Sticky Toffee Cake with Salted Caramel Frosting

Hooray!! Its Treat Friday, actually on a Friday!! It’s a good start at least and as we’re back, let’s do it properly with a huge, far-too-decadent cake.

I first came across this recipe last year when I made it in cupcake form for my birthday. Yes, I know – baking your own birthday cake is borderline pathetic but I’m far too much of a control freak to leave it in anyone else’s hands. If I’m going to spend the day stuffing my face with cake, I want to know that it’s going to be a good one. And this one is very, very good. 

‘Ok, but it’s not your birthday. What are you going to do with a massive cake?’ some of you may be asking and while I’d love to eat it all regardless, I’m going to take it in to work to force upon my work colleagues. After all, our five week training course is ending today and this cake is a great way of celebrating the fact that we’ve all survived and nobody’s cried...that I know of anyway.

Adapted from that constant favourite, sticky toffee pudding, this cake is moist, rich and decadent, with the salted caramel frosting helping to tip the scales from an everyday sort of tea cake to what is essentially what I’d term, an occasion cake. For a while, I thought about incorporating chocolate somewhere in the recipe, the frosting perhaps, but ultimately decided that this would be a step too far! If someone does decided to experiment with adding chocolate somewhere though, do let me know how it goes!

Another reason why I’m a big fan of this cake is that it looks fancy/complicated but in reality is really, really easy. It’s also pretty speedy, not one that you’re going to be spending hours completing different stages over. So give it a go! Hopefully I can add a photo of the actual inside of the cake for your viewing pleasure later on today. As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking it into work today and don’t really want to take it in minus a slice...that just invites mockery, doesn’t it? Anyway, hopefully it goes down well, I’m almost certain that it will!

Have a great day – treat yourself!

Some Final Tips Before You Get Started:

• The secret to a light and delicious cake (or biscuit for that matter) lies in the initial beating of the butter and sugar. I’ve recently realised that this is a tip that I’ve failed to mention up to this point and am now rectifying this! When I’m making anything that begins with the creaming together of butter and sugar, I usually beat them together for at least 5 minutes. At this stage, it’s very difficult to overmix your ingredients and in fact, more beating will only make the end product lighter and smoother. Once you add your flour however, you need to settle down and be gentle and sparing with you mixture!
• As with the main mix, the same rules apply to frosting. With frosting, I take it even further and mix all of the ingredients together for at least 10 minutes. Again, this makes the frosting a lot lighter and helps you to avoid the horrid, heavy frosting that makes you feel like you can’t move for at least 5 hours.
• When it comes to covering an entire cake with frosting, here are the things you need to do:
• Stack up and frost the layers together as evenly and as straight as possible.
• Cover the entire cake with a thin layer of frosting, creating a ‘crumb layer’. This will stop the second and main layer of frosting from being covered with crumbs from the cake which ultimately, just improves the overall presentation of the cake.
• On top of this layer, again cover the entire cake with a thicker layer of frosting. This is the one that people will see so try to keep it neat. I use an (approx.) 33cm straight spatula to apply my frosting, although I fully intend on buying an angled one ASAP, largely because that’s what they tend to use on TV. So try and make it neat but if you can’t, don’t worry because it will still be delicious!
• The caramel I use for the frosting is just a standard, pre-made caramel that usually comes in a tin. If you would like to make your own caramel then by all means do! I’ve just used the tinned caramel for this for speed and efficiency.

Sticky Toffee Cake with Salted Caramel Frosting

Ingredients

180g Dried Dates (Chopped and Pitted)

1 tsp. Vanilla Extract

180g Self Raising Flour

1 tsp. Bicarbonate of Soda

80g Unsalted Butter (Softened)

150g Dark Muscovado Sugar

2 Eggs (Lightly Beaten)

For the Frosting:

500g Icing Sugar (Sifted)

160g Unsalted Sugar (Softened)

50ml Milk

100g Caramel

½ tsp. Salt

3x 20cm Diameter Cake Tins

1)      Preheat the oven to 180◦C, grease and line the bases of your cake tins.

