It's Easter...

Well, almost. So let's talk about Simnel cake.

Simnel cake, for those who might not know, is a spicy, pale fruit cake with a layer of marzipan baked into the middle and a layer on top, which is then grilled or gone over with a blowtorch. There are traditionally eleven marzipan balls on top, said to represent Jesus' disciples minus Judas. Being godless and geeky, I like to think it's one to represent each Doctor.

A Simnel cake looks like this (comedy chick in clothes optional):



Doing some research I found out a couple of things that surprised me. Simnel cake, while now associated with Easter, used to be eaten halfway through Lent - on Mother's Day, in fact, also called Refreshment Sunday. Perhaps a little break in the middle of Lent, more likely named after the point when Lent was not so much for fasting as for simply giving one thing up.

As with most traditions, the explanations vary but we do know that Simnel cake has been known of since Mediaeval times, and that the 11 marzipan balls were introduced, like so many traditions, by the Victorians.Whatever its history, though, Simnel cake is tasty. Rich and sweet, it deserves to be eaten when you're really hungry. Perfect with an afternoon cuppa, it's a lovely cake to put on the table when family and friends gather.

You can buy Simnel cakes in most independent bakeries (and please use independent bakeries when you can - the quality is always better) or, of course from Karen's Kitchen.

But it's also a rewarding cake to make. Tip everything in, give it a stir, cut out your marzipan and you're ready to go. If you fancy giving it a go, this is the recipe I favour, from the wonderful Mary Berry (and I don't wash the glace cherries!)


Here's my simplified version:

100g glacé cherries
225g butter, softened
225g light muscovado sugar
4 large eggs
225g self-raising flour
375g mixed dried fruit
2 lemons, grated zest only
2 tsp ground mixed spice
450g/1lb marzipan
1-2 tbsp apricot jam, warmed

1. Preheat the oven to 150C/280F/Gas 2. Grease and line a 20cm/8in cake tin.
2. Cut the cherries into quarters and place in a bowl with all the other ingredients except the marzipan and jam. Beat well until thoroughly mixed. Pour half the mixture into the prepared tin.
3. Take one-third of the marzipan and roll it out to a circle the size of the tin and then place on top of the cake mixture. Spoon the remaining cake mixture on top and level the surface.
4. Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 2½ hours, or until well risen, evenly brown and firm to the touch. Cover with aluminium foil after one hour if the top is browning too quickly. Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out, peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack.
5. When the cake is cool, brush the top with a little warmed apricot jam and roll out half the remaining marzipan to fit the top. Press firmly on the top. Form the remaining marzipan into 11 balls.
6. Brush the marzipan with beaten egg and arrange the marzipan balls around the edge of the cake. Brush the tops of the balls with beaten egg and then carefully place the cake under a hot grill until the top is lightly toasted.

Give it a go, impress your loved ones. I promise you won't be disappointed.

I should Cacao

A friend of mine recently started stocking Hasslacher's 100% cacao drinking chocolate blocks in her shop so I had to get my hands on some. And I did.

To be honest, I have no idea what to do with it. When I make hot chocolate for myself I use unsweetened cocoa powder and add sugar to taste. If I want a real treat I melt down 80% chocolate and use that instead. Sometimes I add a sticky liqueur too - Kahlua is best, Tia Maria works well too. So I knew I could use the cacao for hot chocolate. But what I wanted was a way to make it work in baking.

This is the product:

It's made to appeal to people like me. Wrapped in wax paper, lovely graphics, produced in Colombia by the growers themselves. A happy package of feelgood chocolate.

The first thing I wanted to find out was how it differs from cocoa. I came across an excellent, non conclusive, argument here. After quite an extensive search, I still haven't come up with an answer. Is the cocoa powder I use at home (Bournville as a rule, Green & Black's if it's on offer) the same? The only conclusion I could draw is that it's basically the same. 

I gave it a go in butter icing, a simple experiment. I usually use sifted cocoa powder but sometimes use melted 80% chocolate instead. I had convinced myself that the chocolate gives a richer taste than the cocoa in both icing and cakes but I think it's the added fat of the chocolate rather than the taste that makes it so. The cacao, I thought would add the richness without the extra sweetness. It did, but I could find no difference to cocoa powder.

So cheer myself up, I melted two squares, added milk and two teaspoons of demerara sugar, stirred it up, gave it a whizz with the aerolatte and had the most amazing cup of hot chocolate ever. This IS different to cocoa power and to 80% chocolate. It's bitter like coffee. Enjoyably sweet to to drink but with that satisfying backnote that coffee provides. 

