Chocolate Christmas Tree Cakes with a Mincemeat Centre

 

I was sent a really cool cake pan to review by CakeMart (which trades in Germany as Mein Cupcake) - a Wilton Christmas tree silicon cake mould. It has nine cavities which create mini Christmas tree shaped cakes complete with a ridged effect on the sides. I'm a big fan of the Wilton brand and also of silicon bakeware as it's easy to clean and takes up so much less room to store!

I couldn't wait to try these out and decided to make chocolate cake following this BBC recipe, but I also wanted to put a fresh twist on it.




I had some mincemeat left over from making this mincemeat tart so decided to see what the cakes would turn out like if I baked a spoonful of mincemeat into each one. So I sprayed the cake pan with Cake Release and half filled each cavity with chocolate cake mixture, then a spoonful of mincemeat, then the rest of the chocolate mixture.

I baked them in the oven for about 20 minutes, checking with a skewer to make sure they were done, and when cooled eased them out of the pan. They came out easily and definitely looked Christmas tree shaped!

They needed decorating of course and I decided to try two methods, buttercream and candy melts. I mixed some butter and icing sugar to make buttercream, added green food colouring and filled a large piping bag fitted with a star nozzle. I went around each cake from the bottom piping a small blob and pulling the tip away, moving upwards a layer at a time, in the hope that these would resemble the pine needles. I decorated the trees with different coloured dragees (balls) which I thought gave the effect of fairy lights on the tree.






For the other tree I took a bag of green Wilton candy melts and melted them in a mug in the microwave. Then I stirred in a little vegetable oil to thin the mixture. I tried holding a tree cake upside down and dipping it into the candy melts but found it easier to use a spoon to cover them. I decorated these with little gold balls - which do you think looks best?





I was really pleased by how the cakes tasted as well with the combination of chocolate and mincemeat so do give this a try!

I'm sending my festive tree cakes to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker.

I'm also sending them to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

 

Plus Treat Petite, hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat the Baking Explorer, as their theme is red and green or Christmas.

 

 

And finally I'm sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabber UK as the theme is festive fun.

 

 

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Meal Planning Monday Week 51

Monday

Dinner: working late on a project that was postponed from last Friday

 

Tuesday

In Edinburgh for a conference

 

Wednesday

Should be home in time for dinner: orange chicken with sweet potato noodles for me and probably chips for him

 

 

Thursday

Dinner: Sausage ragu with butternut squash ‘spaghetti’ for me from Inspiralized, sausage and mash for him

 

Friday

Dinner: ham (gammon joint) in the slow cooker

 

Saturday : A friend is staying as she’s coming up for a bridesmaid dress fitting

Lunch: soup made in the slow cooker from leftover ham with fresh bread

Dinner: chicken tortilla wraps

Dessert: TBA

 

Sunday

Lunch: sausage/bacon sandwich

Dinner: TBA. Might be at the cinema as the other half wants to see Star Wars (and the friend who is staying this weekend doesn't!).

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Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread and Vegetable Soup

Last weekend I decided to make soup and bread for lunch. I had a packet of diced vegetables that were called 'soup mix', the idea being you just bung them all in a pan with some stock. I'd planned to set my breadmaker machine the night before so we could have nice fresh bread in time for lunch - and completely forgot.

Was I going to have to give up on the idea of having fresh bread with soup (or send the reluctant other half out to buy some)? Surely there must be a quick bread recipe out there that I could make in a couple of hours from start to finish (I didn't get up very early on the Sunday morning so lunch was only a couple of hours away!). Luckily, there was: there are bread recipes you don't need to leave to prove, and this is one of them.

It's a recipe from the Telegraph for 'easy beer bread with parmesan and garlic'. I think the beer replaces yeast and all you have to do is mix everything and cook it for just under an hour.

I did change the recipe a fair bit as I didn't have buckwheat flour, polenta, fresh thyme and couldn't be bothered to go into the garden to see if I still had any rosemary (it was raining!), oh and I did't have any parmesan either! Instead I looked in the fridge to see what I did have and decided to create my own flavour of mature cheddar and chilli. I also forgot to add the little bit of butter at the end but it was fine without. So here's what I did:

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

260g strong white bread flour
100g wholemeal plain flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
60g caster sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed
50g mature cheddar, diced
2 tsp Very Lazy chopped red chillis
300ml bottle beer

Preheat oven to 190C and grease a loaf tin. Mix all the dry ingredients.

