banoffee loaf cake

Mary Berry's plain banana loaf has become my favourite banana loaf recipe to play around with, whether it's chucking in extra ingredients or slathering on a different icing. This time I decided to add a soft set fudge/toffee icing to create a banoffee flavour and mmmmmm, it's good.

My cake certainly won't win any beauty contests (take note, the icing really does set as soon as you pour it onto the cake, don't try to spread it) but it most definitely tastes delicious. Loaf cakes are meant to look a bit more rustic anyway...

I really don't know what else to say, other than I'm tempted to make more of the fudge icing just to eat by itself. That's probably not the best idea though when I have a dentist appointment in 2 weeks. Don't want to rot my teeth completely before then. I'm fairly sure I need at least one filling as it is!

Banoffee loaf cake

Loaf recipe from Mary Berry. Icing recipe from Primrose Bakery.

loaf:

100g (4oz) softened butter/margarine

175g (6oz) golden caster sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 bananas

225g (8oz) self-raising flour

1 level tsp baking powder

2 tbsp milk

icing:
45g unsalted butter
4 and 1/2 tbsp semi-skimmed milk
165g light, soft brown sugar
180g icing sugar, sifted
1/2 tsp good quality vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180C/Fan 160C/Gas 4 and line a 2lb loaf tin with baking parchment. Put all the ingredients except the chocolate chips in a large bowls and mix together for about 2 minutes until smooth and well combined. Stir in the chocolate chips before pouring the mixture into the prepared loaf tin. 

Bake in the middle of the oven for roughly 1 hour until well risen, firm to touch and skewer inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

For the icing, combine the butter, milk and brown sugar in a heavy based saucepan on the hob over a high heat. Stirring continuously, bring the mixture to a boil. Allow it to boil for 1 minute, then remove from the heat and stir in half of the icing sugar. Allow the mixture to cool slightly, then add the rest of the icing sugar and vanilla extract and stir until it thickens to the desired consistency. Pour over the cake and leave to set. If it sets too quickly in the pan you can always soften it up by putting it back on the hob over a low heat.

white chocolate and hazelnut praline cake

The combination of white chocolate and hazelnut has been rattling around my brain for ages so last weekend I finally decided to pair them together in a cake. I'm happy to report that it turned out rather well.

 Uggghhh night time photography. Sorry. 

Towards the end of last year I was kindly sent a tub of praline white hot chocolate powder from Whittard along with other goodies (you can find the other bakes I made from these here and here.) It was a special flavour brought out for their hot chocolate month last October but I see from their website that the flavour has been brought back. YES! I'm definitely buying more because oh my word that drink was good. It tasted like a ferrero rocher melted into a white hot chocolate. In other words, it was heavenly. Sadly it never made it into a baked good, but I've recreated the flavour in a special cake for Mother's Day last Sunday.

The sponge is packed with nutty flavour. It might be a bit of a pain to roast, skin and grind hazelnuts but it is definitely worth the effort for the added flavour. The richness of the sponge was complimented by a sweet, creamy white chocolate buttercream and topped with a crunchy hazelnut praline.

PacMan cake angle

It's definitely the kind of cake where you should cut relatively slim slices as it's very filling. As you can see from my photos I cut my usual greedy sized portions but I really struggled to finish my slice. I do not like to be defeated by cake though, so I spaced my eating over an hour. Victory was mine!

Mum's only complaint was that there wasn't enough icing and I definitely agree. I originally intended to ice the sides as well but didn't have enough icing so I made do with just filling and topping the cake. If, like us, you are bonkers for white chocolate buttercream then I'd recommend increasing the amounts, perhaps even doubling it. There's no such thing as too much white chocolate buttercream.

White chocolate, hazelnut and praline cake

sponge:
250g butter, softened

250g soft light brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

4 large eggs

150g plain flour

1 heaped tsp baking powder

150g hazelnuts - roasted, skinned and ground

1 tbsp milk

icing:

100g white chocolate, chopped

100g butter, softened
175g icing sugar

praline:

100g whole hazelnuts, roasted and skinned

50g caster sugar

Line a baking tray with parchment and spread the hazelnuts for both the sponge and praline on top. Roast in the oven at a relatively low heat, at something like 130 or 140C, for around 5-10 minutes. Keep a close eye on them as it really doesn't take long and you don't want them to burn! Once roasted, rub their skins off with a teatowel. Grind 150g of the hazelnuts in a blender (for the sponge) until they're a similar consistency to ground almonds.

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4 and grease and line two 8 inch round cake tins. Beat together the butter and sugar for 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla extract, then the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each addition. In a separate bowl mix together the plain flour, baking powder and ground hazelnuts before adding to the main bowl along with the milk. Mix everything together until fully combined. 

Divide the mixture between the two tins and bake in the centre of the oven for 25-30 minutes until well risen, firm to touch and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. I noticed that mine were starting to colour too much just after 20 minutes but weren't fully baked so I put a layer of greaseproof paper over the top to stop the surface from burning. Once fully baked, remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tins for a few minutes before turning out to finish cooling on a wire rack.

