Cake #57 - Pink Ribbon

Friends First Friday Cake - Pink Ribbon.

This cake is for breast cancer awareness and you, my friends, whose lives breast cancer has affected. I wish you well, I wish you strength! 

October is breast cancer awareness month in Ireland and world-wide, too,  and the Pink Ribbon is its symbol. Therefore this cake.

I made a basic sponge (same recipe I used for example for the Victoria Sandwich), which I filled with whipped cream and strawberries. The icing is white chocolate with some yellow and light brown food colouring and the decorations are made of pink sugar paste.

Cake #56 - Cat Pancakes

Thursday Cat Theme Cake - Cat Pancakes.

I saw this video a while ago and thought why not try making some cat pancakes...

Once you get going, it is not that difficult to make cat shapes just using a piping bottle. To get more detailed faces I would definitely need a better pancake pan and more practice with the hob and temperatures. I also learned that the batter should rather be runny than thick and the piping nozzle rather small than big.

How about a pancake selfie next time?

My Pancake Batter

500 ml milk
3 eggs
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
200 ml plain flour
3 tbsp melted butter

Mix all ingredients together and let the batter set for about half an hour before frying your pancakes.

Cake #55 - Blueberry and Yogurt Cake

Wednesday Natural Ingredient / Healthy Cake - Blueberry and Yogurt Cake.

I know a lot of people who are afraid of making a cheesecake because it would be lumpy. So they never make any cheesecakes at all. 

Do you suffer from gelatinephobia? Why? Just be precise when measuring your ingredients. And patient when mixing them. - Practising (and failing) a couple of times helps, too.

When I made this cake I was thinking about being precise and especially giving precise instructions to others.

Some years ago we had an au pair. Besides childminding, she did some housework. Every week she was supposed to hoover the whole house so we had agreed that on Thursdays she would hoover downstairs and on Fridays upstairs. After some time I started paying attention to the stairs as the carpet on them looked very dirty. Sand, biscuit crumbs, hair... 

But of course -  we had never agreed anything about hoovering the stairs!

Be precise. 

Why did I remember this just now? Because on the day I made this cake, this former au pair of ours was coming over for dinner. We hadn't seen each other for six years. She is studying nursing, she has a family and she is doing well. And I am confident that she can see the stairs now, too. 

Blueberry and Yogurt Cake

Crust:
200 g Nice bisquits, crumbed
100 g butter, melted

Filling:
300 g Greek yogurt
150 ml granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
6 gelatine leaves
100 ml blueberry juice
3 egg whites

125 g fresh blueberries

1. Mix the bisquit crumbs and melted butter.  Press the mixture into the bottom of a loose base cake pan, base covered with baking parchment. Let the crust cool and rest in the fridge while you make the filling.
2. Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for 5 minutes.
3. Mix the yogurt, sugar and vanilla sugar.
4. Heat up the blueberry juice and melt the soaked gelatine leaves in the hot juice and pour the smooth liquid into the yogurt mixture together with the blueberries (leave some for decorations!). Mix well.

5. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them very gently into the yogurt mixture trying to keep it ‘airy’.
6. Pour the filling on the crust and chill in the fridge for at least four hours until firm.
7. Remove the firm cake from the pan very, very carefully on a serving plate and decorate it with blueberries.

Cake #54 - Pizza

Tuesday Humour Cake - Pizza.

I admit, this is one of my non-planned, hastily made creations. When it is 9 p.m. and there still is no daily cake ready nor a weakest idea what to make, it is the best to let the last minute panic solve the problem.

For me it means spinning around in the kitchen, looking into cupboards and opening the fridge door for the fifth time with a slight hope that some idea would just jump onto my pan right there... Nope. Not yet. But I trust I always spot something to give me the inspiration. Something.

This time it was these pizza mesh sheets in the cupboard the door of which should not be opened but I did open it anyway.  It is just when you open the door all the little plastic containers and their lids fall down and then the cat catches the cap of your Bubble which also fell on the floor and then you see what a mess the cupboard actually is and you want to close the door but you cannot because the things that fell out do not fit in there any more and... No. I did not end up organising the cupboard. This time. I just took out the mesh sheets and decided to make a sweet pizza. 

Sweet Pizza 

Dough
200 ml lukewarm water
20 g fresh yeast
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbsp sugar
500 ml strong white flour
3 tbsp sunflower oil

Filling

Red jam 

Cream cheese

White chocolate

Ground almond

Pink sugar paste or even Chocolate Salami

Fresh mint

1. Dissolve yeast in warm water.

2. Add salt and sugar and mix well.

3. Start adding flour gradually.

4. After you have kneaded in about half of the flour, add oil.

5. Knead in more flour until your dough is not sticky any more.

6. Leave the dough to rise in a warm place until double in size, for about half an hour.

7. Divide the dough into two and roll two round pizzas, about  Ø 30 cm.

8. Preheat the oven to 250 C / 480 F.

9. Spread jam on pizzas and add a few spoonfuls of cream cheese.

10. Bake in the oven on the mesh sheets for 5-7 minutes.

11. Add the rest of the fillings. If you add grated white chocolate right after you have taken the pizza out of the oven it will melt a little and look more like melted cheese.

