Don’t be a gooseberry – bake a cake and then everyone will be your friend!!

On Sunday, my friend Vic hosted a wonderful 4th birthday party for her daughter, Mia. Vic, being Vic, had totally gone to town, in addition to catering for over 40 hugely excited children. There was fairy crown making, fairy wand making, bee/ladybird/dragonfly making; I was helping children to ice and decorate their own cupcakes and the long-suffering husband named himself the ‘bouncy castle fascist’ – monitoring how many children were on at one time and counting down their bouncing time!

How do you cater for that many children and their parents?? Vic made all children a sausage in a roll, served up veggies with houmous and crisps; finishing up with birthday cake! Parents were treated to a range of homemade cakes made by Vic, family and friends and the cake below was my offering – a gooseberry cake made with the gooseberries Abbie and I found at Groveland farm shop last Wednesday.

My gooseberry cake… – makes a large loaf tin shaped cake – easy for party slicing
280g/10oz self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
75g/3oz caster sugar
100g/4oz demerera – you’ll need an extra bit at the end for sprinkling to make the top crunchy (always do this on my loaf cakes)
100g/4oz soft soya marg
2 eggs
tiny splash of vanilla extract (or use vanilla sugar in place of caster)
1 large punnet gooseberries (sorry I didn’t weigh them) – top and tail

• Preheat oven to 180C. Line your loaf tin with parchment and grease the sides
• Stew the gooseberries by bringing to boil and then simmer for 5 mins until soft and popping out of their skins
• Beat the dry ingredients to combine
• Add marg, eggs, vanilla  – beat lightly until it looks like cake mixture
• Add all but 1 cup of the stewed gooseberries (if you want some for a pudding) – fold in
• Pour in to loaf tin and sprinkle demerera sugar on top
• Bake for 45 mins and check that it is cooked by inserting a skewer into the middle – it should come out clean – if not bake for 5 mins and try again!
• Cool in tin for a little while and then remove to a cooling rack (or take it to the party in the tin as I did and turn it out there!
• Slice and enjoy!

Gooseberry cake, stewed gooseberries and Nigel Slater's amzing mascarpone cream

Abbie was dying to try gooseberries; I think she has had them before, but couldn’t remember – so that was an interesting experiment while we made the cake. Luckily she LOVED them! So I snaffled a few leftover pieces of cake from the party and served it up for our pudding.

I served it up warm with some stewed gooseberries and made Nigel Slater’s Mascarpone cream to go alongside – trust me when I say this is AMAZING!  A no-cook custard which can be whipped up in a few mins.

Beat 2 egg yolks with 2 tblspns caster sugar; add few drops vanilla and 250g mascarpone, beat until smooth and custard-like! If it weren’t for the calories, I’d make it everyday!

Unfortunately I think we will have to rely on Grovelands for our gooseberries – have counted and we have 7 berries on our bush (still in trauma from last year’s frost obviously). I may be back this week!!

Happy birthday Abbie! – Dairy-free Marshmallow cupcakes – a sugartastic, once a year treat!

She's a big 4 year old now!!

Abbie is 4 today and so, like the wonder-mother that I aspire to be (hasn’t happened yet!)…. I made cupcakes for her class – ‘Marshmallow Cupcakes’ from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. Abbie sat scouring through various books and finally settled on these ones, so that is what made! One of her friends from nursery has a cow’s milk allergy and I understand that as I had a casein intolerance before I was pregnant with Abbie (pregnancy took it away weirdly, although I go back on soy whenever I have any asthmatic probs). So I made dairy free versions and tampered with the sugar content a little as I was using sweetened soy milk.

I was thinking about the sugar content of these cakes pretty much the whole time I was making them, as I was shocked that on Jamie’s Food Revolution, children in LA schools are given a carton of flavoured milk every day which contains 24g of sugar. I calculated the sugar in each cupcake and was equally horrified to find that each cupcake contained a whopping 30g of sugar!! I reconciled myself with the fact that birthdays only come around once a year….. If I hadn’t have put the frosting on the cake, the sugar content would have only been 8.5g, meaning that every child who is drinking a carton on flavoured milk is consuming the sugar equivalent of 4 un-iced cupcakes a day! Would you let your school deliver this? Looking forward to the next instalment tonight… C4 10pm!

Anyway to the recipe….

Marshmallow cupcakes – adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook Makes 24 (for a class!)

