Happy Birtday - chocolate beetroot bundt

I have had am amazing Bundt tin for a while now and I've been waiting for a reason to use it. This volcano birthday cake for my friend Claire was my excuse. I have had a lot of delicious beetroot from the Fern Verrow the Biodynamic veg stall I work on and Claire loves chocolate so I mashed a couple of recipes together to create this... it's low fat and very good for you, with only a couple of ounces of fat in. It's just a shame I can't spell.

11/01/2010 My birthday! No.2

I always complain that no one makes me a birthday cake. I am so ungrateful! But this year my friend Claire (we used to do the Columbia Road cake stall together) made me this rat inspired bejeweled heart shaped masterpiece. It was delicious Victoria sponge with jam and buttercream. Why rat? Below is a photo of the rat mother-with-rat-babies that Claire made me for my present. Nuf said.

05/01/2010 My birthday!

This is the spread I put on for my party. The food was savoury and sweet. I made some cumin flatbread with 4 dips; houmous, beetroot, yoghurt and mustard, roast garlic, onion & yoghurt and black bean).



For the sweet stuff I made last chance mince pies. The above picture was the vegan plate which included gingernuts and below is the buttery plate where I made mincemeat and almond rolls as well as pies.



Below are some ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) biscuits. I made these for the first time a couple of months before my birthday to use up some ingredients in my too full baking drawer and thought they were so delicious that I should share them with my friends. I put walnuts in the first batch I made but these are the more traditional type.



This stolen was the triumph of the evening. I used Dan Lepards recipe with my left over home made marzipan. I had wanted to make it in time for Christmas but was too tired and lazy! So made it for the party instead. I haven't made it before, but it was well worth it and I think it should become a regular part of my Christmas baked goods package that I give my family.

Chocolate Guinness Cake 21/11/09

This is the cake I made for my brother in laws 40th birthday.
I used to make it a lot for the cake stall at Columbia Road. It is the Nigella recipe from feast and is really easy because you can do it all in a saucepan!
When I worked at Cafe Oto I amended the recipe and make it with Pitfield Porter instead - so any stout would work wonderfully. I might try it with Newcastle brown...



My friend Jo recently asked me to make the cake for one of her friends as a birthday present and I remembered how amazing it looked with loads of white candles on top.

05/01/2005 The root of baking

This is the cake my mum made me for my 22nd birthday. She taught me all I know and encouraged me to bake when I was little. I used to be wowed by her beating arm - so fast! I think I've caught up to her now.

05/05/2007 Rhubarb and ginger cake

I adapted a Nigel Slater recipe to make this cake and because I'm silly, I didn't write the exact recipe down so have never been able to repeat it quite like this first time.
When I made it I was a little too eager and took it out of the tin too soon so it broke and one third fell on the floor. My flatmates were more than pleased to eat this bit. The rest was then eaten on a bench in Tring by 4 greedy girls.

23/09/2009 Baked Po-cake-o

The story behind this cake is a strange one. I was talking about making my friend Jane a cake for her birthday and Yuki at my work told me about a book her friend has that has potato cakes in it, as in a cake that looks like a potato, rather than the the Irish ones. She said they look like soiled potato's out of the ground. I thought this was an incredible idea, and very weird. I got a little carried away with the idea of a baked potato cake and here is the result...



I baked a wholemeal sponge cake fashioned it into a potato shape then covered it in buttercream, adding more on top. I then rolled marzipan with the bottom side in cocoa. I then wrapped the potato in it's marzipan jacket and artfully drizzled/ spread it with melted dark chocolate and put it in the fridge. I then slit and pushed it as you would a normal jacket.



I charmed the man in the kebab shop and he gave me a takeaway carton. You can see the scale of the potato because it's busting out of the tray. I grated marzipan to make the cheese and I had made marzipan beans the night before so that they hardened. I then heated up some jam and mixed the 'beans' in. Jacket po-cake-o with cheese and beans was born!




I finished it off with a plastic fork and took it to the pub for Jane to eat!

21/05/2009 Giant fondant fancy

I had never made fondant icing, and it took me a while to find a recipe that I thought would create the right effect. As this photo shows, it melted the buttercream a bit and splurged all over the place.



The cake was an angel sponge. I sliced each layer in half and sandwiched jam and buttercream alternately. then I covered the whole lot in the buttercream which a big mound in the centre. Then fondant icing, and chocolate drizzled on top.



This is a giant fondant fancy that i made for my friend Kate's birthday. This was the first in my themed birthday cake stretch that I had this year. The photo's are a bit shaky, but hopefully you get the idea.

06/10/2009 Chocolate Brazil nut cake

These are some bad pictures of a grown-up looking chocolate loaf cake that I made for Erik's birthday. I put chopped Brazil nuts and silver balls on top for decoration. I had had a run of themed birthday cakes so by comparison this looked a bit serious. It travelled to the pub with me, and got a little squished on the way.

22/08/09 Chocolate custard cake

This is a chocolate custard cake (from Nigella) that I made for my sister's birthday. It was pretty short notice, and I'd been meaning to make this cake for ages. It was nice, and very simple because you can do it all in a blender, but I think I could make it a little bit more custardy and there was a lot, lot, lot of icing. I took it to Harvey Nichols for after our tea and all the waiting staff were very jealous.

06/10/2007 Baked Alaska Flood

This is the baked Alaska that i made my friend Erik for his 30th birthday. It was my first attempt, can you tell? I make a Victoria Sponge and then plonked a tub of ice cream over the top, covered this with meringue and baked it. You can just see the sponge peeking out of the bottom. Success!

21/05/07 Victoria sponge and fresh blackberry 'jam'

This is a traditional Victoria sponge, except for the fresh blackberry jam. It's not really jam, more like stewed blackberries, hence the juice! I went around to see Kate for breakfast on her birthday with a few other friends and she got a lot of deer-related presents (she's a collector) so the photo's are more deer than cake-centric.

21/05/06 walnut layer cake

This cake is a lot of firsts. This is the first recipe I ever made of Nigel Slaters. My then-flatmate Quil, had The Kitchen Diaries and I got very into reading it. It was also the first time I'd heard of golden caster/granulated sugar. From the picture where the cake has been cut you can see that it was a little bit sad in the middle, but that just left more room for icing! Now I'm writing this, this was a cake of firsts in many ways. I think this marks the time when I realised that i wanted to be a baker. Or 'make cakes' as i usually say. I made this for my friend Kate. This started the trend for me making everyone a cake for their birthday and as normal as this sounds, i didn't do that before this one.