I love creating the perfect birthday cakes for family and friends; whether it’s making their favourite flavour or a “novelty” cake tied into their interest, it’s all great fun.  This year I attempted both for Dave’s birthday…

Our weekends often revolve around The Three Cs: comics, coffee and cake.  We all pile into the car on Sunday mornings and descend upon the two comic shops in town.  And then, gleefully clutching our purchases, we hit Costa for coffee and cake.  We all love our little ritual, especially Dave, so I decided to combine all three into his birthday cake.

I decided that a coffee and walnut cake “cup of coffee” would be fun, so baked the batter in a Pyrex bowl for the appropriate over-sized cup shape.  Once it was cooled, I split it into three layers, soaked each with some espresso syrup, filled with espresso buttercream and then covered the whole thing with some white fondant.  For some reason the fondant cracked like a bitch so I wound up having to add the gold detail to hide a truly hideous chasm.  The latte ‘art’ topping is espresso flavoured royal icing, and if you squint, it might just look like a heart.

Dave had recently written and published his first comic along with an artist friend of ours, The League of Analogues, so I thought that it would be fun to bake him an edible first edition.  After a lot of trouble I finally managed to get the front cover of the comic printed onto an icing sheet.  For variety I baked a deliciously moist chocolate cake and filled it with leftover espresso buttercream before covering with fondant and nervously applying the print.  I don’t think I wet the fondant enough as when we cut the cake the print was quite obviously sitting on top and it was supposed to bond to the fondant as though it had been painted on.  No matter, though.  It looked the part and Dave was delighted

As a finishing touch I covered the cake board with fondant and painted it to resemble a wooden table for the full coffee shop experience.  I tried to create little sugar packets but they didn’t turn out so well, so I just left well alone.

In our house, steak and chips is an irresistible treat and the ultimate in “cheery-uppy” dinners after a hard day at work.  When Dave came home after a thoroughly rubbish day I immediately abandoned my plans for a virtuous (yet delicious!) stir-fry and pulled a couple of beautifully marbled rib-eye steaks out of the fridge.

This version of steak and chips is a bit non-traditional but it is so good and it also fits in beautifully with the South Beach lifestyle.  I think I love sweet potato wedges more than “real chips” at the moment, so I totally didn’t feel deprived by having these oven-baked beauties.  The chimichurri sauce was a real revelation to me as I’d never had it before; I was blown away by its zingy flavour and it felt so much better than having a creamy sauce smothering the flavour of the steak.  I’ll be trying it as a marinade and also as a salad dressing in the future.  Tres yummy!

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This week I have lost four pounds.  I’m really pleased with that, but that’ll be my last big loss for quite a while, I think.  You see, on Phase One of South Beach, you’re essentially doing a detox.  Most of the weight I’ve lost is water weight but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost a few pounds of fat, too.  (I’ve had to tighten my belt a few notches or suffer the indignity of my jeans falling straight off.)

Today I started Phase Two of the diet and there I’ll stay until I hit goal.  Reintroducing “good carbs” has gone well so far: I had my sweet potatoes today and they were just amazing.  Almost as good as the banana I had with my morning snack.  Yum!!  No cravings so far which is good news.

Since I started life on the beach back in August ‘09, I’ve lost 29 pounds or 2 stone 1 pound!  I’m really proud of that and my next mini-goal is to reach 3 stones of fat, gone for good!  I’m really hoping to achieve that before we go on holiday.

In foodie news, I bought some gourmet sugar-free syrups that I’m really looking forward to trying out.  I got some fake maple syrup that I’m going to drizzle over some porridge tomorrow morning and also some cookie dough syrup which we’ll use to flavour quark for desserts and maybe I’ll try making some tofu ice-cream with it, too!  All very exciting.

One thing I need to work on is to drink more water.  My water consumption seems to have tailed off this week and I’d like to get guzzling again.  I  always feel so much better when I’m hydrated!

First, the good.  I have lost 7 pounds this week, courtesy of Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet getting rid of lots of water retention and maybe a pound or two of fat.  Hooray!  So I’ve lost all my holiday gain in one fell swoop, which is awesome.