For that reason alone I love this and will buy more when I'm out. As for baking, I'm not giving up. Next time I have an excuse to make cakes I'll do two separate ones and take the taste test. I'm also going to try a ganache and a much richer chocolate icing. A baking friend is going to try using chunks in cookies, and another makes it into hot chocolate with coconut milk. 

I'll keep you posted. Now, where did I put the mini marshmallows?

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Why fairy cakes win

Note: The cakes shown on this blog are not new to anyone who knows my work. However, this article is here to kick of National Cupcake week. Over the next week I'll be making new cupcakes every day and putting them up on www.facebook.com/thisiskarenskitchen. I'll be blogging about my week of cakes (with pictures) next week.

I recently had a strange experience: I saw a display of cupcakes that didn't make me hungry. This is very rare for any cake - most of them look appetising to me - and I set about working out why. It could have been the thick chocolate icing and glitter making them look slightly mucky, or the fact they had clearly been rushed in finishing. But what was really offputting was the size of them.

When I was young, we make fairy cakes: small, fun cakes that were perfect with a beaker of milk. Then muffins came to town. Compared to fairy cakes, muffins are huge but then they can be: they are made with oil, not butter, they are far less sweet and they are not covered in icing.

When did the cupcake become the size of a muffin? There is a general feeling with cakes that bigger is better but that's not true. With a small iced fairy cake in front of me I feel I'm in for a treat, with a giant muffin-sized one I feel intimidated. If I want a large cake I'll go for a slice of something: Carrot cake, for example, or Victoria sponge. A cupcake, on the other hand, should be small but perfectly formed, indulgent but not excessive.

If I use an American cupcake recipe, I always get almost 50% extra from the mix. I can only assume that American cupcakes are either muffin sized or significantly larger - can anyone shed any light on this for me? A rudimentary web search on the difference between the two seems to reach a consensus that they are the same just with different names. However, many people claim cupcakes are larger than fairy cakes. My favourite answer was: one is made by Americans, the other by fairies.

This is why fairy cakes are better:

1. Cakes are very sweet. It may seem obvious, but too much will leave you feeling full, queasy and dehydrated. A cupcake you can hold in your hand and eat in three bites will make you happy and satisfied without bad after effects.

2. You can go mad with the toppings. On a large cake, the prospect of so much sugar is terrifying. On a small one, it's wonderful. A tall swirl of icing on a fairy cake is still edible. Simple decoration looks better, and fancy decoration more impressive.

3. You can make more. 12 large cupcakes or 18 fairy cakes? I know what I'm going for. Everything looks better in large quantities, and design-wise they are far more pleasant to look at. Plus, you can feed more people, and no-one feels bad eating two. In fact, with a large cupcake, nobody will want to eat two.

4. When doing fondant icing for a picture cake, you can decorate on top of the cake and the icing becomes king. These Pac-Man cakes look like a picture, not a big pile of cakes. The fondant is thick but the cake is the right size to make a perfect combination of light sponge and sweet fondant.

5. Flavour. The most important aspect of any cake. I love making cakes from anything from beetroot to dark chocolate to fresh fruit. In a small cake these flavours are king - you can taste every key ingredient. In a muffin-sized cake with icing, they almost certainly just end up tasting sugary.

And in case you need any more convincing, butter icing as just that: butter. I'd hazard a guess that a fairy cake has around a teaspoon of butter on top of it, a muffin sized one about two.

So I say bring back the fairy cake. Let us have a sweet treat with our afternoon cuppa, not a massive dinner-threatening snack. A cake children can hold and eat, not one they have to dissect and lick the icing off first. Let us free ourselves from massive portions and get back to the Instagram-tinged cakes of our childhoods. Let fairy cakes rule again.

Marshmallow teacakes

Today I made my first attempt at marshmallow. In fact, I made teacakes.

Flicking through my recipe books to find inspiration for a friend's birthday treat, I came across these in Peyton and Byrne's British Baking. I've had this a while but never made anything from it, partly because a lot of the recipes are ones for which I already have good recipes, partly because my friend had a disappointing lunch at Oliver Peyton's St James' Park restaurant (mine was lovely) and partly because I don't find the excuse to bake new recipes as often as I'd like.

