Courgettes in a cake for Dundee Baking Club

I have baked cakes with vegetables in them before, most notably carrot cake, and a beetroot chocolate cake, and they have been delicious.  I even bought a book a few years ago, all about cakes with vegetables and less sugar (I was going to name and give a link to that book, but for the life of me can't think what it's called.  If I remember, I'll be sure to include it here), but don't think I've even cracked the spine on that one - perhaps don't tell Mr Becca.

This recipe was for the first meeting of the newly re-branded Dundee Baking Club and the theme was Autumnal Bakes.  As you may recall, about 4 years ago I founded the Dundee branch of the Clandestine Cake Club with Jac from Tinned Tomatoes.  We were very happy with our meetings and members and rolled happily along for quite some time.  Stuart of Cakeyboi joined us and together we ran it all enjoyably.  Then we felt we wanted to bake other than just large cakes, so respectfully broke away and this cake was for our inaugural meeting.  I like to bake big cakes, as our family has little appetite for them so baking for others means I get to taste a little but have the fun of  the bake.

Above we see the grated courgette (or zucchini if you prefer), eggs, brown sugar, flour and spices.

And above here we see the disappointingly thin slivers of cake  :(  I don't know how you would feel with these layers, but I was seriously unimpressed at how little they rose in the baking process.  I had double-checked the recipe quantities and method, in case I had done something wrong, but no.  And my raising agent wasn't out of date or anything like that either...

So I made sure I had plenty of cinnamon flavoured buttercream icing and got to work.  I dusted it all lightly with cinnamon and gold edible glitter spray, plus a dose of delicious walnuts and took it to the meeting.

Where I am pleased to report that it was gobbled up and no-one noticed that the layers were a little on the thin side.  

Getting healthy with homemade granola bars

We are still trying to get to grips with the busier, or rather shorter, weekday mornings (and by we, I don't mean me).  In an attempt to help The Team eat as well as they can in the short time available, I have been researching nutritious and delicious breakfast options, that aren't too time-consuming for me.  And when I came across the Lisa of 100 Days of Real Food, I was pleased. Although the premise is wonderful, I didn't feel like it was something I could easily slot into our lives.  But this granola recipe?  For sure.

As it happens, we pretty much always have all those ingredients in the house at any given time, so it was really easy to get started.

A large bowl full of oats, coconut, seeds, raw cashews, raw brazil nuts, pine nuts, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg - mmm...

Here we can see the seeds were a mix of pumpkin and sunflower, and somewhere in there are the pine nuts, because I didn't have enough cashews and walnuts as per the recipe.

 The melted butter and honey soaked in really quickly, so I had to get mixing fast!

There was so much mixture (the Americans seem to like making huge amounts of desserts at once) that I had to use my usual brownie tray (approx 20 x 30cm) plus an additional 20cm square tin. Although to be fair, the square tray had a thinner layer of mixture than the rectangular one.

And for future bakings, I would lower the recommended temperature and the time involved, as this seems a little dry and overdone to us.  The honey seems to have made it an extra specially golden colour.

However, despite the slight dryness to taste, it's deliciously cripsy, smells wonderfully of honey and tastes great with all the different seeds and nuts in each mouthful!  And it's lasting well in an airtight container, just perfect for afternoon tea or a quick bite in the mornings.

Honey Joys, or maybe cornflake crispy cakes

When I was a young girl, in a land far, far away, Kellogs Cornflakes had recipes on the side of the box.  As did Rice Bubbles and other breakfast cereals I'm sure, but I specifically remember those two. As I do now, my Mum used to bake with us as young kids, and the recipes on the side of these boxes were some of our favourites.  The Rice Bubbles (or Rice Crispies, as they're known here) one requires an ingredient that seems to only exist in that other land, but the Cornflakes one is easy to do anywhere in the world.  In fact, the actual recipe I use is cut from a box, about 20 years ago perhaps!

