How many Hydrangea Sugar Flowers does it take to make a Wedding Cake?

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Baking, cake, cake decoration, Christmas, Food, Fruit Cake and tagged with 5 tier wedding cake, baking, blue, brownies, brownies in a Madeleine pan, cake, cake decorating, classic cake, contemporary, designer cakes, edible lustre powder, florists paste, Food, food gel colouring, fruit cakes, hydrangea, italian meringue, lace design, lavender meringue, layered cake, mini bundt cakes, sugar craft, sugar flowers, sugar paste, the cake parlour, tiered cake, traditional wedding cake, wedding cake, wedding cake design, wedding favour ideas, zoe clark 25/04/2013

After you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time baking 8 enormous boozy fruit cakes, how do you decide which wedding cake design to go for? Do you opt for a classic look, a fashionable design or something to match your colour scheme?? For those that know me, you will know that there has never been a colour scheme in my life. I don’t manage to match things very well. In fact if things clash that’s probably for the better. (

I couldn’t bring myself to decide on just one colour for my bouquet, as I love so many colours so I went for a bit of everything. It was only a last minute decision to leave out the bright pink roses from the bouquet. I decided it may be a little bit too much. You can even see the blue hydragena flowers peeking out between the hyacinths. It was touch and go as to whether these flowers would bloom with it being a December wedding. It was clearly meant to be!

My wedding flowers – a little bit of everything

Part of me longed for a classic cake that I would love forever and part of me me wished for an entire room of different types of cake from around the world. Unfortunately there is not enough space in my freezer to create such an awesome display unless I baked them all the day before the wedding which in reality, was never going to happen.

Petite Italian Lavender Meringues

As a compromise I baked as many extras as I could possibly manage. Opting for petite Lavender Meringues

Table Treats – Mini Brownie Bundts and Madeleines

and mini bundt brownies and madeleines to adorn the tables with.

I found so many gorgeous cake designs flicking through endless pages of Pintrest and magazines but many were way out of my skills set. One favourite was an impossibly beautiful white damask lace design on a pale green fondant I made many many trips to my local cake decorating shop and experimented with different technniques, I was never going to be able to use a stencil. (I practiced with a little one I had in the house and I always managed to smudge it or it oozed out of the sides.) I was then going to make millions of sugar roses, but I made about 4. It took me ALL night and I felt angry. It was way too fiddly and my roses always turn out ridiculously enormous and ‘rustic’ looking.

Green Damask Lace Cake – The Cake Parlour

Another of my favourite designs was a tiered cake with a cascade of hydragena blossoms. Little did I know that both of these cakes were designed by the same woman the amazing Zoe Clark. (I have since purchased her books as I love her designs!)

I continued in an experimental vein ordering lots of plastic sugar tools online and waited a month for them to arrive. I attempted to make fondant pearls by hand but didn’t think about how they needed to dry so ended up with one lump of sugar pearl. That would never do.

Just the one lump of pearl for me please

Back to the drawing board and my two favourite designs. My Mam invested in a hydrangea cutter and mould for me (thank you Mam) rather than watch me struggle with trying to do everything for myself.

Zoe Clark’s design used pink blossoms which is lovely but I’m not much of a pink girl. Instead I experimented with a few different colours including, lilac, baby blue, teal and finally decided upon ‘hydrangena blue’. I coloured some florists paste with food colouring and added a little more to get the right colour. I also left some to dry for a couple of weeks to see how the colour developed as it can fade as it dries out fully. I had found my winner. I made 3 slightly different shades of hydrangea blue paste to give the flowers more of a natural look and variety in the final cascade.

Using a tooth pick add a dot of your chosen food colour gel to the florists sugar paste and knead it until it’s the colour you need. I chose hydrangea blue. Beware adding too much colour in one go, once it’s in you can’t take it out! You may need to colour your paste in advance to allow it to dry a little so it’s not too sticky!

When adding food colouring gel to sugar paste it always makes the paste sticky. I find it much easier to handle if I colour it a few days before I need to use it.

Roll out the colourful florist’s paste on a lightly dusted surface

You can add a little icing powder to the worksurface when you’re rolling it out but not too much as it will dry the paste out and it will crack. Florists paste isn’t cheap but it has a special ingredient (albumen) which allows you to work it into much thinner and more delicate shapes than normal sugar paste. It also dries really hard quite quickly so it keeps it’s shape. I tried to make my own (I know this was not my best idea!) I thought it would be cheaper to buy powdered albumen and knead it into sugar paste. In reality this was an extra faff on that I didn’t have the time for. It was much easier to just buy pre made florists paste and mix my own colour. If you’re feeling extravagant you could even buy yours in the shade you really want.

Strategically press your cutter into the paste and carefully lift it away from the paste

My hydrangea cutter and mould instructions informed me that I needed vegetable fat to smear on the silicon mould to prevent the paste from sticking to the mould. It was late, I was all ready to cut out some flowers so I wasn’t going to make it to any shops. Improvising I took some pearl lustre powder and popped it in a shallow bowl.

Pearl Lustre Powder makes a great alternative to vegetable fat and icing sugar

Using a brand new clean blusher brush I coated the mould liberally with a combination of edible pearl and baby blue lustre powders.

Dust like your life depends on it

Et voila. I have satisfactorily released flowers with a touch a sparkle and glamour that I was going to have to paint on afterwards. Success and time saved!

Using a clean blusher brush first the mould with lustre powder to stop it sticking. You can use trex but I discovered this saved me a job later on!

The little mould that I loved to hate. The first 50 flowers were a breeze but your fingers do start to ache after so much cutting, folding and pressing! The trick is to fold the mould over carefully so you don’t dislodge the flower inside. Or if the paste is too thick it oozes out of the sides of the mould when pressed…

There is a lot of patience and gentleness required in this process…

The pressed Hydrangea Blossom – look at that beautiful detail

If you’ve lustred up the mould enough it should pop out quite easily but you might need to coax it out if it’s a bit stubborn. (Spot the cocktail sticks in the background). Flipping over the mould allows gravity to do the work for you and release the lovely detailed blossom into your palm.

Gently coax the flower out of the mould by peeling the mould away from the flower or let gravity do it’s job

The final result! I also added a little baby blue edible lustre powder to the mix to ad depth and variation to the blossoms. I was glittering for a week after this!

Hey presto! You have a sugar flower all sparkly and full of lustre which helps bring it to life

I found a good way to make the flowers look more realistic was to gently roll themeach one in my cupped hand before leaving them to dry. This gives more shape to the petals, so they don’t appear too flat and fake. Then repeat times a million… This is probably an extreme exaggeration but I lost count of how many flowers I actually pressed. I used about 2 and half 500g packs of florists paste to create maybe around 150 hydrangea blossoms. Not all of them ended up on the cake however as I dropped some on the floor… Some snapped after they dried. They are quite delicate little flowers! And some flowers just weren’t that pretty (sorry flowers but some had to be prised apart and suffered the consequences) so they didn’t make the cut.

Gently roll the flower in your hand to encourage the edges to bend in slightly and create a bit of variety

The flowers need to be held in shape whilst they dry. You can splash out on a special sugar paste foam mat if you like, or you can wrap an egg box in cling film and pile them all up like me. Crinkled up tin foil works really well too. It may also be a good idea to add layers of cling film to stop the flowers sticking together. I know I’m biased but don’t they look pretty all sparkly and delicate??

Line an egg box with cling film and pop all your pretty flowers in to hold their shape whilst they dry. Repeat repeat repeat…

It takes about a day for the flowers to dry out. I made mine in stages so I could spend an hour or two at a time pressing hydragenas until I thought I had enough. Then all that’s left to do is ice the 5 tiers of fruit cake and assemble it all.

The Final Result! The Wedding Cake

This is part 2 of the 4 stages of wedding cake baking! You can read more about my epic wedding cake adventures here…

Part 1 – My 5 tiers of fruit wedding cake - My biggest booziest cake yet

Part 2 – How many sugar flowers does it take to make a wedding cake?

Part 3 – Where to start icing a 5 tier wedding cake?

Part 4 -The Final Frontier – Decorating & assembling my 5 Tier wedding cake

5 Tiers of Fruit Wedding Cake – My biggest booziest cake ever

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Baking, cake, cake decoration, Christmas, Food, Fruit Cake, Lauren Prince, sugar craft, Vintage, wedding and tagged with 5 tiers fruit cake, alcoholic cakes, amareto, around the world in 80 bakes, boozy fruit cake, cherry, coconut, homemade wedding cake. recipe, icing wedding cake, malibu, tropical, wedding cake, wedding cake for 120 people, what to do with a broken oven, what to do with burnt wedding cake, white rum 07/04/2013

Five Tiers of Fruit Cake on our wedding day

After Chris and I got engaged my first thoughts turned not to the arranging the wedding, or buying my dress, but to the wedding cake. I got my priorities right. My theory is sort out the cake first and everything else will fall in to place. I actually bought the first wedding dress I tried on and my nephew who wasn’t quite 1 years old helped me choose it but that’s a completely different story. Let’s concentrate on the cake. We knew we wanted to get married as soon as possible, so the vast majority of the 6 months of our planning and preparation time I spent creating our wedding cake.

Fruit cake is very popular in my family as you can tell by my previous Caribbean Christmas Cakes and Jamaican Black Cake so I knew I needed to make something extra special, something a bit more challenging and flavour packed to feed about 120 of our family and friends. A few sleepless nights later of conjuring up flavour combinations in my head I had it planned. 5 tiers of fruit cake, each with it’s own booze and fruit combination.

12 inches worth of dried fruit soaking in their temporary storage box home

I quickly realised that I needed much BIGGER kitchen equipment than I owned to create the largest 12″ tier. No bowl was big enough to house the enormous quantity of dried fruit to soak it in the flavoursome booze. A quick hunt round the house and I discovered a hard plastic storage box which I disinfected and decanted all the ingredients into. I like to soak my fruit for as long as possible, in a bit more booze than is recommended so then I don’t really need to feed the cooked cake on a regular basis. It matures nicely wrapped up in greaseproof paper and stays moist. I pour enough booze onto the fruit to give it a pungent glistening alcoholic coat, but not so much that it’s swimming in a pool of booze. If you stir it regularly you can make sure the fruit is absorbing the booze. There should be no liquid left after 2 weeks.

