Easy No-Churn Banoffee Ice-Cream

Well, it appears that warmer weather has finally found the UK over the past couple of weeks (although I am nervous to say it for fear of driving it away again!). So to celebrate the warmth I thought I'd make ice-cream. I thought it would be nice to make something quite quick and easy and a little cheat-y too but that doesn't mean that this won't be delicious.

Inspired by Kavey's Bloggers Scream for Ice-cream challenge many months ago (July 2012) I have been intending to make no-churn ice-cream for a long time. Using sweetened condensed milk and whipped cream as the base for the ice-cream means that you don't need to churn it to get a smooth, crystal free ice-cream, perfect for people without an ice-cream machine.

Easy No-Churn Banoffee Ice-Cream
Ingredients
300ml whipping cream
200g (half a tin) condensed milk, chilled to speed the freezing process
150g Bonne Maman Confiture de Caramel (or use Nestle's Carnation Caramel)
2 small to medium ripe bananas (or large, depending on taste)
You'll also need a freezer-proof container or two depending on size

Method

- Whip the cream until it reaches the soft peak stage, don't overwhip.

- Whisk in the condensed milk until you have a combined mixture with soft peaks.

- Chop the bananas into the mixture.

- In order to get a caramel swirl you have two options

      - if your freezer-proof container is big enough you can pour the banana mixture into the container, then add the caramel and swirl carefully.

        - if you're going to be tight on space, swirl the caramel into the mixture in your mixing bowl but then don't mix too much more as you pour it into the container to freeze.

- Freeze for at least three hours or until solid. (I left mine overnight)

Serve with extra caramel (for more luxury) and extra banana (for more health!). If the ice-cream has hardened too much, allow it to soften a little in the fridge or at room temperature to make it scoopable.

I was recently contacted by Fruitdrop - a company who deliver boxes of fruit to workplaces and asked if I wanted to develop a recipe for them. I used bananas to make my ice-cream. They delivered one of their fruit boxes to my house (although the driver looked most confused - he said he'd never delivered to a residential property before!) and were very accommodating about having to work around me leaving the house at a rather early hour.

A Fruitdrop fruit box - with rubbish lighting - sorry!

I wasn't asked to review the contents of the box, but actually, I want to. As well as being very helpful to work with the quality of the fruit in the box was very high indeed - all of the fruit was fresh and unblemished - it had obviously been packed and transported with care (including nectarines!) and I think the quality was probably better than equivalent supermarket fruit. The box contents were as follows: 16 bananas, six pink lady apples, ten satsumas, two nectarines, three peaches, four gala apples, six packham pears and a huge bunch of grapes. The nectarines, peaches and pears were under-ripe, but this is understandable given that they cannot be transported ripe and given a couple of days would have been fine. You can find out more about Fruitdrop boxes for offices here - there is pricing information and I think my box was a 'Seasonal' one. 

Selection of fruit from the box

As I'm not such a fruit bat that I could have eaten all of the fruit before it went off I took the box to work to share with colleagues and quite a number of them commented about the high quality of the fruit. They were also very pleased to have a refreshing change from cakes!!! Sadly the organisation I work for does not have the capacity to take this idea on, but if it did I'm sure it'd be well received.

Thank you to Fruitdrop and Alice for the box.

This is a sponsored post, however I was not required to write a positive review; all views expressed are my own (or my colleagues'!).

Raymond Blanc's Lemon Cake

Well, almost. I remember watching this cake being made, and shortly after saw that Suelle had baked it and made a note of her observations on the recipe. For some reason this recipe popped rather randomly into my mind a few days ago. The combination of a couple of lemons, a pot of double cream and rather a lot of eggs to use meant that this recipe was the perfect solution.

You can find the recipe here on the BBC Food website. I made some small changes to the recipe to reflect my ingredient availability and Suelle's comments about the recipe.

I only used two lemons (that's all I had) and added the zest of both to the cake mixture, along with the juice of one of them. I missed out the rum (sorry Raymond, I don't have rum kicking around my house) and used salted butter (thereby missing out the pinch of salt). Actually, given how much I usually change recipes that's pretty good going for me! After reading Suelle's comments I decided to put the whole lot into the tin (which is very counterintuitive given how much batter there is) and all was well.

