30/03/2012 · 12:00 pm

Blinging it up at Cambridge Clandestine Cake Club

Last Saturday I attended my first Clandestine Cake Club in Cambridge. Word of the CCC is spreading like wildfire, especially after it’s founder, Lynn, appeared alongside our very own Miss Sue Flay of Secluded Tea Party fame on the One Show recently. I’d heard about the CCC on the bloggers grapevine before this sudden wave of popularity and was very excited to be able to attend a local event and to meet Lynn. We were set a theme of ‘Spectacular Show Stoppers’, which caused me some sleepless nights! The problem being that, although I’m very proud of the cakes I make, the best (and tastiest) ones don’t look particularly show stopperish! In the end I decided to make a larger version of my good ol’ sticky lime and coconut drizzle cake and then bling it up to the max! It was all a bit of an experiment. I cut some very thin slices of lime, blanched them in boiling water for 30 seconds and then made up some syrup with sugar and water and boiled the lime slices in it for about 30 minutes. Then I laid them out on a wire rack to dry overnight. On Saturday morning, I got up super early to but the finishing bling touches to my cake. I coated the candied lime slices with edible gold glitter…

and then began assembling my creation…

I sprinkled the cake with caster sugar mixed with lime zest and even more edible gold glitter…

and then arranged the gorgeous, glittery lime slices around the edge…

I was pretty darn pleased with the end result…

Behold my sticky lime and coconut, gold, bling, spectacular show stopper…

My friend Lauren, asked on twitter whether I would be wearing a gold medallion to complement my cake…I think she was joking but she gave me an awesome idea and before leaving the house I changed into my lime-iest, gold-iest, bling-iest outfit, to match my cake! :)…

and hot footed it across town to join the rest of the CCC-ers. As usual, I was the first there, eagerly awaiting the commencement of the cake eating festivities. Slowly but surely the cakes arrived and before I know it I was in cake heaven. Just check out these beauties…

There weren’t any duplicates!

Lynn started proceedings by giving a little speech about Clandestine Cake Club. I love the fact that there’s no element of competition, it’s all about getting together and enjoying cake, it’s as simple as that!

I had skipped breakfast so that I’d have even more room for cake but even so only managed 4 slices before slipping into a cake induced coma! I was so impressed with the variety and deliciousness of everyone’s contributions and spent a very enjoyable morning chatting away to cake friends old and new 🙂

Here are a couple more accounts of the event from fellow food bloggers Miss Igs and Helen of Half a Pot of Cream. 

As the morning started to wind up, we were encouraged to dive in and take some cake home with us…this is the aftermath…

If you love baking and eating cake then the Clandestine Cake Club is most definitely for you. Have a look at their website to find an event in your area or why not start one of your own? Everything you need to know is right here.

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It’s my Birthday! My blog Birthday that is! The Afternoon Tease is 2!

2 years ago today, I tentatively posted my first photo of the towering cupcake creation that I made for my friends wedding and had a little bitch about Sophie Dahl (I still stand by my opinion that she’s sickeningly perfect! ;). When I started out on my blogging adventure I would never have imagined that 172 posts later I’d still be going strong, baking like a demon and blethering on about it with a passion!

I still get quite scared when I think about people reading what I write, which is silly really as I post it on the world wide web for all to see. I’m not a natural writer, I’m just dedicated to cake and to sharing the love! Thank you to all who have visited, read my inane cake related ramblings and tried out the recipes that I’ve shared!

I’m always pondering my next baking adventure so have no fear…I don’t think I’ll ever run out of something to write about…

Watch this space…

Jo

x

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30/03/2012 · 7:55 am
19/03/2012 · 10:00 am

An unashamedly luscious lemon sponge…

The sun well and truly got his hat on this week. Well, for one day only we got a glimpse of the mystical realms of summer! I spent that day in one of my favourite places…the kitchen, whipping up 2 delicious light lemon sponges, drizzled with lemon syrup and sandwiched together with unashamedly lavish amounts of lemon curd buttercream icing…

My recipe is a conglomeration of both this recipe from ‘The Magenta Cakes Blog’ and my old faithful Victoria sponge recipe from Be-ro that I’ve been using since I started baking when I was knee high to a grasshopper (for the record, I don’t think I’ve ever been that short 😉 I then added lemon zest to give the sponge a summery lemon zing. It’s a really easy cake to make and I hope you’ll agree that it looks amazing!?

