World Baking Day 19th May 2013

Are you ready to join me and 'Bake Brave'?

I've been chosen to be one of 100 Ambassadors for this year's World Baking Day on Sunday 19th May.

Stork are generously sponsoring the event and are giving 100 people all over the UK the chance to host a World Baking Day House Party. Lucky winners will be invited to host an official World Baking Day party and will be sent everything they need for the perfect baking get-together. This will include bunting, balloons, cake decorations and egg timers, not to mention a voucher to redeem for a 500g tub of Stork Margarine; the perfect ingredient to bake your cakes. You'll also be provided with the official recipes to enable you and your guests to 'Bake Brave'.

Hosts and their guests will be invited to bring their baked cakes & delights to the party which you'll then decorate together. What a fantastic way to spend a Sunday; a day filled full of cake, friends and fun!!!

All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning one of these 100 world Baking Day House Party packs is to visit Come Round by FRIDAY 12th APRIL 2013 and complete the online application form. Remember that there will only be 100 lucky winners, so pop straight over there and apply for your pack. As they say - you've got to be in it to win it! Please remember to read the conditions of application.

Don't forget from 1st May, you can join us at the World Baking Day website where you can take inspiration from some truly amazing bakers & see the 100 recipes we've shared.

Winning Be-Ro banana bread recipe

Please note that the original recipe is NOT mine. It’s one that I found years ago in one of my trusty fail-safe, go-to recipe books. It came from the Home Recipes with Be-Ro Flour, 37th edition. I wanted to share it, along with some little alterations that I have made along the way to all the banana bread lovers out there.

200g (8oz) Self raising flour
1.25ml (1/4 tsp) Bicarbonate of soda
2.5ml (1/2 tsp) Salt – I NEVER add this
75g (3oz) Butter – I use Stork margarine
150g (6oz) Caster sugar
2 Eggs, beaten
450g (1lb) Bananas (weighed with the skin on)
100g (4oz) Walnuts, chopped (optional)

1. Preheat your oven to 180C, Fan 160C, Gas 4.
2. Grease & flour a 2lb loaf tin.
3. Mix together the flour, bi-carb and salt (if using).
4. Mash the bananas.
5. Cream together the butter and sugar until pale & fluffy.
6. Add the eggs, a little at a time, alternately with a spoonful of the flour mixture and beat well.
7. Stir in the remaining flour, bananas and walnuts (if using).
8. Pour into your prepared tin & bake for 1 1/4 hours, or until a skewer, inserted into the centre, comes out clean.
9. Leave to cool for a few minutes, then turn out to cool completely.
10. Once cool, wrap in foil and ideally leave for 24 hours before slicing & eating.

Rosie’s notes:

A) I add ALL of my ingredients to the bowl & mix as per the ‘all in one’ method.
B) Instead of greasing & lining my tins, I find it much easier & more convenient to line them with a loaf tin liner from Lakeland.
C) when the mixture is in the tin, scatter the top with some more chopped walnuts and then sprinkle some soft brown sugar over the top. The flavour that this imparts is amazing!
D) Try spreading your sliced banana bread with some proper butter for added flavour.

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Ndali vanilla gift swap

I’ve been invited to take part in the Ndali Vanilla Swap that’s taking place at Fortnum & Mason’sprestigious store in Piccadilly, London on Monday 24th September. The event is also in association with Kenwood and The Fair Trade Foundation and has been organised by Vanessa Kimble, Goddess on a Budget, and author of Prepped.

The criteria of the afternoon involves us making or baking a product, or products, in up to 4 categories:
1. Biscuits
2. Cake/cupcakes
3. Sweets
4. Preserves

I’ve chosen to enter the biscuit & the cake categories with two recipes that I will share with you here.

For my biscuit recipe, I’m making a rustic vanilla, oat, cranberry & white chocolate biscuit. Whilst my cake is a rich vanilla infused elderflower sponge with a vanilla bean frosting and decorated with fondant.

