Gluten-free Red Velvet

My baby sister turned 18 last month - something that was very scary and made me feel rather old! I wanted to make her a special birthday cake so decided to attempt my first tiered cake. It needed to be gluten free so I turned to my trusty red velvet recipe - a wheat-free variation of the Hummingbird classic. This recipe made a deep 8" cake, a regular 6" and mini cupcakes.
Gluten-free Red Velvet Cake Batter:

375g caster sugar

950g margarine

6 eggs

1 tbsp vanilla essence

3 tbsp red food colouring

65g cocoa powder

750ml

950g gluten free flour

1 tsp xantham gum

1 tbsp bicarbomate of soda

1 tbsp salt

3 tbsp white wine vinegar

Cream the sugar and margarine until light and fluffy. Beat in three eggs until well mixed and then add the other three and mix well. Mix in the vanilla, red food colouring and cocoa powder and scraoe the sidesto make sure you don't ose any cocoa powder! Alternate adding the milk and flour until it is all mixed in. Add the bicarb, salt, xantham gum and white wine vinegar and beat the btter until smoot, making sure there are no lumps stuck to the bottom of the bowl.

Cream Cheese Frosting:

900g icing sugar

150g butter

350g cream cheese

Beat the ingredients together until smooth and will spread easily.

In terms of the decoration, there was no obvious theme so I wanted to work with the colour of the cake and use bright colours to create a fun and slightly kitsch look.

Baked and decorated, the main challenge with this cake was the transportation from St. Albans to Brixton, keeping it safe and away from 'tasters' overnight and then up to North London. But after two trains, two tubes and two very achey arms the cake arrived safely at my parents house in time for a birthday barbecue.

Happy Birthday!

I have a few blog posts in the pipeline but have been far too busy eating, drinking and generally enjoying being the birthday girl to do anything productive!

So for now I will leave you with a guest blog post over at Cakes for Dorothy, another baking blog which is written by Emma...

http://cakesfordorothy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/guest-blogger-mixing-bowls-cookie-dough.html

Let them eat brioche!

I love baking bread. I also love eating bread. To be honest I'm an all round bread lover!
Despite this I am definitely a beginner when it comes to bread baking mainly due to time constraints - I may have time to whack together a dough but leave it to prove, knock it back, prove again and THEN bake...?

When I do get the time however, I love to organise a day around baking (and then eating) some doughy treats. So with a lazy Monday ahead of me, out came my baking hat and Paul Hollywood's '100 Great Breads'. I decided to make Brioche Tetes mainly to see whether I could and the prospect of freshly baked brioche was very exciting!

The recipe was very easy to follow and I was pleased with the results (I have had mixed success with bread so I had my fingers crossed!). They didn't rise as much as I expected in the proving stage and turned out rather wonky but they smelt amazing when they came out of the oven and tasted delicious.

Although the dough does need to be left overnight, the first stage doesn't take long at all so I mixed the dough in the evening and finished it off the next day so it needn't take up too much time. Just try it. Go on...!

Recipe

375g strong white bread flour

40g caster sugar

15g yeast

1 tsp salt

75ml milk

3 eggs

185g softened butter

Mix the flour, sugar, yeast, salt, milk and eggs by hand for about 8 minutes until it's a smooth dough (or 5 minutes in a food processor). Add the butter to the dough and mix for a further 10 minutes (or 5 minutes in a food processor). Put the dough in a bowl, cover and leave in the fridge overnight. 

In the morning the dough is easy to work with, break it into 75g pieces and shape each pieces into a larger and a smaller ball. Put the larger balls in the muffin case and push the smaller balls onto them. Leave to rise in a warm place or 1 hour. 

Preheat the oven to 200C, brush the dough with eggwash and bake for 15 minutes until golden. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

A beginners attempt at sugarpaste modelling

I've said it many times but cake decorating does not come naturally to me.
However and am trying and recently I have done a bit more modelling which I thought i'd share with you. I have never been taught any sugarpaste work so I am working it all out as I go - tips are always welcome!

'The Gruffalo' cakes seem to be popular at the moment - I must admit that I'm not familiar with the Gruffalo although it reminds me of Where the Wild this are which I loved as a child. The brown sugarpaste I used chocolate flavoured and it didn't seem to harden as well as regular sugar paste, even with the help of quite a lot of CMC. However, it definitely tastes better :)

This one I was really pleased with as when I saw the order I really wasn't sure I could do it! In the end I became rather attached to my little old organist :)

I've also just made my first tiered cake which I'll be blogging about very soon so watch this space :)

What are your top cake decorating tips?

Thai Cakes

Where to begin? It feels like so much has happened since I last blogged; I have been desperate to write about it but my laptop is in the computer hospital :(

My boyfriend and I had an amazing trip to visit our friends in Thailand. Having never been to Asia before, everything was new to me and all my senses were in for a treat! I won't bore you all with the day by day account that my family had to endure but I will share a few photos with you and a bit about my food adventure....

