I don't know why.  I gave them a really good dusting of flour, I was even sneaky and put a drop-zone of plain batter on the bottom of the tin before adding in the rest of the batter with the cherries so they were all floating on the top on their way into the oven, but it didn't help they're all on the bottom.  Maybe I should have cut the cherries in half to make them less heavy?  Advice from the clever bakers please!  Also, sadly, I had serious sticking problems when de-panning that ended with a horizon split across the whole cake, so I've gone back and added "and floured" to the greased tin - even as I was greasing the tin I was thinking I should flour it but I didn't because I thought it's a greased non-stick pan, I'm being overly cautious already.

Yeah, I even went looking for a slice where the Cherries hadn't sunk.

If I had found a floating cherry slice I would have pretended they didn't sink.

+I know golden isn't a flavour but I don't know another  way to describe the lovely harmoniousness of the nutmeg-vanilla combo bathed in sweetness except as golden.

* Mince Pies are the most EVIL thing to do to someone at Christmas and I am so glad they died off of Mom's Christmas baking list in favour of butter tarts - thank-you Mommy, thank-you from me and every taste-bud in my mouth.

The Scone Apprentice's recurring nightmare that comes true every year during the Christmas season in England:

host: "who wants some dessert?"

TSA: "yes, please! I always save room for dessert!"

host: "do you want cream on your mince pie?"

TSA: "I didn't think dessert was going to be mince pies..." ... oh no! oh why did I say yes so quickly! full panic internal debate on whether to go for self-preservation and back-peddle with 'on second thought maybe I'm too full' or if I have to ask for two in an illogical attempt to be polite as a cover for the excessive disappointment and repulsion written all over my face even though the polite façade would only last up to the first bite

host: "they're a new kind!" ... there's hope, maybe it won't be so bad, maybe the new change will make it better

TSA: "do they still have candied peel and beef suet?"

host: "yes! and the pastry crust had a layer of grapefruit marmalade spread under the mincemeat to give them a fresh zing!" ...no that did not make it better, that made it the opposite of better - why don't people here eat butter tarts at Christmas?

** the only way to make sprouts non-offensive is to refuse to bring them into your house, and fyi given that sprouts are food of the devil it makes them most inappropriate to serve during the feast celebrating the birth of Jesus

Chocolate Orange Cake for One

 

A while ago my sister, Allana, and I were talking about all the baking I've done for my blog and I expressed the difficulty of doing all this baking while being a single person.  I'm not complaining that the baking is a lot of work, quite the opposite I'm enjoying this culinary walk down memory lane immensely.  My issue is that when making a recipe that is sized for a family, and even sometimes multiple servings for a family, it takes an iron will for one person not end up the size of a house by having all the product of all that baking in her home.  And despite all my stubbornness an iron will is not something I possess.

This lead the conversation onto those cakes in a mug baked in the microwave recipes that are floating around the internet.  They seem ideal for a single person as they're one serving, I've tried a few of them, they're disgusting, either dry and mealy or slimy and rubbery, and baking them in the oven does little to improve them.  She asked me if I had come up with a recipe for one myself and while I do have a small cake that I make occasionally when I fancy a piece of cake but the smallest I've managed to get it down to is three servings.

With the distance of an ocean and a very large continent between us, we don't send each other many presents through the post as it's prohibitively expensive, the postage has often cost more than double the present.  So we buy presents or do very nice things for each other when we see each other and not on arbitrary dates like Christmas or birthdays, but since today is Allana's birthday I thought I'd do something for her, and this is it, I've developed the recipe for an amazing one person cake and made it wheat free since she has recently suspected that she might have a wheat intolerance.

Chocolate Orange Cake for One

Pre-heat the oven to 320^F (160^F)

In a bowl (either over a pan of simmering water or in the microwave) melt together
25g chocolate (about half a chocolate bar)
20g butter

Whisk in
30g light brown sugar
orange zest from 1/4 of an orange

Let the chocolate mix cool a bit then mix in
1 egg yolk

Fold in
30g ground almonds or hazelnuts - your preference
1/2 tsp cocoa powder (optional, if you use milk chocolate the cocoa powder will make the cake richer, if you used dark chocolate you can omit it)

Whisk up
1 egg white until soft peaks

Fold the egg white into the batter.

Pour the finished batter into a small baking dish that has been greased and dusted with cocoa powder, I used an old small nutella glass jar the size smaller than their trademark oval jar (200g).

