The (gluten free) Jane

So my friend Jane Ruffino deserves a cake. So I tried to make on that was just like her. So this is sweet and a bit tad exotic. It’s got a secret kick and a bit of spice to it too. Mainly and most importantly it’s warm and lovely inside and out.

Ingredients:

Love is absolutely key. Only ever make this cake for someone special. You will also need 200 g of butter, 200g of almond powder, 100 g of dessicated coconut, 4 large eggs, 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence, a good pinch of nutmeg and ginger, 200g of sugar and a punnet of blueberries.

Method:

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C.

Melt your butter in a large bowl over boiling water. Once it’s fully melted, take it off the heat and add all your ingredients apart from the blueberries.

Place your blueberries in your oiled cake tin.

Pour the cake mixture over the blueberries.

Leave in the oven for 30 to 40 min until your knife test is moist but not gooey.

Scrumptious Ham and Cheese Cake

So very easy. This one is to be eaten warm with a side salad or on the go as part of a picnic. I made the easiest combination as it’s what I had at home but you can really get creative with it.

Ingredients: 

100 g flour; 1 sachet of yeast; 150 g of ham or chopped bacon, 100 g of decent cheddar or some compte maybe for that extra nutty flavour, 3 large eggs, half a mug of milk, quarter of a mug of olive oil, pinch of nutmeg, black pepper.

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180C. In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients apart from the ham and cheese. Beat it well until the mixture is nice and smooth. It will be quite liquid so don’t be worried about it. This is not a bread but in fact a cake mixture as strange as this may sound. Once you’re happy with your mixture add the chopped ham and grated cheese. Pour into a buttered mould and place on a baking tray in the oven for 45 min. It will be nice and golden! The inside is fragrant, soft and delicious.

Sinfully Good Gluten Free Chocolate Cake

This one is so good you’ll be wanting it all of the time. And a bit more.

Ingredients: 

200 g of sugar, 4 eggs, 200 g of butter, 1 good pinch of salt; 1 heaped tablespoon of ground almonds, 200 g of gluten free chocolate (the dark carre fin in Lidl is gluten free or the dark high coco content Green & Black).

Method:

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C.

Melt your butter in a bowl over boiling water. Once it’s melted remove it and add your sugar, eggs, salt, ground almonds and mix until smooth. You want to give this a really good beating as air in the mixture will make the cake lighter.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over boiling water and pour it into the cake batter.

The before.

Mix at all well together.

How good does this look?

Pour into the mould.

In the oven for 20 min.

How easy was that?

Gluten Free Coconut and Raspberries Delight

This is a slice of colourful heaven on a plate. Easy, cheap and gluten free for all those allergies and intolerances.

Ingredients:

1 litre of milk, 3 eggs, 160 g caster sugar, 100 g corn flour, 2 vanilla pods, 2 teaspoons of vanilla essence, 1 punnet of raspberries and 100 g of dessicated coconut.

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

In a bowl mix the eggs, sugar, the corn flour, the vanilla essence and 125 ml of milk. If you have an electric beater use that! If you don’t, beat the mix energetically. Give it some bzzz!

Heat up the rest of the milk and vanilla pods (slice open and grate the beans out with a knife) to the boil.

Place your raspberries in your mould.

Pour the hot milk over the mixture in the bowl and mix (this really is easier with an electric beater). Pour everything in the pot and return to a low fire. You need about 30 seconds of a simmer. Keep on mixing with a spatula. This should now be slightly thick. Stir your coconut in.

Pour into the mould (remove the vanilla pods).

Place in the oven for 40 minutes. Place under the grill for a couple of minutes if necessary as the colour doesn’t always come up.

Tada!!!

There Was Whiskey In My Cake.

The gin and tonic cake last week was delicious and as the days are getting shorter and the evening colder, I am reminded that booze does warm you up a bit. So I’ve been scratching my head as what kind of tipsy new treat I could put together and here is what I came up with…

Ingredients: 

200 g of self rising flour; 200g of caster sugar; 180 g butter (softened and cubed); 4 eggs; 2 apples (peeled and grated); 1 punnet of blackberries; 1 good pinch of nutmeg; 5 shots of whiskey (I used tasty Jamieson), 2 generous tbs of maple syrup.

