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!