Add the beer and mix in well

Spoon into the prepared loaf tin and bake in the oven for 50 minutes

In the meantime here is my soup mix, which I simply simmered with some vegetable stock until the veg was soft, then put it in a blender.

I added some more water as it was a bit thick

 

 Here's the finished loaf of bread

The garlic, cheese and chilli flavours all came through really strongly, so this is a good bread to serve alongside a simple soup - one that perhaps doesn't have an overpowering flavour of its own.

Lunch! And possibly the fastest loaf of bread I've ever made.

I'm sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Jen's Food and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy.

And also to Extra Veg, hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary on behalf of Michelle at Utterly Scrummy again, and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

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Chocolate Igloo Cake with Polar Bear

Some guys I work with are off to Sweden for an Arctic Biathlon, to raise money for charity - which involves teams competing in husky sledding, ice fishing, orienteering in low light and so on. It sounds like a really tough challenge!

To raise money they held a bake sale at work and even though I wasn't going to be around that day (apparently I missed some people dressed up as polar bears) I offered to make them a cake. I saw a cake last year that made me want to bake a cake shaped like an igloo and this was the perfect time!

I used this recipe from Tesco to make the cake itself, though I decorated it differently. It makes a large cake, that I cooked in a 2 litre Pyrex bowl; the cooking time was pretty accurate and the cake turned out well.

I did have to level the top (or bottom rather) as it rose quite a lot:

Very neat!

I thought that even if it was quite a moist cake it would be a lot to eat without any filling so I split the cake through the middle and filled with some chocolate buttercream.

I didn't have any doughnuts and while I thought Tesco's cake looked good, I thought it would actually be quite tricky to make without ending up with too much blue, and who wants a blue igloo? Instead, I decided to decorate it my own way.

I made some chocolate buttercream and spread it all over the cake, then covered it with roll-out fondant.

Using a knife I scored lines in it to represent the blocks of ice.

I made the entrance to the igloo with another block of fondant and placed the cake on a board I had previously covered with fondant and left to go hard. A blue ribbon around the board was the finishing touch.

I wanted to make a polar bear (actually I wanted to make a penguin until I remembered that they don't live in the Arctic!) and figured it was quite simple to model as I've made various animals before.

I started with a large egg shape for the body and a smaller egg shape for the head, then rolled out sausage shapes for the arms and legs. I rolled a small ball and pressed it flat to stick on the end of the feet as paws and used the same technique for the ears. I used a little bit of black fondant to make patches on the ears and feet and to make the face. I sat my polar bear next to the igloo.

As the finishing touch I found a packet of snowflake sprinkles (I can't remember where I got them from!) and stuck some on with edible glue. The guys taking part in the Arctic challenge were really impressed with the cake and pleased to have it help with their fundraising.


This month for Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, we have chosen the letter N, and decided that it can also stand for Noel - any Christmassy recipe or bake - so I am sending in my igloo cake.

I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's a very Christmassy recipe.

 

I'm also sharing this with Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen, as the cake of course contains eggs!

 

 

The theme for Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK, is festive fun, so this cake is just right to enter.

 

 

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Mincemeat Tart

I had a lot of ingredients left over from my Christmas pudding and realised that many of them were found in the recipe for mincemeat – that is, the traditional English mince pie filling, a sweet pastry that is nothing to do with Shepherd’s pie or spaghetti Bolognese!

 

My fiancé loves mince pies though I’ve never been keen, so I decided to make a bit of a twist on the idea and make a giant one – but to make it a bit healthier, I wanted to make a mince tart rather than a pie, with a lattice top.

  

With something so traditional as mincemeat who else to turn to but Delia Smith? I used this recipe

 

 

 

 

and did leave the flavours overnight to infuse. However, I left out the suet as I didn’t have any, and I’m sure when I made mince pies before I didn’t add suet – I’m not sure these days it’s really something people use in cooking. The mixture turned out perfectly well without me doing this.