240g plain flour
200g caster sugar
3 tsp baking powder
a pinch of salt
90g veg/soya margarine, at room temperature
240ml sweetened soy milk
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

For the frosting:

vanilla frosting (500g icing sugar beaten for 5 minutes with 160g veg/soya margarine, 50ml soya milk and a tiny splash of vanilla extract)
200g mini marshmallows
Edible glitter, to decorate
2 12-hole cupcake tray, lined with paper cases

1.Preheat the oven to 170°C (325°F) gas 3.
2.Put the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and margarine in a freestanding electric mixer with a paddle attachment (or use a handheld electric whisk) and beat on slow speed until you get a sandy consistency and everything is combined. Gradually pour in half the soy milk and beat until the milk is just incorporated.
3.Whisk the egg, vanilla extract and remaining soy milk together in a separate bowl for a few seconds, then pour into the flour mixture and continue beating until just incorporated (scrape any unmixed ingredients from the side of the bowl with a rubber spatula). Continue mixing for a couple more minutes until the mixture is smooth. Do not overmix.
4.Spoon the mixture into the paper cases until two-thirds full and bake in the preheated oven for 20–25 minutes, or until light golden and the sponge bounces back when touched. A skewer inserted in the centre should come out clean.
5.Leave the cupcakes to cool slightly in the tray before turning out onto a wire cooling rack to cool completely.
The next bit is optional – I did it and at point of trying to get sticky marshmallow into a sponge, I wished I hadn’t! Put 24 big marshmallows in a heat-proof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Leave until melted and smooth. When the cupcakes are cold, hollow out a small section in the centre of each one and fill with a dollop of melted marshmallow. Leave to cool.

I started putting metled marshmallow inside, but frankly it was too fiddly and sticky, so I stopped!

6.Stir the mini marshmallows into the vanilla frosting by hand until evenly dispersed.
7.Spoon the frosting on top of the cupcakes and decorate with edible glitter.

Frosting and edible glitter on!

 

This recipe should probably have a warning on for diabetics….. but I have to say they look and taste sensational. I was just so pleased that Harry could join in the fun as it is horrible when everyone else is having something and you can’t….. clearly a feeling I have built up over years of casein intolerance and dieting!!

Very sugary... but how gorgeous?!

What do you do when you have no energy, but your daughter is bouncing off the walls??

Answer – to the kitchen! I was able to sit, with the occasional move whilst we weighed, mixed, poured and baked Nigel Slater’s ‘Lemon Frosted Pistachio cake’; surely guaranteed to lift my spirits and put a smile on my face. Abbie is becoming suddenly more independent in the baking arena and now insists on trying to do everything herself…. cracking eggs has definitely improved – I only had to retrieve 3 pieces of shell (a definite improvement on previous attempts!)

Weighing and measuring...

If you could hear this photo it would say...'Ta da!'

Juicing the orange - luckily I only need 2/3 of its juice

This was a great recipe for trying new things – ‘green nuts’ went down very well, although she came a cropper later when sneaking a naughty one as my back was turned…. tried to eat the whole thing, shell and all!! That’ll teach her! Abbie also enjoyed pinches of ground almonds (so different to how whole ones taste) and smelling the rosewater which she said smelled ‘flowery’.

Thank goodness also for Jonts, who probably wished he hadn’t called to say he was coming home, as he was greeted with a ‘please could you just……’ (this happens quite a lot). Anyway, he was the cake’s hero as without him and the bottled lemon juice, there would have been no icing!

GORGEOUS!

This cake is GORGEOUS!… we ate it with berries and creme fraiche. I made 2/3 of the recipe and we were only supposed to eat a third of the cake. Confession: there is only half left and I am not sure that it will make it through the evening – I am in bed and I can almost hear Jon sliding a plate from the cupboard…. opening the fridge door….. Hero or not, there had better be a piece for Abbie and I tomorrow or he’s in big trouble!

Abbie has seconds and then asked to share my second piece! Cheeky monkey! Of course I let her - weak!

Have to say, I am a Slater convert at the moment as I have not had any kitchen disasters with any of his recipes and they have all been simply delicious. In fact I am at present thinking up a name for all Slater followers…. maybe I am a ‘Slaterite’, ‘Slatertater’ or a ‘Slaterplater’? All lame I know! I’m sure you can do better……

LEMON-FROSTED PISTACHIO CAKE (from Nigel Slater’s ‘The Kitchen Diaries’)
serves 10-12

250g of butter
250g of caster sugar
3 large eggs
100g of shelled pistachio nuts
100g of ground almonds
An orange
1 tsp of rosewater
60g of plain flour

Icing:
100g of icing sugar
2 tbsp of lemon juice
Preheat the oven to 160° C. Line the bottom of a non-stick 22cm cake tin with baking parchment.
Cream the butter and sugar until very light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating between adding each egg. Blitz the pistachios in a food processor to turn them into fine crumbs and then add them, along with the almonds, to the butter, sugar and eggs. Add the zest and the juice of the orange and then stir in the orange blossom water and, finally, fold in the flour.
Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 50 minutes, covering the top lightly with foil for the final ten minutes. Check that the cake is done by inserting a skewer, it should come out quite clean with no wet mixture stuck to it. Leave it to cool in the tin before turning out.

Make the icing by mixing the icing sugar and lemon juice together until smooth and then pour it over the cake. If you have any leftover pistachios use a few to decorate the top of the cake. Leave the icing to set and then serve and enjoy.