Coffee & Walnut cake

I like cake, I like Coffee, I like walnuts.
so when I came across this recipe in the Mary Berry’s book of classic cakes, I thought that sounds perfect, knowing I already had the ingredients, I wandered off to the kitchen and reached for the bake ware

Following the recipe was easy enough.

I’ve only one cake tin, (must mention this to sweetness, as Christmas is coming) so instead of splitting the mixture into two sponge tins as suggested in the book, I tipped the whole lot into my only cake tin, (got to mention the foil backed parchment paper is brilliant, nothing seems to stick to it)  and just doubled the recommended cooking time, once the oven started to bleep alerting me the cooking time had finished, I tested the sponge by sticking a clean knife into the centre and it came out clean, after letting the sponge cool down, I carefully sliced the single sponge into two pieces, it looked good, no soggy middle.

While the sponge was cooking, I had made up the coffee butter cream and placed it into the fridge to cool down and thicken up,  oh and the walnut praline,  I was a little bit short on walnuts and so made up the nut content with flaked almonds.

Spreading a decent quantity of the butter cream onto the top of one of the sponges – its looked good enough to eat, I then placed the other half of the sponge back on top of the base with the butter cream on, then finished the top off with the remainder of the butter cream, finally sprinkling the bashed walnut praline on the top of the cake.

I thought the recipe wanted more instant coffee flavour and toyed with increasing the amount of coffee in the cake, but on second thoughts, and as it turns out rather happily,   was not tempted to use any more ,  too much coffee will obscure the taste of the walnuts.
This really did go down a treat at the office, really rather yum!

The recipe can be found here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/coffee_and_walnut_cake_03763

Claire’s Coffee Traybake

I’ve known my friend Claire for over half my lifetime (quite a few years then!), and she’s a very experienced baker and cake maker. In fact, Claire makes cakes for lots of people and events. When I told Claire about the Cake Crusaders she was happy to make suggestions for recipes to try, and when I told the other Crusaders about Claire’s coffee cake they were keen for me to try it too. No pressure then!

Claire’s recipe for coffee cake came from Lucy Young’s book, Secrets of Aga Cakes. No problem that I don’t have an Aga: the recipes give alternatives for using a conventional oven.

The only potential difficulty was that the recipe is not dairy free (and I am!), so I would have to make some substitutions. I’m not an experienced baker and I’ve never used this recipe before but I thought I would give it a punt because the other Crusaders were by now expecting coffee cake and I didn’t want to let them down.

Learning from my previous experience, I started baking my cake in good time. It was a bit of a shock retrieving my mammoth mixing bowl from the bottom of the cupboard and finding a dead spider in it! However, this was not a recipe for arachnicake so I gave it a good wash, as you may be sure.

The first substitution I made was to change the butter for vegan spread, and I used Pure Sunflower. My second substitution was to replace regular milk with soya milk. It all seemed to go in well and although when I added the four eggs I thought the mixture was a bit on the sloppy side, a few stirs gave it a good dropping consistency.

Once the mixture was in the baking tray, there was then the excitement of wondering how it would turn out. The light in my oven is kaput, so I checked progress by shining a torch through the glass door!

After about 30 mins the cake had risen well. I waited for it to cool and then started preparing the coffee “buttercream” icing. I was a bit worried about how this would work as of course I wasn’t using butter. Would it still be ok to use the Pure Sunflower spread? I did a quick bit of research on the internet, where the consensus seemed to be that using vegan spread instead of butter required extra icing sugar to be added to the mix, to prevent it from separating. Well, I had a good sized box of icing sugar and was prepared to throw the whole lot in if needs be. Luckily, I didn’t have to, but I found I probably put in a lot more than the 5oz of icing sugar that the recipe suggested.

Finally, at 10.30 pm my coffee cake was iced and ready. As it was an extremely hot evening, I covered it with a foil tent in order to keep off any passing nightlife. I felt a few tremors of trepidation that the “sun-cream” topping might melt into a coffee flavoured disaster as I carried it across London to work but thankfully it held together and the Cake Crusaders gave my cake a very kind reception!  Many thanks to Claire for the delicious recipe and all her help.