Chocolate Ripple Cake - Happy Australia Day

This is more assembly than baking (as in, there's no baking involved whatsoever), but it's still pretty! Plus, I'm lead to believe that this is an Australian recipe, and it's nearly Australia Day :).

The recipe on the packet calls for 500 mL of fresh cream, but I used slightly less than 400mL. I think I was supposed to start with more on the bottom, but I was being cautious in case I ran out partway through the biscuit sandwiching.

Maybe this would be a good dessert for a black and white party! (Apparently that's a thing.)

After setting in the fridge for about 7 hours (the suggested minimum is 6) the cake (aka chocolate biscuits) was getting towards soft, but still a little bit of crunch. If you want it really soft you'd be better off leaving it overnight so the cream can really soak in. But this was good too!

After checking the price of fresh strawberries I opted to defrost a packet of frozen ones to decorate with.

There's no Vegemite in the cake. It's just part of the Australia Day theme I guess.

Guest baker! Annika makes Hummingbird Bakery Brownies

I haven't been baking much recently, partly (and somewhat ironically) because I'm home a lot more and know I would end up eating most of the goodies myself. I did make this carrot cake with cream cheese icing for a departing Kiwi friend though...

And then, Annika came over and baked brownies with me! She looks surprised, but she wasn't really.

We used Hummingbird bakery's traditional brownie recipe, which you can find here. Simple yet effective.

It would probably be easier to cut if you waited for it to cool completely, but that takes a long time and we wanted to try some. We're very professional like that.

In case you can't read Annika's crazy eyes, they're saying, "This is amazing!"

Rich, moist, chocolatey goodness.

Banana Meets Caramel

I like using overripe bananas as an excuse to bake, and on this occasion I realised I'd never actually posted the banana cake recipe I use (though I've mentioned it before, and its source - my friend Jenn).

I'll post it now, as much for my own convenience the next time I want to use it as anything else. (Locating my recipes became somewhat trickier when we moved to Japan, leaving most of my hard copies behind in a giant glorious box of baking books and folders >_<.)

Amazing Banana Cake

• 125g butter (softened)
• 1.5 cup caster sugar
• 2 mashed bananas (the riper the better, seriously!)
• 2 eggs
• dash vanilla extract
• 100mL milk
• 1.5 cup SR flour
• half tsp bicarb soda

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius
2. Grease/line a 20cm cake tin or 12 muffin tray
3. Food process all wet ingredients (butter, sugar, bananas, eggs, vanilla, milk)
4. Add flour, bicarb and process well
5. Pour into tin/tray
6. Bake 1 hour for cake or 25 mins for muffins

The catch is that I don't have a food processor. So I just mixed it all up as best I could by hand. And by, "as best I could," I actually mean I didn't incorporate the butter very well at all. I had this idea that maybe it would all just melt together nicely in the oven (and my arm was tired from mixing).

As it turns out, unincorporated butter does not just obediently mix itself into the cake once you put it in the oven. In fact, the butter bubbles to the top of the cake and drips all over the oven. I was worried that I had managed to fail with a never-fail recipe.

But in a happy turn of fate, the bubbling butter actually had a kind of caramelising effect on the top of the cake. And in a fortunate coincidence I had already prepared a caramel sauce (admittedly only after realising I didn't have enough cream on hand to make chocolate ganache).

I got the idea and recipe for caramel on banana from the always fantastic Donna Hay, on here recipe page, here. She's surely a genius. That said, fresh cream is quite expensive in Japan, so I reduced the quantities down to the following, which was a good amount to cover my cake.

Donna Hay's caramel sauce of deliciousness
(...possibly not its official name...)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar

- 165 mL cream

"While the cake is cooling, place the sugar and cream in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Increase the heat and simmer rapidly for 8 minutes or until the sauce thickens. Allow to cool and spread over the cake."

I enjoy it immensely when my baking errors produce unexpectedly positive results.

Big Cake, Small Oven

My little Japanese oven can handle cupcakes quite well, although they tend to rise more evenly if I turn the tray part-way through baking.

The first time I cooked a larger cake was a learning experience. Fruit is pretty expensive here, but I can still buy peaches in a can so I decided to try making my fruit and cinnamon cake recipe (also delicious with apple, but apples are pricey in Japan!).

Peach!

I put it in to bake and all seemed well. I thought I was done. I let the cake cool a bit and then went to remove it from the pan... but alas, it wasn't cooked through and collapsed all over the place! Not to be defeated by a rebellious cake, I squeezed it back into the tin and put it back in the oven.