Suffice it to say, Mini-1 had a friend over to play and Mini-2 didn't fancy whatever game it was they were playing, so asked to bake instead - as you do.  We had made Honey Joys a month or so ago, so still had lots of cornflakes leftover.

A little aside.  I just Googled honey joys and was astounded to get links!! Those two links are different, but for the exact same recipe.  That is just so cool!  I had no idea it would be out there - isn't the web great?

So, as you can see from the recipes, they are super quick and easy to make.  The UK conversions are 90g of granulated white sugar and 150g of cornflakes.  And that's it.  It's seriously that quick and simple.

I find that you need to let them cool in the baking trays for a while, so that they harden in the correct shape.  And they do last in a baking tin for storage, but never for long chez Becca - they're far too more-ish for them to stick around long!  Even Mr Becca has been known to eat a few in a row.

These ones have pretty sprinkles added to them - it doesn't affect the taste at all, but the children thought it looked nicer.  If you make some, do come back and let us know how you got on!

Pumpkin Pie Spice, homemade

Lots of American recipes I see now use Pumpkin Pie Spice in them.  I have checked closely, but nowhere sells it.  So then I checked my trusty friend, Google, and hey presto!  I found a recipe (or twenty!). 

I signed up a while ago to the Betty Crocker website, as they do so many different items and hav so many recipes from which to choose.  So when I saw that Betty had a recipe for spice mix, well, that just had to be the one I chose. 

As you can see on my photo, I didn't use quite all the right amounts.  And to be perfectly honest, I found it too heavy on the cloves even with these proportions.  So I added in another 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon, to take off a bit of the clove taste, and it works better for me.

If you make some, do let me know what you think - and how much you enjoy baking with it.  Mmm, smells like Autumn!!

Cinnamon danish for Sunday breakfast

I love a cinnamon danish.  Or even a cinnamon roll, which I think is a bit softer and more bread-like.  My Swedish friend P, who sadly moved back to Sweden over a year ago, left me with her recipe for cinnamon rolls.  I've yet to try it, but she tells me it's easy and I know it tastes amazing... one day.

In lieu of that, and because I have learnt to treasure my weekend morning lie-ins now, I decided to try out a pre-packaged cinnamon danish recipe.  It's by Jus-Rol, a company who specialise in ready-made pastry and whom we've tried and liked before (and no, this post isn't sponsored by them at all).  They were quick and easy to prepare and made for a super delicious Sunday morning breakfast treat, with a cup of mocha  (milk for The Team).  Enjoy!

You can even see, in this before photo, the fun roll-up tin the danish came out of and the actual real Swedish pearl sugar that P gave us as a parting gift.  Mmm...  tasty!  Uh, this photo isn't of the right item!  Oops, made by the same company, but those ones down there are croissant.  Wonder if I can find the right photo?? Still, you get the idea right?  ha ha

Fish pie? That's not a dessert...

After the limited success of the courgette fritters, I thought I ought to try again to feed The Team something home-cooked, delicious and nutritious.  So another magazine recipe to the rescue - well, it said it was easy. It's called Cheesy Fish Pie and is in the July 2013 issue of the in-store Asda Magazine (page 59 of 101 if that link doesn't take you straight there).  As you will see, not a tricky situation.  

But, well, what can I say in my defence?  I'm a baker, not a cook.  I was worried that it was all a bust, because the fish took nearly twice as long to cook as they suggested, but it ended up being just fine after all. I had started in plenty of time, so that despite the extra time for the fish to be cooked dinner was served on time.  Mind you, that didn't mean the girls were keen to eat it...  But when 'bed hungry' is the only other menu option, they get hungry eventually.  

Mr Becca and I thought it was fine, not huge on flavour but easy enough.  I've heard that Jamie Oliver does a good fish pie, we'll have to try that one next time.