This week I have been eating Kaylan’s Egg Muffins, Red Thai Chicken Curry (with lentils simmered into the sauce rather than rice on the side), Steak with roasted artichoke hearts, vegetable moussaka and other delights.  Oh, and lots of lunch-time salads, despite the Arctic weather.  I haven’t felt at all deprived apart from one day when I was unwrapping Lucas’s Christmas chocolate money and the smell started to get to me.

The bad: You may have noticed a lack of posts during the week, and while I’m not a prolific poster these days, you may be worried about two diet updates in a row.  Worry not, I’ll get back to posting recipes (mostly South Beach friendly ones) soon, hopefully.  I had a couple of bad falls before Christmas which aggravated my prolapsed discs, and then this Thursday I managed to trap a major nerve in roughly the same area which has left me in agony and unable to stand for more than two minutes.  I am putting my faith in the chiropractor and I hope that I’ll be feeling a lot better in a few weeks.  I’m really gutted that I won’t be able to belly dance for a while, too.

And the recipe: Taco Bake (Phase 1, South Beach Diet, courtesy of 3 Fat Chicks website)

I had intended to cook this for Dave last night, but he ended up cooking it for me instead.  This isn’t my usual sort of meal, but twenty pages of rave reviews convinced me to give it a try.  We both loved it, and I think my portion tasted especially good because my lovely Dave had made it for me.

Serves 4:
1 can refried beans (no lard, please!)
1 lb extra lean beef mince
1 large onion, chopped
1 large bell pepper chopped
8 oz mushrooms, coarsely chopped
1 can green chilis
2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2-3 TB chili powder blend
1 TB ground cumin
2-3 TB tomato puree
2/3 C shredded f/f or l/f cheese, your choice, although I think cheddar is the best

Garnish – any, all work well:
chopped green onions
chopped black olives
l/f, f/f sour cream
chopped lettuce and tomatoes
chopped fresh coriander (cilantro)
chopped white or bermuda onion
salsa

Preheat oven 230C (210 fan). Take a flat casserole dish, spray with cooking spray and spread refried beans on the bottom. Season with salt and pepper and bake for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, sauté meat, onions, bell pepper, garlic (season with S&P) until onion begins to soften and meat beings to brown. Add mushrooms and cook until they’ve released their water and meat is thoroughly browned. Drain fat and add all spices, and cook for about 2-3 minutes until spices toast. Add green chilies and tomato puree, along with a little bit of water, if needed. The mixture should be moist but not runny.

Take the casserole dish with the beans, pour mixture on top and top with cheese (olives and green onions can be added at this stage). Bake in the oven for another 10 minutes or until the cheese is melted and just starts to bubble. Serve with generous heaps of lettuce as a bed (romain, red leaf and iceberg work really well here), and garnish with garnishes of your choice.

Hellooooooo, 2010!  And hello, new diet!

This year I’m participating in RecipeGirl’s “10 in 10″ challenge—ten weeks of healthy living to start the year off right.  Last year I did really well on the South Beach Diet until I got derailed by a spate of birthdays and other celebrations, so I’m quite comfortable with doing that again.

I’m really looking forward to getting back to healthy eating; a big plate of veggies would be great right now after all the rich foods we’ve been eating.  Only one slight problem… I need to run down the fridge and freezer in preparation for the arrival of our beautiful new (bigger!!) fridge/freezer on Thursday.  I am NOT looking forward to defrosting the old freezer, but I can’t wait to fill my new baby with a rainbow of veggies!

I’m also aiming to exercise more.  I am not a sporty person and I don’t particularly want to be, either, but I do love to dance and can work up quite a sweat at my weekly belly dancing class.  So, I’m going to add in practice sessions at home and slowly build up to dancing every day.  So I should end up being a better dancer and also a bit fitter. Sorted!

I’m taking the weekend to re-read the South Beach diet book and get a menu sorted for the next few days.  The diet begins in earnest in Monday, 4th January!

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

When I discovered that December’s Daring Bakers challenge was to make a gingerbread house, I was thrilled!  I’ve wanted to make a gingerbread house for years and I’d actually planned to make one with Lucas this year.  (Admittedly I was going to buy Lucas a kit from IKEA for insant gratification!)

