Nigella Experiment – Day 14 – Rhubarb Cornmeal Cake & Muscat-Mascarpone Cream

Day 14 – Rhubarb Cornmeal Cake (page 30) Muscat-Mascarpone Cream (page 31)

I’d initially discounted making this cake as I thought the rhubarb season was well and truly over, The Eat the Seasons website told me it was January time not mid-September. Further worry as Nigella says to use the ‘first, forced fruit’.. Imagine my surprise when driving up Alexandra Road in the drizzle, I spied a bunch sitting merrily in the roadside fruit and veg stall. £1 for the bunch – bargain. It may have been a little bit ‘end of season-y‘ looking, but heck I’m a cooking maverick, I thought, let’s go for it.

It seemed perfectly fine when washed and chopped into tiny 1/2 cm pieces. This was done to the kitchen accompaniment of Radio 4’s programme about gold miners in Indonesia and mercury poisoning – interesting stuff and helped the monotony of the task in hand. The rest of the cake preparation was pretty standard, although adding in yoghurt and polenta to the mix was unusual.

Into the oven for an hour. Lovely golden colour on top and springy to touch. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the full cake in all it’s glory due to a slight mishap of plate and cooling rack. Bother! Anyway, here is a slice:

The Muscat-Mascarpone cream was super easy to make…lots of whisking of egg whites, egg yolks, icing sugar, mascarpone and muscat. Muscat is a sort of sweet dessert wine and flavours the cream deliciously. Paul described it as “a bit like sherry flavoured cream in a trifle”…you get the picture.

My lovely friend Karen happened to pop in and she had a slice!

My camera phone seems to be letting me down on some pics…..camera for Christmas perhaps?

Marks out of 10: 8, Paul thought the rhubarb staying slightly crunchy was good and bad at the same time…strangely like eating teeny bits of celery.

Bakers comment: I haven’t tasted it yet myself as today is a fast day, but I enjoyed making it! Quite time-consuming, but that is a pleasure when there is something good on the radio 🙂

Nigella Experiment – Day 12 – Autumnal Birthday Cake

Day 12 – Autumnal Birthday Cake (page 24)

According to Nigella this isn’t strictly speaking a birthday cake, or it doesn’t have to be! As we don’t have any birthday’s just around the corner it was a ‘Wednesday-night-treat-cake’ instead. It looks pretty fancy in the book:

Apologies for the grainy pic. The recipe has two parts; the cake and then the icing. Unusually the icing has just as many ingredients as the actual cake mix. It’s a maple syrup flavoured cake with a meringue icing. Now, maple syrup is one of my favourite things in the world…but over the past couple of years it has become very expensive, ridiculously expensive. In the local supermarket 330g is £5.49 for their own brand – eeek. This recipe asks for 350ml in the cake and 125ml in the icing – which equates to 475g. Flip! too much money for me right now, especially as I’m in the process of setting up my business (ha! knew I’d shoehorn it in somewhere) – http://www.theflyingcaketin.co.uk. So, I did really want to make the cake, but knew there would have to be a compromise. This came in the form of Clarks maple syrup blended with carob fruit syrup which is a lot cheaper. Probably not what Nigella would have had in mind, but certainly what my purse could stretch to at the moment.

Anyway on with the baking, fake-ish maple syrup in hand. The cake batter mix was straightforward – into the mixer, whizz up, into the sandwich tins and into the oven. Bish Bash Bosh. Took 40 mins to cook and came out a deep, golden, brown colour. So far so good.

The icing is created on a double boiler (where you boil water in a saucepan and suspend the mixture in a bowl over it). This has to be done whilst mixing it with a hand-held electric whisk. Complicated and involved a wire trailing over a pan of boiling potatoes (it was dinner time too!) and me having to shout Paul to hand me a tea-towel to hold the burning bowl as meringue slopped around as I couldn’t stop mixing. You get the picture, it was a little bit hectic! I think this is becoming a bit of a theme now, but I don’t think I whisked to quite the correct stiffness – when icing the cake it was a little bit too runny…my mistake also in the last 2 cakes.

