Saffron and Lemon Syrup Cake

Sometimes I feel I should rename this blog ‘An ode to lemons’. The last three cakes I’ve done on my blog have been variations of lemon cake. Mini Rhubarb Lemon Buttermilk Bundts, Blueberry and Lemon Drizzle Bundt, and now this Saffron and Lemon Syrup cake. Hopefully you won’t mind though, because this summery, sunshiney cake was too good not to share.This cake was a winner for me because it was the first time I have enjoyed a semolina cake. Normally, I find cakes with semolina or polenta in have a strange gritty or claggy texture, but this one had just the right amount of substance whilst remaining lovely and soft. The sliced lemons on top retain a hint of bitterness which contrasts nicely with the sweet cake perfectly – it definitely wasn’t hanging around in the cake tin for long! I seem to be having a real thing for upside down cakes at the moment, constantly adding them to my To Bake lists so you can definitely expect some more soon – I love how they look impressive with so little effort. You can find the recipe from Honey & Co. here – the only change I made was to make a quick lemon syrup to soak the cake in as I wasn’t actually such a fan of the leftover saffron version. Enjoy!

Blueberry & Lemon Bundt Cake

I feel like as it is mid-July I should be blogging about ice cream, barbecues and gluts of summer fruit. But it appears the English weather is yet to get the ‘summer sunshine and warmth’ memo so I made a cake instead. My first bundt cake!I’ve wanted to make a bundt cake for so long so when I finally got my hands on a tin last week I knew it wouldn’t be long until one graced my table. I’m now desperate to make another one at the same time as another batch of these and have a bundt cake party…but that’s a whole other day. I used this lemon drizzle cake recipe from olive magazine and just added a few handfuls of blueberries to the mixture and used some more for decoration. Berries tend to sink to the bottom in cakes, but the beauty of the bundt is that you turn it upside down to serve so it looks like all the fruit stayed perfectly at the top. The heavy pan means it did darken slightly alarmingly on the outside, but it actually cooked really well and the ground almonds and berries keep the cake moist for days… if it lasts that long! Enjoy!

 

Mini Rhubarb Lemon Buttermilk Bundt Cakes

I have wanted a bundt tin for so long so I was very excited when I found a yellow silicone mini bundt tin in Lidl for just £2! I’m normally quite good at resisting tins and kitchenware that I know aren’t exactly vital to my collection, but this was too much of a bargain to resist. And I’m happy I didn’t because it gave me the excuse to make these tasty little rhubarb cakes. They turned out so cute that I want to make all my muffins and cupcakes in this tray in the future! I slightly overfilled the tin, hence the pirouetting look to my cakes, but no one was complaining about having a bigger portion. Rhubarb and orange is a classic combination but lemon and rhubarb work really well together too, giving a fresh and zesty result. I didn’t want to hide the pretty bundt shapes, but if you were just using a muffin tin I think a lemon glace icing would be perfect on these to add a little extra sweetness. Because I adapted this from a muffin recipe, they are not super sweet on their own and technically count as breakfast food. What is not to like? You can find the recipe below – enjoy!Mini Rhubarb Lemon Buttermilk Bundts adapted from this recipe

Ingredients: 175g caster sugar
200g rhubarb, halved lengthways then diced into 1cm pieces
1 lemon, zested
2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 egg
125ml buttermilk, or 125ml milk and 1tsp of lemon juice left to stand for 5mins 
200g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method: 1. Heat oven to 180’C. Spray a mini bundt tin with cake release spray, or line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper cases.
2. Stir the sugar, lemon zest and rhubarb together and set aside.
3. Beat the oil, egg and buttermilk together. Pour onto the sugary rhubarb and stir until combined.
4. Now, add the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda and stir until just evenly incorporated.
5. Quickly spoon into the cases, filling ¾ full. Bake for 15-18 mins until golden and springy to the touch. Cool on a wire rack and dust with icing sugar.