Soaking 3 tiers of boozy fruit

Weighing out the fruit and measuring in the booze can be quite complicated as I found out, especially if you don’t mark on your pot which size cake the fruit is eventually intended for. Note to self: You really won’t remember which fruit is which after 2 weeks of soaking in booze so don’t even pretend that you will. Your memory is good but it’s really not that good. Squashing an 8″ cake’s worth of fruit into a 6″ cake will not work and you won’t realise that this is the problem, even when you can’t fit it all into the cake tin and have to make extra cupcakes with the rest of the mixture. The cake will be extra moist and you will think it’s not cooked so you have to bake it for an extra 3 hours to convince yourself it’s definitely cooked. To compensate for the extra oven time you will then pour way too much booze on the hot cake when it comes out of the oven and drown it. You will never be happy with this cake so you will then have to start again. From scratch. (You will also have to make another 8″ cake as you decided to bake the two cakes simultaneously and made a right pigs ear of the whole thing. That was a really good Saturday well spent.)

One incinerated wedding cake – let’s eat the middle with a spoon

For my 5 tier wedding cake I ended up baking 8 actual cakes! Mainly due to my own stupidity and also because the oven broke. The 2 cakes which required an extra 3 hours of baking (when added onto their original 4 hours of baking is a lot of time in an oven!) made me realise that the oven wasn’t playing nicely. I invested in an oven thermometer to check the temperature throughout the wedding cake baking process and followed this precisely. Only to then incinerate one cake completely. It was a charcoal cake. Although once I chipped away the outer charcoal casing the centre of the cake was really rather nice. I was determined not to let the amaretto soaked cherries to go to waste. So I chopped up the inside of the cake and served it with ice cream. It was delicious!

The quick ice day late spare cake

The other ‘ruined’ cakes did not go to waste either. I decided to donate one of my reject cakes to the church bake sale and quickly iced it. However upon arrival we discovered we were a day late for the bake sale… Ah the brain fog of wedding preparations! So I shared it with friends instead when they came round for festive drinks. I must admit the extra booze and fruit in the cake made it tricky to cut but it was so tasty!! The final uniced extra boozy tier is still maturing nicely in the cupboard. I’m going to save that one for a special occasion. I’m sure it’s good to keep for at least a year or two.

I despaired slightly as I still had 3 cakes left to bake with a broken oven. Then I did a bit of googling and decided instead to dismantle the oven, clean it and put it back together. Thankfully this seemed to do the trick! I also watched the other cakes like a hawk and turned them every hour to avoid any charring from the hot spots in the oven. The result? The final 3 tiers were the best cakes I’ve ever baked in my life. I’m sure that extra care and attention was the secret to their success. They were so level they didn’t need to be propped up when icing them to get an even top.

Creaming the butter and the eggs - wedding fruit cake

Creaming the butter, sugar and orange and lemon zests

The method for each sized cake is exactly the same and after baking 8 of them I was starting to know it off by heart. I think this Christmas I may make chocolate cakes! After soaking the fruit in booze for at least 24 hours (if not 2 weeks) you cream the butter, sugar and fruit zests together until light and fluffy.

Whisk in the eggs to the butter and sugar

Then to add the eggs, whisking them into the butter and sugar mix one at a time. I had to use the biggest bowl I own for this job as the eggs inflate like mad when whisked. The mixture can start to curdle or separate at this point, but it’s not the end of the world. You can whisk in a little flour to stop it separating but it’s still going to taste pretty amazing.

The whisked eggs are dangerously close to overflowing the bowl

Then to prepare the dry ingredients. A separate bowl was definitely required to sift the mountain of flour and spices together. I love a spicy cake, so I’m always quite liberal with the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Mountains of flour and spices

For the 12″ cake I didn’t have a bowl big enough to fit everything in so had to resort to stirring it all together in the plastic storage box! Who knew it was so difficult to stir things in a square box… I ended up with cake mix right up to my elbows and consequently my face and hair. But I did it!

Time to stir it all together! Wooden spoon at the ready

You have to fold the wet and dry ingredients in a third at a time until it’s all incorporated. Then finally fold in the ground almonds, chopped nuts and treacle.

Almost fully combined just the treacle and almonds left to fold in

I hired the largest cake tins from my local cake shop. At 50p a day it was much cheaper than buying massive cake tins and I don’t have to worry about storing them in our already full to capacity flat. It’s really important to double line and grease the cake tins to help prevent the cake from burning as it needs to bake for a really long time at a low (ish) temperature (150 degrees Celsius).

I always tie an extra collar of greaseproof paper around the outside of the tin and use that to prop up a greaseproof paper lid to protect the top of the cake from burning too. As it doesn’t have any raising agent in it the fruit cake won’t really rise any higher than it sits in the tin uncooked. I wanted to try to get the most even finish that I could so I carefully layered the mixture into the tin, spreading and flattening it down with a spatula. No air pockets for me thanks and the smoothest top I’ve ever achieved.

An even spread – all of the 12″ cake mixture in it’s very large tin

The largest cake obviously takes the longest time to bake. In hindsight starting a massive cake at 6pm is probably not the best plan. It takes at least an hour to combine all of the ingredients together and prepare the tins. Then it needs 6 hours in the oven. This meant I was babysitting the cake until 3am. I accidentally fell asleep and awoke with a fright with the oven timer going off, in my own personal inferno with the oven and the heating on, whilst wearing fleecy pyjamas, a dressing gown and a furry blanket with the cat sat on top of me. I forgot to turn this cake whilst it was baking, due to me being asleep and all , so the cake had a nice diagonal shadow across it, but once it had an extra feeding of booze and it was iced no one noticed. And with a cake this big, using so many ingredients there was no way I was going to start again!

The biggest 12″ fruit cake with a slight shadow… shhh no one will notice

The cake fruit and booze combinations I created were…

4″ Cake – Amaretto Tier – Almond, Amaretto and cherry
6″ Cake – Vanilla Tier – Vanilla Brandy, dates, peel and sultanas
8″ Cake – Tropical Tier – Malibu, dried pineapple, coconut, papaya and mango
10″ Cake – Traditional Tier – Brandy and mixed fruit
12″ Cake – Orange Tier – Orange Brandy sultanas, cherries, peel

Putting things into slightly frazzled perspective. This cake was bigger than my head.

Each cake had a different baking time too although all were baked at 150 degrees

4″ Cake – 2 and a half hours
6″ Cake – 3 hours
8″ Cake – 4 hours
10″ Cake – 4 and 3 quarter hours
12″ Cake – 6 hours

The 6 inch wedding cake. Quite the smooth level finish even if I do say so myself

What I used to bake my wedding cake – Ingredients

4″ Cake – Almond, Amaretto and Cherries

150g dried cherries
100g sultanas
40g candied peel
soaked in (at least) 2 tablespoons of amaretto
100g butter
100g brown sugar
zest of 1/4 of lemon
zest of 1/4 of orange
juice of 1/4 orange (add to the soaked fruit just before you combine the rest of the ingredients)
2 eggs
100g plain flour
1 tsp cinnamon (or more…)
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp almond extract
10g ground almonds
10g flaked almonds
1/2 tablespoon treacle

6″ Cake – Vanilla Brandy, dates, peel and sultanas

70g glace cherries
375g sultanas
200g dried chopped dates
45g candied mixed peel
soaked in (at least) 4 tablespoons of vanilla infused brandy (pop a vanilla pod in your bottle of brandy and leave a vanilla pod in with the fruit whilst soaking in brandy)
175g butter
175g brown sugar
zest of 3/4 of lemon
zest of 3/4 of orange
juice of 1/2 orange (add to the soaked fruit just before you combine the rest of the ingredients)
3 eggs
175g plain flour
1 tsp cinnamon (or more…)
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp vanilla extract
20g ground almonds
20g flaked almonds
1 tablespoon treacle

8″ Cake – Tropical Tier – Malibu, dried pineapple, coconut, papaya and mango

125g glace cherries
650g sultanas
320g dried tropical fruits (pineapple, papaya and mango)
100g candied mixed peel
soaked in (at least) 5 tablespoons of malibu (coconut flavour white rum)
350g butter
350g brown sugar
zest of 1 and half of lemons
zest of 1 and a half oranges
juice of 3/4 orange (add to the soaked fruit just before you combine the rest of the ingredients)
6 eggs
350g plain flour
2 tsp cinnamon (or more…)
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp mixed spice
35g ground almonds
35g desicated coconut
1 and 1/2 tablespoons treacle

10″ Cake – Traditional Tier – Brandy and Mixed fruit

180g glace cherries
800g sultanas
210g dried apricots
250g dried chopped dates
250g dried cherries
110g candied mixed peel
soaked in (at least) 8 tablespoons of brandy
450g butter
450g brown sugar
zest of 2 of lemons
zest of 2 of oranges
juice of 1 orange (add to the soaked fruit just before you combine the rest of the ingredients)
8 and half eggs
450g plain flour
3 tsp cinnamon (or more…)
2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp mixed spice
55g ground almonds
55g flaked almonds
2 tablespoons treacle

12″ Cake – Orange Brandy sultanas, cherries, peel

250g glace cherries
1460g sultanas
400g dried apricots
350g dried chopped dates
250g dried cherries
200g candied mixed peel
soaked in (at least) 10 tablespoons of orange brandy liqueur
660g butter
660g brown sugar
zest of 3 of lemons
zest of 3 of oranges
juice of 1 and 1/2 oranges (add to the soaked fruit just before you combine the rest of the ingredients)
12 eggs
660g plain flour
4 tsp cinnamon (or more…)
2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp mixed spice
75g ground almonds
75g flaked almonds
3 tablespoons treacle

5 teetering tiers of fruit cake. Stacked and ready to mature

Once all 8 cakes were baked I had a job trying to find places to store them. A bit of strategic thinking and double wrapping in greaseproof paper and tin foil later 8 cakes were ready to mature for a month before being iced. I’ll tell you all about that adventure later on along with our house flooding 2 weeks before the wedding and making over 100 sugar flowers…

My bakers impression of the final 5 tier wedding cake

Love from the new Mrs Lauren Hoy x

Me – more bridey than cakey

This is part 1 of the 4 stages of wedding cake baking! You can read more about my epic wedding cake adventures here…

Part 1 – My 5 tiers of fruit wedding cake - My biggest booziest cake yet

Part 2 – How many sugar flowers does it take to make a wedding cake?

Part 3 – Where to start icing a 5 tier wedding cake?

