Playing with chocolate

Here I am, bright eyed and bushy tailed and feeling positive about the recipe testing. Well, mostly. It's Vegan Chocolate Cake Day and the first batter is in the oven.
I thought you might like to follow how it's all going. I converted the American recipe to metric for ease of use.

Joy The Baker's Cake (ish)

Dry -
380g plain flour
300g sugar
50g cocoa
1 tsp bicarb
1/2 tsp baking powder

Wet -
250ml warm strong coffee
125ml vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla

Sift the dry ingredients together to thoroughly combine them. In a jug, mix the wet ingredients together and pour them into the dry ingredients. mix until combined. This is a very thick batter indeed - i kept re-reading it hoping for more liquid. 

Joy bakes hers in a bundt tin. I've gone for a deep 8"/20cm tin because the extra surface area of bundt cakes means they tend to dry out more quickly which is no good for a cafe, which needs cake to remain saleable for longer.

As it's a very deep cake it needs 50 minutes to bake. 180 degrees C, as usual.

On reflection, I would be better with two sandwich tins. It rose much higher than I expected and I was concerned that the outer bits were overdone by the time the centre was cooked.  It smelled good. I cut it horizontally (ish) and spread it with the third glaze (see below).

Oh, funny story - We have some friends who wanted to serve a raspberry sorbet and langue du chat biscuits for dessert at an event.  The recipe was American and asked that the biscuits be baked at 320 degrees. My friend didn't look at the oven dial and think "Mine only goes up to 250, so something must be wrong here." Nope. She thought "I can only get up to 250 so it might need a little longer."

She didn't notice that the American recipe was in Fahrenheit and her British oven was in Celsius.

The biscuits were charcoal. She decided raspberry sorbet on its own was dessert enough. Smart woman

Cake from AliciaK at Instructables (mostly)

180g plain flour
200g sugar
35g cocoa
1tsp bicarb
1/2tsp salt
250ml warm water or coffee
80ml vegetable oil
1tsp vanilla
1tsp cider vinegar

Sift the dry ingredients together. Beat the wet ingredients together in a jug and pour into the dry. This one's a very wet batter! Pour into a 9"/23cm square tin and bake for 30 mins.

This came out of the oven looking dark and moist. It is a low traybake, good for parties and multiple servings.

Glaze 1

50g Trex
50g sugar
100ml water

250g icing sugar
20g cocoa

Heat the fat, sugar and water together until dissolved. Sift in the icing sugar and cocoa, beat well and pour over the cake.

DISASTER
I started out with a straight substitution - vegetable fat for butter. I make this glaze a lot - it's runny and if left undisturbed will set with a lovely dark gloss.
Unfortunately, this was one of those moments when I am reminded that I am just a domestic chemist. The sugar crystalised immediately. I tried sieving out the chunks of sugar but it was still gritty.  Total failure as a glaze. On the plus side, I bet it would make a kick-ass beauty product.  Forcing it through the sieve left me with soft, silky hands.

Ho hum.

Glaze 2

200g dark chocolate (check no milk solids!)
80ml soy milk

Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl, stir in the milk, spread over the cake

Wow, soya milk much more yellow than i expected. Smells a little strange. However, melted with athe dark chocolate it seemed to work well.  A more bitter topping than I'd planned, and definitely a 'Grown up' icing rather than a kid's cake.

Glaze 3 - 

200g icing sugar
30g cocoa
splash of coffee

Sift the cocoa and icing sugar together, mix in the coffee until smooth.

THE RESULTS

Cake 1 was too dry as a deep cake. However, the mouthfeel was better overall, and it certainly looked the part. The dark chocolate with soya milk made the cake too bitter. 

Cake 2 was very moist and had too little substance to it. Miss B loved it, but all the adults found it too insubstantial and commercial for 'real' cake. Glaze 3 worked a treat, though. Although not overly rich in flavour it added moisture and sweetness to the cake.

Therefore, I am going to bake Cake 1 in two sandwich tins for 22 mins, and use Glaze 3 both between the layers and over the top of the cake.

Me and my big mouth

I did it again.  That "sure, no problem" thing.
A new vegetarian cafe is opening in Leeds next week and is interested in stocking some of my cakes as a trial. This a A Good Thing - a potential 4th outlet for my stuff.  However, they'd like vegan cakes.
I was a vegetarian for a good few years.  I still claim to be a veggie because it stops people serving me meat but I'm not vegetarian because I eat fish and am not nearly so worried about rennet and so on these days. I love veggie cafes - the old cooperative Roots and Fruits was one of my favourite haunts; it's great to have a decent choice of things for lunch apart from cheese or egg sandwiches. I like vegetarianism and love heaps of vegetarians.  I love my vegan pals too (waves at Ali and Kram).
I have a number of dairy free recipes that are wonderful. They produce lovely, long-lasting cake with a delicate and moist crumb. I'm totally fine making dairy free cakes.
BUT
It's eggs.  I don't like cakes without egg in.  They aren't fun to make (at least in my experience so far.) They aren't as reliable and the texture isn't right. Those I've had in cafes have been rather heavy, wholemeal-y and worthy. Cake can be a lot of things but it really oughtn't be worthy.
Then there are our 9 free range hens in the back garden - as spoilt a bunch of birds  I've met. They looked under the weather so I was making them porridge with Marmite and calcium earlier this week (Yes I know it sounds vile but they love it and it is ferociously good for them). Our household eggs come from them and my business eggs come from a lovely free range flock that the extremely ace Ian Taylor keeps. I know veganism is more complicated than just animal welfare but I do think the eggs I use come from very well looked-after chickens.

