Simple Recipe: Easy Chocolate Orange Tart

Chocolate orange is one of those classic flavours. Growing up in the 1980’s, Christmas stockings were always bulked out with a hefty chocolate orange. It was such a treat, and over the years (decades!), chocolate orange has become more and more popular and available. Indeed, on my last trip around a supermarket, I found a box of Cadbury’s Chocolate Orange Fingers, and an idea for a pretty pudding was born; this simple chocolate orange tart!

Now, I just added some orange zest to my tart, and I thought the flavour was orangey enough; but if you want the full whack of chocolate orange goodness, then bars of actual chocolate orange are now available in the shops. You can easily swap out the milk chocolate for chocolate orange chocolate if that floats your boat. I feel like I’m saying the words “chocolate” and “orange” quite a bit here.

Easy Chocolate Orange Tart

This tart is rich and delicious, it didn’t last very long at all, which is always a good sign. If I’d have let him, my 11 year old would have probably eaten the lot in one sitting!

Easy Chocolate Orange Tart

Ingredients:
For the pastry –
4oz plain flour
2oz butter, cubed
A pinch of salt
2-3 tablespoons of cold water
-or- a packet of ready rolled shortcrust pastry

For the filling –
300g single cream
4 tablespoons of sugar
300g milk chocolate
Zest of one orange
Approx 1/3 of a box of Cadbury’s Chocolate Orange Fingers

Easy Chocolate Orange Tart

How to make a chocolate orange tart:

Tip the flour, salt and butter in a large mixing bowl. Using your fingers, rub the butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs. Use a knife and stir in just enough cold water to bind the dough together. Do this gradually as you don’t want your pastry to be too wet. Once you’ve made the dough, cover the bowl and chill it in the fridge for 15 minutes or so before rolling out.

Or if you’re using shop bought, ready rolled pastry, take it out of the fridge about half an hour before you want to use it.

Pre-heat your oven to gas mark 5 or 190°

Take your pastry and roll it out to the thickness of a pound coin. You can either roll it out on a floured surface, or between two pieces of baking parchment. I find the baking parchment method quicker and a lot less messy.

Grease a 20cm tart tin and carefully put the pastry in the tin, pressing it against the sides. Let the pastry hang over the sides of the tin, you can trim it later. Prick the base all over with a fork. Top the pastry with a sheet of baking parchment and cover with baking beans, bake in your pre-heated oven for 10 minutes.

Easy Chocolate Orange Tart

Remove the baking beans and parchment and pop back in the oven for another 8 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. Once cool, carefully with a sharp knife trim the pastry so it is flush with the top of the tin.

While your pastry is cooling, warm up your cream and sugar in a saucepan. Finely chop the chocolate and once the cream is simmering, turn off the heat and add the chocolate to the pan. Leave for a minute and stir until the mixture is smooth, like really thick hot chocolate. Once it’s cooled a little, add around half of the finely grated orange zest and stir through.

Carefully fill the tart case with the melted chocolate mix, level it off and make an artistic swirl or ripple on the top if you want. I decorated my tart by placing the chocolate orange fingers in regular intervals, so that when you slice the tart you’ll get a chocolate finger with each delicious wedge. I then scattered the remaining orange zest over the top of the tart. Put your chocolate tart in the fridge for a minimum of two hours, or overnight if you wish.

This chocolate orange tart is rich and delicious. I don’t think it needs anything with it, but you might want to add a drizzle of cream or a scoop of ice cream. For me, it’s just perfect served on its own.

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might like this Easter mini eggs chocolate tart.

Easy Recipe: Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts

We were sent a selection of Violife vegan cheese to try, so we made this vegan cheese baked camembert with candied walnuts. All images and opinions are our own.

Since I became lactose intolerant five or more years ago, I’ve been reducing the amount of dairy I’ve been eating. Rich dairy, things like soft cheese, brie, camembert and halloumi all seem to make me quite poorly. I can take tablets to lessen the symptoms, but sometimes it’s just easier to avoid them altogether. Baked Camembert is one of those things I really miss. Sharing an oozy baked cheese with some crusty bread and a nice glass of crisp white wine is, or was in the past for me. However, vegan cheese makers, Violife have created a camembert which melts when you bake it, and it’s perfect for dunking crusty bread in and sharing with a friend; glass of crisp white wine optional.

