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!