As the name suggests, it’s a gift swap in as much as we produce our creations to go in to a draw, according to the category entered. We are then lucky enough to draw an equivalent gift which has been lovingly created by a fellow attendee which we will no doubt marvel at and possibly enjoy on the train home later that evening.

We each have some wonderful Ndali vanilla product to use in our creations. I really can’t recommend their vanilla powder enough! The fragrance is sublime, whilst the taste is incredibly intense, yet gentle at the same time; a truly amazing product! Along with the Ndali vanilla, we will be using Fairtrade products where possible.

To give you a potted history of Ndali vanilla; Lulu Sturdy inherited a former tea plantation and, after experimenting with other crops, settled on vanilla. She now grows premium quality Fair Trade vanilla on her organic 1,000 acre mixed tropical farm, Ndali. She also processes the individual vanilla crops of hundreds of small farmers who she has helped to gain Fair Trade deals. Growing, hand pollinating, harvesting and processing are all highly labour intensive. The cream of the crop is packaged under the Fair Trade ‘Ndali’ brand for retail. There are still a lot of farmers in the area who do not have Fair Trade deals.

Fair Trade makes an incredible difference to the lives of producers; it’s not just a brand. Learning about these growers has convinced me that the deals brokered through Fair Trade make a huge difference to the lives of the farmers and their families. Many are subject to exploitation by unscrupulous traders.

You can’t fail to be moved by one farmer’s statement: “We don’t want charity, we just want a fair price for what we have grown”

Demand for vanilla outstrips the supply of vanilla beans and, sadly, most UK vanilla flavouring is synthetic with the vast majority of it going into manufactured foods. In home baking, we can avoid this ‘vanilla essence’ and buy pure vanilla in pods, extract and powder form. Of course, its more expensive than it’s synthetic substitute, but in terms of quality and flavour, there really is no substitute worth considering. Next time you shop for vanilla please consider not only the quality of the product that you’re buying, but also the life changes you are helping to make for the Ugandan vanilla growers and pay a fair price.

Karen is 50!

Karen is a former work colleague of mine who was celebrating her 50th birthday.

Her order was for a cake to celebrate and for 30 matching cupcakes. For this one, I decided to make a deep, vanilla tray bake cake with a pair of flared ‘jeans’ which were cut from an 8″ square cake.

The decoration was in the form of different coloured circles of fondant icing.

The matching vanilla cupcakes had a white swirl of buttercream on top & were embellished with matching circles of fondant icing.

Vanilla & Elderflower Drizzle Cake

175g Butter
175g Caster sugar
3 Eggs
150g Self raising flour
75g Ground almonds
5ml Baking powder
5ml Ndali vanilla powder
30ml Belvoir Fruit Farms Elderflower Cordial
70ml Milk

FOR THE ELDERFLOWER DRIZZLE
60ml Belvoir Fruit Farms Elderflower cordial (undiluted)
60g Granulated sugar


1. Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3.

2. Grease and line an 8″ deep round tin with baking parchment.

3. Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

4. Add the eggs, flour, almonds, baking powder, vanilla powder, elderflower cordial & milk and beat until smooth.

5. Pour into the tin and bake for 45-50 mins until a skewer poked in the centre comes out clean.

6. Just before the cake comes out of the oven, mix together the ‘drizzle’ cordial and sugar.

7. As soon as you remove the cake from the oven, leave it in the tin and prick it all over with a skewer. Slowly pour the 'drizzle' all over the cake, allowing it to soak in.

8. Leave the cake to cool completely in the tin, then carefully lift out onto a serving plate.

I chose to decorate mine with small, white fondant flowers cut & bunched to look like the head of an elderflower surrounded by some green leaves.

Enjoy with a glass of cold, sparkling Belvoir Fruit Farms Elderflower cordial, or a lovely cup of tea.

This is a lovely, delicately flavoured & moist cake that, due to the addition of ground almonds will easily keep for a few days. If you’re lucky and it doesn’t all get eaten very quickly that is!