Oh well, it looked quite pretty sprinkled with the chopped pecans, please ignore drippy meringue:

The taste testers declared it a success! Maddie would like this to be her next birthday cake 🙂 I ate two slices, after all tomorrow is a fast day.

Corrina sent the following text ‘OMG!!! Cake F*ing Delicious! So moist and sweet and creamy and……sigh……!‘ Waiting on the results from the Allcock/Woodhead contingency bit will update when the verdict is in.

Marks out of 10: 8-9

Baker comment: good flavour, I think the meringue was quite a faff and means it has to be eaten on the day it is baked. Might have an experiment with some maple flavoured straightforward icing and buttercream instead.

Nigella Experiment – Day 10 – Coconut Cake

Day 10 – Coconut Cake (page 23)

I was almost tempted to try and skip this cake as I didn’t feel I could justify buying a whole bottle of Malibu (you remember that that drink from the 80’s?!). However, Paul and I have been rejecting the bottle of wine option at the end of the day, instead whisking up French Martini’s to ‘relax’ 😉 with. Hence the purchase of a cocktail shaker set, 2 martini glasses and ideas of setting up a cocktail cabinet. Malibu can slot into this new vision!!

The cake is picture-less in the book so it is another one springing simply from my interpretation of the words on the page.

This may have led to the slight mis-interpretation of how to deal with ‘50g of dessicated coconut soaked in 150ml of boiling water‘. Do you drain it? Do you leave the water in? Hmmm….well I left the water in and the cake batter was decidedly more sloppy than what I would normally expect. Seems to have baked ok, although the dip rather than rise in the middle is a slight worry.

Toasting the dessicated coconut in a dry frying pan was satisfying – watching it turn golden brown from icy white was strangely pleasing (it’s the small things). Coconut buttercream – delicious. The icing for the top of the cake is a mix of royal icing sugar and malibu. I think I must have mis-measured my tablespoons of booze (years of practicing generous measures!) as it was all a bit runny. As with the Boston Cream Pie, I only really realised that once it was on the cake:

The runny icing doesn’t impair the taste at all though! Rohan is back from his second half-day at school and we enjoyed sharing a lunch-time slice of tropical paradise. Not too sure how child-friendly the malibu icing/buttercream are as it’s not like I’ve ‘boiled away the alcohol‘….he seems pretty jolly anyway which is a good thing! I feel like I need a sleep…

Marks out of 10 – 8.5

Bakers comment: this is a cake I think I could make look a lot better next time with less runny icing. Would be nice to try it with lime and malibu icing or a lime curd alongside the buttercream. Interesting.

Nigella Experiment – Day Four – Gateau Breton

Day 3 – Gateau Breton (page 11)

This is another cake from the section titled ‘Loaf and Plain Cakes‘ and Nigella isn’t kidding…they are just, well, SO plain!! and a little bit boring. Only two more to go after this one to get to a new section of filled cakes which look lovely.

Anyway, sticking to my commitment to cooking all of the recipes in turn I dutifully made the next one in the book the Gateau Breton (sorry for blurry photo it’s quite hard sometimes to re-photograph the pics in the book):

Otherwise known as a Brittany butter cake it was in fact quite fun to make as used a different method to any of the others. Instead of mixing up ingredients you use a dough hook to make a golden sticky dough and squish it into the cake tin by hand.

Glazed with an egg wash and prodded with a fork to make a design on the top. I had a mental block as to what a lattice pattern would be and Paul described my version as a seagull pattering about. Hmm anyway it didn’t matter as after cooking all trace of my extensive fork work had disappeared.

Two willing victims I mean tasters appeared out of the blue – Corrina & Dylan and in my rush to force, I mean offer them a slice I didn’t take a photo of the whole cake. But here it is after a few slices being removed:

Dylan struggled to finish his small slice and I think that is the most common reaction amongst tasters so far. This cake is very rich and a bit bland. Not a lot going on taste-wise but it makes you feel a bit bluurgghh quite quickly. Paul went over to Marie & Stephen’s to collect Maddie and took them a slice each and Marie described it as ‘ok, but not her favourite‘.

Marks out of 10: 4 – only really giving it this mark as it looks lovely and matches the picture in the book.

Bakers comment: fun to make, but what is the point when no one wants to eat it?!