Cricket Cake

As you may, or may not, know it's Gary's birthday today and I decided to make him 2 cakes. Lucky boy!! I wanted to make a simple cake that focused more on flavours and a more complex cake, which will be posted later.

The simple cake was to be decorated with a few cricket pieces but I was going to try some new techniques. First was the sponge it's self. He wanted raspberry and white chocolate flavours so the tricky thing was to get these flavours to balance. White chocolate is quite a subtle flavour and I was afraid it'd be dominated by the raspberry. I made a vanilla sponge and then stirred in 200g of chopped white chocolate. I then added some raspberries and stirred these in carefully to try and maintain their shape and structure.

For the icing I made Italian merringue butter cream. I will post how to make this at a later date, and stirred in some homemade raspberry curd, again will post about this later. I filled the cake with icing and also gave it a coating in the raspberry icing. 

I then made a white chocolate ganache by heating some double cream and adding white chocolate to melt in. Ideally I would have done a 4:1 ratio of chocolate to cream but I didn't have enough chocolate so I used a 2.5:1 ratio. This seemed to work fine and I had a thick chocolate mixture. I spread this over the cake and left it to set. I then covered this is green sugar paste and smoothed it, creating a crisp edge. 

I made a bat, ball and stumps out of sugar paste and stuck these on the top. 

Finished cake

Overall the cake looked ok, it was very simple. I could have put more details on the cake if I'd had some more tools, which I don't, but it was ok. The icing was too thick and so towards the edges the balance wasn't right. However, if you had a slice from the middle it was much better. 

Internal view

Chocolate and Raspberry Angel Food Cake

I decided to use up my 9 egg yolks, from yesterdays custard tarts, by making another angel food cake, however, I wanted to use up some homegrown raspberries so I decided to create my own variant. The original post can be found here and the recipe is based on this. 

Ingredients:

10 egg whites

1tsp cream of tartar

300g Caster Sugar

100g Plain Flour

25g Cocoa

Handful of raspberries

Whisk the egg whites until they are starting to thicken. Add the cream of tartar and whisk further until the whites are soft peaks. Add the caster sugar one spoonful at a time ensuring it's properly whisked in. This will cause the mixture to have a glossy finish, whisk until these form firm peaks. 

Meanwhile place the flour and cocoa in a bowl. 

Preparing egg whites and flour is ready to go. 

Carefully fold half of the flour mixture into the egg whites, ensuring that you maintain the structure of the whites. Fold in the remaining half and make sure it's full incorporated. 

All folded together

Fold in the raspberries but don't stir for too long as you want them distributed not crushed.  

A handful of raspberries

Carefully put the mixture into a ungreased 8" baking tin and level off the top. 

Levelled and ready for a baking

Place in the oven, 180oC for 45 minutes. A skewer when inserted should come out clean, showing the cake is cooked all the way through.

Cooked all the way through

 Turn the tin upside down and leave to cool on a rack. 

Cooling upside down

Once cool, at least 1 hour, carefully insert a knife around the edge of the cake and prise it out of the tin, removing the base. 

Out the tin in one piece

Cut a slice and enjoy. 

Sliced and ready to be eaten

The verdict: I thought this cake was lovely and light, it hadn't risen as well as my previous attempt though. I thought the raspberries gave a lovely freshness and there were few enough that you just got a small sample rather than over powering the cake. I think the cake would have benefited from having a cream coating, like the previous cake, as it was perhaps a little dry on its own. Gary and I enjoyed this cake so much that it didn't go into work and we managed to eat almost the whole thing ourselves, added bonus was that 1 slice was only 2 weightwatchers points, yay!! I would give it 8/10. Gary says he preferred the original version :(.