Coffee & Walnut Cake

With guests arriving tomorrow, I thought it might be a nice idea to bake a cake.

The Air Show weekend does tend to involve a fair degree of sitting in the garden, and refreshments are always welcome. I therefore decided to extend my baking repertoire and have a go at a coffee and walnut cake.

I used Nigella's recipe, and upscaled it to suit my two 9" baking tins. The ingredients and method are summarised here.

Ingredients

• 65 g walnut pieces
• 285 g caster sugar
• 285 g unsalted butter
• 255 g plain flour
• 5 tsp instant espresso coffee powder
• 3 and a bit tsp baking powder
• ¾ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 5 large eggs
• 1 - 2 tbsp milk

and for the buttercream

• 440 g icing sugar
• 220 g softened butter
• 3½ tsp instant espresso coffee powder
• walnut halves to decorate

Method

1. Lightly butter two 9" baking tins and line with baking parchment
2. Pre heat the oven to 160℃ (fan)
3. Add the walnut pieces and caster sugar to a food processor and pulse it until is is a fine (ish) powder
4. Add the softened butter, flour, coffee, baking powder, bicarb and eggs, and blitz it until it forms a smooth batter.
5. While still mixing, gradually add some milk. The aim is to produce a soft dropping consistency.
6. The divide the batter between the two pans
7. Bake until the sponge springs back when pressed, or a skewer comes out clean. It took about 40 minutes for a 9" cake.
8. Once baked, leave the cake to cool in the tins for about ten minutes, before turning out on to a cooling rack.

Buttercream 

1. Pulse the icing sugar in the food processor to remove any lumps
2. Blend in the softened butter to produce the buttercream frosting
3. Dissolve the espresso powder in 1 tbsp of boiling water and, while mixing the buttercream, slowly introduce to the mixture; to produce a coffee flavoured filling and topping.

I'll let you know how it turns out tomorrow

The afternoon included a bit of hoeing in the veg patch and it's worth noting that it's not every day that a Lancaster bomber does a low level pass right over one's house. We also had a few strafing runs by the Red Arrows.

Leek & Potato Soup

 Yesterday's soup making was aborted due to hypoglycaemia. Actually I'm wondering whether aborted is a bit of an exaggeration? All I had managed to do yesterday was pull a few leeks and fetch a carton of double cream from the village shop. Gathering ingredients might be closer to the truth.

Today I got back on track and actually made the soup. The BBC Food website was my recipe source, and my mildly modified version is outlined below.

Ingredients

• 8 oz of peeled and cubed potatoes
• 2 medium leeks, sliced finely
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
• 2 pints of chicken stock
• 5 fluid ounces of double cream
• Salt and Black Pepper to season

Method

• Pour the oil in to a saucepan
• Add the leeks, onion and diced potato
• Soften the vegetables over a medium heat for five or ten minutes. Don't let the vegetables brown and add a splash more oil if they start to stick.
• Pour in the chicken stock and bring to the boil
• Simmer for ten to fifteen minutes until the vegetables are tender
• Blitz to a creamy consistency with a hand blender
• Pour in the double cream and blitz once more
• Season to taste

The result was a lovely creamy soup with a velvety texture. 30% declared it a great success. This is praise indeed, as she is not a fan of leek and potato soup.

That's a good job really, as I have enough ingredients for another batch ... and the leeks really need using up.

Christmas Eve

Obviously the plan for today was to ensure that the house was tidy and that all Christmas preparations were complete ... well, it's fair to say that most of the Christmas preparations were completed ... the critical ones anyway. As for an orderly and clean domestic environment that'll have to wait until tomorrow morning.

This is how the day panned out.  First activity this morning was to get the honey roast ham* on to platter, covered and in the refrigerator. I then bagged up and froze the water it had been cooked in, as it makes the most fantastic pork stock ... perfect for soups.

I then continued with general clearance activities until 30% asked me if I had received my tax rebate. I had a few minutes to spare, so I checked ... My account balance was not as magnificent as expected, as the buggers at His Majesty's Revenue & Customs had clearly failed to hand over my cash. I ten spent ten minutes going round in circles with the HMRC on-line help before picking up the phone. I then spent thirty minutes talking to a lovely lady in Glasgow and, after much fiddling with my tax record, it looks like I should get my rebate in the next couple of weeks.

As I finished speaking to HMRC, Bobbyn turned up and we took the dogs for a walk down the lane. At this time of year the lanes are disgusting and the dogs were filthy by the time we returned. Fortunately TP was on-hand to assist with washing and drying the mutts, and they were soon settled in their beds.

In the afternoon I finally wrapped my Christmas gifts and then had a massive kip. For some strange reason I was absolutely exhausted and didn't feel much better on waking. 

Final task of the day was to ice the Christmas carrot cake. I eventually decided to go with my original cream cheese icing recipe and the resultant masterpiece is now taking up a lot of space in the fridge.

