These are currently my complete favourite sweet treat. I cannot begin to describe how utterly gorgeous they are! Cake sex! Messy, make you moan, and finished far too quickly.
Ahem....Anyway, this was my third attempt at making these and they finally looked like what they're supposed to look like. The recipe is from Mary-Anne Boerman's blog and is a recipe she used in the Great British Bake Off.
Ingredients:
250g Plain flour
58g Cornflour
58g Icing sugar
250g Unsalted butter at room temp.
1 tsp Vanilla extract.
Food colouring (Optional)
For the filling:
125ml milk
2 tbsp Plain flour
110g Unsalted butter at room temp.
110g Caster sugar
1 tsp Vanilla extract
Seedless Jam
Preparation:
Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and mix together until pale and fluffy.
Add vanilla extract and mix in.
Sift the flour and cornflour, add to the butter mixture and mix well until smooth.
Now, if you want, you can add a line of food colouring to the inside of a piping bag, this will pimp the biscuits up, or you can have them plain.
Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a large star nozzle.
Pipe circles of the mixture onto a baking paper lined baking tray. Pipe a circle of about 3-3.5cm diameter finishing in the centre and lifting the nozzle to form a small peak. Place each swirl at least an inch apart. You should get about 30 biscuits from the mixture at this size.
Place the trays of biscuits in the freezer for 15-20 mins. This will help them hold their shape when baked.
Preheat the oven to 200c/180c Fan
Bake the biscuits for about 12 minutes until pale golden and turning very slightly brown at the edges.
Leave to cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack. Be gentle with them.
Cooling.
Filling:
Put the milk and flour in a small saucepan and heat whilst whisking.
Keep going until the mixture thickens, then keep going for 1 more minute.
Pour the mixture onto a plate and cover, leave to cool completely.
Beat the sugar and butter until pale and fluffy, and then beat a bit more, the more pale and fluffy the better.
Add the cooled milk mixture and vanilla extract and mix in for at least 10 minutes.
Put 3-4 tbsp of jam into a bowl and stir for a bit with a fork to even any lumps in the jam out.
Using a teaspoon, spoon jam onto the bases of half the biscuits.
Spoon the buttercream mixture into a piping bag fitted with the large star nozzle and pipe mixture onto the bases of the other half of the biscuits.
Put jammy halves together with creamy halves.
Sprinkle with a little icing sugar.
Eat. Moan with joy. Realise they've all gone. Cry. Return to Step 1....
The red swirls would have been more defined if I'd been less generous with the food colouring.
THE nicest buttercream!
Melt-in-the-mouth gorgeousness!
Some tunes for these beauties because they're the best!
Dear melting moments, nothing compares to you....
"It's been 7hrs and 15 days..." Yes, but enough about your marriage Sinead!
Robert Smith heard about these and then wrote Just Like Heaven for them! Oh yes!
..and then you eat them all :( and you think Good thing, where have you gone?
So I thought, hmmm, what can I make my Sister for Christmas, I know! A cake with all her animals on! One text later I regretted this idea - 2 dogs, and now others had increased to 11 rabbits and 19 guinea pigs! (These numbers were out of date by the time the cake was eaten haha!) Still, the modelling practice would be good, especially seeing as all modelling I had ever done in 41 yrs was, um, disappointing. So challenge on!
I used the cake and buttercream recipe from Sara's Cooking Diary with the only change being that I used 23cm/9" spring-form tins as I wanted as much top surface as possible for the animals. It still made a plenty deep enough cake. I thought the sponge was just right for a large cake, not too light and fluffy, not too heavy, just about the right body and texture, and mixed with the buttercream it was very, very nice! I will be using this for a choccy cake again :)
Ingredients:
250g Dark Chocolate
170g Unsalted butter at room temp.
350g Light brown sugar
3 Large free range eggs
370g Plain flour
1 1/2 tsp Baking powder
1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp Salt
500ml milk at room temp
2 tsp Vanilla extract.
For the buttercream:
175g dark chocolate
225g Unsalted butter at room temp.
1 tbsp milk at room temp.
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g icing sugar
Preparation:
Grease and line 2 x 23cm tins, or as I do now spray lovely non-stick spring-form tins with even lovelier cake release spray.