Whole Lemon Bars

Something happened to me last week whilst cooking that, in 5 years of blogging, has never happened to me before. We had lots of fresh gooseberries to use up and I love taking advantage of their short season in all the different recipes I gather during the rest of the year. I found a Nigel Slater gooseberry crumble cake recipe that sounded like it would fit the bill perfectly – a simple cut and come again cake that could also be easily transported. I made it, photographed it, took it to my Granny’s and sure enough it went down really well, like most Nigel Slater recipes do. When I was eating it, and then particularly when I was writing up the blog that evening, I started to feel that there was something really familiar about this cake. I checked my archive and sure enough, in July 2011 I had already made and posted it. Today’s post is my 205th, so in all honesty I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before! If you want to read about the cake, you can read my original post here, otherwise today I present all new Whole Lemon Bars!

I really enjoyed making this cake with a whole orange a few months ago, so when I saw these bars I was intrigued how the same technique would work with a much sourer fruit. I ended up making the lemon mixture in my mini food processor as my normal size one had broken, and luckily it just about all fit in, making the whole process really easy. Lemon bars in record time! The base was also super simple as you just press it into the tin, saving any rolling faff. The results were delicious – obviously the whole lemon in the filling meant they tasted (and looked) really vibrant and citrusy without being too sour. The base was also actually really tasty even just on it’s own, I think the vanilla balanced really well with the sharper topping. You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Lemon Drizzle Traybake

The picture below is only roughly half of this traybake. Sometimes you just need a hefty dose of cake. This lemon drizzle marks the third and final (for now!) podcast in the Lucy’s Recipes series, which you can listen to here. I think lemon drizzle cakes are one of those bakes that are always popular – they’re seen in tearooms and cafes across the country. They’re also easy to adapt to your own likes and needs – I’ve made loaf cakes, mini cakes, covered the whole top with icing, used a crunchy sugar syrup instead of icing, and used oranges or limes instead of lemon. The possibilities are endless! The recipe I used is below, adapted from a Donal Skehan recipe – enjoy!Lemon Drizzle Traybake
225g caster sugar
225g butter
4 eggs
250g self raising flour
1tsp baking powder
3tbsps milk
zest of 3 lemons
150g icing sugar
juice of one lemon
1. Preheat the oven to 160’C. Cream the butter and sugar until really light and fluffy.
2. Gradually add in the eggs, mixing well in between each addition.
3. Grate in the lemon zest, then sift in the baking powder and flour.
4. Add the milk and fold gently until everything is evenly combined.
5. Pour the cake mixture into a lined rectangular baking tin (30x23cm) and cook for 30mins until golden and springy. Place on a wire rack to cool.
6. Combine the icing sugar and lemon juice into a smooth paste. Drizzle off the end of a spoon over the cooled cake in a large zig zag pattern. Enjoy!

Mini Lemon Cheesecakes

There are only four of us in my immediate family. My sister is away and my Mum doesn’t eat that many sweet things – so this leaves just me and my Dad to bake for. Whilst we wouldn’t exactly say no to eating layer cakes and batches of muffins and trays of scones, it’s hardly good for us and more often than not the food is no longer its freshest and best before we’ve had a chance to eat it and this waste is super annoying. It also limits my recipe choices: when I had some leftover cream cheese I knew immediately I wanted to make cheesecake but all the recipes I read were way out of my feasibility – calling for 700g of cream cheese, 400g of biscuits, finished bakes serving 12 etc. It was time to go it on my own!I don’t create my own recipes from scratch very often so I used this as a starting point but halved it to make it even smaller. I prefer chilled cheesecakes to baked – they seem to be creamier yet lighter and so much easier. I’ve also written before about how citrus desserts for me need to be rammed with flavour so I wanted this to be really punchy with lemon. These also gave me the chance to finally use my food rings which I got for birthday nearly a year ago now and had never used, and I was really pleased with how they turned out looking very neat! I wasn’t exactly sure how to use these so I just set the cheesecakes straight onto the little plates and then removed the ring at the end which actually worked well as I didn’t have  to risk moving them! Overall I loved the finished cheesecakes – they were the perfect size for a satisfying, slightly decadent individual treat and tasted divine. Mini Lemon Cheesecakes
Makes 3-4 mini cheesecakes