Bake for 25 - 35 minutes, take it out when a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Once out of the oven take it out of the baking dish immediately to cool, this will help stop it collapsing down.

Cover with butter cream icing, you can melt down the other half of the chocolate bar and mix it into the icing to make it richer.  This isn't a 5 minute cake like the microwave ones, it actually takes just as long to bake this as it does a full size cake, so you have time to do things like make icing and in my case even candy the remaining peel from the orange.

My decorating skills aren't the best but I've always been of the school that taste is more important than appearance when it comes to baking.  It's a good little cake, well worth the effort to make, and hopefully worthy of being a birthday present.

* Edit *
Allana was so pleased with her present that she baked one right away!  She had a nifty little oval baking dish that worked perfectly.

Orange Chiffon Cake - Gram and Allana

It's my birthday and growing up, apart from a few animal shaped cakes that looked like they should have been painted on cave walls, birthday cakes were made in a tube pan, that means angelfood cake (I think the only cake in our house that was made from a box mix) or Orange Chiffon Cake.  This is also the cake that we remember had money inside, which made it an extra special birthday cake.  I remember my sister Allana making this cake a lot in the summer, I know other people made it at other times but this one I really identify with her so she's getting a mention in the title credit.
 
Gram gave this recipe to Mom to help use up all the eggs from the chickens, there really were more eggs than we could eat sometimes, I can remember having multiple 4-litre sized ice-cream buckets full of eggs in the fridge some summers.  In the summer the chickens had such rich diets from all the vegetable scraps, kitchen waste*, garden trimmings, and grass clippings they were fed and they got so much sunshine in those long northern days that their eggs had these impossibly deep dark orange yolks, all the baking had a strong yellow tint - no such thing as a white cake at our house in the summer, so the orange chiffon cake was a warm golden colour that complimented it's name and flavour beautifully. 
 
I can also remember trudging out to the chicken coop every morning in the snow to feed and water the chickens and collect the eggs before school and getting paid $1 per week to do it.**  There weren't many paid chores around our house, but if we took on an extra responsibility we did get rewarded - side note the chicken chore also required the chore doer to shovel a path out to the coop every time it snowed (that was on top of regular shovelling duty) and you weren't allowed to quit the job mid-winter so if you were lazy and shovelled a narrow little path at the start of the snowy season you made a rod for your own back until spring.***  I'm also pretty sure that if no one took chicken care and egg collecting as a paid extra around the house, it would have become a mandated free chore.
 
Orange Chiffon Cake
 
Pre-heat the oven to 300^F (150^C)
The cake is mixed in three separate bowls, then combined at the end.
 
Bowl A - use your mixer for then transfer the whisked egg whites into another bowl so you can use your mixer again for Bowl C
Whisk together to form stiff peaks
5 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
 
Bowl B - use any bowl big enough to hold the ingredients
Mix together
1 1/2 cup flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
 
Bowl C - use your mixer again for this
Whisk until pale (or somewhat lighter if you had summer eggs from our chickens)
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup orange juice
5 egg yolks
zest from 1 orange (or 3/4 tsp of lemon extract, but I don't remember this being in our house)
 
Now incorporate backwards.
 
Into the egg yolk mixture in Bowl C, gradually whisk in the dry ingredients from Bowl B, then gently fold in the egg whites from Bowl A.
 
At this point I'm going to make a dastardly confession, this is pure sacrilege in the baking world but I'm just going to say it.  I don't fold in my whisked egg whites.  I'm really bad at folding in egg whites.  I either over mix to such an extreme that I've lost half the air in the whites that there was no point in being so finicky or I end up with slimy cooked blobs of un-mixed-in egg white all through my cake.  I've given up trying.  I add them (usually in two or three batches) to my mixer and stop/start the machine using the lowest setting so that it barely swirls and I push down the egg whites every few times and occasionally pull the batter from the bottom up over the top, the process usually takes about four minutes.  And maybe it's because I'm so bad at folding in egg whites, but I don't think I lose any more air than if I spent half an hour trying to fold in the whites.  If I'm really worried about the potential loss of airiness of my cake I'll whisk an extra egg white at the start.  There you have it, my dirty secret, use it wisely and at your own risk.
 
Pour the batter into a 10 inch loose bottom tube pan like you'd use for angelfood cake and bake for 25 minutes at 300^F (150^C) then turn the heat up to 325^F (162^C) and bake for a further 20 - 25 minutes.
 