2)      Place the chopped dates into a heat proof bowl and mix together with 180ml of boiling water and the vanilla extract. Leave to soak for 20 minutes.

3)      Cream together the butter and sugar for at least 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs, beating between each addition. You may need to add a tablespoon of the flour to this mixture half way through the addition of the eggs in order to prevent curdling.

4)      Sift the remainder of the flour and the bicarbonate of soda into the wet ingredients and fold until just combined. Finally, add the date and water mixture and mix gently.

5)      Divide the mixture into the three cake tins and bake for 20 minutes until a deep, golden brown. Remove from the oven and leave to cool completely.

6)      To make the frosting: Using an electric whisk or freestanding mixer, combine together the butter and icing sugar until well mixed but still powdery. Gradually add the milk and beat on a high speed for at least 10 minutes. Finally, add the caramel and combine again at a high speed for a further 5 minutes.

7)      When the cakes have cooled completely, place one on top of the other with a generous amount of frosting spread between each layer. Once stacked, cover the cake completely with a thin layer of frosting to seal in the crumbs. Finally, spread a thicker layer of frosting around the entire cake, smooth and decorate to your preference.

Enjoy!!

P.S. I apologise for the shocking quality of the photos this week. That's what happens when you move and leave your camera at home and end up having to use your phone!

Chocolate Peppermint Slices

I promised you there’d be a Treat Sunday, didn’t I? This time when I say I’m back, I mean it and here’s a recipe to prove it!

When I start to think about writing a recipe, I tend to get an idea or some form of inspiration and then I look for as many recipes for this idea that I possibly can. I look through my mountain of recipe books, I Google, I go through all of my favourite food websites and I compare and contrast what they tell me, take my favourite components and turn them into my own interpretation of the recipe. I’m incredibly disorganised in that a lot of this takes place in my head, and any notes that may be written down tend to be on scrap bits of paper which then get lost in the bowels of my handbag when I take them shopping to buy ingredients. I am a bit more organised when it comes to actually baking in that usually by this point, I’ll have the bare bones of a recipe which then gets scribbled on as I bake.

So there I am, every week, trying to write up my blog using a, by this point, mangled and (often tea/chocolate/butter) stained piece of paper with the recipe on it. Now, on the particular week that I wrote this recipe...I went mental. I tore the recipe out of my notebook in order to write it up on the train without lugging my notebook around, didn’t get round to it...and the paper disappeared!! Nightmare.

Luckily for you, I can remember it...well I’m about 99% sure that I can! These Chocolate Peppermint Slices are so nice though that I’m sharing it anyway and if anyone encounters a problem you’ll just have to let me know and I’ll re-experiment and make corrections where necessary.

These Chocolate Peppermint slices, as I’ve already said, are delicious and this is coming from someone who really isn’t a huge mint fan. The best way I can describe them is that it’s like eating a giant After Eight (or other brand of after dinner mint) and it just makes sense.

In my family, After Eights only tend to appear around Christmas, usually to be found in my father’s stocking and are universally enjoyed by all, even as we found out one year, by the dog. That one particular year, it was the evening of Christmas day and while all family members were in the sitting room in various states of a food-induced coma, someone noticed that the dog had gone very quiet and had in fact, not been seen trotting around for quite some time. So we all got up to look for her and eventually she was found in the conservatory, under the dining table, surrounded by empty After Eight mint packets. She’d eaten them all, the little piglet. To this day we don’t know how she got the box, opened the box or got the mints out of their packets (there were no chewed up packets). I personally think she’s harbouring a secret set of opposable thumbs but this has yet to be proven. 

Anyway, that’s what after dinner mints remind me of. It’s a story that always makes me smile and it was one I thought about when I was making this recipe. So if you’re a fan of the chocolate mint flavour combination, and even if you’re not, you should definitely gives this one a try. Just don’t feed them to your dog, that would be a waste and if they’re anything like my dog was when she scoffed all those chocolates, you’ll spend the rest of your day cleaning up dog sick. Not nice.