12. Fool you family and leave the pizzas on the kitchen counter together with a bottle of garlic sauce.

Cake #53 - Blueberry Raspberry Almond and Cake

Monday Mood Cake - Blueberry Raspberry Almond Cake with Orange Syrup. 

Colours and vitamins for dullness and lack of energy.

I am grateful for the work projects I am asked for every now and then, and I am grateful for them being very short-term ones. I am grateful for not working permanently and full-time as with this family I have my hands full 24/7. And I am not even talking about my cakes and cats yet. 

I have 8 years of working experience as a project manager in a multi-project environment, leading project teams with 5-50 people. I used to be good at both time management and risk management. 

So I should have known better. 

What comes around, goes around. Due to the latest work project, I am here now, catching up with all outstanding stories and recipes for this blog with a dull mind and no energy. 

My resource management skills have never been good. Especially weak they are now that I am both the baker and the writer. The baker has been successful, the writer has got lost.

But. I am calling my inner poet in a minute, and I believe she will appear any time soon. In the meantime I will bake another cake. To be put in the queue. 

If the all the cakes in the queue for the blog had not been eaten yet they would sure be blaming me for poor project management. Fair play.

Click here for recipe for Blueberry Raspberry Almond Cake. I followed the recipe with the exception that I used 125 g blueberries and 125 g raspberries on top.

Cake #52 - Cloudberry and Cream Cake

Sunday Traditional Cake - Cloudberry and Cream Cake.

Cloudberry is one of the yummiest berries I know. They taste kind of  earthy but very sophisticated at the same time. Cloudberry is rare and therefore the berries are very expensive. In Finland fresh cloudberries would cost about 25 €/kg at a market. Even jams are dear; this jar I bought in Finland in the summer is one of the affordable brands and still it was about 5€ for 400g (of which berries 35%).

I had the idea that cloudberries grow only in the Nordic countries and Northern America so I was surprised to read that there are cloudberries in Northern Ireland, too. Well, that is north. 

Fresh cloudberries may not be that easy to find, but besides jam there is cloudberry liqueur, cloudberry cider, cloudberry sweets, cloudberry suryp and even Lumene cosmetics where cloudberries have been used. Just google cloudberry products and see where you could get a taste of it. It is worth to pay a little extra.

Not sure if I would exactly taste this one, though:

Cloudberry and Cream Cake

4 large eggs
200 ml granulated sugar
300 ml self-raising flour
100 g butter, melted
50 ml cream

400 g cloudberry jam (or fresh cloudberries)
500 ml fresh cream, whipped

1. Preheat oven to 175C / 350F and grease and flour a Ø 23 cm cake pan.

2. Beat eggs and sugar until white and fluffy.

3. Fold in flour together with melted butter.

4. Pour into pan and bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

5. Let cool completely before filling and decorating.

6. Slice the cool cake into three layers.

7. Mix a tablespoon of cloudberry jam with 200 ml of water and moist the layers.

8. Spread some jam and whipped cream on each layer.

9. On the top layer spread jam and then pipe the sides of the cake with whipped cream.

10. Let set in the fridge an hour or two before serving.

Cake #51 - Gorgonzola Gingerbread Cake

Savoury Saturday Cake - Gorgonzola Gingerbread Cake.

The combination of blue cheese and gingerbread may sound unusual and weird but there is true harmony in that. In Finland, especially around Christmas time, gingerbread cookies topped with Aura blue cheese is a usual canape served together with Glögg (Nordic mulled wine).

Unfortunately, in Ireland you cannot get Aura cheese anywhere (of Irish cheese Cashel Blue is the best!) but you can get the Nordic type non-alcoholic Glögg in Ikea. - Is it the season yet? Better be as I really should visit Ikea next week for some bakeware. 

By baking this cake I wanted to take a step towards Christmas. Only 66 days to go!!

Gorzonzola Gingerbread Cake

150 g soft butter

50 ml soft brown sugar

2 eggs

½ tsp salt

400 ml plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cardamom

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground cloves

½ tsp ground nutmeg

50 ml milk

200 g Gorgonzola cheese, crumbed

1. Heat the oven to 175 C / 350 F and grease and flour a 1 kg / 2 lbs loaf pan.

2. Mix together the dry ingredients.

3. Cream together butter and sugar.

4. Add eggs and mix well.

5. Add the dry ingredients and milk.

6. Pour half of the mixture into the pan. 

7. Place Gorgonzola crumbs on the base and pour the rest of the dough evenly into the pan so that it covers the cheese.

9. Bake in the oven for about 30-35 minutes.

10. Let cool before removing from pan.

11. Enjoy with Glögg, coffee or tea.