When done, invert the pan on top of a bottle so that it hangs upside down to cool, my cake pan is annoyingly 10 1/2 inches and it really makes a difference but has convenient little feet to cool it upside down so I forgive it.  By the way, this is one time where you don't want a non-stick cake pan, you want the cake to stick to the pan and not fall out while it cools.

Once cool, flip the pan right side up, run a knife around the sides and the tube of the cake to loosen, then pull the side part off, run the knife along the bottom of the pan, then flip the cake over onto a plate and the tube/bottom part of the pan should slide out.

Next is Gram's money magic trick, I only remember there being coins in tube pan cakes but Gram says she put them in any cake that she made as a birthday cake.  I can remember learning this trick for the first time in Gram's kitchen in Duncan, I really felt like we were being sneaky, I can remember being so excited about being let in on the secret of how to get the money into the cake.  I helped her wrap coins up in wax paper, then she took a knife and made some slits in the cake into which I pushed the wrapped coins, then we iced the cake which covered up the points where we pushed the coins.  Mom recently told me a story about Gram marking the point on the cake with a toothpick where one of the coins was inserted before icing the cake to make sure that the birthday boy (she had two sons) got a slice with a coin, or it might have been that there were enough coins that everyone got a slice with a coin but they were all pennies and the birthday boy got a nickel.  Either way, Gram was sneaky and I was easily impressed.

The toothpick marks out the pound coin for my slice of my birthday cake, the other coins wrapped up are pennies heh-heh-heh.

* watching chickens eat spaghetti is hilarious
** might have been $2 a week, but it certainly wasn't $5 - there was the mother of all arguments that mowing the whole lawn with the push mower was worth more than $5 and egg collection was worth a lot less than lawn mowing - I do remember it was a paltry sum even back then so I'm sure it was $1, but hey it was $1 more than your sisters were being given and you didn't have to justify why you needed/wanted money, it was yours to spend as you like.
*** occasionally Dad would run the snow blower all the way down to the chicken coop and not just stop at the barn, but I remember often having to shovel it when it was my chicken chore.

Rhubarb Cake - Mom and Gram

This cake officially comes from Gram LuVerne, Mom's copy of the recipe is in Gram's handwriting.  My rhubarb memories are so tightly tied to my Mom and it is my Mom who I remember making this cake.  I don't think many people grow up with rhubarb memories, none of my childhood friends did, more than once I had to identify the plants for them.  I can remember the rhubarb plants being contained by old tires behind the greenhouse and their massively huge frilly leaves on their primitive stalks made me think they should have belonged in a jungle not our back yard.

As with all garden items in my childhood, rhubarb came with chores and there were a few days every summer that were spent cutting mountains of rhubarb into chunks to be bagged and frozen.  But there was also the treat of being given a stick of rhubarb and unlimited access to the sugar bowl to dip and chomp away.  Rhubarb mostly went into pies and this cake, a few times I can remember it being made into jam and at least once it became wine.  It's a funny fruit but I'm glad it featured in my childhood, that sour pink and green stalk is an acquired taste and I don't have to miss out on it because I do know what to do with it.

The recipe makes mention of chopped nuts, just that a few would be nice, but Mom has confirmed that they never made an appearance in her version of the cake.

Rhubarb Cake

Pre-heat the oven to 350^F (177^C)
Grease and flour a 9 x 13 inch rectangular cake pan

In your mixer beat together
1/2 cup of butter (the recipe says margerine or oil but Mom uses butter)
1 1/2 cups sugar

When fluffy add in and mix well
1 egg

While that is mixing, measure out your wet and dry ingredients and prep your rhubarb

Dry
2 cups all purpose flour (plain flour)
1 tsp baking soda

Wet
1 cup soured milk
     - or 1 cup fresh milk with 1 tsp vinegar to sour it

Rhubarb
2 cups chopped rhubarb, tossed with a dusting of
1 tbsp flour

Alternately add in half your dry ingredients, then milk, then the rest of the dry ingredients, be careful not to over mix.

Stir in by hand the chopped rhubarb and pour the batter into your cake pan.

Mix up the topping
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 tsp ground cinnamon (be generous)

Sprinkle the topping over the batter and bake for 45 - 50 minutes
     My cake pan is smaller than 9 x 13 so my cake needed to bake for 60 min

It's not much to look at but the flavours are beautiful, when you slice into it, the cinnamon sugar topping just crumbles and dredges the whole of the cut side and drags the flavour all the way down the slice.

