BRUNEL BAKES

I have a little weird extra job at the moment. I am making cakes for the Brunel Museum's cafe. Business has dropped off a bit due to the inclement weather over Christmas and the New Year, but I was called to make 'cakes for 60' by the man that runs it, Robert.

And here they are:

Apparently they went down very well.

So I thought I'd share my recipes for them. The chocolate one is apparently Robert's favourite.

Double Chocolate Sandwich Cake

So you need:

2 x 21cm sandwich tins generously buttered and lined

Then you need:

225g unsalted butter that's very soft

225g caster sugar

4 large eggs

225g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

4tbsp cocoa powder

50g dark chocolate, grated

And for the filling:

200g full fat (of course) cream cheese

100ml double cream

4 tbsp cocoa powder

4 tbsp icing sugar

And white and dark chocolate to decorate.

So start by creaming your butter and sugar together. Add the eggs one at a time, with a spoonful of flour between each to help the mixture bind. Fold in the rest of the flour and add the chocolate and cocoa powder. Easy as pie. Divide the mixture between the two sandwich tins and pop into a preheated (to 180degrees) oven for about 25 minutes. The cakes will be coming away from the edges of the tin slightly and should spring back up when you touch them.Remove them from the oven and allow to cool in the tin on a wire rack for about 10 minutes before turning out.

Allow to cool completely before adding the topping and filling.

To make the filling... whip the double cream to soft peak and fold it into the cream cheese along with the icing sugar and cocoa powder. Beat all this together to loosen the mixture slightly. Taste to see if anymore icing sugar or cocoa is needed. Just add more to taste.

Spread two thirds of the mixture onto the top of one sponge and place the other on top. Top this one with the rest of the remaining mixture and grate a combination of white and dark chocolate on the top. Blimey. Chocolate fest.

And here's the finished product:

Next up is my store cupboard pineapple upside down cake

Here she is...

This is a store cupboard cake as it uses tinned pineapple. In two of its guises.

So you need:

1 23cm springform tin, buttered and lined

And for the cake you will need:

1 tin of crushed pineapple

1 tin of pineapple rings

250g self-raising flour

150g ground almonds

1 tsp baking powder

250g softened unsalted butter

250g light brown caster sugar

4 large eggs

a bit of vanilla extract if you fancy

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the eggs one at a time adding a spoonful of flour between each to help combine. Mix together the flour, almonds and baking powder and fold into the mixture along with the crushed pineapple.

For a camp flourish, drain the pineapple rings, and place them, artist-fashion, in the bottom of the buttered and lined spring form tin. Any arrangement will be nice. Carefully pour the mixture into the tin, being careful not to disturb the arrangement. Then bake in the oven for about an hour, though check after 45 mins. It could take up to an hour 15 mins, but that will depend on your oven.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin. I decided to brule the top of mine so after it was cook and removed from the tin and inverted, I sprinkled the top with golden caster sugar and popped under a hot grill for a minute or two to 'brule' the top.

NICE.

Finally for my MASSIVE traditional Victoria Sponge:

The basic recipe is the same as the chocolate cakes, just minus the chocolate and cocoa powder, and doubled. I used a 23cm silicon sandwich tin for this. It'll take about 30 mins in the oven.

To decorate, you will need:

300ml double cream

5 tbsp icing sugar

Good quality fruit jam, strawberry or raspberry is fine or anything that takes your fancy

A mixture of fresh fruit

Whip the cream with the icing sugar until you a have a stiff peak in the cream. Smear this over the top of one of the sponges. On the bottom of the other sponge, smear with any amount of jam you like! Arrange the fruit on the layer of cream, making sure they're not too near the edge. Place the other sponge, jam bottom down, on top of the fruit. For an extra flourish, cover the top in cream and artfully arrange strawberries on the top. Lovely.

This cake will serve between 16 and 20, depending on how greedy they are.

And for all this baking, I made £74.62. Nae bad.