Special Agent Oso cake

Junior is a very special little boy who absolutely adores Special Agent Oso so I was asked if I could make a cake for his 3rd birthday.  First job for me was to make a Google search to find out exactly who Special Agent Oso was as my two children are much older and have outgrown such characters.

Turns our Special Agent Oso is a yellow bear!  Who would have known? Lol

This is what I created for him; a fondant bear which took an AGE to texturise. I was really pleased with the reaction I got when it was collected as they were expecting a simple, flat image, not a whole 3D character!

The sponge is an 8" vanilla with a buttercream and jam filing, covered with fondant and then decorated.

Amber's 11th birthday cake

I was asked to make a cake for a former colleague's daughter who was about to celebrate her 11th birthday. Tina and I worked together for several years but had sadly lost touch since then. Through the power of Facebook, we have thankfully been chatting and catching up again. It also turns out that both our daughters will start the same senior school in September this year so it looks likely that we won't be losing touch again.

Amber had specific requirements for her cake. It had to be white with bright coloured decoration and just HAD to have a bow! Not one to let a birthday girl down, I rose to the occasion with this two tier vanilla cake.

The top tier was a 6" round and the bottom was an 8" square. The bow was made from fondant, which was rolled very thinly and folded, supported overnight to hold its shape.

Northampton Clandestine Cake Club Meeting July 2012

What a wonderful evening last night. We held our 3rd Clandestine Cake Club meeting for the Northampton district. Our theme was (appropriately with the weather) a Summer Garden Party and that's exactly what we had!

We met at our 'secret' location which was the beautiful and characteristic home of one of our members in a beautiful Northamptonshire village. The sun was shining and her garden looked truly amazing - the perfect setting for a garden party.

There was a vast array of incredibly beautiful cakes, brought to our meeting from every corner of our county by lovely ladies (and even some gentlemen too!).

You can see the two tables, full to bursting point of these incredible cakes here:

For my cake this month, I decided to have a bit of a play with flavours that are evocative of a summer day; namely elderflower. Sadly it wasn't homemade elderflower cordial that I used, but one that I buy all year round from Belvoir Fruit Farms. I adapted a plain, ground almond sponge recipe that I use by adding elderflower cordial in place of the majority of the milk to add a subtle flavour that I hoped wouldn't bake out. Once the cake was baked and still hot from the oven, I mixed some granulated sugar with some more elderflower cordial and used it as a topping, which when dried would have soaked into the sponge leaving a wonderfully fragrant and flavoursome topping to my cake. I'm really pleased to say my recipe experiment worked perfectly too!

For decoration I cut lots and lots of tiny white flowers and stuck them to a flattened ball of fondant to simulate an elderflower head, which I surrounded by leaves, before adding two more much smaller flower heads to the cake.

A lovely evening filled with cake, friends, laughs and setting summer sun; perfect!

Laura's Zebra Cake

Carol is an old work friend of mine going back some 20 years. Laura is her daughter who was celebrating her 16th birthday and wanted a zebra striped chocolate cake with 12 matching cupcakes.

The colours were black and white with a contrasting fuchsia pink, and we all know that a birthday girl's gotta have what a birthday girl wants ;-)

Happy to oblige, this is what I made her. I loved making the zebra cake. I'm on the lookout though for fushcia pink gel paste though now to properly colour my buttercream.

Layla's gymnastic cake

A special request for this cake. It had to be dairy free so that Layla could actually have a piece of her own cake.

Vitalite was used in the sponge and Lactofree spread in the buttercream icing between the cake and the fondant.

Layla's a very keen (and very good) gymnast who practices alongside Tia, which is the other gymnastic cake I made that week. So she just HAD to have a cake to celebrate her achievements in gymnastics.

Her mum told me she loved the cake and was excited to be able to eat a slice as it was specially made dairy free just for her. Every little girl deserves a birthday cake that she can have a slice of, don't you think?

Tia's gymnastic cake

Tia is a fantastic gymnasts and Tia's mum is a friend of an old school friend of mine, (Savannah's mum, hence the recommendation).