If you’d like to give it a go you’ll need…

350g unsalted butter

350g golden caster sugar

6 eggs

350g self-raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

Grated zest of 4 lemons

Splash of milk

For the lemon syrup you need…

Juice of 2 lemons

50g caster sugar

For the lemon curd buttercream icing you need…

100g unsalted butter, softened

200g icing sugar

2 tbsp good quality lemon curd

Juice of half a lemon

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees and grease and line the bases of 2 x 8 inch cake tins.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. I used a handheld electric mixer but you can also use a posh KitchenAid style appliance if you’re lucky enough to have one or just get stuck in with a wooden spoon like they did in the olden days!

Add one egg at a time and with each one add a small amount of sifted flour and baking powder. Mix well after each addition and continue doing this until you’ve added all 6 eggs and all of the flour.

Stir in the lemon zest. At this point you need to use your judgement and if you feel that the cake mixture’s looking a bit thick, add a splash of milk until it’s smooth and of thick dropping consistency.

Divide the mixture between the 2 cake tins as evenly as possibly and pop them in the oven.

Whilst your cakes are cooking you need to whip up your lemon syrup. Simply squeeze the juice from 2 lemons into a bowl and stir in the suagr until it has dissolved. Set aside for later.

Check on your cakes after 30 minutes by inserting a skewer into the centre of them, if it comes out clean it’s ready, if not, pop them back in and check them after another 5 minutes (don’t forget, this part is crucial).

When you’re happy that they’re cooked, remove them from the oven and stand them on a wire rack. Use a skewer to make some holes in the cake and then pour over the lemon syrup. This’ll make the cakes even more moist and delicious…

Leave them to cool completely before removing them from their tins.

Now, you can make the lemon curd buttercream icing by using an electric mixer to beat together the icing sugar and the butter. Then add the lemon curd and finally the lemon juice, which will also make your icing slightly thinner and easier to spread. Give it a final beat until light and fluffy and then dollop it onto the top of one of your cake generously. Stack the other cake on top and finish it off with a dusting of icing sugar. Et voila…

Pure, unashamed, spongy, light, lemony, summery goodness…

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Here are some pictures of my latest (and possibly weirdest) cake commission. A friends colleague asked me to make a baby shower cake for her friend. I made my favourite, totally delicious chocolate fudge cake (recipe here) and was asked to adorn it with the message ‘You’re going to make a great MILF!’ It was a nervewracking experience…I hope she likes it! 🙂

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18/03/2012 · 5:52 pm
16/03/2012 · 11:32 am

A soda bread recipe for the impatient…

I’m quite obviously addicted to baking, which most commonly takes the form of cakes…large and small and of many different varieties! However, every now and again I have a longing to master the art of bread baking. I think the reason I keep putting it off isn’t the technical aspect but the fact that it takes so damn long! I love the (nearly) instant gratification you get from cake baking…mixing up the cake batter, licking the spoon, popping it in the oven and being rewarded by, first it’s divine sugary aroma, and then, a beautiful freshly baked cake, all within an hour (depending on variety obviously). 

I do however, love bread, especially of the wholemeal, seedy, substantial variety! I decided to end my bread baking evasion and meet it in the middle somewhere by trying my hand at Irish soda bread. It doesn’t use yeast so there’s no hanging around waiting for it to rise but has all of the winning bread characteristics mentioned above.

Without a modicum of modesty, I’m extremely proud to announce that my first soda bread attempt was a victory…

I used Rachel Allen’s ‘Brown Soda Bread’ recipe as a starting point but went a bit off piste with my choice of flours. 

To try it yourself you need…

225g wholemeal flour. I used this seed and grain bread flour and it worked a treat.

225g plain flour

1 tsp salt

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

Rachel suggests adding 50g mixed seeds such as sesame, pumpkin, sunflower or golden linseeds but the beauty of using the seed and grain bread flour was that they’d added those for me already! 🙂

25g butter

1 egg

375-400ml buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees.

Sift the plain flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. There’s not point trying to sift the wholemeal flour as you’re really not going to get very far so just mix it in afterwards.

Add the butter and rub it into the flour mixture with your fingers tips until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. 

Beat the egg and buttermilk together in another bowl.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour the majority of the liquid ingredients into it. 

Now, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get involved…use a hand to bring the flour and liquid together. It’s a messy old process so just embrace it and get stuck in! If it looks a bit dry, add a bit more of the buttermilk mixture. Your aiming for a soft dough that’s not too sticky. Don’t panic, if it IS too sticky, all is not lost, just sprinkle in a tad more flour.