FROM THE VEG BOX - WORKING DINNER

So, Jaimie is now working. Working hard for the money. So dinners aren't as leisurely as they once were, and a lot more 'grabbed between the two screens'. If you're interested he's been working on this little wonder.

But I still want to make sure we're eating proper like, even if it's quick.

So this is a little root vegetable curry that I knocked up. Can also be enjoyed without 3 computer screens.

2 onions

ginger about a thumb sized piece

3 garlic cloves

750g root veg - I used what we had in the veg box, so parsnip, cauliflower, carrot and potato

6 cardamon pods

2 tsp cumin seeds

3 tsp coriander seeds

2 tsp ground turmeric

1/2 tsp chilli powder

500ml veg or chicken sock

single cream

Peel and chop the onions into hunks and blitz in a food processor until you get a rough mince. This is thoroughly satisfying. Peel and grate the ginger and peel and finely slice the garlic cloves. Also, peel and roughly chop the roots into chunks.

Now the spices, remove the black seed from inside the cardamon pods and grind them up along with the cumin and coriander seeds.

Heat the oil in a large pan and soften the onions, so they don't go brown. Add the ginger and garlic and after a few minutes add the ground spices along with the turmeric and chilli powder. It looks awesome:

Cook this through until you can smell the waft of the spices then add all the chopped veg. Add 500ml of chick or veg stock and partially cover with a lid and leave to simmer gentle for about half an hour. Carefully stir in the cream but don't let it boil or it'll curdle. Check if it needs a little more of anything. And serve with basmati rice, all fluffy like, and some nan bread.

Why have brownies, when you can have....

BLONDIES!

I've only recently discovered these truly amazing things. I had huge cravings for Brownies when I was pregnant with Laika, and I'm sure if I'd have known about them I'd have gone wild for them. I recently made them as an experiment for the Sisters Burn Christmas fair, Sister Sledge for the cake stall:

(you can see them in the front middle!)

So here is my recipe for creating these lovely things. And here's some I made earlier:

200g white chocolate

300g light muscavado sugar

250g unsatled butter

4 eggs, beaten

200g plain flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

85g peanut butter

100g unsalted peanuts (optional)

This recipe makes about 10 generous pieces.

So, preheat your oven to 180 degrees. When I made these for the fair I did them in a commercial oven. If you can get hold of one of them, so much the better! Grease and line a square tin. Over a low heat, melt together the chocolate, butter and sugar and stir until melted and combined. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Thoroughly mix in the eggs. Add the flour, baking powder, peanut butter and if using, the peanuts. Mix together until combined. Spread this mixture into the tin.

Right, the amount of time this takes TOTALLY depends on your oven. You want them to be squidy in the middle and crisp on the outside. Timing this is difficult without overdoing the outsides, so you may have to play around with it. I reckon on anything up to 45 minutes, but have a look after about 25 minutes.

Cool in the tin, and then portion by cutting into squares. Then eat. Alone.

FROM THE VEG BOX - CANDLE LIT CELERIAC

Who says celeriac can't be sexy. Well, no one actually. But I thought I'd made the effort this evening for dinner, seeing as we were using up the remnants of the veg box and dinner was going to be soup. Nothing wrong with soup for dinner, it's just sometimes it feels a little underwhelming.

So I lit a candle, in the hope that would make it feel a little more... sophisticated.

But it turned out that the soup was actually rather good. It was a suggestion from Jaimie, but I cobbled together some ingredients and pulled it together. The apple in the recipe isn't very pronounced but gives the soup a really fresh after taste. Which is nice. I suggest adding a little lemon juice in this recipe. This is because I added a rather posh ingredient, lemon and thyme infused salt to be precise. I imagine not many people have this to hand. So a squeeze of lemon should do the trick.