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 180 C. In a bowl mix the butter and sugar together until well incorporated.

Add the eggs and beat the mixture until smooth. Add the flour and cinnamon and mix until there are no lumps left. Stir the whiskey in.  Add the grated apples and blackberries and place in the baking mould.

I put that picture up and you all thought it was rice pudding. How I laughed!

Place the cake in the oven and let it bake for 35 to 40 min. Your knife should come back clean from the test. The apple doesn’t come through much but keeps it really moist so don’t be worrying about wanting the middle undercooked like you might for some other cakes. Place it on a cooling tray and take it out of the mould like so. I used a paper plate so it wouldn’t go all over the place!

Once it’s cooled down for about 10 min, prick the top with a fork and pour the syrup (mix 2 shots of whiskey with 2 tbsp of maple syrup). Take your time with it as you want the syrup to coat the top but also get inside the cake and not just drip to the sides! Trust me this is gooooood!

It’s better cooked than it looks! I didn’t get a chance to take a good picture so will try harder next time!

My Gin & Tonic cake. Mine!

Right so, I’ve seen a recipe for a G&T cake doing the rounds a while back but I wasn’t too enthused as it seemed so very lemony. My friend Aiofe sent me a recipe for something similar last week and it looked a lot more up my alley. I also happen to have a bottle of the most wonderful Scottish Gin which I opened recently and thought, sure, why not?!

The measures in the recipe Aoife gave me were all a bit funky so today I worked from scratch. I’ve never made a cake with no recipe before. I just used what I had done with other cakes and tried to fix it up with a loose look at the other recipes for a quick sanity check!

So for the cake you will need:

200 g of self rising flour; 200 g of caster sugar; 200 g of butter; 4 large eggs; the juice of 1 ripe lemon; 4 shots of your favourite gin and finally a peeled and chopped granny smith apple.

And for the drizzle:

4 shots of gin, juice of 1 lemon, a splash of tonic and 150 g of caster sugar.

I used this beauty of a Gin. It’s a small batch made in Scotland and is best served, not with cucumber, but with some sliced apples, a few ice cubes and a splash of tonic. Really really good!

Now. Stop looking at my gin. It’s mine.

Pre-heat your oven to 180C.

Get a bowl and add 200 g of butter (if you’re clever and not like me you will have cubed it and left it to soften out of the fridge for a good while. The softer the better, but not melted mind!) and 200g of sugar. Mix until nice and incorporated. It makes for a quite firm mixture. You want to now add your 4 eggs and mix well until fully smooth. You really will need to work out all the little lumps as you don’t want to add flour to a lumpy mix. It would be a royal pain you know where!

Now that your mixture is nice and smooth and shiny, add your flour and work it in. It should be nice and easy. Add the juice of 1 lemon and 4 shots of gin.

I went for this kind of shot glass. Nice and standard. No funny business.

Peel and chop your apple like so:

Add it to your cake batter and mix well. Pour into your cake tin (buttered and floured or whatever you use to prevent stickage) and place in the bottom of the oven for about 45 min. It should look like this:

Get your cake out of the tin and place it on a cooling tray over a baking tray. In a bowl mix the gin, lemon, sugar and tonic water until most of the sugar is melted down. Fork the cake all over and pour the drizzle over. Let it rest. Maybe 30 minutes.

Then tuck in! Cheers! Oh yeah… don’t eat and drive!

Death by chocolate

I was asked to bake for a little boy’s first birthday and so figured I should probably try and make something a wee bit special. A small slice of this cake will go a very long way and will easily do for 10 people. It’s a bit time consuming, maybe 3 hours all in all when you allow for the cooling but it really is worth it.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

2 x 200 g of sugar – 2 x 200 g of good dark chocolate – 2 x 200 g of butter – 2 x pinch of salt 8 large eggs – 2 x 1 tbsp of flour – alcohol to taste (I like a good splash of Galliano) – 1 jar of peanut butter (smooth is best I think).

For the ganache:

250 cl double cream – 1 tbsp of sugar – 1 tbsp of butter – 200 g of good dark chocolate.

Method: 

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C.

