sticky date cake

With snow forecast this week I felt the only way to ease myself into the cold, winter weather was with a slab of cake packed with juicy sultanas, raisins and sticky dates.

This is basically a boiled tea loaf recipe (or Smiddy cake if you're Scottish), but condensed milk is used in place of sugar to add a lovely caramel flavour to the cake. I'm one of those people who enjoys drinking condensed milk straight from the tin so it saddened me that the recipe used a whole tin. There wasn't much left for my sweet tooth to scrape!

Interestingly there are no eggs in this recipe, so there wasn't much rise, but the cake has plenty of moisture and a very soft texture.

My Dad in particular absolutely loved this cake. I think we all liked how deep each slice was, a bit like scaling a cliff face! Stupidly I thought this cake would last us a while due to its size, but it barely lasted three days.

As it's such an old fashioned, homely cake I thought I'd photograph it with Mum's 1970s Denby which we picked up from a charity shop for a couple of pounds last month. I suppose like a boiled fruit cake it's something you'll either love or loathe. Personally I rather like the brown, retro charm.

Sticky date cake

Recipe found on pg26 of "Vintage Cakes" by Jane Brocket. Published 2012 Jacqui Small

275g medjool dates, halved and chopped into sixths
175g raisins
225g sultanas
250g butter
275ml water
1 x 397g tin condensed milk
300g plain flour
1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp orange marmalade

Gently heat the dried fruit, butter, water and condensed milk in a large heavy based saucepan until the butter has melted. Do not over stir as you don't want to break up the dates. Bring the pan to the boil and continue to boil over a medium heat for 3 minutes until the mixture has turned a darker colour and smells of caramel. Stir the mixture occasionally to stop it from sticking. Leave the mixture to cool.

Preheat the oven to gas mark 3/160C and grease and line a 20cm round tin with baking parchment. Once the mixture is cool/lukewarm, sift in the flour and bicarbonate of soda and stir on the marmalade. Mix everything together until well combined and spoon into the prepared tin, levelling the surface. This mixture almost fills the tin but don't worry as it doesn't rise much.

Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 2- 2 1/2 hours (mine took 2hrs 5 mins, and my oven is usually on the slow side). Check the cake after 1 hour to check the top isn't browning too quickly. If it is (mine was) lay a double thickness of tinfoil over the top of the tin and continue baking. Your cake will be fully baked when a metal skewer/knife inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave your cake to cool in the tin.

addicted to collage

I've discovered the joys of photo collaging and it's quickly becoming a serious addiction. I want to collage EVERYTHING.

*pastel china*

I may even start collaging specifically by colour soon....

 *pyrex*

*green dresser lovin'*

*favourite things*

*I love tea*

I've been using PicMonkey, a free online photo editing software for all my collages. This is not a sponsored post for them by the way, I'm just *very* fond of their software at the moment and felt the need to share the collage love.

Now, what can I collage next....

mini fudge cheesecakes

Last week I had a craving for cheesecake. It somehow felt too indulgent to make a big cheesecake so I made mini ones instead. I'm fully aware that I probably ate so many that I might as well have made a whole cheesecake, but please humour me.

There's absolutely nothing healthy about this recipe. Nothing. But sometimes you need to make something as unashamedly fattening and sweet as this because nothing else will hit the spot.

Creamy and fudgey with a buttery biscuit base (you know I had to go there!) What more could you want? I loved how cute and dainty these looked too.

I also used a fudge which was almost more like a tablet/candy, so it had that extra sugary, melt in the mouth quality. Perfect for an indulgent cheesecake.

Mini fudge cheesecakes

This is what I did:

150g crushed Hobnob biscuits

40-50g butter, melted

100g cream cheese

300ml double cream, lightly whipped

125g fudge, plus extra for grating on top. You can never have too much fudge!

First, cut thin strips of greaseproof paper/baking parchment and lay in the base of 9 muffin tin cups. This will help you to remove the cheesecakes from the tin later. To make the cheesecake bases, mix together the crushed biscuits and melted butter and press into the bottom of the cups. Put the tray in the fridge to chill while you make the filling.

Beat the cream cheese until soft. Grate the fudge and add roughly 100g of fudge to the cream cheese and scatter the rest over the bases. In a separate bowl, lightly whip the cream and carefully fold this into the cream cheese/fudge mixture. Once combined, spoon this mixture on top of all the cheesecake bases and grate a little more fudge on top if you're feeling decadent. Leave to chill in the fridge overnight, or at least 6 hours, before serving.

spider cookies

I don't know why I just used the word "cookies". To me they're biscuits. It's the British in me I suppose.

Anyway, spider biscuits/cookies... I made these for Hallowe'en. I found the recipe here when I was browsing for Hallowe'en themed bakes last week and their cuteness appealed to me.

I didn't have any golden caster sugar left so I used ordinary caster sugar and I misread the recipe by only adding 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract when it's meant to be 1 tablespoon, so the flavour was a little underwhelming (although still perfectly edible.) At least I know that was my own doing rather than the recipe itself.

I also used two giant chocolate buttons sandwiches together for the spiders' bodies instead of minstrels and little edible pearls for eyes as I didn't have any silver balls.

And I didn't chill the dough for 2 hours before rolling out, I shoved it in the freezer for half an hour instead. I bet you're starting to think I didn't read the recipe at all!

The last thing to note is that this recipe makes a lot of biscuits, I think I had about 50 biscuits in total. It tested my patience drawing that many spider legs, but it was definitely worth it in the end as they had a lot of character and charm. Everybody seemed to enjoy them which is always the main thing.