Choc orange cake

It's been a while since I've done any baking, so when I got an incredible chocolate/doughnut dessert instead of cake for my birthday and then received this book from Ness, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to make a cake!

Here's what you'll need:

Pretty simple, huh?!

Here's the full list of ingredients:
200g butter, softened
200g + 75g golden/raw caster sugar
4 eggs
Juice and zest of 3 oranges
200g self raising flour
100mL double cream
150g dark chocolate
Edible gold leaf, if you have money and stuff

Start by chopping up your butter. It should be softer than mine was...

Add in the 200g of raw caster sugar (which looks a little like sand) and cream it together:

Beat the eggs and zest two of the oranges:

Add the eggs and the zest into the butter and sugar mixture and mix to combine. It will look lumpy and gross and kind of reminiscent of vomit. DON'T PANIC, EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE:

Add in the flour - mine was gluten free - and fold it in. It will continue to look lumpy and gross. Then add the juice of one orange and fold that through too:

Pour it all into a greased ring pan (the recipe specified a 24cm savarin tin, but all I had was a 20cm ring pan. It worked perfectly) and shove it in the oven at 180 degrees C for 30 minutes (mine, because it was gluten free, was more like 35 minutes):

While the cake is in the oven, make your orange syrup. Put the remaining 75g of raw caster sugar into a small saucepan:

Add the juice of 2 oranges (zest the third one before you juice it!), and stir over low heat until all the sugar has dissolved. Set aside to cool.

When the cake is done (i.e. when a toothpick/kebab skewer comes out clean), take it out of the oven and spoon the orange syrup over the top.

Leave it to stand for five minutes (mine was more like ten, because gluten free tends to be a little slower to absorb things), then turn it onto a cooling rack.

Once it's cool, make the ganache topping. Chop the chocolate into small, even pieces. Heat the double cream over a double boiler, then add the chocolate and stir until smooth:

Leave it to cool until the mixture coats the back of a spoon, then cover the cake. Top with the remaining orange worth of zest or some edible gold leaf if your budget stretches to that:

Leave it to set, then try not to shove your entire face into the cake because it's so pretty.

The verdict? This cake is AMAZING. Orange cake has a tendency to be a little on the dry side in my experience, even if it's got a crapton of butter in it. But the orange syrup gets rid of that completely. It's moist and light, and the raw caster sugar stops it from being overly sweet. But it's also rich thanks to the ganache. You could probably make it without the ganache if you wanted, but the chocolate factor really adds an extra level of amazing to the equation!

Yum.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!

K xx

Funemployment

When one is unemployed, one has to make one's own fun to avoid going completely and utterly stir crazy and spending one's days hitting F5 on a bunch of different websites in the hopes that a job you're perfect for will magically appear.

For this reason, Deidre and I had a somewhat spontaneous Dessert Day yesterday. We consulted our "Dessert Day Planning" Google Docs spreadsheet (yes, we have one. What of it?!), and came up with two different things that we wanted to try:
1. Gluten free chocolate eclairs, and
2. Chocolate orange biscuits.

The first involved many MANY things that terrify us, including (but not limited to) eggs, piping bags, adding raw eggs to hot things, cutting things in half and filling them, and (perhaps most importantly) trying to convert butter measurements from sticks into grams.

As it turned out, making gluten free choux pastry wasn't as scary as anticipated. Although we WERE very glad of the instruction telling us that if it looked like mac and cheese, we should keep mixing because everything would be okay. Because seriously. It looked like mac and cheese.

When it came to the filling, we decided that using the vanilla pudding option listed in the recipe was far too crass easy for the likes of us, and that we were going to make creme patissiere from scratch. A wee spot of Googling gave us this recipe. Degree of difficulty = low? WHERE DO WE SIGN UP?! We decided to double it, on the theory that too much is always better than not enough (a lesson I learnt while trying to colour match buttercream frosting...). And the degree of difficulty was, indeed, low. Except for the part where I managed to spill hot milk all over the kitchen floor. Whoops.

Eventually we were ready for the assembly process. But prior to assembly, I took photos of this eclair because it looks a little like a ghost:

No, seriously:

Ahem. The filling process - with me manning the piping bag full of creme patissiere and Deidre manning the saucepan full of ganache - went surprisingly smoothly, except for when we started to run out of room on the tray and the eclairs started making friends with each other...

End result?

The biscuits were incredibly simple to make, although rather stubborn when it came to forming a dough. I suspect you could make them in a food processor without any issues. We used regular caster sugar, on account of why would I buy a kilo of raw caster sugar when this is the only recipe I've ever seen that calls for it?! They turned out fine.

Poor biscuits. I forgot to take proper photos of them.

