Honey and Nuts Birthday Chocolates

Yay, it’s another birthday today! I made chocolates! Happy days. :)

These are white chocolates (as I hope you can tell from the picture ;) which I filled with a slightly decadent white-chocolatey and buttery honey and nut filling and sprinkled with dark chocolate because I think it looks nice*. :)

You know, depending on my mood I find it hilarious or infuriating respectively when food bloggers claim their sweets and cakes are “healthy” because they contain nuts or honey. It might make the stuff slightly healthier – as opposed to pure butter dipped in sugar, for example. But come on! Seriously!? Yes, some honey and a few nuts are good for you but if chocolates and cakes are your main source of them, there’s something you might be getting wrong…

Anyway. I am not going to say these chocolates are healthy. They are, however, yum*. Win! :)

* Nice looking and yum? Yes, they were when I made them. But I had to mail them to my friend because he lives too far away; no idea what state they are in when he gets them!

White and Dark Chocolate Beer Mug Cake

For tonight’s party I am accessorizing with a double chocolate cake which looks like a mug of beer! If it weren’t for all my faults, that could easily make me the perfect woman! :D

I’ve used this recipe for my cake. Yes, another one from GoodFood. Have I mentioned that I am a fan of that website?

Some adaptations had to be made for the beer mug cake though. I used 2.5 times the quantities and a smaller tin (17 cm) so that I would get a nice big stack of cake layers. And I baked the cake layers separately, which took forever (as I only have one round cake tin the right size) but I think it was worth it!

For the decorations, I made some more of the ganache but with white chocolate instead, plus yellow food colouring. E numbers are my friends!

The mug handle is made from marzipan. I attached it to the cake with the help of wooden skewers. The glass bottom is a strip of marzipan; and the foam is whipped cream.

I am quite happy with the cake – especially considering all the thousands of things that could have gone wrong! Now the only massively scary potential for disaster left lies in the fact that I have to get the beer mug cake to my friend’s house…

—

PS: I have been told that you can’t really tell the size of the cake from the photo… It wasn’t very small. The cake layers are 17 cm in diameter; all in all the cake was about 20 cm high. And it weighed about a ton. And it was NOT easy to transport, but it made it to my friend’s house safely. Phew!

Whisky Chocolate Cake Chocolates

Birthdays are like bad news; they always come in bulk. Also: both are reasons to bake cakes! :)

One of my film group mates is officially getting even older today, so we’re going on an outing! We’re going to the cinema to watch Iron Sky. Looks promising, doesn’t it?

I had so many inappropriate ideas for moon-nazis-themed cakes but in the end decided to go for grown-up cake chocolates instead. It’s a sad day when I forgo politically incorrect cakes in favour of grown-up ones, I know. Sigh.

The day is much less sad, however, when there are whisky chocolate cake chocolates!  Nothing that has the word “chocolate” in its name twice can be bad, can it!?

For these chocolates I baked two miniature cakes, a chocolate one and an even tinier almond one. Then I destroyed them. Whoever uses a food processor to turn a cake into crumbs is missing out on one of the most fun legal activities! :)

Then I added a chocolate cream and a bit of whisky (not very little, in fact, but the taste is subtler than I’d expected) to my cake crumbs, put the mixture into a rectangular baking tin and the baking tin into the freezer.

There are a thousand things you will be tempted to do with a frozen slab of cake – at least if your mind is as twisted as mine! And I like to think that birthday boy would have approved of almost all of them anyway. :)

But once more I decided to pretend I’m a grown-up, so I just cut the frozen stuff in to small rectangles, dipped them in dark chocolate and decorated* them with milk chocolate.

* Decorate. What nice word for when you take spoonfuls of melted chocolate and just fling the stuff all around you. :D

Ferocious Panda Fairy Cake

There’s this really persistent mate of mine whose birthday it was last week. And for weeks before that, he’d been pestering me about panda fairy cakes. He saw some on one of the websites he spends way too much time on and decided that’s what he wanted for his birthday from me.

Do I look like the fairy godmother? I don’t make dreams come true. When are people going to understand this? I am happy to crush all your dreams any day. Anything else I’m not in charge of! :-Þ

SIGH.

I am such a pushover. BUT! The rebel in me refused to bake a cute panda. That’s something, right? This does make me a tiny bit cool, doesn’t it? ;)

GRRRRR!

Anger is what I do best. :)

I baked a cocoa and hazelnut fairy cake, iced it with white chocolate and used biscuits for the ears. The face is dark and white chocolate, and the blood is red food colouring.

Usually I’d be annoyed because the white chocolate went all spotty when it cooled but in this case, that’s fine. Angry panda has acne. You’d be angry too. :D

 

Strawberry Chocolate Cake

You know what’s sad? I can’t tell you whether this cake is/was as yum as it looks (if I may say so) because I didn’t eat it. I gave it away. [sad face]

A friend helped me out the other day, and foolish as I am I asked her how I could return the favour. :) Nah, I don’t mind that cake seems to be the strongest, or at least most wanted currency among my friends. I can imagine worse scenarios!*

This is a chocolate sponge cake with a chocolate, cream and strawberry filling. Not exactly low in calories but my friend exercises so much, she needs all the chocolate she can get! :)

By the way, I actually used a recipe from a cookbook for this cake. And it went horribly wrong. So I made up my own chocolate sponge cake on the spot. Problem solved! Apparently I have come to a point where I bake better improvised impromptu cakes than with an actual official recipe.  I don’t know whether I should be worried or proud! Probably a bit of both…

* I can imagine much, much worse scenarios. You do not want to know what’s going on in my head. Seriously.

