Cake!

I am currently taking the Wilton Decorating Basics course, in which I learn the basics of cake decorating with buttercream icing. Last Monday I made my first layered sponge cake, filled with strawberry mousse and decorated with different colours of buttercream. We had to choose a simple drawing/picture to practice our decoration technique, and I chose a fish because they have a simple shape and they are just really cool, haha. I am very happy with the result,  I think it turned out very good for my first cake! Here are some photos :)

The cake didn't just look good - it also tasted great! So we finished it within a few days. But I will be baking a lot more in the next weeks: this week I need to make cupcakes for the course and next week is the final project - another layered cake.

Do you like baking and decorating cakes?

Double-Chocolate Marbled Loaf Cake

 On Thursday I only had to go to school in the morning for my Dutch oral, so I decided to use my free afternoon to bake something! In December I got 'The Great British Bake Off - How To Bake', an amazing book with lots of recipes for cakes and othe bakes. You might know The Great British Bake Off, it's a baking competition, and the second series was on BBC at the end of last summer. I watched the entire series and really enjoyed it, so I really wanted the book! The book contains recipes by the contestants, explanations of the technical challenges (such as Paul Hollywood's foccacia) and other recipes. I decided to bake the Double-Chocolate Marbled Loaf Cake, because I love chocolate and it did not seem all to difficult to make. This recipe makes 1 large loaf cake, you will need a 900 gram loaf tin which measures approximately 26 x 12.5 x 7.5 cm. Grease the loaf tin and then line it with a strip of greaseproof paper, this will make it easier to remove the cake from the tin.

Ingredients

For the sponge:
250 g unsalted butter, softened
250 g caster sugar
4 large free-range eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250 g self-raising flour
Good pinch of salt
75 g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), roughly chopped
75 g good-quality white chocolate, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon cocoa powder

To finish:
25 g dark chocolate (70% coca solids), roughly chopped
25 g good-quality white chocolate, roughly chopped
30 g unsalted butter, diced

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celcius/325 degrees Farenheit/gas 3. Put the soft butter in a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon or electric mixer for 1 minute or until creamy. Gradually beat in the sugar and beat thoroughly until the mixture turns pale and fluffy.

Beat the eggs with the vanilla just until combined, then gradually add to the creamed mixture, beating well after each addition; add 1 tablespoon of the flour with each of the last 2 portions of egg to prevent the mixture from curdling. Sift the rest of the flour with the salt into the bowl and gently fold in with a large metal spoon. Transfer half the mixture to another bowl.

Put the dark chocolate into a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of steaming hot (not boiling) water (don't let the base of the bowl touch the hot water). Melt gently, stirring frequently. Remove the bowl from the pan and leave to cool while you melt the white chocolate in the same way.

Sift the cocoa powder into one bowl of cake mixture. Add the cooled melted dark chocolate and mix gently until thoroughly combined. Carefully stir the cooled melted white chocolate into the other bowl of cake mixture. Spoon both mixtures into the prepared loaf tin, adding tablespoonfuls of each mixture alternately. Gently bang the tin on the worktop to eliminate any pockets of air, and carefully smooth the surface. Draw a chopstick or table knife through the two mixtures, swirling, to marble them.

Bake for about 1 1/4 hours or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Set the tin on a wire rack and leave to cool for 20 minutes, then carefully turn out the cake onto the rack and leave to cool.

To finish, put the dark chocolate into one heatproof bowl and the white chocolate into another. Add half of the butter to each bowl, then melt gently as above. Using a teaspoon (or a small piping bag), drizzle the 2 chocolate mixtures over the top of the cooled cake. Leave to set, then wrap the cake in greaseproof paper or foil and leave for a day before slicing. Store in an airtight container and eat within 5 days.

My notes:
- For my oven, a fan-assisted oven, 170 degrees Celcius was slightly too hot which caused the edges to be a bit burnt. It was done within 1 hour. If I make this cake again I will put the oven at 160 degrees Celcius. I think this is something you need to try out a bit, because every oven is slightly different.
- When I was making the chocolate to drizzle over the top, something went wrong with the white chocolate. I don't know why this is, it might have been the temperature or the combination with the butter because when I melted white chocolate without butter for the sponge it worked fine. I couldn't use the chocolate anymore (that's why there is no white chocolate over my cake). I would recommend melting the white chocolate without butter, also because white chocolate already has quite a lot of fat itself.

This is what my cake looks like from the inside, cool right? I really like the look of marbled cakes!

Oh and the cake also tastes great, the taste of the dark chocolate comes through really nicely in the sponge, it's not too strong. The chocolate on top is a bit strong, although that would have been toned down if I had also had white chocolate to put on top. Even my brother, who is always quite picky, likes it so that's a good sign! I think this is a cake I will make again in the future.

Source of the recipe: Collister, Linda. The Great British Bake Off How To Bake The Perfect Victoria Sponge and Other Baking Secrets. Random House, 2011. Print.

Have you ever watched The Great British Bake Off?

Blueberry Muffins



This afternoon I made some delicious (well actually I haven't tasted them yet, but I already made them before and they were delicious) blueberry muffins! And it's actually quite easy to make them, here is the recipe:

According to the book I used, this recipe will make 12 muffins. I got 18 out of it, so I think it really depends on the size of the holes in your muffintray.

Ingredients

115 g very fine granulated sugar

1 tablespoon grated lemonpeel
300 g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 whisked (not sure whether this is the right word to use, but just whisk/mix them with a fork) eggs
2 1/2 dl milk
115 g butter, molten
1 teaspoon vanilla-essence
350 g blueberries (fresh or frozen)

Instructions
Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius, gas setting 4. Put 12 paper liners in a muffinplate.