I baked my camembert very simply, with a good crack of black pepper and a drizzle of olive oil, but there are all kinds of different vegan recipes and suggestions on the Violife website. I adore candied walnuts and their nutty sweetness really brings out something special with the cheese. They’re also something I make quite a lot of just for snacking. Walnuts are one of my favourite nuts and they’re packed full of the good stuff.

Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts

This recipe makes enough for a nice lunch for two, with crusty bread.

Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts

Ingredients:
A Violife Le Rond Vegan Camembert
A drizzle of olive oil
Some ground black pepper
Fresh thyme or rosemary, optional

For the candied walnuts:
100g walnut halves
2 tablespoons of water
25g of sugar

Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts

How to make your Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts:

Begin by candying your walnuts. To do this, toss your walnut halves in the water and shake off the excess. Toss the damp nuts in the sugar and place on a baking tray and pop them in the oven at 200° for five minutes, check them regularly as you don’t want them to burn. Once they’re starting to brown a tiny bit, remove them from the oven and tip onto a plate to cool down. While your nuts are cooling, it’s time to turn your attention to the vegan cheese.

I’ve got a camembert baking dish, but any ceramic or cast iron dish would work well. Put your vegan cheese in the baking dish, drizzle over about half a tablespoon of olive oil and add some black pepper. If you have it, some fresh thyme or rosemary works well on top. Bake the cheese in your oven until it’s melting and bubbly, this took me around 15 minutes.

Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts

Serve your baked vegan camembert with crusty bread, a heap of fresh rocket and a lovely, crunchy handful of the candied walnuts. Delicious!

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like to try my vegan sausage rolls or these Vegan cheese and baked bean pasties.

Vegan Baked Camembert with Candied Walnuts

Easy Recipe: Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

We were sent a selection of Violife vegan cheese to try, so we made these vegan cheese and baked bean pasties. All images and opinions are our own.

At some point in my late 30’s I started to develop what turned out to be lactose intolerance. As a cheese lover, this was something of a blow to me. I’ve been a vegetarian for 32 years now, and I find myself more and more cutting out dairy from my diet. I can take tablets to help me digest non-vegan cheese, but it’s just nice to be able to sit down and enjoy a meal that I know won’t make me poorly. Vegan cheese has come a long way since I first tried it several years ago, and Violife seem to be leading the way in making a range of vegan cheese products for all kinds of different vegan recipes.

I was chatting to a girl I work with who is vegan, and she recommended the epic extra mature cheddar as being the best vegan cheese she’d tried. So following her recommendation, I made a batch of vegan cheese and baked bean pasties for my hungry family. They are ridiculously easy to make, you don’t need any extra special culinary skills and they are so good, my 11 year old was scrabbling for more!

Easy Recipe: Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

This recipe makes four pasties, to make more, just double it, or triple it. It’s so simple to throw together and they make a lovely warming lunch, or pre-swimming snack in our case.

Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

Ingredients:
A sheet of ready made puff pastry
1/2 tin of baked beans
4 big pinches of grated vegan cheese
Vegan egg wash, I used melted vegan spread.

How to make your Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties:

Pre-heat your oven to 200°. Unroll your sheet of ready made puff pastry and cut into four rectangles – have a look at the picture below which shows you the process.

Easy Recipe: Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

Open your tin of beans and tip them into a sieve to drain off some of the excess bean juice. Some brands are juicer than others, ideally you don’t want to add too much juice to your pasty as that will encourage them to leak out. Once they’ve drained off a bit, add about a tablespoon of beans to one side of the pastry and top with a large pinch of grated cheese.

Fold the pastry over and press the edges together. Using a fork, press the fork around the edges to seal them together. Arrange your pasties on a baking tray so they’re not touching and then brush with your preferred vegan “egg wash”. I used melted vegan spread and I was rather generous with it.

