Drown the jelly babies!

The ringbearer had been making comments about another chocolatey cake, so I decided to adulterate the Sacher Torte. But what with? My efforts with gummi bears have ultimately been failures, so I decided to move onto the humanoid version-Jelly Babies. The ring bearer believed the Jelly Babies should be placed on top of the chocolate topping. I was forced to draw a line - I have no interest in decorating cakes with sweeties, I want to experiment with sweets as integral ingredients. The only reason I made a gingerbread aircraft carrier was because of the foolishness of the ship-shape, not because I deem decorating with sweets to be in anyway equivalent to baking with them. No-siree, I have standards. That said placing the JBs under the chocolate instead of the usual apricot jam filling seemed a fair sweet-involvement. So here we have it, my report on the jelly-babied Sacher torte.

1. Melt the chocolate in the bain marie. Steal several finger fulls
2. Laugh gleefully as you use the magimix to make (almost) instant breadcrumbs
3. Mix together breadcrumbs, sugar, egg yolks and then ladle in the molten chocolate
4. Prepare for the tricky bit. Fold in the beaten egg whites, stressing with every flollop of the spoon whether you have gone too far or not accounted for the collateral mixing that will occur during transfer to the baking tin.
5. Bake
6. Lovingly arrange jelly babies on top of the cooked tort. Try very hard to not place like coloured JBs together and fail. Ignore urge to check the mathematical reason for this on the internet.
7. Melt more chocolate. Steal yet more fingerfulls
8. Drown the jelly babies in chocolate. Mutter witchy chants to yourself as the little jelly babies disappear. Erroneously leave far too much chocolate in the middle.
9. Leave in the fridge

Personally I don't believe jelly babies go with dark chocolate. Strangely the green ones tasted better than any other flavour (a chocolate lime connection perhaps). I think perhaps the bitter aftertaste was the feeling that I had betrayed my initial mission towards sweetie integration. This was merely Jelly Baby insertion. The ringbearer had other ideas. He believes that the 'Jelly Babies enhanced the flavour of the cake, much like a cherry. Although some colours were better than others, especially black and red Jelly Babies', he has made no comment about the metaphysical requirements of experimental sweetie baking. He was however happy that a recent baked ham didn't come with optional sherbet lemons.

The Good-Ship-Gingerbread

Some of you will remember my efforts to come up with an idea for my Christmas gingerbread construction. Sadly events over Christmas left me without the time to bring an idea to fruition. However, I never give up on an idea and sometime in mid-January I set about the mighty gingerbread project. Inspiration proved illusive until walking through the flat I stood on one of the several small, push out and construct plastic aircraft the ringbearer got in his advent calender last year. I finally decided upon my gingerbread project! And somewhere to put those bloody toys. A Gingerbread Aircraft Carrier! Below is my delayed report on how to create your very own gingerbread navy.

Step 1. Carefully follow German Hexenhaus recipe, melting butter, sugar and honey together. All the while cursing the sticky hard to manoeuvre nature of honey.
Step 2. Add gooey warm mixture to dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, cocoa, sugar). Mix and then start to form into a ball Recall some hazy warnings from high school home economics teacher about handling hot molten sugar and burning off nerve endings. Decide lack of pain means that issue isn't relevant. Leave dough to cool in fridge.Step 3. Employ the assistance of the ring bearer (note in pictures he isn't wearing his ring on the grounds that he doesn't want to get gingerbread stuck in it). Get him to roll out the gingerbread.