Cinnamon rolls, fresh from the oven

I love cinnamon rolls.  And Danish pastries.  And basically most bread type products.  I mean, seriously, who doesn't??  I bet even Coeliacs and gluten-allergy sufferers probably still love the smell of fresh baked bread, even though they can't partake in quite the same gluttonous way.  Anyway, I digress, and I don't like to go too far off topic.

My good friend P, who just happens to be Swedish and the daughter-in-law of a baker (and wife of a keen home bread baker), made us her cinnamon rolls using the huge chunks of Swedish Pearl Sugar on top for decoration.  She up and left me a few months back (meany, the whole family relocated and we've all been down in the dumps ever since) but did leave me her recipe and a box of Parlsucker (that's probably not how you spell it, sorry P!).  So one day, I surely intend to bake them and report back to her, via Skype, ha ha.

In the meantime, we went to Ikea a couple of weekends ago and I brought back these goodies.

Yep, that's right - the Ikea cheat's version of P's Swedish cinnamon rolls!  Well, I had fancied them last night and these were by far easier to whip up for The Team breakfast.  And they were pretty darn good too...

Mmm,  now, just to find that recipe of P's and get started on the real thing...

Last lesson before Christmas

My remit - as the school baking lady/parent volunteer baker - is to choose easy, fun, fast recipes, so that the kids don't lose interest part-way through and so that we have enough time to complete all the tasks in the allocated lesson time.  I had thought that this lesson's recipe (for simple, roll-out sugar cookies) fit that bill, but as John Steinbeck so aptly wrote many years ago, 'the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang awry'  (it's a good few years since I studied this book in high-school English Lit class, so if that quote isn't verbatim, then let's call it a paraphrase).

Here we can see the instruction board that the teacher made - not too many ingredients (top left), tasks (right hand side) or length of recipe (lower left) - right?

This recipe required a hand-mixer, so the teacher kindly brought in her vintage Kenwood number - some of the children had never seen nor used one, so it caused much merriment.

Everyone wanted a turn!

You won't be surprised to learn that the resultant dough was rather sticky, probably from being overworked.  So we just spread out more flour before rolling out the dough and stamping out the fluted circle shapes (I'm telling you the actual shape of cookie, because when you look further down you may not recognise those shapes as circles, bless them (we didn't have a spatula with which to lift up the cookies onto the tray))

Here we see a couple of the children rolling out the last possible bits of dough in order to stamp out just one more cookie!!

And the final tally - 3 trays of roll-out sugar cookies, counted just as the bell was ringing for the end of the period.  The school is gearing up for the St Andrews Day (November 30th) performance and then the Christmas Show so we won't have time for any more lessons this year.  Here's hoping they want me back next term/next year.  Happy Holidays kids!

National Baking Week UK

No sooner has National Chocolate Week finished, than National Baking Week starts.  Come on, guys - do we need help to get into the kitchen?

In honour, I started with a refridgerator Mars Bar Slice and dusted it with neon orange and graphite grey/blue glitter, as Halloween is the next upcoming holiday.  Here's a full-frontal shot, with the little pots of gorgeous glitter...

And a sexy interiors shot...

Mr Becca likes banoffee and had bought the ingredients to make the recipe on the back of the pack of dried banana chips.  It wasn't hard, just crush up the digestive biscuits and some banana chips and mix with melted butter.  Press into the base of a 20cm tin and cool in fridge.  Then whip up mascarpone cheese, banana yoghurt and some icing sugar for one layer and melt brown sugar and butter with condensed milk for the other.  Finally decorate with choc-dipped dried banana chips (you'll note that I didn't choc-coat the chips...).  So I made it for him just now, but he says he's not hungry.  Grrrr

Bananas are my least favourite fruit, so here's hoping he tucks in soon!

P.S. I took it to a friend's for lunch the next day and they all loved it, but felt it would have been better with fresh rather than dried banana, so you wouldn't have that crunch on top.  Mr Becca had some this evening and pronounced it good - yay!!