Variation on a Theme: Gluten & Dairy Free Bakewell Tart Cake

Finishing off the birthday cake triumvirate was the gluten free bakewell tart cake. Firstly I feel I should say that I have essentially already posted this recipe before, with my sticky almond and lemon cake, this is just a variation of the same recipe, but since I have ended up making it twice in 5 days and I actually remembered to do process photo's of making it this time I though I might as well put it up. Plus it shows just how versatile the basic almond cake recipe is.

I make this with tinned cherries because my pockets do not stretch to fresh at the moment (although I pop a couple on the top for decoration), also the juice is useful for making the syrup at the end. If your lucky and happen to have a cherry tree in your garden then by all means use fresh cherries which would be delicious, but otherwise the tinned do well enough.

Gluten Free Bakewell Tart Cake

4 Large Eggs
175g Caster Suger (+ 2 tbsp for the syrup)
225g Ground Almonds
1tsp Baking Powder (If making for celiacs ensure it is gluten-free baking powder)
1(small) tsp almond essence (not too much its powerful)
1 can of tinned cherries in juice or syrup
a handful of flaked almonds (optional)
a couple of fresh cherries to decorate (optional)

Preheat Oven to 180C

1) Seperate the eggs into two bowls
2) Whisk the whites until they form stiff peaks, you should be able to hold the bowl upside down without it dropping out.

3) Mix the Sugar and Egg Yolks together until it turns pale

4) Fold in the Yolk mix, 200g of the Ground Almonds, Essence and Baking Powder to the Whites, be gentle you don't want to loose all the air you put into your whites.

5) Take your tin of cherries, strain them into a bowl (remember to keep it for the syrup), and then roughly dry them with some kitchen towel. You don't want them too wet. Then coat in the other 25g of Ground Almonds.

6) Add this to your cake mix and gently stir in until they are fairly well distributed.

7) Pour into a greased and lined 8" cake tin and decorate as you fancy, this time round I sprinkled flaked almonds over the top and pushed some halves of fresh cherries into the top, as I was not planning on icing it. Last time I just left it to decorate after baking. 

7) Bake in a preheated oven for at least 45mins-hour, keep checking it, if the top looks like its going to burn cover with some tinfoil, but you want to bake it until the top is a little bit crisp and a skewer comes out clean.

8) Pour over your cherry syrup (see below) and leave to cool in tin before transferring to a plate to serve.

Cherry Syrup

This part is optional but it makes the cake just that little bit more moist, colourful and adds a nice zing. If you have cherries in syrup already just pour that over but if you have them in juice, to make a tangy cherry syrup to top it off with, put the juice from tin of cherries, juice of 1/2 a lemon and 2-3 tbsp caster sugar in a pan over a low hob & simmer until it has reduced by about 3/4, and voila!

Enjoy!!

Lots and Lots of Cake... Onto Carrot Cake

Next on my baking spree was carrot cake... 

This is based on a Hummingbird Recipe which is not my usual carrot cake recipe(which I can't find) but I liked because it seemed so easy to remember & scale up & down. Be warned, however, they come out appearing rather flat (although not in a dense way). Glued together with cream cheese icing two are perfectly fine if you are having a smaller party or like me, have several types of cake on offer, I understand why the original recipe calls for 3 layers for more of a single statement cake. (Next time I might experiment with some more raising agents, will alter accordingly if it’s an improvement). I was told by a couple of people that this was the best carrot cake they had ever eaten which may just have been the champagne cocktails talking, but it is certainly very moist, moreish & yummy.

Yummy Carrot Cake

Oven 170C

Per layer (multiply as you see fit)

100g Butter

100g Soft Brown Suger

100g Plain Flour

110g Grated Carrots

2 eggs

1 tsp Cinnamon

½ tsp ginger

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp bicarb

¼ tsp vanilla essence

Pinch of salt

Raisins - optional, I really like them as I think it adds extra moisture and some bursting sweetness, while other people prefer walnuts although personally they are a little oily for me, but chuck in whatever takes your fancy

1)     Combine eggs, vanilla essence and butter and beat together

2)     Sieve the rest of the dry ingredients together and mix in well.

3)     Add in the grated carrots and raisins and stir in by hand until well dispersed.

4)     Pour into greased & lined 20cm tin and bake for about 20/25 mins, or until the top bounces back.

As you can see from my photo I iced my cake with an equally yummy cream cheese icing, which is one of my favourites, but as I tend to make it up as I am doing it I have never actually weighed the ingredients. Next time I will and will put up the recipe, one quick tip though: when you are making cream cheese icing you don’t tend to want it too sweet so remember to add a good squeeze of lemon to cut through some of the icing suger and bring out the savoury qualities of the cream cheese.

Lots and Lots of Cake... Beginning with Easy Cupcakes

Righty so it was my 21st birthday last week and in honour of this momentous event I begun my celebrations with a civilised tea party. This naturally entailed one thing on my part - the baking of plenty of cake! I decided to keep things simple and bake old favourites instead to trying to mix things up so I ended up with a cake stand of assorted small & large, chocolate and regular vanilla cupcakes,  a carrot cake with butter icing (which was my 'birthday cake') and a cherry variation on my gluten free almond cake which I call bakewell tart cake.

