mixed berry and lemon drizzle cake

A fresh, fruity and zingy cake. Perfect for a sunny, socially distanced summer picnic in my mum and dad's garden a few weeks ago.

It's based on this recipe, another classic from BBC Good Food's website which I've baked before. I actually made the original version (with lime) the previous week and thoroughly enjoyed it but then fancied trying it again with lemon instead.

The recipe states to use an 8" square tin but like the previous times I've made it I used a 9" round tin (it holds the equivalent volume) as I find round cakes easier and more pleasing to slice.

Usually I buy fresh berries for baking but this time I used a bag of frozen mixed berries (a mixture of blackberries, blueberries, raspberries and red currants, maybe even blackcurrants?!) as that's what I had to hand. This worked really nicely and was also a lot cheaper. I'll definitely do this again.

And for the first time ever the berries didn't all sink to the bottom. I don't know if this had something to do with using frozen over fresh or the consistency of the batter. Regardless, I did a little happy dance when the cake came out the oven.

As far as I'm concerned this is a complete winner of a cake. It's a decent size too for feeding a family, although no judgement from me if you plan to eat it all yourself. 

black tea and blackberry cupcakes with honey cream cheese icing

I'm going to come out and say it... this is one of my favourite things I've baked in a long time.

To be honest I've felt dissatisfied with the majority of my bakes since the new cooker arrived back in May. It has taken a while to make friends with the new oven and I've ended up in a bit of a baking slump. Both my work and my hobbies are practical/creative so it's inevitable that something temporarily falls by the wayside and recently it has been my baking.

Therefore I was delighted when Whittard contacted me last month to ask if I'd like to play with some of their hot chocolates and teas. I felt it was the perfect opportunity to throw myself into some baking and get creative. These cupcakes certainly did the trick.

I really don't know how to describe the flavour of the sponge other than delicious. You wouldn't say "ooh that tastes of black tea" but the tea definitely adds a subtle depth of flavour, or richness perhaps, as well as turning the cupcakes an attractive golden colour.

I initially considered lemon and honey as flavours to compliment the tea, but decided against lemon as it has increasingly become my default baking flavour. As I still wanted a sharp element I chose blackberries instead. I love the contrast in flavour between the tart blackberry and the sweet, creamy honey icing. It's a really satisfying combination.

I also love the burst of colour from the blackberries in the centre of each cupcake - a cheerful surprise on a dreary November day.

I think the Whittard 1886 Blend was an excellent choice for this bake as it's a lovely strong, rich tea. I find it very comforting to drink, like a big tea hug. The other black tea I was sent, Whittard's Original, has a lighter, almost citrus-y flavour. It's very refreshing and I find I add less milk as I don't think it needs it. At the moment I'm favouring the 1886 more - I need a good, strong tea to keep me going in winter!

What's your favourite tea at the moment? Any other Whittard fans?

Black tea and blackberry cupcakes with honey cream cheese icing

Adapted from Earl Grey Cupcakes in the Hummingbird Bakery's "Cake Days" book.

cupcakes:

3 black tea bags. (Whittard's 1886 Blend or an equally strong flavoured black tea.)

80g (3oz) unsalted butter, softened

280g (10oz) caster sugar

240g (8.5oz) plain flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

240ml (7fl oz) semi skimmed milk

2 large eggs

a small tub of blackberries

icing:

250g icing sugar

125g cream cheese

50g unsalted butter, softened

1 tbsp honey

Almost bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan then remove from the heat. Add the 3 tea bags and leave to steep for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 190C/375F/Gas 5 and line a muffin tin with cupcake cases.

Mix the butter, sugar, flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl (on a slow speed) until it resembles breadcrumbs in texture. Squeeze out the teabags and remove from the milk then pour the tea infused milk into a measuring jug. Top it up to 200ml if it has dipped below then add the eggs and whisk together with a fork. Pour 3/4 of the egg milk mixture into the flour mixture and mix until thick, smooth and combined. Add the rest of the milk and mix again for about a minute until smooth. Fill the cupcake cases until half full, pop a blackberry in the centre of each case, then cover over with more mixture until roughly two thirds full. This batter easily filled 16 cases.

