Category Archives: Cakes and all other things baked

It’s meant to be summer, it’s miserable and it’s cold, I mean properly chilly for heaven’s sake! I need comfort and I don’t mean anything dull. I want brownies, not earnest little girls who can tie knots and clean shoes, but big, chunky, chocolate filled cakes. These moist, chewy cakes are great hot or cold.  I love them warm with ice cream, but then that’s just me. 

This easy recipe  makes 16 brownies. You will need:125g/ 4ozs butter plus 1 teaspoon, 175g/6 ozs good quality plain chocolate, 2 tablespoons water, 125g/ 4ozs caster sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla essence, 125g/4 ozs self raising flour, ½  teaspoon salt, 2 large eggs, 60g/2 ozs walnuts, chopped.

Method

• Preheat the oven to Gas mark 3/160°C/140 Fan/325°F
• Grease an 8inch square baking tin (non-stick is best)  with the teaspoon of butter and set aside
• Put the chocolate, water and butter in a saucepan and place over a very low heat, stirring occasionally
• When the chocolate is melted, remove from the heat and stir in the sugar and vanilla essence
• Set aside and allow to cool to room temperature (can take 20 minutes)
• Sift the flour and salt in to a mixing bowl or food processor
• Gradually stir in the cooled chocolate mixture
• Add the eggs and beat well
• Fold in the walnuts and pour the mixture in to the greased tin
• Bake in the over for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a sharp knife plunged in to the middle comes out clean
• When cooled cut in to squares

If you want to cook them in advance and still serve them hot, you can warm them by just placing in the oven on Gas mark 4/180°C/350°F for 5-10 minutes before serving.  Don’t overheat them as you don’t want to lose the moistness that makes them so special.  As I mentioned, ice cream is fab with brownies, and frankly life is too short to make your own with my best friends Ben and Jerry around.

This week I’ve decided to do a feature on a selection of the easiest recipes I know, so here is a virtually non-cooking one to start with . Okay it’s not fashionable, it’s not pretty and it’s not clever, but I still find it irresistable. There is something about the combination of bananas, cream, chocolate and toffee that still makes me abandon all calorie counting and go slightly sugar crazy. There are prettier, fancier and definitely more clever desserts, but especially now those lovely people who make condensed milk have started to sell it already made in to toffee, you don’t even have to do any cooking unless you want to.

So here it is, banoffee pie for beginners. You will need either a ready made crushed biscuit crumb case or a sweetcrust pastry case (If you want to make it yourself, try using crushed ginger biscuits, it works really well with this recipe), 1 Large tin of Nestles ready-made toffee (OR, if you do want to make it yourself a large tin of condensed milk, placed in a  pan of cold water, brought gently to the boil and allowed to simmer for 2 hours, keep topping the water up with boiling water from the kettle. It is VERY important that the can is not pierced and that the water doesn’t boil dry, it is also ESSENTIAL you allow the can to cool down completely before opening it – stick to these rules and you will avoid first-degree burns and a toffee face mask), 500ml/½ pint Double cream, whipped until thick, 3 bananas, 2 tablespoons of Lemon juice, 2 cadbury’s flakes – you can use milk chocolate, white chocolate or both

Method:  Spread the toffee evenly over your pie base. Peel and slice the bananas, and coat all over with the lemon juice, then arrange the bananas on top of the toffee. Spread whipped double cream on top of the bananas, crumble up your chocolate flakes and decorate the top of the pud. Keep in the fridge, but I would use within 24 hours, the bananas can go a bit soggy otherwise.  the other variation on this is to do individual ones, M&S make some brilliant ready-made mini  sweetcrust pastry cases that you can use and they do look a bit fancier, especially if you dust them with some edible gold glitter.

Last Friday, our challenge, which we had chosen to accept, was 400 cocktail-sized cupcakes, 150 american-style cookies, dips for 120 and 20 floral table arrangements. Rolling up our sleeves by 10am, the intrepid Jellie and I examined the main ingredients. Oh dear, I had been well and truly Costco-ed.

 “To be costco-ed” verb: To visit a discount warehouse and lose all sense of size and number of purchases and to  truly believe that buying a catering pack of jalapeno peppers that would keep Mexico in fajitas for a year is not only appropriate, but necessary and reasonable

Having surveyed the ingredients I had bought, who knew the butter mountaing was in Maidenhead? At least, I would never have to purchase basic baking ingredients for the next ten years. We decided on lemon cakes, chocolate chip, maple and pecan and strawberry. Sherri was to come alter for the cookies and  Joyce was head of floral arrangements. You already have the lemon drizzle recipe from a previous blog, so for today, we’ll go with the chocolate chip cupcake. To make either 12 large, 24 medium or 40 cocktail sized, you will need:

•  4ozs/115g unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 4ozs/115g caster sugar
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• 4ozs/115g self raising flour
• 1ozs/25g cocoa powder
• ¼  oz/5g baking powder – just to make them nice and light
• Handful of good quality chocolate chips
• 40 x Sweet sized cake cases/mini muffin cases
• For the icing: 175g/6 ozs unsalted butter
• 350g/12 ozs icing sugar
• 4 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon milk
• To decorate: chocloate chips, white and dark and edible glitter (optional)

Method

• Pre-heat oven to gas Mark 5, 190oC or 170oC for a fan oven
• Beat the butter and sugar until it is white and fluffy – if you’re doing this without the aid of a mixer – who needs a gym?
• Add the eggs one by one
• Sift in the flour, cocoa and baking powder
• Put 1 teaspoon of mixture in to each individual cake case for cocktail size
• Bake for 8-12 minutes until each cake is well risen and springy to touch – don’t overcook or they will not be as moist. Allow to cool, in the meantime make the icing.
•  In a  food processor or with a hand beater, combine the butter, cocoa and icing sugar until it is light and fluffy
• Either using an icing bag or just with a teaspoon, pile the mixture on top of the cooled cakes and decorate.

These are really lovely little cakes and were very popular on Saturday night. Watch out this week for  recipes for strawberry and maple and pecan, cookies and flower antics. One of the best things about cake making is scraping the bowl afterwards. Jellie certainly seemed to enjoy…

Don’t you just hate it when those lovely, firm bananas turn into those blackened, soggy things lurking at the bottom of your fruit bowl?

Although many people argue that the riper they are, the more flavour they have, for some reason I have a pathological hatred of any soft, brown bits on my bananas. So what to do with them, I feel so guilty about putting any good food in the rubbish bin? Hoorah, my conscious has been saved!  I have discovered the joys of banana bread. You will need: 3 or 4 ripe bananas (the riper the better), mashed up, 75g melted butter, 220g sugar, 1 egg, beaten, 1 teaspoon vanilla essence, 1 teaspoon baking soda, inch of salt, 250g of plain  flour, handful of chopped walnuts or pecans.

There is no need for a food processor  for this recipe. Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 4, 180C/160C Fan (175°C). Mix the butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Add the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in along with the nuts. Sieve the flour in last, mix gently. Pour mixture into a buttered 4×8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool before serving.

The best thing about this recipe is that it gets better and better as the bread gets staler.  I like it best a couple of days old and toasted with a little butter on top, much better than when it first comes out of the oven.

You also have the benefit of feeling sanctimonious about using up left over food.