This was the first of two gymnastic cakes that were made in the same week but I wanted them to be very different to each other. Not just in colour, but also in general style too.

My first attempt at making fondant people. They do need some practice and further work but you can tell its a human!!!

Ronnie's 50th

This was a double layered vanilla traybake. Commissioned by Lynn for her husband Ronnie's 50th birthday. It was also their 5th wedding anniversary around the same time so I decided to make 2 little ducks swimming on a heart shaped pond in his garden.

Being a keen gardener of both flowers and a little vegetable plot, Lynn had asked me to make his cake to that theme.

I loved the collection of this one, as he was taken out on a 'magical mystery tour' in the car and ended up at my house to receive his cake!

Dionne's mum's 50th cake

A last minute, day before order was this one. A cake for Dionne's mum's 50th birthday. Luckily I didn't have a cake order for the Saturday, so I managed to step up to the breach and make her a cake.

Pretty much free reign on this one. She wanted pink, purple, feminine & elegant for her mum.

It's an 8" vanilla sponge.

Papa's 60th birthday cake

This was a relatively simple request to make up. A vanilla sponge in the theme of a Real Madrid football shirt. It had to have Papa on the back and his age.

Google's a great tool when researching something in my eyes! It certainly helped me to make the shirt in the right colours with the 3 stripes down the sleeves!

Another surprised birthday boy got his cake!

Gary's racing car

This was my first ever carved cake. It was made from a two layer vanilla traybake sandwiched together with jam & buttercream.

It was made for the brother of a friend of mine, who's sister in law is a truly amazing (but incredibly busy) cake maker who didn't have time to make this one. To say I was nervous was a true understatement; I've seen Fiona's cakes!!!

It was decorated on the afternoon I came out of hospital after having Glaucoma tests on my eyes. My eyesight was still pretty fuzzy when I piped it as you can see :-(

I also made a dozen gluten free cupcakes for my friend's husband & daughter who are both Coeliacs so they could have a cake too.

Emma's grandad's 90th birthday cake

Emma is a colleague of mine. Her grandad was going to be the amazing age of 90 and as a keen gardener in his youth, the theme of the cake had to include flowers, vegetables and a garden spade & fork.

It's an 8" square vanilla cake.

Grandad thankfully loved his cake :-)

Spongebob Squarepants Cake

I didn't realise just how far behind my blog was, so I'm now playing catch up with my commissioned cakes.

Spongebob Squarepants was the order of the day for April's 15th birthday. She'd previously told her mum that that was the cake she wanted, and us mums have memories like elephants when it comes to some things you know!

This was April's cake.

Giant cupcake for Tegan

This is one of the three cakes that started my business off.  It was made for my daughter's friend, Tegan, who was celebrating her 11th birthday in March.

The sponge is vanilla with chocolate flavoured fondant covering the base of the cake.  The top is piped with vanilla buttercream swirls in various shades from yellow (her favourite colour) through to a bright and vivid orange.

It's trimmed with fondant flowers and leaves.  The bottom is piped with buttercream 'grass' and I've added a couple of friends to the board; namely a snail (on the left hand side peeping round at you) and just about to crawl onto the log at the front of the cake is a ladybird (with the bright googly eyes!)

Thankfully Tegan loved her cake and all who saw it were pretty impressed too.  Not bad for one of my first attempts at a giant cupcake.

Picture credit goes to my husband Will for making it look so incredibly bright and vibrant.

I am taking the plunge...

I've been asked recently to make birthday cakes for my neighbour's two children, Sammah who has just turned 6 and Zain who has just turned 3 along with my daughter's friend Tegan, who was 11 in March.  I've always been a baker and maker of cakes and to have the honour of producing cakes for such special occasions really touched me.

This was Tegan's cake - a giant cupcake in tones of yellow (her favourite colour) and orange.  I have to thank my husband for taking this photo and making it look so beautiful (Thanks Will! x)

The cake I made for Sammah was this 8" square one (on the finished version I added her name):

This pond themed cake was for Zain:

(Apologies for the photo quality; they were taken on my iPhone).  I will try to remember to replace them with 'proper camera' photographs.