Easy Recipe: Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

Bake in your pre-heated oven for 15-20 minutes, until they are golden and gorgeous. Take them out of the oven and leave them to cool for a few minutes. Do not be tempted to dive right in as the filling will be as hot as molten lava!

Easy Recipe: Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

Once they’ve cooled off a little, eat them however you like. We ate ours on a park bench after school on our way to swimming, and very excellent they were too!

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like to try my vegan sausage rolls.

Vegan Cheese and Baked Bean Pasties

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

My now 11 year old is mad on Minecraft and has been for a couple of years now. He loves everything Minecraft and asked for a Minecraft block birthday cake for his 11^th birthday. I lack the skills (and time and enthusiasm) to bake and decorate something really complex, but I can bake a good sponge cake. I figured if I did some kind of grass block, then if it looked a bit rough and ready, it would be all the better for it.

Although this is fairly simple, it is a bit time consuming. Baking the cake layers took me a couple of hours and I made sure I had an hour or so free the next day to put it together and decorate it. I did cheat and use ready-made tubs of frosting, but you can make your own if you want to.

We baked four layers of sponge using a 20cm square cake tin. My son loves the look of rainbow sponge cakes, so I coloured each one a different shade using some Wilton cake colourings I had. I always find they work really well; just remember that once you bake the cake, the colour gets darker, so go easy.

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

We used my regular sponge cake recipe, but instead of splitting it into two tins, I just threw it all in one tin and had an extra thick cake. I needed to adjust my baking time upwards, to around 35 minutes. But just bake until you get a clean skewer when you poke it in the middle.

I baked four of these thick sponge cakes, but you may need more or less. I wanted my cake to be as tall as it was wide, in other words, it needed to look like a cube, or a Minecraft block. We bought sugar paste Minecraft figures off the internet, because I lack the skill and time to tackle making those for myself.

I try and make a cake every year for my son’s birthday and he really, really loved this cake. It was worth the fairly small amount of effort I put into it. I’m not an exert cake decorator by any stretch of the imagination, but this was pretty impressive.

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

You will need:

4 layers of sponge cake, rainbow coloured if you like
2 tubs of vanilla buttercream
Green food colouring
Green sprinkles
3 tubs of chocolate buttercream frosting, I used chocolate orange flavour
A packet of chocolate biscuits, I used bourbon creams
A cake board
Sugar Minecraft figures, optional
Birthday cake candles, mandatory

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

Once you’ve baked your layers, it’s time to build your cake. You may need to trim the tops off your sponge layers to level them out a bit. The important thing about this cake is that it’s level and a cube shape.

To build the cake, using a palette knife put a dab of the buttercream in the centre of the cake board. If you’re using rainbow cake; decide which order your rainbow layers will go and place the bottom layer on top of the blob of buttercream. This will help to anchor your cake in place and stop it sliding about.

Spread a layer of buttercream on top of your first layer and top it with your next sponge layer. Cover that with buttercream and continue until all the layers are stacked. With the top layer, even if you’ve trimmed the top off the cake to make it level, if you flip it upside down. It will guarantee that the top of the cake will be perfectly level, which is what you want.

Once it is approximately a cube shape, it’s time to decorate it. I began by covering the sides of the cube with the chocolate frosting. While I was doing this, I gave my son the job of smashing up a packet of chocolate biscuits into crumbs. This was so I could press the crumbs into the buttercream to make it look like soil. I wasn’t too bothered about the crumbs being uniform in size; in fact some bigger crumbs just made it look muddier. Once you’ve covered the sides of the cube with chocolate frosting, carefully press the crumbs into the sides until they sides are covered.

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

For the grass layer, I mixed two tubs of vanilla frosting with some green food colouring. Just add a few drops until you get to the shade of green you’re happy with. Carefully spoon the frosting onto the top of the cake; making sure it stays on the top and doesn’t run down the sides. Once I’d done this, I used green sprinkles on top to add some grassy texture and then I put it in the fridge for a couple of hours to firm up.

When you’re ready to present and serve your cake, arrange your Minecraft figures however you’d like, light the candles and sing Happy Birthday in your best voice.