I am going to begin by setting out the easiest recipe for making plain sponge cupcakes ever


Super-dooper Easy Cupcake Recipe


Preheat your oven to 170C
1) Weigh your eggs in their shells (2 eggs = about 12 cupcakes)
2) Weigh out the same quantity of butter, sugar & self-raising flour
3) add baking powder (about 1tsp per 2 eggs) & vanilla essence
4) Mix well & transfer into cupcake cases (fill your cases to about 1/2 to 3/4 full, no more otherwise you will end up with overflowing or hard to ice cakes.

Bake until the top of the cakes are golden brown and spring back to touch. Simples!

For Chocolate Cupcakes chop some milk chocolate into chunks & add it to the mix with a couple of tablespoons of coco powder... Chocolatey Goodness....

They were iced quite late the night before the party so they are not particularly beautifully done, but for those who want to know they are topped with butter icing and decorated with a selection of chocolate flakes, coco powder, hundreds and thousands and  some nifty little cake toppers which they sold in sainsbury's which i thought were rather sweet.

Begining Afresh: The Trees By Philip Larkin

Ok so it has been a while since my last post, but I have had good reason I promise. I have been rather busy and had fairly sporadic access to the internet. In the time since my last post I have finished my degree, Interned at the Hay Festival and met loads of really cool authors, had a holiday in Tenerife and started thinking about my life in the big bad world. I have also had the opportunity to start reading in earnest again, something which I have really missed with months of uni work, and which I am so glad to have back again. In honour of this and to attempt to maintain my critical faculties to some extent, over the next few weeks I am going to try and attempt to write up some of the books I have been enjoying throwing myself into (review seems too critical and formal) as well as try and catch up with my neglected weekly poem schedule.

I was going to begin with the Jabberwocky, one of my favourite poems of all time, but I feel that deserves its own blog post, without my ramblings above, so instead I am going to begin with ‘The Trees’ by Philip Larkin:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

By Philip Larkin

Although it is no longer spring it seems for my life at least, to be a time for renewal, reawakening, and rebirth so the regenerative message of this poem seems particularly apt at the moment, however what I usually find so appealing about this poem is the bittersweet tone of the first stanza. The delicacy and ephemeral quality of the description of the new leaves “coming into leaf/ like something almost being said” really captures my imagination but also simultaneously juxtaposes and involves the strange sense of holding back and of disarticulation, of words unsaid. Alongside the beauty is a sense of loss, which is also hinted at by the final line of the stanza: “Their greenness is a kind of grief”. It seems to be saying that in the very beauty of the new is their past and future, the way they were and the fact they will soon fade, but they are more beautiful because of it. This poem is almost a memento mori which also highlights life and rebirth as well as death. Anyway despite the slightly sombre note at times, the final line is the one I am going to take as my message: “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”

A Poem a Week - Halfway Down the Stairs : A.A Milne

Halfway down the stairs

Is a stair where I sit: 

There isn't any other stair quite like it. 

I'm not at the bottom, 

I'm not at the top: 

So this is the stair where I always stop.

Halfway up the stairs 

Isn't up, and isn't down. 

It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town: 

And all sorts of funny thoughts 

Run round my head: 

"It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead!"

A A Milne

In honour of writing my last ever philosophy essays I decided to return to one of my favourite pieces of childhood philosophy. This poem by AA Milne has always been around, maybe as a consequence of the fact that have always ended up sitting on stairs reading, because my room used to be at the top of the house and I would get distracted before I got there. I love the simple logic, the trippy nursery-rhyme-type rhythm, and the sense of fun. By next week I will have finished essays for ever and so will be able to get down and start actually exploring the poems, and maybe start posting some books reviews.

Hark! A Vagrant - Dude Watching With the Brontes

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=202

Hehehe always makes me giggle....

A Poem a Week- A Note to the Difficult One: W.S Grantham

A Note To The Difficult One


This morning I am ready if you are,
To hear you speaking in your new language.
I think I am beginning to have nearly
A way of writing down what it is I think
You say. You enunciate very clearly
Terrible words nearly always just beyond me.


I stand in my vocabulary looking out
Through my window of fine water ready
To translate natural occurrences
Into something beyond any idea
Of pleasure. The wisps of April fly
With light messages to the lonely.


This morning I am ready if you are
To speak. The early quick rains
Of Spring are drenching the window-glass.
Here in my words looking out
I see your face speaking flying
In a cloud wanting to say something.


W.S. Graham, 1918-1986


This is another poem which deals with the concept of language, I am currently wrestling with essays and this poem manages to somehow articulate a difficulty of articulation. The lingustic worry of having not only words but the right words. I haven't got time to really discuss this poem in detail, but it rewards rereading. I hope you enjoy it.

A Poem a Week- Coombeland : John McCullough

Coombeland

Work of the devil. Dark place where hills

mould men. Where sense and breath adjust

to a muscular camber, the grounds diaphragm

small houses riding contractions, stiff verbs.

