I hate coffee, but I couldn’t help but be impressed with this Frothy Coffee Cappuccino Cake my boyfriend made as his second ever cake for Mother’s Day (he made his first cake last year).

He adjusted this recipe from Good Food magazine to skip the walnuts for extra froth and used Tesco Finest Costa Rican coffee because of the chocolate and spice notes of the blend. The Good Food recipe calls for light soft brown sugar, but in future I’d be tempted to mix this with muscovado for a richer coffee colour on the cake. The recipe as Jon made it is below:

Ingredients

• 250g pack butter, softened
• 250g soft brown sugar plus 5 tbsp extra for drizzle and icing
• 300g self-raising flour
• 4 eggs
• 200ml strong cold coffee (Tesco Finest Costa Rican worked well)
• 500g tub mascarpone
• cocoa powder or drinking chocolate to decorate

 Method

1. Pre-heat the fan oven to 160c
2. Cream together the butter and 250g of sugar before adding the eggs, flour and half the coffee. Divide this evenly between two greased and lined sandwich tins and bake for 25 mins.
3. Mix the left over coffee with 3 tbsp of sugar and when the cake has cooled, drizzle 2 tbsp of the mixture on each half of the cake.
4. Cream together the marscapone, left over coffee and 2 tbsps of sugar, using half the mixture to sandwich the sponge layers and half to top the cake before dusting with the cocoa powder for a frothy coffee look.

I used to buy double chocolate cookies from the supermarket as a treat but they’ve either changed the recipe or the baking method recently as they’re just not as chewy as they used to be. Once you get into crunchy territory, I think you’re talking biscuit not cookie.

So after a bit of playing around with quantities of ingredients, I came up with my recipe for this triple chocolate cookie which uses white, milk and dark chocolate instead of cocoa powder for more chew and chocolate. You can make the dough in advance and keep it in the fridge for up to 48 hours if you need to.

Ingredients

• 125g lightly salted butter
• 75g light brown sugar
• 75g granulated sugar
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 medium egg
• 60g white chocolate, roughly chopped
• 60g milk chocolate, roughly chopped
• 60g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
• Pinch of salt
• 240g plain flour

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Cream together the butter, sugar, vanilla extract and egg using an electric whisk if you have one (it saves a lot of effort) then add in the salt and sugar until all the ingredients are well mixed and combined.

Stir through the chopped chocolate, I like a mix of sizes so you get some chunky bits but flavour well-distributed throughout then knead together to form a solid dough.

Chill for at least two hours to allow the dough to settle, then split into about 16 equal pieces and cook on non stick baking trays for around 15 mins, maybe a bit more if you like  bit of crunch in your cookie.

This Pimm’s Drizzle cake is the perfect treat to serve at a picnic or barbecue on a sunny day. It just smells of summer and looks absolutely beautiful.

Ingredients

225g unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
4 eggs
225g self-raising flour, sifted
zest and freshly squeezed juice of 1 orange
zest and freshly squeezed juice of 1 lemon
Handful of mint, finely chopped
150ml Pimm’s no1
Strawberries, lemon and mint to decorate.

Method

1)      Preheat your oven to 160 ºC  for a fan oven,  180ºC or gas mark 4 for standard ovens.

2)      Cream together butter and sugar until smooth and pale, then whisk in the eggs one at a time.

3)      Fold in the flour until smooth then stir in zest, chopped mint and 50ml of Pimm’s.

4)      Put into loaf tin and bake for about 50 mins.

Mix the juice of the orange and lemon with the 100mils of Pimm’s you have left and when cake is baked, prick it over the top and slowly pour the juice on while it is still hot allowing it to soak in.

Allow to cool, decorate and eat.

Sweet treats for your cariad?

It’s Dydd Santes Dwyenwen/St Dwynwen’s Day tomorrow (a bit like a Welsh Valentine’s Day) so how better to show some love than by baking someone some Welsh cakes, or pice ar y maen. It’s a traditional recipe which couldn’t be easier to make but which always goes down a treat in my house. I’ve made some to take into work with me tomorrow- along with a ginger cake which I just fancied trying out- because we’re holding a joint celebration with Burns’ Night.

To make Welsh cakes you need a heavy, flat griddle (I use one which belonged to my great-grandmother) though a bakestone will do the same job. The you also need the following ingredients:

225g self-raising flour

110g butter (some go half butter and half lard but I save my lard for birds)

85g caster sugar

A handful of raisins (more or less according to taste)

1 medium egg

Milk

Extra butter for greasing

In a mixing bowl, rub together the flour and fat until you have something that looks like crumbs with no lumps of fat showing then stir in the sugar and raisins. Beat your egg then mix it with the dry ingredients to form dough. At this stage, my dough isn’t usually doughy enough, so I add in a tiny bit of milk at a time until I can bind it into a dough that I can roll and work with.

Roll your dough out on a floured surface until it’s about half a centimetre thick and then cut circles out using a cutter. Welsh cakes normally have a frilly edge and though I normally use a cutter which is about  4inches in diameter, this time I will be using one which is 3 1/16^th inch (sorry, I can’t type fractions!) because you can make extra cakes that way which is good if you have lots of people eating them and you only have one egg left! Made with a normal sized cutter this recipe makes about 8 cakes.

When your dough is made and your cakes are cut, grease your griddle and fry each cake for two or three minutes on each side until they are golden brown, though they taste fine if they go a little darker.

