Category: Cakes and biscuits

Apple crumble muffins

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We’ve got another cake sale coming up soon at my daughter’s primary school. These are definitely one of the PTA’s most successful ways to raise funds. You should see the number of homemade cakes the parents bring in. It’s very impressive.

I have a couple of standards I usually bake, which I know always get snapped up. The first is the banana chocolate cupcake, which I’ve featured here before. And the other is the scrumptious apple crumble muffin, the recipe for which I’ve taken from Linda Collister’s excellent book ‘Baking with Kids’.

I like to think of both these cakes as being vaguely healthy since they contain fruit. Obviously they also contain lots of butter and sugar too, so I don’t think you can really claim they’re a substitute for one of your child’s five-a-day!

The apple crumble muffin is a big hit in our house. The perfect combination of cake and pudding.

And as they contain apple, I’m entering this muffin into February’s In Season Challenge over at Make It Bake It, where the theme this month is any recipe containing apples.

Apple crumble muffins

Topping:

50g butter
50g sugar
50g plain flour
50g ground almonds

Cakes:

275g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
175g caster sugar
1 lemon
150g butter
2 eggs
100ml milk
2 eating apples

Preheat oven to 190°C (375°F) Gas 5.

To make the topping, cut the butter into small pieces and put in a mixing bowl with the other ingredients. Work them together until it looks like crumble mixture.

For the cake mixture, sieve the flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl and mix in the sugar. Stir in the zest from the lemon and make a well. Pour the melted butter, beaten eggs and milk into the well, and mix gently.

Spoon the mixture into paper muffin cases in a 12-hole muffin tray. Core and roughly chop the apples and scatter on top of the muffin mixture, then sprinkle over the topping.

Bake for 30 minutes until golden brown. Enjoy with a cup of tea or a glass of milk!

Love heart jam tarts for Daddy

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I spent this afternoon in the kitchen with my two girls baking these oh-so-easy jam tarts for their Daddy for Valentine’s Day.

I offer them up to you now, at this late stage in the day, just in case you’ve failed to remember it is 14 February tomorrow and you need a very quick idea to help rustle up a little loving something for your own loved one. Chances are you’ll have all the ingredients you need in the fridge and store cupboard. Go with any flavour jams you fancy.

OK, so it’s not sophisticated baking but I’m sure you’ll receive a warm smile when you present a plate full of these lovelies to the love of your life. And if you can get any children you might have around the place involved in their preparation, so much the better.

Love heart jam tarts

230g plain flour
Pinch salt
115g butter
2-3 tbsp cold water
Strawberry or raspberry jam, lemon curd – you choose!
Icing sugar

Sieve the flour and salt into a large bowl. Rub in the butter using your fingertips until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs.

Many hands make light work. Apparently.

Use a knife to gradually mix in enough cold water to bring the mixture together so that you can form a ball in your hands. Wrap the pastry in cling film and place in the fridge for half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas 6.

Smear with butter a 12-holed tart tin.

Sprinkle the work surface and your rolling pin with flour. Roll out the pastry until about 0.25cm thick. Use a circular cutter to cut out 12 circles and place in the tart tin, pressing gently into place. Save the rest of the pasty for the heart lids. Prick the bottom of each one with a fork.

Bake the circles in the oven for six minutes until lightly golden. Remove and leave to cool for a few minutes.

You may need to use your fingers to slide the jam off the spoon. Licking of fingers may therefore be necessary.

Carefully (or not so carefully depending on your helpers) spoon a desert spoonful of your chosen jam/s into each tart.

Roll out the leftover pastry and using a heart-shaped cutter cut out your heart lids. Place these on top of each of your tarts.

I give you my heart!

Return the tarts to the oven for six to eight minutes until golden brown.

Leave to cool for a few minutes before carefully using a knife to gently slide each tart out of the tin and onto a wire rack. When completely cool, arrange on a plate and sprinkle with icing sugar.

The icing on the cake

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I promised myself some time off over the Christmas break from blogging and tweeting and the like, but my six-year-old has persuaded me to come online to show you their drawing of the Christmas cake I made this year.