I also wanted to try a little trick I'd heard (not sure whether I heard it via twitter/in one of his books/on his blog) from Edd Kimber about getting the crack on a loaf cake. You put a little line of butter down the centre of the cake before putting it in the oven and then it melts and forms a weak point in the batter where a crack will form (my understanding of it). I wasn't sure if it'd work but thought it worth a go and I did indeed get a very attractive crack along the length of my loaf. A good tip, and one I'll be using again. Thanks Edd. I found my cake too longer to bake than the 50-60 minutes specified. Mine was more like 1hr 15-20 (I sort of lost track). I covered it up after about 55 minutes to stop it over-browning.

For the icing I decided not to go the apricot jam and glaze route, but just to revert to the kind of drizzle I know I like - I dissolved the 150g icing sugar in the juice of the remaining lemon, allowed it to boil over, creating sticky chaos on my hob (yeah, I don't really recommend that step) and then when the cake was baked, stabbed it all over with a long cake tester (the cake is too deep for a wooden cocktail stick, which is my usual cake-testing-implement-of-choice) and poured the syrup over. I left it until cold in the tin to absorb the syrup. Yum, sticky (actually - very, very sticky....)

This was such a good cake. I don't quite know how to describe it, because if I say it was dense, that doesn't sound complimentary and it's actually meant to. It was the perfect balance of denseness and solidity yet when eaten it was delicate and soft. My method of soaking the syrup into the cake worked as well as I had hoped and created delicious moist, lemony edges to the cake, and at the base of the cake there was a lovely moist bit too. I will certainly make this again the next time the correct ingredients align in my baking life.... I can't say that it was a cheap cake due to the number of eggs and the cream, but oh boy was it ever worth making. Next time I think I'll try and ramp up the lemon flavour by adding more zest, or perhaps a teaspoon of lemon extract (oil) and using more lemon juice in the glaze, to get that real lemon zing that was perhaps missing (as also noted by Suelle).

As I have been meaning to make this for ages and ages (and have merely been waiting for the correct constellation of ingredients-needing-to-be-used-up to occur) I am going to submit it to Bookmarked Recipes, hosted by Jac of Tinned Tomatoes. (Or I will if I can find the linky, I don't think it's up yet... Edited to add link 14/11/12)

Chocolate cream cake with a jammy middle

It seems that round here, chocolate is the theme for the month, what with all of the chocolate containing goodies I made for Chocolate Week, and the preceeding double chocolate ricotta scones (oh so good!) and now this rather delicious chocolate cream cake. I shall have to make some more fruity cakes to balance it all out and make sure my ginger pear cake doesn't feel lonely... what can I say though, I love chocolate.

Anyway, I saw this chocolate cake recipe by Dan Lepard on the BBC website a while ago and was intruiged by the use of double cream in the ingredients. I can always rely on Dan to come up with something I haven't seen before, and I usually want to try them out. In this recipe the conventional amount of butter is replaced by the combination of a smaller amount of butter, a little oil and the double cream, all contributing to the fat content of the recipe but also to the liquid content.

I have to confess that I didn't have exactly the right ingredients in the house, so made a couple of small substitutions. Specifically I didn't have milk, so decided that I would use 120ml double cream plus 60ml water instead of 100ml double cream and 80ml milk. I suppose my cake ended up with a little more fat in it than the original recipe, but not by too much, and the liquid content was the same. I also went a different direction for my filling and topping. You can find the original recipe here, along with a video (next confession - I didn't watch the video before making the cake, but I'm sure it's an excellent video - the BBC ones always are!)

Chocolate cream cake with a jammy middle

Ingredients

100g unsalted butter

250g light muscovado sugar

50ml light olive oil

25g cocoa powder

2 tsp vanilla extract

4 medium free-range eggs

60ml water

120ml double cream

300g plain flour

3 tsp baking powder

For the filling and topping

A 340g jar of your preferred jam, I used blackcurrant

150g 37% cocoa solids chocolate

40g unsalted butter

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and line a 9"/22cm square cake tin. This was my guess, see rant later...

- Melt the butter over a low heat and then pour into a bowl with the sugar, oil, cocoa powder and vanilla extract. Beat well until smooth.

- Whisk in the eggs followed by the water and double cream. Yay, no curdling or splitting here!

- Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix until smooth.

- Spoon into the prepared tin and level. Cover with foil.

- Bake for 30 minutes covered then remove the foil and continue to bake. The recipe specifies 20 minutes, mine required about 35-40 minutes more, which is a lot extra. After an additional 20 minutes there was still liquid batter on my cake tester, but I was worried that I had overcooked it by leaving it so much longer, and that it would be dry.

- Allow to cool a little in the tin and then completely on a wire rack.

To decorate

- Melt the chocolate and butter together in a small bowl over warm water. Leave to cool a little.

- Split the cake in half, spread the jam over the middle and replace the top.

- Spread the chocolate mixture over the top, smoothing out until evenly spread. I found I had enough for a reasonable layer, not too thick, but not too mean!

Can I take exception with the instructions on the BBC here please... I'm not sure if Dan's original was transcribed properly, but 20cm is not 9", it's 8". 2.5cm = 1inch therefore 20/2.5 = 8. I also want to know if my cake tin is supposed to be round or square.... OK, rant over.

This really was an easy cake to make - melt and mix, my favourite kind!

It was an excellent cake - I needn't have worried about it being dry, it wasn't! The jammy middle and not-too-sweet topping provided a good contrast to the soft, chocolatey cake. I'm glad I tried this recipe - new techniques are always good to try, and this will be a good cake to have in the repertoire. (Much appreciated by colleagues too - I think they quite like chocolate cake!)

Lemon cupcakes with lemon curd filling and icing

I've seen a couple of recipes around recently using cream as an ingredient, not surprisingly, Dan Lepard is behind a couple of them, but Suelle started a discussion on Dan's forums about using cream as an ingredient in baking which was very interesting. I decided that I really ought to do some investigating into this..... well, seemed only right to have to try out a recipe and see what the texture was like for myself.

Baked and ready to be filled

I decided to make Dan's Orange custard cream cupcakes, fairly recently published in the Guardian How to Bake column. Except that I was planning to be lazy and not make the orange cream filling - I wanted to fill them with curd. I meant to go to Waitrose because they do a Jaffa orange curd, but I didn't make it so decided to switch all the flavours to lemon, lemon curd being much easier to get hold of (yes, my lemon curd is from Waitrose, I'd already bought it on a previous occasion!) The only other change I made was to use self raising flour instead of plain plus baking powder, which is just my personal preference.

I don't have posh lemon oil, mine is from Sainsbury's and the label tells me that it's only 12% lemon oil, not pure lemon oil, so I decided to use 2tsp rather the specified 1tsp. I'd love to try the real deal here though!

It was rather therapeutic, digging out a little mound of cake, and lopping most of it off (mmm, baker's treat!) before filling the hole with lemon curd and replacing the lid.

Lids all replaced, ready for the final icing.

You can see that some of them showed their secret a little more than others... over-generous hand with the lemon curd, or insufficiently deep hole!

Anyway, nearly enough photos now, what did they taste like? Very good! The texture (see picture below) was extremely fine grained, they were very delicate cupcakes. The lemon flavour was good, but I bet it would be stunning if I'd used the extract Dan recommended. I really must repeat the recipe with that extract! The lemon curd filling worked well with the cake - it contrasted nicely as a rich, smooth texture against the slightly drier, yet still moist cake crumb. The sweet lemon icing on the top was good too - another contrast. Next time I'll use a finer grater than my coarse microplane, and I might add a little of the lemon extract/oil to the icing too, just for a further flavour boost!

Glorious Gooseberry Crumble Cake

This one was inspired by a recipe for rhubarb crumble cake in the March 2011 issue of Delicious magazine. I don't make nearly enough recipes from the magazines that I subscribe to, so it was nice to feel that this is being rectified. Rhubarb is apparently in season at the moment. I know this should be the case and I keep seeing it at the supermarket but I haven't bothered to look where it is coming from - whether it is imported or home grown. Hopefully homegrown, but possibly not.

Supermarket rhubarb quite often seems a little on the soft side, so I went to my local wholefood co-operative in the hope that they would have some nice rhubarb for me. When I couldn't see any I asked about it, and was informed that it's not quite in season yet. Ah. I really thought forced rhubarb would be here now, but obviously not. I'll have to be patient.