Eggless cake recipes are often American, with things we find harder to source here.  Heaps of them call for apple sauce, which is not sold in the gigantic jars in the supermarket like is was in Canada when I grew up.  I don't have time to make my own applesauce before making my own cakes. Some recipes call for cane juice, egg replacer, or xanthan gum (I have no idea what that is).

So there I am, talking on the phone to the nice woman about her new cafe and saying "Sure, no problem," in answer to her request for vegan chocolate cakes while inwardly shouting Oh Bloody Hell, How'm I Going To Manage That?? (Recipes and suggestions welcome!)

And that is how, instead of having a morning off, I will be spending tomorrow experimenting with vegan recipes.

Call me Zeitgeist-girl

I am so *very* up to the minute! I've been reading loads of baking blogs and saw something I fancied trying. As we get to weather for days out and picnics -  actually, we're in weather to stay in and avoid the torrential rain but hope springs eternal - the idea of easy to pack, hard to damage portions of cake seem just the very thing. So here we go, push up cake pops.

Crap name, must actually call it something decent.

  Anyway, I started with a tray of cake, done in two colours. I had been tempted by disposable icing bags for use in my workshops and hadn't used them myself, so I took the opportunity to have a go with them as well. I tinted the icing two shade and if I were making a bigger batch I might use 3 different colours.

Don't they look fun? They pass the first test, which is that my kids are clamouring for them. The pass the second test, which is that Himself thinks they look great. Obviously the important thing is that they taste great.  I haven't tried an assembled one yet, because I'm about to have my dinner, but I've been cheekily scoffing the trimmings and I can vouch for their deliciousness.

After that, I must do a costing. If the unit cost if more than any sane person would pay I have to give up on a project. This happens quite a lot. Decent ingredients are really rather expensive.

Then it's longevity I look at.  I will make some and store them in the cupboard, fridge and freezer and see what the various shelf lives are. In general, a fridge KILLS cake, and it drives me bananas when people store it there.  Fridges dry cake out.  However, as these are totally enclosed they ought to be fine. I think.  Hence the testing.

If all of these are positive, and to be frank I usually go back and tweak the method about a million times, I can finally look at selling them.

I think they'd be lovely for both the milkshake bar and the soft play centre. The down side is that there is a lot of plastic packaging. It can be put through the dishwasher and re-used, and is fully recyclable but it does go against the grain to have such a heavily packaged, non-biodegradable product.

Anyway, that's the latest experiment. What do you think?

Cocktails, anyone?

Today I had a go at a gin and tonic cake.  I had a good browse online, looking at others' experiments. I made tiny gin and tonic mini cakes some years back using my beloved Annie Bell book, but they hadn't impressed me.
I started with a light lemon cake as the base -
225g butter
225g caster sugar
zest of a lemon
4 eggs
225g self raising flour
a splash of milk.
As usual, I creamed the butter, sugar and zest together, added the eggs one at a time and the flour.  It was a bit stiff so I poured in a splash of milk. I baked the cake in two 20cm round tins for 25 minutes at 180 degrees C.
Then I made the syrup.  I wanted that quinine taste of tonic and a good splash of gin.  however, i only had the VERY nice gin I was bought for Christmas, so I was a little more stinting that I would be if it had been cheaper stuff.
100ml tonic water
100g caster sugar
juice of 1/2 the lemon
25ml gin
I simmered the tonic and the sugar together until the sugar had dissolved and the liquid had about halved.  I added the lemon and the gin - it smelled lovely!  I brushed the syrup across the warm cake very liberally as it came out of the oven and left it to cool.
For the icing, I wanted a nice smooth white butter cream with a gin kick.
100g butter
250g icing sugar
G&T syrup
25ml gin
I beat the butter until it was white, added the icing sugar and drizzled in the G&T syrup I'd got remaining after brushing the cakes. It was too mild so i added another 25ml of gin.  It's still to mild - you get a lovely juniper whiff as you smell it but the taste is just a lemon and something. You'd not guess G&T.  I'm having another go with more gin in the icing. Just as soon as I have a cheaper brand of gin to play with.

New Year, New You?

I'd been looking forward to January.
This is my 4th January trading as Cake Box (happy 3rd anniversary to me!) and the previous three have been deathly quiet.  Everyone's full of New Year Resolutions about healthy eating,  Indulgences like cake are brushed aside as people join gyms, think about summer holidays and go on diets. Or at the very least looking to the credit card statements with some nervousness after the Christmas spend.
It's the prospect of this extended period of quiet that keeps me going through the very busy autumn.  By Christmas week I'm ready to hibernate. Orders will be down, I can choose not to accept the birthday or anniversary orders from private customers. I can use the time to recover from the marathon baking session that October to December involves and I can look to the future.
Well, that's the theory.
I don't know what went on this year. The deli had a quiet fortnight but the soft play centre went mental for cake. Orders were up, not down.  I had my much-anticipated weekend away, but the work either side was heavier than ever.
So here I am, on the last day of January. I'd done my tax return in plenty of time and my admin is up to date. But I've not worked out a business plan for the year, nor done any recipe testing.  I have a fair amount of guilt about that.
Looking forward, I've an interesting fortnight ahead.  From Monday I've a work experience pupil with me for a week.  I've worked out which jobs to give her and which skills and techniques I can show her.  It's my hope that she'll do some of the low skilled stuff that chews up my time - stuff like washing up and wiping the counters down - as well as some baking and cake decorating.
One job she's looking forward to and I'm delighted to be rid of for a week is piping the faces on the gingerbread men. It's the sort of job that is fun if you don't do it often. However, it is a right pain if you're doing 150 of them at the end of a busy day when your hand is so tired it keeps cramping.
We'll also talk abut how to professionally cover a cake and ideally she'll design and make a celebration cake across the course of the week that she can take home for half term.
Should time allow, I'll use the opportunity to do some recipe testing while I've help to hand.  I've got a list of HEAPS of things I'd like to try.
During half term itself we hope to have the marvellous Miss P back with us.  She did a few days of work experience with me in the summer and charmed the whole family into loving her.  She's impossibly tall and beautiful, good company and ace with the kids.  If she's this marvellous at 16, she'll set the world alight by her 20s.  She's been asked to decorate a wedding cake for a family member, and I've invited her to come here and use my equipment to help her.
If I do get some new cakes ready, I'll pop here to post the recipes, I promise!

