Pistachio, Praline and Vanilla Cake

I was asked to make a Pistachio, Praline and Vanilla Cake for a local coffee shop. They had had this cake in the past and it had proved popular so they wanted me to try it out.

I tried a few different recipes and adjusted them. In the end this is the recipe I came up with that has worked each time: 

Ingredients: 

125g Pistachios

250g Butter

250g Caster Sugar

5 Large Free Range Eggs

70g Plain Flour

285g Self Raising Flour

Preheat the oven at 140oC (this may vary from oven to oven so you may need to experiment). Line an 8" cake tin with greaseproof paper. 

Grind up the pistachio nuts in a food processor until they are small crumbs. Add in the sugar and whiz it up to combine everything. 

Place the butter and the sugar mixture into a mixer and mix until really light and fluffy. 

Add the eggs one egg at a time until fully combined. 

Sift in the flours and mix on a low speed until just combined, be careful not to over work the mixture as this results in a flat and fragile cake. 

Place the mixture in the tin and into the preheated oven. I initially check the cakes after 1 hour but they usually require closer to 2. My oven is very temperamental so this will vary depending on your oven. I cook on a low temperature, due to the oven, and for longer so use your usual cake settings if you are used to making cakes. 

Once a skewer comes out of the cake clean leave it to cool. 

For the vanilla butter icing I mix: 

250g Butter - I do find that the quality of the butter makes a difference and my preference is Anchor

500g Icing Sugar

Vanilla Essence

Mix together the butter and icing sugar until fully combined. Pour in the vanilla essence, depending on taste, but I usually start with 2 teaspoons. 

I then use this to spread between the layers of the cake and on the top. 

For the praline element I firstly caramelise some sugar in a saucepan. After experimenting I've found that a larger surface area at a high heat is the best way to achieve a caramel rather than crystals. Once this is ready I then add in chopped pistachios and leave it to cool. 

Once solid I crush it up in a pestle and mortar and sprinkle it on the top of the cake. 

Praline Sprinkling

I sell these cakes individually so if you'd like to order one then please just drop me an email. I usually have availability for these cakes.

Finished Cake

Farmhouse Loaf

My husband and I have recently started making bread in an attempt to save money. We have a bread machine so this isn't much effort and my husband is very good at setting it up to get a reasonable loaf. However, we've had a few problems with the loaf sinking so we achieve a flat top, in the instructions there is a trouble shooting page and we do need to go through that, but I decided it was time I made some by hand and see how that turns out. 

I looked in a couple of books and decided to go with Mary Berry's recipe from her complete cookbook. It looked like a basic loaf that just contained a few simple ingredients. It was for a 2lb loaf, which I believe is bigger than we normally make, so I'm hoping it'll also go a bit further. 

The recipe starts off with combining the butter and the flour to create breadcrumbs, very easy, and then add the salt and yeast. This is all stirred together and then lukewarm water is added to bring it together as a dough. Knead this on a little floured surface until it is a smooth dough, place in an oiled bowl and leave to rise for an hour or so. For convenience I left mine for 2 hours and it nicely rose to double the size. 

This rose very nicely to fill the bowl

I then turned the bread out onto a floured surface and punched out all the air, kneaded it for a few minutes and then placed in an oiled loaf tin. 

Just put in the tin for it's final rise

I left this to rise for the allocated 30 minutes and then it went in the oven. 

Ready to go in the oven

The bread itself is very easy to make and didn't require very much effort, the hardest part for me was the energy required to knead the dough. I enjoy making bread, it's quite therapeutic!! The recipe uses much more flour than our bread machine, 750g, this seems like a large amount and I need to look up whether this is usual. However, it doesn't use milk powder or sugar like the machine does. 

I cooked the bread for 30mins and it came out slightly brown, I took it out of the tin and tapped the bottom. I think it sounded hollow but when I sliced it I noticed that some areas of the bread weren't quite cooked yet so decided to cook it for a little longer. It certainly rose out of the tin though and produced a large loaf of bread!! 

After 10 more minutes I got the bread out for another look, once opened up it still didn't look fully cooked but I decided to leave it to cool this time. But first I cut myself a slice, fresh homemade bread is delicious!

Inside the loaf

Out of the tin and looking good

My verdict is that this bread is really tasty, if slightly under cooked. Next time I'll leave it in the oven a little longer and turn the heat down as the recipe required a quite high temperature of 230oC. The bread definately has a lovely crust to it, something we don't get in our bread machine, and I think it also tastes much nicer. Something I would definitely consider doing again as it's not much effort and produces such a lovely loaf which rose beautifully.

I would like to add a few additional notes to this blog. My husband really liked the bread and said if we were marking it would get a 8 or 9/10. After a night on the side cooling down the loaf is much better. This morning the bread looks fully cooked through and is very tasty. Lost its crunchy top but really tasty.