Cake #98 - Irish Winter Cats

Thursday Cat Theme Cake - Irish Winter Cats.

Gingerbread Cheesecake with Shortbread Cookies Covered with Milk Chocolate.

I love mixing together ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger and cloves, and spicing cakes with that combination which is warm, earthy, cosy, welcoming and Christmassy, too.

My younger daughter loves mixing together cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, cardamom pods, fresh ginger, bay leaves and orange slices to cook a lovely fragranced simmering pot for Christmas. She pours the liquid into beautiful little jars which she places all around the house for us to enjoy the fragrance and for the cats to knock over.

So on lazy days and busy days, on good days and bad days, on sunny days and grey days - let there always be spices to taste and to smell as it brings harmony and warmth. Just remember to hold your cats tight. Your ginger coloured cat may not want to smell like ginger, too.

The recipe for the shortbread pastry is from here. As you can see above, the first cookies kind of expanded so I had to add some more flour to get the right consistency. The proper final cookies I covered with milk chocolate before sticking them onto the cake.

Note to self: Always bake a test cookie in the oven before making and baking a larger batch! There are differences between plain flour A (used in the original recipe) and plain flour B (you are using) no matter how carefully you weigh and measure your ingredients. Ovens are different, too.

Irish Winter Cats
Gingerbread Cheesecake with Shortbread Cookies Covered with Milk Chocolate.

Base
2 large eggs
100 ml granulated sugar
150 ml self-raising flour
50 g butter, melted
25 ml cream
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp ground nutmeg
½ tsp ground cardamom

Filling
200 g cream Cheese
3 eggs
50 ml cream
100 ml granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp ground cinnamon
50 g raisins

1. Preheat the oven to 175C / 350F and grease and flour a Ø 20 cm cake pan.

2. Beat eggs and sugar until white and fluffy.

3. Fold in flour together with spices, raisins, melted butter and cream.

4. Pour into pan and bake in the oven for 15  minutes.

5. Mix together all ingredients for the filling and pour on the cake base.

6. Put the cake back in the oven and bake another 15-20 minutes until the filling is set.

7. Let cool before removing from pan and decorating.

8. Place shortbread cats and Christmas trees on top of the cake and sprinkle with a little icing sugar. The Irish winter cats do not usually get very snowy... 

Cake #97 - Lemon Polenta Cake

Wednesday Natural Ingredient / Healthy Cake - Lemon Polenta Cake of Unwaxed Lemons.

Fallon & Byrne is my absolute favourite food browsing shop in Dublin. I say browsing because most of the stuff they sell is very expensive and I hardly can buy anything I would like to buy. So I browse instead. (And drool.) Every now and then I do buy something little - or something special for some special occasion.

For example.

Unwaxed lemons. Perfect for baking and cooking when you need to grate the rind, too.

Chanterelles. When they happen to be fresh.

Fresh artichokes. When it is the season they are good and affordable.

Veal. Good quality. For Vitello Tonnato a few times a year.

Raspberry vinegar. For cooking and baking.

Escargots. The whole family loves them and this is the only shop in Dublin I have been able to buy them. Except last time I went there they did not have any cans at all!

And many other seldom needed groceries. If I bump into a new recipe I want to try and there is some ingredient I know I will not find in my usual shops, Fallon & Byrne is the place where I go first. 

If I am not lucky I can at least get some unwaxed lemons for 70c each and bake a cake.

Click here for the recipe.

Cake #96 - Pathetic Reindeer

Tuesday Humour Cake - Pathetic Reindeer.

A cake which at first nearly became a catastrophe. Or no cake at all. Luckily, it decided to become a pathetic reindeer.

I had made a chocolate Swiss roll and filled it with vanilla buttercream and I had a brilliant idea of a reindeer figure I would make out of it. Antlers made of caramelised sugar and everything. 

Earlier that day I had had a dentist appointment and I had not been able to eat properly for many hours. Then in the middle of all baking and cooking dinner our dishwasher decided to break. Just like that. And it was full of dirty dishes too. Why cannot dishwashers break only after they are done with the wash? Last wash, so to say. Or at least there should be a warning coming up: 'do not fill, not gonna wash'.

I was tired. I was frustrated. I was drowning in dirty dishes.

I was telling everybody there will be no cake as I am too tired to melt any sugar for the antlers and there is nothing else in the house I could use for making the antlers of.

The Husband calmly walked to one of the kitchen cupboards, opened the door and handed me a bag of cinnamon sticks. I was speechless and I still am. - If you are wondering why, you can read the story about the cinnamon stick here.

