Babycakes! An adventure in dairy free baking.

My youngest has been diagnosed with an allergy to cows milk, which is fairly common but has made the already challenging journey of parenthood even more so. It also means that he hasn't been able to taste any of my baking apart from my bread, as pretty much everything contains butter when it comes to baking. 

But I have recently been introduced to soya margarine, which has opened up new doors in dairy free baking. So I thought I'd try out a dairy free cake, complete with buttercream (or is it margarine cream) and fondant icing. 

Here is the recipe I used. It's pretty similar to your usual sponge recipe, except replacing the butter with margarine:

Cake:

Using two 20cm (at its widest point) heart shaped tins

225g caster sugar

225g soya margarine (we used the Pure brand)

225g self raising flour

1/2 tsp baking powder (possibly unnecessary with self raising flour already there but I was playing it safe)

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

Strawberry jam to fill

Buttercream:

275g soya margarine

375g icing sugar

A few drops of vanilla extract

To decorate:

500g fondant icing

Food colouring of choice

I used the creaming method with the margarine and sugar, then beat in the eggs and vanilla extract. The flour and baking powder were then folded in and the mixture was split between the two cake tins and baked at 180 degrees (fan) for 25 minutes. 

The cake itself was delicious and it has still not gone stale a week later. I'm not sure if this is to do with the margarine or the airtight quality of the box I am keeping it in though!

The buttercream was also pretty tasty, although its qualities were different to if it had been made with butter. As margarine is meant to be spreadable it didn't set when I had crumb coated the cake (this is how I have learnt is the easiest way to cover a sponge cake in icing: cover the cake in a thin layer of buttercream to seal in the crumbs, then put the cake in the fridge for the buttercream to set. Then add another layer of buttercream and use this to flatten the top of the cake and create sharper edges. Let this set in the fridge again and then cover with fondant) so I had to put it in the freezer. Even then it didn't set completely. So the sides of the cake looked very messy as I hadn't been able to get completely straight edges. I have yet to discover a way around this. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to comment!

As for my decorations, I was visiting my best friends for the day and I decided to model the cake on their babies who are the same age as mine. I need to practise bodies again I think!

Treacle Tart

I'm back! Sorry about the silence, there has been a new addition to the family and having a toddler and a newborn has kept me so busy I haven't had the time for baking! Littlest one is just starting to entertain himself for a few minutes at a time these days and is napping a little longer too, so I'm starting to get on top of things again.

I've been watching re-runs of The Great British Bake Off over the weekend and I was inspired to try out a tart since I have had a lovely new tart tin sitting in the cupboard for a few months now. I've seen a few programs where James Martin (I do rather like James Martin :) ) makes treacle tart and it seemed simple enough so I thought I'd give it a go.

The most time consuming part was actually the pastry. I had to make it, chill it, then blind bake it before adding the filling. Moulding it into the tin was quite difficult as the recipe I used included flour, butter and an egg which made quite a dry, crumbly pastry. Rolling it out was a complete waste of time as it just tore so I just stuck the whole lot in the tin and pushed it out to the edges making sure it was nice and thin and even. After 30 minutes of chilling it went into the oven until it was just brown, and then I added the filling, which consisted of an entire tin of golden syrup (!!!), bread crumbs and lemon rind/juice. It really is a simple recipe so if you buy ready made pastry it's one you can do very quickly. Interestingly, there is no treacle in a treacle tart recipe!

Half an hour of baking later and this is what I ended up with:

Fresh out the oven

Cooled and removed from the tin

Served with a big dollop of whipped double cream

For the record, it was delicious! I was expecting it to be incredibly sweet, given how much syrup went in there, but the lemon cut through it nicely.

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A look back at my journey

I've put together a collage of all the large cakes I've ever decorated, in the order I did them. I was interested to see if there is a notable difference in them based on what I have learnt over the months.

On some of the pictures it seem like I have perhaps taken a step back since decorating the previous cake, but I think the quality levels are quite dependent on who I am making the cake for and what the occasion is. For example, the wedding cake is (in my own opinion) the best cake I have made, but of course a wedding cake is one of the most important parts - materially speaking - of the wedding. Whereas some of the cakes have been made for myself, just for fun, and I think it shows that I cared slightly less for these!

Today's cake is not included in this collage for the simple reason that it was not about the decorating. It was more about baking practice, and about the CHOCOLATE FUDGE! :-D

Christmas Cake

So I finally finished it - at about lunchtime on Christmas Eve mind, but I finished it :-)

So, here we have an 8 inch square fruit cake (made with Delia's recipe) covered in marzipan and sugar paste. I managed to cover the cake and board together without ripping the icing, which I always feel is the hardest part as it's the most difficult thing to fix. It was a little bit lumpy, but I think once the decorations were added then the lumpy bits were less obvious.

I cut out some stars and sprayed them with silver lustre, cut out some holly leaves and modelled some berries and a little penguin which people tell me looks like a famous children's TV penguin, but that wasn't deliberate. The image must just be etched in my brain :-)

I also added some snowballs just to fill in the gap.

A vast improvement on last year's effort, I think :-)

In case you forgot...

Christmas cake is coming

Christmas cake is on its way... it has been marzipanned and iced. Now all I need is some inspiration for the actual decorating. Hmmm.












Oh, the potential...

The Latest Baking Practice

Just a few of the latest creations from my baking practice:

Chequerboard biscuits: These were fun to make but didn't taste very good. Might be because I ran out of plain flour and tried replacing it with the only vaguely suitable thing I could find - brown rice flour. Didn't work...

Jamaican ginger cake made with stem ginger. That's lemon icing drizzled over the top. Yes, I know what it looks like.

Well, you've got to make mince pies this time of year haven't you? Unfortunately I over filled them and they exploded. That stuff sets like concrete so I couldn't get them out of the tray! I made the shortcrust pastry myself though. 

I rather fancied some chocolate so I threw these together in a hurry ;) The cake is Rachel Allen's chocolate cupcake recipe and the icing is the Primrose Bakery's chocolate buttercream. I used Co-Op's Fairtrade Ghanaian 84% cocoa solids chocolate for the buttercream - it was lush!