Sunset Citrus Ombre Cake

I wanted this post to be an interesting one because it’s my 100^th post! That means I’m either a very dedicated blogger or an absolute cake-loser. I think I’ll go with the first option. My sister’s birthday seemed like the perfect excuse to whip up a ‘showstopper-style’ birthday cake so here we are. Ever since Edd Kimber showcased his ombre cake in a Good Food magazine ages ago I’d wanted to try this style of decoration. My sister decided that she wanted something based around autumn, (random, I know), so this is what I came up with. This cake needs to come with an extreme obesity warning because although the actual cake inside is a different recipe from the magazine one, it did state that one slice was 1,000 calories. I shit you not.

Ingredients

Cake

6 eggs

12-14oz self-raising flour

12-14oz butter

12-14oz caster sugar

3tsps baking powder

Red gel colouring

Yellow gel colouring

Lemon essence

Orange essence

Lemon zest

Orange zest

Decoration

11oz butter

1 lb icing sugar

1 lb full-fat cream cheese

Lemon curd

Orange curd

Orange zest

Red gel colouring

Yellow gel colouring

This cake does take time, but I promise it’s not as difficult as it looks. I made the sponges the day before to save on time. The reason I’ve put 12-14oz of flour is because I always weigh the eggs first and match it to the flour weight, so it depends how heavy your eggs are.

Firstly preheat the oven to 180⁰C and line 3 round cake tins, around 20cm wide.

In a large mixing bowl (or KitchenAid if you have one), combine the butter and sugar until creamy.

Beat the eggs and then add a spoonful at a time to the buttery mixture, along with a heaped spoonful of flour.

Keep doing this until all of the eggs and flour are beaten in.

Divide the mixture equally between three bowls.

To one add ¾ of the zest of a lemon and half a tsp of lemon essence. Add enough yellow gel colouring until you’re satisfied with the shade.

For the middle layer add the other ¼ of lemon zest, a ¼ of an orange zest, ½ tsp lemon essence and ½ tsp of orange essence. Add enough red and yellow gel colouring to make a pale orange colour. If it’s going too pink then counteract it with some more yellow.

To the final set of mixture, which will form the top layer, add the rest of the orange zest and ½ tsp of orange essence. Add the colouring to make it a deep orange colour.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tins and bake for 25-35 minutes or until springy to the touch and cooked all the way through. I shouldn’t be telling you this, because you might not have noticed otherwise, but I got a bit oven happy and opened it after 20 minutes which caused two of my layers very annoyingly to sink a bit. I would undoubtedly be thrown out of the Bake Off tent for such an error, but as it is my family doesn’t care as long as it’s cake.

When they’re done, cool them on a wire rack. If you’ve made them the day before then wrap them well in clingfilm so that they don’t go stale overnight.

When you’re ready to decorate you need to first make the buttercream. Sorry but I don’t have any pictures of this stage because my mum sneakily did it while I was at work. Beat the butter for 3 minutes until light and creamy. Add the icing sugar, a spoonful at a time, until it’s all combined. Add the cream cheese and mix until smooth, but be careful not to overmix.

Set a small bowlful of the icing aside for assembling the cake and then divide the remaining icing into three.

Leave one icing white, but add a generous spoonful of lemon curd to flavour it.

Add half the zest of an orange to both of the other portions of icing. Then add red and yellow colouring until you make one a light orange colour and the other a darker orange colour.

Choose a cake stand or plate and place the yellow, lemon cake layer to form the base of the cake.

Cover the top in a layer of white icing, followed by a layer of lemon curd.

Place the paler orange cake layer on top of this and cover in a layer of icing, and a layer of orange curd.

Pop the final cake layer, the darkest one, to form the top of the cake.

Cover the entire thing, including the sides in white icing. This gives the blobs something to stick to.

Now this is the fun bit. Get three piping bags fitted with a large round nozzle and fill with the three different types of icing. A good tip is to let them rest in tall glasses while you’re not using them, which stops the icing from going everywhere.

Starting with the white icing, pipe two generous blobs going up the cake, followed by two of the paler orange colour and then two more of the darker colour. The six blobs should cover the cake from the top to the bottom.

Then use a small palette knife to gently smear the icing to the right, cleaning between each colour.

For the next row, move one blob down, so start with one dark orange blob at the bottom, then two white, two lighter orange with one dark blob on the top. Carry on like this all the way around the cake, just moving one colour at a time, smearing as you go. When you get into it, it’s really easily to forget which colour you’re supposed to do next, so just take your time and enjoy it.