In the meantime however, I made this cake using some of the stash of lovely, juicy tart gooseberries in my freezer. I thought gooseberries would be a pretty good substitute for rhubarb - both are tart and need added sugar to make them palatable. Although having said that, the gooseberries I used were a mixture that consisted predominantly of red dessert gooseberries, which are much sweeter than the green varieties.

I can't find the recipe online, and am not going to reproduce the whole thing here, but the crumble part of the recipe was intruiging:

5og unsalted butter
25g light muscovado sugar
40g caster sugar
100g plain flour, sifted
pinch salt

Melt the butter over a low heat, remove then add the sugars, stirring until they seem to have dissolved, making a toffee like sauce. Stir in the flour to make a stiff biscuit-like dough, spread into a small mixing bowl and leave to go cold.

The fruit is tossed in a mixture of flour and sugar, which sadly didn't prevent it dropping to the bottom of my cake. Hey ho!

The sponge part of the cake is a soured cream cake and has a proportion of ground almonds or hazelnuts, which I substituted for more plain flour.

The recipe instructs you to spread the cake mixture into the tin (20cm square) then top with the fruit. You then have to break up the crumble topping into chunks and scatter this over. It was certainly an interesting technique to try!

The recipe states that it makes 9 squares, but I got 16 reasonable coffee time size pieces out of mine. Nine would probably make an excellent pudding with custard.... mmmm, custard.

Sadly this was not my most popular of cakes - I forget that just because I love gooseberries other people tend to be put off by the thought of them. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps people just don't see them often enough? Do you like gooseberries? Do let me know in the comments! But those who were put off missed out! This was a tasty cake - the main body of the cake was nicely sweet and soft, contrasting with the moist pockets of gooseberry (which had predominantly sunk to the bottom of the cake) and the chewy chunks of crumble.

I can't quite decide whether I liked the crumble part or not. It was certainly a different way of making a crumble for a cake, and perhaps my pieces were too big but most of them sank during the baking of the cake, whereas those in the photo that inspired me had mostly remained on the top of the cake. It's annoying when that happens isn't it! The rhubarb also seems to have stayed afloat better than my gooseberries, but it's hard to know whether this is down to me using different fruit, or my cake turning out differently from the one pictured on the cover of the magazine. I think on the whole I wouldn't do the crumble like this again, I already have a crumble the works well for cakes, so I think I'll stick to that in the future.

Soured cream blueberry and raspberry cake

I'm absolutely sure that I'm not the only person with so many things on the 'to make/bake' list that only the top few are ever going to be made, no matter how hard I try to make my way through it. This cake is one that I've glanced at on many an occasion, but always glossed over. The reason is that in the picture, pretty much all of the fruit has sunk to the bottom. Generally speaking, this annoys me because the bottom of the cake is soggy and the rest of the cake boring, with no fruit, so it was easy to push this cake to one side and let others creep up the list.

What made me think again then? The Caked Crusader made and blogged about this cake recently, and it made me think again. I was also liberated by the thought that I didn't have to pile the cake with great swathes of soured cream icing, which I didn't much fancy. And since pretty much everything I've made after seeing it on her blog has been delicious I was inspired to make this cake too. That, and the pressing need to use up some of the fruit mountain that accumulated in my freezer last summer and hasn't been eaten yet. This summer is rapidly approaching (yes, really, it is.... well, at least in terms of how quickly items in my freezer get used up) and I need to use last years fruit to..... ahem, make room for this years fruit..... (yep, my mind works in strange ways). Plus I had soured cream that also had no purpose in my fridge, just begging to be used.

Lets get back to the cake now shall we? The original recipe can be found here, on the BBC Good Food website, but is also in a number of their recipe books I imagine, it's certainly in my 101 Cakes and Bakes book.

I decided to give my cake a crunchy sugar crust, achieved by a liberal hand with the caster sugar just before the cake went into the oven. I used a mixture of blueberries and raspberries, but decided to break the raspberries up a bit as they were quite big ones. This worked well, and the lovely pale pink streaks you can see dotted through the cake are probably raspberry. The original recipe states a 22cm cake tin, which is what I used. The CC used a 20cm tin, so if you want a deeper cake go for that. My cake cooked in the original specified time though, and if it had been deeper I would have had to cook it for a little longer.