I like my cakes pretty much straight off the griddle with a cup of tea while they are still hot and buttery, but they will last a few days in an airtight tin. In university, my housemate’s Mamgu made us enough to fill a 5kg cake tin and we lived off those for weeks. They got a little stale but they were fine washed down with tea!

I made some Rocky Road/Fridge Cake for work this week (publishing involves a lot of cake) and since people seemed to like it quite a lot I thought I’d share the recipe.

It’s really easy to make, and you can keep it in the fridge for a few days so it’s great If you need to make something in advance. To be honest, it’s pretty much just fat and sugar, so it would probably last a really long time if you could stop yourself eating it.

200g rich tea biscuits

125g butter

3 tablespoons of golden syrup

200g dark chocolate

100g milk chocolate

100g mini marshmallows

1. Bash up the rich tea biscuits in a clear sandwich bag until you fairly equal parts of biscuit dust (crumbs, I suppose…) and small pieces of biscuit. I use a rolling-pin, which I find quite therapeutic, but if you want to be super bookish then I guess you could smash up the rich tea biscuits with a hard back book. When you have them as you like them, pop them in a big mixing bowl to wait for the wet ingredients.
2. Melt the butter into a pan over a very low heat, and when it is all liquid (or near enough) add in the golden syrup and stir over the heat until they are melted together. When they are, take the buttery goodness off the heat and add in the chocolate. I like to have it ready broken into squares. I don’t add the chocolate when the pan is on the heat as it can burn and then it will never melt.
3.  Tip half the chocolate mixture into the biscuits and mix until they are all covered. Then add in the marshmallows and mix some more.
4.  Squash the mixture firmly into a baking tin so that it’s quite densely packed and when you’re happy with it, pour the other half of the chocolate mix across the top and spread out.
5.  Pop in the fridge until cold, then enjoy the chocolatey biscuit goodness with a good book and a nice cup of tea.

My current alternative to biscuits and tea

So apparently biscuits and English breakfast tea, combined with a sedentary day’s reading, though delicious and enjoyable, don’t make for the healthiest lifestyle. Drat. I’ve been feeling a little lacklustre, so decided to diversify my snack range. Instead of my usual book, biscuit and tea, I’ve been trying a range of caffeine free teas and vitamin filled nibbles.

My current favourite is Pukka’s Detox Tea with aniseed, cardamom, fennel and liquorice root. Unlike most herbal teas which smell great but taste like pond water, the tea has a really nice flavour- a subtle sweetness. Combined with the slightly salty taste of the edamame beans, you’ve got a full snack spectrum there without any pesky crumbs in your book. Result!

I bought the Little Paris Kitchen cookbook by Rachel Khoo a few months ago, having watched her series and seriously considered moving to Paris as a result. Fortunately a trip through Charles de Gaulle airport on my way home from Lisbon reminded me of the less charming aspects of Paris before I put down a deposit on a flat in the City of Light. I have never met such rude airport staff.

As I am trying to cut back on my cake intake at the moment, I couldn’t make the Madeleines with the lemon curd and raspberry which would have been much simpler to eat while reading, so made the oeufs en cocotte instead (recipe here). Yummy, but runny, so find something to prop your book on.

Oeuf en Cocotte

I had lots of plans for how I would spend the six weeks living alone. One idea was Pilates every other day to sort out the book belly before it became a problem but I ended up making these instead. Exercise has never really been my thing.

They are really easy and taste absolutely amazing. I have to take them to work because I’ve already eaten about half.

Ingredients

• 200g salted butter
• 300g golden caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 200g plain flour
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150 g raspberries
• 150g chopped white chocolate

Method

1. Melt the butter over a very low heat to avoid the salt burning, then when it’s all clear, stir in half the white chocolate.
2. Cream the sugar and the eggs together until they are fluffy, then fold in the chocolate mixture, vanilla extract and the plain flour to make a thick batter.
3. Pour the batter into a brownie tin then stud with the remaining chocolate and the raspberries.
4. Bake at gas mark 4/160 Celsius for 40 minutes or until a fork comes out clean.

I’m between books at the moment. I finished Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin yesterday and can’t decide what I should move on to. It’s beginning to worry me. I had to take a magazine on the bus this morning… I don’t know how I’ll cope tomorrow.

Natasha Solomon’s Baumtorte

There are a few foods in this world that I love more than the humble pancake- my preferred version being the crepe and not the Scotch or American styles. I used to spend far too much time cooking them as a teenager, to the point that my Dad asked me whether I was studying the art of pancake making as a form of zen.

In honour of pancake day, one of my favourite days of the year, I’ve been wracking my brain to think of a book which fully extolls the virtues of the humble pancake but I was stumped. Please let me know if you can think of one.

I did however think that the baumtorte in Mr Rosenblum’s List might be perfect for this kind of occasion, I think it is good to have happy rememberances of people, as well as sad ones.

You may remember that I had planned to cook this myself, but sadly I forgot to get the recipe before I passed the bookon to an eager recipient. Never fear! Natasha Solomon herself has come to my rescue with her blog and a recipe in The Times.

My pancake mountain

So until I write my own novel in which pancakes and all things nice are heavily featured, please feast your eyes on my contribution to unhealthy eating. I hope you are enjoying feasting on your own pancakes as well.