The food was amazing - definitely some of the best I've ever tasted. Everything was just so full of flavour; we tried something different each night and (with the exception of a big smelly fruit!) there was nothing I didn't love! The Thai way of eating is to each have a small plate/bowl of rice and share meat and vegetable dishes which you add a small amount at a time to your rice. I think this is perfect as you get to try several dishes and go back for more of your favourite!

They're not big into desserts/cake (why would you be with so much fresh pineapple and mango available?!) but we did find a cupcakery in Bangkok. I tried a white chocolate and macadamia cupcake which was topped with whipped cream instead of buttercream. Despite the fact that I'm not a huge fan of cream, I loved the cupcake (the cream had definitely been sweetened!).  This kind of thing is fairly exclusive to the Thai 'high society' but I did also try some more authentic Thai cakes...

These are local to Nakon Sawan, the town where our friends had been living for the past two and a half years. I can't say that they are cake as we know it; one is very dry and the other is very soft and elastic like uncooked bread dough! They both come in very bright colours and a variety of flavours (I could identify coconut, chocolate and strawberry - the rest were a mystery to me!) - I can't say that I'll be getting the recipe!

I do however have a Thai recipe book and a collection of pastes and spices - ready and raring to poorly recreate some amazing dishes!

In a other news, on arriving back in the UK we announced that we are getting married in August so our lives are now a whirlwind of venue bookings, flower arrangements, big smiles and moments of 'I just can't believe it' !

For more on Thailand and travelling as well as some stunning photography, please visit http://www.travelingandthat.com/

A little adventure......

I will be disappearing from here and twitter for a couple of weeks as myself and my boyfriend visit our very good friends in Thailand. It will be the first time either of us has visited Thailand or even Asia and no doubt we will try done new and exciting foods and flavours which I will endeavour to capture in photographs and memory.

Happy Easter, I hope you all eat a silly amount of chocolate and have fun baking :)

Gluten-free cherry and Amaretto cake

Mothers Day weekend this year managed to coincide with my Mum's birthday and my Grandmas's 80th birthday celebrations.As they are both wheat intolerant I decided that a gluten free celebration cake was in order. I have had mixed success with gluten free cake and I needed this cake to have a good structure (no sinking of the middle or crumbling away at the sides!) as I was covering it with sugarpaste. So I wanted to keep the recipe fairly simple but gluten-free flour can have a distinctive taste so I wanted to use a strong flavour. Knowing that my Grandma is a fan of amaretti biscuits I decided on Amaretto and cherry.

I would have loved to use fresh cherries but I couldn't get hold of them (and they tend to be horrendously expensive)so I used natural coloured glace cherries. The night before I baked the cake I soaked the cherries in Amaretto which worked well and the cherries really took on the flavour of the Amaretto.

Recipe: 

300g butter/stork 

300g caster sugar 

4 eggs 

2 tsp gluten free baking powder 

300g gluten free flour (I used Doves Farm self-raising flour) 

90ml amaretto 

2 tsp xantham gum 

300g glace cherries that have been soaked in Amaretto overnight (I put cherries in between the two layers as well as inside the sponge so if you just wanted them in the sponge you would only need 200g glace cherries) 

raspberry jam 

• Preheat the oven to 160 C and grease and line a cake tin (I used a 9" tin but you could definitely use an 8" or 10").  

• Cream together butter and sugar until creamy and fluffy. 

• Mix in the eggs on a high speed. 

• Mix in half the four and then stir in the Amaretto. Mix in the rest of the flour along with the baking powder and xantham gum. 

• Once well mixted, lightly coat 200g cherries in flour and stir in. 

• Bake for 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the centre of the sponge. 

Amaretto Buttercream: 

500g icing sugar 

150g butter at room temperature 

1 tablespoon milk 

1.5 tablespoons Amaretto 

• (Ideally you want to use an electric hand mixer or stand mixer for this. If you are mixing it by hand, get those muscles ready!) 

• Cream together the butter and icing sugar. If you're using an electric mixer,  use a low speed until the icing sugar is mixed in to avoid a sugary cloud in your kitchen! Then way the speed up to full and get that butter nice and fluffy!

• Once they are well mixed and start to gradually add the milk and Amaretto until you are happy with the taste and consistency.

Sandwich the two cakes together with jam, amaretto buttercream and the remaining cherries. I covered the cake in sugarpaste but you could simply top with the buttercream or even a dusting of icing sugar for a perfect teatime treat :)

I was very happy with the cake which held together well and was tasty and moist - you definitely couldn't tell that it was gluten free at all!

Happy Baking everyone! x