I think I like blueberries - I certainly like them when they're flavoursome and blueberry-ish but I think I must have had quite a few bad examples of this fruit where there is just colour and little taste. I do think that cooking the berries helps the flavour and this is probably the case in this cake too. The juicy, moist blueberries were a lovely contrast to the soft, moist, rich crumb of the cake and the crunchy sugar topping added another texture. The sour cream definitely gave this cake an edge and I'll have to try baking with it more often.

Extremely well received, this cake gained compliments from lots of people and I was asked for the recipe too (and I think said person may even make this cake, as they seemed particularly impressed by it). I'd definitely make this cake again, I'm just sorry it's taken me so long to get round to trying it in the first place.

Mmm, crunchy sugar crust...

Sour cream bread two ways

Something slightly less sweet for those days after Christmas when the last thing you want to think about is chocolate and rich desserts. Although I don't quite understand why I don't fancy rich desserts because I didn't particularly over-indulge over the festive period. I think it must be down to this nasty cold that is refusing to budge and is affecting my sense of taste too.... Anyway, this is one from the archives (there's a lot in there!) that I made shortly after Dan published the recipe. The choice of this bread was partly inspired by a tub of soured cream sitting unloved in the fridge, but also by the rave reviews of this bread on Dan's forums here.

I wanted to use my whole tub of sour cream, but for reasons of space in the freezer (i.e. I couldn't make this bread, plus another and fit them both in!), the bread had to make something suitable for lunchtime sandwiches, and for breakfast, when I like a slice of bread with added dried fruit for preference. I decided to make the whole recipe but split the dough in two and knead about 90g of dried sweetened cranberries into one portion of the dough. When it came to shaping I shaped each dough separately and left them to rise on the same baking sheet. You can see from the pictures that they joined together during baking - not really a problem though! Otherwise I pretty much followed the recipe as given apart from not needing to bake for as long as specified as my dough was in two smaller quantities.

Taste/texture? You can see that the texture was fabulous - very fine grained and moist. In fact, this bread kept very well in the freezer - suffering little from freezer burn. I wonder if this was to do with the fat content. The bread I usually make has very little added fat and is sometimes prone to freezer burn if I don't get through it fairly quickly. The loaf smelled lovely while it was baking and cooling - warm and creamy but I didn't find the loaf particularly creamy to eat.

It has to be said that this is not my favourite Dan Lepard bread recipe. I don't really know why - as you can see from his forums most people were raving about this bread, but although it was nice enough I didn't think it was anything special. I'm definitely in the minority here! I think that at the time I made it I was craving wholemeal bread more than pure white and this has perhaps tainted my memories of it. The part I liked least was the crust - again for no particular reason, but perhaps I overbaked it slightly or something like that. The recipe probably deserves another chance, when I'm in a white bread 'mood'. I will admit that the half with cranberries in was enjoyed greatly for breakfast and would have been delicious toasted, if work ran to providing a toaster!

I think if I make this bread again, which is a possibility if I have sour cream left over from something else, I'll bake in a tin rather than freeform, because I think this might help keep the crust from browning as it did. The crust was definitely my least favourite part of the bread and I can't really put my finger on why.

Because I baked two loaves and didn't space them apart sufficiently, I got a nice soft joining bit - yum!

Three chocolate squares?

The inspiration for these is another recipe from my recent purchase 'Easy baking' by Linda Collister. In the book they're called three chocolate squares - cocoa powder, dark and white chocolate, but I decided to ditch the white chocolate topping and just have the cake. I also didn't have the specified soured cream but did have creme fraiche lurking in the fridge. An adapted version was born! Ignore the uninspired title of the post, I just couldn't think of a good way to describe them!

Moist chocolate cake
Ingredients
60g dark chocolate, melted
120g soft butter
170g light muscovado sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (the good stuff!)
1 large egg
220g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
25g cocoa powder
150ml creme fraiche

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line an 8"/20cm deep square cake tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

- Add the chocolate and mix to combine.

- Add the egg, flour, vanilla, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cocoa powder and creme fraiche and mix well, until all is combined and no traces of flour remain.

- Spoon into the tin and level.