For the icing, melt the white chocolate in short bursts in a bowl in a microwave or in a heatproof bowl over a small pan of simmering water (whichever method you prefer.) Once cool, add to the butter and icing sugar and beat together for about 5 minutes until soft and creamy. Use this to fill and top the cooled cake.

For the praline, put the caster sugar in a heavy bottomed pan and cook over a relatively low heat. Watch it like a hawk as it really doesn't take long for the sugar to dissolve and caramelise. Once it turns a nice caramel colour chuck in the remaining whole hazelnuts, give it a quick mix and quickly dump onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. Once cool and set, roughly chop up the praline and press it onto the top of the iced cake.

I knitted another hat!

Don't fall off your chairs with excitement, but I have successfully knitted a second hat. This time, I followed Sirdar 9060 Click Chunky's top right view with a chunky Stylecraft acrylic/wool mix in my favourite shade of pink - a dusky raspberry.

Check me out taking photographs outdoors. I was walking along the beach as the sun was setting and thought I'd document my hat while I was there and the hat was on my head. Doesn't it match my favourite scarf nicely?

  Hell yeah I wear dolly mixture earrings.

I love the fun bobble effect. It's like a textured polka dot and surprisingly not too difficult for a beginner like myself to achieve. The only thing which confused me was the first row after the ribbing as my increased stitches left fairly visible holes. I'm not sure whether this is normal or I increased incorrectly/should have used a different type of increasing stitch. It's not worth losing sleep over though.

As the ribbing was a similar size to my first hat (slightly bigger actually) I decided to stick with needles a size and a half smaller than recommended. It's a bit annoying that I'm missing the "slouch" feature of the hat pattern but I think the ribbing would have been too big on my head had I sized up. I didn't want a repeat of the spaceship hat.

Interestingly the hat has a bit of slouch on my Mum's head. It can't just be that I have more hair (don't let the shortness deceive you, I have incredibly thick hair) so I must have a bigger curve at the back of my head which fills the hat. Perhaps I'm part alien. Who knows.

If I knit this pattern again, which I'm bound to, I'll either add an extra bobble row before decreasing or knit with needles just a half size bigger to see if I can get a slouchier fit. It really is a fine balance between looking relaxed and... pancakey.

By the way I've joined the cool knitter kidz on Ravelry. It's all a bit foreign to me so feel free to say hi if you're over there too. My username is jotriestoknit :)

lemon drizzle poppy seed bundt

At times I think my blog could be renamed What Do You Make Of My Lemon Cake? because I bake them so often. As much as I try to use other flavours, I inevitably return to lemon. It's a firm favourite.

There was a pile of lemons sitting in the fruit bowl last week so I searched the interwebz for baking inspiration and landed on this beautiful bundt recipe on Sally's Baking Addiction. It's packed with lemon flavour and different from my usual lemon cakes in that it also contains poppy seeds and buttermilk.

The buttermilk provides a lovely, creamy balance to the punchy, lemon flavour. I also like that it gives the sponge a soft yet weightier texture, which is perfect for bundt moulds. I should use buttermilk more often.

There were two near disasters with this cake though, the first being the lemon soaking syrup. All the ingredients are weighed using American cup measurements so I got a chance to use my heart shaped cup measures, which are all handily strung together on a loop. Handy for storing, yes, but not so handy when you have just filled 1/2 cup of squeezed lemon juice and the weight of the other of the measures pulls it off the worktop as you pick it up, catapulting lemon juice across your kitchen.

I wasn't best pleased, although it made the kitchen floor smell very fresh.

Luckily I had a spare lemon although I did need to soak up some lemon juice from the floor with a kitchen towel to fill up the cup measure. Before you judge, the floor was clean so I deemed this action acceptable.

Near disaster number two was a pack of writing icing falling out the cupboard and bouncing off the freshly iced cake. Luckily it was a light tube, not a massive bag of flour, so it didn't damage anything. Perhaps I need to clear out that cupboard... 

Other than that, the cake was great. Give the recipe a whirl if you feel like something a little bit fancier than a lemon drizzle loaf. Just don't throw lemon juice around the kitchen like me.

sonic birthday cake

It was middle nephew's 5th birthday on Wednesday so a Sonic The Hedgehog cake was required. Sonic was much easier to model than eldest nephew's Star Wars themed cake as I'm actually familiar with the character. In fact, I had a Sonic The Hedgehog themed cake for my 5th birthday. Funny how these things come round again.

For the cake I used Mary Berry's trusty, all-in-one sponge traybake recipe, cut in half and sandwiched together with strawberry jam and butter icing. We thought a quick cake recipe was the best choice since we had a lot of fondant cutting/modelling to do. Speaking of which, is it possible to work with fondant icing without your kitchen looking like a bomb has hit it? This was the cake decorating aftermath.

Sonic went down a treat with the birthday boy and half the cake disappeared in one sitting which is always a good sign.

I always feel there's something special about sponge cakes with fondant icing. They instantly take me back to childhood birthday cakes. I love the sweetness of fondant icing and can often be found eating chunks of it straight from the block. Sickly, yes, but oh so good.