How to make a Minecraft Block Birthday Cake

Recipe: Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

I’ve been making these Shreddies pancakes for a few years now. They’re an easy way of getting some of the good stuff into my son, whilst at the same time he feels like I’ve given him a bit of a treat. Shreddies have long been one of my favourite cereals, they’re delicious just in a bowl with milk, or whipped up into these hearty pancakes.

Shreddies contain wholegrains, and are high in fibre. They’re also fortified with five B vitamins and iron. They’re a healthy start to the day, and if you can spare a couple of bowls of Shreddies from your box, these pancakes are well worth making.

Recipe: Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

This recipe makes thick, American style pancakes. Making around 6 thick pancakes, they are very filling and this is enough for my little family of three to have a hearty breakfast. You can easily double up the recipe if you have more mouths to feed.

Top them however you like. We like them best with fresh fruit and a drizzle of golden syrup, sometimes with blueberry jam. Sometimes we add squirty cream, sometimes I add some cinnamon to the mix and top them with sweetened apple purée. If you wanted to up the protein, a drizzle of warmed peanut butter would work well with a chopped banana. These pancakes can stand up to being topped with pretty much anything you fancy.

Recipe: Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

Ingredients
80g Shreddies cereal
80mls milk
3 medium sized eggs
2 tablespoons of sugar
Oil or butter for frying

Recipe: Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

How to make your Shreddies pancakes

Using a food processor (I tend to use my Nutribullet for little things like this), blend your Shreddies into powder. If you don’t have a food processor, putting them in a sealed plastic bag and smashing them up with a rolling pin works just as well.

Recipe: Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

In a large bowl, mix your powdered Shreddies and the rest of the ingredients until they are well combined. I use a whisk for this just to make sure I can beat a bit of air into the mixture. Once you’ve done this, set the bowl aside for ten minutes, this will help it thicken up a bit so you can dollop the pancake batter more easily. When you’re ready to cook your pancakes, give the batter another quick stir and you’re good to go. If you think it is too thick, add a little bit more milk until you’re happy with how it is.

Put some oil or butter in a non-stick frying pan and when the pan is hot, dollop a couple of tablespoons of the thick batter into the pan. This makes one pancake. Have the pan on a low-medium heat; the pancakes are thick and need to cook through without browning them too much. When I see little bubbles start to appear around the edges of the pancake, it’s time to flip it over and cook the other side, I use a fish slice for this. Cook this pancake until it is nicely brown on both sides. Repeat the process until you have used up all the batter.

Super Easy Shreddies Pancakes

Recipe: Easy Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes

As Valentine’s Day approaches, my thoughts turn to little bakes I can do to gift to my loved ones. When I was younger, Valentine’s Day was reserved for the one special person in your life, but these days anything goes. I tend to make a slight fuss of my boy, he’s a bit too young for actual romance, but he’s never to old to be told his mum loves him. One of the ways I express my love for him and others is in the kitchen, so I whipped up a batch of these Baileys Irish Cream cupcakes and decorated them in a manner fit for Valentine’s Day!

Easy Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes

These cupcakes are really easy and decorating them is pretty simple too. I piped buttercream roses into mine, and they’re a lot easier to do than you’d think. If you’re not sure how to do it, watch this short video. You can add sprinkles, chocolates, drizzles of sauce, whatever you want. I went for some simple heart shaped sweets I got from a local shop and some chocolate hearts I spotted which I thought might fit the bill.

This recipe makes about 24 cupcakes and if you’re quick, you can have them baked, decorated and ready to it in about an hour. I love quick and easy bakes, I’m a busy mum and finding loads of time to bake these days is a bit difficult at times.

Easy Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes

Ingredients
225g soft butter or baking margarine like Stork
225g caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
25g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla essence
4 large eggs
6 tablespoons of Irish cream, I used Baileys

For the Irish cream buttercream
150g soft butter
300g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
20g cocoa powder
6 tablespoons of Irish cream, I used Baileys

Easy Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes

Method
Preheat the oven to 190c. Grab a couple of bun trays and put a paper cupcake case in each of the holes. You need to have 24 paper cases ready.

