Orange and Almond Cake

So, I was making candied orange peel. As you do. Because it’s the season of oranges and cinnamon and sweet things to help us through the short days.

..And I had lots of orange syrup left over from the boiling of the peel with sugar, so I wanted to use it to make a lovely moist festive orange cake. The nutty almonds, sweet syrup and zesty zest work together to make this the ultimate tea-time cake.

And another welcome use for this cake is after a Christmas dinner - I don't like Christmas pudding but this one can be rigged up (depending on how fancy your cake tins are) to look just like one and (for me) it tastes so much better!

I used a little fancy cake tin and though it was more difficult to extricate the cake (it required heavy greasing beforehand and careful handling after!) it gave it a fancy finish that I really loved.

Zimtsterne – German Cinammon Stars

IT’S BEGINNING TO FEEL A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS.

Just back from an amazing holiday to Hong Kong and China – they really have taken to Christmas there but it’s just not the same. They have spectacular trees and light displays, and I’ve never heard so many “modern” remixes of Christmas songs. Fabulous but not quite Christmas.

But if you want to look to a country that can really do Christmas, look no further than Germany. This is a traditional German Christmas cookie – they are a big fan of cooking huge batches of cookies in the weeks leading up to Christmas. A nation after my own heart. That means that these stay fresh for up to a month! Another bonus – no gluten or dairy! The cookies are bound with whipped egg white instead of (the more traditional) dairy.

I had a lot of fun making these cookies, they are perfect for a Christmas snack – or to give as presents!

Makes approx. 3 dozen cookies

Sweet & Spooky Gingerbread Skulls

Happy Hallowe’en everyone!

I re-use this gingerbread recipe every couple of weeks. It’s delicious, and it is so easy to work with. Just a dream come true in biscuit form. So I am using it here with just a few flavour tweaks.

I wasn't really going for "spooky"

You don’t have to use skull cutters. If you are more of a free-hand person, then you could cut out circles and then ice those without the “guidelines.” And even if you use cutters which come with cut out indents, you aren’t forced to copy those shapes, you can always get creative and add your own patterns over the top.

I have a slight obsession with holiday baking. And there is something hugely therapeutic about icing buns in an intricate and ridiculously detailed manner. This is how I spend my Sunday evenings and it’s so much fun. Edible hobbies are the best kind.

German Biscuits

German biscuits are a staple in Northern Irish bakeries, along with other such classics as snowballs and coconut fingers and fifteens.

They’re a very important part of my childhood, and whenever we would head to a bakery, my sticky little fingers would reach for this sweet round shortbread biscuit,with jam oozing out the sides and barely-set white icing dolloped in the centre.

As I've said, the classic combination is jam and white icing, so the caramel in half of these isn’t strictly “canon” but I had a little bit of caramel left over from another baking project so I thought I’d mix things up. It was delicious, as adding caramel to things normally is. If I had to choose, I think I have to favour tradition and give my thumbs up to the classic jam-filled ones, mainly because I'm a sucker for nostalgia.

You will note that the icing on top is a little.. slapdash. But that’s the way it is meant to be. A beautifully and finely piped topping of icing is great.. but it’s not quite right for these. So dollop away!

Spiced Bundt Cake (plus Cupcakes!)

My belated Christmas gift to you.. This cake. This is a truly perfect cake. You know gingerbread men? Imagine them soft and moist and in cake form. Doesn’t that sound like something you need to have in your life right now?

I may have mentioned it before, but I love cakes. And I’ve never made a bundt cake before, but my boyfriend managed to find me a few cool tins at the house he grew up in in Sweden, and I was happy to take them!

This cake actually worked surprisingly well, the hardest part of a bundt cake is extricating the delicious (and soft, and fragile) cake from the tin. It took me a few scary moments with a plastic knife to get it out, but a well-greased pan in preparation really does do wonders.

I had intended to make just a cake, but I ended up with a LOT of mixture and a rather small tin, so I got about a dozen cupcakes out of it too. I baked them until golden, which took about 20-25 minutes. And for icing those, I just whipped up a simple buttercream icing, added a load of cinnamon to it, then piped and embellished in a festive theme. YUM.