Chalk ridges give the dialects backbone.

The hole-ridden earth draws in watery vowels.

Ploughshares bring up guttural relics

flint-teeth with the sibilant ocean inside.

Stroke a nugget of chalk. Already white dust

accents the contours of your fingertips. You inhabit

the past tense, submit to a crumbling tongue

the way the hard c in coombe yields

to liquid and the unsayable ghost of a b

that’s the beat of the land’s hollow heart.

John McCullough


I have no idea where I found this poem but it is one I have since come back to time and time again. I love poems to be spoken aloud and with its onomatopoeic wordiness this poem is almost sensual when read out.  With the final stanza in particular you find yourself caressing the  "c in coombe" which "yields to liquid". You get the sense that this is a poet who really loves the language with all its flexibility and gorgeous verbosity, but despite this manages to be gloriously understated at times, the simplicity of: "Stroke a nugget of chalk" gives the poem a ceasura from the language and allows the poem to still feel light. The conjunction of body language and landscape is also something I find particularly interesting, and this poem places me on undulating downland whenever I am stuck inside.

A Poem a Week- Charlotte Mew

Domus Caedet Arborem

Ever since the great planes were murdered at the end of the gardens,
The city, to me, at night has the look of a spirit brooding crime:
As if the dark houses watching the trees from dark windows
Were simply biding their time.

- Charlotte Mew

So I have decided that I need some structure to this blog,  I love poetry but hardly ever think to just get out one of my poetry books and read a couple of poems, so hopefully posting, and thinking about a poem a week will get me back into it.
This week I have decided to start with Charlotte Mew, a little known early 20th century poet, who I discovered in an anthology and piqued my interest with just the first stanza of one of her poems, entitled 'Afternoon Tea' which begins 

Please you, excuse me, good five-o'clock people,

   I've lost my last hatful of words,

And my heart's in the wood up above the church steeple,

   I'd rather have tea with -- the birds.

I feel that is such a lovely wistful image, the rest of the poem is a tad uncharacteristicall sentimental and victorian, but her "last hatful of words" drew me in. Charlotte Mew, was described by Virgina Woolf as 'very good and interesting and unlike anyone else', for Thomas Hardy she was the 'best living woman poet' and when she fell on hard times at the end of her life, several leading poets and authors including Hardy petitioned for her to be granted a civil pension writing:
  "As she is a poet, writing poetry of a rare kind, she may not be widely known for many years.  We feel that it would be a wise and gracious act, worthy of a great people, to give to this rare spirit the means of doing her work until the work can appraise and reward it." 
The world is now starting to be able to appreciate her and she is being gradually rediscovered. 
I wanted to post 'On the Road to the Sea', simultaneously tender, possessive and utterly enthralling, i do not usually like 'love' poems as they tend to be rather sappy but this is certainly not that and I find it strikes that chord whereby it feels 'true', however it is too long for a blog post really, so I chose a considerably shorter poem of Mew's. Living in a city, the vision of malevolent houses and tamed gardens killing the wilderness is haunting, especially when if you think about it houses look quite a lot like faces....
Do read 'On the Road to the Sea', if you enjoy her this website has several of her poems, and also had a biography of her life.

Dutch Apple Pie Cake/Muffins

So, as the many posts are testament to, I'm still supposed to be essay writing, so am procrastinating on here instead. Continuing on with the theme of past (and future) bakes, here is another of my standards. I cannot remember which book this is originally from out of the many cookbooks my dad owns (will update when I find it) but this is the version I have in my recipe collection which has probably been tweaked a bit anyway. It is perennially scrumptious and works well both as a cake to have with tea (or just munched) or as a pudding with custard, it is best eaten on the same day of baking because of crunchy topping goes soggy after a bit, but because of all the apple it actually stays moist for ages meaning should be still good for a few days after if kept in an airtight tin (saying that i can't vouch for it because its usually eaten rather speedily in our house so I haven't actually seen how long it could last). The photo of the muffins is the only one I could find on my computer but will update with a better photo when I next make this again.

Dutch Apple Pie Cake/Muffins

1. Preheat Oven 200°C
2.  Sift together
• 250g plain flour
• 150g Caster Sugar or ½ Caster Sugar and ½ Soft Brown Sugar depending on what you  have
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoon cinnamon (ish, add more or less as you like)
3. In separate bowl mix batter
• 1 beaten egg
• 175 ml milk
• 75 ml oil (e.g. sunflower)
4.  Pour batter into flour – mix
5.  Fold in 225g apples – peeled and cut into chunks - (I use about 2 medium sized cooking apples you don’t have to be too precise) and you can add raisins too if you feel like it.
6.  Pour into greased 8-inch round cake tin or spoon into muffin cases
7.  Mix topping
• 100g sugar
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 2 tablespoons softened butter
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• It should get a consistency of breadcrumbs
8.  Sprinkle on top

Bake 25-30 mins at 200 C  - (I find it usually needs quite a bit longer than this but after ½ an hr the top will be done and crunchy. Test with a knife in the deepest part and if still gooey inside cover with foil and put it in again, checking regularly)

Enjoy!