Lorna's Pecan Cake

For our Cake 'n' Bake charity picnic/tea party i decided to make a pecan cake, with fudge icing, decorated with lovely glittery butterflies! 

So shiny!

Anyway, too the  recipe;

Ingredients:

Cake:

150g margarine, softened

120g caster sugar

3 eggs

270g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 heaped tbsp golden syrup

45ml milk

50g pecans, chopped

Icing:

30g butter

15ml milk

20g brown sugar

2 tsp golden syrup

200g icing sugar

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C, and line a deep 8" round tin (a 7" would also be fine but you'll get a tall cake).

Cream together  the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs one at a time. If you want, add a squirt of vanilla extract but it's not necessary if you don't have any in - the cake will still be super tasty! Beat in the golden syrup, then stir in half the flour along with all the baking powder. Mix in the milk, then the remainder of the  flour. Finally stir in the pecans until well distributed. Bake for 40-45 minutes (if you're using a 7" tin then increase the cooking time by 10-15 minutes).

For the fudge icing, melt together the butter, syrup and brown sugar (i blasted them in the microwave for 30 seconds). Then stir in the icing sugar and milk. Beat until smooth. It will be a little runny while it's still warm, but will solidify as it cools.

When the cake is cooked, take it out of the tine and let cool completely. Cut in half and spread your icing in the middle, then sandwich back together.

I finished my cake with some melted dark chocolate, and glittery butterflies (made from white chocolate modelling paste). You could alternatively top with more fudge icing, or just a simple glace icing.

Birds Vs Bees Bake Sale

A few weeks ago we were contacted by our new friends at the National AIDS Trust to ask us to take part in their Bake Aware Campaign. Raising funds and awareness for the charity through baking? Just our cup of tea!

The campaign aims to get people talking about the birds and the bees, and so that became the theme for our bake sale! We split into two teams, Teams Birds and Team Bees, and a number of our members donated baked goods to the cause. On Sunday 19th May, Joy and I spent the day selling cakes to the lovely folks at the Cambridge Nursing Centre.

Representing Team Birds:
Jennie's Duckie Shortbread
Wendi's Snicker-Dodos
Stacey's Chicken and Bacon "Sausage" Rolls, Birdy Jam Tarts, and Bird Cake Pops

Representing Team Bees:
Catherine's Fridge Cake and Guinness Cake
Joy's Honey and Chocolate Cupcakes and Honey Spiced Cupcakes
(And standing in for Ruth, who had to drop out of Team Bees at the last minute...) Stacey's Bee Cake Pops

We had a fantastic time at the sale, and raised a respectful £47.15 for the charity - not bad for the club's first ever bake sale! If you too would like to raise funds for the National AIDS Trust, just head over to their website to find out how to get involved.

Happy Baking!

Baby-Cakes

Our friends at Baking Mad got in touch recently to invite us to join them in their latest campaign - celebrating the impending arrival of the Royal baby! We were asked to place a guess as to whether we thought our Duke and Duchess would be having a little prince or a little princess – Cake’n’Bake Club style!

Now, being a Royal celebration, we could have gone for a number of recipes from www.bakingmad.com. They have some great recipes for scones, or a Traditional Victoria sponge, but we went for cupcakes. (I especially like their chocolate cupcake recipe!)

After whipping up a batch of yummy cupcakes, I headed to the club meeting armed with two piping bags of butter cream – one pink and one blue! At our meeting, members were asked to “vote” by decorating their cupcake either pink for a princess or blue for a prince:

Once all of the votes had been cast (and the spare cupcakes consumed!!) two of our more mathematical members set about displaying them in graph form to indicate our results:

We think pink! The royal baby is due in just a few weeks now, so it won’t be long to wait to find out if we’re right. In the meantime though, if you wanted to play along and make your own cakey poll, Baking Mad have a great video tutorial on how to make cupcakes :-)


Happy baking!

Laura's Speculoos

Speculoos - the spiced biscuits from our Eurovison, these are belgian biscuits

The recipe is exactly what is written on this blog post

Ingredients

140g butter at room temperature
80g caster sugar
120g dark brown sugar
4g four spices
270g plain flour
3g baking soda
2g salt
1 egg
1-2 tbsp water

In the bowl of your Kitchen Aid, work the butter with the paddle until creamy and airy, add both sugars and keep on working the dough until well combined.  Mix together the flour, spices, salt and baking soda and add them to the mix. When the dough is homogeneous, add the egg and eventually a little water.

