BAKING: The Great Purple Alpha-Bake | E for Eton Mess Cheesecake

It has been months, pretty close to 6 since i've added to my alpha bake. I've been so very manically busy, that I haven't had time except the odd Brownie here and there, which I have to say have been delicious. Lorraine Pascal's Oreo brownies are AMAZING!! I also tried out my own recipe and added some Rose flavouring to a batch, which I LOVED!! Although it is an acquired taste.

Last weekend I had ladies night at a friends house volunteered my dessert services and made an Eton Mess Cheesecake - my own recipe and Caramel Shortbread, like we used to have at school.

Mini-me couldn't believe her luck when I let her loose with a rolling pin and pack of digestive biscuits, which formed the base of both my desserts once added to butter and left to cool.

The Caramel Shortcake was simple enough, condensed milk, butter and dark brown sugar brought to the boil and then poured over the chilled biscuit crumb. Put in the fridge and bish, bash, bosh, back to Primary school we went... Didn't get a chance to photograph them :-(

The Cheesecake, although the brain child of my overflowing brain was suprisingly just as simple. I used the basic unbaked Cheesecake recipe of whipped double cream with mascarpone cheese and icing sugar, to which I beated in broken up meringue and raspberries, I then folded in some more, spooned the biscuit into champagne glasses, spooned the cheesecake mixture on top and garnished with more broken meringue and raspberries. Sounds even more ridiculously easy now that i've written it down, but it was also ridiculously delicious.

It is testament to my absolute love of dessert that I am mastering this baking malarchy and taking the time to make things, although these recipes weren't exactly baking....

Maybe I should challenge myself to making actual food...? Hmmmmm....

The Great Purple Alpha-Bake | D for Dark Chocolate Fondant

So I was really nervous about this, as a Masterchef fan i’ve seen many a fondant relegated into the realms of over cooked chocolate cake type thing. Being the (scatty-at-best) novice that I am, I figured if they couldn’t do it then what chance did I really have. Nonetheless I rolled my sleeves up, dug out the recipe that made it sound the simplest (courtesy of Donna Hay) and went into battle.

Melt chocolate into butter, okay seriously even amateur fools couldn’t mess this up, but I stood over it like a Hawk watching prey, stirring occasionally waiting for the inevitable, which in my case would’ve been the chocolate ‘seizing’ and creating that stiff grainy paste you get when you over heat it. But the Hawk-like stance i’d adopted in front of the cooker kept the ‘seizing’ at bay.

Whisk eggs, egg yolks and sugar until pale… Electric whisk, bish, bash, bosh… The bosh took a little longer to arrive then I expected and I was pretty certain I missed something out as the paleness was a long time coming, but we got there eventually.

Fold chocolate mixture into egg mixture adding flour… Panic set in as the flour formed small lumps which I convinced myself were the eggs scrambling from the heat of the chocolate, I was pretty close to binning the whole mixture and claiming defeat, when like a fairy liquid bubble one of them burst and the flour poofed out like fairy dust. Whey hey!! Back to folding; over, round, through, over, round, through…. Gently so as not to remove air or some such nonsense, and no stirring – not sure why, but i’m sure i’d heard it somewhere. I spooned the mixture into 4 (out of the hundreds that clutter my cupboard) gü ramekins and packed them up to bake later while at my cousin’s house for dinner.

I also made Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies for the kids (also courtesy of Donna Hay) as I figured they wouldn’t appreciate the fine dining experience that my Dark Chocolate Fondants were sure to be *ahem*. Brownies, with a cream cheese mixture swirled through it, sounded like Hummingbirds Black Bottom cupcakes to me, so I was game. It all went to plan and was pretty straight forward until it came to the ‘swirling’. Brownie mixture was thick and cheesecake mixture was runny, so ended up sitting on top, creating more of a ‘topping’ than a ‘swirl’. Although they didn’t look as pretty as the cookbook picture they tasted pretty darned good!!

When the Fondants, left at the hands of the oven timings, came out we initially thought they were over cooked, but closer inspection (a knife to the heart – lol) produced oozing melted chocolate… Result!!! Masterchef contestants eat your hearts out!!