Break the chocolate into pieces and melt in a bowl over a saucepan of water or in a microwave heating with 30sec bursts. Don't stir the chocolate while it's being melted. Allow the chocolate to cool a bit.
Preheat oven to 180c/170c fan/Gas 5
In a large bowl cream together the butter and sugar until pale and smooth
Separate the eggs, beat the yolks and slowly add them whilst mixing.
Add the slightly cooled chocolate and mix well.
In another bowl sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt.
In a jug mix together the milk and vanilla extract.
Alternately add a third of dry ingredients and third of the the milk to the chocolate mixture and mix well. Repeat until the dry ingredients and milk are all added.
Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks.
Carefully fold in the whisked whites to the mixture with a metal spoon until fully mixed in, be gentle, you don't want to beat the air out of the whisked whites.
Divide the mixture equally between the 2 tins.
Bake for approx 35 minutes, until risen and a skewer comes out of the centre clean.
Leave the cakes to cool for 10 minutes, then tip out onto a cooling rack to cool completely.
For the buttercream:
Melt the chocolate as above and leave to cool a while
I did the following in a food processor, but you're welcome to hand beat it. In a large bowl beat together the butter, milk, vanilla and icing sugar until completely mixed.
Add the slightly cooled chocolate and mix until creamy and smooth. If the mixture seems to runny, add more icing sugar.
I mated the 2 top sides of the sponges together so that the bottom and top of the cake were flat. Test the two sponges together and if necessary, trim off any bits of the mating faces to help the sponges sit flat.
Add buttercream to one surface and sandwich the sponges together. If you are icing the sides as well as the top then use about a third of the mix. If you're just doing the sandwich and top then use a half (It will be quite thick, which is fine :) )
Use a palette knife to apply the buttercream to the rest of the cake.
I found the buttercream to be quite solid at fridge temp but less so, but not runny, at room temp.
Eat! or decorate further.
Half the army of animals ready and willing!
Stanley Dog - The first animal I made and the only one I was happy with.
Rocky the Shug.
Now mothers, tell your children, not to doooooooo what I have done.... The Animals - House of the Rising Sun.
A single Animal doing his thing whilst Rita Moreno tries to sing Fever. Just brilliant!
And finally, I think there's enough animals for them to have a Carnival.... Saint-Saens - Aquarium
Finally, finally. Seeing as I made this for my Sister it's a fine excuse for slipping in some awesomeness from Groove Armada - Look Me In The Eye Sister. I was thinking that i got carried away with Gingerbread Glastonbury until I saw this :D Just brilliant Vid!
Being born a few miles from the Pilton site I've always been proud, when living in the area, of having the best festival in the world on my doorstep. Each time I've been leaves so many life long memories of all the bands, comedians, cabaret and theatre acts, and other festival goers. From the deepest, stickiest mud to the hottest, dustiest, heatstroke inducing years, and from camping the full five days, to helping out on the sewage side of things (Imagine being up to the tops of your wellies in human....nevermind) and popping home each night to a nice shower and bed. Glastonbury is the sweetest festival, and so...
Sweet indeed! There must be at least, oooh, 50 calories in this :) Hundreds of thousands of Jelly babies rockin it in front of the famous Gingerbread Pyramid stage. (I think it's Jelly Baby Bloc Party playing, but they've forgotten their instruments. Silly Jelly BabyBloc Party!)
Ingredients:
200g butter
85g Caster Sugar
85g Brown Sugar
150g Golden syrup
500g Plain flour
1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp Ground ginger
1 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1 Large egg white
300g Icing sugar
Decorations.
Preparation:
Make cardboard templates of what you want to build, be it a house, Pyramid Stage, or VW Campervan. I sellotaped mine together first, just to check it all worked.
Line enough baking trays with baking paper.
Melt the butter, caster sugar, brown sugar and syrup in a suacepan.
Sift the flour, bicarb, ginger and cinnamon together.
Add the melted butter mixture and mix well until a dough forms.
Flatten the dough ball to 2cm thick, cling film, and place in the fridge for at least 30 mins
On a floured surface take some of the dough, or all of it depending on the surface size you have to work on, and roll out to about 5mm thick. Place on the templates and cut out with a knife or roller cutter. Place the cut out gingerbread onto the lined baking trays.