Bake in the oven for 18-20 minutes until well risen and springy to touch. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling. In a large bowl mix all the icing ingredients together. I recommend initially combining everything with a spoon to prevent massive icing sugar dust clouds with the mixer! Once smooth, spoon over the cooled cupcakes with a palette knife. Feel free to reduce the icing amounts as I had enough icing left over to cover perhaps 3 more cupcakes.

Disclaimer: I was sent products to bake with as Whittard recognise I'm a crazy cake lady with an uncontrollable hot chocolate and tea addiction. They're a brand I enjoy and have purchased from before. I was not paid for this post and all opinions expressed are my own.

browned butter berry banana bread

Well that was fun alliteration. Let's say it again. Browned butter berry banana bread!

There's 50g of white chocolate chips in there too but mentioning that in the title would have spoiled my fun.

This is actually the second time within a week I've baked this loaf and my last bake before these was also banana based. The warmer weather has sent me on a banana baking loop! Within a day or two of buying bananas they seem to turn brown. Not that I'm complaining, I like banana loaf.

For a slight change I decided to brown the butter for this loaf as I love the flavour of browned butter in blondies and figured it would work well in a banana loaf. Sadly I didn't detect much of a difference in flavour, probably because there was enough extra flavour with the berries, cinnamon and vanilla, but occasionally you'd get a little hint of the sweet, biscuity flavour from the browned butter.

I love how banana bread is so simple and easily adaptable. You can substitute and/or chuck in extras to your heart's content. Victoria sponges are fantastic for similar reasons. I nearly didn't bother posting this cake as I have posted a couple of variations of the same recipe already, but the vibrant berries bursting from the cake's surface were too enticing not to photograph. It's also good to remind people not to chuck out dodgy looking bananas. Look at what you can produce with them!

Browned butter berry banana bread

Recipe adapted from Hummingbird Bakery's banana loaf

250g brown sugar (I used half soft light brown sugar, half light muscovado brown sugar)

2 large eggs

2 large brown bananas, weighing roughly 250g

300g plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste

140g unsalted butter, melted and browned

50g (ish) white chocolate chips (optional! They were lurking in my baking cupboard)

150g mixed berries (I used frozen)

Preheat the oven to 170C/160 Fan/Gas 3 and line a 25 x 12cm loaf tin. Melt the butter in a saucepan and gently cook for about 5 minutes until the white solids turn golden and the butter starts to smell biscuity and sweet. Set aside to cool before adding to the cake mixture.

Whisk together the sugar and eggs for a minute or two until well incorporated and lighter in colour. Add the mashed bananas and vanilla bean paste and mix again. In a separate bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon then add to the sugar mixture. Mix thoroughly. Pour in the (cooled) melted butter and mix until everything is fully combined. Lightly coat the berries in a small amount flour and stir half of them into the mixture along with the white chocolate drops. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin, level the surface and scatter the remaining berries on top. 

Bake in the centre of the oven for roughly 1hr 15 minutes, checking on the cake after an hour. As the surface was quite brown I lay a piece of baking parchment on top to stop it burning for the last 15 minutes of baking. The loaf is cooked when firm to touch and a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out to finish cooling on a wire cooling rack.

berry bakewell cake

I'd like to start off by saying a huge thank you to everybody who left advice on my last post regarding my not so successful bundt. The general consensus is that I should invest in some cake release spray so that's what I'm going to try next. I shall not be defeated by that bundt tin!

Hello photogenic plugs and sockets.

Now onto a cake which was a total success, woohoo! My Mum is a huge fan of almondy, bakewell flavours so I decided to make this pimped up Victoria sponge for her birthday last week.

It's a very simple cake but the addition of ground almonds and berries make it that bit more special. Basically if you love victoria sponges and bakewell tarts then you'll love this cake.

The nephews are excellent fire extinguishers.

I used frozen berries in this cake but I imagine fresh would taste even better. I was a bit worried about adding too many in case they would all sink and make the sponges soggy but thankfully this wasn't the case. If anything I think I could get away with adding a few more next time.

We have red blinds in our kitchen so if you're wondering why all my photographs are rose tinted that's why. I haven't gone all instagram toaster filter on you.

Ahhh just looking at that photo makes me want to bake the cake again. Apparently the last slice tasted even better the following day.

Berry Bakewell Cake

I naturally bake in imperial measurements (I'm old school like that) but I've converted the weights into grams. I hope they're right!