After much admiring of gingerbread houses on flickr I settled on using a pattern from Ultimate Gingerbread.  I splashed out on their Pearl House pattern, purely because it looked like my dream house!  Doesn’t everyone want a house with a turret?!?  Extravagant (and completely unnecessary), I know.  I printed off the pattern pieces and then invested a happy half an hour for sticking them to card and cutting them out.

I chose to use the recipe that Y posted from Scandinavian Baking by Beatrice Ojakangas (recipe available on Y’s site). I own this book, so it was very handy to be able to take a book into the kitchen.  I did modify it ever so slightly by adding 110g of light brown sugar for sweetness as a lot of people had complained it wasn’t tasty, and I also used 2tsp of ground cloves instead of 3tsp.  The dough wasn’t quite as fragrant, but it did mean that it was more kid-friendly. Cloves are quite fierce and I wasn’t sure that Lucas would appreciate them as much as me!

Despite reports of dry, troublesome dough on the Daring Bakers forum, I had no problems with the dough.  All three batches came together easily; it was supple and easy to handle; and it smelled and tasted great.  I chose to roll out the dough between sheets of clingfilm before chilling since it was butter-rich and bound to set up like a rock!  This also sped up cutting out the pieces of the house, all eleventy million of them!

It was only when I started cutting out the pieces that I realised how huge this house was going to be!!  I’d paid scant attention to the measurements when I’d cut out all the template pieces and now it was too late to shrink it down!  I was sorely tempted to downsize but decided to persevere in the end; I could always invite people over to eat it!

The first pieces to be cut and baked were those for the main roof and porch roof.  I then made small cardboard moulds, a bit bigger than the trimmed pieces, and assembled the cap roofs, using a heck of a lot of royal icing that I had left over from the sparkling snowflake cake.  Baking the rest of the pieces took ages.  I was beginning to lose the will to live when I suddenly realised that I was done. Hooray!  I then crushed up an entire bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints and used them to create clear ‘glass’ windows in the house.  The double-baking of the main walls made me feel a lot more comfortable about constructing the house later on!!

Compared to the tedium of baking loads of small pieces, decorating hardly took any time.  I did most of it on Monday when we found ourselves snowed/iced in.

I copied shamelessly from the sample pictures provided by Ultimate Gingerbread and piped pale pink royal icing siding on to my house.  Each window had white frames piped on and an evergreen garland underneath.  Shiny silver balls were dotted on to the upper corners of the frames which looked very pretty.  Finally I piped a gorgeous wreath on the front door and left everything to dry overnight.

Construction day dawned and I procrastinated like mad.  It just seemed too difficult, despite my earlier practice with the IKEA house!  I finally sucked it up and made a batch of white royal icing.

After laying out the main walls on my board (A1 foamcore sheet!), I piped a heavy bead of royal icing all around the bottom edge and the joining sides.  Then I stood up the back wall and propped it upright, inside and out, with a can.  From there, it was easy to get the remaining walls up and stuck properly.  I only left a can against them for five minutes and then they were stuck fast.  I reinforced the seams with plenty more royal icing and then moved on to making the bay window, then the leaning turret, and finally the right extension.  I let it dry overnight before enlisting Dave’s help to get the rooves on.

After all that, it just took an hour to ice the roofs and dress the board.  I wanted to make a little cluster of Christmas trees but I ran out of green royal icing so you can just see last year’s Christmas tree, planted out in the garden by the house’s occupants.  Dessicated coconut sprinkled over a smear of royal icing makes the snow look convincing, and I finished off by piping garlands around the porch supports and using flattened Jelly Tots as a welcome mat on the porch.  (Every gingerbread house needs some sweets, right?)

I want to say a BIG thank-you to Anna and Y for this fantastic challenge!  I had loads of fun making my house and I hope everyone else did too!

Merry Christmas!

I hope that each and every one of you, my readers, has a wonderful day.  Whether you’re celebrating with friends, family, or by yourself, may it be full of joy, fun, laughter, great presents and amazing food!

This gloriously festive stollen comes from the Christmas issue of BBC Good Food Magazine ‘08.  It was the cover recipe and looked so deliciously enticing that I just had to make it.