Part 4 -The Final Frontier – Decorating & assembling my 5 Tier wedding cake

Coconut Crazy! Homemade Italian Coconut Gelato

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Cookery, dessert, Everday Cooking, Food, gelato, ice cream, Italy, Lauren Prince and tagged with camping, coconut curls, coconut custard, coconut gelato, coconut halves, coffee, colosseum rome, cream, desiccated coconut, dessert, dessicated coconut, difference between ice cream and gelato, dried coconut, Eggs, espresso, Food, frozen dessert, gelato, holidays, home made, how to make basic gelato, how to make coconut decoration, how to use kitchenaid ice cream attachment, ice cream, ice cream maker, italian, Italy, kitchenaid mixer, milk, recipe, shaving a coconut, Sugar, thomson al fresco, trevi fountain, vegetarian 16/03/2013

Homemade Italian Coconut Gelato complete with coconut curls

My favourite ice cream in the whole entire world has got to be Italian Coconut Gelato. Now that’s a bold statement I know, but having sampled real Italian Gelato and having lived very close to a Gelato shop in Newcastle I think I’ve tried quite a few flavours and this is without doubt top of my list every time. Yeah chocolate is always lovely but a bit too much of an obvious choice sometimes for my liking. I do love cherry gelato and pistachio is tremendous too but coconut is what is usually what I crave when looking for a cold fix.

I’ll have half a dried coconut please

I seem to be developing an obsession with coconut, finding ways to incorporate it into all foods. Be that coconut milk, oil, dessicated and dried. In the creation of this gelato I discovered the wonderful ingredient of dried coconut halves which saved me the effort of breaking into a fresh coconut with a hammer and fork (my only suitable kitchen implements I think for such a job!)

Trevi Fountain adventuring in Rome with my Dad

I visited Rome just last year for the first time with my Dad. It was gorgeous. We spent a few days wandering round, bouncing from the Trevi Fountain to pasta cafes to St Paul’s basilica. Pausing to absorb the beauty and history of our surroundings and to take on more fuel in the form of pasta and gelato. I dragged my Dad to many cake shops and the beautiful and oldest gelataria in Rome, Giolitti. Not that I heard him complain once

What a view from the top! Colosseum, Rome

The main difference between ice cream and gelato is the taste and texture. Gelato freezes at a higher temperature than ice cream. This gives a much more intense flavour than you get from eating ice cream which is colder and numbs your tastes buds slightly. The warmer the temperature the more you can taste! Gelato is also made with less fat, so good news it’s better for you than ice cream! (Depending on how much you eat of it of course). Gelato is also much softer and smoother in texture than traditional ice cream. All the better for eating!

Heating the milk and cream to infuse flavour into the gelato base

The initial stage of heating the milk/cream gives you the perfect opportunity to infuse flavours. You can choose to infuse whatever flavour you fancy into your gelato. Some flavours will require a longer infusion time than others. A vanilla pod may take about 20 minutes over a low heat to impart it’s flavour fully, but something like coffee extract, tea bags, cocoa powder or other flavour extracts will give instant flavour and need little infusion time (maybe about 5 minutes).

You can infuse your base with your favourite flavours, such as vanilla, coffee, tea, lavender, rose, cinnamon, cherry, pistachio and much much more! If you’re going to choose a different flavour it would be wise to choose something with a low liquid content as adding water to the mix may cause ice crystals to form. Adding alcohol in small amounts should be ok, but remember alcohol doesn’t really freeze.

Another flavour option can be created by using a different variety of milk. Even better news for people with food allergies or intolerances! I used coconut milk here but you could just as easily use cows, goats, soy, almond or hazelnut. Each will give you a slightly different flavour and possibly texture. Some milks can become grainy when heated, so it may be wise to try heating up a small amount first to make sure it can stand the heat. before you commit to cooking an entire batch. Or have a fine sieve to hand!

Add your choice of flavour to your milk then heat the cream/milk until it starts to bubble. I added 80g of desiccated coconut to the milk and cream here to infuse even more coconut goodness.

Keep stirring it so a skin doesn’t form on the top. Allow it to cool slightly. Cream and milk have slightly different boiling points so keep a close eye on the pan, you don’t want it to boil over, or get a thick skin on your coconut cream!

Beat together the eggs and sugar for about 5 minutes

Beat together the sugar and eggs until smooth and fluffy. They will become a mellow yellow colour after about 5 minutes of beating with an electric whisk/mixer.

The discarded dessicated coconut - nothing will go to waste in my house! - gelato recipe

The discarded desiccated coconut – nothing will go to waste in my house!

Once the cream/milk has cooled slightly pass it through a fine sieve to remove your flavouring if needed. Squeeze all of you milk/cream out of the coconut so you don’t miss a drop of your infused cream. I kept my creamy coconut mixture to use later on.

Sieve your hot cream mixture if you need to remove additional flavourings like vanilla pods or dessicated coconut!

As the next stage is to make a smooth custard you can’t add any swirls of fruit/flavours at this point. Your custard needs to be smooth and pure so it can thicken fully. Hang on to any additional flavourings that you would like to add for later on. You can then swirl them in just before the final freeze. After about 5 minutes of beating, the sugar and eggs will inflate slightly and take on a pale yellow colour.

The beaten eggs and sugar – the custard base

Whilst continuing to beat the fluffy eggs and sugar slowly pour the hot coconut cream into the eggs. Add the hot cream gradually to avoid scrambling the eggs! Adding very hot cream at this stage will give you lumpy egg custard, I don’t think anyone would enjoy lumpy gelato although it may be an interesting texture on the palette!

Pour the hot cream into the eggs gradually whilst continuing to beat the eggs

Once you’ve poured all of the cream into the eggs, keep beating the mixture until it’s fully combined. When it’s ready the custard will start to thicken as the hot cream gently cooks the eggs. The custard will be smooth, fluffy and a very pale yellow in colour due to all those beautiful egg yolks! (Note my leftover egg whites in the jug. I’m saving them for another recipe later on…)

Fluffy coconut custard

Then all that’s left to do is thicken the custard a bit more. You can do this in a bain marie (in a bowl suspended over a pan of hot water) to avoid burning the custard and gently thicken the mixture. Or if you’re in a hurry, whack it all in a pan and heat the custard over a low heat and stir like mad so nothing burns/sticks to the bottom. The key is to keep stirring to distribute the heat evenly and allow the custard to cook thoroughly.

Thickening up the coconut custard in a bain marie

Not letting the precious coconut custard out of my sight as I thicken it in my home made bain marie

Once the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon it’s good to go! The custard needs to cool before you can freeze it and unfortunately this can take up to 6 hours…. Not great when you need a gelato fix right this second! A quick cheat is to carefully place your hot pan of custard into a bowl (or in my case a sink) of cold water to rapidly cool the custard. Keep stirring it every now and then to stop a skin from forming. You can chill it further in the fridge before cracking out the ice cream maker.

Coconut Custard coating the back of a spoon – thick enough to cool!

After all this patience the end result is not far off! I recently bought myself an attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer. The ice cream maker! This was my very first experiment and venture into ice cream making. You will need to follow the instructions for your own ice cream maker as they’re all a bit different, but for the Kitchenaid, I had to freeze the special ice cream bowl in the freezer for 15 hours (it now lives there permanently for all ice cream making emergencies) . Once I had fitted the blade to the Kitchenaid mechanism it’s good to go. One important thing to note is that you should pour the custard in whilst the machine is running as the custard may freeze solid instantly and could break your Kitchenaid if you’re unlucky.

Freeze me up – KitchenAid Ice Cream attachment in action

It takes about 20 minutes in the Kitchenaid to freeze the gelato to a ‘soft set’ . I couldn’t resist a sneaky taste of it at this stage and it tasted pretty amazing. It will be quite sweet at this stage as when it’s set further in the freezer the sweetness is reduced.

Letting the KitchenAid do all the hard work freezing my coconut gelato – time for a cup of tea methinks

So with 20 minutes on your hands you’ve got plenty time to have a cup of tea and start the washing up. Once the gelato has reached the ‘soft set stage’ where it starts looking like slightly melted/soft ice cream you can stir in any additional flavours. I added 2 tablespoons of the left over desiccated coconut for good measure. You can see some of it lurking on the top of the blades!

Soft set coconut gelato ready for the freezer

You could probably eat it at the soft set stage if you like your gelato extra soft, or scoop it into a freezer container, smooth it down and leave it in the freezer to set fully for about 5 hours. As Gelato contains less fat it freezes much harder than ice cream, so you may need to take it out of the freezer to soften before serving. You could pop it in the fridge for 15 minutes if it’s a bit difficult to get it into a bowl.

Shaving a coconut to create coconut curls

Shaving a dried coconut to create coconut curls

Taking my trusty vegetable peeler I shaved the dried coconut halves into thin slivers to create some pretty coconut curls. I quite like the dark brown edges of the coconut rind against the white coconut flesh. It’s makes a tasty decoration too! Pop a couple of curls on the top of your gelato for a quick and sophisticated looking decoration.

Coconut Gelato complete with coconut curls

Sharing Coconut Gelato with friends – I didn’t eat it all myself. I promise!

I didn’t eat it all myself. I promise! My friends came round for tea and we all quickly cleared our bowls of gelato which marks it as a clear success! It was smooth, creamy and extremely coconutty. Just my kind of gelato! I liked it so much that when I was washing up after my friends left I decided to start making some more custard, but this time I experimented with Italian Espresso Gelato instead.

Coconut Gelato – it didn’t last long

Coconut Gelato – extreme close up

What I used to make Italian Coconut Gelato (Gelato di Crema)

Coconut Custard

1 x 400ml can of coconut milk (which is equal to 1 and 3/4 cups)
109ml of double cream (1/2 cup)
55ml semi skimmed milk (1/4 cup)
(you can use your own combination of cream/milk here to total 545 ml or 2 and 1/2 cups of liquid)
5 egg yolks
110g (or 1/2 cup) granulated sugar (I used vanilla infused sugar)
80g (or 1 cup) desiccated coconut (add your flavour to infuse at this stage)
Keep 2 tbs of the desiccated coconut back to add to the soft set gelato before putting it into the freezer.

Coconut Gelato Method Summary

Add flavouring and heat cream and milk until boiling
Beat eggs and sugar together until fluffy
Cool cream slightly
Pour hot cream into eggs and sugar while continuing to beat the mixture
Thicken the custard in a bain marie/pan until it coats the back of a spoon
Cool the custard until chilled throughly
Freeze the custard using ice cream maker for about 20 minutes until soft set
Set the ice cream in the freezer for about 5 hours

Many thanks to Thomson Al Fresco who supplied the ingredients for me to make this Italian Gelato creation! If this recipe has whetted your appetite for all things Italian you might enjoy camping in the beautiful Lake Garda, Lazio, Tuscany, Adriatic Coast or the Venetian Riviera. I’m already dreaming of my next Italian adventure.

