Wednesday 19 October 2011

Energency baking

Yes, it's true, I was feeling twitchy because there was no cake in the house so I've been baking again and I have a number of important thoughts to share with you all.

Following up a couple of comments that came from the jammy dodger/custard cream epsiode, I have been wondering whether I could use the custard cream recipe as a basis to make bourbon biscuits. The short answer is no, for a number of reasons.

The custard cream recipe is in Feast by Nigella. I replaced 2 of the tablespoons of custard powder in the biscuit mix with cocoa, and used cocoa instead of custard powder in the filling. The biscuits baked fine and tasted good and the filling similarly, but the real problem is that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get over the fact that they were ROUND, not rectangular, and they don't have BOURBON CREAM stamped in the top. So I have some pretty decent chocolate sandwich biscuits, but bourbons they ain't. So now you know.



I'm a bit confused at the moment with my days - I keep thinking it's a day later than it actually is this week, so in my mind, I'm on Thursday. I don't know why I'm wishing the week away like this as the kids start half term a day early with an INSET day on Friday, so some how I have to fit in work and dog walking with entertaining them. In truth, Mr Disney will probably do most of the entertaining while I crack on, and we will do stuff in the afternoon.We are heading to the husband's brother & sister in laws on Friday and I am planning to make some sourdough bread and a cake to take with me, but I don't need to do that till tomorrow (because tomorrow is actually Thursday, although my head won't let me believe that). Still, the oven was on any way for supper (Nigella's African Chicken out of Kitchen which I thoroughly recommend. It's a good one to make up in bulk and then freeze uncooked in convenient portions), and I had a plan to bake those biscuits so I thought I would make another cake to use up some of the lemons that are lurking in the bottom of the fridge.

Nigella's got a lemon syrup loaf cake (a bit like lemon drizzle) which is really yummy and dead easy so I thought I'd do that. Unfortunately, after I'd decided to make up ground rice for the kids pudding and used up the last of the milk, I remembered that the cake needed 4 tablespoons of milk. By this time, I'd already got to the milk part of the recipe - which is the last bit, so it wasn't like I could just forget about the cake. I considered the fridge and decided that the natural yoghurt was probably my best bet so I used 3 tablespoons of that and do you know, the cake isn't bad for it. I think it's probably a bit wetter than if you use milk, but it's very edible.

The best thing about this is that my lovely cake tin that I got from my Granny after she died has something lovely inside it. If I had one thing to save if the house was burning down aside from the husband the kids and the dog, I think it might be this cake tin.

You can tell how old it is because the design on the outside, which is like a sampler alphabet, includes "G is for Golliwog who has a black face"... I just love this tin.

 I love the sampler alphabet, I love the pretty yellow flowers on the oil cloth that's been used to line it, and most of all, I love it when it's full of cake...

1 comment:

  1. That is the most loveliest cake tin! And a scrummy looking cake too ;)

    ReplyDelete

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