Unlike cookie dough, the Speculoos dough will be very soft and hard to get together. With a serving spoon, drop it on a piece of cling film and fold it in then put it in the freezer for 2 hours.

Once the dough is firm, preheat your oven to 150° C (300°F) then line the dough on parchment paper or silicon mat into a square or rectangular shape 2mm thick.

If you have trouble lining your dough, cover it with a piece of cling film at least the size of your baking tray. This way, the dough won’t stick to your rolling pin, you’ll just have to remove it delicately once the dough is properly lined.

Bake it for 20 minutes.

When you take it out of the oven, the dough is still soft when you press it with your finger. It’s normal and it will be very helpful as it will allow you to cut the biscuits.

Use a sharp long knife and start cutting the biscuits.

You can also use star, heart, animals cutters if you want to have more fun. In that case, keep all the leftovers in an airtight box. You can use them to replace Digestive biscuits in your Cheesecake base! Let them cool down and enjoy them the way you like them!

A couple of notes.

The recipe calls for four spices which is a french spice mix called quatre epices. I made this up myself using white pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger, allspice and cloves in a ratio of about 4:2:2:2:2:1. First time I didn't believe the recipe when it said I needed the 4g of spice the first time I made them but I would say you need that if not slightly more.

The dough is quite tricky to handle and seemed to break a lot when rolling out. I cut it into pieces before baking rather that marking and breaking after the fact as suggested in the blog post

Laura's Kourapiedes (or Greek Butter Biscuits)

First Kourapiedes, this recipe if from Faling Cloudberries a lovely cookbook

The Ingredients are

250g Butter
2 Tbsp of Icing sugar
1 Egg Yolk
1 tsp of Vanilla Extract
1 Tbsp of Brandy (optional)
300g plain flour (Sometimes I have needed more to get the dough to hold)
1 tsp baking power

Beat the butter till light and fluffy (this takes 5-10minutes in my Kitchenaid).
Add the icing sugar and continue beating
Add the yolk and vanilla
Add the brandy
Add the flour and baking powder (The book says to sift but I generally don't)
Beat the ingredients together till they from a dough

Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes (I did it overnight and it took an hour or so to soften once it came out of the fridge)

Take roughly walnut sized balls of dough and place on baking sheet, they don't spread much so you don't need too much space between each one

Bake in an oven at 180 for 20 minutes (My first batch were a little brown I suspect 160 in a fan oven would be fine or less time)

June - Marvellous Miniatures

We have been neglecting this blog a little lately - we must resolve that! I'm typing this on my phone on a tea break at work whilst enjoying some of last night's leftovers, so please forgive the inevitable spelling and grammatical errors!

Back at our May meeting, Ana suggested that we have a feast of bite-sized portions in June, and so the theme was set as "marvelous minis", and it truly was marvelous!  (Although we don't think that any less was consumed!) We also welcome three new members this month, hurrah!

So, the role-call: Aileen decorated some cupcakes to look like super cute little big cakes, Ana herself baked some lovely mini potato cakes,  Laura made some greek butter biscuits, Lorna baked mini chocolate and beetroot cupcakes, Mary-Anne flew the savoury flag with some prosciutto and parmesan dough balls and some parmesan cookies, Ruth baked some delicious creme brule flavoured mini cupcakes, Sally baked some mini banana cupcakes, Sian baked some teeny lemon merringue pies, Stacey M baked some mini Victoria sponge cakes, I made dough balld with garlic butter and pesto, Tom make some sandwich cookies, and Wendi baked some butterfly shaped banana bread! Nom!

Birds vs Bees Bake Sale for National AIDS Trust

We at the Cambridge Cake’n’Bake Club were recently contacted by the National AIDS Trust to ask for our help in raising funds and awareness through their Bake Aware initiative – a very exciting, and very tasty, initiative to encourage people to talk about the Birds and the Bees, and HIV awareness.