Beat the butter (or margarine) and sugar together until pale and fluffy. I used an electric hand whisk, but you can use a wooden spoon if you prefer. Add the eggs, cocoa powder, vanilla and Irish cream and mix together. Gently tip in the flour and baking powder and combine until it’s all smooth.

Using a spoon, drop the mixture evenly into the cases. If you were feeling like being precise, you can weigh each one to make sure they are more or less the same weight. This will help them look more uniform, it’s not essential, measuring by eye also works.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 18 minutes or so, until they are cooked through and risen.

Turn your cupcakes out onto a wire rack and leave to cool fully. If you’re in a rush, you can pop them in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Easy Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes

While you’re waiting for your buns to cool, it’s time to make the buttercream icing. Sift the icing sugar and mix with your softened butter in a mixing bowl until smooth. Beat in the Irish cream and cocoa powder with the vanilla essence.

Once your cupcakes are cool, put your Baileys buttercream in a piping bag with a star piping nozzle – I used a Wilton 2D nozzle. Starting in the middle of the cupcake, swirl your buttercream around until you’ve got a buttercream rose shape. If you’re not sure how to do it, watch this short video.

It’s really simple, and if you’ve not happy with your first few efforts, you can scrape the buttercream back into the piping bag and start again. Once you’re happy with your cupcakes, feel free to embellish them however you want, with sprinkles or hearts or whatever you fancy.

Tip: Once you’ve finished decorating your rose cupcakes, you could pop them in the fridge for an hour so the buttercream firms up a little before serving.

These Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes are really pretty and very easy to bake. The icing is much easier that you’d think. I’m no expert cake decorator, but with a little bit of practice and patience, you’ll be piping buttercream roses like a pro!

if you enjoyed this, you might also like to try my simple Baileys Irish Cream cake, or these simple heart shaped Danish Butter Cookies.

Easy Baileys Irish Cream Cupcakes

Christmas Recipe: Christmassy Rocky Road

I love baking at Christmas, but sometimes I just want to step away from the oven and make something colourful, a bit silly and something that Will Ferrell’s Elf might fancy for breakfast. This Christmassy rocky road is a great thing to make with kids, it’s all bashing and stirring and waiting patiently (and impatiently) for it to set so it can be cut up and gobbled down greedily.

Rocky road usually has marshmallows in it, but I decided to swap these out for Haribo Christmas Trees to make each slice extra festive. If you want to leave the gummy sweets out and stick to the traditional marshmallows, then just swap them in the recipe.

Christmas Recipe: Christmassy Rocky Road

CHRISTMASSY ROCKY ROAD

Ingredients:
200g Milk Chocolate, broken into small pieces
2 Tablespoons of golden syrup
135g Unsalted butter
200g gingerbread men
100g Christmas sweets, I used Haribo Christmas Trees
75g Dried Cranberries
60g Smarties or M&Ms
Christmas sprinkles

Method:
Line a high sided baking tray with baking parchment. I used a square 20cm tin.

Put the milk chocolate, golden syrup and butter in a glass bowl. Using a bain-marie (put an inch or two of hot water in the pan and place the glass bowl over the top making sure the water doesn’t touch the bowl) over a gentle heat. Stir the chocolate, golden syrup and butter until everything has melted together.

While the chocolate mixture is slowly melting, put the gingerbread biscuits into a plastic bag and bash them with a rolling pin until they’re broken up, but not crumbs. Ideally you want a mixture of chunky pieces and smaller, crumbly bits. Once bashed, tip them into a mixing bowl. Add the marshmallows and raisins and the Smarties or M&Ms and add them to the biscuit mix.

Christmas Recipe: Christmassy Rocky Road

Once the chocolate mixture has melted, take it off the heat and carefully tip the biscuity mix into the chocolate. Stir it well and make sure everything is coated. Then tip it onto your baking tray spread the mixture out and gently press it down with the back of a spoon. It needs to be about 2cm deep as a minimum, but the thicker the better as far as I’m concerned.