If you want to make another Italian classic you could try making your own Espresso Gelato, using the same method but a slightly different recipe.

Espresso Gelato

3 tbs coffee essence
273 ml (1 and 1/2 cups) milk
218 ml (1 cup) double cream
1 tsp cocoa powder
5 egg yolks
110g (or 1/2 cup) granulated sugar (I used vanilla infused sugar)

Homemade Espresso Gelato

46. Say hello to my Brazilian Roll ~ Rocambole Cake

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Baking, cake, cake decoration, Christmas, Food, Mary Berry and tagged with around the world in 80 bakes, baking, Brazil, brazilian friend, Brazilian Roll, cake, caramel, chocolate log, chocolate roulade, christmas, clandestine cake club, delicate sponge, dessert, doce de leite, dolce de leche, dulche leiche, egg whites, Food, home baking, international baking, lauren hoy, lauren prince, light sponge cake, Mary Berry, newcastle, Rocambole, rocambole recipe, sponge cake, Sugar, Swiss roll, toffee, vanilla 14/02/2013

Brazil is yet another country on my still to visit list. However I do have a lovely Brazilian friend who was an exchange student at my sixth form. We became firm friends over A Level Media Studies and parties. Thinking of you Gabriella when baking my Brazilian Roll or as you may call it in Brazil a Rocambole.

This bake reminds me of Mary Berry’s Chocolate Roulade (one of my very first around the world in 80 bakes more technical challenges). Both are very similar to the wonderful Swiss Roll however the distinguishing factor of the Rocambole and the Roulade is that they use whisked egg whites to fluff up the sponge. This means it’s a fragile cake but very light. Where as the Swiss Roll is more like a sponge cake, less delicate and probably (in my opinion) a bit easier to bake and to handle.

Traditionally the filling in a Rocambole is a Doce de Leite. This is a Brazilian favourite. It’s a creamy milky toffee sauce made from slowly reduced condensed milk. (It’s quite similar to the Italian toffee sauce dolce de leche). It’s reduced down over a low heat until caramelised to produce a thick fudgey gooey paste. As the filing takes quite some time to prepare it’s best to start with this! You need to be really careful with this as if the pan is left to boil dry the can could explode and really hurt yourself (and your kitchen).

Simmer an unopened can of condensed in a pan of water for at least 2 and a half hours

Take one unopened can of condensed milk (Most cans in the UK randomly contain a very precise amount of condensed milk of 395ml. Who knows why? But the process is the same regardless of the size of your tin). Place your unopened can of condensed milk in a pan of boiling water and simmer it for 2 and a half hours. Keep an eye on the pan and keep topping up the water so the water level remains.always around 2 thirds of the way up the can. Allow the can to cool for about 30 minutes before opening it.

Evaporated milk isn’t the same and unfortunately won’t work as a substitute, as evaporated milk doesn’t have as much sugar in it. Never to be defeated I have managed to make doce de leite with evaporated milk. If you’re up for an experiment and evaporated milk is all you’ve got, you could get away with adding sugar to evaporated milk and dissolving it slowly over a low heat to create your own toffee sauce. (I have free styled this recipe before and it gave a rather more liquid toffee sauce so it can be done! Just add enough sugar until you reach your desired level of toffee colour and taste.)

The grand reveal! My doce de leite looks suspiciously like condensed milk. No hint of toffee here. Back in the pan you go

Unfortunately I failed to let the water bubble (being a little too cautious – very unlike me!) so when I opened my can it still looked like condensed milk, just a bit thicker. However undeterred I threw it all into the pan and heated it on the stove to make my doce de leite directly in the pan. It does require a bit more attention and elbow grease however…

The slightly reduce condensed milk straight from the can, the bottom revealed some thicker doce de leit

The slightly reduce condensed milk straight from the can, the bottom of the can revealed the beginnings of some thicker doce de leit. It’s a bit lumpy so needs a good whisk

I’m a little impatient and wanted it to thicken up quickly so kept increasing the heat and whisking by hand until it bubbled, then removed the pan from the heat to allow the residual heat to continue to cook the condensed milk. You need strong arms to keep whisking continuously as the milk thickens! (My arms weren’t feeling the strongest after a full day of Yoga handstands the day before but I still managed)

Whisking the condensed milk over a low heat to make doce de leite

My impatience led my doce de leite to become extremely thick and it pulled the head off my hand whisk! However a little cold milk reduced the heat of the sugar to calm the doce de leite down. It allowed me to get the sauce back to a slightly more spreadable state. To stop the cooking process I placed the hot pan into a sink of cold water. In my ‘wisdom’ I then dipped my finger into the doce de leite to test if it was cool enough to spread! It was most definitely NOT cool enough and welded to my finger. I managed to pull the molten lava doce de leite off my finger and ran it under the cold tap. Did you know a piece of frozen melon makes a wonderful cold compress to take the heat out of a burn? Clutching my melon I managed awkwardly to continue to whisk the sauce still undefeated by my blistering finger. I ended up clutching on to more frozen fruit whilst spreading the doce de leit and rolling up the cake.

After a good 5 minutes of whisking and heating it turns a golden brown colour and becomes quite thick! Add a bit of milk to loosen the mixture if it needs it.

The cake itself takes hardly any time at all to prepare. The whisking is the most time consuming part of the Rocambole. Like a Roulade you have to whisk the ALL of the egg whites (there’s 5 eggs in this cake! That’s a lot of egg!) on a high speed setting. (If you have an electric whisk, if not prepare your arms for a bit of a work out!) until stiff and shiny. This takes about 5 to 7 minutes. The egg whites will double in size. I love this bit!

Whisking the egg whites to make Rocambole

One slight difference between the Rocambole to a Roulade is that the egg yolks are then also whisked into the egg whites. (With a Roulade you whisk the yolks with the sugar and chocolate then fold it into the egg whites.) The Rocambole is a bit quicker banging it all together and whisking to your hearts content. You don’t want to knock any of the air out of the egg whites, so it’s best to beat the yolks lightly first so they are runny. You can then pour the egg yolks in as you whisk.

Adding egg yolks to whisked egg whites - rocambole

Whisking in the egg yolks to the egg whites – lovely creamy yellow colour and very fluffy!

Then to whisk in the sugar. The traditional Brazilian Rocambole recipe doesn’t include any flavourings or spices, it is a plain egg sponge. (A bit like my Chinese Egg Yolk Sponge favourite!) Ever the experimenter I wanted to add a bit of flavour to this bake so I used vanilla sugar. I made this really simply by shoving a leftover vanilla pod, which I had scraped the seeds from for another bake, into a bag of sugar. I then left it to infuse it’s vanillary goodness for a couple of weeks. It smells lovely and gently flavours the sugar with a hint of vanilla. It’s a good way to get your moneys worth out of those more expensive ingredients as I hate to throw the pods away. I often pop a vanilla pod into any spirit that I have in my cupboard too. Vanilla Brandy or Vanilla Rum anyone?

Then to whisk in 5 tablespoons of water into the eggs and sugar

The eggs should be seriously expanding and threatening to overflow the bowl by this point as they inflate rapidly. You need to continue to whisk the fluffy and shiny eggs whilst pouring in 5 tablespoons of water. This takes around 5 minutes of whisking.

Fold in the tiny amount of flour and baking powder

In order to maximise the air in the cake and to avoid knocking the air out of the wonderfully fluffy eggs, sift in all 5 tablespoons of plain flour and half a teaspoon of baking powder. Then using your best metal spoon fold in the dry ingredients gently. This is probably the smallest amount of flour that I’ve ever folded into a cake. It felt a bit odd as the flour just disappeared to the bottom of the bowl, but trust in the recipe, it definitely works!

Carefully pour the mixture into a rectangular baking tin

Line and grease a rectangular baking tin. I used a tin 37cm long by 22cm wide and 5cm high. Use a deep tin as it will rise in the oven. This mixture is really delicate so to avoid knocking the air out of it, hold your bowl of mixture as close to your tin as possible and pour. It’s a very liquid mixture so try to pour it into all of the corners so you don’t have to move it around too much in the tin. Gently level the mixture with a spatula to avoid an uneven bake.

A fully cooked and curled Rocambole

After baking it in a preheated oven (350 F/170 degrees Celsius) for 15-20 minutes, it will become golden brown and feel slightly firm and springy to the touch. I always check that a cake is cooked by using a cocktail stick, if it comes out clean from the sponge you know it’s done. Unfortunately I was trying my Mary Berry recommended foil backed parchment paper and it doesn’t always do what it’s told. In the heat of the oven it curled up and into the cake! Maybe a wider variety of paper is needed for this tin so that it reached the edges of the tin and can be scrumpled down over the lip of the tin to hold it in place?

Carefully lift your cake from the tin and prise any baking paper out of the sponge (if needed)

Allow the cake to cool in the tin slightly so it holds it’s shape. Then carefully lift the cake out of the tin, by the baking paper. But don’t remove the baking paper.

Spread the Doce de Leite carefully onto the sponge – try not to take the cake with you

Using a spatula and a palette knife , I tried to spread a thin layer of doce de leite across the cake. This is easier said than done whilst holding a piece of frozen fruit on your burnt finger. The Doce de leite is very gooey and if it’s as thick as mine, it could pull holes in your cake (note the holes in my sponge above…) But who is going to check the inside of your cake? When it’s rolled up no one will notice and it’s going to taste gorgeous anyway so throw it on as best as you can.

Carefully does it … Roll Roll Roll your Rocambole (excuse my slippers)

There is a bit of a knack to rolling up a Rocambole. I decided to neaten up my slightly rough edges, trimming the longest edge as straight as possible with my very best sharp knife. It’s not the easiest cake to trim as the sponge is very moist and delicate (so it sticks to the knife!). I only trimmed one edge in case I destroyed the other side. This cake was to accompany me to the Clandestine Cake Club and I didn’t have time to make another one (or anyone condensed milk!). Trimming the cake does have it’s benefits however, I could make sure it tasted good before serving it up to my friends!