Step 4. Measure rolled out gingerbread against cunningly developed battleship net. Realise you have too little gingerbread and get Ringbearer to roll it thinner whilst feverishly chopping down the template to make it fit. Bank very heavily on the gingerbread rising a bit to ensure the air craft carrier doesn't have a dangerously thin hull. (I know that no hull could really withstand a short range gingerbread torpedo, but that's no excuse.)
Step 5. Cut out net and arrange pieces of gingerbread on numerous baking sheets and bake. Realise that whilst manoeuvring pieces to the baking tray the gingerbread stretches under its own weight. Reform shapes on baking sheet. Watch in amusement as ringbearer becomes enthusiastic with remnants and starts to form gingerbread anchors and fish.
Step 6.Remove gingerbread from oven and worry about the slightly deformed shape of the hull. Resolve to plug any holes with excess icing. Plan for excess icing meets instant ringbearer approval.
Step 7. Liberally cheat and make royal icing from ready made powder and arm the syringey icing thing. After realising that the ship's hull will not hold together whilst icing sets brilliantly come up with the idea of using glasses as structural support during icing. Forget that lighting is poor on this side of the kitchen and ice most of the ship together with minimal lighting. However decide that this is probably the authentic feeling of welding aircraft carriers whilst under blackout conditions and embrace the darkness.
Step 8.Having completed the hull add the deck and the bridge. Congratulate oneself a great deal when the deck fits on the hull and doesn't break during manoeuvring.
Step 9.Break out the sweets for decoration. Agree to ringbearer's notion that pink shrimp sweets should surround the hull like barnacles. (Ignoring the fact that they are a completely different species to barnacles and would if kept to scale with the aircraft carrier, be incredibly scary giant killer shrimps).

Step 10. Try and apply dollymixtures as portholes, wrestling with the futility of icing one single dolly mixture and making a great deal of mess. Start a small discussion with the ringbearer about where the red and green dolly mixtures should go to represent the ship's navigation lights. Send ringbearer off for emergency google check (green for starboard btw). The ship might lack propulsion, have impossible killer shrimp attachments and technically dissolve in water, but my god she'll obey International Regulations For Preventing Collisions at Sea!
Step 11. Unsure of how to include the jelly worms in the aircraft masterpiece place them everywhere, deciding they are either landing strip lights or the ship represents a little known sea battle called 'Jelly Worms on an Aircraft Carrier'. Draw the line at trying to make a gingerbread Samuel L. Jackson. Decorate aircraft carrier with mini planes.

The Gingerbread Aircraft Carrier lasted about a week. Most of the sweets were picked of within a few days. Structural integrity was maintained even when large sections were torn off and the mighty good-ship-gingerbread looked a very proud and noble vessel as she withstood her slow demolition and consumption. Sadly tearing off a chunk meant showering the floor in icing bits which was annoying. Perhaps the good-ship-gingerbread's final revenge upon us, her creators and destroyers.

Gingerbread architecture

Image from cutmesomeflack.wordpress.com
Yes, I have been very quiet - also very busy. A stream of visitors forced the ringbearer to ban any cakey inventions. Apparently not everyone likes finding gummys in their chocolate brownies. However, I have been experimenting with my lebkuchen recipe and now I have a star stamp, I shall be manufacturing zimtsterne like I was the big bang.

However, I have another grand plan. No, not marshamllows in mince pies[1] but a gingerbread construct. Gingerbread houses are dull, so what to try instead? A castle? A post apocalyptic nightmare? Confuse the Christmas message with a Gingerbread mosque? A tank? A ship? Or should I keep it simple and depict some sort of naughtiness in the house? Ideas in the comments! Come on, the odder the better.

[1] Not a bad idea actually.....

Bananering the pineapple cake

The ringbearer loves foam bananas. Don't know why-horrible fake tasting things that they are - but he does. As we disagree on this point I decided not to put too much effort into the mighty foam-banana-cake experiment I agreed to and utilised one of the easiest (and stickiest) recipes I know. So here it is: The pineapple upside down foam banana cake.