Some Final Tips Before You Get Started:

• In this recipe I used an ingredient I’ve never, ever used before; vegetable shortening. It worked out great in this recipe in that it stopped the white peppermint filling from going yellow, as it would have had I used butter. It’s pretty weird stuff to work with but as I said, it works here so you should have a go with it. I think if you didn’t want to use it you could probably substitute the vegetable shortening with butter and a couple of drops of green food colouring (for that minty look), but this isn’t something I’ve yet tried and it’s therefore untested.
• The base of these slices are exactly the same as the Marbled Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies I made a while ago...obviously minus the cheesecake. I’ve written quite a few tips regarding the making of these on this page so if you need a few pointers or want to see what I do, have a browse at the tips for this recipe.
• With the chocolate topping, I’ve given the incredibly specific ingredient of ‘several drops’ of peppermint extract. Basically tailor this to your own taste. If you just want a mild peppermint flavour, leave it out of the chocolate topping and let the peppermint filling do the work. If you like a strong peppermint flavour, however, add a few drops to your chocolate topping as well.

Chocolate Peppermint Slices

Ingredients

For the Brownie Base:

200g Dark Chocolate (broken into small pieces)

175g Unsalted Butter

300g Caster Sugar

130g Plain Flour

3 Eggs

For the Peppermint Filling:

185g Icing Sugar (sifted)

30g Vegetable Shortening (melted)

2 tbsps. Whole Milk

½ tsp. Peppermint Extract

For the Chocolate Topping

150g Dark Chocolate

100ml Double Cream

1 tbsp. Butter

Several Drops of Peppermint Extract (optional)

30cm x 20cm Rectangular Baking Tin

1)      Preheat the oven to 180◦C, grease and line the baking tin with greaseproof paper.

2)      To make the brownie base, place a large heatproof bowl over a saucepan filled with an inch of water, making sure the base of the bowl is not touching the water. Bring the water to boil over a medium heat. Break the chocolate into chunks and place, alongside the butter into the heatproof bowl and melt together, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool slightly once melted.

3)      Mix the sugar and flour into the melted chocolate and butter and stir until combined. Add the eggs and little at a time, mixing until a wet mixture has formed. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking tin and bake for 25-30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the brownie comes out mostly clean. Leave to cool.

4)      While the brownie base is cooling, make your peppermint filling by sifting the icing into a bowl. Stir in the melted shortening, milk and peppermint extract until a smooth paste has formed. Spread the filling over the cooled brownie base and leave to set in the refrigerator

5)      To make the chocolate topping, heat the double cream in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. As soon as the double cream begins to simmer, remove from the heat and pour the hot cream over the broken up chocolate pieces and stir until the chocolate has melted. Add the butter and (optional) peppermint extract and stir until melted and combined.

6)      Pour the chocolate topping over the cooled peppermint filling and refrigerate again for 20 minutes or until the chocolate has set.

7)      Once set, carefully remove from the baking tin and cut into slices or squares. Enjoy!

Oh and here's the After Eight stealing dog with secret opposable thumbs....just because she's cute!!

Kitchen Disaster Time

So I'm finally connected to the internet - hooray!!! I've managed to massively fluff up the recipe I was going to publish this week - boo!!!

It was all going so well! The internet finally got connected after much faffing about on the part of my broadband provider, I had two great recipes in the bag and another idea ready to try out for this week...and then I lost one of the recipes, lost the pictures of another and the great idea I had for a recipe this week turned out to be not so great in practice. Oh and then after all this I put the back of my hand on the electric hob plate I'd had on for about 25 minutes. Kitchen disaster time.

So no Treat Friday today. However for one week only, there will be a Treat Sunday which when you think about it, is exciting. I can even reveal that the treat will be Chocolate Peppermint Squares and that they are delicious. They're like big, cakey, after dinner mints. Yum!! Teaser picture below...

Now just to find/remember that pesky recipe...

See you Sunday!!

New Recipes Coming Soon!!!

Just wanted to give a quick update! Sorry for the lack of recipes over the past few weeks, it's taken me that long to get my house properly moved into and sorted. I'm also waiting for my internet to be connected which should (fingers crossed) be happening this week, so expect a new recipe and blog next Friday!!