Lastly, sprinkle over your Christmas sprinkles and put somewhere cool (or in the fridge) to chill and set for a few hours, preferably overnight if you can wait that long!

If you enjoy regular rocky road, then this Christmas version is so much extra. The gingerbread biscuits really make it extra special, and all the festive treats packed into it make feel like a bar full of festive joy.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like to try –

Christmas Recipe: Christmassy Rocky Road

Christmas Recipe: Danish Butter Cookies

I grew up in the 1980’s and you could always tell when Christmas was coming by the appearance of a blue tin of Danish Butter Cookies on top of the fridge. They were simple but incredibly moreish and they were to us at least, an exotic festive treat.

A few years ago, I started making my own Danish Butter Cookies with my son. They are incredibly easy to make and they are a nice predictable bake, meaning that they never fail. I’m pretty good at cake baking, but for some reason my kitchen confidence always leaves me when it comes to biscuits and cookies. Perhaps the dependability of the recipe is why I make them so often.

Christmas Recipe: Danish Butter Biscuits

Because to me, and other children of the 80’s, Danish Butter Cookies are forever linked to Christmas, it’s at this time of year I tend to make them the most. A batch of cookies neatly wrapped in brown paper, or in a decorative bag or box make a lovely little edible gift for someone.

Danish Butter cookies

Ingredients:
375g butter, room temperature
250g caster sugar
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
500g plain flour
Milk (entirely optional)

Method:
In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla essence and mix in thoroughly.

Beat in the plain flour, I tend to do this in batches so the kitchen doesn’t get covered in a flour cloud. Once it’s all mixed in, you need to decide if your mixture is loose enough to pipe, or if it needs letting down a bit. If it’s a bit stiff, add a couple of tablespoons of milk and beat the mixture again.

Heat the oven to 180° and line some large baking sheets with parchment paper. If you’re choosing to pipe your cookies, select a wide piping nozzle and put in your piping bag. I prefer to use disposable piping bags and a Wilton 1M nozzle, but you use whatever you’re comfortable with.

Carefully pipe circles of the biscuit dough onto your parchment paper. I used a knife to help poke them into shape as my piping was a bit rusty. Once you’ve piped a tray (leaving room for them to spread a little), put them in the oven to bake for 12-15 minutes. You don’t really want them to get brown, because like shortbread, these Danish Butter Cookies are supposed to be pale and interesting.

Christmas Recipe: Danish Butter Biscuits

Once you’ve removed them from the oven, leave on a cooling rack until they are properly cool. Resist the urge to eat them all, especially if you’ve baked them as gifts for Christmas.

These Danish butter cookies should keep in an airtight tin for a week or so, should you be able to resist them for that long!

If you enjoyed this, you might also like to try –

Danish Butter Cookies

Recipe: Chocolate Cherry Porter Cake

About 15 years ago I had my first slice of chocolate stout cake in a café in Didsbury. It was probably the best cake I’d ever eaten and I once I started baking regularly, I wanted to make one for myself.

I’ve baked this cake many times now, each time with a different stout or porter. It’s such a rich, delicious cake and really very simple to make. After going to this year’s Didsbury Beer Festival, I was reminded how good the Dunham Massey Chocolate Cherry Dark Mild was and I knew I needed to bake this with it.

Recipe: Chocolate Cherry Porter Cake

A bottle of the Dunham Massey Chocolate Cherry Dark Mild usually has 500ml of stout in it, which is enough for two cakes, so I often double up the recipe and bake two cakes. Un-frosted, they keep quite well, though that’s never really an issue in my greedy house.

Chocolate Cherry Porter Cake

250ml Stout or porter, I used Dunham Massey Chocolate Cherry Dark Mild
250g Butter
75g Cocoa powder
400g Caster sugar
150g Sour cream
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
275g plain flour
3 teaspoons of Bicarbonate of soda

For the frosting
250g Cream cheese
150g Icing sugar
2 tsp Cornflour
125ml Double cream

Recipe: Chocolate Cherry Porter Cake

How to make a Chocolate Cherry Porter Cake

Preheat your oven to 180°C and grease and line a 9 inch cake tin.

