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.

Homemade gifts

Early in December I posted a teaser post about what I could be making with these ingredients. 

For Nate and his cousins, I made peppermint creams or my version of them. Using the ready made icing and food colourings I made Dr Who shaped flavoured icing. I know Dr Who isn't very Christmassy but the children receiving the presents were all Dr Who fans especially Nate who can identify all of the characters on the mould.

Each of the colours were a different flavour, red was strawberry, green for peppermint, yellow for orange and blue for chocolate. Nate's favourite were the red ones, they were a great little gift for his stocking. 

The next homemade gift were biscuits, I made quite a few of these biscuits as I made some for Nate to ice for his nursery workers and these for the mini stockings as well. 

I used the basic dough I posted here.

Then I iced them, I'm not the best at decorating but I think I did a good job. I used the Baker's Toolkit for colouring the icing, which I can't rave enough about. The colours were vivid and I mixed a few to get different colours (orange for the snowman's nose). There were enough colours to keep Nate entertained. 

Disclaimer - I purchased everything I used in this post. 

Christmas tree cake

It's been a busy week here and I thought I'd blog about one of the things we made for the Christmas table from Disney - cakes & sweets magazine Christmas special. It came with a tree mould to make a Christmas tree cake, so we decided to make the 3D version.

One of the first things I set about doing after whipping together the mixture, although the mixture didn't quite stretch to two cakes, was making presents to put under the Christmas tree. 

Another little moan about the recipe it called for 1kg of icing sugar and 500g of butter to make butter icing and we using roughly half of the butter icing, so there wasn't quite enough cake mix and we used the icing to hide the lack of cake in the middle at the tip of the tree and way too much butter icing. 

Our finished cake, I made the star freehand as the moulds that came with the magazine weren't deep enough for our liking and the icing was quite difficult to get out of the moulds in one piece. Nate was very impressed with the Christmas tree.

Disclaimer - I didn't use any dairy free alternatives in this cake so Nate wasn't able to try any but you can use dairy-free spread or Trex to make Butter icing so it is dairy free.

Christmas Baking

This weekend we spent a lot of time in the kitchen, we baked biscuits and stollen for Nate's nursery. After the biscuits were baked Nate iced them. I coloured the icing using Baker's Toolkit Paste colours and then let Nate ice the biscuits as he liked. The colours were very vibrant with only a tiny bit of paste and I even mixed some of the colours to get orange and purple. 

Nate really enjoyed icing the biscuits, I had to bake more and make more icing so he could continue icing them. In the end he was also asking for more colours, I originally only gave him pink, blue and green. 

Some of Nate's finished work

Baking Focaccia

This weekend I was looking at Kimberley's (from the Great British Bake Off) website and came across a recipe for Roast garlic and red onion focaccia and I had to try and make it.

As always Nate wanted in on the action so he helped knead it

Poking 

Really kneading it now

Nate really enjoys baking so it was great to try something different from the bread we normally bake or biscuits. I cooked the red onion topping while Nate was kneading. I find getting the dough to the stage where it is starting to lose it's stickiness first before letting little fingers loose is best.

Finished!

This was so lovely we will be making it again and it didn't last at all long. There was a little left for breakfast the next morning. 

Easy lunch

Today, we didn't know what to have for lunch and were a little bored of sandwiches. I had a quick look in our fridge and we had the jus rol croissants and ham and pasta stir in. That looks like an impromptu lunch with no dairy. 

 First of all I added a little of the paste to the croissant. I only put it on the base of the croissant but you could add more but not all of the way to the tip otherwise it would get a bit messy.

 Then I added a little ham, once again you could add more but I felt this was enough as the croissants are only small. Roll them up, like you would normally.

This is how they came out after 15 minutes in the oven. Yummy!

Dairy Free cooking

Nate is Dairy Free due to suffering from an intolerance to Dairy along with Soya so we are constantly looking for recipes and ideas. At the moment we seem to be baking biscuits every fortnight, Nate likes to help with the rolling and cutting the biscuits out. I found a recipe for a simple biscuit which is very nice.

Here is our variation
165g Plain Flour
100g Dairy free spread
50g natural caster sugar
1tsp ground ginger

We roll it out to roughly 3-4mm thick use cutters (the fun part) to cut biscuits out and bake at 160C for 14 minutes. Our oven can be fiery so it may be best to check the biscuits often.

Nate cutting out his biscuits

Another thing we love here is rice pudding, we've had to change it a bit for obvious reasons as we used to love it with clotted cream stirred in at the last minute. 

I found a recipe last year that was made with coconut milk, and black rice. I decided to give it a go. 

Nate's Portion in a heart bowl

"Yummy in my tummy"

Now the black rice turns a purple colour and does stain little people so best on a nice hot day when you can strip them down and then pop them in the paddling pool. 

I don't have the exact recipe for this as I have made this different each time. This is the basic outline:

3/4 cup of black rice (we found the black rice in a small local Asian shop)

1 small can of coconut cream

20g sugar (I've limited the sugar due to Nate having it and the coconut cream is also sweet)

1 1/2 cups of Water

Put the rice, coconut cream and water in a saucepan bring to the boil and then add the sugar. Turn down to a simmer. Simmer for an hour, keep an eye on the pan as you may need to top the water up.
Enjoy!

The rice has a slight bite to it but it went down well here.