Step 1. Batter making. This is dead easy, no folding, bain-maries or even a mixer. Just add eggs, sugar, flour and pineapple juice in a bowl and stir.
Step 2. Melt butter in chosen dish on the hob, then add sugar. Squish the sugar into the butter (This is great fun and looks horrible)
Step 3. Place the pineapple in the dish. Also add pointless banana items in a specifically zoned area.
Step 4. Pour over the batter. Put in oven and bake.
Step 5. The only tricky bit. Cool the cake a little bit and attempt to flop cake out of dish onto plate. If this isn't done when there is residual oven warmth then the cake will NEVER come out. Seriously you could use the stuff to seal a reactant leak at Sellafield. At this point I spot a problem. Look at the picture below, have you spotted it?
Yes. The cake would flop over the edges of the plate. Now normally this would come with the considerable benefits that I could legitimately eat the fallen off parts. But I wasn't in the mood - there might be foam banana in parts of it! After much clanking and near misses I discovered a rectangular platter in the cupboard, that still didn't quite fit and had curved edge issues, but would mean less spillage. And tadaa!

The cake is naturally best served warm with cream. The ringbearer was delighted and to prove it gave me some very eloquent reviews. (I think he's been taking my remarks about his monosyllabic reviews to heart). He declared it to be 'A pineapple cake as interpreted in Las Vegas.' If this is a good thing I don't know. He also said 'It had a heightened sense of banana which formed a hyper real mix with the pineapple.'. I will grudgingly admit that it wasn't that bad and was very probably better than the softmint yoghurt cake. But lascked the diverting scientific questions about softmint integrity. Foam banana integrity was incidentally very good-which isn't suprising they taste of hardened wood anyway.

Refreshing the almond wine biscuits

Enough with this cake business, I have decided to embark on some biscuit alteration. My best biscuits are probably the 'wine biscuits' from Dr Oetker, so I thought I should try something with those. But what? Pondering the sweetie shelves, I came across my beloved sherbet fountains (in new packaging-of which more later). What accompanies sherbet, in tingliness? Why Barrats refreshers of course!
Stage 1 Make the dough. This is very easy indeed, especially with the mighty magimix. The breadcrumb like stage is meant to be combined with wine, instead of a tablespoon of water. As much as the ringbearer and I enjoy necking a bottle of left over wine, it always seems atrocious to open a bottle just for a few ml, which you can't taste anyway. I therefore switched to German grappa, which not only tastes stronger but we have a bottle of and rarely drink. Once the dough was made it was rolled out and cut into circles.

Stage 2 Refresher tests. Would refreshers survive the cooking temperature? Sure, they only needed to last about 15 minutes, but would they degrade? I therefore popped 1 in with the jacket potatoes. 30 minutes later the flat stunk of burned sugar as the blackened remains of the refreshers was removed from the oven. Not a good sign, but the jackets were in at a higher temperature, the refreshers were cooked for longer on the wrong substrate/matrix than they would on the biscuits, plus I have never let one very clear indicator of possible failure stop me before....
Stage 3 Topping. The rounds were then covered in beaten egg white, sprinkled with sugar or sherbet and then decorated with chopped almonds and/or halves of refreshers. I also cunningly hid the refreshers under the egg white, as a sort of initial blast cover. the biscuits were then baked in batches. At this point we must digress to the new sherbet fountain packaging.Plastic? Aren't we meant to be caring for the environment? Sure the paper sometimes got a bit soggy, but that was part ofthe art of consumption. The only reason I can think that Tangerine confectionery chose this atrocious environmentally disastrous, untraditional, quick and easy packaging for the lazy and slobby is that it allows you to replace the top and save your sherbet. Save your sherbet? When did obesity fears outweigh the importance of elegant eating and the environment? And who leaves a half eaten piece of liquorice for later? YUK!
Results. Score one for optimistic disdain of rough-shod scientific tests! The Refreshers survived unburnt, especially those hidden by egg white. Personally I could only just about taste the sherbet, which manifested as a slight extra-tang. However the refreshers were very potent and tasty. Certainly these biccies are unsophisticated and quite frankly taste a little loopy, but I liked them. The ringbearer, once he had gotten over his disappointment that a vast cake wasn't appearing from the oven (also his delight that the flat didn't fill with stinking burning refresher again) deigned to taste the biccies. He claimed they were like 'An outbreak of sunshine on a biscuit base', but mumbled a bit about whether he thought they were better than the sugar and almond original.