In a large saucepan, melt the butter and add your stout or porter. Add the cocoa powder and sugar and whist gently until the sugar dissolves.

In a mixing bowl, beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and then pour into the pan and finally whisk in the flour and the bicarbonate of soda.

Pour the cake batter into the greased and lined tin and bake for 50 minutes to an hour. As the batter is quite wet, I tend to leave it in the cooling oven for 15 minutes to stop the cake shocking and sinking in the middle. If it does sink a little in the middle, it’s not a disaster, it’s just a tasty dent you can fill with the frosting! Once you’ve removed the cake from the over, leave it to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack.

When the cake is completely cool, it’s time to make your frosting. In a clean bowl, whip the cream cheese until it is smooth, sift the icing sugar through a fine sieve and do the same with the cornflour; then beat to combine with the cream cheese.

In a separate bowl, whip your double cream until it is thick and then fold it through the cream cheese mixture. Spread it thickly over the top of your cake, which should look like a dark pint of stout with a rich creamy head.

If I’d thought it through at the time, I would have also decorated the cake with chocolate dipped fresh cherries; but maybe that’s one for the summer when they’re in season.

This cake works really well with all kinds of stouts and porters; so pick your favourite and give it a whirl!

Recipe: Chocolate Cherry Porter Cake

If you enjoyed this, you might also like –

Halloween Recipe: Creepy Chocolate Cupcakes

In the UK, Halloween usually falls during half term, so it’s a great excuse to get the kids in the kitchen to whip up some terrifying treats. This year time was short and energy was low, so we made a quick batch of creepy chocolate cupcakes and decorated them in a suitably spooky style.

I usually have a decent selection of cake sprinkles in the cupboard, and I’d stocked up for the occasion with some edible eyes, food colouring and some Halloween sprinkles from Cake Angels. So we were well prepared to make some spooky bakes.

Halloween Recipe: Creepy Chocolate Cupcakes

This recipe makes approximately 24 cupcakes.

Creepy Chocolate Cupcakes

Ingredients:
200 g caster sugar
200 g softened butter or margarine (I use Stork)
4 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
1.5 tbsp milk
25g cocoa powder
175 g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder

To decorate
2 large bars of white chocolate
1 pack of edible eyes
Food colouring, we used green
Assorted Halloween sprinkles

Method:
Heat your fan oven to 190c. Get two bun trays and set out your cupcake liners in each tray. You will need about 24 of these.

In a large bowl, beat your butter and sugar together until fluffy (I used a hand mixer). Add the eggs, milk and vanilla and combine, then add the cocoa powder, flour and baking powder and mix together until you have a smooth batter.

Using a dessert spoon, dollop an equal amount of the mixture in each cupcake liner and then bake in your pre-heated oven for 15-18 minutes. If you’re feeling like being precise, then you can weigh your cupcakes to make sure they are all the same size.

Once baked, take your cupcakes out of the oven and leave them to cool on a cooling rack. Once they are cool, you can set to work decorating them.

Halloween Recipe: Creepy Chocolate Cupcakes

Break up your two bars of white chocolate and put them in a microwave proof bowl. Microwave in short blasts until it is just about melting, stir with a small spoon until it is smooth and lump free. Beware! White chocolate melts much quicker than milk or dark chocolate, so this won’t take long.

Once melted, add a small splash of food colouring and mix it through, add more and stir until you get the shade of creepy you are looking for.

When you’re happy with your coloured chocolate, drop a small spoonful on the top of each bun. Swirl it around a bit with the back of the spoon to spread it around, the chocolate will naturally spread a bit. When you’re happy, it’s time to decorate with those edible eyes or the Halloween sprinkles.

Halloween Recipe: Creepy Chocolate Cupcakes

Once decorated, leave the creepy chocolate cupcakes somewhere cool and out of the way of hungry children (and adults) until the chocolate sets. Once it has set, they’re ready to eat.

We had a lovely time making these very simple little cakes. They were so easy to make, but light as a feather and they looked suitable spooky for Halloween.

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Halloween Recipe: Creepy Chocolate Cupcakes