Fiona's birthday malteser cake

I made a chocolate malteser cake for Fiona's birthday today. The recipe is from Cakes Galore by Valerie Barret. Although I have only used the book once book, I would recommend it for the photography alone. I really need to use it more often. The batter for this cake tasted so good, full of chocolatey, malty goodness.

For photography I decided to go with a red background, inspired by the red malteser bag!

The icing tasted amazing, the malty flavour definitely came through. However I found the cake itself a little bit dry.

Easter eggs

Easter baking always leads to blowing and decorating eggs, so this is what I did with the eggs I used for the lemon buns yesterday.

Lemon love

I unexpected bought a three tier cake stand from the Curiosity Shop in Kirkwall today. It was only £18 and begging to go to a loving home (mine!) Look at how pretty it is!

The yellow it's so chintzy and cheery, and perfect for spring. I assembled the cakestand as soon as I got home and baked some lemon buns to continue the yellow theme. Then, naturally, I had to have a little tea party to celebrate the cakestand's arrival.

Carrot cake

Oh how I love carrot cake. Proper, chunky carrot cake. I wanted to make it last night but discovered that the philly cheese in the fridge was mouldy. I wasn't going to ice a cake with mouldy icing and I certainly wasn't going to bake a cake without any icing to put on it. 

So today I made the carrot cake, or perhaps I should say yesterday. I started late in the evening and the cake only came out the oven after midnight. Who cares, it's amazing! I always use the same recipe and haven't been able to try others as I love this one so damn much.

Frosted carrot cake

Recipe from Children's Quick and Easy Cook Book - I got this for Christmas when I was about 10. It was first cookbook and I still occasionally use it!

225g (8oz) carrots

225g (8oz) self-raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

140g (5oz) soft brown muscovado sugar

grated zest of 1 orange

2 tsp ground cinnamon

115g (4oz) chopped roasted hazelnuts or chopped walnuts (I use walnuts)

55g (2oz) desiccated coconut

2 large eggs

150ml (1/4 pint) sunflower oil

juice of 1 orange

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Grease and line a 20cm (8 inch) round, loose bottomed cake tin. Scrub or peel the carrots, trim off their tops, then grate. Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl then mix in the grated carrots, salt, sugar, orange zest, cinnamon, nuts and coconut. Beat the eggs. Add the the eggs, sunflower oil and orange juice to the cake mixture and mix everything together well. Spoon the mixture into the cake tin and bake for 60-75 minutes until a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean. (I usually put a layer of greaseproof paper over the cake for the last 15 minutes to stop the top from burning.) Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes before turning it out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

I usually make up my own icing to taste. Maybe roughly 115g (4oz) cream cheese, 30g (1oz) butter, 55g (2oz) icing sugar and a squeeze of honey and lemon juice to taste. Basically I just add enough of each to achieve a good spreadable consistency and nice flavour. 

Banana and chocolate cupcakes

In the wise words of Craig Revel Horwood, these cupcakes are "Ah-may-ZING!!!" (Thanks Alice!) They are deliciously light and moist and chocolate buttercream icing is always damn tasty. I am most definitely making these again.

Cursing cake

Well there's nothing like a massive virus attack threatening to destroy your computer to make you back up all your files.

I made a malteser cake with a friend on sunday night after finding the recipe from a blog a few weeks ago. It was a Nigella Lawson recipe so I thought it would be pretty reliable, however our cake just didn't turn out right (and this was our second attempt!) Here's a quick photo I took on my phone.

It took double the length of time to cook and didn't rise particularly well. There also seemed to be a lack of butter in the recipe(?) So off I went on Tuesday night to browse other malteser cakes on google images to see if other bloggers had similar problems. Then BANG!!! My computer went nuts saying it was being attacked by various scary viruses. Thankfully I have a Norton programme so it seemed to sort everything out but holy crap it gave me a fright.

But seriously, cake? A picture of a CAKE started all these viruses? I knew popular sites like youtube or myspace were bad for catching viruses but pictures of malteser cake from blogs?!

No more cake browsing on google images for me then.