Home Baking Jaffa Cakes

We love baking, Nate loves making cakes. If I say I making cakes it's impossible to get him out of the kitchen. Which is great because we are doing things together and he actually wants to be involved in the whole process now, from weighing up (a great way of teaching numbers) to mixing and pouring the mixture into the cases.

For Christmas I was given Ms Cupcakes book which is a vegan baking book, I have seen some reviews that complain about the fact the recipes are 'American' but from the Jaffa Cakes recipe I'm pretty happy with the result.

We did a few things slightly different however, I made Orange jelly and didn't use the marmalade as  suggested in the book. I didn't find it took too long, I made the jelly while sorting out breakfast and we made the cakes just before lunchtime. The jelly was set long before we started making the cake mixture.

Orange jelly (this makes more than enough jelly for the 15 jaffa cakes Ms Cupcakes recipe makes)
150ml Orange juice (we used fresh)
1 gelatine leaf (vegan - 2  1/2 tsp of veg-gel)

Follow the instructions on your choice of setting agent.

I have recently had a giant jaffa cake from Waitrose who use chocolate fondant icing on their jaffa cakes, so I had to try it myself. I knocked up a fondant icing using dark chocolate and some fondant icing sugar. This is a work in progress as although it worked it wasn't exactly what I was hoping it would be. If you want to try it the way I did it's 25g Chocolate melted and 2 dessertspoons of Fondant Icing sugar. Keep it warm and covered while you work with little bits of it. It sets hard.

Chocolate fondant

Finished Jaffa cakes.