Place the trays in the freezer for at least an hour.
Preheat the oven to 180c/170c Fan/Gas 4
Bake the pieces for 12-15mins.
When cooked, move the gingerbread on the baking paper to a cooling rack.When cooled stiff, they can be removed from the baking paper to finish cooling.
Freezing before cooking helps the gingerbread hold it's shape during cooking but when totally cool you can put the pieces up together to see if there are any areas that have gone out of shape. Any trimming can be done with scissors, gently.
Make the 'cement' for the grand design by mixing together the egg white and icing sugar in a bowl. The cement needs to be able to be piped but not so runny that it runs off a spoon. Add more icing sugar if the mix is runny. Place how much you think you may need into a piping bag with a 2-3mm hole or nozzle.
Put cement on the edges to be joined and build, build, build. At this point you may need an extra pair of hands or three, or in my case a variety of beer cans a tub of salt to hold sides together until they dry. Vertical or self supporting sides can be left unsupported after about half an hour, just don't breathe on them! Leave the structure to dry overnight. The remaining icing mix needs to be covered, or placed into an icing bag with a small hole/writing nozzle, to stop it drying.
A Naked Pyramid Stage.
You will of course now have your decorations ready and an exact plan of what you're doing with them! Haha. Ok, Grab the decorations you have, the smaller ones like little pearlescent balls or choc drops can be attached with a line of icing on the structure, for the larger ones like the smarties, choc buttons I found it easier to apply icing to each sweet and then stick to the build.
For this, I used Curly Wurlys, Chocolate buttons, Jelly Beans, Jelly Babies, Chocolate chips, Smarties, Soft shimmer pearls, Silver shimmer spray for the stage floor, and White Regalice for the pyramid tip. Oh, and some grey Regalice for the crowd's 'Pigeon-on-stick' :)
Let your creative juices run wild. There are plenty of Gingerbread House images you can google for inspiration, and have a gander at these beauties!
Stare at your creation and go WOW! Show your friends, this will help them become convinced that you're insane.
Eat, though probably not all at once because that would be insane.
Entered in The Great British Baking Club's Gingerbread house challenge, it was a joint winner of 'Most creative interpretation of a Gingerbread house' (I think they made a special category for special entries lol) along with @cakeboule's awesome Gingerbread VW Campervan! :)
I miniaturised myself, jumped in a tiny helicopter and took this footage :)
So, onward to some tunage! Sticking to the Pyramid stage to start with, which I rarely do at Glastonbury, kicking off with the only time I've managed to see Muse do Citizen Erased. It was emotional.
...and then, whilst lots of strange people were sat in a couple of fields watching a game of football, the rest of us were enjoying the delights of Glastonbury, including a bloomin good shout-a-long with the following two...
Not normally my kind of thing but this blew me away! Energy and Soul incarnate! Blasting the Other Stage Janelle Monae - Tightrope
One of the reasons I had to go back in 2010, after a long break, was seeing this on TV. Pendulum, I think, reaching the zenith of their career with their 2009 Glastonbury set. Gives me goosebumps watching this, and I wasn't even there lol. The 2011 Pyramid set just didn't cut it for me. It felt, lacklustre.
2009 - Pendulum - The Other Stage - Different & Remix of Clavin Harris's I'm Not Alone.
Moving on to the awesomeness of the Theatre and Cabaret @ Glasto
...and finally, Arcadia Spectacular! The South-East doing what it does... (Full screen HD required :) )
And finally, finally! Chase and Status - Sweet Sensation from 2011. THE Biggest set to hit West Holts for, well, ever! :) (Although, I missed a bit due to ambling down from, um, Radiohead in The Park I think (?), and thinking Chase started half an hour after they did lol)
As you can see from the videos, I think I captured the minute details of the Pyramid stage, from the regular June snowfall, right down to the Smarties light system :) Long Live Glasto!
P.S. I'm sooooooo sorry Michael, it was the beer :)
P.P.S. 14/2/12 - A massive thank you! to the wonderful Glasto peeps who have posted Gingerbread Glasto on the Festival Site! I am one big messy grin!