When you’ve covered the outside of the cake move onto the top. Pipe two rings of the darker orange colour, smearing sideways to the right. Then pipe two rings of the lighter orange colour, doing the same, followed by the white to fill in the middle.

If you manage to eat a whole slice of this cake then you are some kind of superhuman, because it is seriously sweet.

Raspberry, White Chocolate and Custard Muffins

I wanted to try out custard powder in a muffin to see if it would be as tasty as it is in a biscuit. Short answer, yes it is. My family ate them all in a matter of hours, although they are massive fatties so this is not necessarily helpful evidence. Personally I thought that they weren’t very sweet at all, which can sometimes be a bonus, but I think that they would be nicer with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream or something. Frozen raspberries will work better for this recipe because they will hold their shape more but it’s no big deal if you use fresh.

Ingredients

250g self-raising flour

125g plain flour

90g soft light brown sugar

4tbsps custard powder

100g butter, melted

250ml milk

1 egg, beaten

125g white chocolate, roughly chopped

A few good handfuls of raspberries, frozen

Preheat the oven to 200⁰C and line a muffin tray with cases.

Sift both flours in a large mixing bowl.

Add the sugar and custard powder.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the melted butter, milk and beaten egg. Fold everything in until just combined.

Stir in the chopped chocolate and raspberries.

Spoon large dollops of mixture into the muffins cases and make for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

These are delicious eaten warm.

Lemon Madeleines

My auntie bought me a madeleine pan for my birthday so I thought I’d give them a go with a classic recipe to begin with. The mixture is quite sloppy, almost like a pancake batter, but the end result is a fluffy little cake. These are great for afternoon tea, although be warned that you might end up eating two.

Ingredients

100g caster sugar

2 large eggs

100g plain flour

¾ tsp baking powder

Juice and zest of 1 lemon

100g butter, melted and cooled slightly

Whisk the eggs with the sugar in a medium-sized bowl until light and frothy.

Grate in the lemon zest.

Add the lemon juice, belted butter, flour and baking powder and whisk gently until all the ingredients are incorporated.

Cover the bowl in cling-film and pop into the fridge for an hour.

Just before the batter is ready pre-heat the oven to 200⁰C. Melt a little bit more butter and brush the madeleine tray lightly with it. Dust with some flour.

Pour the mixture into the tin, until level with the surface. Don’t worry if there’s mixture left over, just wash and dry the pan after the first round and make some more!

Bake for 8-10 minutes or until puffed up in the middle and golden.  Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Vegan Brown Betty

We had my sister’s American friend staying with us for a little while before she found a house in London, and she was not only lactose intolerant, but vegan as well. This was not a problem exactly, but it distresses me greatly when people can’t eat cake. Especially when there is so much of it around that she couldn’t eat. She had a vegan cookbook though, so I amalgamated a few recipes to make this pudding. It was pretty banging if I do say so myself, and with custard on (vegan or not) you could hardly notice that it didn’t have the usual large quantities of butter in it. The recipe is in cups which I apologise for; it’s some strange American thing, and quite possibly the least accurate way of measuring in the world. If you want to convert it, it can be quite confusing because it depends on what you’re weighing, but Delia has quite a good conversation table on her website.

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups self-raising flour

½ cup cocoa powder

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

½ tsp salt

1 ¼ cups caster sugar

½ cup vegan margarine

1 cup of soya milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Enough stewed apples to cover the bottom of a pie dish

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C and butter a decent sized dish.

Line the bottom with a generous layer of stewed apples. We happened to have these in the fridge because of all the apples coming from the garden, but it’s really easy to make it you don’t have any pre-prepared. Just cut the apples into chunks and simmer with some sugar and water until they are tender. Then keep them in the fridge for up to a month.

In a large mixing bowl cream together the sugar and vegan margarine. I used Pure sunflower marg.

Add the soya milk and vanilla. The mixture will look really disgusting at this point, but don’t worry, it will soon transform.

Sift in the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Mix until thoroughly combined. You’ll see how the texture of the batter is a little different, almost webby. I don’t know why this is, something to do with the soya. If someone could actually enlighten me on this, that would be cool.

Turn the mixture out into the dish, making sure to completely cover the apples. Bake for 45 minutes – 1 hour or until a skewer inserted into the middles comes out clean.

Serve warm, with custard, cream or ice-cream. Vegan things don’t seem to have the same longevity because there are no eggs, so this is best eaten on the day.