I'm going to kick off this weekend by baking a cake. The cake tin is empty which is completely unacceptable. Hopefully knitted hat number 2 will get finished over the next couple of days too. 

I sure know how to party.

I knitted a hat!

That's right, your eyes have not deceived you. I actually knitted this hat. Go me.

Weirdly I hadn't intended to relearn knitting right now (I've started and stopped so many times over the years) but the thought has been sitting quietly at the back of my mind for a while. I've surprised myself.

On a side note, it's really hard to take a good photograph of yourself wearing a hat. I felt like a contortionist trying to get the angle I wanted.

It all started with a handknitted hat my Dad received for Christmas from a family friend. My brother saw it and loved it so my mum offered to knit something similar. As I stood in the wool shop with her, browsing colours and hat patterns, I had a sudden urge to knit my own hat. More specifically, knit a replacement beret style hat for the one I lost in Edinburgh last year on The Day Where Everything Went Wrong (stomach bug, missed my bus, lost my hat, my hatless head got rained on etc.)

This hat is better than my old one though because it has a bow. Me being me, I couldn't help but feel the need to embellish the hat. As you've probably deduced from my blog/style, I struggle with the concept of "plain".

I have to admit that I knitted this hat twice. The first version turned out massive. Spaceship on my head massive. It may have looked cool on a big Jamaican dude with a glorious head of dreadlocks but on me it looked ridiculous. As it only took me two evenings to knit I unravelled the whole thing and started again on needles a size and a half smaller. But not before documenting it on my mobile phone. Big lolz.

I initially worried that hat version 2 would go the opposite and be too small. Admittedly it doesn't have quite as much slouch as the pattern picture shows (Sirdar 9698 Hayfield Chunky with Wool if you're interested) but I like it and considering the wool is 75% acrylic it'll probably grow over time. I think it did me good to reknit the hat too as my stitching was much more even second time round.

I love the swirl created by all the decreases. Knitting feels like some kind of wizardry! This is the first time I've ventured beyond basic scarves and cushion covers, rectangles basically, so this hat feels like a huge achievement. 

 I was feeling pretty funky wearing my hat with my old dungarees.

Dare I say knitting might actually stick with me this time. Sure, I still need to figure out how to fix mistakes instead of just shoving it towards my mum saying "fix please"  but I like how I can knit in bed when I can't sleep (which happens a lot) or on the sofa in front of the tv. Knitting allows me to be lazy and productive at the same time.

Now onto the next hat. Then maybe a cardigan? No, I need to fix the fitting issues on my Christine Haynes Emery bodice and get a dress sewn. Hmmmm, to knit or to sew...

"have a cuppa tea" skirt

Woohoo, my first sewn item of 2015! A flirty Anna Maria Horner Study Hall skirt. I'm surprised that there doesn't appear to be many versions online as I think it's a fantastic little pattern.

Do you ever have days when your face just will not co-operate? I was suffering from a bad case of chronic bitch face whilst photographing this skirt. No matter how pleasant an expression I thought I was pulling, I looked pissed off in every single photograph.

I was going for casually gazing out the window.... instead I look like I'm quietly plotting someone's death.

And I look utterly disgusted in this one. "What the hell is this? You call this a cup of tea?!"

Perhaps I'm angry because my skirt is slightly squint in these photograps. *face palm* I'm clearly incapable of dressing myself properly. The number of times I've discovered that my skirts have swivelled half way round my body is ridiculous.

But wooh for my fairly well matched centre back seam! And you can finally see the lovely colour of my tights in these photographs.

Now down to the details. I cut out a size SM and....

• lengthened the skirt panels by 1 inch as I'm tall-ish

• removed the hem border as it seemed unnecessary when I wasn't using a contrasting fabric.

• finished the hem with bias binding so I could keep as much skirt length as possible.

• reduced the side seams to 1/2inch as I prefer my skirts to sit at the top of my hip bone rather than my waist. In retrospect I probably could have left them at 5/8 inch but meh, it's comfy.

• added a skirt lining to prevent sticking-to-tights syndrome. As the skirt doesn't have a waistband I attached the lining, tucking it in a few places, to the skirt facings (which I also interfaced) and then "stitched in the ditch" at the top of the side seams to hold down in place. I doubt that's a professional method but it worked for me.

• swapped the invisible zip for a regular one. Partly because I couldn't a find an invisible zip the correct colour or length, mostly because I prefer regular zips.

• finished the side seams of my lining with french seams. It made me feel fancy. 

Tidy insides make me feel happy. I also love the contrast of bright pink lining. It's a fun surprise.

Would you believe I was originally 3-4 inches short of having enough pink bias binding to finish the hem? I had enough green but in my mind it *needed* to be pink so I had to wait a couple of days until I was next in town to buy the correct amount. Frustrating, but worth the wait.

After my (still ongoing) struggles of fitting dress bodices it felt amazing to have a skirt fit with minimum fuss - no tilting seams, weird wrinkles or pulling areas. Only having my hip curve to contend with makes things so much easier. Hurray for having a relatively pancake flat ass!

Bonus points to those of you who immediately started singing The Kinks after reading my title. Such a great track. :D