- Bake for 40-50 minutes until just firm. (The original recipe specified 25-30 minutes, but at this point my cake was still extremely wobbly and nowhere near done.)

- Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin before turning out.

- Cut into 16 squares.

Wait for admiring comments!

The flavour of this cake is really good. I wasn't going to blog about it due to the lack of attractive photos (the photo at the top makes it look far more dense and brownie like than it actually was, an artifact of poor lighting) but it really does deserve a mention. I took a couple of chocolate cakes into work in close succession and the opinion was that this one was better. I'm not sure about better, but I can understand the comment. This cake is moist with quite a rich, deep sweet flavour given by the muscovado sugar. The other cake was made with white sugar, which has a much lighter sweeter flavour. I'm sure the creme fraiche also made a contribution to the moistness of the cake, even though I had to cook it for much longer than specified.

Blackcurrant and apple creme fraiche cupcakes - an apology and a thank you!

Naked!

The apology and the thank you are, oddly enough, to the same person. No surprises that it's Dan Lepard, who originally published this recipe in the Sainsburys Magazine in the February edition this year. I've already blogged about it here, but really didn't do justice to this lovely cake. So with a tub of creme fraiche (it was a full fat, French DOC Isigny Ste Mere type, I'm not sure how other types would work) in the fridge about to expire I decided to substitute this for the specified clotted cream. I also chopped up the apple more finely, and because I found the mixture quite stiff, added a fair amount of milk to slacken it (a good few tbsp). I made the cakes in muffin rather than bun tins, which meant that I could add a blob of jam, blackcurrant this time, (which I left alone, not adding any water as last time) and it stayed put with more cake mixture on the top. I used the new season Discovery apples, but only used two rather than three and this time just added extra flour rather than semolina in place of the specified ground almonds. So the apology is for playing fast and loose with Dan's original recipe, but on the other hand it's not as if I'm complaining that the recipe didn't work, after not following it and making my own adaptations!

I had some fantastic feedback about these buns - one person said they were 'messy to eat, but absolutely amazing' and a couple of people said they were the best thing I've brought into work yet. I was really pleased that the jam stayed put in a blob, and the soft gooey cake around the jam blob was really delicious. The cake has a close moist texture and the apple had sort of almost dried out during the baking, becoming slightly chewy in the final cake, which was a great contrast to the soft cake and gooey jam and icing. The icing doesn't set at all, remaining sticky without any kind of crust or hardening, which is great, but really, really messy to eat! I tried to get a photo of the inside of the cakes but it was too dark when I was eating them to be successful.



I'm glad I tried the creme fraiche as a substitute for clotted cream though, because it's more readily available for me, and more affordable too, and that'll encourage me to make them again, which is good because they were really, really good, and I definitely want to make these again. I'm wondering if other combinations of fruit and jam would work - chopped pear and cranberry jam or jelly perhaps for autumn? Or apricots and raspberry jam in the summer? So many possible combinations!

A party, a mess, some chocolates and a Chocolate Pear Crumble Tart

Well, it's really all about the tart... But let's talk about the party, the mess and the chocolates first. I went to my Gran and Grandfather's house for my Gran's birthday party and even though there is practically zero chance of her finding this (they aren't on the internet!) I'm not going to be the one to divulge her age (and to be honest I'm not 100% certain what that age is). It was a lovely chance to meet up with family and catch up on the gossip, although in reality this means listening to my family's (often rather forthright!) opinions on various subjects. It's good fun though, and to celebrate we had a lovely meal together.

But you can't visit the birthday girl and not take presents, so along with some wine and flowers I thought it would be nice to take chocolates. My Gran likes dark chocolate and inspired by Celia's post here about making chocolates I thought it would be nice to make an effort rather than just buying a box. I have to confess that I didn't temper my chocolate though (it seems an intimidating thing to do) as I was short of time so my chocolate was slightly dull when it set, but I don't think that it really matters too much. All I did was melt some dark chocolate carefully in the microwave and then spoon little puddles of it onto baking parchment. I added a variety of dried fruit and nuts to each little puddle, allowed it to set then drizzled with a little white chocolate to decorate. I was really pleased with how they turned out and they were easy and fun to do - I can see me doing this again, but more importantly, my Gran was really pleased with them too!