This was made for a friend to say 'Thank You' for her kindness

Whilst this one was for my lovely friend Susan's birthday:

Remember my Whitworth's cake mix I was given?  Well this is what I made with it and decorated up with white fondant and some bright red and yellow flowers (photographs courtesy of hubby).

Inspired by these cakes and also by the fact that my neighbours seem to love my frequent baking gifts to them, I registered my kitchen with my local Environmental Health Department and am now waiting for my inspection to start a little business doing something I absolutely LOVE to do!

Business cards and postcards have been ordered tonight from Vistaprint.  Although not necessary, my Public Liability Insurance will be organised next week and my Level 2 Food Hygiene course has been booked for the beginning of May.

I already have orders for cakes, starting with a Hello Kitty cake for my great niece Shannon's birthday next weekend, followed by 4 more for May and June and an enquiry for wedding cupcakes to accompany their wedding cake.

I'm hoping that this is the start of something good.  Wish me luck!


Rosie
x

Most Marvellous Chocolate & Raspberry Supermarket Cake Bake Off

If you remember, I was invited recently by Vanessa Kimbell, the author of Prepped to take part in a bit of a supermarket ingredient experiment which involved us all making a cake using the same ingredients, to the same recipe and methodology but sourcing our ingredients from our 'allocated supermarket'.

Well, we all dutifully purchased our ingredients as follows:

Aldi - Jayne

Asda - Karen

Co-Op - Ren

Lidl - Rosie (Me)

Marks & Spencer - Rachel

Morrisons - Most Marvellous (Coffee shop cafe)

Sainsbury's - Carmela

Tesco - Vanessa

Waitrose - Fleur

Charlotte was due to cook from Tesco ingredients, but due to her becoming quite unwell, Vanessa stepped up to the bar and filled the place.  (Get well soon Charlotte x).

This was my cake made using Lidl ingredients.

We had two judges who were blind tasting the cakes; William Sitwell; writer, presenter and editor of Waitrose Kitchen magazine and Helen from the fantastic food blog Fuss Free Flavours. They were helped by three chocolate cake connoisseurs; namely Libiana, Alice and Albert.  The judges knew the baker, as we each presented our cakes to them. What they didn't know was the Supermarket that the ingredients were bought from or the cost of the cakes being presented.  The results were broadcast LIVE on BBC Radio Northampton's Kitchen Garden show at 10am.

There was quite a vast difference between prices of ingredients purchased.  The most expensive being Marks and Spencer, with the cheapest being Aldi.  The cake costs varied from £12.50 to £6.78 per slice.

I have to say, it's really quite scary presenting such fantastic foodies with a slice of your cake, even through it's pretty much out of your hands what it tastes like as we were reliant on the ingredients being used.

It didn't take long for the first cake to be dismissed (Asda), rapidly followed by Aldi and then Lidl hot on their heels.  The judges whittled the rest of the cakes down to their final three which were placed on the top table for final judging.

I really didn't envy the judges task; 9 sumptuous chocolate cakes, decadent, rich and calorie laden!

The final three were ranked as follows:

1st - Morrisons (4th most expensive at £9.61 per cake)

2nd - Co-Op (3rd most expensive at £10.32 per cake)

3rd - Sainsbury's (6th most expensive at £8.63 per cake).

The 'budget brand' supermarkets of Aldi and Lidl were in the bottom three along with Asda.

So, if you want to make Vanessa's Chocolate & Raspberry Cake, make sure that you go and buy your own brand supermarket ingredients from Morrisons!

I had a fantastic time, the calories that I burnt off with the nerves were rapidly replaced post-judging with a slice of chocolate cake.... or two!

If you're local and want to to have a coffee and possibly a slice of yummy cake in a Most Marvellous Cafe, take a trip along to Most Marvellous on Kettering Road in Northampton.  While you're there, take a look around at what there is to offer in this most unique vintage/retro store.

Thanks to Vanessa for arranging this.