There are 100,000 people living with HIV in the UK, and 1 in 4 people don’t know they have it. Those who do have it still face discrimination in school and in the workplace, and this is what NAT are trying to stop.

On Sunday 19^th May, Cake’n’Bake Club will be holding a Birds Vs Bees bake sale at the Cambridge Nursing Centre, 5 High Street , Chesterton , from 10am – 2pm. We’d love it if you could come along, treat yourself to some of our baked goods (and they are good!) and help us to raise funds for this very worthy cause. We’ve split into two teams, Teams Birds and Team Bees, and each team will be competing to raise the maximum funds for the charity. We’re going to put in all the hard work in our kitchens – for you; it’s going to be a piece of cake :-)

Please feel free to help our cause by spreading the word! 

Happy Baking

May - Eurovision Bake Contest

Hello!

Sorry it's been a little quiet around here lately... we're all busy little bees!

A few meetings ago, whilst enjoying our tea and cake, the topic of conversation moved onto the Eurovision Song Contest, and how atrociously fabulous it is. So, we decided that in May, the month of the song contest, we would host our own Eurovision Bake Contest! Each member got to pick a country from the list of eligible countries, and they baked something to represent that country in the contest. We then each voted for our top three countries; giving 12 points to first place, 10 points to second place and 8 points to third place, and the country with the most votes was dubbed the overall winner of the competition, and received a commemorative mug! (Which I foolishly forgot to take, so there will be an awards ceremony at our next meeting!)

Anna, representing Greece, baked a lovely honey cake; Jennie chose to represent Hungary with a traditional apple pie; Joy contributed our savoury course this month with her Italian bread sticks, homemade pesto, and some sun-dried tomato biscotti; Laura S represented Belgium with some very traditional biscuits; Mary-Anne baked some traditional Israeli honey-dough pastries for her entry; Nathalie, representing her native France, baked some delectable hazelnut madaleines; Ruth baked for Azerbaijan with some delicious baklava; Sally, despite not believing that her country, Moldova, actually exists, baked some delicious custard bread rolls; Stacey M also based her bake on apple pie, but this time with a cupcake twist for The Netherlands; I represented Sweden with a Princesse Torta; and Tom, representing our home and country great Britain, baked a delicious carrot cake in the shape of Big Ben! (Sort of...)

The bakes were eaten, the votes were counted, and the winner of the Cake'n'Bake Club Eurovision bake Contest 2013 was... France! Congratulations to first-timer Nathalie on this monumental achievement. (And I promise to bring your mug to our June meeting!!)

I'll post the photos a little later, but for now - happy baking!

 

Tom's Honey and Spice cake

This month's theme was April's fool.  I'm afraid my cake wasn't really a fool at all, even though I did make it in a torus shape.  Instead I made a card jester's hat to go in the middle!  You could add some colouring to the icing to make it a bit different.

Ingredients:

8oz plain flour
4oz butter
3oz caster sugar
3oz clear runny honey
2oz finely chopped mixed candied peel
1 egg, beaten
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
1tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
grated zest of an orange
grated zest of a lemon

Method:

Butter a 7" square cake tin.

Sift the flour and spices together, then add the sugar and zest. Rub the butter in to form a crumbly mixture. Mix in the egg and honey (if the honey is not very runny then warm it in the microwave for 30s or so). Dissolve the bicarb with 3 tablespoons of cold water then beat into the mixture until it is smooth. Stir in the mixed candied peel, and spoon into the tin.  Bake for about 30 minutes at 170C.  Leave to cool for 10 minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack.

The Icing:

4oz sifted icing sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons warm water

Sift the icing sugar then mix in the water and juice to make a thin icing. Put a big plate under the cake and pour the icing over the top, letting it run down the sides a bit.

April - April Fools!

Since we did Easter last April, this year we went for an April Fool's theme.  The idea was to make something a bit different or surprising in some way.

Unfortunately Stacey (our usual all round awesome club organiser) couldn't make it due to illness so we did our best on our own.  I think we managed OK - cakes were brought and enjoyed.  The only major disaster was me forgetting the milk for the tea!

Without further ado, here are the bakes:

Laura made Chocolate Chip cookies, but with some surprise crisps in them!

Catherine also made chocolate chip cookies, her's had either coconut or cayenne in.