Happy Easter!!!

Marbled Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies

This week I’ve been both incredibly busy and frustrated, immersed in the world of house hunting. After many months of waiting , I’ve finally been offered a job and now have to relocate before I start next week. So you might think that I’d have been too busy to write and bake a recipe this week – but would I do that to you?

So we’re talking brownies and to be precise, marbled chocolate cheesecake brownies. You may be asking why get the cheesecake involved and not just do normal chocolate brownies but I find that most people have a favourite chocolate brownie recipe and they’re pretty easy to come across, so you don’t need mine. I definitely have a favourite brownie recipe and I’ve been making it for years! I first introduced them to the world a depressingly large number of years ago while still at school where they were very popular and have been making them, usually by request, ever since. Now, for some reason I’ve always kept this recipe a closely guarded secret and now I feel like I cannot change, therefore you probably won’t ever see it here.  Today’s brownie recipe though is still really delicious so I hope you like it!

These recipes are not exactly your traditional brownies though and I’m going to begin with this warning – if you don’t like cheesecake, you’re probably not going to like these brownies!! Although if you don’t like cheesecake, I’m not sure I want you reading this blog anyway – what’s wrong with you?? Oh, you have a dairy allergy?? Then you shouldn’t be eating chocolate either!!! Actually thinking about it, what do you do if you have a dairy allergy and want to make a recipe that contains chocolate? Can you just substitute the chocolate for dairy free chocolate?? Does it melt and bake the same?? So many questions that I’m going to have to find out the answer to!

Anyway, if you do like both chocolate and cheesecake then these are the brownies for you! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I was experimenting with these, but what came out was something that tasted a little like chocolate cheesecake on a brownie rather than biscuit base. Accept that this is what they’ll taste like and you’ll love them. They’re moist and tangy and chocolatey and great – try them! And for those of you who don’t like cheesecake – you crazy bunch – the chocolate brownie part of the recipe makes lovely brownies by itself so you can always have a go at this is you prefer!

Finally before I go, there may not be a recipe posted next week due to the moving, the new job, my probable lack of internet and probable lack of kitchen! I’ll see what I can do!

Some Final Tips Before You Get Started:

• I always melt my chocolate in a bain-marie (ok, a Pyrex bowl balanced over a saucepan of water) but if you don’t want to fuss with this you can always melt your butter and chocolate in the microwave. Just be careful not to burn it by microwaving at a fairly low temperature and taking it out frequently to stir until fully melted.
• Make sure your mixture has cooled sufficiently before you add the eggs. Adding the sugar and flour prior to the eggs should lower the temperature enough but just double check, otherwise you’ll end up with chocolate scrambled eggs. Not ideal.
• I used a standard, supermarket bar of dark chocolate for these which I’m guessing had a fairly low cocoa content because that’s what I prefer for brownies. This is what I’d suggest but if you prefer a more bitter chocolate, say 75% cocoa chocolate when you bake, by all means use it!
• Once baked, unlike normal cakes, a testing skewer inserted into the brownies shouldn’t necessarily come out clean when checking to see if they’ve cooked all the way through. You still want it to be very slightly sticky in order for your brownies to be moist. If it comes out covered in batter however, they still need more cooking time. Go with your gut on this one.

Marbled Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies

For the Cream Cheese Mixture:

400g Full Fat Cream Cheese

1tsp. Vanilla Extract

125g Caster Sugar

2 Eggs

For the Brownies:

200g Dark Chocolate

175g Unsalted Butter

300g Caster Sugar

130g Plain Flour

3 Eggs

A 30cm x 20cm Rectangular Baking Tin

1)      Preheat the oven to 180◦C, grease and line your baking tin with greaseproof paper. In a large bowl, cream together the cream cheese, vanilla extract, caster sugar and eggs. Stir until smooth, creamy and well combined. Set aside in a cool place.

