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!

Lorna's Devil's Food Cake

Been a little while since i last made a meeting due to the utter chaos of life around the holiday period, but it was lovely to be back and see everyone again! For the occasion i made a Devil's Food Loaf Cake. Nom.

Ingredients:

50g cocoa powder
230ml water
100g butter, softened
200g sugar
2 eggs
175g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1tsp bicarb of soda
1tsp vanilla extract

Method:

Preheat the oven to 160C, and grease and line a large loaf tin.

In one bowl mix the coca with the water to a "smooth" paste (it looks a bit frothy and weird, but just do the best you can), and in another bowl beat the butter with the sugar and vanilla then beat in the eggs one at a time. Add the half the flour, the bicarb and the baking powder to the butter mix, then half the cocoa paste. Mix well, then mix in the rest of the flour and cocoa paste, stir until just combined.

Pour into your loaf tin, and bake for about 40 minutes. Leave it in the tin until completely cool, then turn out.

Jen's Chocolate Digestives

For Cake Club's guilty pleasures theme, I decided to make chocolate digestives. My reason for making these was simple; I love eating them! 

More like hobnobs than digestives? 

Ingredients

•  4oz/100g wholewheat flour

•  4oz/100g medium oatmeal 

•  2oz/50g soft brown sugar

•  1 teaspoon baking powder

•  pinch of salt

•  4oz/100g butter

•  1 tablespoon of milk to mix

Method

I mixed together all of the dry ingredients and rubbed in the butter. The first time I made these, I used my fingertips and got a dry breadcrumb texture. The second time, for speed I used a food mixer and the dough came out quite wet.

Next, the recipe (by Gary Rhodes), told me to add up to 2 tablespoons of milk to make a soft dough. As my first batch was dry, I did add the recommended measure of milk (2 tablespoons), but for the batch made in the mixer I only added a very small amount, certainly no more than 1 tablespoon. For the record, I preferred the texture of the biscuits with less milk in.

Next I wrapped the dough in clingfilm and refrigerated for 15 minutes to firm the mix.

When rolling the dough, Mr. Rhodes recommended that it should be rolled between two pieces of clingfilm to prevent sticking and cracking. This worked well and would use this technique again.

I rolled the dough to a thickness of about 5 mm and cut out circles using a cutter with a 6 cm diameter. This produced about 11 biscuits.

I used a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper that I lightly greased with butter to bake the biscuits on. I baked them for about 20 mins at 180ºC (gas mark 4/350ºF).

When cooled, I melted about 200 g of milk chocolate and spread a generous amount on each biscuit. When cooling, I used a metal cake tester to drag vertical and then horizontal lines through the chocolate to make the standard chocolate digestive pattern. At this point I realised I had been a bit too generous with the chocolate - the lines were much more effective on the biscuits with a thinner layer! 

I then popped the finished biscuits in the fridge to completely set the chocolate, and then stored them in a plastic container at room temperature. 

Charlie's Peanut Butter Squares

Ingredients

For the base:

50g dark muscovado sugar

200g icing sugar

50g unsalted butter

200g smooth peanut butter

For the topping:

200g milk chocolate (although I used 200g plain and 100g milk and most of us thought this tasted nice!)

100g plain......see above!!!

1 tbsp unsalted butter

Method - from 'How to be a Domestic Goddess" Nigella Lawson

Stir all ingredients for base together until everything starts to come together and you have a sandy mixture that sticks together when you press it to the side of the bowl with your spoon. Press the mixture into a lined brownie tin (the recipe said 1x23cm square but I used a rectangle one and they were fine!) and make the surface as smooth as possible.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a microwave on medium for about 2 minutes....in my microwave it took nearly 3 though so just ding it for a few seconds at a time and check!

Spread on base and put in fridge to set. 

February - Guilty Pleasures

Well, January was an incredibly guilt-free month for us, so in order to bring balance to the cakeiverse February was all about the guilt! Bakers were asked this month to bake and bring something inspired by their guilty pleasure, whether that was something they know the shouldn't eat, but absolutely love to, or a TV show they secretly love, or an obsession they don't like to admit to.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of sweets and no savouries this month. Anna baked us some Polish pastries, Charlie made some tasty Peanut Butter Squares, Claire baked and decorated some super-cute Lego-Head Cake Pops, Jen baked some very professional looking Chocolate Digestives, Joy baked some Peanut0Butter and Nutella Cookies, Laura made us some Millionaire's Shortbread, Lorna baked a Devils Food Cake, Mary-Anne baked some delicious Portuguese Custard Tarts, Ruth brought us two amazing treats this month; the first was her Pillows of Heaven (PB and Golden Syrup Sarnies) and the second an amazing Almond and Cherry Cake, decorated to look like Van Gogh's Starry Night, Sally bought us some un-baked Cake Mix so we could all lick the bowl, and I made some Mars Bar and Salt and Vinegar Crisp Brownies.