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.

Jaffa Cakes

Funny story to go with these Jaffa cakes. I took them to my friend’s house when she was holding a get together of all our friends at the end of Easter break. I always forget to bring in the stuff I make for my friends and I knew that my family of 3 didn’t really need 18 of these lying around! One of my friends brought their cousin with them, who had never met any of us before. He didn’t realise that it was me who had made the Jaffa cakes, and therefore remarked when the tin was passed round ‘Who on earth has time to make Jaffa cakes? Don’t they know you can buy them?’ Cue much, much embarrassment! Luckily he was very sweet and spent the rest of the evening trying to recover from the gaffe. I’d also like to point out that he ate 4!It did make me think though about the funny things having a food blog can make you bake. Some people were similarly bemused when my friend Emily and I made marshmallows, considering you can buy a big bag for 90p! However as you know I really enjoy making homemade versions of shop-bought favourites – you can see my previous challenges here. I’m not sure how well known Jaffa Cakes are out of the UK, but basically they are little flat cakes with a disc of orange jelly on top, covered in dark chocolate. I was inspired to make these after seeing the recipe here by the guys at Sorted Food –my new favourite way to procrastinate is exploring their site!These were really satisfying and fun to make and I was so pleased when they worked perfectly and looked like the original! After a few baking fails I love it when a plan comes together. I followed the recipe to a T and my only comments would be that I think the amounts for the jelly and chocolate were too generous – 200g of each is stated in the recipe and I only used 100g of jelly and 120g of chocolate. I didn’t really mind about the excess jelly as it comes in packets of 200g so you can see why the recipe just says to make all of it (and it was very soothing when I came down with a really sore throat!) but I think it is good to have a heads up. Happily, I also got 18 instead of 12 final cakes and mine were a decent size! The ratios of the layers in the final jaffa were perfect – the classic thin Jaffa cake layers all combining perfectly. I also really liked the method of using a packet of orange jelly cubes (the finished cakes are still a lot more homemade than normal!) and jazzing up the flavour with the juice of an extra orange, which made it really strong and stand up to the chocolate. Enjoy! :)

Blueberry Friands

These friands proved to me the uniting power that cake can have. One of the main perks of having baking as a hobby is getting to share delicious bakes with friends and family and seeing the look on their faces when they try something new, successful and irresistibly tasty! I took these baby blueberry friands to a serious occasion with lots of small talk but these soon got people talking as we discussed their tiny size, the recipe, method and author and I think everyone enjoyed passing these round whilst sneaking a couple at a time off the platter!The recipe made a lot as you can maybe tell from the pictures, but I also made mine pretty tiny in a mini muffin tin – only a couple of centimetres high – so that they were the perfect canape, so clearly if you made them larger or in traditional oval friand moulds the recipe would make a more normal amount. There is sometimes a stage in baking that can be quite therapeutic – for some bakers this might be piping, kneading dough, rolling pastry or stamping out cookies. Today for me it was the process of filling up the mini muffin tins over and over with a little teaspoon of mixture and a couple of blueberries. The cakes take hardly any time to bake because they are so small and are delicious warm straight out the oven but also last nicely for a good few days. They are light, moist (terrible word but true), with bright bursts of flavour from the blueberries and lemon zest. You can find the recipe below – enjoy! Mini Blueberry Friands, adapted from Jill Dupleix’s Totally Simple Food
Makes about 40 mini muffin size, or around 10 normal sized friands or muffins

Ingredients: 180g butter, melted and cooled 
200g icing sugar
60g plain flour, sifted
120g ground almonds
5 large free-range egg whites
zest of 1 lemon
200g blueberries, fresh or frozen
icing sugar for dusting

1. Heat the oven to 200°C / Gas 6. Grease 2 mini muffin tins, or 10 friand moulds, or one muffin tin.
2. Sift the icing sugar and flour into a bowl and mix in the ground almonds. Lightly beat the egg whites with a fork and fold them into the dry ingredients. Add the cooled, melted butter and lemon zest, and mix until all combined.
3. Place a teaspoon of mixture in each mini muffin tin, add two or three bluberries and cover with another teaspoon of mixture.
4. Bake for 8-10minutes until golden brown and springing back to the touch, checking on the edges as these darken quicker than the top of the friands. Three-quarters fill each mould with the mixture and bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 10 minutes.
4. Leave the tins for 5 minutes, then gently unmould onto a wire tray and leave to cool. Dust the friands with icing sugar and store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

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.