Ruth made an egg, chips and beans meal fashioned out of fruit!

This one's mine - a honey and spice cake with a jester's hat to make it foolish

Cupcakes with pretend meatballs and spaghetti topping

Lorna made scones which masqueraded as hot cross buns

All were delicious :).  And some were at least a little surprising!

Tom's Oven Scones

This month I decided to have another go at oven scones, something I've never had much success with.  I tried a different recipe from the one I usually use, this one is from the Good Housekeeping cookery book (1978 ed.).  Makes around 10-12 scones.

Ingredients

8oz self raising flour
1-2oz butter or baking margarine
¼ pint milk
1tsp baking power
pinch salt

This will make rather dull plain scones, you can add various flavourings with the flour - I added some chopped dates and almonds. The Book recommends adding 2oz of your flavouring.

Method

Pre-heat oven to 230°C, and warm a baking sheet or two in the oven.

Sift together the flour, salt, and baking power (it does make a difference!), then rub in the butter or margarine to make a fine breadcrumb texture.  Add enough of the milk to make a soft dough.  Turn out onto a floured surface and knead very lightly until it forms an reasonably evenly textured lump.  Roll out to about 2cm thickness and cut into rounds with a cutter or triangles with a sharp knife - don't twist the cutter or use a knife which you have to saw at the dough to cut it; this will stop the scones from rising well.  Place on a warmed baking sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes at 230°C until well risen and browned.

My scones turned out much better than my previous attempts, but still weren't fantastic - they didn't rise very much - I think I used too blunt a knife to cut the dough up.  Let that be a warning to others!

Good luck with your own scones.

Ruth's Practice Makes Perfect. Maybe. MACAROONS!

Okay. So I tried to make macaroons. 
I have tried to make them before but they always came out awful.
This time was NO exception. Sigh. 

I even tried using the recipe from the Great British Bake off. Oh well. Here goes!! 

Ingredients:
110g egg whites (whites from approx 3 large eggs)75g caster sugar
125g ground almonds175g icing sugar

You will also need a food processor, a large bowl, spatula, sieve and whisk.

Measure out the ground almonds and icing sugar and put them into the food processor.  Turn it on and leave it on. 


Measure out the egg whites, macaroons need special measures.  

Egg whites are measured in grams seems a bit silly to me as surely you measure them in ml’s as a liquid but hey ho 110g egg whites = 110ml egg whites.

Maybe try out egg whites from 'Two Chicks'. The egg whites can be bought in Waitrose, Sainsburys, Tescos.  

Place them into a large bowl and whisk like you would a meringue.  As the mixture comes to soft peaks begin adding the caster sugar a third at a time until it’s all worked in and smooth and glossy.

You don’t need to whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks but they should be thick and glossy.
One of the wonderful things about macaroons are their fab colours – whatever takes your fancy.

Using gel paste colours is the best way to colour the mixture without changing the consistency.
Add a small amount of colouring to the meringue and mix in well.

Now you can turn off the Food Processor (and take your ear defenders off).
Sift into the meringue mixture half of the almond/icing sugar from the food processor.

Fold into the mixture using a spatula or metal spoon until it’s fully mixed in.
Sift in the final half.

The residue left in the sieve can be very grainy and hard so don’t force it through the sieve just discard it.

Fold in as before.

Now comes the tricky part,  you need to keep folding the mixture until it goes smooth and glossy.  By my reckoning this takes 1-2 minutes folding in a figure of 8.  This loosens the mixture until it is the right consistency.  You really don’t want to knock ten tons of air out of it but achieving the right point is important.

Hold your spatula above the bowl.  The mixture should run from it in a smooth ribbon.  If it’s jerky and breaking then it isn’t right yet.  Just watch out though you want to stop right at this point and go no further, otherwise you’ll have hugely spreading macaroons.


Add the mixture to a piping bag fitted with a plain wide round nozzle.

Prepare two baking tins lined with grease proof paper.

Pipe the macaroons onto the tray in small circles.  To begin with they will have a small peak on the top.  If you have the correct consistency that will soon flatten and you will have a tray full of perfectly smooth macaroons. 

If you are adding crystallised rose petals or violets for decoration then now’s the time to pop them on the top.