The mess was Eton mess - chopped strawberries, whipped double cream and broken meringue. Super easy and quick to make and I cheated with bought meringue because I have meringue fear and cannot make them..... I think I went a bit light on the strawberries though, but everyone else loved it, even adding extra cream to theirs!

And finally, the chocolate pear crumble tart. I've wanted to make this for ages (well, since it was published here, last September) and I can't remember what reminded me about its existence in the dark recesses of my mind, but when I volunteered to make desserts for the party, this just popped into my head! I followed the recipe fairly well but forgot to chill the pastry (or, more honestly, ran out of time to chill the pastry....) which may well, in combination with my poor pastry making skills, account for the huge shrinkage of my crust. I'm glad I used baking beans to weigh it down though, otherwise I don't think there would have been any space to put the pears in. I must conquer pastry.... Anyway, the pears smelt delicious while they were cooking, and I was seriously tempted to just eat them all on their own, yum, pears in buttery alcoholic caramel sauce..... and even though I probably only used about 600g pears, it was enough to cover the base of my 20cm cake tin. I used the cake tin as my tart tins are all shallow and I didn't want to lose the crumble mixture when I added it on top. I chose a smaller tin after reading Suelle's comments about the tart when she made it, here, and I was pleased because there was quite a lot of shrinkage. I also added a few tbsps water to the crumble mix to make it less crumbly.

Overall, I was pleased with how the tart turned out. The pastry bottom wasn't crisp (but I'm sure that's down to my lack of pastry prowess combined with pear juices) but the combination of pear and chocolate was good. Glad that I made it, very pleased that my Grandfather went back for seconds, but probably not one to repeat!

Apple, blackcurrant and clotted cream cupcakes

Presenting to you the reason that I bought the tub of clotted cream in the first place, which led to me having half a tub of clotted cream left to use in this shortcake. So was it worth buying the clotted cream - oh yes! I discovered two good recipes so a definite bonus. This recipe is from the Sainsbury's Magazine (excellent value for money, as I'm sure I've said before) and generally full of interesting things to read, and really good columnists, both foodie and otherwise (and no, I am in no way connected to/employed by/recieving anything from Sainsbury's for saying this, but if they want to offer.....) so if you can get hold of a copy do! The recipe came from a feature on afternoon tea which caught my eye when first flicking through the magazine and then when I looked more closely it turned out that the recipes were by Dan Lepard, which only served to make me keener to try them - I know that his recipes work well. Other than the clotted cream, I had everything to hand. I made a few small changes to the recipe, which I'll outline below.

I made these for a 90th birthday party I went to where the recipients (of varying ages!!!) were of conservative taste. Another party go-er made banana toffee meringue pie, which looked delicious, but which was repeatedly greeted with 'oh, I only like lemon' and a disappointed look before walking off. Needless to say, anything that didn't look conventional or perfect didn't go very well, and I'm very sad to report that these cupcakes suffered this fate. I blame myself. The recipe clearly specifies two bun tins, and I possess only one muffin tin. Hmm. Even though I used two paper liners and squashed the cases into a relatively tight space, it just wasn't happening. Hence the rather erm.... 'rustic' appearance of the cakes. However, as I'm sure you know appearance is not everything, and what these lacked on the looks front, they more than made up for on the taste front. In a way, I feel sorry for the people who didn't try them when they had a chance, they really missed out!

Mmm, square cupcakes - special!!!

Anyway, fewer excuses for appearance, more recipe for cake....

This recipe was first published in the February 2010 issue of Sainsbury's Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission from the editorial team there, and by Dan Lepard, whose website (currently undergoing an exciting makeover) can be found here, along with the forums where you'll be able to find many more excellent recipes, worthy of your time and effort along with invaluable advice from fellow bakers. Go there, go now and you won't regret it. Well, actually, stay long enough to read the recipe here first and tell me what you think, then go!!!

