Cookies & Cream Birthday Cake

There is no denying that we love an Oreo in our house, packets are fought over with passion. Therefore when my friend Michelle made an Oreo flavoured cake for one of our Clandestine Cake Club meetings I knew I had to bring a large slice home or none at all. It proved to be a hit and my then six year old son declared he wanted this cake for his birthday. Well yesterday was his birthday and I was only too happy to oblige!

Firstly if you would like to make this cake yourself here's the link for the recipe

http://sweetapolita.com/2015/05/midnight-cookies-cream-cake/

 As you can see it's an American recipe, so if your unfamiliar with the terms here's some decoding for you....

 All purpose flour - Plain Flour
 Superfine sugar - Caster sugar
 Heavy cream - Double Cream

 Black Cocoa - This is cocoa that has been Dutched. This means it has been through a process where the acid has been stripped from the cocoa. You can buy Black Cocoa from Amazon and if you want a true Oreo experience you should buy Black Onyx Cacao, which has been heavily dutched. However Green & Blacks cacao has been dutched and works perfectly well. It's also easily available and won't break the bank! 

 High Ratio Shortening - Having done some research I decided that Trex was probably the nearest, easily available product that would match. When my friend made this cake she used all butter and the frosting was delicious, so if you don't want to use Trex it's not the end of the world. I decided to use Trex, after all if it didn't work it was only family I would be making sick! But luckily it works a treat. This is a revelation to me, it's only a vegetable fat and completely tasteless so nothing to be frightened of, it also has less saturated fat than butter. I'm definitely going to be using it more.  

 This is a true American style cake. It reminded my family of cakes that we have bought while holidaying in the States. It's a perfect party cake and a real crowd pleaser. The sponge is moist and the frosting is light. I'm calling it frosting because that really is what it is! 

 When Michelle made it she added no colour and it looked very Cookies & Cream, while in the original recipe the outside frosting is coloured pink. I thought this made it look more party like and decided to colour our one blue, for obvious reasons! Not sure I would do it again, not only did the children go a bit hyper, but I think white frosting with sprinkles running through it would be nicer, but that's just a personal preference! 

 The family raved about this cake and it will be a regular I'm sure. My sister-in-law even declared she wanted it as her wedding cake. I said 'Maybe not in blue?' and she replied 'No, definitely keeping the blue, I love the blue!' And she was serious.....

Baby Steps into Bread - Baking Breadsticks

The thought of baking bread scares me a little. I have baked bread quite a few times with varying success but I'm just not confident with it. We've been eating and baking it forever and it's made of so few ingredients, it should be fairly straight forward! But the reality is that a really good loaf takes skill that I don't possess right now. I've had a mental note to find time to bake more bread for the last bazillion years, well ok maybe not that long but it definitely feels it!  I'm pretty confident baking anything else, so I'm hoping that by starting this blog I'm going to bring my bread making skills to the same level.

I have acquired quite a few books on bread making over the last 3/4 years and dipped in and out of them, trying a recipe here and there, without full commitment to learning the craft properly. 

This week my son has had Chicken Pox and we have been in quarantine at home, so what a perfect time to bake some bread! I picked up James Morton's Brilliant Bread book and found his recipe for breadsticks, and as I had Taramasalata in the fridge I thought I'd start with these, especially as they looked easy with the only ingredients being flour, water, yeast and salt.

When making something new I always read the recipe at least twice. With this one, even though it's a very straight forward recipe I read it through over and over as I was going through each stage. So after mixing, kneading, proving, dividing, rolling, proving again & dealing with the tricky art of getting them on the hot stone without knocking them back I was flummoxed when I realised there was no instruction on how long they should be in the oven. How did I miss that? This is clearly a mistake and I've never seen it in a book before. Can you believe I've managed to choose the one recipe without timing instructions! This felt like a Great British Bake Off moment, you know where they are given basic instructions and have to use their intuition. I made a guess at 10 minutes and eventually I left them in for 14. I don't think they were absolutely perfect and as I used my dough hook on my mixer to knead, I could be accused of cheating, but I was really happy with the result. Crispy on the outside whilst fluffy on the inside and delicious eaten whilst still warm, even my sick toddler, who hadn't eaten hardly anything for days devoured one. The remainder were fought over by the rest of the family and as they are so easy to make I'm going have them as a regular in my repertoire. I will probably have to double the recipe as 8 doesn't go far in a family of 6, and one is just not enough.....

Bailey's Marshmallows

You will find that I have a thing for homemade marshmallows. They are so different from the pink and white ones that we know so well. I have so many ideas for flavours and a lot of them include alcohol, oops! Marshmallows are fairly easy to make, you just need a sugar thermometer and a free standing mixer. 

These Bailey's Marshmallows would be great as Petit Fours, although I made these for no other reason than I just fancied them.....

                                                       
INGREDIENTS

FOR THE PAN 

                                      

200ml Baileys                                              

300g Caster sugar                     170gGlucose

FOR THE MIXER

100ml Baileys                    
170g Glucose 

ALSO

120ml Water   

40g Leaf Gelatine                                           

50g Icing Sugar     50g Cornflour

          

METHOD

Firstly grease a tin or dish that is approximately 20 x 28 x 5cm deep with a flavourless oil, I use Grape seed oil. Then line with cling film and grease the inside of that too. 

Place all the ingredients for the pan all at once in a large pan. Put on a low heat to gently dissolve the sugar. 

In the mean time place the mixer ingredients in the mixer and put the gelatine and water in a microwaveable bowl. The gelatine needs to soak for at least 5 mins and turn the sheets over so they all soften up. 

Once the sugar has dissolved turn the heat up, pop in the sugar thermometer and boil rapidly until it reaches 114 degrees C.

When you are nearly there start gently melting the gelatine in the microwave. I do it in 10-20 second bursts as you don't want to burn or over heat it.

Once the pan mixture has reached 114c turn the mixer on slow and gradually pour it in. Be careful and take your time as the mixture will be very hot. 

Add the liquid gelatine and turn the speed up to fast. Leave it mixing for around 5 mins, by then the mixture should have at least tripled in size, become thick and dreamy and cooled down.

Pour into the dish and cover with another piece of oiled cling film and leave to set for at least a few hours. 

To finish, mix the icing sugar and corn flour together, cut up the marshmallow slab into around 3cm square pieces and toss into the flour/sugar mixture until thoroughly coated.... Enjoy!