2)      Place a large heatproof bowl over a saucepan filled with an inch of water, making sure the base of the bowl is not touching the water. Bring the water to boil over a medium heat. Break the chocolate into chunks and place, alongside the butter into the heatproof bowl and melt together, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool slightly once melted.

3)      Mix the sugar and flour into the melted chocolate and butter and stir until combined. Add the eggs and little at a time, mixing until a wet mixture has formed.

4)      Pour ¾ of the brownie mixture into the prepared tin. On top of this, place dollops of the cream cheese mixture before filling the gaps between these with the remaining brownie mixture. Using a skewer, swirl together the cream cheese and brownie until a marbled pattern is created. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes or until the cheesecake is golden and a skewer inserted into the mixture comes out slightly sticky.

5)      Leave to cool completely in the tin before removing and cutting the brownies into bars.

Toffee Apple Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting

This week I’m making a request. Several weeks ago, I made my way to London with the noble intention of going to a party and while there I met up with many of my friends, all of whom are now living fabulous lives in the capital city, and a specific request was made as to what recipe should feature in this blog one week. This request was to write a recipe that involved apples.

Now, that in itself does not really narrow my task down, as apples are a deservedly popular ingredient in the baking world.  Pies, biscuits, tarts, cakes, muffins – they really are incredibly versatile and almost always delicious. After much deliberation though, I have decided to go for an apple cupcake with some toffee sauce and cream cheese frosting thrown in for good measure. It sounds excessive but I promise that it’s not and that all of the elements work well together. Cream cheese instead of butter frosting, the high apple content and only the slightest hint of toffee  makes this cupcake a lot lighter than a more traditional cupcake too – you may even, if you try really, really hard, be able to convince yourself its healthy!

The recipe itself is probably one of the most easy and stress-free cupcake recipes I’ve ever used and I’ve used a lot, so that’s a bold statement. All three components; the cakes, the sauce and the frosting, are quick to whip up, I would even go as far as to say that the most time consuming and annoying bit is the chopping up of the apples and even a monkey could do that!

On the subject of the apples, I’m not one of those people who insist on using Bramley or cooking apples in my baking. My general rule would be to think about what you’re making and to make a choice between sweet or tart. I’m not an apple connoisseur (can you tell?) but those are essentially your options and I would suggest sweeter apples for cakes and more tart apples for pies and tarts. For this particular recipe I used Braeburns but like I said, think about it and go with your gut.

So Fi, here is your recipe! I hope you like it!

Some final tips before you get started:

• By the time you add all four eggs to the creamed butter and sugar, it will look all curdled and mildly disgusting BUT it will be fine once the flour is added.
• When making the frosting, make sure the butter is very soft so it all blends together properly.
• Again for the frosting, making sure you’re cream cheese is kept cool in the fridge until the moment you need it will ensure a workable frosting. If your cream cheese is at room temperature it’ll be too runny.
• While the lure of a lovely toffee sauce might cause you to get carried away, each cake really only needs a teaspoon (max!!). It’s enough to add great flavour without creating a messy, sticky cake.

Toffee Apple Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting (Makes 12)

Ingredients

For the Cakes:

200g Unsalted Butter (softened)

200g Golden Caster Sugar

4 Eggs

200g Self-Raising Flour

1tsp. Ground Cinnamon

2 Eating Apples (Peeled, cored and diced into ½cm cubes)

For the Toffee Sauce:

50g Soft Toffees

2tbsp. Double Cream

For the Frosting:

50g Butter (softened)

100g Full Fat Cream Cheese

300g Icing Sugar

1tsp. Ground Cinnamon

Ground Cinnamon to Decorate

1)      Preheat the oven to 180◦C and line a 12-hole muffin tin with muffin cases. For the cakes, cream together the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs and mix in a little at a time.

2)      Into this mixture, sieve the self-raising flour and ground cinnamon and gently fold into the wet ingredients. Finally, add the cubed apples and stir until well distributed throughout the mixture.

3)      Divide the mixture between the 12 muffin cases and bake in a preheated oven for 25 minutes or until golden brown. Leave to cool completely.

