Orange Cheesecake

Everyone knows how to make a cheescake, right? I won't bore you with the details then, but here's a few pictures of one I made...


Biscuit crumbs! I eschewed the traditional rolling pin and plastic bag technique in favour of a food processor. Boooooooring...

Mix with some melted butter, then press into the bottom of a greased cake tin.

Mix up some cream, philadephia, a couple of drops of vanilla and some other magic ingredients, then pour them over the buscuit base. bake in a bain marie until it wobbles very gently when rocked.

Most of the way there now, but not quite finished yet. The grains in the topping are orange zest, in case you're wondering.

The finished cake. I decorated it with some tangerine pieces, and made a syrup from sugar, water and some juice I squeezed from a couple of oranges.

Food porn!

Gingerbread Ambulance

Rachael's working this evening (yep - New Year's Eve), fixing all sorts of drunken injuries at the local A&E, so I offered to make an A&E-themed cake for her and her colleagues to make things a little more bearable. I wanted to wire up a woo-woo siren and some flashing blue lights to a push-button on the cake board but I was told that might be a little bit near the mark...

Here's the model I based the cake on. It's a Mercedes Sprinter in case you were wondering. And no, I'm not an ambulance nerd - I had to look it up :-).

I like to draw my cakes before I start baking so I know what I'm trying to make (even if the drawings are a bit "industrial"). It sort of helps me to keep it in check if it starts going a bit weird half-way through.

To make the gingerbread, gently heat an unholy concotion of brown sugar, butter and cream. Stir until fully melted and combined.

Mix the dry ingredients - plain flour, baking powder and some ground ginger, then mix it into the treacle. I like to add a bit extra ginger so it has a little kick to it. Once it's all combined you have to work quickly as it will slowly harden as it cools.

Roll the mixture out into sheets about 5mm thick, cut them to shape and then bake them until they just start to darken around the edges. I'd made some templates for the individual parts so I cut them to shape before I put them in the oven. However, they spread slightly as they cook so I trimmed them up again when they came out. Again - work quickly because they harden very quickly as they cool down and you'll end up cracking the pieces if you're not careful.

Once the pieces have cooled, glue them together with a thick icing. I had to trim a couple of pieces down more so they all fitted together properly.

I made a chocolate sponge cake to mount the ambulance on, which also meant it would go further.

Halloween 2009

It's nearly Halloween again, which means it's time for the annual Halloween cake. Yay!

This is the basic plan. Don't laugh - I was a little bit tipsy when I drew it :-)

Ok, so once I'd sobered up a little bit I did some research so I wasn't shooting blind...

...and while the cake was baking I made a couple of wings from some crepe paper coat hangers.

I bought a special ball cake mould for this mission. According to the instructions you can make all sorts of balls with it - footballs, basketballs, tennis balls. In fact, anything *round*. Wowsers.

The two halves of the cake glued together.

A quick bit of decorating later, and it's starting to look like the original drawing. (Or hopefully a bit better than that).

A few sugary features later, and the cake is complete.

Vending Machine Cake

I made this cake for a colleague who was leaving work a couple of weeks ago. There was a standing joke that the company who operated the on-site vending machine would probably go out of business if she ever left, but it still seems to be there for the time being.

A photo of the original, real-life vending machine, just in case you can't tell the difference later :-).

The cake - it's a chocolate sponge with a chocolate buttercream filling.

Iced and ready for decorating. I was going to try mixing the colouring into the icing, but it came out a murky grey so I decided to paint it instead. It worked pretty well, but I think I needed to leave it a bit longer to dry properly.

The finished cake. The 'glass' is a piece of perspex I bought from a local farbication company, and the stuff inside is more icing painted with food colouring. I quite like the end result.

Fig Trifle

I met my parents at Borough Market at the weekend with my brother and while we were there we bought some fresh figs from one of the stalls. We weren't quite sure what we were going to do with them but they looked too nice to pass up on.

My brother found a recipe for a Spanish-style fig trifle so I made it:

The ingredients.

First, soak some sponge fingers. The recipe called for sherry, but I used the rumtopf I made last year instead as I've still got loads left.