Anyhow, it's rather a lovely book with lots of traditional baking recipes in it from jammy dodgers to banana butterscotch pudding (find it here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Baking-Oliver-Peyton/dp/0224086618) and the teacakes caught my eye mainly because I fancied trying something new. In fact, I'm not even much of a fan of the shop-bought version, finding them rather cloying and thick. I prefer the Danish flødeboller, which have a thin wafer base, light, uncooked filling and a very thin layer of chocolate (Try them from http://www.scandikitchen.co.uk/products/Flodeboller-x12-320g.html).

But a light biscuit, soft marshmallow (not the set one with gelatine) and melted chocolate cannot fail to tempt, and I particularly like how egg yolks and whites are both needed - that's a tidy recipe.

Can I just state here that making marshmallow is brilliant. Egg whites, sugar, syrup and vanilla essence are heated over a pan of water and whisked constantly to become frothy and light. Then an electric mixer turns it into a meringue-like substance that pipes happily onto the biscuits. It's baking alchemy of the kind I love most.

Here's the making of the marshmallow:

I failed to get a decent picture of the piles of marshmallow piped onto the biscuits but they looked ace. With smaller bases and some coconut, they would be perfect as they are.

So far so good but I was nervous about the chocolate. I'm always apprehensive about working with chocolate and usually opt for a ganache but in this case I was following the recipe exactly. I melted half the chocolate in the usual way then added the other half, finely chopped, and let it sit for 7 minutes. I couldn't see it working but it did. I suppose the temperature of freshly melted chocolate would be too much for the marshmallow so this was a good solution for the right texture without the heat. It still seemed a little cold as the chocolate covered unevenly, and didn't reach the base. It's very possibly my technique but I can't see too many ways of spooning chocolate over a biscuit.

The resultant teacakes are, erm... rustic. I would like the chocolate to have been thinner and neater but they have a satisfying home made quality nevertheless. And most importantly, they taste amazing. The marshmallow is soft and melts in your mouth, the base is light and buttery and the chocolate set but not crunchy. They are not sticky or heavy at all but light and moreish. I may well try to make them again, but better. Or I may find every other marshmallow recipe I can lay my hands on and try them instead. Either way, marshmallow is the most fun I've had in the kitchen in a while and I suggest you try it immediately.

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Homage to a small appliance.

 My Mum bought a Kenwood Chef in the early 70s and it's been there almost all my life, mixing cake batters and pastries, mincing pork for leverpostej (Danish baked liver pate), liquidising a variety of good soups every winter.

Best of all, every year we use the fantastic shaping device on the mincing attachment to crank out hundreds of vanillekranse (those small round Danish butter cookies). The mincer is old and it slips so it takes one person to grab the attachment and pull back with all their strength while the other feeds the dough into the machine and tries to grab the long star-shaped strands shooting from the other side without squashing them. Sadly there are no photos - it's all hands on deck.

A few years ago some family friends came across the exact same model in an attic. Somehow it ended up with me and it's the best thing I own. Here it is:

A few years ago I bought a brand new dough hook and went bread mad. I think it was the rye bread that did it - not long after, my beloved Kenwood died in a cloud of smoke. After completing a triple-sized batter mix, luckily. My marriage ended the day after - it was an omen.

Things started looking up when my parents took the mixer to a man in Lincoln who replaced the motor for a nominal fee. He loved the mixer, said he was dying to get his hands on one. And my almost-40-year-old mixer was back on its feet, in a clumsy metaphor for my life.

The motor isn't brilliant: it cycles a little on certain settings, and I'm nervous about exposing it to too much pressure, but to all extents and purposes it's still going strong.

I gaze longingly at shiny new Magimixes and Kitchen Aids of course, with their curves and colours and shiny new steel. But there's something about the A901, with its straight edges and clunky appearance. It's form out of function; a reliable Land Rover to the curvy Magimix's flashy Range Rover Sport. More Tom Baker than David Tennant, it may not be as nice to look at but it's the best there has been, and it's mine.

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Princess castle cake

This is one of my favourite cakes, Megan's princess castle. I made it last year and am not sure how I would do it differently now, so here's how I did it, and ways I could improve it. Mental note: take "in progress" photos from now on.

There are a couple of popular variations on the princess castle cake. The first is a square cake with turrets made from ice cream cornets in each corner. I love this idea as a homemade cake made with love but I wanted to offer something more professional. The second is a square cake with turrets at each corner. This just didn't appeal somehow: what about the blank space on the top of the cake?

I started off looking at castle cakes online to get the idea for what I wanted to do. The structure of my cake is a copy of a Jane Asher cake that comes in at £350. Here it is, if you're feeling flush (available from http://www.janeasher.com). Mine is very different both in design and price. In fact, I feel rather brave putting this up but I'm not a member of Jane Asher's professional team and have neither the resources not the experience to reach this standard. If I did, I'd be charging the price of a flat-screen TV for my cakes too.