Dense, Dark Chocolate Cake

Okay. I have a terribly-kept secret: I LOVE CHOCOLATE CAKE.

So it is time for another variation on one of my very favourite things! You know how 

Mrs Doyle loves making tea? That’s the level of my feeling for chocolate cake. "Oh, won't you have a slice? You will! You will!" Which is why I’m posting a SECOND variation only a few months after the last one!

This cake is a little more grown up than the last iteration – it is dense and dark and moist and chocolatey and tastes extremely decadent. And it’s all in one bowl, minimal washing up! I made this cake as I was feeling inspired during the classic cakes finale of “Great British Bake Off.” I would bake a chocolate cake all day long for that challenge.

One thing that I wanted to show with this cake is that you CAN safely melt chocolate in the microwave. Sometimes there is just no time to melt over some hot water.

First, you break up the chocolate into a bowl:

Then, stick it in the microwave for 30 seconds:

Stir well, the bottom bits will melt quicker than the top, so mix them all up.  Stick in the microwave for another 15 seconds:

Now, this is the point where I STOP microwaving. I think this is where a lot of people go wrong and burn their chocolate. 

This is plenty melted enough, just keep stirring it. And pretty soon you will have this:

Don't stop, keep stirring!

I have fallen into a rut with my cake-decorating and that’s what I’ll be working on over the next few months, but for now, bask in the glory of chocolatey chocolate icing slathered dripping down the sides of your cake, and sprinkled with chocolate sprinkles for additional deliciousness.

Strawberry Cake Donuts

These donuts have fulfilled a lifelong goal of mine: to make a donut which looks exactly like one that Homer Simpson would eat. And I think I succeeded. Of course, I would have preferred the longer sprinkles for authenticity, but beggars can't be choosers (Sainsburys only had ONE type of sprinkles, the horror).

The difference between this and regular donuts is that there is no yeast, so no rising time. The leavening agents (bicarb of soda, baking powder) take care of the rising in the heat. What it basically means is that if you want donuts within 45 minutes you can have them. Which is VERY IMPORTANT information.

This wasn’t the easiest recipe to be honest, and a good few of my donuts got slightly charred on the bottom of the pan. But that was usually easily fixed, and icing sugar covers all sins.

The addition of cinnamon in the batter was a complete revelation. They aren’t the sweetest donuts without icing, but the cinnamon gives them a really delicious depth of flavour. And why would you eat an un-iced donut anyway? What are you, watching your figure?

Makes about 9 donuts and 12 middles

Gingerbread Men - 100th Post Christmas Special!

Let’s hear those sleigh bells ringing!

I love Christmas. Christmas really and truly is the most wonderful time of the year. I love that everywhere gets decked out with lights, I love singing Christmas songs, I love watching Christmas movies with loved ones, and I most especially love cooking Christmas treats.

Christmas, for me, is a time for tradition and comfort, I like watching the same films and wearing the same dodgy jumpers. I also like eating the same things! Having said that, I am always on the lookout for things to add to my festivities: Four years ago I saw It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time, and now it is an unmissable part of the season for me.  Three years ago, my boyfriend and I traipsed to IKEA in Christmas jumpers and got meatballs and a whole bunch of Julmust, and now we do it every year. Even just last year was the first time I’d made ham in coke, and now it has been added to my festive menu!

I’ve never had that “perfect” recipe for gingerbread.. Until now. And wouldn’t you know it, Mary bloody Berry strikes again! I was initially sceptical about the recipe, I’ve never added syrup to a biscuit recipe, but damn it was good.

I’ve made a few adjustments to the spicing, just to amp it up a notch.  Her recipe also was for larger gingerbread people, wheras I’ve gone with a mix of teeny Christmas shapes and the larger people. The small Christmas shapes were a present from my mum and are my new exact favourite thing.

To me, the smaller ones are very similar to Swedish “pepparkakor” in that they are dark, crisp and spiced. The larger ones are that gorgeous, chewy gingerbread cookie that is just delectable.