Coffee Break Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for the people in my office on my last day of my internship at the start of August, as I had wanted to make something a little bit more special than muffins for my last bake. I had found these on the always perfect blog, raspberri cupcakes, a few weeks before and bookmarked them on the off chance I would find a situation where they would be suitable. With a few adaptations they became the perfect treat.Originally, I stayed pretty faithful to the recipe on raspberri cupcakes. I made both the condensed milk icing and the cookie dough…and used neither. The condensed milk icing was gorgeous, but insanely sweet. Properly sweet. I don’t normally find things too sweet, but even I could only manage a miniscule spoonful. It was probably as close to eating pure butter as you can get! It still tasted good, but I thought it would be pretty over powerful to pile it on top of a chocolate chip cupcake. Bearing this extreme sweetness in mind, I also chose not to stuff the middle with cookie dough and baked this into cookies another day instead. So in the end I had: coffee cupcakes with dark and milk chocolate chips, coffee buttercream, mini HobNobs and milk bottles. I couldn’t find mini chocolate chip cookies, and the HobNobs seemed appropriate after an embarrassing day at the office when the the rest of the team noticed how I ate a ridiculously large amount in one day… These are fun to personalise too: I swapped in cola bottle sweets on one cake for my boss with the Diet Coke habit, and added an extra shot of coffee to the cake of the boss who drank copious amounts of black coffee throughout the day. They went down a treat at the office – I hope you like them too :)

Mini Marble Cakes

Once I realise what I want to bake, I tend to become quite stubbornly specific about that idea. I have to hunt through the indexes of cookbooks, trying to see if they have the recipe I have in mind. Unsurprisingly, today I didn’t find a specific recipe for mini marble loaf cakes that I wanted. Guess I'll just have to write my own book one day! The inspiration came from a link I’d bookmarked, but on closer inspection that used 3 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks and I didn’t want the faff of using up the egg whites. Many of the marble cakes I saw seemed quite dry or difficult to downsize to my little batch. In the end, I heavily adapted a Mary Berry recipe (how can you go wrong?) and ended up with exactly what I’d wanted.I’ve wanted to make a marble cake for a long time and it seemed the perfect way to use up odds and ends of chocolate. Using mini loaf pans made the marbling process a little bit more fiddly, but it was worth it in the end. The chocolate cake part is made using cocoa powder and dark chocolate chips, which means it isn’t too sweet against the light vanilla cake. The cakes are probably a little bit bigger than a cupcake (although some shop-bought cupcakes can be huge!) but seeing as they don’t have any icing they are not too rich and are the perfect teatime treat! I’d definitely like to experiment further with marble cakes when I have more ingredients in the house – a chocolate orange version, a coffee version, a version with dried fruit…so many ideas!

Mini Marble Cakes, adapted from a Marble Traybake recipe from Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book

Ingredients: 110g butter
110g caster sugar
140g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1tbsp milk
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1tbsp cocoa powder
1tbsp hot water
50g dark chocolate, chopped
50g white chocolate, chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C. Line 6 mini loaf tins with a strip of greaseproof paper.

2. Put the butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, eggs and milk in a food processor and beat until everything is well blended together.

3. Measure out half the cake mixture into another bowl. Add the vanilla essence and white chocolate chunks to the remaining mix in the food processor and stir to incorporate.

4. Mix the cocoa powder and hot water to a paste in a small bowl, then add to the other half of cake mixture along with the dark chocolate chunks.

5. Place a small teaspoonful of vanilla mixture into the bottom of each loaf tin, with a spoonful of chocolate mixture next to it. Layer up the two mixes in the tins, with alternating mixes on top of each other. Briefly marble with a thin cake skewer.

6. Bake for around 15-20minutes, until risen and set in the centre. Leave to cool before running round the edges of each tin with a knife and turning out.

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.

10,000 Cupcakes

No, don’t worry, I haven’t been on a huge baking spree. 10,000 Cupcakes is the name of a brand new baking book by Susanna Tee that I was recently sent by Ivy Press.
The book is a flip book, with the pages split into three separate sections – a cupcake recipe, an icing recipe and an idea for how to decorate the cupcake. These pages are interchangeable so you can mix and match different flavours and eventually choose a page from each different section that you most like. There’s 23 ideas in each section ranging from the classic to a bit different. For the cupcakes it ranges from Lemon to Doughnut cupcakes, for the icing from Vanilla to Pineapple butter flavours. I chose to make the Apple and Almond Cupcakes with Penuche Frosting, decorated with Sprinkles.I chose to halve the recipe which I later half regretted as the results were so delicious we could have easily eaten a full batch very quickly! The recipes were easy to follow and created very moreish results. The cupcake was very soft and tender, almost muffin like with the involvement of the fruit. The Penuche icing was not a flavour I’d heard of before which was why I wanted to try it. I learnt that penuche is a type of fudge, so this icing just involved melting together butter and brown sugar and then beating in icing sugar. It was thick and very sweet and I thought worked nicely with the apple base – the finished products were like toffee apple flavours in cake form! I chose simple sprinkles for decoration but there were lots of ideas in the book, from lavender sprigs to crushed cookies to crystallized rose petals.I think this book would be a great gift because it is fun and light hearted but the recipes are still interesting and actually work. I also think it’s good for inspiration, mixing new flavours or ideas and creating something unique. I think the book would benefit from real pictures of the food as there’s only one at the very start, but the cartoons are still fun. Plus, as the title suggests, there are 10,000 ways to combine all the different ideas so it’ll keep you busy for a while! Ivy Press have kindly agreed to give away another copy of this lovely little book – all you have to do is comment on this post by the 7th October saying you’d like a copy and I'll pick a winner with a random number generator! Good Luck everybody!
Book credits:
10,000 Cupcakes
Susanna Tee
ISBN: 978-1-907332-85-2
Price: £9.99
The Ivy Press
www.ivypress.co.uk
Also, do go and ‘like’ the Ivy Press Facebook page here for information and fun videos on the books they publish.