8oz/ 225g caster sugar

8oz/ 225g margarine (I used Vitalite as I wanted to make the cake dairy free)

3 large duck eggs (hen eggs are fine, as long as the overall weight is roughly 8oz)

8oz/ 225g self-raising flour

1 oz/ 28g ground almonds

a few drops of almond essence (add to taste)

roughly 2-3 ounces/ about 75g mixture of berries (fresh or frozen) for scattering

a few tablespoons of strawberry jam

Icing sugar for dusting

Grease and line two 20cm round cake sandwich tins. Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C. Beat together the sugar and margarine for about 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, adding a tablespoon of the flour if the mixture starts to curdle/split. Add a few drops of almond essence (to taste) along with the rest of the flour and ground almonds and mix until everything is fully combined. Divide the mixture between the two cake tins. In a separate bowl, give the berries a light coating of flour to stop them sinking in the mixture (you can cut some of the heavier berries such a blackberries in half to reduce weight.) Lightly press the berries into the surface of both cakes. 

Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for roughly 25 minutes or until both sponges are golden, well risen and spring back to touch. Leave to cool in the tins for a few minutes before turning out onto a wire cooling rack. Once cold, sandwich together with a generous amount of jam and serve with a dusting of icing sugar on top.

apple, blackberry and almond crumble

Last week mum and I had a crumble craving. Embarrassingly, I could probably count the number of times I've made a crumble on one hand. They're so quick and easy to make, not to mention incredibly tasty and comforting, that I have no idea why I don't make them more often.

Probably because I would become morbidly obese if I allowed myself to make pudding every night.

But at least with crumble you get to fool yourself that it's nearly healthy. Look, it has *two* types of fruit!

Sweet, buttery crumble with tart blackberries and apples. What's not to like? I toyed with the idea of using cinnamon but went with almond instead. I liked the sweetness and extra texture it added to the crumble topping. 

Apologies for the shoddy night time photographs, the grainy quality is pretty horrific. No amount of brightness or contrast could help, but the crumble was too tasty not to share.

Apple, blackberry and almond crumble

I didn't particularly follow a recipe, but this is roughly what I did:

filling:

1 small packet of blackberries

5 or 6 small eating apples - peeled, cored and cut into chunks

demerara sugar for sprinkling over the fruit

crumble:

100g plain flour

100g butter, cubed plus extra for greasing the dish

100g demerara sugar

50g rolled oats

50g ground almonds

handful of flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 180C/160 fan/Gas 4 and butter a small ovenproof dish. Cut up enough fruit to sufficiently fill your dish. Once you're happy with the amount, sprinkle demerara sugar on top. The amount you use will depend on personal taste or the type of fruit used. At this point you could choose to soften the apples by lightly simmering/stewing them in a pan with a small amount of water, but we were lazy and didn't so our apples were still a little bit crunchy (which I quite liked.)

To make the crumble topping, rub together the butter and flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, oats and ground almonds. Sprinkle your crumble mixture on top of the fruit in the dish and scatter a handful of flaked almonds on top. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for roughly 40 minutes until the crumble topping has browned. Serve warm with custard, cream or ice-cream. Personally, I'm a fan of Bird's custard :)

Blackberry bakewell cake

The recipe for this cake actually calls for raspberries, but after last week's unfortunate raspberry incident I was in no hurry to revisit them. In fact I went as far as glaring at the raspberries in the supermarket and bought blackberries instead. Much more seasonal not to mention bug free, hurray!

I toyed with the idea of replacing the vanilla extract with almond extract to ramp up the bakewell flavour (and I see I had the same thought when I baked this cake last year) but I came to the conclusion that the sweetness of vanilla would compliment and balance the super tart blackberries.

I also see from last year's post that I mentioned this cake would be good served warm with custard. I can now testify this as that's exactly how we ate it at the weekend and the waft of vanilla from the reheated cake is amazing. 

Custard snobs will throw their hands up in horror because we made custard from the powder. Quite frankly I don't care, I love custard made from powder!

This is definitely a cake I can recommend to almond fans. My mum was delighted that I revisited this recipe as she loved it the first time round. The recipe can be found on BBC Good Food. and the only change I made was my choice of berry. As my blackberries were quite large I cut them in half to spread them evenly through the mixture. I also found my cake took an extra 15 minutes to bake.