Autumn splendour

What an astonishing year! Hot dry spring, cold wet summer, then a dazzling week of heat and golden sunshine as we entered October, with a 15 degree drop in temperature as the cold and rain hit us once more.

September was a blur of baking, home educating, and playing with preserves. I have a cupboard full of plum jam, damson jam, chutney, elderberry jelly, rosehip syrup and elderberry cordial. The latter makes truly marvellous (if very frothy) cocktails when mixed with sparkling white wine like Prosecco or champagne. A hedgerow Kir Royale - yum!

Luke wanted to learn how to make lemon curd, too. It's his favourite thing for toast or pancakes and we'd never had a go at making it. I decided to follow Nigel Slater's recipe from the Guardian as Nigel's always reliable for that sort of thing. It was absolutely delicious, and Luke was extremely proud of his efforts.

On the cake front, the plum cake season is over; shame, I'll miss it. It's apple cake time again, and I'm looking ahead to parkin recipes too. In the name of research I bought some from Betty's tea rooms in Harrogate. I'll not be happy with mine until it can compare reasonably well with that, so I may be some time...

These Two Imposters

Fortunes up and down at the moment. I've tried new cakes, old cakes, and my first ever tiered cake (the prospect of which scared the pants off me) with both triumphs and disasters. As Kipling instructs us, I need to take both in the same spirit.

Life's been pretty hectic lately. This is no surprise - self-employment from the house, 3 kids, 11 chickens, bits of decorating to do in the house, veg beds to tend in the garden and all the other things that are part of family life mean that if it weren't hectic I'd be surprised. But it's been even more so than usual over the last month while my fabulous Number One Son has a break from formal education and we dabble in a period of Home Education. It's been wonderful but requires time I am struggling to give.

So, as the cake club weekend approached I had not done my usual recipe experimenting to come up with new treats for the subscribers. It'll be fine, I thought. I was wrong.

My rash attempt to tackle the dreaded flapjacks went properly wrong twice. TWICE. I hate my flapjacks, so I don't know which demon moved me to try again. I don't even like the flapjacks of people who make them beautifully all that much, not when I could have cookies or cake. Perhaps I should just admit they are not something I can make. Nah. I will plug away every year or so and one day I'll make flapjacks that I like.

I tried to make a Victoria Sponge following a recipe different to my usual one. Actually, cocky that it would be fine, I made a double batch and popped them in together. Both collapsed; four 20cm sandwich tins full of sunk cake. Great.

Overtired by the time I tackled the meringues, I made a basic error that I could have slapped myself for. The results were just delicious but not the sort of thing I was after. Fantastic; what was I going to do now? Only the Battenburg cake turned out well.

A wonderful thing about baking is that most mistakes can be transformed into something else. Not the flapjacks, unless we fancied unusual roofing tiles, but the others. The meringues suggested Eton mess to me, so the cake clubbers got Eton mess cupcakes. They were utterly scrumptious, they really were.

If you fancy a go, here's how -

12 vanilla cupcakes
100g soft butter
200g icing sugar
splash of vanilla
2 handfuls of berries (I used raspberries, red and black currants and blackberries)

20 small meringues (about the size of a jammy dodger) or equivalent amount of larger ones

Beat the butter until white, beat in the icing sugar and keep going until it's all fluffy and whippy looking. Stir through the vanilla, and if the icing is a bit stiff add a splash of milk.

Bash all but 6 meringues into big chunks. If you're using frozen berries, defrost them and drain any excess juice before folding into the icing with the meringues.

Generously ice the cupcakes with the berry/meringue/buttercream mixture and top each with 1/2 of one of the reserved meringues.

I've made cake pops with mixed success a couple of times before; I certainly wasn't particularly impressed. Having bought a few from different places to sample them, I've found them over-sweet, a claggy texture and pretty disgusting, really. However, I had lots of spare cake thanks to the collapsed Vic Sponges and I do love Bakerella's blog, so I thought I'd have another go.

I aimed at a drier, less sweet mix than I'd had elsewhere and I was far more happy with the result. I dipped them in pink coating with a few pastel coloured sprinkles or glitter on each. The cake clubbers got a pair each, alongside the Battenburg, Eton mess cupcakes and some VERY fragile but rather tasty home made jammy dodgers.

Incidentally, I'll try a different recipe for the dodgers next time; something slightly more robust so they'll be less breakable. Sorry, guys.

