The one you’ve been waiting for… May Madness part 1

So the 29th of May was the 60th anniversary of the first successful (that we know of) ascent of Everest. I work in a cafe, which is joined to a climbing shop. Can you see where this is going yet?

 

Interestingly the shop staff didn’t have a clue until I brought it up, despite seeming to live and breathe climbing. I had assumed that they would be doing some sort of event so me offering to make a topical cake for the occasion would make sense. The response was, they didn’t know, nothing was planned but cake sounds good! This was from the assistant manager in the middle of March.

 

So I went away and planned, and planned. I needed a good map so a few weeks later I went downstairs to ask for help. 

 

I wish I had my camera on me, because the look on the managers face when asked if he could recommend me “a good topographical map of Everest”, was absolutely priceless!!

 

Suffice to say the assistant manager (his younger brother) had not thought to mention the cake, the anniversary, or anything which might have given him a clue that I wanted the map for anything other than climbing.

 

I should say that when I started planning this cake it was quite simple, the top 200-300m, one nice big pyramid of cake. But then some bright spark asked if I could mark on the campsites form the original expedition. When I looked into where these were I realised how very little of the route I was showing, not even the dreaded 2nd step!

 

So the cake got a bit bigger and a bit more complicated:

 

The shop staff did do their own celebration of the anniversary, most by climbing but one by doing the Everest Marathon. The blogs of these are available here for the climbing and here for the marathon.

 

Part 2 with the bake and build will be up soon.

Anniversary Insanity

This is a little teaser pic of what I have been up to, that has caused me to miss 3 months of write ups. They will be done, soon, I promise!

February Failure

So this month there is no recipe, as the guinea pigs (my esteemed colleagues) failed in their part of the bargain. On Saturday 16th, there were several plates, bowls, cups and a fair bit of cutlery to be rescued from the staff room, hence no cake is deserved! However, I must apologise to the three good guinea pigs (sounds like a children’s story) who were away for the weekend when the cake was forfeit, and still have been bringing stuff back to the cafe since being told (not just them, but mainly). But they still aren’t getting cake.

 

I must say that they picked an especially bad month to slip up on, as my birthday happens to be close enough to the day when I would have brought in the cake that I was going to go for a real treat. It’s Denver Chocolate Pudding (pictured below), a really good rich chocolate sponge with an even better sauce underneath. 

 

I blame the dominance of this pudding in my childhood for my fussiness when it comes to chocolate cake, I usually find it either too dry of not rich enough or, worst of all, both.

 

And no, I didn’t make it just so that I could put a picture up to taunt the guinea pigs. The pictured pudding was made by my mother last week for an event she was going to. She also got very upset when I said that I wanted to put the recipe on here: I have been banned from sharing the recipe!

 

However, I will give some hints about how I have taken to tweaking disappointing cake recipes to fix the above problems:

1. Always brush with apricot jam before icing (or instead of icing). This will add moisture, seal the surface so the cake cannot loose it’s moisture, and the apricot boosts the chocolate flavour. You will want to heat the jam for a few seconds in the microwave until it is runny enough to do this, but be careful – trust me, you do not want to burn yourself with hot sugar.

2. If the recipe asks for either water or milk, add instant coffee. Boil it up with which ever liquid first and cool as necessary, but make it strong. You wont taste the coffee in the end cake, it will just give the chocolate flavour a boost. This is actually a trick used in the Denver.

3. (As long as it’s not already in the recipe) Add salt. Just a pinch, trust me it makes a difference.

4. Use both 2 & 3 in the icing. If it’s butter icing base, boil up the hot milk with a lot of instant coffee to add to the mixture to let it down when it starts to get too firm initially. But taste after mixing in each addition.

5. Add chilli. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I like the added warmth, and in moderation most people wont know unless you tell them. I have previously put a full teaspoon of Cayenne Pepper into a cupcake batter, and more into the icing, not told anyone and watched them all disappear at a great rate of knots – and nobody guessed. But again taste as you add, I wouldn’t trust that pepper not to be over a year old in which case the flavour would be less potent.

Double or nothing – Januarys reward

Firstly, I’m afraid that there are no pictures this month because I forgot to take them.

This month I got caught out in several ways so ended up making a second cake incase the cupcakes didn’t go down very well.

The cake I had intended to make was a spiced beer cake. I’ve wanted to make one for a while and when I saw the recipe on “the caked crusader” I knew what I wanted to make this month.

However I rapidly ran out of time and ended up with my first attempt being handed over as the reward. Now this wouldn’t normally be a problem, but these cupcakes did not look promising. Thank goodness for buttercream!

I first ran into problems with this recipe because of my lack of foresight in checking that I had all the ingredients. It turned out that I did not have All Spice or more importantly any stout! To compensate for the lack of all spice I added a pinch of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves as (apparently) this is similar to the flavour. The lack of stout was a bigger problem, I had wanted to use a local brew “Noggin Filler” but ended up using one of the other ales from the brewery, their flagship ale “Bakewell Best Bitter.” This didn’t give as strong a flavour as Noggin Filler would just a nice after taste, in fact if you didn’t know you were tasting a beer cake I doubt you would have guessed.