Softminty adventures in yogurt cake land

I have been of the opinion of late that the ringbearer has been getting one too many cakes his way. Therefore I decided to concoct one of my favourite cakes, which includes yoghurt and strawberries. Somehow the ringbearer's puppy dog eyes did manage to persuade me to add malteasers instead of strawberries. But I was not completely manipulated! I have long pondered how to include mints into cakes. After all mints take up a large section of the sweetie shelves, shouldn't they be included in my experiments? Here was the ideal opportunity.Stage 1. Baking the chocolate cake base
Pretty boring really, except I added some malteasers just for fun
Stage 2. Playing with gelatine.
I love playing with gelatine (not much for vegetarian baking I'm afraid). Covering the sheets in water makes for a nice mystery when it comes to fishing around for the squishy gelatine. Subsequently squeazing the gunk before heating it in a pan is also very pleasant sensation. Nice and oozy.Stage 3. Making the yoghurty mix
Yoghurt, lime juice, whipped cream, sugar and gelatine. Yummy! This was then slopped onto the cake baseStage 4. Addition of the sweeties
I refused to go all malteasers, so most of the cake was still strawberry filled. A section was mixed with malteaser, a section was homogeneously malteaser and another section included lovely softmints.
Stage 5. Refrigeration and a discovery!
The yoghurt mix set quite nicely around the strawberries and malteasers. But fascinatingly the softmints melted (liquified)! My chemistry senses were twitching! Softmints become quickly chewy in the mouth and dissolve. Which might happen due to a change in pH rather than (as I thought) heat and agitation. Had my yoghurty mix been acidic enough to liquefy the softmints? Or had the presence of gelatine caused some sort of diffusion? Or had the softmints just givenup any semblance of solidity the moment they were exposed to the cold. Cowards!

The liquid softmints meant that the minty flavour had travelled further than expected within the cake and was not limited to pockets of mintyness. This was odd but not unpleasant and went quite well with strawberries. The malteasers also worked really very well. The ringbearer noted that the cake was the only one he had eaten that left a minty fresh aftertaste. Although he refused further comment as he was clearly bitter about the 'healthiness' of the strawberries. I therefore think that it would be easier to add mint cordial to the yoghurty mix rather than softmints to achieve the same taste sensation. The malteasers might be a permanent addition to the normal fruity goodness.

Any suggestions about the magic melting effect of cold yoghurt and gelatine on softmints are welcome.

As happy as pigs in an artery clogging cake - the anti benecol

Upon coming across a nice looking recipe in the Sunday papers, I decided to persue some baking that didn't involve sweets or covering my camera in batter. Of course the moment I walked into M&S this idea was scuppered. The gloriously tasty Percy Pigs were by the cashier. I instantly jumped upon the notion that as they were large and foamy rather than gummi, they might not melt in such a counter productive as mini teleporting gummi bears. Surely a few pilot piggies wouldn't hurt an already unknown recipe? Plus the ringbearer looked positively delighted when I left the health food shop with Macademia nuts and nothing that looked like fruit or tofu, so I thought I could use that good currency to keep him guinea pigging.
Stage 1. Following the recipe I masterfully separated eggs (OK one bit of shell got in) and ground the nuts into a fine pulp. Just coz they were looking at me funny! Yeah! On a side note nuts are expensive, in future I might try mixing them up with something cheaper, like hazelnuts..... or sawdust.Stage 2. I then made the ovely gooey chocolatey, nutty mess. And found a problem. Its the old how to fold in sweets with beaten egg whites scenario. Would adding the piggies at this stage effect the airyness of my folding? I decided not to find out and elegantly folded away.