When you’re happy with it, turn your dough onto a floured surface and shape it into a round that’s about 4cm high and cut a deep cross into the top like so…

Place it on a baking tray and pop it into the oven for 15 minutes. Then turn down the heat to 200 degrees and bake for a further 30 minutes. You’ll know when it’s ready because it’ll sound hollow when you tap it on the bottom and it should look a little something like this…

I made myself wait until it had cooled before tucking in but I can confirm that it was definitely worth the wait!…

I think I’ve found the perfect bread recipe for even the most impatient of people, like me. Prepared, cooked and cooled within an hour and a half and…entirely delicious! I already have plans to make another loaf this weekend as an accompaniment to… ‘Jool’s favourite beef stew’ ,a Jamie Oliver special, which my brother’s cooking up as a special Mother’s Day treat for us all! Yum!

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11/03/2012 · 8:58 am

Floaty light marmalade layer cake…

Not another marma-laden blog post I hear you cry! It does seem that I’ve developed a slight marmalade addiction of late. The thing is…I still have a few jars of my homemade amber nectar to get through and delicious sounding marmalade based recipes keep invading my periphery! 

This month, for the ‘Book & Bake’ club that I attend we were reading ‘Case Histories’ by Kate Atkinson and baking something from Dan Lepard’s ‘Short and Sweet’. I’ve already baked quite a few things from his book and am very happy to report that everything has been an absolute success and his marmalade layer cake was no exception…

Now, I’m a little bit nervous about even mentioning Mr Lepard’s name as I know there have been a number of incidents where his publisher has requested that recipes be removed from blogs due to copyright issues. I’m hoping that posting a link to the recipe on the Guardian website is acceptable, so here goes…follow this link and you will find a recipe for the most deliciously light sponge with a marmalade zing. It doesn’t contain any butter just lashings of double cream and involves lots of beating to fill it with air and make it floaty light! To finish it off it’s sandwiched and topped off with swathes of vanilla laden cream! Awesome…

The ‘Book & Bake’ ladies had thrown themselves into the task at hand and excelled. Just look at that spread… 

Out of sheer luck we managed not to have any duplicates. From ‘Short & Sweet’ there was cherry beet cake, marbled chocolate crumb cake, alchemist’s chocolate cake (yes, it was as crazy as it sounds), banana blondies, dark chocolate chunk cookies and raspberry ripple tarts. We even had sweet potato brownie’s, malt whisky ginger cake and lemon curd cookies from Dan’s column in the Guardian. And of course there was my marmalade layer cake…

I took one for the team and, for experimental purposes only you understand, made sure I tried a bit of everything :)…

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This time last year I made a tealoaf using my homemade Seville orange marmalade and blogged it here. I wasn’t as happy as I could have been with it as I overcooked it slightly. Being a creature of habit, and because it it officially National Marmalade Week, I thought I’d repeat the process and give it a go with years batch of marmalade and these are the pics…isn’t it pretty!?

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28/02/2012 · 3:56 pm
28/02/2012 · 10:00 am

Rhubarb & apple crumble with walnut topping…

On Friday afternoon I saw this tweet for help from FoodCycle Cambridge…

We’ve 2 slots free on our cooking rota for tomorrow, no experience needed, 9.30am-12.30 at the Centre@StPauls. Get in touch if interested!

and bearing in mind what a great time I’d had last time (blogged here) I jumped at the chance to help out! After team introductions we were shown the booty of surplus food that had been collected and the menu was revealed…

Last time I had been too scared to volunteer to be on dessert duty because, although I love baking, I was nervous about scaling it up to the size needed to feed 30 odd hungry people! However, this time I decided to face my fears head on! We were in real luck with the donation of (surplus/waste) food, we had a huge pile of rhubarb…

some cooking apples and some oat and raisin cereal bars so decided to, with the aid of a few staple ingredients like butter and flour, make 2 giant trays of rhubarb and apple crumble based on this recipe on the Good Food website.

We sliced the rhubarb into approximate 4cm sections and cooked it in a saucepan on the hob with some sugar for about 15 minutes…

By which time it was really juicy…

We sliced the cooking apples and mixed them in. We didn’t pre-cook them in the hope that once the crumble had been baked in the oven they would still retain a bit of bite instead of turning to mush.