Unlike traditional stollen, this one incorporates jewel-like dried cranberries and jade-green pistachios.  It really is worth the bother of peeling loads of fiddly little nuts as they look so wonderful dotted through the crumb and scattered over the top of the finished stollen.  The cranberries also lend a slight sharpnes to the stollen which is quite refreshing and delicious, too.

It’s a welcome addition to any Christmas table and I’m sure that after one taste it’ll become a new family tradition.  Merry Christmas!

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This sparkling snowflake cake was my contribution to the Christmas Raffle at Lucas’s pre-school.  I was asked if I knew anyone who could make cakes, and without a shred of modesty I said, “That would be me!”  So having bigged myself up, I felt that I needed to make an extra-special effort which is why this cake is completely over the top and probably wouldn’t be out of place at a wedding.

I wanted to make a cake that would look like a snow shower, with glittery snowflakes  cascading down against a background of wintry ice blue; I love the Icy Christmas look and wanted to capture it in a cake.  So after sketching out a few ideas I set to work with  snowflake cutters, flower paste and edible glitter.

What really brings this cake together is the piping work.  I’ve long been an admirer of Mich Turner’s gorgeous piping work in her book Spectacular Cakes, and I quite fancied having a go.  So I piped some woefully uneven pearls around the base of each tier—I desperately need a turn table to bring cakes up to eye level, or perhaps I should just sit on the floor—and then started piping random pearls over the sides of the stacked tiers.  To get rid of any pointy ends I flattened them with a dab of my finger. (A small bowl of water and a cloth are very handy.)  It’s a very effective technique to have in your decorating arsenal and it’s really easy, too!

A Spoonful of Sugar has just passed its sixth anniversary!  It barely seems like a any time has passed since I typed up the fifth anniversary post.  It’s been a fun year… full of new food experiences and taste sensations.  I hope you’ll all join me for year seven!

Few things make me happier than being asked to bring dessert for a party or gathering.  It’s an opportunity to pull armfuls of cookbooks off the shelf (and we all know how much I love my cookbooks, right?)  I pore over them, meeting recipes that I have somehow missed on my first read-through and re-discovering old friends.

The recipe I settled upon for last week’s Murder Mystery evening as hosted by my friend Sam, was an old lust of mine.  In the new and especially exciting days of food blogging, when everyone knew each other and Google Reader hadn’t been invented yet, my friend Alberto of Il Forno (now very, very sadly defunct) baked Pierre Herme’s Nutella Tart from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme, of course, with stunning results.  I’d had the cookbook for a few months and had been particularly pleased with the chocolate macarons, but hadn’t found an occasion to make the sexy Nutella Tart.  An evening in with a juicy murder to solve and a crowd of girlies seemed just right to try the tart for the first time.

Tart-making is probably easier if you’re (a) not in a rush and (b) not beleagured with a small child loudly demanding pudding when they haven’t eaten any of their dinner.  I opted not to make Pierre’s sweet tart dough recipe as he insisted on making a very large batch so as not to overwork the dough.  Of course you could freeze the excess for a month.  A month?  I make one or two tarts a year these days!!  So, I just bought a pack of excellent sweet pastry from the supermarket.

While your tart crust bakes, multi-task!  Use this time to toast the hazelnuts, cool ‘em, and then chop them in half.  Then flip your board over and industriously chop your chocolate finely.  Stick the butter in a separate bowl and fiddle around with some eggs.  Once that’s done, put your feet up. (If you’re lucky!)

There’s a bit of waiting around involved once the crust is fully baked.  The Nutella needs to be slathered on, but you can’t do that while the crust is hot!  And you can’t make the ganache until the Nutella is in place.  It’s a bit This Is The House That Jack Built, really.

I found the ganache to be quite difficult.  I suspect that my chocolate siezed as I ended up with a thick, plasticy mass in the bowl which only improved very slightly as I gently drizzled and stirred butter into it.  Seriously, it looked truly awful.  I poured it into the crust anyway and as I scattered hazelnuts artistically, I reflected that it wouldn’t take long to detour to Sainsburys if it all went pear-shaped.  Eleven minutes later, I opened the oven door and was greeted by a tart that looked like the picture in the book!  I love my wonky oven—it really saves the day sometimes!

