Lemon and Turkish Delight Disaster Cake

I've had rose flavours on the brain recently. That's what happens when I dig in cupboards and unearth different bottles - they get left out on the side and every time I see them I wonder how else I can use them. Such was the way with the rosewater bottle. However, it didn't actually make it into this cake, rather provided the inspiration. The other factors were a surfeit of eggs that I needed to use, plus a box of (whisper it, Christmas) Turkish delight that I stumbled across when doing a little light tidying. Well, it wasn't even tidying really, I was just moving things around. Tidying implies that the place looks, well, tidier after you've finished. Mine doesn't - things have just moved round a bit. Anyway, back to the Turkish delight. The box I found was rose and lemon flavoured (they usually are round here...) and having made rose flavoured things recently, I opted to enhance the lemon flavours this time round. Plus I had lemons in the fridge already!


This was a midweek bake, so I chose my bundt tin because I always think that bundt tins give cakes that look good whether you decorate them beautifully or not, and I knew I wouldn't have much time to decorate my cake. I think this was a mistake given the advantage of 20/20 hindsight....


I decided to chop my Turkish delight into little pieces (each of the original pieces was snipped into 8 and dusted with more icing sugar to prevent it all clumping together in the cake) and mix it through the cake batter. I was slightly concerned (rightly so...) that the heavy Turkish delight pieces would sink a little, so spread some of the batter into the greased tin before mixing the Turkish delight through the rest of the batter and spreading that on. Hmm, well that idea failed spectacularly. All of the TD sank like a bomb to the bottom of the tin and stuck there. Like superglue, or perhaps those annoying kind of labels that just won't come off your book/plate/shoe or something else very sticky. Once cooked and cooled the cake eventually (with much levering and prising out) came out of the tin with a crater like top, devoid of any TD. However, I scraped all the Turkish delight off the tin and pressed it back on though - I will be triumphant!

I won't give the exact method for this because I can't imagine that I want to do this again, but the cake was good so I'm going to note down the amounts I used, for future reference.


Lemon Turkish Disaster Cake
Ingredients
175g softened butter
200g caster sugar
200g self raising flour
3 large eggs
grated zest 1 unwaxed/organic lemon
175g Turkish delight, chopped small


Method
- Preheat oven to gas 4/180C. Grease your bundt tin.
- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs, flour and lemon zest and beat again until well combined.
- Fold in the TD and spoon into the baking tin. Bake for 35-40 minutes until risen and golden.
- Remove and allow to cool until you can handle the tin.
- Remove from tin. This is where it all goes wrong, and where this method will stop.....


You can see the damage in the photo above - the cake really had well and truly stuck in some places and it was heartrending to see it ripped when it finally dropped out of the tin. However, I was sure it would taste good and not wanting to waste an entire cake I took it into work anyway. Was the taste a disaster? Nope! Actually quite a successful cake. The cake was moist, light and lemony and the turkish delight on the top provided a nice contrasting chewy texture. I think that had I not admitted to people that this had almost been a complete disaster they wouldn't have known or said anything! Needless to say, it was all eaten.

Turkish delight condensed milk cupcakes

When I was little, we had a phrase in our household - the 'eyes and tummies problem'. Yep, it was how my mum referred to my brother and I being slightly greedy and taking more from the serving dish than we could manage and subsequently complaining of being full and not able to finish our dinner. These cupcakes are the result of an adult variation of this problem. I shall explain... at Christmas time I look at all the delicious boxes of chocolates and sweet treats and I buy them. I do not logically consider how long it will take one person to finish up the excess purchases. Although many of the boxes I buy end up as presents, I often find that I've overbought to the extent of not having anyone left to give them too, and there is always the element of wanting to enjoy them myself. Yes, I am hanging my head in shame at my greed...

Why am I confessing this? Well, these rather good cupcakes are the result of part of the remaining box of turkish delight. I also at some point bought a squeezy bottle of condensed milk, no doubt thinking that it would be really useful to be able to use a smaller amount than comes in a tin. I'm sure it would be if I had multiple uses for condensed milk. I don't! Although feel free to suggest some more. So I ended up making two batches of these cupcakes. The first batch were vanilla and the second turkish delight.

You can see the vanilla cupcakes above. The vanilla buttercream is piped in a slightly odd way because I was using a new tip that I had hoped would let me do something else, but turned out to be completely wrong. By that stage I had a bag of buttercream and needed to get it out - i.e. through the nozzle!

There are a couple of differences between the vanilla and turkish delight cupcakes. The vanilla ones were the first I made and I stuck to a recipe I found here pretty closely. The second batch I didn't have enough condensed milk left, so decided to improvise by substituting milk and caster sugar. It worked well, unsurprisingly since condensed milk is effectively milk and sugar as far as I understand!

Vanilla cupcakes
Ingredients
125g self raising flour
250g condensed milk
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
85g butter, softened


(For the turkish delight cupcakes I only had 160g condensed milk left, so added that plus 50g caster sugar and 50ml milk. I also added 1tsp rosewater and 125g chopped turkish delight and left out the vanilla extract)


Method
- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Line a muffin tin with paper cases (I recently found some pretty ones with flowers on them - small things please me!). The vanilla cakes made 9, the turkish delight 10.
- Place all ingredients (except chopped turkish delight if making this flavour) into a large bowl. Beat with an electric hand mixer for 3-4 minutes until well combined. Now fold through the turkish delight if you're using it, or I guess an equal weight of any other flavour you fancy - chocolate chips, dried fruit and so on.
- Spoon into the waiting paper cases and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown. If you like your cakes paler, bake for less time (oh, the joy of common sense!)
- When baked, remove to a wire rack to cool.

For the vanilla cupcakes I made a simple vanilla buttercream by beating 50g softened butter and probably about 125g icing sugar together with 1tsp vanilla extract until very light, creamy and fluffy. Decorate the cupcakes as you want, which is probably not by copying what I did.....

For the turkish delight cupcakes I made a simple glace water icing using icing sugar (probably about 125g, but this depends how thick you want the icing to be and how much icing sugar you've got left....) and 1tsp rosewater. Add more water until desired consistency is reached, then top with a little piece of turkish delight. When I was chopping the turkish delight up, I did so with a little pile of icing sugar at my side to dip the sticky cut sides of the turkish delight in as I went, and to dip my knife in when it got too sticky. Worked well.

I was really pleased with the way these turned out - soft and sweet and the mixture had enough strengh to hold the pieces of turkish delight in suspension so they didn't all end up on the bottom of the cupcakes (although a fair few did). Vanilla is always popular and turkish delight went down well too. I have to admit that the flavour of the rosewater didn't really seem to come through. I was quite cautious adding it to both the cupcake mixture and the icing, next time I'll add more.