Ta da! One rolled up Rocambole! (And one pan of soapy boiling water on the stove to dissolve all of the doce de leite)

Before I even attempted rolling the cake I made sure I had loosened all of the edges from the baking paper gently with my fingers to avoid tearing the sponge. It’s best to keep the sponge on the paper so you can use the paper to coax the cake over. I started the roll off by pressing a knife into the sponge about half an inch in from the shortest edge. I then folded this lip of sponge over to start the roll and give a really tight spiral. Then to let gravity do it’s job! Lifting the paper over, letting the cake fall into place whilst coaxing it into a roll with your hands. Once you start it’s easy to get carried away! Hence my lack of photos of this process the Rocambole was all rolled up before Chris could get into the kitchen to take a photo for me!

Gently ease any slightly stuck bits of cake off the paper using your finger tip…

All of the pictures I could find of a Rocambole seemed to show a cake with a very long spiral with a very thin sponge so I chose to roll mine from the short edge to the short edge, to maximise my spiral. If you wanted to get more slices out of your Rocambole you could roll from long edge to long edge and get a much longer cake.

Just rolled Rocambole – trimmed edge to the front!

Once you’ve rolled up your Rocambole all it needs is a liberal dusting with icing sugar and you’re good to go! I recommend eating it quick as the doce de leite has a tendency to ooze out of the sides when left for a night. But if you like this effect then see if you can hang fire for a bit for an extra level of goo. I can confirm that this a tasty cake. It’s definitely a winner if, like me, you have a sweet tooth as most of the flavour is derived from the sugar in the cake and the milky caramel doce de leite! It’s an extremely tender sponge that almost melts in your mouth. I’ve heard very good things from my Brazilian friend, who’s Grandma makes Rocambole. She covers the entire Rocambole in chocolate buttercream and adds some texture with a fork to create a chocolate log Rocambole! Now there’s a good idea for another Christmas bake to add to my list!

Glorious Cake Collection at the Clandestine Cake Club Newcastle at Pink Lane Coffee

I took my little Rocambole along with me to the Clandestine Cake Club at the lovely Pink Lane Coffee shop in Newcastle where we were baking around a ‘New’ theme. This could mean a new recipe, new baking tin, new ingredients. This was perfect for me as pretty much every recipe I bake is new to me and a bit of an experiment. There were some amazing cakes that night, my favourite being a chocolate and peanut butter layer cake (7 layers in total!). Check out Lisa’s blog for more gorgeous pictures of the beautiful cakes from all of the bakers who braved the January snow. When there’s cake nothing will get in my way. It was immense. I must admit I took an extra sneaky piece home for later too. I was so happy that all of my Rocambole got eaten.

So if that has whetted your appetite for a spot of Rocambole here’s what I used to make mine.

Ingredients

Doce de Leite Filling

1 unopened can of condensed milk (395 ml)

Alternative fillings…

If you don;t fancy simmering a can of condensed milk down in a pan I’m sure you could put a jar of nutella or jam or guava marmalade (another traditional Brazilian Rocambole filling) to good use here too.

Cake

5 eggs
5 tablespoons of vanilla infused sugar (or just normal sugar will do)
5 tablespoons of water
5 tablespoons of plain flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

Lauren’s Layered Lamington Cake

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Australia, Baking, cake decoration, Cookery, Food, wedding and tagged with Australia, cake, chocolate ganache, coconut, Coconut madeira, Lamington, layered lamington cake, recipe, strawberry jam, triple chocolate coated, triple layered maderia, wedding 04/02/2013

Lauren’s Layered Lamington Cake

You may realise by now that I LOVE Lamingtons. They are definitely one of my Australian highlights, alongside the cake shops in St Kilda and the koalas hanging out in eucalyptus trees. It’s been a while since I baked any of these sweet treats and I must apologise it’s been quite some time since I wrote. It’s been a bit hectic what with getting married having a last minute trip to Berlin and oh yes fitting in the proper job too… I promise I will get back to some international baking VERY soon (and also share with you the photos of my wedding cake too!). In the meantime I wanted to share with you an experimental Layered Lamington Cake that I made up the other day.

I had promised Chris a tiered Lamington Cake for the wedding. Something that I had imagined in my mind but frankly in amongst baking and icing 5 layers of fruit cake, making 150 sugar flowers, our house flooding 2 weeks before the wedding and baking brownies and Lavender meringues I never had the opportunity to bring to life. Until now. So here it is! A slightly smaller scale Layered Lamington Wedding Cake for Chris. Next time I will bake 2 more smaller cakes and stack them one on top of the other… for a tower of layered Lamington!

Lauren’s Layered Lamington Cake – 3 layers of coconut madeira, double chocolate coated and jam sandwiched

I wanted to make a more grown up version of the Lamington. More luxurious, decadent and slightly prettier than the Lamington bricks that I’ve made previously. To produce this I incorporated the coconut into the sponge, which meant I could keep the top of the cake coconut free to showcase the shiny chocolate ganache, whilst preserving the coconut and chocolate Lamington tradition. I double coated the cake in chocolate soup sauce first before a double chocolate ganache layer to increase the luxuriousness of the Lamington. And then to add an extra level of height and flavour why not add a third layer of sponge, one more than your traditional Lamington sandwich. It’s an extremely indulgent cake. One to be enjoyed on a special occasion perhaps. It takes a bit of organising and assembling, but I can assure you it’s worth the effort! Chris definitely enjoyed it and so did my friends. If you fancy having a go I’ve included the instructions below.

As the cake is entirely encased in chocolate and contains a double layer of jam it’s a light and moist sponge. I’m hungry just reminiscing about it now! Hope you enjoy it as much as me.

Lauren’s Layered Lamington Recipe

Coconut Madeira Sponge Cake

Caster Sugar 250g
Butter 300g
Self Raising Flour 400g
Desiccated Coconut 50g
Pinch of salt
Milk 6 tablespoons
2 x 8 inch round cake tins
Bake at 170 degrees Celsius (fan) for 25-30 minutes

Cream together sugar and butter
Sift in flour and baking powder and gently fold it into the creamed butter and sugar
Fold in desiccated coconut
Fold in milk
Gently pour mixture into 2 greased and lined 8 inch round cake tins
Carefully level the mixture
Bake in the middle of the oven until the cakes shrinks back from the sides of the tin, is golden brown and a skewer comes out clean from the sponge
Let the cakes cool in the tin for 10 minutes to hold their shape
Remove from tin and place on cooling rack
When fully cooled carefully split one cake in 2 down the centre with a sharp knife
Carefully level the other sponge removing the top (you can then sample the top bit of the sponge!)

Filling Strawberry Jam (you could buy a jar or make it yourself)

1kg strawberries
1kg granulated sugar
½ lemon, juice only
small knob of butter

Heat equal amounts of fruit and sugar in a large pan
Stir until all of the sugar has dissolved
Stir in lemon juice and butter
Stop stirring and boil rapidly (about 10minutes)
Keep boiling the jam and checking the consistency of the jam every 10 minutes and take it off the heat once it coats the back of a spoon (this could take up to an half an hour but hopefully less!)
Allow the jam to cool and set slightly in the pan

Icing

Butter 25g
Sifted icing sugar 450g
Sifted cocoa powder 50g
Milk 120ml
Vanilla Extract 2 tsp

Sift all of the ingredients into a large bowl
Put the bowl over a pan of boiling water
Melt the butter over a low heat
Stir together to make a thick chocolate soup
Remove from heat
(but if it gets too hot pop it back on the heat to warm through)

Chocolate Ganache

Plain chocolate 140g
Double cream 200ml
Milk chocolate 25g

Heat the double cream over a low heat in a pan
Break up the chocolate into small pieces
Allow the cream to become piping hot then take it off the heat
Throw in the chocolate and stir until it’s really smooth and shiny

Layered Lamington Assembly

Have a pre-prepared cake stand/plate to arrange it all onto
Turn the bottom of the sponge face upwards (from the one sponge that you’ve split in 2) spoon a generous amount of chocolate icing soup onto the sponge and spread it evenly over the sponge base and sides. (Lamingtons are supposed to be encased in chocolate and this will help to fix it to your stand too…)
Give it a few minutes to ‘set slightly’ then flip over the sponge so the chocolate is face down on your cake plate.
Spoon half the jar of strawberry jam onto the sponge and spread evenly.
Place the other half of the sponge cake on top of the jam and press gently.
Spoon the rest of the jam on top of the sponge and sandwich the final layer of sponge on top. (smoothest side up)
Rest the cake in the fridge for 5-10 minutes to set the jam and hold sponge in place
Pour the chocolate soup all over the cake and smooth with a palette knife. Removing excess icing to give a smooth ‘crumb coating’ and hold the cakes in place
Return to the fridge to allow it to set for 5 minutes
Pour the hot chocolate ganache all over the cake and sides. Ensure you have a smooth and shiny coat by tilting the cake to run the ganache down the sides, use a palette knife if necessary to sharpen the edges of the cake.
Use a hairdryer if needed to melt the ganache slightly to create a smooth finish
Repeat ganache layer again to double coat the cake.
Whilst the chocolate is still wet carefully sprinkle the sides of the cake with desiccated coconut, use a cupped hand to press the coconut into the ganache, leaving the top of the cake free so the ganache shines through
Allow the ganache to set at room temperature to maintain the high gloss finish and serve in huge chunks with a bucket of tea.

45. Rosca De Reyes – Spanish Three Kings Cake

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Baking, Bread, Christmas, Cookery, Food, Fruit Cake, Lauren Prince, Travelling and tagged with 3 kings cake, 3 wise men cake, 6th january, baby jesus, blog, Chelsea buns, christmas gifts, christmas tradition, competition, cosmos holidays, edible decorations, epiphany, Food, gold lustre spray, holidays in spain, international baking, kings cake, kings ring, Latin American cake, marzipan, mexican, new year cake, Rosca de reyes, roscadereyes, roscón de reyes, spain, spainish, spanish christmas cakes, star anise, stollen, wise men 13/12/2012

Rosca de Reyes – 3 Kings Cake

I’m so excited! I’ve been invited to join an online bake off with 4 amazing bloggers, including the wonderful Yasmin Lambert from the Great British Bake Off! We’re all baking the Spanish festive bake, Rosca de reyes and the baker with the most votes will win £500 worth of holiday holiday vouchers! (which would come in very handy for our honeymoon which are still yet to arrange following our wedding in less than 3 weeks…) I’m so happy to also be able to offer you the chance to win £50 of vouchers to spend on the very.co.uk Christmas Shop, perfect for finding those last minute Christmas gifts! My first ever competition on aroundtheworldin80bakes!