Now you need to set the trays aside for 30 minutes.  After this time they should have formed a slight ‘skin’ and you should be able to touch them with your fingertip.

Preheat the oven to 140c Fan/160c/Gas Mark 3.
Place the trays in the oven for 13 minutes.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool, still on the tray.  Good macaroons should be smooth and glossy with a good foot and not flat.

Sandwich together with a buttercream or ganache of your choice.  

Parma Violet Buttercream
1 large packet of Parma Violets, ground plus icing sugar to weigh a total of 125g250g butter, softened1 tbsp milk

Yeah. Mine didn't turn out so great. Never mind. Better luck next time. If I can be bothered!!! 


(Not mine)

March - Practise Makes Perfect!

Oooops, I'm a little late with this one and the recipes have started coming in already!!

A theme we've been toying with for a little while was for our bakers to try their hand at baking something they were not very good at - hence, practise makes perfect!

It could have easily been a disastrous month, with us all going home early, but it was far from it! Everything was definitely edible, and actually tasty! Hurrah!

Joy commented that collectively, the club are bad at beige.

Anna baked a Polish Tray Bake, Catherine baked a Chocolate Ginger Loaf, Clare baked a dairy-free Chocolate Cake, Joy baked some sausage rolls, Lorna baked some Danish Pastries, Lou baked some Cookies, Mary-Anne baked and decorated some cupcakes, Ruth baked some macaroons, I made croissants, and Tom baked Scones!

Lorna's Danish Pastries

You'd better clear a good 4 hours for this! It's not all work, a lot of roll, fold and chill for the pastry but it does take a while.

Ingredients:

Pastry:

500g white bread flour

360g butter, softened

1 sachet dried yeast

65g caster sugar

150ml lukewarm milk

2 eggs, beaten

Fillings + Toppings:

maple syrup

caremel sauce

pecans, chopped

100g icing sugar

Method:

Mix the flour and the sugar and rub in 60g of butter. Stir in the yeast, make a well in the centre and add the milk and eggs. Mix until combined to a dough. Knead for 15 minutes on the worktop until smooth and elastic. Place in a bowl covered with clingfilm and leave in a warm place to rise for 1 hour.

Tip out, and roll into a 8x14" rectangle. Lay on your worktop with so it's short and wide. Take half of the remaining butter (150g) and dot the right two-thirds of your dough with it. Then fold the left third (not buttered bit) end over, followed by the right third on top of that,  to end up with 3 layers o dough with butter in between each layer.

Seal the edges of the dough, turn 90 degrees (so the sealed edges are left and right as you see it). Roll out into a rectangle again maintaining, and repeat the same process. Once folded up, wrap in clingfilm and chill for 20 minutes. Roll out, fold up and chill 3 more times (same as before but no butter).

Finally you'll have some dough you can actually use! Cut into 4 equal portions, and shape each section into one of the below:

Pinwheels:

Roll into an 8" square, and cut into 4. With each small square, cut into the corners diagonally into the centre, but not all the way. Place some maple syrup in the middle and sprinkle with pecans. Then take alternate corners and fold into the middle to create a pinwheel.

Kites:

Roll into an 8" square and cut into 4 smaller squares. In two opposite corners make 2 cuts about 1/2" in, as if to be cutting out a smaller square from the one you have, but don't go all the way around. Put maple syrup and pecans in the middle, then lift each cut corner across the middle and over to the other side.

Crescents:

Roll into a 9" circle and cut into 4 quarters. For each quarter, place some caramel sauce along the long arc, and roll fat end to thin. Curve into a crescent shape.

Plaits:

Roll into a 6 x 11" square, and cut into four 3x5.5" rectangles. With each rectangle, lay it so it looks long and thin. along each side, make 4-5 evenly spaces cuts that go a third of the way in. Put maple syrup and pecans down the middle third, then fold in each strip alternately over the pecans to make a plait shape.

Lay your pastries out on a greased baking tray, and leave in a warm place for 30min-1hour until well risen.

Wash with beaten egg and bake at 220C for 15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Mix the icing sugar with a few teaspooons of water so it's pourable but thick, then drizzle over the pastries.

They are best eaten fresh, and can be frozen.