Stage 3. Shlomped the goo into a lined baking tin. The consistency was approximately that of blue tack. Definitely more elastic than viscous. If only I could have put it in a rheometer and found out more! With this punch resisting consistency came problems. How to insert the pigs? I tried putting them in sideways and hoping they would sink below the goo leaving one pink trotter dramatically held aloft. But no such luck (see the photo at the top). These piggies didn't seem to like chocolately, nutty mud and were trying to run all the ways home. So I forced their little heads under the mixture by he vicious application of a cocktail stick.
Stage 4. Baking was successful, although as you can see form above there was piggie rupture. But at least I knew where to look for them this time.

The ringbearer snaffled a chunk of cake before I could even point out where the piggies were. He helpfully offered the review, 'Tastes better than it has any right to'. Personally I didn't know cakes had rights and was a little concerned about how I had been violating them. In my opinion the piggies, which were still whole and tasty added a certain something without tasting artificial to an otherwise terrifyingly dense and rich cake. (The ringbearer was delighted with this causer of instant obesity and continued to wade through the cake with scary commitment.) After a 3cm^2 piece I was forced to have a lie down to try and clear my arteries.

Importantly I have now discovered that Percy Pigs are a key ingredient in sweetie/cake fusion baking. Under cake conditions they don't teleport, they stay pink and they taste nice. Trust M&S.

Suggestions for further baking always welcome

Strudel Surprises - when mars bars, tootie fruities and cherries collide

I had intended to limit my strudel experiments to just mars bars. Standing in the newsagents perusing the selection, it became clear I needed to push the pastry envelope and I came home laden with Fudge bar, Mars bar, Munchies and a packet of Tooty Fruities. I decided against normal strudel and instead went for strudel packets (typically full of crushed lady fingers, almonds, marzipan and cherries), which allowed me a dazzling rainbow of sweetie experimentation. The report:
1. Ring and finger crisis. I forgot to buy lady fingers! Clearly these would be needed for moisture absorbtion, sweetness and bulk. I therefore decided to use party rings instead. Because they are sweet, they matched the theme of my experiment and I like eating them. So as not to appear prejudiced, I carefully decided to crush one party ring of each colour, instead of limiting myself to the orange ones.2. Pastry preparation. Not from a packet. Nooo. Lovingly made according to Dr Oetker's recipe and then rolled and stretched out on a tea towel.3. Filling decsions. The inside of the pastry squares was then smeared with ukky egg mixture in preparation for the filling. At this point I realised how foolish I was to have so many options. All the parcels needed to contain the almond/ party ring biscuit mix but would Marsbar go with marzipan, would Munchies go with cherries? I eventually decided on a list of varying fillings following the basic combinations shown below (notable exception being tooty fruities andthe fudge bar, which were always combined with cherries)

Sweetie + Cherries +marzipan
Sweetie + Cherries
Sweeties4. Parcel construction. This was very messy and in the process my careful planning came apart. Soon I could not remember what filling was in what what packet! Disaster? Not for the stout of heart, I decided instead that I had invented strudel roulette and the mystery(like that found in a packet of Revels) would add to the fun.
5. Baking The parcels were lovingly baked with only a few marsbarish ruptures. They were then messily dusted with icing sugar and served with a helpful warning about the contents.
Results!It didn't prove entirely impossible to tell the packets apart. To me, Munchies were pretty similar to marsbar and fudge. However, tooty fruities were very distinctive. Offering the cherries a strange fake-fruit after-taste to what was blatently real fruit. Fascinating. Anything chocolatey and cherries went well and even the marzipan seemed to work. The ringbearer complained bitterly when he got a normal cherry packet instead of a chocolatey one and offered extensive further insights into the strudel saying 'The experiment was successful', 'Munchies were the nicest' and 'Leave me alone, I'm watching the cricket'. So it's nice to know his assesments have reached 2 sentences instead of 1. Ultimately, I like fruit, so I'm not sure adding mars bar was a success, but I am apparently in the minority in this preference. But where next? An enormous Altrincham-Marsbar strudel? Or an upside down cake replacing pineapple rings with gummi snakes?