First I had to get the body of the cake. For this I used a 23cm springform pan and the 10cm mini springform pan appropriated from my son's baking set. I've used this combination before, in this cake for my dad's 70th. 

I set the small cake on top of the large one, off centre and iced them both with white royal icing to keep them fresh. Then the work could begin. To make the turrets I'll put my hand up and admit to using mini rolls from a shop. I'm not a fan of bought cakes as part of my cakes but at the time couldn't think of a better solution. Now, I think I'd bake another square cake then cut rounds with my smallest round cutter and pile them up. There's still an issue with keeping them straight though. Any ideas, I'd be glad to hear them. Next time around I'll put dowels through the length of them; for this, I stuck them down with butter icing and shored them up with the pink stones.

The castle walls I cut by hand and wrapped around each cake, and the stairs were simple enough. Then it was just a case of doing the fiddly bits: doors, windows, window sills. All done freehand, and I'm aware that they are slightly wonky but that adds to the cake in my opinion, making it more of an old, fantasy castle.

A couple of icing discs on top of the towers and pink piped turrets again took away any semblance of realism. I don't know if I would do the turret roofs differently next time. Ice-cream cones made them taller than I wanted, and I didn't think they would take the weight of moulded fondant. I'm pretty happy with them as they are though.

And then I found the pen. I genuinely had no idea these things existed until I was poking around Hopscotch, my local baking supplies store in Barnet (http://www.hopscotchsweets.co.uk). An edible pen! It's genius. 

I'm no artist, but again an impression of creeping vines was all that was needed, and it changed the whole character of the cake. It took a long time - if you try this at home, I strongly advise you get a turntable - but I think it made the final cake magical.

And there it is: the cake that taught me structure and construction and introduced me to a favourite kitchen gadget. I would love to do another one, better, but I'm still proud.

On online recipes and marshmallow fluff

I have a couple of recipe books I use again and again, most notably the slim cookbook that came with my Kenwood Chef in the 70s, and Nigella's fantastic "How to be a Domestic Goddess". But I use an awful lot of online recipes too, especially if I have something to use that I don't bake with regularly, such as seasonal fruit.

For example, this recipe for plum crumble cake works every time: http://www.recipenetwork.co.uk/i/recipe486.htm

Hunting for online recipes does come with hazards and most of these, I'm sorry to say, come from America. Don't get me wrong, I love American baking. I was given an Good Housekeeping recipe folder for my wedding that I keep going back to, and for uniquely American recipes such as pancakes, fudge and fruit pies, the Americans have it sussed.

I bought measuring cups last time I was in the States, and they are available everywhere in the UK now, so that's not an issue. The real problem comes with the ever-present spectre of convenience foods, and incorporating them into recipes.

Some people don't bake, and that's fine. They are the ones who buy shake and bake cartons, or ready-made cookie dough to bake with their children. All power to them. But who on earth would put a recipe online that calls for a tub of ready-made frosting? Americans, that's who. Making a birthday cake? Start with a box of cake mix. Want to make fudge? Just mix marshmallow fluff in a pan and add flavour. All well and good, but it's not baking.

This is my favourite, no-fail fudge recipe, with no nasty processed ingredients in sight: http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/513459.

Another example: Looking for a recipe for piping gel (more of which later) I found, "one pack Knox Gelatin". Well first, what is Knox? Unless you live in the States it's not available. Secondly, how much is a pack? Is it powdered or sheet? This is just lazy - if you can't put a measurement or work without brand names, don't bother posting your recipe.

To end on a positive note, I'd like to state that some of my best friends are American, and it is a country full of fabulous bakers. So here are some tips for American recipes:

Corn syrup: dissolve sugar in water until it's light and syrupy, put it in a jar and you have long-lasting corn syrup. It's a useful ingredient to have around and I'll write about its benefits for icing another time.

A stick of butter: half a pack, or approximately 125g.

Shortening: lard - vegetable lard is a fine alternative and makes a real difference to pastries.

Semi-sweet chocolate: dark chocolate. To be true to the recipe this is about 60% cocoa but I've never met a  chocolate recipe yet that doesn't taste better with 80%.

Marshmallow fluff: Don't. Just don't.

And my favourite online recipe of all time? This, from Angela Nilsen: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3092/ultimate-chocolate-cake

I've baked it loads, and it's always beautiful. And here it is. Instant popularity on a plate. Enjoy.