To make the topping we rubbed the butter into plain flour until our hands ached but it had the texture of breadcrumbs! Then we added the sugar (dark brown and granulated), some ground almonds, chopped walnuts for added crunch and the broken up donated cereal bars…

We poured this over the trays of fruits and popped them into the oven to bake…

The kitchen was a hive of activity as the team created the rest of the meal…

We used the rest of our time to get on with our side dessert of raspberry and orange fruit salad, which was made purely from donated food…

It was simply the segmented sections and juice from 5 oranges, a few punnets of ripe raspberries and some chopped fresh mint. The result was deliciously refreshing and the perfect, juicy accompaniment to the crumble. 

The frittata looked and smelled amazing especially once it was topped with gorgeous, bubbling melted cheese…

and was served up with new potatoes, roasted red peppers and tomatoes and green beans sautéed with garlic…

I watched the crumbles like a hawk but despite the slight unpredictability of the ovens, they turned out beautifully golden brown and bubbling around the edges…

They were slightly top heavy, which suited me perfectly as a complete crumble topping fiend 🙂

But without further ado, here’s the finished article, my rhubarb and apple crumble with walnut topping served with raspberry, orange and mint salad…

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I was recently asked if I would make a couple of cakes for a fundraising Valentine’s tea party at a local community gallery called Cambridge Art Salon. Unfortunately the weather conspired against us and even the lure of cake couldn’t get people out of their cosy houses. But hey, it meant there was plenty of tea and cake to go around, I got to meet some lovely people and to chat to Paul aka The Finsbury Park Deltics, who was exhibiting his amazing work there at the time. If you’re in the area pop your head in and see what they’re up to!

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22/02/2012 · 9:36 am
20/02/2012 · 9:06 pm

On a Cambridge mission…

Having lived in London for 5 years, I’ve been completely and utterly spoilt by the food options available to me. With even more exciting eateries opening by the minute I sometimes feel completely over stimulated and that there’s just not enough time in the day or pennies in my bank account to humour my constant hunger for exciting food!

At the end of last year I moved back to my hometown of Cambridge. It’s so easy to take familiar places for granted and not actually SEE what’s just on your doorstep, which is a travesty when it’s as beautiful as this…

In the few months that I’ve been back I’ve made it my mission to re-discover Cambridge, to look up at my surroundings instead of being on a pavement pounding mission and to seek out the little gems that may not be glaringly obvious! Cambridge is a mecca for camera wielding tourists, who mostly annoy the s**t out of me, but who also make me even more determined to shun the mainstream and to discover places off the beaten track. These are some of my findings…

I recently went to my first Cambridge supper club: Saucepan & Suitcase Secret Suppers run by the lovely Francesca, who welcomed me very warmly into her home and introduced me to Tuscan cuisine. The highlight of the evening for me, were these delicious malfatti…or as I prefer to think of them, naked ricotta and spinach ravioli, no pasta in sight!… 

I joined a Book and Bake club, which as the name suggest is all about books…and baking. Each month we choose a fiction book to discuss and a cookery book, from which we choose something to bake. Then we get together to chat and eat…perfect!…

I’ve found my new favourite restaurant, which very jammily is a hop, skip and jump from my front door…Bibimbap House. A Korean restaurant specialising in bibimbap, literally meaning ‘mixed meal’. There are just 7 options on the menu, great for an indecisive diner like me. I opted for this, the pork bulgogi bibimbap… 

When it arrived at the table, the centrepiece, a boiling hot stoneware bowl, was still sizzling away. I wasn’t sure where to start or how to tackle such a meal as there were so many exciting parts to it, so I asked the lovely owner for advise. Unless she was just humouring me, it didn’t sound like there were any hard and fast rules involved…so I just got stuck in, using my chopsticks to mix everything in the large bowl together, pouring over lashings of their AMAZING homemade soy sauce, nibbling on the cold side dishes and pausing for a miso soup break every now and again. It was so delicious that I didn’t want it to end, so delicious, in fact, that I’ve already been back within a week…

I have also made the acquaintance of my friendly local purveyor of wine, Cambridge Wine Merchants, who also do a great range of beer. I went in recently with a yearning for a Brewdog 5am Saint ’the holy grail of red ales’, unfortunately they’d sold out but luckily for me had just had a delivery of Moor’s Revival…

It’s just what it says on the bottle, ‘an immensely hoppy and refreshing pale ale’ full of citrussy, grapefruit zinginess. Now that they’ve proven their good taste, I will most definitely be returning for more beer tip offs.

These are just a few of the Cambridge gems that I wanted to share, there are many more to come and I’m looking forward to discovering them!

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