Ingredients: 50g butter

120g digestives

200g cream cheese

1tbsp creme fraiche

50g icing sugar

1 lemon, zest and juice

Method: 1. Heat the butter in the microwave until fully melted. Place the digestives in small plastic bag or bowl and use the end of a rolling pin to bash the biscuits to crumbs. Tip the biscuits into the melted butter and stir until fully combined then press a few teaspoons of crumbs into the base of each food ring.

2. Combine the cream cheese, crème fraiche, icing sugar and lemon zest and juice all together in a bowl until smooth. Taste and tweak if you like – the exact quantities do not matter too much in this recipe, so feel free to add more sugar for more sweetness or some more lemon for a sharper cheesecake etc.

3. Spoon the cheesecake mixture between the food rings, pressing the mixture down and levelling the top to prevent air bubbles forming. Cover with clingfilm and refrigerate for 3-4 hours until firm.

4. To remove the cheesecake from the ring, I just warmed them slightly with my hands and ran a knife round the edge and then gently pulled the ring up and off. Zest a little more lemon over the top of the cheesecakes if you wish and enjoy! 

Mini Lemon Drizzle Cakes

I think it’s amazing the amount of random kitchen equipment you can get nowadays, Lakeland catalogues in particular are brilliant to introducing you to all sorts of things you never realised you needed – it has 15 different tin openers, a 3-in-1 avocado tool, banana holders and much, much more. It can get pretty dangerous for the bank balance! I’m pretty restrained though, my least used pieces of kitchen equipment are probably the deep fat fryer I’m slightly scared of (for both calorie and fire issues!) or the slightly fiddly doughnut maker, which I should really use more. Another underused piece is a tin from Williams-Sonoma that makes very pretty mini flower-shaped cakes, which I have avoided due to its intricacy and obvious issue of getting the delicate cakes out whole!  When Dr. Oetker offered to send me something to try, I was intrigued to try the Cake Spray. I’d seen it on TV cookery programmes, mainly Lorraine Pascale or American shows, but never tried using it myself. I wasn’t really sure what the benefits of it would be over simple butter or baking paper, but I was intrigued and wanted to to give it a go. I thought the intricacy of all the shapes would be the perfect way to put the spray to the test, as well as get some delicious cakes!
I’m pleased to say, as you can probably tell from the photos, the spray worked perfectly! The cakes slipped out super easily and it was easy to use as well, less faff then I think butter would be for a tin like this with lots of nooks and crannies. I  thought the cakes had quite crispy edges on them, but as I rarely use this tin this could be caused by the weighty and dark metal. I was pleased (and relieved!) with the results and I will continue to use the spray for more fiddly bakes, when I don’t want to use liners for appearance reasons or when I’m out of butter or paper. Now – onto the cake!
I wanted to do a lemon drizzle cake as I thought the bright flavour would suit the cute flower shapes nicely. I found it surprisingly difficult to find a recipe that suited what I wanted with plenty of lemon flavour and a simple lemon syrup instead of crunchy coating or glace icing topping, so I adapted a couple of different sources to make my own! The cakes had a strong lemon zing, the syrup kept them moist and their diminutive size made it very easy to eat several in one go…. Enjoy!