So, here is my Candle-lit celeriac and apple soup recipe (serves 2/3)

1 onion, chopped

1/2 head of celeriac, peeled and chopped

1 bramley apple, peeled, cored and chopped

600ml vegetable stock

200ml single cream or milk

salt and pepper

lemon juice (optional)

In a pan, sweat the onions in a little oil until soft. Add the celeriac and apple and heat through for about 10 mins to soften. Add the stock and reduce the heat to a simmer, and leave to simmer for 20-30 mins until everything is a little mushy. Remove from the heat, stir through the cream and add salt and pepper. Take a hand blender and blend until a smooth consistency is achieved. If the soup is a little thick, add a touch more milk or cream, or indeed more stock. If using, finish with a squeeze of lemon, perhaps some parsley, and serve with crusty rolls.

LEFT OVER CHRISTMAS CRANBERRIES...

For some reason I had a bag of cranberries left over after the Christmas period. I wasn't really sure what to do with them until I came across a recipe for cranberry and cream cheese muffins in January's Good Food magazine. I thought I'd make a little adjustment to the recipe so now they're:

Cranberry, clementine and cream cheese cakes

This recipe used up all the cranberries I had left over, about 300g which left me with a nice extra batch of cranberry sauce which went well with some pork pie for lunch.

100g full fat soft cheese

400g caster sugar

300g cranberries

200g plain flour

50ml clementine juice

2tsp baking powder

2 eggs

75ml sunflower or vegetable oil

1tsp vanilla extract

First off, you have to make your cranberry and clementine sauce. Heat the cranberries in a pan with 100g of the sugar and the clementine juice over a medium heat. It should take about 20 mins for you to achieve that sort of syrupy, jammy texture you're looking for. The skins of the cranberries should split, but mash any of the more stubborn ones with the back of a wooden spoon. Take off the heat and allow to cool completely. You'll need about 200g for the cakes and the rest, spoon into a sterilised jar.

Preheat the over to 180 degrees.

Beat together the cream cheese with 25g of the sugar and set to one side.

Sift the flour into a bowl and add the remaining sugar and baking powder. Add the eggs, oil vanilla and cranberry mixure and gently stir together. It doesn't matter if the mixture is lumpy. Divide it up between muffins cases, the mixture should do about 15-16 cakes. Make a small dip in the centre and pop in a tea spoon of the cream cheese mixture. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden.

GOT A NEW PINNY!

This pinny was from my Ma for Christmas. It's from the amazing Anthropologie, my new favourite shop. I like it so much I decided to overhaul the blog's design in its honour.

FROM THE VEG BOX

New Year, new you. So we decided that we'd be all ethical and good and eat more veg. So, on recommendation from James and Charlotte, we opted for the Able & Cole large veg box, twice monthly. Turns out its reasonably economical. And there's no packaging, they pick up the box and they're very nice on the phone to boot.

I've decided to regale you with recipes from my veg box, and this is the first this I made.

Laura's veg box curried parsnip soup.

1 large onion, roughly chopped

1kg parsnips, roughly chopped into small cubes

2tbsp olive oil

3 sprigs or so, of fresh thyme

3tbsp honey

4 tbsp mild curry powder

1.5 litres chicken stock

200ml double cream (naughty!)

bunch of fresh flat leaf parsley, or coriander to serve

So, preheat the oven to 200 degrees. In a roasting tin toss the onion and parsnips with the oil, thyme, honey and curry powder. I used mild curry powder as I'm a wimp, but feel free to spice things up with more potent blend. Pop into the oven for about 30mins until all the parsnip is cooked through and very soft.

When this is nearly done, get your stock into a large pan, along with the cream and bring to a simmer. Add the roasted parsnip and onion, being sure to pick out the thyme stalks. Simmer these in the stock and cream for about 10 mins. At this point, if you like, you can add a ladle full of the stock into the roasting tin, placed over the heat, to get all the lovely roasted flavour from the bottom of the pan, and add this to the soup. Remove the pan from the heat, and with a hand blender, blend the soup until smooth. If using a hand blender, be patient, it might take a wee while, but it's worth it for non-lumpy soup. If the soup is a little thick at this point, add some more stock to get a smoother finish. You don't want it to have the consistency of baby food, because that's gross.

Lovely, serve it with snipped flat leaf parsley or coriander and little toasted nan breads.