While I transormed myself into the seductive Fleur Tashious, famous humanitarian actress, the tart cooled to room temperature.  There was just time for an artistic drizzle of Nutella zig-zagged over the whole thing before I had to dash.

Pierre’s Nutella Tart was a big hit.  A really, really big hit, in fact.  I served it with some extra-thick brandy cream which went beautifully with the chocolate and hazelnut decadence of the tart.  And while it was amazing at room temperature, I think I actually liked it better chilled the next morning…

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“Hope you don’t mind… but I’ve… um… volunteered you to make a cake,” my friend Caz said.

It turned out that Caz had managed to draw the short straw of organising the “Guess the weight of the cake” competition for her school PTA Christmas Fair, and feeling somewhat panicked at the idea of doing the cake herself had volunteered me for the job.  Not that I minded, of course.  Cakes and me are best friends.

Christmas always equals fruit cakes, so my favourite “simmer and stir” recipe was a given.  Christmas puddings are always popular, too, so I decided to combine the two and make a Christmas Pudding shaped Christmas Cake!  Simples!

To make the appropriate shape, I baked the cake in a 2L Pyrex bowl.  I would have loved to bake it in a pudding basin, but I don’t have one and was very shocked to discover that they cost almost £10 in Sainsburys!!  Lining the bowl was pretty tedious to say the least.  I broke out a tape measure and measured the internal height of the bowl, along the curved side if that makes sense and then cut a sheet of parchment 6 inches bigger so that it would have sufficient height in case of unexpected rising.

All you need to do next is butter the bowl, press the parchment into it and then make a series of cuts down the paper leaving an untouched circle about 2″ wide in the middle of the bowl.  I made cuts every inch or so and tucked and pressed the parchment in place.  After a lot of grumbling I ended up with a beautifully lined bowl and very buttery fingers.  I also completely forgot to take a picture of this masterpiece—sorry!

Make the cake as usual but decrease the oven temperature by 5C because glass conducts heat very well.  I took no chances and placed the filled bowl on a baking sheet before it went into the oven as I was paranoid about it shattering.  The one change I made was to leave pouring the extra brandy (or rum, in this case) over the hot cake as that would definitely have shattered the bowl.  I brushed that all over the cake once cold and fed it a similar amount of booze a couple of times before it was time to decorate.

For this cake I pre-prepared the Christmassy mouse and the holly leaves to ensure they’d be rock hard by the time I needed them.

You don’t need to buy special holly cutters, and if you do want to, I suggest buying them in the summer when there isn’t a massive rush for them!!  I had a couple from years ago, but had managed to lose the biggest cutters.  So instead I cut out ovals of modelling paste (50:50 blend of sugar paste and flower paste, strong, tastes decent and more pliable to work with) coloured a darkish green and scalloped the edges with the end of a piping tip until it looked right.  Draw in the veining with a knife and you’re done.  I dried the leaves over crumpled bits of foil to give them more shape.

The mouse was more difficult, but still relatively straightforward.  I used the same modelling paste recipe and coloured it cream.  The instructions I followed are from “The Essential Guide to Cake Decorating” but any mouse tutorial you find online would be fine.  My biggest tip here is that sugar glue is your friend.  Much better and stronger than water for sticking models together.  I am a complete convert!  After I modelled the mouse, I stuck in wire whiskers and allowed it to dry before painting.  I’ve got to say that I’m really proud of my little mouse!  I did intend to have him holding a Christmas card or carol singing sheet, but in the end I thought he was just perfect on his own.

In comparison to making the mouse and holly leaves, assembling the rest of the cake was really easy.  Apricot glaze, marzipan. Let dry. Rum, dark brown fondant. Let dry.  Glue on white splat-shaped sugar paste to make the sauce/cream on top of the pud and try your best to remove all the icing sugar that’s dripped everywhere.  Glue on blobs of black sugar paste to represent raisins.  Move to covered board and stick down with royal icing or sugar glue. Glue on holly leaves, holding each leaf in place until set.  (If necessary, stick a holly berry underneath to hold the leaf up.  The finishing touch is to roll some red sugar paste (or flower paste if you have some pre-dyed) into balls and stick them in place.  To really gild the lily, glaze the holly berries with a little piping gel.

And there you have it!  A Christmas Pudding Christmas Cake!!