Mini Lemon Drizzle Cakes, adapted from The Big Book of 365 Cakes and Cookies by Hannah Miles

Makes around 40mini cakes (sounds like loads but remember they’re tiny!) or one 20cm/8in large cake

225g softened butter
225g caster sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
225g self raising flour
2tbsps milk
3 lemons, juiced and zested
2tbsps icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F. Spray your mini muffin tins or a 20cm springform cake tin.
2. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs gradually, beating well after each addition. Add the flour, lemon zest and juice of 1 lemon and fold into the mixture.
3. Fill the mini tins 3/4 fill and bake for 10 minutes, until golden and springing back. If doing one large cake, bake for 25-30 minutes. Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack.
4. Heat the icing sugar and remaining lemon juice in a small saucepan until the sugar has dissolved, then boil for 1 minute to create a syrup. Spoon over the cakes whilst still hot, repeating until all the syrup is used up.

Mini Bakewell Tarts

I made these tarts a few weekends ago when I had the day spare and kitchen free. When I initially read the recipe properly, I was worried about the pastry because it contains no sugar. When I ate my first finished tart, that completely made sense. Sweet strawberry jam, fluffy almond sponge, smooth lemon icing and a sticky glace cherry – if the pastry had been sweet as well these could easily go into overload and become sickly. As it is, I was more than happy with them. I saw these on Jo’s lovely What do you make of my cake? blog, and was severely tempted straight away. I can’t believe I managed to wait so long before making them myself! They look so dainty and cute and very much reminded me of a bake suitable for Red Nose Day or Comic Relief with their bright red cherry. I love bakewell tarts, having made a whole one before, and also tried the Mr Kipling ones but I knew these would be so much better. As I’ve shown previously, shop bought baked goods often contain all sorts of crazy ingredients and the Mr Kipling Mini Bakewell Tarts (which look pretty much identical to mine) are no different, with over 30 ingredients…
 
Really, these Mini Bakewell Tarts are not that hard to make and you can be safe in the knowledge that all ingredients are pronounceable. Also, seeing as you’ve gone to the trouble of making them yourself you definitely deserve more than one :) You can find Jo’s original post with the recipe here – definitely give them a try. Even though they aren’t tiny and are quite sweet, I still found these quite addictive – enjoy!

After 10 Chocolates

Doesn’t Christmas seem a whole world away now that spring is evidently on its way? Shortly before Christmas, Jamie Oliver had a festive special on television and one of his ideas, After 10 Chocolates, really stuck out to me. So often with cookery books or shows the same recipes keep appearing over and over again. Chocolate cookies, treacle tart, Victoria sponge, lemon cupcakes – there are endless recipes in nearly every recipe book you buy. The After 10 Chocolates were really refreshing because it was an idea I hadn’t seen before and hopefully its new to you to!

Flavoured sugar soaking before being arranged in stripes The idea is you roll out a long piece of parchment paper – over a metre. Then you get five or six (although you could do as many flavours as you wanted) bowls and add a small amount of demerara sugar to each. Then you flavour each sugar bowl differently with a few drops of extract – I used almond extract, orange blossom water, lemon extract, rose essence and vanilla extract. These form pastes, and you spread these in separate vertical strips down sections of the paper. You can add non sugar flavourings as well – I did a strip of coffee and a strip of salt. It helps to label the different strips before the best part: going crazy drizzling a whole lot of melted dark chocolate all over the sugars. Write your name, write a secret, draw a picture with the chocolate – it all merges together into one long, lacy piece of chocolate with all the different flavours hidden inside…You can either go Russian Roulette with your chocolate – break it all into shards and jumble them up so nobody knows what flavour they’ll get, or keep all your flavours separate. It is so much fun to make – especially when you’re mixing up the sugars and your kitchen suddenly feels like a science laboratory. Favourite flavours in my family were the rose (although be careful not to add too much as it can become overpowering and taste like strong Turkish delight) and the surprise hit – coffee granules. I think this would be a fun, different talking point at a dinner party instead of normal shop bought mints especially as its so easy to do. You can find Jamie’s proper recipe here, enjoy!