Edit - Gram sent me an email about this cake, she checked her recipe and noticed that she got it from (my Great) Aunt Eva, and most likely came from Aunt Eva's mother my Great Grandma Pierce.  She also said that my Mom commented she thinks this is a prairie cake.  Thanks for sharing the heritage Gram!  It's a yummy cake.

Pumpkin Loaf - Mom

I am in the worst kind of heaven right now.  I have two freshly baked pumpkin loaves on my counter, they smell fantastic, better than fantastic, they smell deliriously, mouth-wateringly, head-rushingly, drool inducingly amazing, and I have sit in this blissful, pumpkiny, spicey cloud of aroma while I wait for them to cool before I can cut into them.  Other fruit or vegetable based cakes should be ashamed of their own existance, banana bread should go hide itself for being insufficient, zucchini loaf should tremble from its own inadequacies, and carrot cake should resign itself to being a waste of both carrots and cake, pumpkin loaf makes me wonder why people even bother with lesser loaves, but still I have to wait.

This is, fyi, another one of my mom's "saboteur" style sharing efforts.  There are some obvious errors in her email, eggs are listed twice, under no circumstances would she pour that much oil into a measuring cup and think yup I'll add all that in, and a very inconvenient spelling error could have someone without the sensory memory of this cake burned into her olfactory system mistaking cinnamon for cardamom with disastrous results and there's no way she would ever be so stingy with the spices.  She also limited the total of her instructions to "bake in a greased and floured loaf pan for 50 min at 350^" which would have a less intrepid baker shying away from it due to the complete lack of direction on how to make the batter.

Pumpkin Loaf

In a stand mixer, whisk together until pale and the mix falls in ribbons from the beaters when you raise them
4 eggs
3 cups of sugar

add in and whisk until smooth
1/2 cup vegetable oil (flavourless like sunflower or canola)
1 small can of pumpkin (that's 1 3/4 cups - I measured it on the way out of the can)
1/3 can of water (use the pumpkin can to measure)
               if you puree up your own fresh pumpkin and it is already quite watery,
               use 2 cups of pumpkin and omit the extra water

sift together all your dry ingredients then add to the wet and mix until just incorporated
3 1/2 cups of flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cloves
3 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp allspice

Pour the mixture into 2 loaf tins (this is a double recipe, you can half it but then you have to use half the can of pumpkin and do something with the other half, just make two loaves and freeze one for later you won't be disappointed).

Bake in a preheated oven at 350^F (177^C) for 50 minutes, poke it with a long skewer to check if it's done in the middle and if not put it back in for 5 minutes at a time until it is.

Just a note, it should be a bit darker on the outside and it shouldn't be so mountainous in shape but my oven was at 325^ in error.  I have been suspecting that my oven has been running hot compared to the temperature dial, to check I bought an proper internal thermonitor to get a more accurate gauge and I was right, but today I mis-read the thermonitor and ended up too low.  So as the loaves cooked unusually slowly, the centres bulged ever higher in what was worryingly threatening to become a volcano of warm raw batter and it took much longer to bake.  But after some nail biting and several extensions of the cooking time it did eventually bake and it didn't spill over the sides and fuse to the tins, so alls well that ends well, get the butter out it's gotta be time to cut a slice now.

Look at that beauty!

Flan Cake with Raspberries - From Mom

When I asked my family to help me with the list of recipes to include, my sister Allana came back with the warning that getting some of these recipes out of Mom was going to be difficult, reckoning that some of the things she baked are carefully guarded secrets. I brushed off that statement, nah my mommy wouldn't do that to me, she's sent me recipes in the past, yes they're full of spelling mistakes but it's easy to figure out, she's just bad at typing, she wouldn't sabotage my project.

Because it's unseasonably warm this autumn and there are still local British raspberries in stores, I thought I'd better make this cake up, otherwise I won't be able to afford it until next summer. I'm now starting to wonder if Allana was right, reading the email Mom sent of this recipe I realise that there are gaping holes in the method instructions, some quite significant like what temperature to set the oven to and how long to bake it! This cake fall into a catagory that I would call 'trophy baking' the kind of thing you make when you want to show off your skills, it's one of the recipes that only Mom baked and usually only on special occasions, and given how little praise she received for her cooking over the years, I might be understanding of why she wants to keep some baking secrets. However, my project is to share these recipes with my sisters so they don't disappear, the instructions below are tainted by my newly formed suspicions, it came out beautifully so whether my mistrust is valid or not I must have done something right.