 

 

Lack of time meant that I used ready made shortcrust pastry. I lined the bottom of a pie tin and spooned in the mincemeat filling. I used my lattice cutter to make the top of the pie, though I'm still not very good with getting to grips with it! I brushed the top with milk, and cooked it in the oven for about 25 minutes until the top was golden brown. My fiancé really enjoyed it – while I stuck to an apple crumble as I had fruit that needed using up, but he doesn’t like apple!

 

 

I’m sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's a very Christmassy recipe.

 

 There is nutmeg in my mincemeat mixture so I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter I have chosen this month is N.

 

 I'm also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Janie at the Hedgecombers, as their theme is sugar and spice.

 

 

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Restaurant Review: Crown & Shuttle, Shoreditch, London

Meeting a friend for lunch between our offices one day I suddenly realised it was Thanksgiving and that I quite fancied a turkey sandwich – actually, what I would have preferred was a full-on Thanksgiving dinner but didn’t think we would find anywhere at short notice that didn’t have long queues!

 

He suggested a pub just up the road from us on Bishopsgate called the Crown & Shuttle, which indeed had a special Thanksgiving menu. It was more what I would call a not to Thanksgiving, eg a cheeseburger and fries, or Maine lobster mac and cheese; I had the closest thing they offered to a Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey schnitzel with bashed sweet potato, maple and pecans, dill pickle and peanut slaw for £12.

 

The dish was so-so – relatively plain and straightforward – but also a bit different which is always good. It’s a nice pub, with exposed brickwork and industrial-chic with a good selection of local and foreign beers. The website boasts a “secret cocktail bar upstairs that make you feel like you’re in an awesome house party” though we never made it upstairs.

 

The regular menu isn’t extensive – three of the seven ‘big plates’ are burgers but the ‘small bowl’ options look intriguing – cauliflower cheese croquettes with tomato jam, anyone? And if I’d seen the peanut butter and chocolate tart for dessert…

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Sachertorte Cupcakes and Home Bake Box Review

I've written before about the Home Bake Box mini box I ordered and made macarons from; I subscribed for a second month to see what I got and once again it was something I'd made before, though this time much more successfully than the macarons: Sachertorte.

Again all the ingredients were neatly weighed and packaged in little labelled bags with a recipe card. There was also a note saying that when they had packaged the first few bags of jam they had leaked so they were double bagged, and wouldn't be sending jam through the post again!

When I made it before, I made the traditional round cake with the word Sacher written on the top. This time instead of suggesting we pipe that word (which is how I thought it was always made), we were given some gold leaf to decorate the top. I was also interested to see the recipe gave instructions for making three different sized cakes, either a larger single layer, a smaller two layer cake, or cupcakes.

Since I had made it before I thought it might be fun to try out the cupcakes. There's not a lot of point me posting the recipe here as it isn't a recipe as such - the sachets were labelled things like 'cake mix' so I couldn't tell you exactly what quantities of which ingredients you need.

The method was quite interesting in that I had to beat the egg whites - this made for a really light and fluffy cake.

 

Almost there...

 

The cupcakes before and after baking. Afterwards, I spread a little of the apricot jam as a glaze on top.

Finally I had to make a chocolate ganache to cover the top but couldn't see the amount of cream I needed to add to the chocolate that was provided. By this point I had gotten so used to all the ingredients being pre-measured that it never occurred to me to turn over the recipe card and look on the back, so I just guessed how much cream to use (I was getting impatient by this point) and my chocolate ganache ended up too runny. It still worked ok, but was a little thinner on top of the cupcakes - you can still see some of the apricot jam in places.

We were also provided with a small piece of gold leaf and instructions to use scissors or tweezers, not our fingers. So I used scissors but when the pieces stuck to the scissors and I tried to get them off with my fingers they stuck to my fingers - doh! This was the first time I had used gold leaf - I know it's normally pretty expensive - and it's not something I'd be particularly bothered about using again unless it was a really integral part of a cake decoration.

Here are the finished cupcakes, with all the gold leaf that I could get onto them (the rest ended up stuck to my fingers!) - they tasted a lot better than they looked!

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