Once the cake boxes were delivered I could concentrate on a large order for an 18th birthday. I needed to make 12 vanilla cupcakes, 12 lemon cupcakes, 24 chocolate cupcakes, 60 mini cupcakes, one chocolate malteser cake, one lemon drizzle cake, 24 plain scones, 12 fruit scones, 12 lemon scones and finally a 2 tier cake with hand made butterflies, glittery polkadots and ribbon.

I had been fretting about the cake for days. My very lovely distant cousin in New Zealand had given me the business advice of steering clear of tiers and brides, and I'd generally followed her advice. Lesley, my rather fabulous college tutor, assured me it was a doddle and I'd be fine. And you know what? I was!

I did make mistakes with the cake. I was thinking about the tiers individually, so made them proportionally high, rather than as levels of the same cake, which should have the same height. The top tier needed an extra layer. I'll get that right next time.

My experiences at college had taught me to make spares of all icing details. This was A Good Thing as several butterflies broke when the lid balances across the top of the cake, erm, stopped being quite so balanced and touched them. Knowing my clumsiness, I'd made HEAPS of spares, so could make repairs, keep spares on hand for any damage transporting the cake, and still had enough to top the cupcakes as well.

I'm still pretty pleased with it, but I could really rather do with rest now!

Delish!

Chocolate and nuts - could there be anything nicer? Whether it's almonds in milk chocolate, hazelnut praline, good old Cadbury's Whole Nut or Reece's peanut butter cups, I think nuts and chocolate make a wonderful match.

After seeing a recipe in a cupcake magazine on holiday (the Americans have cupcake magazines, gosh!) I was keen to try chocolate and peanut butter cupcakes. I didn't fancy the recipe as they gave it - too much sugar and not enough butter for me - so I spent a happy time faffing about to get one I was happy with and by George I think I've got it!

Have you bought the Annie Bell book yet? Here's the link -

because if not, you really must. It's great. I use the chocolate traybake for my chocolate cupcakes. They remain moist and delicious for several days and it is an incredibly easy recipe to do. The batter does 18 cupcakes using a 1/4 cup measure, which is about 60ml, to fill each large cupcake case and they take about 22 minutes to bake at 180 degrees Celsius

The recipe for the icing is :

100g softened butter
250g icing sugar
70g smooth peanut butter

Beat them together until light and fluffy. It should have a gently peanut-y flavour. I found it crucial not to have too much peanut butter because it becomes a bit overpowering after a couple of bites and it can lead to an oily, claggy texture, so gently does it.

I was faffing about melting chocolate in the microwave, pouring it in a piping bag and squiggling flowers and stars onto some butcher's wrap, which I then popped in the fridge to set. I plopped one of the shapes in the top of each cupcake and the effect amused me. no good for eating in the garden on a sunny day but kind of fun anyway!

Learning from my mistakes

I really like Meet The Robinsons. It's one of Disney's less well regarded movies but for several reasons I'm very fond of it. One is that it was the brand new film when we were in Disney World last time and a tiny toddler Miss B was transfixed by the character of Lewis who was meeting kids. Another is because it talks about how you learn from failures. And WOW I've had plenty of learning opportunities lately.

Here are some of the lessons I've learnt:

• Do not bake when overtired. I've messed up 2 chocolate ginger cakes (same batch) and a chocolate malteser cake in the past few days. I had assumed I could bake them with my eyes closed by now but it turns out that when staggeringly tired I forget raising agents or miscalculated when scaling recipes up or down.
• Do the accounts every month, not every 6 months. This ought to be a no-brainer but as work, builders, decorating and general family stuff ate up all available hours I got dreadfully behind. It's a tedious process catching up that much and it's possible I've forgotten some cash purchases so am not accurately reflecting my true earnings. I also hadn't realised I was owed £300! That's been paid now, I believe - I can check on Monday (Nice surprise though!)
• It is not a good idea to experiment with recipes or new techniques when overtired (are you sensing a theme?) To use up one of those wrecked cakes I did some experimenting. The same bleary-eyed hard-of-thinking befuddled state of mind that caused me to mess up a cake in the first place pretty much ensured the experiment was a disaster
• Green and Black's white chocolate does not melt to a thin enough consistency to make a good dipping coating. Adding butter to thin it curdles it, adding a tiny splash of milk makes to go a horrible colour. I think cheaper chocolate might be worth a go.
• It is OK to say no to commissions. If I am overtired (ha!) or over-committed (double ha!) it could be the smart move to turn down some work, whatever Mark says. (Mark is a keen fan of Always Accept Work but as I am the one working myself into something of a stupor, I have decided not to take his advice.)
• If a customer changes the rules at the last minute it is OK to say No to the whole job. I'd accepted a job for a Sunday which, on the Wednesday before, was changed to a "I need to collect it tonight and forgot to tell you." I was already baking 14 batches of cakes and cookies that day and it was demented getting a celebration cake made as well. It was nice to satisfy the customer and she's a lovely woman but I pushed myself to tears of fatigue getting it done. Not smart.
• I need to account for my time when costing things, and do so at a proper wage. Earning £5 a hour when I am an experienced, skilled professional is ridiculous. That's under the minimum wage.
  - as a self employed woman, does that mean I'm exploiting myself? probably!
• It is good practice to ask for some detail about the person for whom a cake is intended if the customer has no design brief other than "make it nice." Having a selection of themes to get me started on a design is a big help.
• I am not a lazy person. I think I am, because I hate exercise and am a messy slattern in some respect. However, my Mum pointed out that I work pretty much non-stop from waking up until 8 o'clock ish most nights, and that is not being lazy.
• It is very important to keep my laptop calendar and my iPhone calendar synched. I nearly missed 2 appointments and did miss a talk at the school because the calendars weren't synched when I assumed they were both up to date.