If you would like to enter this competition all you need to do is vote for my Rosca de Reyes (aroundtheworldin80bakes) on the Cosmos Holidays website by leaving a comment at the bottom of the article and a 5 star rating. This would be very gratefully appreciated! You can see the full Rosca de Reyes in all it’s glory over on the Cosmos holiday website. The closing date is Wednesday 19th December. Then please let me know that you have voted by leaving me a comment on (any or all!)

Facebook aroundtheworldin80bakes
Twitter @laurenprince
or this blog post directly in the comments. (I hope that all makes sense!)

This means I can then contact you if you are the lucky winner. I will choose one winner at random from all of those who vote for me. You could tweet something like “I’ve voted for @laurenprince #roscadereyes to win£50very.co.uk vouchers http://aroundtheworldin80bakes.com #bakeoff #competition Vote to enter”

Now for the bake itself! I hope you like it!

Rosca de reyes (Kings’ Cake) is a traditional Spanish cake with an amazing story. It’s eaten on 6th January, the day that the 3 Kings (or wise men) reached the stable to visit Jesus. This is also known as the religious holiday the Epiphany, a day where Christians celebrate the Son of God taking on human form as baby Jesus. In some countries this is the day that children open their presents rather than Christmas Day so this day definitely needs a special cake to celebrate! A little figurine or a bean is usually hidden inside the cake to represent baby Jesus fleeing from King Herod who was trying to kill Jesus. Whoever finds the baby bean/figurine is blessed as ‘King’ or ‘Queen’ of the banquet and should take the figurine to church with them on February 2nd. In Mexican cultures this person also has to throw the Epiphany banquet party for their families and friends the following year!

I’ve never eaten a Rosca de reyes despite all of our family holidays in Spain as a child. We always visited Spain in the Summer holidays where we contented ourselves eating ice cream and custard filled donuts whilst basking in the sun on the beaches instead. Some of our best family holidays were in Spain, so this recipe intrigued me. I’ve never attempted to hide things inside my cakes before and was unable to find a figurine in my house small enough, or that wouldn’t poison us all so I decided to make one out of sugar paste instead and hope that it doesn’t melt in the oven!

My marzipan interpretation of the baby Jesus…

Looking for a suitable recipe I discovered there are quite a few variables. The Rosca de reyes is usually a ring shape or it could also be an oval (depending on how many people you’re baking for!). The festive dried fruits usually include wonderful reds, greens and oranges so you could use cherries, apricots, figs, cranberries, or mixed candied peel. The choices are endless.

This is essentially an enriched dough, shaped into a bejewelled festive wreath. It’s a bit of a cake/bread/pastry hybrid and stuffed with beautiful dried fruits.

Whizz up the flour and yeast

If you’re using instant dried yeast you can throw it straight into your flour and mix it evenly through the flour. Using my Russian Doll measuring cups makes life a bit easier than weighing things out on the scales.

As it’s almost Christmas (we’re celebrating on 15th December this year as our wedding is just around the corner…) I wanted to make light work of this recipe. I struggle to knead dough for a long time, I’m simply not tall enough to put enough weight into it! So I whacked it all into my food processor to ease the process. If you don’t have a food processor you can mix it together by hand instead.

Grind up a star anise

I whizzed the yeast and the flour together first to make sure the yeast is evenly distributed throughout the flour. Then while the food processor was running I added the dry ingredients first, the sugar, salt, cinnamon and ground star anise. The spices really enhance the colour of the dough giving it a wonderful brown hue.

Rub in the butter

Once this is combined I popped the butter in and rubbed/blended it into the flour.

Rub in the butter until it looks sandy

Followed quickly by the beaten eggs, vanilla pod seeds and water. In the future I probably wouldn’t add any water as this made an extremely wet and sticky dough which meant my food processor went into over drive and actually caught fire! The poor food processor didn’t make it but the dough was thoroughly kneaded!

Beat in the eggs

The food processor may screech a bit in protest but it can (usually!) knead the dough (using the dough hook) for a good 3 minutes before it starts to rock out of control and dance off the work top.

I had to add a little more flour in order to knead the dough by hand as it was more of a paste at this stage.

Once it becomes a firm dough it’s ready for a final knead on the work surface for 5 minutes or so until it bounces back when pressed lightly with a finger.

Then to rest the dough for 2 hours in a greased and covered bowl in a warm place until it’s doubled in size. Or if like me you like to do things in stages feel free to let it rise slowly over night in the fridge and shape it at your leisure the next day.

When the dough has risen, punch it down and knead it thoroughly before starting to shape it into a ring or wreath. This really reminds me of my Swedish Tea Ring attempt. Roll it into a rectangle about 30cm by 20cm. I oiled the board to stop the dough from sticking rather than dusting it with flour.

Roll it out to an even rectangle about 5mm thick

Spread the melted butter all over and give a generous coating to the outside edge of the dough.

I found I had an extra bit of dough which I trimmed off to make my rectangle extra straight. I used this to make another plaited version of Rosca De Reyes later on.

Line the dough with an even covering of candied fruits, cinnamon and sugar.

Take your figurine/bean (or in my case a hand crafted marzipan baby Jesus) and hide him amongst the fruit.

Then roll it up into one long sausage, from the longest edge to the longest edge.

Once you have you sausage shape you can add a smattering of melted butter to one end and coax the 2 edges together to form a ring. Feel free to pop a small greased pudding dish in the centre of the ring to ensure the ring has a hole in the middle as the dough rises.

A final egg wash and decoration with your chosen candied fruits, I used glace cherries and mixed peel, and it’s ready for the final proving.

Cover your ring with greased cling film to prevent it sticking and leave it for an hour to double in size on a baking tray greased and lined with greaseproof paper.

After 40 minutes in the oven at 170 degrees C the Rosca De Reyes will have taken on a golden tinge and be firm to the touch. You can check it’s cooked through by tapping the bottom, of the ring, it should sound hollow.

Once it’s cooled completely I carried on decorating my Three Kings Cake. I’ve been saving my gold lustre spray for a special occasion and this seemed to be the perfect time to use it! I thought the gold would add a regal touch to the ring and additional symbolism as one of the 3 Kings brought gold as a present for baby Jesus. So I’m presenting a very gold Rosca de Reyes to you!

Then it seemed a bit too gold… so I added a sprinkling of marzipan stars with a dab of brandy on the back of each star to hold it in place. The original plan was to add just the one star, as the 3 Kings followed the star to Bethlehem to find baby Jesus in the stable, however I got a bit carried away with my cutters and made an entire starry night of marzipan instead. Resulting in a very decadent Rosca De Reyes!

With my left over dough I created a plaited Rosca De Reyes and smeared cinnamon, butter and sugar in between the plaits and dotted a few more glace cherries on the top. I hid one whole cherry underneath and tucked it into the dough.

Once it was baked I also gave it a liberal coating of edible gold lustre.

This bake feels so festive and is a wonderful cake to share with friends and family. It’s a bit like hiding a silver sixpence inside your Christmas pudding, waiting in anticipation to see who finds the baby Jesus inside their piece of bread. I loved this bake and think it may become a regular festive creation in my house. The egg wash gives the outside a fantastic bite to it. I love warming spices and this definitely packs a punch, with the cinnamon and star anise spices in the dough, carried through to the spicy sugary fruit inside. It is also rather reminiscent of a sticky Chelsea bun but even more festive and sparkly!

Marzipan is not traditionally found inside Rosca de reyes, but I adore it and try to fit it into everything that I possibly can. The addition of marzipan made the rosca de reyes slightly stollen-esque and what’s not to love about stollen? (It’s another of my favourite festive bakes – as if I don’t have enough already?!) I try not to waste any ingredients and wanted to put my left over marzipan to good use from icing my Wedding and Christmas cakes. You can adapt this recipe to suit your own favourite ingredients and play around with the shape too. Have fun and hope you enjoy it as much as me!

Things I used to make Rosca De Reyes:

Bake for approximately 45 minutes at 350 degrees F or 170 degrees C

1/3 cup warm water (only add as much as you need)
1 packet of yeast (7g dried instant yeast)
4 cups flour
1 cup sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground star anise
4 teaspoons vanilla extract

Filling

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoon cinnamon/mixed spice
A marzipan baby Jesus (or you can use a small figurine or toy or a bean)
Dried/candied fruit (about 2 cups of assorted fruit cut into small pieces such as sultanas, orange/lemon peel, mango or cherries)

Decoration

Large dried fruits (so they don’t burn in the oven) such as glace cherries
Beaten egg (to wash over the whole ring)
Edible gold lustre spray (or glitter) if you wish!
Marzipan and star cutters

Experimental Chocolate Chip Polvorón – Spanish Christmas Cakes or Mexican Wedding Favours

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in Christmas, Food, Lauren Prince, Travelling, wedding and tagged with around the world in 80 bakes, baking, biscuits, busy bakers, chocolate chip, christmas, cookies, lauren prince, mexican wedding cakes, nut allergy, nut free recipe, Polvorón, polvores, quick recipe, spanish christmas cakes 21/11/2012

I adore Polvorón and wanted to have a go at creating a nut free version. What other flavours could I incorporate into this delectable sweet treat and not diverge too far from the traditional ethos of the the Polvorón which mainly consists of nuts…? What else but chocolate and cinnamon!

Using the same method as my original Polvorón attempt I replaced the nuts with dark chocolate and added a generous dose of cocoa powder.

And here we have it… a flatter chocolatey and chewier version of Polvorón!

Perhaps because they lack the nuts to hold them together and chocolate (unlike nuts) makes when baked, the little chocolate balls spread into perfectly round chocolate chip cookies.

I chose to use caster sugar rather than icing sugar to enhance the crunchy texture. It also added a wonderful chewiness to the cookie, with the sugar and chocolate combining to create a toffee in the centre of the crumbly cookie! Yum! They have been very popular in my house!

With a light dusting of icing sugar they look very Festive. The hint of cinnamon conquers up Christmas.These are would make a perfect homemade present, or to be eaten by the handful with a large bucket if tea. I really rather enjoyed making this Spanish Christmas cakes/cookie recipe up!

I’m looking forward to my further Polvorón flavour experiments!