A bit of icing sugar helped to disguise its disfigurement and it still tasted good. Next time I bake a big cake in a small oven I'll be watching it a bit more carefully!

Banana Cake with Chocolate Ganache

Getting ready to move house is not hugely conducive to blogging. Or baking for that matter. But I did recently make banana cake with chocolate ganache - I had some very ripe bananas and some fresh cream that I wanted to use up!

This is the moment when you start to question whether your food processor can actually deal with a double batch of banana cake batter...

Thankfully, it turns out, mine can.

The other half of this batch went into cupcakes but I didn't get any photos as they were a bit messy once I'd scooped out the middles and dolloped in the delightful chocolate mixture.

Something I've learned about chocolate ganache (which is made by melting chocolate into just-boiled cream): if you try to make it and use it in a hurry it's almost certainly going to be very runny. This time I got smart and refrigerated the ganache overnight, which made it nice and firm, without being too hard to spread. Definitely the way to go!

Carrot cake - the smaller, gluten-free and dairy-free version

One thing I really like about baking is that you can start off with elements that look rather horrible (take, for instance, this bowl of oil, vanilla essence and eggs - slimy) and end up with something wonderfully un-horrible.

An aside: If you want to know the most effective way to crack an egg, check out this post over at Cupcake Project. Nerdy yet practical.

I made carrot cake back in February and rather enjoyed it. This time I used the same recipe but with gluten-free flour and dairy-free honey icing. I also decided that I didn't need a giant cake, so I halved the recipe and just made a single layer cake in a smaller tin (I guess about 8 inches, but estimating was never really my thing!).

The icing had a lovely, almost pearlescent sheen to it at first... but before long it got tricky on me and separated out rather badly. I think it was the combination of the honey with the Nuttelex. It still tasted fine, but if I was making the same cake again I would ice it JUST before serving so it didn't have a chance for mischief!

Carrot Cake

I didn't use up all of my cream cheese icing on the gingerbread cupcakes so felt the need to use it on something else. I figure the most obvious candidates for cream cheese topping are banana cake or carrot cake. It was with some horror, though, that I realised I didn't have a go-to carrot cake recipe at hand, and decided I must remedy that!

I don't know why I like photos of freshly grated stuff. Just do. It looks new, bright.... something.


Layer cake! I used a recipe for "Most Wonderful Carrot Cake" from justapinch and just added my own already-made icing (see previous post). The recipe said to use 9 inch pans, but my only matching set is 10 inches... and I've had too many experiences of unevenly sized cake layers, so 10 inches it was!

First layer "plastered."

And second layer on. Size matching success = win.

I opted not to ice around the sides because it tends to just get messy and drip everywhere any time I try that sort of thing. I also kind of like being able to see the middle layer of icing peeking out.


The recipe said it was "very important to serve this cake at room temperature." But, dear recipe, I must disagree with you. I had my first piece at room temperature, and then another piece the following day out of the fridge (it just doesn't feel right leaving cream cheese out in the heat to melt...) and I say the cold one was better. Awesome even. How I wish there was some left!

Chocolate Orange Mousse Cake (gluten & dairy free)

I hosted a gluten and dairy-free afternoon tea on the weekend and had fun trying a couple of new new recipes, which both came out really well. This is the first one - a really rich chocolate orange mousse cake from The gluten, wheat & dairy free cookbook by Nicola Graimes.

I used Nuttelex as my dairy-free butter substitute. It's lighter in colour than butter, but it actually tastes pretty good.

This is the cake base, all ready to bake, and already looking pretty appetising.


I used 70% dark Lindt chocolate to make the mousse. It felt a little wrong melting down such nice quality chocolate, but it's the most reliably dairy free chocolate I could source (that isn't just a gross chocolate substitute).


As I was separating my four eggs I was lamenting the fact that I would probably end up throwing the unused portion away. Then I read the recipe properly and found that I would actually be using both parts. Yay! Also, look how orange those yolks are.


Yet another orange ingredient - the rind of two oranges in fact.


Crazy things happen to eggs when you beat them for long enough. It's like magic. Here's before.


And after. Crazy.


After I'd mixed up the mousse and spread it across the cake base I put it in the fridge to set overnight. It probably didn't need that long, but that's how long it got. Here's the finished product, decorated with a sprinkling of extra orange rind.


The verdict from my husband was that this cake tasted like Jaffas. You wouldn't know it didn't have dairy or gluten in it if nobody told you. Unless you were very, very perceptive. What I mean to say is that it was really good.