See? Isn't that a lot of important stuff to have learnt? I think so. But then, I've not managed more than 5 hours sleep for most of the last month, so it's possible my judgement is impaired!

;-)

Happy 2nd Birthday

Cake Box turned 2 this weekend. Terrible Twos! As an experienced parent I know this is the point to expect tantrums, testing boundaries and heaps of creativity; so, pretty much the same old Cake Box.

To celebrate 2 years as a professional baker, I spent some of my hard-earned cash on a very posh handbag. I am not generally a designer handbags kind of woman but I really loved the bag as soon as I saw it. And what the hell - goodness knows I've earned it. I worked stupidly hard in November and December and my expected quiet month of January hasn't quite materialised.

It happens that I go away to London for the same weekend every year. Around about January 15th I go to Sadler's Wells to watch Matthew Bourne's latest ballet (Cinderella, and marvellous it was too!) and to have a little time to myself, browsing galleries, bookshops and coffee shops as well as having a prowl in the cake shops to see what's coming.

Two years ago, I had just had my meeting with the deli and agreed to start supplying them with cake after the weekend. I was giddy with excitement at actually supplying a shop! In addition to the cakes I brought her, the deli owner asked for pretty cupcakes so I spent part of the London weekend obsessively watching the people in Hummingbird ice their cupcakes using palette knives in the hopes I could manage something similar. Every cupcake took me 3 minutes of icing and re-icing to get right. Now I slam them out at a hell of a pace.

Last year I got some good ideas, including Rocky Road cupcakes that have been very successful with my customers. This year was similarly productive. I've spent all week having a go at recipes inspired by things I saw. I tried 3 different cakes while I was there. Primrose Bakery was as pretty as ever but the cake was stale again. How they get repeat business is a mystery, unless I am terribly unlucky. However, I chatted to the girl working there and got some helpful insights into what they do and what's successful for them. It was pretty much as I would have guessed, but it's nice having it confirmed.

Ellie's was much busier than last time. I expect this is because the owner has her own series on BBC2. The cupcakes are nice enough (scarily priced, but Covent Garden rents must be breathtaking).

Mark tells me I'd be a roaring success if I lived in Notting Hill - hobnobbing with media types and celebrities while I sell them my cakes, then having a shop, book deal and telly series. That's what happens in that there London, apparently. And the woman who nearly frogmarched me to the recording booth at the British Museum because of my "beautiful speaking voice " would no doubt agree.

Incidentally, I am not often embarrassed but that had me cringing. I think she mistook "loud and talkative" for "beautifully spoken," personally. However, it has been a fun thing to tease my pal Bon about, as she was the one I was talking with at the time and no one made her record her voice.

She would doubtless claim it is because she couldn't get a word in edgewise.

Anyway, I was inspired by what I saw to play about with rose cupcakes, berry crumble cupcakes and lime and coconut cupcakes. The deli will stock the first two in the next couple of weeks (woohoo!) and I am refining the third as I am not happy that it is quite what I want.

I do love a bit of inspiration.

Pastry adventures continue

I don't know about you, but I LOVE snow. Proper snow; dry, squeaks-under-your-boots snow. Not that rubbish slushy stuff. This weekend we've had lots of proper lovely snow and I am feeling about as festive as is possible with 4 weeks to go until Christmas.

Last night I made another 9 little Christmas cakes (demand is quite high this year) and today I decided I'd better get back to my experiments in pastry making so I can do mince pies. Being a bit of a wuss i found 4 or 5 little jobs it was *essential* I do first but by 11a.m. I stopped my displacement activities and bit the bullet.

My tutor Lesley said she used the Roux brothers' shortcrust pastry recipe. I didn't find it online although I did laugh watching a telly clip of them bickering in the 80s. Googling also threw up stuff by their son/nephew and I can understand SJ's crush on Michel Roux Jr. He's always ace.

My other tutor, Judith, was amazingly kind. She uses a recipe called German paste. She not only gave me the recipe (in an official catering format, which threw me a bit) but also a big splodge of pastry dough to have a go with.

German paste uses slightly different proportions to the shortcrust recipes I'd been used to. It is 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat and 1 part sugar plus an egg. I rolled it out between two pieces of clingfilm as recommended by Rachel Allen and tried to remember to keep it THIN. It felt much greasier to work with and I have to admit I was a little sceptical as I watched it in the oven. There were no temperatures or timings given so I tried 190 for 12 minutes. It looked a little underdone so I left it a further 3. The finished mince pies were rather shiny so perhaps I didn't need an egg wash.

Mark commented that he likes a more biscuit-y pastry like the mince pies from the supermarket. Yuck. However, I found a recipe on the BBC Food site that claimed a more biscuit-y taste so i tried that. The suggested method is to squish a ball of dough into the tartlet tins. Hmm. Many of the comments below the recipe from people who'd tried it suggested adding an egg and rolling it out as a big improvement and that's the route I took.

The cooking time was given as 20 minutes. That seemed a little long but I trusted the recipe. Oops. They were definitely overcooked.

By this time the mince pies from Judith's pastry were cool. Mark and I tucked in to them with cups of tea. Wow. I mean really, Wow. I apologise for my doubts, they are utterly delicious - quite crisp and just meltingly tasty.

Next test is to try and make it myself.

Steep Learning Curve

I've had for first attempts at mince pies this year. As will all new endeavours, it's a pretty steep learning curve. I can honestly say I'm learning loads of things not to do.

