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.

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.

Busy making for Christmas

Just a teaser post :)

Flavourings and icing

These are the ingredients I'm currently using. 

Any ideas what I'm making?  

Pancakes/cakes

I have been experimenting with baking without eggs as they are on our shortlist of things that Nate reacts to. I liked the pancakes we had been served at the MomenTums launch so decided to tweak the batter to make cakes and to match what I had in the cupboard already (it was 6pm on a Sunday, no chance of getting to the shops)

I used this mixture to make a scotch type pancake and cakes

Pancake/Cake
1 cup of Gluten free Bread flour blend
1 1/2 teaspoons baking power
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 can Coconut Cream
1/2 Coconut milk (I use Koko)
4 Dessertspoons Sugar

Mix the dry ingredients and then add the wet ingredients, mix well. If you are making cakes fill up cupcake cases and bake in a preheated oven for 13/15 minutes at 180 C
Pancakes - I left the batter while the cakes were baking and then heated up a non stick frying pan with a little oil, ladle in some of the mixture to make a pancake roughly 7cm in diameter cook them for a few minutes until golden (when you see lots of bubbles on the surface that's a good time to turn them) and then turn them over and cook until golden

Cooking the pancakes

These are the first cakey cakes I've made since baking without eggs, a lot of vegan cakes end up very oily or heavy, these are lovely and light. We then decorated them with a little icing.

These cakes didn't last long

Chocolate steam buns

I have quite a few things to write up. The nice weather has really got my creative juices going. We love Char Sui Bao here and I wanted to make something using the bread outer as I wasn't confident that I could make the Char Sui the same. I decided on Salmon, so I cooked the Salmon in the oven and filled the Bao with a mixture of tomato, cucumber and cooked courgette. The outcome was lovely however, I wanted something sweet.

Salmon Bao

I had an idea, we always have chocolate and I had coconut cream. So I melted a tablespoon of chocolate chunks and added two tablespoons of coconut cream to the melted chocolate and used this mixture to fill the Bao dough. Steamed the bao for 10 minutes and they were ready.

Over flowing chocolate Bao.

Recipe

I used this recipe for the Bao dough. For the chocolate filling:
3 tablespoons of chocolate
6 tablespoons of coconut cream

Melt the chocolate however you would normally, I used the microwave method 30 seconds, stir, 30 seconds, stir etc until melted. Then stir in half of the coconut cream, once it has been stirred in add the rest of the coconut cream. Divide the dough up into 24 balls. Take one ball and make a big hole add a teaspoon of chocolate/cream mixture and then pinch together carefully. Try not to let the mixture touch where you are going to pinch the sides up as it won't close properly. Steam for 10 minutes, I only have a little steamer so steamed them in batches of two. Let them cool down slightly and eat.

None of these buns made it to the next day or to dinner for that matter, they should have a slightly coconutty taste but it shouldn't be overpowering. I'm sure the coconut cream could be swapped out for normal cream for those who aren't dairy free.

Yummy!