Things I used to make Chocolate Polvorón

Makes about 40 small biscuits

Preparation: 15 minutes

Chilling time: 30 minutes

Baking time: 18-20minutes at 170degrees c

220g butter (1 cup or 2 sticks) room temperature
250g caster sugar (2 cups or 240 grams) – rather than icing sugar to add an extra crunch that the nuts would normally add
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g all purpose flour (2 cups or 240 grams)
100 g (1 cup) dark chocolate coarsely ground/chopped
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
30g cocoa powder
icing sugar to dust the biscuits with

I’m entering these experimental Spanish Polvores into Chris’s Cooking Around the World Spain Round up. Pop on over to his blog for a round up of some inspirational international cooking! Thanks for reading!

43. Polvorón – Spanish Christmas Cakes or Mexican Wedding Cakes

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Baking, Christmas, Cookery, Food, Lauren Prince, princeproductions, The Great British Bake Off, wedding and tagged with Around the world, around the world in eighty bakes, baking, busy bakers, cake, christmas, cooking, Food, Great British Bake Off, home baking, lauren prince, mexican wedding cakes, polovores, polvoron recipes, quick bake, spanish christmas cakes, Sugar, wedding, wedding favour ideas 13/11/2012

Polvoron – you are always on my mind

I’ve had Polvorón on my mind for some time. I read about these crunchy little biscuits bites, months and months ago and they’ve been sitting patiently in my ‘Things to bake’ pile ever since.

They are quite an unusual discovery, something I had never heard if before. Traditionally Polvorón are eaten as wedding cakes in Mexico made with pecans or as Christmas cakes in Spain, kind of like a Spanish Shortbread. Now I’m planning my own wedding I thought perhaps now is the time to incorporate an international flair into the festivities. Intrigued I launched into my own interpretation of the traditional recipe, basically determined by whatever ingredients I have in the cupboard.

Chopped up dried coconut

I don’t usually buy pecans or walnuts so they had to be substituted for good old almonds (a nut which is ever present in my cupboard and life…) and chunks of dried coconut roughly chopped.

Due to the speedy baking that was necessary (and seems to be happening more and more often in my house) I improvised yet again. No time to assemble to food processor so I grabbed the nearest heavy item (a glass jar), threw the almonds into a sturdy sandwich bag and hammered them with the jar until they were delightfully smushed. Feel free to use a pestle and mortar if you wish to be a tad more refined than I.

Beating the butter to a smooth paste

The ingredients are very similar to basic shortbread, with flour, butter and sugar.

Thoroughly whipped butter

This is another brilliant biscuit for busy bakers as I managed to whip up the dough first thing on a Saturday morning, chill it whilst I showered. I used my trusty hand held electric whisk to beat the butter and icing (powdered) sugar together. Then to whisk in the flour and vanilla extract.

Whisking in icing sugar, vanilla and finally flour

My combination of ground almonds, chopped blanched almonds and chopped coconut.

And finally the nuts of your choice.

The dough looks a bit scrambled eggy to start with…

Take a small amount of loose dough in your hand

I completely misunderstood the recipe which calls for the dough to be chilled. I shapped the dough by hand into about 35 mini golf balls.

squash it together and hey presto you have a ball!

I popped them all onto a greased and lined baking sheet covered them with cling film and popped them in the fridge to chill.

All the Polvoron lined up in a row – ready for chilling

(I think you’re supposed to chill the whole dough then shape it?!) But this gave me a chance to shower so in effect helped to speed up the process.

Delicately golden Polvoron fresh from the oven

I then spaced the little balls out evenly to give them room to spread whilst they baked. I popped the tray in the oven to bake it at 170 degree C for about 18-20 minutes, until they took on a delicately golden hue, whilst I applied clothes and make up.

Cooled and ready for a good dusting of spicy icing sugar

Just enough time to then allow the Polvorón to cool on the tray to set their shape for 5 minutes. Then to cool them fully on a wire rack to stop the butter sweating out of them and give them sticky bottoms.

Fully coated Polvoron

Once cooled fully I rolled the Polvorón in a bowl of icing sugar swirled with cinnamon giving them a fluffy white coat. As they set the sugar absorbed slightly into the biscuit adding an extra dimension of sweetness to the treat.

Happy Birthday Mel!

I then quickly bagged them up, tied with a pretty ribbon and dashed off with my pretty packages of Polvorón to celebrate my friends birthday! With a champagne fueled (10 minute) train journey to Durham. Followed by more food, cocktails and Polvorón.

Obviously I had to ensure their quality before sharing them with friends… they passed the test! Crunchy and sweet Polvoron

We declared them a tremendous cocktail accompaniment (and that’s not the frozen strawberry daiquiris talking).

Polvorón are buttery like shortbread but with an added crunch as they are smaller and denser than a traditional shortbread biscuit. The almonds brought a subtle creamy yet crunchy texture along with the coconut. I expect pecans would add even more bite to the biscuit. The Polvorón remind me a little of biscotti or amaretti biscuits which I also adore. What’s not to love about a delicious bite sized treat. Even better, as they’re so small you can obviously eat a whole handful of them in one go!

Polvoron – up close

I love the method of shaping these little biscuits into balls as I find rolling and cutting out biscuits a bit laborious I quite enjoyed this hand made alternative and I’m already inventing my own nut free recipe for my friends who can’t eat nuts as I think everyone needs a bit of Polvoron in their lives!.

Things I used to make Polvorón

Makes about 35 small biscuits

Preparation: 15 minutes

Chilling time: 30 minutes

Baking time: 18-20minutes at 170degrees c

220g butter (1 cup or 2 sticks) room temperature
250g powdered sugar (2 cups or 240 grams)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g all purpose flour (2 cups or 240 grams)
120 g (1 cup) almonds/pecans/coconut coarsely ground/chopped
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Thank you to Sourdoughtheangrybaker for inspiring me to bake Polvoron! I had not heard of these wonderful cakes until you told me about them. Brilliant blog if you haven’t had a look already, I recommend reading.

42. Swedish Tea Ring – the cake for busy bakers

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in Around the World in Eighty Bakes, cake decoration, Everday Cooking, Food, Fruit Cake, LaurenPrince, Marguerite Patten, Mary Berry, princeproductions, The Great British Bake Off, Travelling, wedding and tagged with 5 tier fruit cake, aroundtheworldin80bakes, baking, blog north awards, booze, busy baker, can I prove dough in the fridge?, can I prove my dough over night?, Chelsea buns, Cinnamon, cinnamon swirl, dried fruit, dried instant yeast, enriched yeast dough, icing sugar, lemon glace icing recipe, Marguerite Patten's recipe, mini cake, portable cake, quick bakes, slow proving dough, spicy cake, sturdy cake, swedish tea ring, tips to prove dough quickly, water icing recipe, wedding cake 24/10/2012

Planning to bake something in advance of an event or special occasion can be difficult. Sponge cake will dry out if baked too far in advance and if you freeze it you can’t ice it beforehand. I seem to be in a real baking frenzy at the moment. Partly because I’m in the process of baking my 5 tier wedding cake…

The teetering tower of fruit cake… shame 2 tiers need to be re-baked.

I’ve chosen fruit cake for my 5 tier wedding cake is because I love fruit cake and it will be Christmas(!) but also because I can plan it in and bake it in advance. Then take my time with icing it, hopefully resulting in a well organised and non stressful experience. Also fruit cake improves with age! The longer I soak the fruit and feed it BOOZE the better it will taste.

Swedish Tea Ring

So what else keeps well? A rich yeast dough, that’s what! Bring on another new discovery and favourite of mine, The Swedish Tea Ring!!

Marguerite Patten has been tempting me with this recipe for years and I finally found a reason to bake it! To give as a present to my friends Josh and Mark for looking after me in Manchester at the Blog North Awards last week.

It’s like a robust Chelsea Bun/Cinnamon Roll/Belgian Bun hybrid. Perfect for cinnamon junkies like me and for preparing in stages for the busy baker. I can also confirm it’s portability! It survived a 3 hour drive through lightening and torrential rain! That’s one sturdy bake.

Whisking the dry ingredients together…

One thing I dislike about making yeast doughs is the kneading time required. I no longer own a hand whisk with dough hooks attached and my food processor can only handle dough for 2-3 minutes before it starts rocking around the counter top precariously. So, in my mad baking frenzy, I improvised as best as I could do. I used my electric hand whisk and beat the dough together… Who knows if this is an acceptable baking practice?

Whisking in the egg

But despite my poor little electric whisk’s protests (it’s been through a lot this year) It managed to combine the wet dough together with minimal effort required from me. I call that a result (although the blown out birthday candle smell emanating from the little whisk’s motor might suggest otherwise…)

Whisking in the milk – making a wonderfully sticky dough

Now as Marguerite arranged each bit of this recipe in a different section of the book, I managed to confuse my recipe somewhat. I used the full rich yeast dough recipe and didn’t adjust it for the Swedish Tea Ring, which means you either make one massive tea ring or one modest sized ring (according to the recipe) and a smaller mini one for later with the off cuts. (I made 2!)

Poor little burnt out whisk – thoroughly kneading/whisking the dough

Whisk all of the dry ingredients together. Then whisk into the mix the butter, followed by the egg and then the milk until you get an elastic, wet sticky dough.

One thoroughly kneaded lump of richer yeast dough

Leave it in an oiled bowl and cover with greased cling film to prove. I popped mine in the fridge over night to prove slowly (although it should only take an hour or two in a warm spot).

Or if you’re in a hurry you could pop your bowl over a pot of soup on the hob to prove…

Remove the proven dough from the fridge and allow to come to room temperature (if you have proven it in the fridge).

Fully proven dough straight from the fridge

Kneaded the full proven dough thoroughly to re distribute the heat throughout the dough.

Kneaded and shaped into a rectangle ready for rolling out

Roll the dough out to a rectangle 10 inches by 8 inches about 0.5mm thick. I was feeling very precise so I even measured and trimmed the rectangle so it had straight edges, to avoid the misshapen ends I found when making Chelsea buns

Rolled and trimmed to perfection. (Note the ball off extra dough leftover…)

My favourite bit was smearing the entire rectangle of dough with melted butter. I don’t think you need to be precise here. I found a pastry brush too delicate for this job and slapped the lot on with my hand instead straight from the microwave. (It only needs about 30 seconds to melt the butter through). The more generous with the butter the more gooey your filling.

Smeared with butter

For those who adore cinnamon, don’t feel restricted by the recipe. Feel free to pour as much cinnamon into your sugar as you can handle. Give it a quick stir to combine and then throw it onto your butter dough until you have an even blanket of cinnamony wonderment. I like to use enough cinnamon to give the sugar a dark brown colour. I ran out of brown sugar so improvised with normal caster sugar. Perhaps brown sugar would produce more of a caramelised effect?