I knew Nigella was being a pain about all that darned putting stuff in the freezer. She says to add enough orange juice to get the dough to start coming together. That took a lot of orange juice. An awful lot. Far more than I thought. But hey, trust the recipe and all that, right? Stick to it the first time and tweak it on subsequent trials.

Nah. It was a disaster. I am convinced the dough didn't come together with the small amount of orange juice expected because the butter in the pastry was frozen. Once it warmed up slightly - i.e. when I came to use it - it was a horrid sticky gloopy mess. It's in the bin.

Rachel Allen suggests putting the pastry between two large pieces and cling film when rolling it out. That worked really well. I never roll pastry out thin enough, I know I don't. This helped me to roll it quite thinly without added more flour and risking the pastry becoming tough.

Rachel's cutter sizes were a bit weird. They didn't work for me at all. The lids were too small, although those covered with a star rather than a lid fared better. The pastry as a tiny bit underdone and was far paler than I'd expect for something given an egg wash. I think the oven was a bit low; perhaps 190? and I think I'll try 210 next time.

The pastry itself was delicious. lovely and light and flaky, so a thumbs up on the taste department. I need to practise more with the amount of mincemeat to go in it. It's a pain when it overflows but I do hate an under-filled mince pie. The home made mincemeat is delicious and I want heaps of it.

I'll keep plugging away at it in between this week's commitments. I want to have a decent mince pie ready for December 1st. Given the number of Christmas cakes I need to do before then and now, it'll be a squeeze but I am confident I'll manage it.

Feel the Fear...

There are some irrational fears I have. Driving a car, carpet sharks (they're real, I swear, they just disappear when the light comes on) and making pastry.

The lack of car driving is a fairly substantial stumbling block for some forms of business expansion. I believe there will come a point when the desire to drive for the business will be greater than my fear I will kill someone with a car and I will finally learn to do it. Or I'll earn enough to hire a driver.

Carpet sharks are unlikely to create a problem in a baking business.

Pastry... well, pastry is a different thing entirely. If I could do it with confidence I could expand my product range. It can't be that hard, loads of people manage it. Last year I swore I'd get the hang of pastry in 2010 and I'm swiftly running out of time.

You will no doubt be stunned to hear (yeah right) that when a client asked if I do mince pies I said, "Sure, no problem". I thought it would force me to pull my finger out and get down to it. Then I faffed about thinking about whether or not to buy a food processor which everyone says makes pastry easier - but how long would it take to recoup the cost? In the end I got a little trigger happy at John Lewis online, when buying the replacement dishwasher and ordered a cheap Kenwood model which was delivered yesterday.

Christmas is not nearly as far away as I would like so Finger-Pulling-Out day is clearly upon me.

I like to be thorough when I try something new. I have all my favourite baking books splayed around me and I am making their recipes for pastry one by one. Rachel Allen's shortcrust is resting in the fridge as I type, Nigella Lawson's mince pie pastry is weight out and chilling in the freezer before mixing as per her instructions. Personally, Nigella's emphasis on iced water,

chilled orange juice and frozen ingredients is rather freaking me out. I have warm hands and a hot kitchen and I'm trying not to feel doomed before I start.

Next will be Nigel Slater's recipe from Appetite, which is heavier on the butter than the others - sums Nigel up in a sentence, bless his delicious fattening soul. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's

recipe uses 2 egg yolks and I expect will be too expensive for me to use commercially. Annie Bell favours the inclusion of ground almonds, Prue Leith is a fan of egg yolk but uses one to Hugh's two.

I'll let you know how I got on.

As for the business...

I guess the biggest change is in the number of hours I am working. I am definitely full time now. There's a happy balance between work for the Deli and the play centre - one is busiest on

pleasant days when people pop out for coffee whilst the other is heaving on rainy days when kids need a dry place to run around. I do marginally more work each week for the play centre and it's confined to one mad busy baking day. The Deli remains 3 deliveries a week.

Another change is in the number of private commissions I'm doing. I've put a few photos up of some recent ones. The Hello Kitty cake was a roaring success. I have concerns about using a copyrighted image and have contacted the copyright owner for advice but they took so long getting back to me (have yet to hear!) that I got on with it.

The cake with heather and white roses had me scratching my head for a while. The family has roots in Yorkshire and Scotland and wanted to represent both florally on the cake. It's the biggest cake I'd done (12 inch square). I found the madeira cake recipe x 1.5 was about right for each layer. I bottled out of doing my own white roses and bought some instead. The heather was a result of something Lesley said when I was fretting about modelling heather, "or maybe piping it would be better." Of course! Heather is a brown twiggy stalk with loads of tiny little round flowers in clusters, and I could definitely manage that in royal icing.

It took longer than I thought (doesn't it always) but I was pleased with the result. The client was absolutely thrilled, yay!

Oh, the lettering was white overpiped with a thin line of the heather colour. It looked much better on the cake than it looks in the photo!

The black and white cake was a rush job and they didn't want to spend too much. A parent from school needed a 40th birthday cake for 3 days to go with a black, white and silver themed party. I went all Mary Quant with circles and trimmed the base with black satin ribbon with a band of silver across the centre. I think it looks pretty effective.

Anyway, all this blogging is just an excuse not to make that pastry. Best get on with it!