The figs. Cut them in half, drizzle with honey then bake for 10 minutes until soft and caramelised.

The custard is made with milk which is heated in lemon rind and cinnamon. Strain the milk after heating.

The other half of the custard is egg yolks, sugar and cornflour. And yes, I broke a yolk - I managed to salvage it though.

Add half the figs to the bowl, then put more sponge fingers on top and soak in more sherry / rumtopf.

Arrange the other half of the figs around the bowl then pour in the custard and chill.

Finally, add some whipped cream and toasted almond flakes. Enjoy...

Twin Towers

One of the companies I work for got bought up by a larger company a while ago and the legal merger officially completed a week or so ago. I got asked to make a cake to mark the occasion - nothing fancy, just something for the department to scoff while the dust settled.

The two companies both have quite distinctive head office buildings in Frankfurt so I thought I'd try to reconstruct them in sponge cake. It's not my finest work, but I think it's my tallest:

The Silver Tower

The Silver Tower, owned by Dresdner Bank AG - a German high street bank. If the cake looks like it's about to fall over that's probably because it is...

This is what it should look like, courtesy of the Google 3D warehouse model of it.

The Commerzbank Tower

The Commerzbank Tower, owned by, er, Commerzbank - another a German high street bank. This one looks a bit more stable, but even so I'd steer clear in case of falling cakework...

Here's the 3D model for this one as well.

Severed Hand Cake

Ok, now this one might need some explaining...

My brother's having a bear-themed fancy dress party this weekend, and I said I'd make cake for him if he came up with a concept. One of his friends suggested a severed hand - the result, I suppose, of an unlucky encounter with a bear.

So here it is:

I wanted it to look like a hand when you cut through it so I dyed the cake mix pink with food colouring before cooking it, then carved out some channels for bones made from icing once it came out of the oven.

The hand with the icing for bones in position. Probably not anatomically correct, but I did remember to put *two* bones in the arm - the ulna and radius. And yes, I did just have to Google their names :-).

Making the rest of it was fairly pedestrian - just covering the cake with marzipan and ready-to-roll icing. The end result, however, was pretty gruesome. (The blood is some raspberry jam my brother made last month from the leftovers from the summer pudding).

Creme Caramel

I used to love creme caramel as a kid, so now I'm all grown up (allegedly) it's about time I started to make them :-).

I'm writing this post retrospecitvely, so I can't remember why there are no eggs in the photo. I must have forgotted to get them out of the fridge for the line-up shot. Anyway, the first step is to heat some sugar with a bit of vanilla to form the syrup. Burn the sugar to a rich brown colour, then pour into the bottom of a dish and turn it to cover the entire base.

Blitz all the remaining ingredients together, then pour into the cooled dish on top of the solidified sugar syrup.

Cover with tin foil and chuck it in the oven for a while until it's just about solidified (don't worry - it'll firm up as it cools). For extra points, bake in a bain marie so it dries out less.

To turn it out, run a knife around the edge of the dish, then place a plate upside-down on top. Turn the whole thing over and watch as the syrup runs over the top of the dessert. Yum.

Summer Pudding

I went round a friend's house for dinner a couple of weeks ago and she made a great summer pudding for desert, so I thought I'd try one myself...

Gently heat some fruit and sugar for a few minutes until it starts simmering.

Whack the heat up for a minute or so until there's plenty of juices coming out of the fruit, then remove from the heat.

Get some thinly sliced bread and let it go a little stale. This is so it holds its shape once it's soaked in the fruit.

Remove the crusts and cut into a series of elaborate shapes so it lines a small bowl.

Soak one side of the bread in the fruit juices, then line the bowl with the soaked side on the *outside*.

Fill the bowl with the remaining contents of the saucepan, make a lid out of some more bread then compress down with a saucer and some weights (a bag of sugar works). Put in the fridge overnight.

To turn it out, run a knife around the edge of the bowl, put a plate over the bowl then invert. Don't do this too early before you're ready to serve it as it might just collapse into a pile of splodge.

Serve with cream. This is my new favouritest thing ever.