Valentines Raspberry and White Chocolate Cake.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

I'm easily distracted

Oooh, look, Cake!

Ok, this is a quick post for now for various reasons, I'll upgrade it when BT give me my own broadband back :) *It's back now, this is the upgraded/old post mash up :) *

I finished this cake about an hour ago and to be honest I was bloody glad it was all over lol
The last thing the cake did to try and thwart my attempts to finish it was throwing my pack of lovehearts out of my trolley in Tesco without me noticing, or remembering until I'd got outside. Re-joining the uber-queues for 1 packet was not an option. All praise be then to my lovely local shop that had some!

So finally done, this is a 2 sponge cake with a hint of raspberry in the sponge, a layer of white chocolate buttercream and Raspberry jam in the centre and covered with white chocolate buttercream. I then added home made dark chocolate hearts, 'Red' (I tried lol) buttercream blobs, big and small, white regalice hearts, the stand-up silver lustre'd chocolate hearts, the Lovehearts atop the blobs (They don't half have some weird things written on them nowadays!)

What the...?

 and finally wavy maltesers!!! Whooop!

I made this cake not only to eat, although it looks like the snow is might put pay to getting it to where it was going to be eaten tonight :( , but also to see what I could come up with knowledge i've picked up over the last few months (If any! haha), and also to enter in some Valentines Bloggy Bake comps! Yay!

This is entered in the wonderful @cakeboule's Valentines Craft and bake Competition (Do have a browse of her awesome creations while you're there, after putting a drool-capture device on your keyboard!)

I'm also entering it in @EnglishMum's 'Baked with love' Bake-off!

Ingredients:

• 225g Self raising flour
• 25g Cornflour
• 250g Caster sugar
• 250g Soft Butter
• 4 Medium eggs
• 2 tbsp Raspberry puree 
• 2 tbsp Milk
• 2 tsp Baking powder
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract.

For the filling and icing:

• 500g icing sugar
• 200g Soft Unsalted butter
• 2 tbsp Milk
• 200g White Chocolate, melted then cooled a bit.
• 200g Seedless raspberry jam.

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 180c. 
2. Prep the tins - Grease and line 2 x 23cm/9" cake tins. (Or in my case spray cake release around 2 non-stick 23cm/9" springforms.) This recipe amount makes fairly shallow sponges but quite a nice depth cake once the icing and filling is added. If you want a deeper cake use 20cm/8" tins. 
3. Mix the caster sugar and butter together in a bowl.
4. Sift the flour, cornflour and baking powder into a seperate bowl.
5. Add 1 egg at a time and some of the flour whilst mixing, until all the eggs and flour mix are added.
6. Add the raspberry puree, milk and vanilla extract whilst mixing. 
7. Split the batter between the two tins.
8. Bake for about 30 mins or until a cocktail stick comes out of the middles clean.
9. Eat. Oh, wait, not yet haha.
10. Allow to cool in the tins for 10 mins, then tip out onto cooling racks to cool completely.
11. Put the white chocolate in a bowl and melt over simmering water or in a microwave, heating for 30 secs at a time.
12. Meanwhile mix the soft butter in a bowl slowly adding the sifted icing sugar and a splash of milk at a time.
13. Keep mixing and add the melted chocolate.
14. Apply about a quarter to a third of the icing to one of the sponges.
15. Put the jam in a small bowl and mix a bit with a fork just to loosen it up a bit.
16. Spread the jam over the iced sponge and sit the other sponge on top.
17. Using a palette knife apply the rest of the icing to the cake.
18. If the icing cools too much it can become a bit of a sod to spread out, prefering to stick to the knife, even a heated one, rather than the cake. If you leave the icing to set a short while then it dries a bit and doesn't stick so much but you can still smooth it. I quite liked the fluffy look but I wanted the top smooth for the decorations. I was planning to stick icing hearts on the side but after fighting the choc icing decided to leave it fluffy :)
19. Eat, or decorate, then eat.

The heart chocolates were made by just melting dark chocolate and using silicon moulds, saving some to cool slightly and be piped into heart shapes on some baking paper. Something that I managed properly on the 3rd attempt after the choc cooled too much in the piping bag lol

White hearts were rolled out Regalice and cut out with heart cutters.

'Red' blobs were buttercream with red food colouring (And then you added too much black food colouring didn't you? - ed.) Yes.