Coming over all Keats-like

Here we are in Autumn and I'm feeling very Ode To Autumn- 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' and all that sort of thing. (A-Level Eng Lit lingers in the brain somewhat)

Still worshipping the twin gods of Seasonality and Local Produce, I've been dabbling with more recipes. I can get away with lemon and raspberry cake for another few weeks because my own raspberries are only just coming out. However, the Big News in the garden at the moment is the plethora of plums (what a nice bit of alliteration). I've made 6 jars of plum jam and we still have a good crop on the trees. So, plum cake it is.

I've tested 3 recipes so far. One of them was horrid - claggy and pointless. One was not bad but had no longevity and the taste didn't really wow me. It was essentially a vanilla sponge with halved plums on top. The other - the first one I tried - is lovely. It's full of chopped plums, sultanas and cinnamon and it tastes only just sweet enough. For the moment I can use my own plums too (if Z and I don't eat them all first) so I get the double glow of using things from the garden and being in touch with the tastes of the season.

As always, I get other people's verdicts too. I sliced it up and took it to the playground at school pick-up time. It was enthusiastically received. In fact, my lovely mate Julie only waited until she'd got back to her house before texting me an order for it for the next day. The deli is keen as well. The cake did quite well in on practical issues, too. I wrapped a large slice and put it in a tin, and put another slice in the freezer. The frozen slice was pretty good and the fresh slice kept a decent texture for 3 or 4 days before feeling a bit stale. That makes it a goer - Hurray!

Apples are also coming into season again, which means Riet's apple cake is back on the menu. I've rather missed it. I'll do a dummy run before I start supplying the shop with it but I expect to be selling it within the month.

Horses for courses

I criticised Nigella's roll out cookie dough here last time. I find the dough is either too stiff from the fridge or too sticky in the warm kitchen and that Goldilocks time frame of Just Right lasts about 2 minutes. Rebecca disagrees - her kitchen is pretty darned cold and the dough works just fine there.

A few weeks back I gave a link to the Red Velvet cake I use - of the 3 or 4 I've tried, it's the recipe that works best for me although I use a different icing and do half the recipe. Andrew gave it a go and it was a disaster (it really was - I saw it!) When i gave them a wedge of Red Velvet, Jude said it was her family's favourite cake, Liz says hers didn't like it much.

Zach loves the muesli bars. Sair and Cath love the muesli bars. Emma says they are the nicest thing she's had. Michelle thinks they are horrid.

I try pretty hard to make as many people happy with my cakes as possible, obviously. It wouldn't be much of a business if I didn't. But in the past couple of weeks I've noticed how tricky that can get. I need to taste things myself, get Mark to taste them (he's more discerning, which is a nicer way of saying he's more likely to criticise) and have to get 4 or 5 other people's opinions or I end up with a pretty skewed product range.

I've made a mental list of who is a reliable source of tasting. Rebecca's family hate fruit in cake, as do Michelle's, and are keen fans of chocolate cake as long as it doesn't look like chocolate malteser cake. If it does look like chocolate malteser cake, if better be the real thing or they will be disappointed.
Sarah F's family like to try pretty much all kinds of cake but Sarah doesn't like apple or banana. Claire H's kids always have interesting points of view and don't always go for the obvious choices. Lisa and her family are keen to try any and everything and will rank them in preference, which was very useful when I was sorting out apple cakes. SJ loves cheesecakes. Val doesn't like sugar at all.

An added complication is that my palette is changing a bit. I'm not keen on the taste of royal icing (overexposure, I expect) and I'd rather eat a vat of buttercream icing than a tablespoon of sugarpaste. I am definitely keen on less sugar than I used to be. I spend so much time breathing in icing sugar as I sift and mix that I prefer the less sugary things. However, my two biggest selling items are both very sweet indeed. Butter, on the other hand... There's never too much butter, a perspective that Mark and Val both dispute.

So here I am, juggling feedback and tasting notes, suggestions and recipes. At some point I just have to go with what I think works.
You can't please all of the people all of the time etc. The joy of self-employment is that, on the whole, you can please yourself.

Sugar and Spice

Here I am, elbow deep in butter and sugar and in dire need of a sit down and a cuppa. Where's my butler when I need him?

Lacking domestic staff, I thought I'd blog about my day.

Today has been a brainstorming and trialling day. I did a mad dash to Harrogate to buy stuff at Lakeland (I can't possibly bake without their wonderful reusable baking sheets) and then zoomed home to pick up Miss B from Nursery.

I spent the drive thinking about all the flavours and foods that feel Christmas-y. Not the turkey/goose/roast spuds/sprouts sort of thing, obviously, as that's no use to a cake maker. Especially a vegetarian one. But you know, all those lovely smells that make you want to trim a tree and wrap presents.
So far I have -
Cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, chocolate, cranberries, oranges, chestnuts, fruit cake, brandy, mincemeat, Toblerones, Terry's Chocolate Oranges, walnuts, gingerbread and mulled wine.
If you think of any others, please tell me. I'm after all the inspiration I can get.

I decided that the idea to let people know I am recipe testing and offer selection boxes of assorted cake and cookie samples for a five would be a good way forward. i sent out a mass text, hoping for at least 5 responses to help cover the ingredient costs. I got 13. Coo.

I'm fiddling around with recipes old and new to come up with a winter range that fits in with those sort of flavours. I'm making a shocking mess, using stupidly huge quantities of eggs and lovely Green and Blacks cocoa but I'm having a lovely time and the house smells divine.

The first success is chocolate orange cake. I'm going to look at the price of Terry's Chocolate Oranges because I think the cake would look great with a some segments arranged on top. It's a good recipe, it's commercially viable and I think it is delicious.