Stacey's MBS&V Brownies

MBS&V = Mars Bar, Salt and Vinegar. Bear with me.

When we decided that the theme for this month's bake would be "guilty pleasures", I knew exactly what mine would be based on: a delightfully disgusting habit I discovered as a young teenager. See I was a young teenager in the early 2000's, in the time before Jamie Oliver launched his attack on Turkey Twizzlers and before anyone even considered sending their kids to school with a healthy, nutritious packed-lunch. So my packed lunch usually consisted of a soggy sandwich, a packet of crisps (Salt and Vinegar, naturally) and a chocolate bar. I've never been overly fond of sandwiches, so that usually got binned, and I spent my later school years (without my mother's knowledge or consent, I should add!) lunching on mars bars and salt and vinegar crisps. But boy did I know how to make the most of it! I would break the mars bar up into chunks, and put these INSIDE the bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I would then take a chunk of mars bar out of the crisp bag, sandwich it between two crisps, and shove the whole lot in my mouth in one bite. I know, it sounds disgusting, but trust me, the combination of crispy, crunchy, salty crisps, with sweet, gooey mars bar is the tastiest contradiction ones tongue could ever know.

As I got older an wiser I started eating healthy lunches, but ever so often I'd treat myself to my tasty guilty pleasure... so that's why we ended up with Mars Bar and Salt & Vinegar brownies!

Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 40 minutes
Makes 12 brownies

Ingredients:
225g margarine
100g cocoa powder
3 mars bars
4 eggs
450g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g self raising flour
2 packets of salt and vinegar crisps

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4 (180) and line a square cake tin with greaseproof paper.
2. Melt the margarine in a saucepan over a low heat. Once completely melted, remove from the heat and stir in the cocoa powder until a thick, smooth mixture forms. Leave this to one side to cool.
3. Whilst the chocolate mixture is cooling, chop your mars bars into bite-sized chunks.
4. Tip the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract into a large mixing bowl and whisk at a high speed until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is thick, pale and creamy. Fold in the cooled chocolate mixture and the chunks of mars bar until the chocolate is all stirred through.
5. Add the flour to the bowl and fold in until just combined, then transfer the mixture into the prepare baking tin.
6. Crush the crisps into small chunks and sprinkle these over the top of the brownie mixture. Bake for 40 minutes, until firm to touch. Allow the brownie to cool in the tin before cutting into chunks.

Ruth's Guilty Pleasures, Cherry Van Gogh Cake.

Hello! Ruth P here,

I decided with little time that my guilty pleasure was undoubtedly 'The Antiques Roadshow'.

Having watched it as a child I have always been fascinated by old curiosities and of course their inevitable surprising value. I digress. 

I decided to re-create Van Gogh's, 'Starry Night' on a cake.

    This is the original!

 

It certainly took me a while and my baking cupboard is now a complete mess and I have just abut managed to remove all evidence of food colouring from my hands and nails. 

I also decided that the cake itself needed to be something I loved, so I set upon baking a cherry and almond sponge! 

Ingredients  8 oz (225 g) butter at room temperature  8 oz (225 g) caster sugar  4 large eggs, lightly beaten  8 oz (225 g) plain flour  ½ teaspoon baking powder  9 oz (250 g) glacé cherries, quartered  4 oz (110 g) ground almonds  a few drops almond essence  2 level tablespoons demerara sugar  1 tablespoon milk  Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4, 350°F (180°C). Cream the butter and sugar together until light, pale and fluffy. Gradually beat in the whisked egg a little at a time. Then sift the flour and baking powder together, and carefully fold this into the creamed mixture using a metal spoon. Toss the quartered cherries in together with the ground almonds, and carefully fold these into the cake, adding one or two drops of almond essence and the milk.  Now spoon the cake mix into the prepared tin, level off the top with the back of a spoon, then sprinkle with the demerara sugar. Bake the cake in the centre of the oven for 1 hour, cover with foil and continue cooking for a further 30 minutes, or until the cake has shrunk away from the side of the tin and the centre is springy to touch. Cool the cake in the tin for 15 minutes before turning it out on to a wire rack to cool. Store in a tin.  (I actually spooned the mix into two tins and reduced the cooking time to 40 mins)  TADAA!