4)      For the toffee sauce, place the soft toffees and cream into a saucepan and warm over a low heat until the toffees have melted and combined with the cream to make a sauce. With a knife, cut a small round out of the top of each cooled cupcake, fill with a teaspoon of toffee sauce and replace the cake that was removed to make the hole.

5)      For the frosting, cream together the butter and cream cheese using an electric whisk or mixer. Whisk in the icing sugar and cinnamon and stir until a smooth yet firm frosting has formed. Don’t mix for too long or the frosting may go runny. Pipe or spread the frosting to cover each cupcake before finally dusting with a small amount of ground cinnamon to decorate. 

Chocolate Orange Syrup Cakes

This week I’ve taken an idea and run with it, regardless of whether it makes sense or sounds nice or in fact even works when put into practice. I’m talking about Chocolate Orange Syrup Cakes. Not the snappiest title, I know and it is somewhat confusing but let me attempt to explain the (albeit questionable) logic behind it.

Basically this has all stemmed from me being bought new bakeware. To be more specific, a silicone heart shaped muffin pan. I wanted to use it but was getting bored of making muffins and cupcakes so started to search for an alternative. A couple of weeks ago I posted a recipe for lemon drizzle cake, a cake which had always been a favourite in my house, and it got me thinking as to how I could develop this recipe further. Now I have always been a huge fan of oranges – in fact I’m potentially the number one fan in the world. I have at least one a day and genuinely feel weird if I don’t have one, making it a borderline problem but we’ll ignore that for now! I also of course, love chocolate and therefore the combination of chocolate orange just makes perfect sense to me and so this is how the idea developed. It was like a big food word-association; lemons, oranges, chocolate orange – winning idea for a recipe!!

I could have made one large chocolate orange syrup cake but having done the lemon drizzle cake recipe so recently, I decided that something slightly different was in order...and I wanted to make heart shaped cakes.

So yes, these are what I’ll be scoffing this Treat Friday and having made myself get up and go to the gym at 7.30am, that’s completely fine. If only I could stop eating cake, I could save on the cost of a gym membership...and have a lie in. 

Some Final Tips Before You Get Started:

• As I’ve not used any sort of cake case in this recipe, make sure all of your muffin pans are really well greased. I melted butter and painted it onto the pans using a pastry brush and therefore avoided having to serve my cakes in the muffin tin with each person digging cake out of the hole with a spoon. That’d be so uncivilized.
• When making the syrup, it only needs heating very gently to help the sugar dissolve into the orange juice faster. If you’re dealing with a burnt pan situation then you’ve gotten carried away.
• It’s an obvious one but just make sure that all of the dry ingredients are sieved into the mixture. No-one wants to bite into a lump of baking powder or cocoa powder.

Chocolate Orange Syrup Cakes

Ingredients (Makes 16)

200g Unsalted Butter (softened)

200g Caster Sugar

200g Self-Raising Flour

1tsp. Baking Powder

3 Large Eggs

3tbsp. Cocoa Powder

8tbsp. Warm Tap Water

30g Flaked Almonds

Zest of 2 Oranges and Juice of 1 Orange.

100g Orange Flavoured Chocolate (roughly chopped)

For the Syrup:

150g Icing Sugar

75ml Orange Juice (freshly squeezed)

25ml Lemon Juice

2x 12-Hole Muffin Tins

1)      Preheat the oven to 180◦C. In a large bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Into this mixture, sift the self-raising flour and baking powder and gradually add the eggs. Stir until well combined.

2)      In a separate bowl, mix together the cocoa powder and warm water to create a smooth paste. Gently fold this paste into the other ingredients before adding the flaked almonds, chocolate, orange juice and zest and mixing well.

3)      Divide the mixture into the muffin tins and bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the cakes comes out clean.

4)      In the final minutes of baking, combined the ingredients for the syrup in a saucepan and gently heat until all the sugar has dissolved and a thin syrup has been made.

5)      Once the cakes have been removed from the oven, while still warm skewer each cake multiple times before pouring over a tablespoon of syrup onto each cake. Leave in the muffin tins until completely cooled.