This was a summer cake that Mom baked when we had company, she used a flan case that resulted in a thin sheet of cake that when turned out onto a plate had a raised fluted edge, she covered the top with raspberries that formed concentric circles to the centre and glazed the fruit so that it shined. The final result was a cake that could have sat in the window of a patisserie shop confident in it's ability to entice you away from chocolate eclairs and towering layered mousse cakes.

Other things missing from Mom's instructions, what did she make the glaze from and did she put some sort of barrier between the fruit and the cake to stop the cake going soggy, because when she upturned the flan she put the fruit next to the more porous side of the cake that baked against the tin, and she's at a school reunion this weekend so I can't even call her up to ask, score: Mom 1, Jenn 0.

It's a good thing that this recipe is small because my first attempt at batter had to go down the drain.  I might have curdled the eggs because the milk was too hot, or I might have put too much flour in on the first alternating turn, whatever I did it formed little knots that would take crazy beating to get rid of and result in a tough cake. Either way it didn't look anything like the very few times I witnessed the batter when this cake was going into the oven and I thought it best to not even put it in the pan  (somehow Mom managed to avoid an audience when baking this).

On a side note, this recipe must have made its way into Mom's repertoire before we had chickens because she included the comment 'you get a good sponge with only 2 eggs' and frankly once we had chickens rationing egg use in the summer wasn't an issue, rather the opposite. Officially this recipe is either called Lazy Daisy Cake or Hot Milk Sponge, and it is light and soft right out to the edges and delicate, and it really is a cake for grown ups.

Flan Cake with Raspberries

 

Pre-heat the oven to around 350^F or 180^C

 

Grease and flour a (probably) 11 inch round flan tin, or a 9 inch square cake pan (like I did if you don't have a flan tin).

 

In a small sauce pan on a low to medium setting, heat up:

1/2 cup milk

1 tbsp butter

1/2 tsp vanilla (because I don't believe for a second that Mom didn't add this)

do not let the milk scald, it should get hot but you should still be able to briefly stick your finger in it, don't let it form a skin on top or catch on the bottom

 

In a mixer beat until light and fluffy:

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

 

add the sugar slowly, a few spoonfuls at a time, it should take 10 minutes to add in all the sugar then leave it to beat for a few minutes more

 

In a separate bowl, mix together:

1 cup flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

 

Add the flour mix and the milk mix in alternating turns, starting and ending with flour, at least 4 turns of flour and 3 of milk. Pour the milk slowly and from a good height in a very thin stream to cool it down. Make sure that everything is mixed before switching between the two.

 

Scrape it all into your cake tin, it should be a very thin liquid-like batter.

 

Bake for around 16 - 18 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean, it is a thin cake so will be fast to bake. I set the timer for 20 minutes but took it out at 18, and that was a bit too long.

 

 

Once out of the oven, give it a few minutes to settle and come away from the sides then turn it out onto a cooling rack.  I've never had a cake so easily fall out of the pan, I didn't even have to run a knife round the sides.

Once cool, put it on a plate and arrange the raspberries like little mountain ranges on top, then pour over the glaze.  I put the top of the cake up because, like I said, I didn't know if I needed to use a barrier to avoid soaking the cake with the fruit or the glaze.

Glaze

I remember Mom pouring the glaze onto the fruit, and it must have had some sort of agent (possibly cornstarch) to make it cling thickly to the fruit.  I don't have her recipe so I had to find one, it's not the same, if I get hers I'll update.

In a small sauce pan, mix:
1/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp cornstarch (corn flour)

Then stir in until dissolved:
1/4 cup water
2 tbsp lemon juice
Run your finger round the inside of the pan above the water level to make sure you have all the sugar granules mixed in.

Bring it to a boil over medium heat and allow to boil for 1 minute, then set it aside to cool, do not stir once you start to heat it. 

I don't have much experience making glazes but I know that sugar always wants to return to its original state if disturbed while heating (so granulated sugar will go grainy in the finished product if stirred or more sugar is added, syrups will not harden, etc).

Once completely cool, pour the glaze evenly over the fruit - spoon it out if, like me, you don't trust your pouring but can't be bothered to brush it over the fruit.  If you have a flan tin so that your cake will have a little retaining wall to hold the glaze in, double or tripple the glaze recipe, so that you have a full layer of it coating your raspberries, mine just ran over the sides of the cake and under it so I had to stop.

Invite your friends round for a slice, watch them be impressed.

Score: Mom 1, Jenn 1 (I love my mommy, but she has some answers to give on this).