Madeira Cake

It was my mum's birthday this week.  In a rare event, I was at her place for her birthday, so I made her a birthday cake.

Mum does not like rich cakes, and I heard her once mention that she liked Madeira Cake.  For this reason, I dug out my high school Day to Day Cookery book and made mum a Madeira Cake for her birthday.

This cake is quite simple to make and is rather tasty.  I added a lemon glaze to the top of my cake for a bit of extra sweetness and moisture.

If you would like to try making this cake for yourself, you will need:

120g butter

3/5 cup sugar

grated zest of one lemon

1/4 cup milk

1 1/2 cups self raising flour

Grease and line a loaf tin, and preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Cream the butter and the sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  In a separate bowl, sift the flour and stir through the lemon zest.

Add the flour and milk alternately to the cake batter (3 x 1/3 flour, 2 x 1/2 milk, starting and ending with the flour) and mix after each tranche to just combine.

Scrape the  batter into the prepared loaf tin, smoothe the top with a knife, and bake in the preheated oven for 35-40 minutes or until cooked through when tested.  

Remove the cake from the oven and leave in the tin on a wire rack for around 10 minutes before unmoulding from the tin onto the rack to cool completely.

Once the cake has cooled, you can decorate it as you please (I used a simple glaze made of icing sugar and lemon juice).

Passionfruit Coconut Cake

Recently, I made this amazing Passionfruit Coconut Cake from a recipe by Lorraine at Not Quite Nigella.  This luscious cake is flavoured with passionfruit pulp and dessicated coconut, and is topped with a delicious passionfruit flavoured buttercream. 

How good does that look!  I only made half the icing (as I don't like thick icing), and used tinned passionfruit in the cake.  

I absolutely loved this cake - moist (yep, that's a good word for a cake), light and fruity.  An absolute winner!  If you want to get in the mood for summer, this is the perfect cake to make. 

TWD - Buttermilk Scones

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Buttermilk Scones. As the name suggests, these scones are made with buttermilk rather than straight milk (though I cheated and just used soured milk instead).

This scone recipe is different to what I am used to as it contains egg. This made the scone dough rather sticky, and I had to use more flour than the recipe suggested to get anything resembling a workable dough. I also found that the finished product did not rise like a typical scone, presumably because of the texture of the dough.

The end result was perfectly edible (see photo), but it won’t be my go to scone recipe.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Orange and Hazelnut Galette

 Last week, a friend gave me some blood oranges, remembering that I had mentioned I always missed the season.

Having been gifted these beauties, I wanted to showcase them, and found this recipe for an Orange and Hazelnut Galette from UK Delicious - perfect!

The recipe features an orange flavoured galette dough topped with hazelnut frangipane and blood orange slices. The only change I made was to use Dorie Greenspan’s galette dough recipe from Baking with Dorie instead of the one in the recipe.

This galette is a delicious dessert, and a fun way to showcase blood oranges, should you be lucky enough to have them.

TWD - Tomato Tart

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie (Baking with Dorie) is Tomato Tart.

If I saw this tart on a menu, it’s not something I’d naturally gravitate to, but this is delicious. 

I made a half recipe for a smaller tart. The savoury galette dough as promised makes a crust that is both crispy and flaky. The partly baked tart shell is topped with a honey-mustard mixture, torn basil and grated cheese, before being layered with sliced, salted and drained tomatoes. More basil is slotted under the tomato slices before baking.

Once the tart comes out of the oven, it is sprinkled with more grated cheese, pepper and more basil.

The tart makes a perfect light lunch when served with salad on the side.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of  the TWD website.

Helen Goh’s Favourite Orange Cake

 This weekend, I made a cake that has been on my to do list for a while - Helen Goh's Favourite Orange Cake.  You can find the recipe online here.

The smell of this cake while baking is glorious - it contains a whole boiled orange that has been pureed, and it gives the cake a beautiful orange aroma and flavour.

On Day 1, I left the cake unadorned and ate it warm with icecream for pudding:

On Day 2, instead of using the thick buttercream icing in the recipe, I made a glaze using icing sugar, water and a couple of drops of orange essence to top the cake.

Whichever way you eat this wonderful cake, it is a perfect way to enjoy the flavour of orange in cake form, and very easy to make.  You just need a bit of time (as the orange needs to boil for an hour).

TWD - Fortune Cookies - final DC recipe

Well, we have made it - after nearly six years (!), we are posting the final recipe from Dorie’s Cookies.  The first Dorie’s Cookies recipe was posted on 1 November 2016 (though I was two days’ late).

The last recipe happens to be Fortune Cookies.

These fortune cookies are shaped by hand and in a mini muffin tin. Somehow, mine don’t look quite the right shape, but they’ll do.

I didn’t bother writing my own fortunes - I just printed off some motivational message fortunes from the Web.

My cookies are posing with a tiger brooch for the year of the Tiger.

Here’s a final look at Dorie’s Cookies:

 FINIS