Christmas cake is nice,
but Christmas carrot cake is really nice

30% and I had planned to wander down the lane to join in the carol service on the village green. However we were both so exhausted that we settled for sausage and mash on our knees in front of the TV and an early night.

---

* Honey Roast Ham

• Place the ham in a large lidded saucepan - I use a stock pot or jam kettle
• Cover with water and add 3 peeled and coarsely chopped onions, two or three sticks of chopped celery, three or four sliced carrots, a few black peppercorns and half a dozen bayleaves.
• Boil the ham for about 35 minutes per kilo
• Once cooked, transfer the ham to a roasting pan
• carefully remove and discard the skin
• score the fat in a diamond pattern and insert a clove in to each of the diamonds
• Once the ham has been studded with cloves, gently sprinkle and rub in a few handfuls of soft brown sugar
• trickle over half a jar of good quality honey and place it in a fan oven pre-heated to 170℃
• After about twenty minutes, baste the ham with the juices that have collected in the pan and pour over the remaining honey
• continue to bake for about another twenty minutes until the ham is a beautiful golden brown

Mmmm!

Carrot Cake - part 2

 Friday's baking got me thinking about my original carrot cake recipe, so I googled again and actually managed to track it down.

A pdf of the user manual for a Sharp microwave/oven grill* was found and here is an excerpt.

I clearly recall that I doubled the quantities, used two tins and baked this cake in an oven rather than a microwave. I can't remember anything about the temperature or timing, but, as a rule, I used to cook everything at Gas Mark 5!

---

* When I separated from TP's biological mother, she took the cooker. I survived with the Sharp microwave, a toaster and a kettle for a good few months until my auntie Joan gave me her old gas cooker. I recall that it was dark green and the numbers on the oven control had been rubbed off. I learnt that you didn't need to be that precise about oven temperature when cooking.

The last of the carrot crop

 I dug up the last of my carrot crop back on the twelfth of the month and the final few are still sat on the bottom of the fridge.  They really need to be consumed and today I made my token contribution.

One of the first meals that I cooked for 30% was a roast lamb dinner and I had baked a carrot cake for dessert. This was back in 2002 and I don't think I have baked another in the intervening years.  The cake must have been pretty good, as 30% still speaks very fondly of it, and it only took her the best part of twenty years to agree to marry me.

Anyway, back to the narrative. A few days ago 30% suggested that it would be nice to make a carrot cake with some of our carrots, as they are very sweet.  I very rarely bake,* so I was a little apprehensive, but I didn't take a huge amount of convincing that this was a good idea.  I no longer had the recipe so successfully used to woo 30%, so I scoured the internet for an alternative.

The BBC Good Food website came to my rescue with the recipe detailed below. I did have to adjust the ingredient quantities, as the original was for a 20 cm cake tin and mine are 23 cm.

Ingredients & Method

- Oil two baking tins and line with baking parchment

- Pre heat oven to 160 ℃ (fan)

• 290 ml vegetable oil
• 125g plain yoghurt
• 5 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla essense
• the zest from 3/4 of an orange

- Place the above ingredients in a jug and whisk together

• 330g self raising flour
• 420g soft brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 3 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• a good pinch of salt

- Place the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix well, ensuring that there are no lumps.

• 330g grated carrots
• 125g rasins or sultanas
• 65g of roughly chopped walnuts

- Finally mix the wet ingredients with the dry ones and stir in the carrots, raisons and chopped walnuts. 
- Mix well and divide between two cake tins
- The recipe suggested a bake of 25 - 30 mins, although feedback indicated that forty minutes was more realistic. Note: With the increased quantities and larger tins, my bake was about an hour
- Place in the oven and bake until a skewer comes out clean. 
- Once cooked, remove from the oven and leave to cool on a rack in the cake tins 

Once the cake has cooled it can be iced, but it also freezes well. As we are off to Egypt on Monday, I did exactly that. The two cakes were double wrapped in clingfilm and then finished with a jacket of aluminium foil, before being put in the freezer.  They'll be thawed and iced much nearer to Christmas.

Icing Ingredients and Method

• 125g slightly salted butter
• 375g icing sugar
• 125g full fat cream cheese

- Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth
- Add half of the cream cheese and beat again
- Beat in the remaining cheese bit by bit, to prevent the icing splitting
- Use half of the icing as a filling and the remainder as a topping 

- Sprinkle 65g of chopped walnuts on the top 

So, there you go. Friday's achievement was a carrot cake. I'll let you know how it turns out later next month.

Note to self: Reviews of this recipe question the icing ingredients, suggesting that the quantities are insufficient and that there is far too much icing sugar.

---

* Apart from the bakery course at Butter Street on the nineteenth of October, the last time I baked was when I made a sourdough loaf during lockdown. If I'm honest, I don't think the "reward" of a sourdough loaf is worth the faff of making a sourdough starter ...I'm not a fan.