Now that I had all the ingredients roughly sorted and mixed up into a runny batter I ran into my next problem: I have an Aga. The recipe called for baking 15-20 minutes at Gas Mark 5. I can approximate the temperature of Gas Mark 4 by using the cold tray in the top (hotter) oven or Gas Mark 7 without the cold tray and with the rack in the middle of the oven, but I was not sure what configuration would give me Gas Mark 5. I decided to place the cold tray much higher than normal and hoped for the best, put the first batch in for 15 minutes and waited. When the timer went off it was clear that the cakes were no where near done, they ended up being 35-40 minutes in the oven before the skewer came out clean.

When I did finally take them out of the oven to cool some of them had risen dramatically and overflowed the cases. Unfortunately they all sank down in the middle, both batches (so it wasn’t to do with opening the oven door to early as I feared for the first batch). I think this may have been due to using to much raising agent, I can’t remember doing so but I have been known to miss read teaspoons for tablespoons before (the joys of dyslexia). Fortunately this gave me some off cuts so I knew that at least you couldn’t taste the Bicarb.

The cakes taste lovely, especially with the honey buttercream for a hint of sweetness. However the honey flavour was some what lost when eaten with such a strong cake and the cakes definitely needed the covering of buttercream to cover the flaws.

The sight of all sad sunken cupcakes the morning that I was to take them in was really depressing. So before I whipped up the icing, I whipped up another cake! This time a tried and tested favourite, Merry Berry’s “Sharp Lemon Slices” from the Aga cookbook, only changing the icing to a lemon and sugar mixture to make the most wonderful lemon drizzle cake.

Cakes all done, challenges over? Not on this day, because on this particular day I had to get the train to work. I was only traveling one stop along the line and it normally will take me 10-15 minutes to walk up to the station, but normally I’m not carrying a box of cupcakes and a tray of cake. By the time I got to work I had very sore arms so was very happy to be told not to start for half an hour.

The cakes went down very well, and I honestly think that I could have gotten away without the Lemon cake, but I still wouldn’t risk it another time, after all they are rewards!

 

December’s Reward: a New Years treat.

Well, I had promised the staff “something with Ginger” as the reward cake for December, but I don’t think they were expecting this!

The windows are isomalt and the signs are royal icing, piped onto grease proof paper the day before assembly.

 

 

 

 

 

I delivered this at opening time on New Years day, and I don’t think the staff being hungover did anything to diminish their astonishment. I had, in fact, mentioned my plans to several people so wasn’t quite expecting them to be SO astonished.

 

For the Gingerbread I adapted a BBC recipe by adding 1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg and a pinch of ground cloves. I felt that this gives a better all around flavour, backing up the ginger. I had come across this by fluke, when making biscuits with the same recipe I found that I only had 1 tsp of ginger in the entire house(!) so added the nutmeg and cloves to make a christmas spiced biscuit instead.

 

This was the only deviation from the recipe, which you can find here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/gingerbread_men_99096

 

I used a thick royal icing to stick it together and to pipe the signs with. If I had time I would have let down some of the icing to fill in the signs, as this would have made for a smoother finish.

 

The most important stage was working out the template. I did this by using the photos of the actual shop (the ones above) and, in powerpoint, created line drawings of each side of the building I wanted, plus the support pieces. Once I had these right I printed several copies, and on each cut out different features. So one copy was just the outline, one was the outline with the windows cut out, and one was all the bits which stuck out. I kept the in between bits to trace the signs onto.

 

With these I trimmed each piece both before and after baking to make sure they were right. The sooner out of the over the better for trimming as once they firmed up it was very difficult to get a clean cut. I had to us the isomalt filling the windows to keep several of the frames from falling apart, luckily no one noticed.

 

I cut the windows after baking, this was more forgetfulness than planning. I had been planning to use the more traditional method, of baking with a crushed boiled sweet in the hole, to achieve the windows. In the end though the isomalt was so good that I had to cover the floor of the building with the icing, since the windows were so clear that all the glue holding the building together was very visible.

The confession: what and why

I’m Emily, and I love baking! However, due to being far to good at finishing off anything that I make, I am also on a diet. Hence I had to stop baking, unless I have to give it away.

 

It helps that I work in a cafe, I do bake there a minimum of once a fortnight. However, there isn’t a great deal of variety… I can make several varieties of crumble from memory.

 

The cafe is attached to a shop, and the staff from the shop come up for lunch every weekday. They will usually take their food to the staff room, because there usually isn’t room for them to sit in the cafe, but they frequently forget to bring the crockery and cutlery back to the cafe. This has led to me making several back-breaking trips back to the cafe with trays piled high with plates.

 

After one such trip, where I had to leave several items behind for fear that the tray would break, I decided that something had to change. The current system of a sign in the staff room reminding people to return plates, and a harassed phone call when there was more customers than plates in the cafe, clearly wasn’t working.

 

As the main person from the cafe who was making these trips to collect crockery it was in my interest to prevent them from occurring. So I had a brainwave: I knew that the shop staff love cake, and they knew that I made really good cakes (I had made some for various people’s last day), so I decided to bribe them! 

 

For every month that went by with out me having to collect any piece of crockery or cutlery, I would make them a cake.

 

I introduced this system at the start of November, and so far they have been very good and got two cakes. 

 

Now I am going to share the experiment with you. I am using the cake a month to try new recipes and experiment with techniques and decorations. So this blog is going to be a place where I write about what worked and what didn’t, as well as discuss how the experiment is going.