Apple and blackcurrant clotted cream cupcakes
Ingredients
3 dessert apples, peeled and cored
2 tsp mixed spice (I omitted this)
50g unsalted butter, softened
113g tub Taste the difference clotted cream (or half of a 227g tub, which appeared to be the only size they sold in my local store)
150g caster sugar
1/2 tsp almond extract (I omitted due to allergies)
2 large eggs
75g ground almonds (I substituted with semolina due to allergies)
225g plain flour
2tsp baking powder
100g high quality blackcurrant conserve (Taste the difference is specified, I used Bonne Maman)
For the icing
150g icing sugar, sifted
75g blackcurrant conserve, as above

You will also need 2 cupcake trays lined with 20 cupcake cases (you really do need these.....and I made around 25 cupcakes)

1. Preheat the oven to 190C/Gas 5. Chop the apples into rough small dice (I was doing this by hand and mine were probably about 1cm square, which I think with hindsight is too big. They need to be really quite small). Toss with the mixed spice until covered.
2. In a bowl, beat together the butter, clotted cream, sugar and almond extract (if using!) until smooth, then fold in the ground almonds (or semolina). Sift the flour and baking powder into the bowl and fold this through, too. Add the apples and fold very gently until just combined. I found the mixture very stiff and difficult to fold the apples into. Gentle didn't come into it!
3. Half fill the cupcake cases with the mixture. Dilute the conserve with 25ml of boiling water, beat well, then spoon a little into each cupcake. Top each one with a teaspoonful of cake mixture. I have to confess that due to the combined problems of stiff batter with large lumps of apple in it, this was really difficult - I ended up with some cases full of essentially apple and little batter, others all batter, little apple. I also found that the let down jam ran out and everywhere, next time I won't let it down. It was difficult to properly cover the jam because it had run out and because of the lumpy sticky batter, so eventually I gave up, and marbled the rest of the jam through the remaining batter, which was much easier. I will try again the proper way I think.
4. Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden; leave for 5 minutes then loosen each cake with a knife and move to a wire rack to cool.
5. For the icing, beat the icing sugar with the conserve and a little water until creamy. Spoon on to the cupckes and leave to set.

The accompanying photo in the magazine looks much better than my efforts, although my top photo is ok. Next time I would chop the apple smaller, and perhaps let the batter down with a little milk to make it easier to work with. I also wouldn't dilute the jam. But I would make them again, the flavours were lovely and the blackcurrant and apple together were really nice. It was also a good way to use up some dessert apples I had lurking, and it's always nice to use things up!

Like I said, I had a few escapees. I like to think of this cupcake as the elephant man of the batch. Still delicious though and all were eaten with relish by colleagues who didn't have a choice of other items and I think know that most things I bake are edible if not really quite yummy!!!

Clotted cream shortcake

I found myself with half a tub of clotted cream that I was very loathe to waste and much as it would have been rather delicious eaten all on its own or with a few berries, I feared that I might not be able to moderate my consumption! There's something truly delicious about clotted cream, and breaking through the crust is such a pleasant sensation. Mmmmm, buttery creaminess! If you want to know more about clotted cream, visit the Rodda website, and you can find out more about the history of the product. I decided to bake this rather delicious shortcake, which I could then freeze and enjoy at my leisure. Spreading the enjoyment of the clotted cream even further if you will!

The recipe I decided to use was this one from Dan Lepard. Because I only had half the amount of clotted cream I halved the recipe (naturally!) and I also used self raising flour, omitting the baking powder specified in the recipe (sorry Dan, that's what I had to hand!). I forgot to brush with milk and scatter sugar over before baking, but I'd do that next time because a bit of crunchy sugar topping wouldn't go amiss here. Mine took a little longer to bake than specified, but perhaps my oven wasn't quite hot enough. I made one round with my half batch, not two small ones, and instead of layering the two pieces as specified in the recipe, I split mine and served it with jam. You could add whipped double cream for extra enjoyment, but my fridge is currently occupied by low fat plain yogurt :-( which wouldn't have quite the same effect!!! The jam you see is blackcurrant, which I love, but in this situation I actually preferred strawberry.

The shortcake was rich and moist and delicious and seems to keep better than the scones I usually make. I started to wonder what the difference between shortcake and scones is, generally speaking (i.e. not compared to this recipe using clotted cream) and to my untrained eye there doesn't seem to be much. Shortcake recipes seem to use a higher proportion of fat to flour and sugar, and are often baked as a large (6-7"/15-18cm) round, rather than being individual as scones are but I think that's it. Shortcake to me is a more American treat, whereas scones are more traditionally British. Feel free to correct me though!