Melt 200 g of butter in a bowl placed over boiling water. Once the butter is melted remove and place a bowl with the 200 g of dark chocolate in chunks over the boiling water. While the chocolate is melting, in the first bowl, add the sugar, salt and flour to the melted butter. Beat until smooth. Add the 4 eggs and incorporate them.

Once the chocolate is melted, incorporate into the batter and place in the greased baking tray.

Place in the oven for about 30 min. Test with a knife and when the blade comes out semi clean, turn the oven off and take the cake out. Place cake on a tray to cool down for about 30 min.

Once the cake is cool enough (30 to 45 min), spread about half a jar of peanut butter on top. Best done very delicately as the cake is fragile. Use a large flat knife if you can.

Start making the 2nd cake. It’s the same as the first one. While the cake is baking make the ganache. In a small pot put the cream, the butter and sugar and heat to the boil. Remove from the heat and add the 200 g of chocolate in small chunks. Let it rest for 2/3 minutes before whisking gently. Keep stirring until you have a smooth and glossy texture.

Once the second cake is cooked and cooled down, place it on top of the first one.

Once the ganache has thickened and cooled down starts spooning it on the top of the cake. Use a spatula to bring the drips back onto the side. This takes a fair bit of time but will work out in the end.

I made 3 of those cakes today. One of them was minus the peanut butter for people with allergies and so I just replaced it  with a layer of ganache! Easy peasy.

Warm and spicy coffee yogurt cake

I’m going to visit a friend on Friday and I said I would bring dessert. Turns out coffee cake is her very favourite. Now I’ve never made coffee cake before and in fact I’m really only starting to bake.

When my granny first started to show me stuff in the kitchen, she said to me that one of the most basic cakes is the yoghurt cake. So today, I’m bringing it back to basics and I made a coffee and yoghurt cake. This was a trial run for Friday and I’ll be a bit more generous with the spices, but man does it taste good already!

Ingredients:

1 pot of natural yogurt, 2 pots of sugar (I used brown sugar), 2 pots of self raising flour, 1/2 pot of oil (I used olive oil), 3 eggs, 3 teaspoons of instant coffee, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Method: 

Preheat the oven to 180 C. In a bowl, pour the yogurt. Rinse the pot (125 g) and use it as a measure for the rest of the ingredients. Add you sugar, flour and oil, crack your eggs. In the pot, put your 3 teaspoons of instant coffee and mix it with a few drops of water (unless it’s already fine powder), pour the mixture in and add your spices.

Butter the tray and shake some flour on the bottom. Pour the mixture in and place in the oven for 30 mn.

It’ll come out looking something like this:

 

Tunisian Orange Celebration Cake

Impressive huh?

This was a cake I made for Christmas day but you could try it for any celebration. It’s not my recipe but an interpretation of several recipes on the internet that I combined. The links are to the various components and then I’ll tell you how I put it together as well as the little alcoholic addition that made it just superb. This recipe takes a day to do (and longer for the ice cream) but it is worth it.

So to start you need a round cake tin.

The cake mix is flour free although it does use breadcrumbs. I don’t know whether you can use gluten free bread but if you try and it works let us know.

The cake itself is a Tunisian Orange Cake… the recipe is here

The quantities were a little too much for my cake tin as it does rise quite a lot. I guess I need a deeper cake tin or a wider one.

I made two of cakes and they turned out about two/two and half inches deep. I added a glug of Cointreau in to the drizzling syrup, my French blood demanded it.

I made some Candied Orange Peel for the filling and decoration… recipe here

I diced most of the Candied Orange Peel and put a layer of it over one of the cakes, then I put the second cake on top. Don’t do this while they are still warm.

You’ll end up with a sandwich of orangey goodness.

I kept four slices for the decoration on top.

In the same cake tin I made a Meringue, flavoured with a teaspoon of Orange Flower Water… recipe here

When the Meringue was cool, that went on the top of the cakes.

Just for the hell of it, I made some Orange Butter Icing… recipe here

I smeared that around the sides of the cake and I added a little red and yellow food colouring for fun.  Careful of the red, it’s strong.

Finally I did some Sugarwork Caramel over an oiled bowl… recipe here

Do this at the last moment otherwise it will slump and melt.

The cake was served with Cardamom Ice Cream… recipe here

It was unbelievably amazing and although it take time and patience to make, the result is sublime.