Generously coat the butter in cinnamon and sugar (I was clearly in a hurry when I took this photo – apologies for it’s blurriness!)

After watching the Great British Bake Off, I realised my rolling skills may bye somewhat lacking. I have a tendency to misunderstand which side is the long side of the dough so I took photos to make sure I can bake this again in the future. Roll the dough towards you from the longest edge to the longest edge creating a ‘swiss roll’ of cinnamon dough.

Cinnamon swiss roll

Don’t worry if some of your sugar falls out of the roll. There’s plenty in there to make it taste wonderful. Keep the roll as tight as possible and if you have some melted butter leftover, it’s a good idea to spread a bit along the longest exposed edge to help ‘glue’ the dough to itself. I would also add a bit to one end to help later on…

Keeping the roll tight with one hand and glueing with butter the dough together

Press your fingers along the join in the dough to encourage the dough to combine and stick together. Turn the roll over so the join is firmly disguised under the roll of dough. Gravity should help to force the roll to stick together and stop the sugary goodness running out whilst it bakes.

Firmly joined together – then hide this join underneath the roll of dough

This also means you have the smooth (and prettier) side of the dough roll to play with. The most difficult bit of this bake is definitely joining the two short edges of dough together as they are very sugary and don’t want to stick.

This is my Chelsea Bun attempt but it’s very similar! The swirl of cinnamon at each end makes it difficult to join but making sure you have straight edges when you roll out the dough (unlike here – look at the overlap!) makes it much easier to join

I coaxed them together with butter and nipped the edges together with my fingers until they begrudgingly worked with me.

The troublesome join

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it finally stayed in place! It could almost be one MASSIVE cinnamon doughnut at this point. But it had to have another little rest to prove again (about 20 minutes) before the next step…

a MASSIVE cinnamon doughnut

Now here my recipe reading skills escape me again. What I failed to understand was Marguerite meant for me to cut completely through the ring to create a fan of cinnamon buns in the shape of a ring, like this…

Marguerite’s Swedish Tea Ring – How it should look in real life – fully exposed cinnamon

Unfortunately the photo was on a completely different page and I interpreted the instructions like this…

Partially exposed cinnamon – my interpretation

Brandishing my sharpest kitchen scissors I snipped delicately and diagonally into the ring to partially expose the cinnamon swirls. I must admit I was nervous that this slicing would compromise the integrity of my dough join so was possibly overly hesitant at this stage.

Snippity snip

All it needed was to be placed into a moderately hot oven for 30 minutes or so, until it turned golden brown.

Swedish Tea Ring ready for the oven

As the Swedish Tea Ring is essentially a bread dough I also made sure it was baked through by knocking the bottom of the ring to listen for the resounding hollow tap.

Fully baked (and a bit more irregular in shape than Marguerite’s)

The baked Swedish Tea ring is a tempting sight with glitterring cinnamon peeking out from the dough (although not the most organised of rings it still looks inviting to me!)

Lemon Glace Icing

Once the ring cooled fully I whipped up a batch of lemon glace icing. It hides an enormous amount of irregularities and flaws, especially if you layer up your icing! Again I can;t say I followed Marguerite’s recipe exactly. I like a tart lemon flavour so I sloshed in a bit of lemon extract to give an extra punch to the icing. I also free poured the icing sugar and mixed it with enough lemon juice to create a runny yet thick icing. (This does take quite a bit of icing sugar!).

free pouring icing – balanced over a big mug

When the icing is just about right in consistency it should taste good (obviously!) not be gritty, the sugar should totally melt into the liquid and it should part when stirred in the bowl. (see the picture above) This means it’s starting to hold it’s shape a bit whilst still being runny to cascade over your tea ring and coat the cake in thick white goo.

iced and decorated Swedish Tea Ring

It’s best to pop your Swedish Tea Ring on some greaseproof paper (or a plate) before you pour the icing over it to catch the icing waterfall. It needs some time to dry and set. I iced mine just before bed so it had time to set over night before being deposited into it’s travel box. Please note you may need more than 2 hands and a palette knife to prise your cake from the paper after it’s iced!

The final Swedish Tea Ring

Mary Berry recommends decorating cakes in groups of threes. I didn’t have the traditional galce cherries in my cupboard but I always have a store of sultanas, hence the trio of sultanas dotted on each section of ring. It’s also best to add these decorations while your icing is still wet.

The Swedish Tea Ring in it’s rustic glory

I loved this bake. It was a pleasure to make, especially as I could spend an hour at a time doing each step making it a more manageable bake to do after work over 2 evenings. The contrast of the sharp and sweet icing against the warming cinnamon is so comforting, just what you need after a long drive in the winter night. Each slice reveals a beautiful cinnamon swirl…

A cinnamon swirl in every slice

I can recommend it with a celebratory gin or a cup of tea. Whatever your preference, I think you’ll enjoy this one. I enjoyed seconds, and could have even squeezed in thirds if I wasn’t being polite!

A chunk of Swedish Tea Ring

It was a good job I had baked my mini Swedish Tea Ring and froze it for later on that week for my friend’s house warming, as it then made a special appearance in a photo shoot for the Sunderland Echo who published an article on my Blog North Award. You can see the mini Swedish Tea Ring being balanced on a cake stand by me here

Double Swedish Tea Ring – Little and Large

Things I used to make my Swedish Tea Ring

1 quantity of Richer Yeast Dough

7g of dried instant yeast
3 oz sugar
1 lb plain flour
pinch of salt
3 0z butter/margarine (you choose)
1 egg
just under 1/2 pint milk (room temperature)

Swedish Tea Ring

Use 8 oz of richer yeast dough to make one tea ring or the full quantity of richer yeast dough to make a larger ring (and a mini ring like me)

Filling

1 oz melted butter
2 oz brown sugar
2 teaspoons of cinnamon (although I added enough to ensure the sugar was a dark brown colour…)
Sultanas to decorate (although it should really be glace cherries)
30-35 minutes 350F, Gas mark 3-4 or 170 degrees C

Lemon Water (Glace) Icing

about 200g-300g icing sugar (you may need more to get the right consistency)
about 3-4 tablespoons of lemon juice
a good slosh of lemon extract (not essence)

Winner! Best Food and Drink Blog North Award for Aroundtheworldin80bakes

Posted by aroundtheworldin80bakes in @laurenprince, Around the World in Eighty Bakes, Baking, Cookery, Food and tagged with #foodie, 2012, aroundtheworldin80bakes, awards, baking, bbc radio 2, best food and drink blog, blog north awards, chris evans, culture vultures, deaf institute, foodiesarah, international baking, laurenprince, manchester, manchester literature festival, sky tyne and wear, speaking in public, victory garden 22/10/2012

I still cannot believe it. I was stunned when I found out that Foodie Sarah had nominated me for the Blog North Awards for the best food and drink blog. (Thank you very much Sarah!). I was ecstatic to discover that I had been shortlisted from 400 other nominated northern blogs down to 5. So I almost hit the floor when I heard my name announced as the winner of the Best Food and Drink Blog at the awards ceremony in Manchester last week!

I had toyed with the idea of going to the awards but thought that I would never in a million years actually win as the other shortlisted blogs are really fantastic.
I really recommend having a read of the wonderful food and drink blogs
Northern Food
Squidbeak
Offally Good
Little Red Courguette

And also the other categories too!

I came to the conclusion that I would go along for the sheer delight and experience of being shortlisted and to visit my friends Josh and Mark too. BEST DECISION EVER.

I merrily jumped in the car straight from work and flew down the motorway, through torrential rain and lightening, in the merry bliss of enjoying an amazing experience, with the car packed full of international baked goods to share with the boys. It wasn’t until I hit the one way system in Manchester that my tummy did a little flip. (I should also note that this is the furthest I’ve ever driven by myself before, ever! )

We were treated to some wonderful readings from other shortlisted bloggers, my favourite being Victory Garden a Hudderfield postie with a very entertaining blog of his observations of northern folk encountered en route. It wasn’t until the second interval that I started to feel a bit nervous….

The brilliant Culture Vulturess , who I’ve been following on twitter for quite some time, announced the winner of the Food and Drink Blog award and I did a little squeak and staggered down the staircase and up on to the stage, to babble my thanks and amazement at winning. I’m not entirely sure what came out of my mouth at this point but I know I thanked everyone, A LOT. And then my legs realised that I was on stage, speaking in public and momentarily refused to work to get me back down the stairs and off the stage. Once I regained the use of my limbs, I trotted off in a happy haze clutching my winners envelope, with a £50 cheque, a year’s web hosting and a winners badge to adorn my blog.

Me, on stage babbling a few words

Wow! Can you tell how OVER THE MOON I am??! It still feels like a dream and I’m still (almost a week later) smiling very widely. Who would have thought a year ago that I would be half way around the world in 80 bakes and the winner of a Blog North Award?? I could never have dreamed this would happen.

I cannot thank you all enough. Thank you for reading, thank you for voting, thank you encouraging me! Thank you for sampling my sometimes bizarre and experimental cakes!

Thank you for a memorable and inspiring evening. I thoroughly enjoyed the relaxed and intimate event and had the opportunity to listen and chat to some very talented people! I am such a lucky girl.

I came away even more excited to continue blogging and baking and to complete my challenge. Bring on the next 39 bakes!

Just in case you want to know more about the awards you can find more details on the blognorth website here.

Also just in case you would like to see there’s a little article on my blog award on Sky Tyne & Wear website and Chris Evans gave me a little mention this morning on his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show (36 minutes in – thanks Mam!)

Around the World in Eighty Bakes

One girl, one oven, lots of flour required.

Category Archives: Food

How many Hydrangea Sugar Flowers does it take to make a Wedding Cake?

5 Tiers of Fruit Wedding Cake – My biggest booziest cake ever

Coconut Crazy! Homemade Italian Coconut Gelato

46. Say hello to my Brazilian Roll ~ Rocambole Cake

Lauren’s Layered Lamington Cake

45. Rosca De Reyes – Spanish Three Kings Cake

Experimental Chocolate Chip Polvorón – Spanish Christmas Cakes or Mexican Wedding Favours

43. Polvorón – Spanish Christmas Cakes or Mexican Wedding Cakes

42. Swedish Tea Ring – the cake for busy bakers

Winner! Best Food and Drink Blog North Award for Aroundtheworldin80bakes

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