A second version of the cake.

Mega cake! = Mega Tune Selection

Fell in love with a girl, fell in love once and almost completely.... White Stripes - Fell in Love With A Girl.

Love this bit of Love! Courtney Love - Mono.

The best remix of this! Flip and Fill ft Kelly Llorenna  - True Love Never Dies (Kenny Hayes Remix)

and Awwhhhhh, to get you all in a Valentines frame of mind, a snippet of The Wedding Singer :)

Big stringed classic love bought to you courtesy of Holly and co. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power of Love.

Talking of classic love songs.... G n R - Used to love her

Oh Wendy! *Drools* :) Transvision Vamp - I Want Your Love

Eh oop! Another Classic! A couple of versions of this one, First off Candi Staton and The Source - You got the Love.

And then Florence gets her lungs pumping for this, really quite good, cover. Florence and the Machine - You Got the Love 

Can you feel my Love Buzz? No? Ok, I'll turn it up a bit... Nirvana - Love Buzz (I really am sounding like a crap cheesy DJ now lol)

Couple more.... Killing Joke - Love Like Blood! Soooooo good!

I do love a big dose of Freemasons! - ft Amanda Wilson - Love On My Mind

Um, a couple more :D

Huge! Huge! Classic Neil Young cover from St Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Taken from one of their best albums, Disintegration, The Cure - Love Song

and finally.... aaaarrrghh, too many to choose from..... 

Daniel? Daniel who? Hehe. Natasha Bedingfield - Soulmate

...and the final finally Madness - It Must Be Love

Love to you all.

P.S.  :)

Flappy Jam Jacks.

             A bundle of raspberry, white chocolate and oaty deliciousness! This is one of my little arsenal of tray bakes that, when I'm working, end up in my lunch tub to be eaten in unison with a yoghurt. They have an absolutely gorgeous texture to them with the kickin bonus of the jam and white choc layers. I would happily eat the entire 9" x 9" slab in one go! :) The basic recipe is another from the heavenly treat producing Mary-Anne Boermans's blog which, one day, I may have eaten the entire contents of!

Ingredients:

• 125g Wholemeal flour
• 90g Demerera sugar
• 1/4 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• Pinch of salt
• 125g Unsalted butter
• 125g Rolled oats
• 200g Seedless raspberry Jam
• 100g White chocolate or White chocolate chips.

Preparation: 

1. Preheat the oven to 180c
2. Grease or spray a 9" square tin and line with baking paper.
3. Put the Jam into a small saucepan and heat gently whilst you...
4. Put the flour, sugar, bicarb, salt and butter into a food processor and mix until breadcrumby.
5. Add the oats and mix so that they're incorporated but not smashed to pieces.
6. Put two thirds of the mix into the prep'd tin and press flat and to the edges.
7. Pour the warmed jam onto this and spread across the surface.
8. Spoon the rest of the oat mix around on top of the jam and spread out flat and even and pressed down gently.
9. Bake for about 35 mins.
10. For the chocolate topping you can either melt the white chocolate and drizzle or pipe pretty patterns when the bake has cooled a bit. Or, do what I did and tip a bag of white choc chips over the top as soon as it's out of the oven, leave for a few mins and then spread about a bit with a fork. You can do this with chopped up white chocolate as well. 
11. Leave to cool and then cut into whatever sized pieces you will count as having 'just the one' :)
12. Eat (Just the one, or two...)

I also tried another version of these by chucking a tin of caramel in as a filling and topping with dark chocolate. They worked, and were very nice, but didn't quite have the 'OMG THESE ARE LUSH!!!' of the raspberry ones.

Right, kicking off with the obvious ones! The Flappy Jam Jacks with Down in The Tube Station At Midnight!

Pump it! Pump it! Pump it! Pump it! etc etc... Classic from Technotronic - Pump up the Flappy Jam Jack!

Whooooah.... It's Ram Flappy Jam Jacks - Black Betty!

Ooohhh, there's more! Pearl Flappy Jam Jacks with Do The Evolution! (Seriously, don't try and make these with pearl jam...)

Oh, wait, BREAKING NEWS!!!

...and more! Rolling Stones - Jumping Flappy Jam Jack Flash.

...and finally! Flappy Jam Jack White in his White Stripes incarnation with Blue Orchid.