P.P.P.S. 20/2/12 - He's gone home! Have a lovely long life at Worthy Farm sweet gingerbread child of mine :)
A lovely bit of breadstuffs for those of you with friends or a gathering of people to feed. An ace Tear n Share loaf from @officialchefjae's Preheat the Oven Blog with not just a tasty cheesy topping, but the Oooooooh! factor of each piece having cheese and onion in the centre.
Ingredients:
450g White bread flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
7g Easy bake yeast (Or one sachet)
300ml lukewarm water (100ml boiling water with 200ml cold water)
2 tbsp Olive oil
1 onion
150g Mature cheddar (About50g for topping)
Preparation:
Weigh a large mixing bowl so you can work out the weight of dough at the end easily.
Sift half flour and salt into the bowl, sift rest of flour and then add yeast and sugar. Mix briefly.
Add the oil to the water and stir, add this to the flour mix whilst stirring. Mix thoroughly then leave covered for 10 mins.
Put the dough out onto a surface. Floured if the dough seems wet, oiled if the dough seems dry.
Knead for 10 mins until smooth and elastic.
Oil the bowl and put the dough back in, cover and leave to rise until doubled in size. Weigh and subtract weight of the bowl.
Heat a frying pan on a low heat, chop the onion finely and sweat in the pan for 10-15mins.
Put the onion onto some kitchen towel to cool.
Grate the cheese.
Place baking paper on a large baking tray.
Put the dough back on a surface, knock back, and knead for 5 mins.
Divide weight of dough by 19. Take one of these 19ths of dough, shape into an approx 3" diameter circle, add a bit of 100g of cheese and onion (About a 19th of it ;) ) to the centre of the circle and pinch up the edges of the dough circle around it sealing it inside. Place this ball, pinched side down on the baking tray. (You can always grate a bit more cheese)
If you have trouble trying to fit the cheese and onion in the circle of dough you can increase the amount of dough, but you will have fewer and larger pieces, and also 19 makes a nice shaped loaf of 3:4:5:4:3 blobs.
Repeat for the rest of the dough blobs leaving no more than an inch between them on the tray in their 3:4:5:4:3 arrangement (If you have 19 of the little fellas)
Cover, and leave until doubled in size.
When the dough's nearly ready, preheat the oven to 190c/180c Fan/Gas 5
When the dough is ready, sprinkle the rest of the grated cheese over the top.
Bake for about 25mins until golden brown.
Remove from oven, brush with olive oil, leave to cool on a rack.
Party.
OK, Time for some E P I C T U N E S !!!! Starting with Dire Straits - Telegraph Road
Next, we have (Unless I explode during the Blogger youtube search process) Pink Floyd - Shine on you Crazy Diamond Knebworth 1990 Stylee! (You can see me near the middle there somewhere :) )
And finally,THE BEST BAND called Jane's Addiction EVER!!! with Three Days.
These are great songs for listening to whilst sitting next to a pond late at night releasing tea lights in little boats, um, or wherever :)
Good 'ole banana bread using up all those over-ripe bananas that end up sat there because you're too busy eating chocolate truffles. A tasty moist little number this one with added fruit and nuts.
Ingredients:
250g Plain flour
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
1/4 tsp Salt
1tsp Mixed spice
1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon
50g Crushed Pecans
50g raisins
115g Butter - cubed at room temp
115g Soft brown sugar
2 tbsp Honey
2 Free range eggs
4 Bananas - Over-ripe.
Preparation:
Preheat oven to 180c/Gas 4. Grease a loaf tin - approx 23cm L x 13cm W x 7cm D. I also now use Dr Oetker Cake release spray which is bloomin brilliant!
Sift flour, bicarb, salt, spice & cinnamon into a large mixing bowl, add raisins and pecans and mix briefly.
In a seperate bowl cream together butter and brown sugar, stir in the eggs, honey and then the mashed bananas until well mixed.
Add the banana mixture to the flour mixture and mix together.
Pour into the loaf tin. You can add extra crushed pecans to the top now if required. Push them in slightly as they will roast pretty harshly on top of the loaf.
Bake for approx 60 minutes, until risen, brown, and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Leave to cool in the tin for 10 mins then turn out onto a cooling rack to cool.
Eat.
Banananananananananananananarama!
More bananas!
And MORE!!! Oh wait, no, it's Portishead - Machine Gun Live on Jools Holland's Later :)