Use a spoon to mix the sugar, lemonpeel, flour and baking powder in a middle-sized bowl. Use a mixer to mix the eggs (remember to whisk them with a fork before doing this),  milk, molten butter and vanilla essence in a different bowl for one minute. Add the dry ingredients to this mixture, add the blueberries and use a spoon to mix everything. It is allowed to be a bit lumpy. Put the mixture in the muffin shapes.

Bake the muffins for 20 minutes. Take the muffinplate out of the oven and leave it for 5 minutes. Take out the muffins and enjoy!

Source: 500 cupcakes by Fergal Connolly

If anyone wants the Dutch recipe, just ask, and I will copy or scan it for you! :]

Are you going to make these muffins?


Shoplog England

I spent the first week and a bit of my holidays in England, and of course I did the necessary shopping! I didn't spend much time shopping for clothes, because my brother (who says I've been in a clothing shop for hours when, actually, I've only been in there for 15 minutes) and dad were with me and my mum. But I still bought some nice things. Here are some pictures:

David & Goliath pyjama pants! The left one has hearts in different colours/styles and the right one has little big bens, red busses, guards and clouds (I just had to buy this one!).






 



Two David & Goliath T-shirts, with London theme of course :]

Poster of the map of the tube (ignore the books, I had to make the poster flat xD).



Bag with I <3 London, for the schoolbooks that don't fit in my normal schoolbag, and tea in little red bus tins.

 

Close-up of the tins with tea. The left one contains 'London tea' and the right one English Breakfast tea.

 

Book with high tea recipes <3
And the book 'Make The Most of Your Time on Earth' with 1000 travel experiences in many different countries.

 

These cupcake cases are so cute, I just had to buy them when I saw them :]

 

Some books to help me prepare for university and some to help me with my extended essay. From left to right: a book with poems by Federico García Lorca (including English translations!), a book with Spanish short stories (again with English translations), a book on how English became the world's language, a biography about Kazuo Ishiguro, an autobiography of Evelyn Waugh (I'm doing my extended essay on 'The Remains of the Day' by Ishiguro and 'Brideshead Revisited' by Waugh), and a book on linguistics. I think you can guess that I want to study something with language and linguistics?

I always send cards to my friends when I am on holidays, and I also always buy some for myself. This time I bought two in Oxford and one in Windsor.

 

After a lot of problems (I ordered it from Amazon.de but they sent me an e-mail twice saying that it would come 2 weeks later, and I searched for it in music stores in The Netherlands but they didn't have it anywhere) I finally got my copy of Dirty Work, All Time Low's new album! :]

Some magazines! Seventeen (an american magazine, which you've probably heard of in ANTM), National Geographic Traveler and Jamie (Oliver) magazine :]

Besides this we also bought a box of cadbury roses (amazing chocolates!), but I didn't take a picture of those. And my brother got a ferrari from my dad. Too bad for him it's a model xD

What kind of things do you buy when you go on holidays?

Baking inspiration

I'm starting to love baking more and more, especially cupcakes are fun to make. What I love about baking is that you can use your creativity, especially when decorating (cup)cakes and cookies. You can use many different materials, colours and shapes to make it look exactly the way you want it. I haven't decorated that many cakes yet, so I only have a bit of experience with fondant and icing, but I want to enlarge my knowledge and skills of baking and decorating. Here are some pictures that inspire me when it comes to baking, doesn't everything look so yummy?

Pictures were found on weheartit.com

Do you like baking?

I'm back! (with cupcakes)

Oh my gosh, I haven't posted in more than a month... I just didn't get to it because I have been very busy with school. I have one more day of testweek on Monday and then I have 2 more weeks of 'school' but no lessons. So from now on I will try to post regularly again! Maybe you can tell me what type of posts you would like to read, what subjects are you interested in?
I made these cupcakes (sorry for the bad quality of the picture) today, and I am really happy with the result. The white stars are made of fondant (is that what it's called in English as well?) and the pink stuff is icing. This was the first time I worked with ready-made icing from a tube and I think that, for a first try, it worked out quite well! These cupcakes are really easy to make so I'll post a recipe tomorrow.

Cookies!

I baked these cookies yesterday, and they turned out really nice. It was the first time I tried baking cookies with 2 colours, but they look and taste really nice!

Here is the recipe:

Chocolate-vanilla spirals

I got 27 cookies (of which some didn't turn out perfect) out of this recipe, eventhough the book says 36.

Ingredients
225 g butter, soft
115 g fine sugar
325 g flour, plus some extra
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Instructions
1. Prepare 2 baking trays. Mix the butter and sugar untill you have a light mixture. Take half of this mixture and put it in a different bowl, and mix 150 g flour and the cocoa powder through it. Stir the vanilla essence through the other half of the mixture and use a siff to add 175 g flour to this. Make a dough out of both mixtures.
2. Prepare your working area with some flour, so your dough doesn't stick. Rol out both pieces of dough to form rectangles of approximately 20 x 28 cm. Put the chocolate dough on a sheet of baking paper and put the vanilla dough on top of it. Carefully roll up the dough from the long side, using the baking paper as a help. Wrap the dough in the baking paper and leave it in the refridgerator for at least 1 hour, so it can get stiff.
3. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius/gas oven setting 4. Take the dough out of the baking paper and cut slices from it. Put the cookies onto the baking trays and bake them for 10 - 15 minutes, untill they are gold-brownish. Leave the cookies to cool for 2 minutes and then put them on a tray to cool down further.

Enjoy!

I translated this recipe from the book 'Bakken - de beste recepten uit de hele wereld' written by Lisa Scargo.