Disclaimer: Ivy Press sent me this book for free but all opinions and words are my own.

Mini Orange Drizzle Cakes

Its currently that time of year when the weather can’t really make its mind up – should it let the sun shine or should it be gloomy and grey? Should it be getting dark at 4pm or 5pm? It’s also the time of year that inspires the spring clean. In my house the bedrooms are being reorganised, paperwork from all corners of the house is being filed, clothes are being sorted, drawers are being emptied and their contents examined. The last drawer to have the spring clean treatment was the kitchen drawer containing baking bits and bobs. Piping bags, cookie cutters, baking parchment, the heavy rolling pin – everything covered the table. Including a set of tiny loaf tins hidden at the back, bought excitedly but never used. Today that changed! Today was one of those gloomy, rainy days but I ignored it, put on an orange jumper and started baking zingy, fresh orange drizzle cakes. I whipped these up in about half an hour but their scent lingered happily in the kitchen: making it smell fresh, delicious and drawing me constantly back to the baking. Also, because they’re mini they only take 10-15minutes to cook so there’s not too long to wait before you can be enjoying these! The cake edges are crisp and golden, giving way to the soft and moist centre. The crème fraiche in the recipe ensures these stay soft whilst giving them a bit of extra tang which complements the tang of the orange. The orange glace icing on the top adds an extra burst of sweet and rounds everything off simply. I liked these because it’s more interesting than one large cake but makes a refreshing change to cupcakes. I hope you give these a try and that they brighten up a gloomy day in another kitchen. Enjoy :) Mini Orange Drizzle Cakes (makes 8) Ingredients: 100g caster sugar
115g softened butter
2 large eggs
115g self raising flour
2tbsp crème fraiche
2 large oranges – the zest and juice
100g icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F/Gas Mark 4 and line the cake tins.
2. Beat the butter and caster sugar until light, creamy and well combined. Add the eggs one by one, beating after each addition. Add the juice of one orange, and zest of both.
3. Add the flour and crème fraiche and fold the mixture gently until fully combined. Divide the mixture between the cake cases – filling them about 3/4 full.
4. Bake for 10-15 minutes until the cakes spring back and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Let cool in their tins.
5. Mix the icing sugar and remaining orange juice until smooth and fairly thin so that it is easy to drizzle. If there is any orange juice left over, use the cake skewer to poke small holes in the cakes and pour over the juice.
6. Once the cakes are fully cooled, remove from the tins and paper and drizzle over the icing. Enjoy!

Tropical Cupcakes

There is always a lot of citrus baking happening in January and February. There’s not a lot of fresh local fruit and vegetables around at this time of year, and after the excess of Christmas it’s time to turn away from chocolate (unless you’re making this, in which case I am rather envious). Also, when the weather is grey and cold the zing of citrus acts as a great pick-me-up. And when combined with rich buttercream and soft cupcake, citrus baking sounds pretty good to me.Depending on where you live, the flavours might not be tropical at all but pineapple, lime and cherries aren’t grown round London! I’ve only baked with pineapple once before but I loved the results here. The pineapple chunks are sweet and juicy and add fresh bursts of flavour as the cupcake is eaten. Lime is also not an ingredient I have regularly used but it’s sharpness stops the buttercream becoming sickly. This recipe was extremely easy to make – oil takes the place of butter in the cake so there is no creaming done and everything is simply stirred together in one bowl. The cake is also delicious without the buttercream, becoming more like a muffin and far less rich. I wanted these cupcakes to be bright and colourful so I used spotty cases and decorated them with Dr Oetker jelly beans and sprinkles, which made for a cheery kitchen! This vibrancy combined with the lime tang and juicy pineapple made these cupcakes a winner for me. Enjoy!Tropical Cupcakes
Makes 12-15, depending on your cupcake case size
Ingredients: 200g self raising flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
100g caster sugar
50g dried tropical fruit
3 medium eggs
100ml sunflower oil
75ml buttermilk (or 75ml milk and 1/2tsp white wine vinegar)
1 x 227g tin pineapple slices, chopped finely and fully drained
Buttercream: 200g icing sugar
100g butter
1 lime, the zest and juice
1. Preheat the oven to 190’C (170’C fan oven). Line a 12-hole muffin tin with cases, although you may need a few more if your cases are small like mine.
2. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda, caster sugar and dried fruit into a large bowl.
3. Put the eggs, oil and buttermilk into a jug and whisk until all combined.
4. Pour the egg mixture into the flour, and add the pineapple pieces. Stir everything together until combined and divide between the cupcakes cases – you can fill the cases quite high as the cakes do not rise hugely.
5. Bake for 15-20minutes until golden and risen slightly. Leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
6. For the buttercream: Whisk all the ingredients together until smooth and fully mixed. Either pipe or spoon the icing over the cupcakes, and decorate how you wish. :)