Cake #95 - Naughty Chocolate Fudge Cake

Monday Mood Cake - Naughty Chocolate Fudge Cake with sliced Snicker bars on top.

My mood was not that naughty at all, but it is about time for all of us to be extra nice as it is Christmas in no time!

To be honest, I have no clue why the cake is naughty. The Husband says it may be called so because the batter does not have any butter in it. As according to him, any cake without butter is just cheating. At least the icing has butter in it, and finally I sliced a precious Snickers bar of mine to compensate the lack of butter. Good old Snickers bar makes any man to forget butter, right?

The recipe for this cake is from here.

Cake #94 - Lingonberry Cake

Sunday Traditional Cake - Lingonberry Cake.

To be honest, this cake is not really a traditional one - as a cake, that is. Lingonberry buns would be. So this cake is actually a giant traditional lingonberry bun but as it is the size of a cake, I can call it a cake.

In Ireland you can get lingonberry jam from IKEA and frozen lingonberries from some of the Eastern European shops like I did now. I do not use lingonberry that much in baking but to go with various foods. Fried liver, liver casserole, meatballs, spinach pancakes, blood pancakes... Now that I am writing this, I realise I have not had any blood pancakes for ages! They used to be one of my favourite foods when I was in school back in Finland. Always served with lingonberry jam. I can see there are some food producers still making blood pancakes and you can buy them ready-made in the shops in Finland. Probably not that popular nowadays and not even on school lunch menus any more. What a pity.

Lingonberry Cake

300 ml lukewarm milk

25 g fresh yeast (or 1 bag / 7 g fast action dried yeast)

100 ml  sugar

½ tsp ground cardamom

1 egg

100 g melted butter

about 1 litre plain flour

300 g lingonberries (defrost if frozen)

100 ml granulated sugar

Glazing

1 egg

Icing

200 ml icing sugar

about 1 tbsp water

1. Dissolve yeast in warm milk.

2. Add sugar, cardamom and egg and mix well.

3. Start adding flour gradually.

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

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

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

7. Line a springform pan ( Ø 28 cm) with baking paper. My favourite way to do this is to wet a piece of baking paper and crumple it into a ball to get rid of the excess water and make it softer so it is easier to line the form.

8. Form a giant bun of the dough and place it in the pan.

9. Let the cake rise for about half an hour.

10. Preheat the oven to 200C / 390F.
11. Glaze your cake with egg, place lingonberries (mixed with sugar) on top of the cake and bake in the oven for about 40 minutes.

12. Let the cake cool completely - it is easy to remove the cake from the pan either by removing the sides of the springform pan or just carefully lifting the baking paper together with the cake.

13. Drizzle or pipe the icing on top of your cake and enjoy fresh (or freeze on the day of baking).

Cake #93 - Halloumi Cake

Savoury Saturday Cake - Halloumi Cake with Raisins and Fresh Mint.

This moist and gooey cake goes well as a snack or for breakfast. The Halloumi cheese makes it savoury but then there are raisins to satisfy the sweet tooth, too. 

I do not know what the The Husband was thinking but after he had fried some sausages for brunch on Sunday morning he put a couple of slices of the cake on the pan and fried them, too - in the sausage fat, that is, and he said he just loved the cake that way! 

I do not mind. As long as my cakes are eaten and at least liked, if not always loved.

You can find the recipe for this cake here. I did not have groundnut oil so I used rapeseed oil instead. 

Cake #92 - Peppermint Chocolate Cake

Friends First Friday Cake - Peppermint Chocolate Cake.

For all Finnish heavy metal singers who have recorded new and traditional Christmas carols - Christmas baking is even more enjoyable when I listen to your voices. You are all stars!

I was excited to read that a new collection of these heavy metalized Christmas carols had just come out and now I have listened to it dozens of times already. It is called Ragnarok Juletid. 

This Finnish Christmas carol is one of my absolute favourites - first time I hear it translated into English!

Peppermint Chocolate Cake

200 g butter
250 ml granulated sugar
3 eggs
400 ml plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp cocoa powder

150 g peppermint crisp chocolate, chopped

100 ml cream

1. Preheat oven to 175 degrees C (350 F) and grease and flour a 2-litre bundt cake pan.

2. Mix flour, baking powder, cocoa powder chopped chocolate in a bowl.
3. Cream together butter and sugar.
4. Mix in eggs.
5. Add the dry ingredients together with the cream and mix well.
6. Bake the cake in the oven for 45-50 minutes and let cool on a rack before removing from the pan.