I tried it in my new divided cake tin, making 4 little 6x6 cakes. It cooked in only 25 minutes and makes two lovely mini layer cakes.

Next - chocolate chilli cake. I've not done so well at the first attempt. Knowing how much I love chilli, I played it cautious so as not to overwhelm other people. Too cautious, as it turns out - you can't really tell it's there. Still a very nice chocolate cake, though. I'll try again with another version tomorrow.

Chocolate Orange Cake mark II came from an online search. It looks more like the kind of cake I'd make an serve to SJ and Rich when they came for dinner than something from a cafe. No icing as yet, and I rather like the idea of it without. However, that has retail implications; the cake will go stale quicker if its uncovered. I really like the look of it. I haven't tasted it but I've already decided I'm not going to do it commercially unless it is unbelievably lovely. Boiling the orange for half and hour and blitzing it was a right faff and adds a lot to the energy cost of the cake.

Then I moved onto cookies. C is for Cookie, you know.

Cookie number one was a spiced snickerdoodle from Rachel Allen. It's a small, domed biscuit that was terrific fun to make.

Here's the recipe:
Cream 125g of butter until soft.
Add 110g caster sugar and beat until light and fluffy.
Beat in

• 2 eggs
• 1tsp vanilla extract.

Sift in

• 250g plain flour,
• 1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg and
• 3/4 tsp baking powder

Gently mix until you have a soft dough. Form into walnut sized balls.

Here comes the fun bit. In a small bowl or ramekin, mix a dessertspoon each of

• caster sugar and
• cinnamon.

Drop each ball into the ramekin and swirl it around to coat it completely. Pop them on a baking tray and flatten them a bit. Bake at 180 degrees for 15 minutes. Leave them to cool on the baking tray for a few minutes, then transfer them to cooling racks to cool down completely.

They turned out well. Mine were about 40g each, so I got 22 of them I think. (I can't check, as they were very popular and the kids have scoffed a fair few.)

Then I decided to try some butter cookies with orange zest and cranberries. They worked treat. i was tempted to coat them in chocolate but I think it's gilding the lily a bit. Actually, I think it reduces the shelf life, adds cost, makes a mess if they are stored in a warm room and the cookies are delicious without them, so there we are. Definitely a crowd-pleaser here.

Cookie 3 - Bah, humbug. I make chocolate chip cookies using Hummingbird's recipe and to be frank, it's not all that impressive. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's chocolate chip recipes are streets better. My hope was that, having successfully made the basic recipe, I could play about with it and tinker to get a lovely christmas-y cookie. I don't think I'll bother. They are large, very flat an quite gooey cookies but they just lack a depth of flavour or a really good mouthfeel. The kids liked them but both M and I were unimpressed.

Maybe I'll revert to Hugh's lovely recipes tomorrow. For tonight I have chocolate orange icing to make and a rather intimidating washing up pile.
I may be some time...

Recipe Testing

Recipe testing is a bumpy business.

I love it because I like to try new recipes, I enjoy a change from the things I bake most days, and it's exciting when it all works beautifully. I hate it when I'm on version 9 of a slightly tweaked recipe and it's still not quite right, or becomes too expensive to be commercially viable, and my kitchen is a mess and I've run out of time and energy and I still have work to do.

Also, there's the question of what to do with all those test cakes. If we ate them all we'd be sick. I often make up plates of assorted test batches and take them to my neighbours. Well, my nice neighbours. I bypass any grumpy ones. My pal Lisa, who lives around the corner, is a BIG fan of this habit because she gets a lot of cake this way.

I also take some up to the staff at the deli. Partly it gives me some feedback on the success or otherwise of the cakes, but mostly it's just nice to do because they are so chuffed.

It would be nice to sell some of them - maybe half a cake per batch - to recoup some of the ingredients cost. I bet if I scheduled a test week and told people I'd have boxes of mixed cakes and cookies for sale that week, I'd get some takers. My pal Rebecca always says she'd buy any "spare" cake (can you believe I live in a world that has spare cake? Me neither!) but I feel a little funny putting her on the spot. (My inability to ask for money is a right pain when it comes to being self employed, I can tell you.)

Anyway, this week it's all about Christmassy things. I'm trialling spiced cupcakes, Christmas cakes, mincemeat, Christmassy cookies and all things Yuletide. I've been humming Christmas sons to myself while chopping stem ginger and grating nutmeg. I LOVE nutmeg.

I am on a steep learning curve with the fruit cakes - they just behave so darned differently to normal cake - but I am learning something new at each go. Also, Mark and I are rather enjoying scoffing the results that are a little to rough'n'ready to give away. I'd better get good fast, as I've some orders already. Ah well, fortune favours the bold.

The cupcakes show promise, although getting them to a good commercial price is a little tricky. I'm having fun with the icing - I think a cream cheese icing made with the ginger syrup and cinnamon is the right way to go. Sweet but with a lovely spice flavour. Mark finds it a bit too sweet for him but I think it's delicious. I am still trialling a bunch of recipes for the cupcakes themselves - I'm confident I can crack it this week, if everyone one is well and I've no further delays.

It must be said that is a BIG if.

Edited to add -

Woo hoo! I think I've cracked it. I've found a gorgeous spice cake recipe. Nice as cupcakes and extremely lovely indeed as a layer cake. The accompanying icing wasn't up to much, but my cream cheese icing (above) is gorgeous with it.

I must be on a roll - the packaging for the mini cupcakes looks a treat, too. If only the costs of decent packaging weren't so darned high. Ah well, the tiny cakes look lovely anyway.