The verdict? We both thought the eclairs were a little eggy tasting, although we're both on the "Urgh, eggs, GROSS" train, which may have contributed to it. Now that they've been in the fridge for 24 hours, they seem to have improved and a pretty damned tasty if I do say so myself. As for the biscuits, they were FAR crunchier than I thought they would be. Yesterday, I wasn't a huge fan of them. Today? I dipped one in my hot chocolate and it was pretty much the greatest thing ever.

And then I subjected Deidre to the wonders of Paperback Hero, and there was much "WHAT IS HAPPENING OMG PUPPY HUGH JACKMAN YOU STOP THAT IMMEDIATELY"-ing.

In short, hurrah for funemployment??

Please tell me that you think that eclair looks like a ghost too and that it's not just me???

K xx

101 in 1001 #66

On Saturday, I realised that I hadn't done any baking since New Year's Eve. Okay, so it's only like two weeks - hardly the end of the world. But I felt the need to rectify the situation all the same. And for some reason, I got it into my head that I wanted to make a lemon and poppy seed cake, and put cream cheese frosting on the top.

For once, all my cookbooks failed me. The only lemon and poppy seed cake recipes they contained were for syrup cakes. And making a syrup cake without the syrup seemed risky. So I turned to the internet. The recipe I ended up using (which I've since lost the link for. I AM SO SMART, S-M-R-T!) said something at the bottom about how you could double the frosting recipe and use half of it to fill the cake. Which is how I ended up crossing #66 (make a filled cake) off my Day Zero list.

I've attempted to make filled cakes numerous times in the past, and they've always ended up looking something like this:

Clearly, my MS Paint skills are spectacular and Google failed me with decent pictures, and my cake cutting skills in the past have been...squiffy at best. (The candles were to make it look more like a cake and less like a cylinder with a crack in it.) Anyway, I figured it was about time to see if I could do any better. Oh, and technically, this recipe is for an orange and lemon poppy seed cake. It worked out much the same, really!

Here's what you'll need:

(Plus, 250g block of cream cheese, a ton of icing sugar, and some lemon juice for the icing, all of which I forgot to put in the picture. #FAIL)

Start with 1/3 cup of poppy seeds and put them in a small bowl:

Add 1/4 cup of milk:

And leave them to soak. Meanwhile, grease and line a 20cm round tin.

Chop up 125g of softened butter:

Add 1 cup caster sugar:

And cream them together.

Try not to just eat it with a spoon. Then zest one orange and one lemon:

Add the zest into the creamed butter mixture, along with 3 eggs, added one at a time. Beat in between each egg.

Then add in 2 cups of self raising flour (If you're doing what I did and using gluten free flour, don't dump it in like you would with regular flour. Because it will go EVERYWHERE)...

...1/2 cup of sour cream...

...1/4 cup orange juice (I juiced the orange that I'd zested)...

...and the milk/poppy seed mixture:

Beat it until it's just combined:

And then pour it into the tin.

Now, the recipe said to bake it at 160 degrees C for 40-45 minutes. I'm not sure if the recipe is CRAZY WRONG or if it was the gluten free flour that did it, but after 40 minutes, it was still about 40% liquid. I think all up, it took an extra 15-20 minutes before a skewer came out clean. So basically? Don't be surprised if it's not done after 40 minutes!

Here's the (FINALLY) cooked cake:

Let it cool for 10 minutes, then turn it out of the tin. Once it's cool, slice the cake in half. One of my cookbooks has a double page spread on cake splitting techniques. Considering how poorly I've faired in the past, I thought I'd avoid just using a knife. So I got some thread and used that instead. It took a bit of effort to get started, but after that it was SO much easier to keep it straight! And I imagine if you used dental floss instead of thread, it wouldn't be as hard to get going.

I'm not sure I'd use this frosting recipe again for reasons that will become apparent. But here it is anyway.
250g block of cream cheese, softened:

1 cup icing sugar:

4 tablespoons lemon juice:

Beat it all together. Use half as filling:

And half as icing, then sprinkle the top with poppy seeds so it doesn't look really boring:

Okay, the reason I wouldn't use this recipe again? It was INSANELY runny. I had to use an extra 1/2-3/4 cup of icing sugar just to get it to a consistency that would stay on the cake. Even then, it was kind of...custardy?...in texture. And then I had to transfer the entire cake to a cake carrier rather than just covering it with cling film because the ICING DIDN'T SET. EVER. So if I'd cling filmed it, the icing would have just stuck to the cling film and not the cake.

So I think in the future, I'd use a different frosting recipe. One that had at least a small amount of butter in it so that it would set.

ANYWAY. Despite the baking time debacle and the frosting dilemmas, this cake was pretty damned good. As evidenced by the fact that we demolished the entire thing in two days!

So there you have it. I'm pretty sure I'll be attempting filled cakes more often in the future!

K xx