Love Bakery Book Review

I was recently lucky enough to be sent another book by Ivy Press – this one was Love Bakery by Samantha Blears. Love Bakery is an actual bakery on the Kings Road, London so the book gives recipes for a few of their favourite top sellers and lots of other inventive ideas. It’s a beautifully laid out book – full page photos for each recipe, lots of colour, detail and a little background writing accompanying each recipe.  I made the ‘It’s Not Terry’s But My Chocolate’ cupcakes and the lemon cupcakes and both recipes worked well. The chocolate orange ones were a huge hit and I’d definitely make them again – they were rich, dark and a great indulgence. I halved the lemon recipe as I was interested to try it because it’s a classic but wasn’t convinced my small family needed 12 cupcakes! Again the recipe worked well (although I only got five cupcakes) and the cakes were tender and full of lemony flavour – although I always get paranoid with lemon things that they’re going to lack the necessary zing so I added some extra zest and juice. I really liked the variety of ideas in the book – the Cuptails chapter of alcoholic cupcakes is original and there are recipes for a large donut cake and whoopie pies. I also liked the Cakes for Breakfast chapter which included recipes such as Mocha Cupcakes and Greek Yoghurt & Honey Cupcakes. The recipes are really detailed and easy to follow and when I baked the cakes the timings were spot on. There is lots of detail about decorating ideas and inspiration which doesn’t interest me so much but know might please other people. My issues with this book are probably quite minor but I still noticed them each time I read this book. Like I said in my last post, I have an issue with ingredients in the title of a dish not actually being in it. For example, the Oreo cake in the book is just a chocolate cake with Oreo icing and a few other cakes were vanilla with a jam filling or flavoured icing and I found that disappointing. Overall, I don’t this book would be right if you’re a confident baker and really want to experiment or get lots of ideas for new flavoured cupcakes. However, I think this book would make a really nice present (less than two months until Christmas now!) especially if you know someone who often visits the bakery, because its very pretty and has some original ideas.

Passion Fruit Curd Tart

Never let it be said that baking is a stress-free hobby. Passion fruit curd making is distinctly stressful. For nearly five minutes you stand whisking a bright orange watery liquid on an almost negligible heat, so you turn it up just a smidge, then all of a sudden the colour changes to sunny yellow, the curd thickens rapidly and you’re terrified your curd is curdled and your sore hand from 30+ minutes of squeezing and straining passion fruits will all have been in vain. Pheeew. Thankfully today I got the curd just at the right time. And oh, the results were good. I love passion fruits. As soon as you cut one in half their super sweet, fresh, summery aroma is released. The orange pulp is sweet yet sharp and the black seeds are a shot of crunch. Even the inedible skin is beautiful with its deep purpley/pink colour. They are the perfect fruit for welcoming in the summer sunshine and their name is well deserved. I wanted to make a passion fruit curd tart after sampling the individual ones with meringue from top London bakery Ottolenghi. Despite owning the Ottolenghi book the recipe was not to be found – its kept top secret because the tarts are so popular! After a little searching around, I found a Waitrose recipe that I felt would work. My tart doesn’t have meringue – to save both time and calories – and I made one large one to use a new tart pan. Also, the curd is not cooked again once being added to the tart so it stays delightfully creamy and soft.  As I’ve mentioned – I did not enjoy juicing and straining 12 passion fruit. Mine were not hugely ripe so this may have been a factor but I found I spent a long time pushing every last drop of juice away from the pips and through the sieve, so as not to waste any and make as much juice as possible. If you are less concerned about waste you could use more passion fruit or perhaps riper ones would yield more juice easily. Overall, I very much enjoyed the end result of this tart. The lemon pastry adds an extra dimension of summery fruitiness and the passion fruit curd was smooth, buttery and full of that distinctive passion fruit zing. The best part? This tart needs no accompaniments. Armed with a (generous)slice, a fork and a chair in the sunshine I was extremely happy. Enjoy :)