This was my first-ever attempt at a Christmas cake. I baked it back in November and then dutifully ‘fed’ it whisky every week before icing it a few days before Christmas. We’ve all been very impressed with the result, even if the icing looks a little on the haphazard side! Despite all that whisky, it’s still very light, more like a stollen than the rich fruit cake you might be expecting.

I used a recipe by Guardian food writer Felicity Cloake and followed Nigel Slater’s instructions for the icing.

Here’s a photograph of the cake today.

Excuse the state it’s in, but at least you can see it’s being enjoyed.

Merry Christmas!

Beetroot and chocolate brownies

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For a while in the autumn we seemed to be getting beetroot in our veggie box pretty much every week.  Now I adore beetroot so I was quite happy with this situation. Unfortunately the rest of my family do not share my passion for this colourful root.

So while I was rather enjoying eating roast beetroot to accompany a joint of lamb or baked beetroot in a salad with nectarines, I felt compelled to come up with new ways to serve beets in a slightly less prominent way. That’s how I came up with this gorgeous brownie recipe.

They really are surprisingly good. Much lighter than your average brownie and ever so moist. Everyone I’ve served them to, including my anti-beetroot family members, has wanted more.

And I love the way they are tinged with a subtle pink hue.

I’ve tried this recipe with both plain and milk chocolate. Plain is definitely best here.

Beetroot and chocolate brownies

4 medium beetroot
250g plain chocolate
200g butter
3 eggs
½ tsp vanilla extract
200g caster sugar
50g cocoa powder
50g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds

Wash and trim the beetroot, place in a baking dish with half a centimetre of water, and cover with foil. Place in an oven preheated to 200° C /Gas Mark 6 and roast for around 45 minutes until tender. Leave to cool and then skin.

Turn the oven down to 180°C/Gas Mark 4.

Put the chocolate and butter in a large bowl and microwave on a medium heat for two to three minutes, until melted. Stir together well.

Finely chop / mush the beetroot in a food processor. Then mix in the eggs one at a time, followed by the vanilla and sugar. Keep mixing until smooth.

Stir the beetroot mix into the melted chocolate, and then sift in the cocoa powder, plain flour and baking powder and fold in carefully, along with the ground almonds, until the ingredients are combined.

Line a tin, roughly 28cm x 18cm, with baking paper. Pour in the mixture and bake in the oven for 30 to 35 minutes, until just firm to the touch. Don’t over-cook your brownies! When they’re ready, a skewer should come out ever so slightly sticky.

Leave to cool in the tin and then cut into squares. Keep in an airtight container and eat within two to three days. If they’re around that long, that is.

Banana and chocolate cupcakes

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If you ever need to rustle up some cakes for a school cake sale, these should do the trick.

Totally unsophisticated, completely garish and obscenely sweet. Just what little children are looking for in a cupcake.

I made these last week for the Christmas Fair and they disappeared within minutes of the doors opening.

And they can’t be that unhealthy; they do contain banana after all.

Banana and chocolate cupcakes

Makes 8 cakes

1 large ripe banana
110g soft butter
110g caster sugar
2 eggs
½ tsp vanilla extract
110g self-raising flour

For the icing
60g plain chocolate
25g butter
2 tbsp milk
2 tbsp golden syrup
Sweets of your choice for decoration – Smarties, jelly beans, dolly mixture – go crazy!

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 350°F / gas mark 4. Line a muffin tin with eight paper muffin cases.

Beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Whisk the eggs and vanilla in a separate bowl, then gradually add the eggs to the butter mixture, beating well.

Peel and mash the banana and stir into the butter mixture. Sift and fold in the flour.

Fill the muffin cases with the mixture and bake for 20 minutes, until risen and golden. Leave to cool.

To make the icing, put all the ingredients in a bowl and microwave on a medium heat for a minute or two, and mix well.

When the cupcakes are cool, spoon over the chocolate icing and decorate with your chosen sweeties.