Spooky blackberry and white chocolate cupcakes

There was some left over white chocolate icing from my birthday cake in the freezer so I thought I'd use it for a Hallowe'en bake: white chocolate buttercream ghosties on a sponge with a gory blackberry centre.

 

I love the little ghostie faces, they were fun to paint on. I'm always slightly apprehensive about using the circular nozzle for piping icing on cupcakes because, well, they can look a bit like *whisper* poo, but I hope the ghost faces stop anyone else from thinking that.

 

 

Although not bad, I wasn't 100% happy with my sponge. I think they could have been fluffier. I used my usual recipe but decided to add 4 mashed blackberries to the batter (as well as a whole blackberry inside each cupcake) but the batter looked too wet so I added a little extra flour. Perhaps I ended up over mixing, or maybe it was the addition of the pureed blackberries, but they didn't turn out the way they usually do. Strangely they tasted much better the second day.

 

This is my favourite photograph. "Oh no don't eat me!"
 

I've also decided to enter my cupcakes into this month's Hallowe'en themed Calendar Cakes hosted by Dollybakes. Calendar Cakes is a baking challenge alternately hosted by Rachel from Dollybakes and Laura from Lauralovescake with a different theme set at the start of each month. I've never taken part in any of the baking challenges, I'm not really sure why, but I'm doing it this month! The closing date is on Wednesday so there's still time to enter if you fancy joining in with the fun.

 

Blackberry and white chocolate cupcakes

I used the equal weight method. My three eggs weighed 6oz (about 170g, sorry but my brain is naturally programmed to Imperial measurements) so this is what I used:
 

6oz caster sugar

6oz Stork margarine

6oz eggs, lightly beaten

6oz self-raising flour

a packet of blackberries
 

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4 and line a muffin tin with cases. Cream the fat and sugar for about five minutes until light and fluffy. Add the eggs along with a little of the flour to prevent curdling then add the rest of the flour in one go along with 4 mashed blackberries and mix until just incorporated. (At this point I added a little extra flour as the mixture looked a bit too wet.) Put a good teaspoon full of the batter into each case and plop a blackberry on top. Fill the cases until 3/4 full with the remaining batter, covering the blackberry. Pop the tray in the centre of the oven for 20-25 minutes until lightly golden and firm to touch. Cool in the tin for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling. I found my mixture made 13 large cupcakes (yes, annoyingly I needed an extra tin for one cupcake) but it depends what size you want them.

 

 

Unfortunately I don't have a recipe for the icing as it was my mum that originally made it and she just mixed to taste. It's basically a bog standard butter icing mixed with a block of melted white chocolate. If you make too much (like she did) you can always freeze left overs. It defrosted and whisked up beautifully.

semolina berry cake and weekend purchases

This has got to be one of my favourite summer cakes. I found the recipe in a newspaper supplement, although I can't remember which one as it was a few years ago. The colours of the berries look stunning and it has such a fresh, juicy flavour. A perfect summer dessert, polished off with a nice cup of tea and extra berries.

Semolina berry cake

175g self-raising flour

100g semolina

175g caster sugar

175g butter, melted

juice and rind of 1/2 a lemon

2 large eggs

200g(ish) of berries (e.g. raspberries, blueberries, blackberries. As long as it's not strawberries)

Preheat the oven to gas mark 4. Mix together the dry ingredients (flour, semolina, sugar). Melt the butter then pour into the dry mixture. Add eggs one at a time, then juice and rind of 1/2 a lemon. Mix together and spoon into a 24cm greased springform tin. Scatter berries over the top and gently press them in a little. Bake in the middle of the oven for approx. 45 mins or until golden on top and firm to touch. (Have a piece while it's still warm, it tastes amazing!)

And onto the weekend purchases.... I was in town on Saturday and couldn't resist buying these shoes. Not only was I seduced by the cute bow and colour, but they were also £10 in the sale. Hurray! It's also great to buy pretty shoes for a change rather than plain work shoes which support my feet (as I'm on them all day).

I have been lusting after this tin for quite a while online, so when I saw it in town I just had to have it. Here it is casually sitting on my Cath Kidston bedding :)

I love the colour, the font, the handle on the lid, even the feel of the tin (hmm, starting to sound creepy. I don't go round shops rubbing tins, honest!)

A girl can never have too many pretty shoes or cake tins can she?