Chocca Mocca Caramel Cake

I’m a big fan of the BBC GoodFood website; I could browse through their recipes all day long! And I simply had to try this one, if simply for the cool name: Chocca Mocca Caramel Cake. :)

The cake is very sweet (even though I’ve reduced the amount of sugar) and lovely and choccy-moccy and caramelly. You should definitely bake one yourself. The only tricky bit is getting the right caramel chocolate here on the continent. But then again I guess any caramel chocolate will do. The texture of your cake may be a bit different but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, does it?

Alternatively, come round to my house and see if you’ve been quick enough (and if I like you enough) to get a piece. You will have to be very quick though. And very likeable. ;)

 

The picture on the GoodFood website looks so good that I thought I could never live up to, let alone compete with it. Until I realised that I can make a cake picture infinitely more awesome by including my wind-up dinosaur toy. I win! :D

 

Friday the 13th Apple Cake

A very happy Friday the 13th to all of you!

It shouldn’t come as a surprise for you that today is a special holiday for our horror film group. :) We’re meeting up to watch the original Friday the 13th of course. And I’ve made a theme cake of course.

The cake is one I’ve made before; it’s a fairly light apple cake with a crunchy base and a yoghurt and cream topping. Very nice and fresh. Myumm.

For the Jason decoration, I’ve been inspired by Lisa’s blog. You’ll find a very good tutorial there.

Cutting out the stencil took more patience than I usually have, and who ever thought it was a good idea to give me a scalpel!? However, every living thing involved in the making of this survived, and I am almost entirely happy with the result!

Chick and Bunny Cakes for Easter

Christmas is the Joyous Season, right? You don’t have to be in a good mood at Easter then, do you? GOOD. Because I am telling you, these bunny cakes have been annoying the hell out of me. What a load of &$%§& ….

See, the almond cakes I baked (which were turned into yesterday’s breakfast muffins) were supposed to become Easter Bunny cakes. But they were too dry and I wasn’t happy. So I baked another batch of cakes. Try again – fail better, right? Grrrrr. For some reason my cocoa and hazelnut muffins got these really weird flat, wide tops. Is it just me or do everybody else’s cakes also do really strange things sometimes? SIGH.

So my Easter bunnies have really fat faces and I am annoyed. No way was I going to bake a third round of cakes. Sometimes you just have to accept the fat-faced bunnies. I did. Grudgingly, but still.

At least my chick cakes turned out the way the should. They are lemon and coconut fairy cakes (very loosely based on this recipe [language warning: German]) dipped in desiccated coconut coloured yellow, with chocolate eyes and beaks carved and shaped from chewy candy. I find them rather cute.

And I think it’s nice that the cute chick is sharing its plate with the deformed bunny. I’m sure there’s a life lesson in there for all of us. ;)

Happy Easter!

Almond Breakfast Muffins with Strawberry & Pimm’s Jam

You may be awfully surprised to hear that in our house, there’s usually no food shortage. Even more surprising: there’s even more food than usual when we are having people over. I know. You wouldn’t have suspected that.

We’re having family round for Easter, and I baked something for them. (Today really is the day of shocking news!) Breakfast muffins. I had to make them especially as we don’t usually do breakfast. You can have all the coffee you could possibly want, but we never have any bread or cereal or whatever it is you people eat in the mornings. Except for cake. We sometimes have cake. :)

I must admit, however, that these breakfast muffins haven’t been planned. I was going to bake Easter cakes for tomorrow, but this new recipe I wanted to try out produced the driest cakes. (The recipe did, not me! ;) So I really didn’t want to serve them for our Easter Sunday afternoon coffee. But I don’t throw away food either. What to do then with the dry muffincakethingies?

Enter my home-made strawberry & Pimm’s jam. Nice, sweet, yummy, slightly alcoholic jam. The perfect addition to my dry almond muffins!

I cut off the tops of the muffins, filled them with 2 tablespoons of jam each, put the tops back on again and drizzled them with a bit of melted white chocolate.

The result? Well, I like to believe that you can’t tell that the muffins are really cake disaster prevention. Win! :)

Flourless Almond & Spinach Cake

It’s Maundy Thursday, a day on which we traditionally eat spinach.

It’s also zombie film night Thursday, a day on which I traditionally bake cake.

And one plus one equals …

Flourless almond & spinach cake

This recipe spent months on my to-do list, and today was the perfect day to finally give it a go.

The topping is made from almonds, cream and white chocolate, which works well with the hint of lemon in the almond cake, so all in all it’s not too sweet I’d say. The spinach is mostly in there to make it moist, and to give the cake a bit of a green colour, which is always a good colour for cake.

What makes this recipe an even better choice for today is that the partner of the friend who’s hosting tonight’s film night is gluten intolerant, so with this flourless cake I’m hoping she can for once have a piece of cake with the rest of us.

However… I’m not entirely sure whether this cake will be made again. It’s nice and all, but it hasn’t triggered enough enthusiasm in me so far. I guess it depends on what my mates say when they try it tonight.*

* They’ll probably say, “I want more beer.” But I will make them comment on the cake as well!