The Great Purple Alpha-Bake | B for Banoffee pie

So i’ve been excited about making Banoffee pie since I decided to do this whole Alpha-Bake. I am a Banoffee lover but, as is the randomness of my nature I don’t actually like bananas, especially not between caramel and cream as they tend to be quite brown and soggy and I am often sat in front of a plate of brown soggy bananas at the end of a dinner date. I was once pleasantly surprised, when I ordered banoffee at a restaurant called TheShip, where there were no bananas in sight, just banana flavoured cream… Yum!! Result!!

So when the day came I decided I would make Banoffee sans actual bananas, banana flavouring in the cream was my initial idea, but then I decided to blitz a couple of bananas into the caramel, oooh yeah, experimenting with recipes after only 2 weeks, get me.

I spent 2 hours loitering in the kitchen, over come with nervousness, waiting for my inevitable bad luck to cause the condensed milk cans, I had to boil for caramel, to explode!! I topped up the pot so many times to prevent said explosion I was pretty sure that when I opened the cans the condensed milk would still be in the exact same state it was in when I’d started. I had been told to buy the caramel condensed milk that I wouldn’t have to boil, and would’ve saved me 2 hours, but how often do you get to boil cans of milk? So I thought I’d go the traditional route.

Nothing about the pint of double cream or 2 tins of condensed milk I needed aroused my suspicions as to the huge restaurant style serving I would end up with. It ended up being 2 huge Banoffee pies which I had to phone family and friends to come and eat. Luckily, it was delicious (if I do say so myself), no brown, soggy banana to ruin the experience. Just yummy smooth banana flavoured caramel, crunchy biscuit and cream. A success!! Think this may be my new dinner party dish, not that I ever have dinner parties – lol.

My first Alpha-Bake success and only the 2^nd letter. 24 to go, fingers crossed ;-)

The Great Purple Alpha-Bake | Almond & Orange cake

So the Alpha-Bake started, but i've been so busy the past 2 weeks I just haven't had a chance to upload photos and post... So better late then never, here it is ;-)

Almond & Orange cake

Prep: 2hrs 15mins / Cooking: 45mins

For some reason I came in off the street took my coat off, washed my hands and started baking. Sounds perfectly feasible until I tell you I still hand on my brand new boots, scarf and sunglasses… Excited?? Possibly. Honing my stylish chef personality?? Obviously, but also constantly losing focus and just forgot to remove them.

After spending the past few weeks buying all the baking utensils I thought I’d need (including mini silicone cupcake cases, which are infact the work of evil fairy bakers) I found myself caught short with no greaseproof paper or apron!! Oh well, new boots and sunglasses totally made up for it.

I put my oranges (which needed to be simmered for 2 hours) on the stove (is it still called a stove?) and took mini-me to ballet. That was the hardest part. When I came back I put all the ingredients in the food processor, blitzed it and put it in an oven proof bowl in the oven. Oven proof bowl and not cake tin as of course I had no greaseproof paper!

The cake took 45 minutes to cook, but unlike normal cakes the clean knife test was no good as this cake contained 6 eggs and no flour so the consistency would be slightly different. It smelt delicious coming out of the oven and looked quite nice too, I had my fingers crossed that it would come out of the bowl as I’d buttered and floured it within an inch of it’s life as i'd overlooked the fact that greaseproof paper was quite important to the whole baking process. It slipped out like a breeze and stayed in one piece. Looks good, smells good, feels kinda sticky-ish, more pudding like then cake-like, but I figure that by the time it cools it'll be more cake-y (are these actual words?)

So it cools and before I gather everyone for the tasting I cut myself a piece, and am immediately disappointed. The texture is weird, kinda grainy, but also still kinda wet. Initially i'm not sure that I don't totally like it. It isn't very orangey or sweet or anything really, it's kinda 'blah'. Neither here nor there. I could take it, but much more easily I could leave it (I don't say this about cake often). It's weirdly damp, which is probably the main reason I don't like it. I check the recipe to make sure I baked it for the right time, yep 45 minutes. Nowhere in the recipe description does it mention it being wet and pudding-like. The word cake is in the title, this is not cake!!

So I decide (in all of my day old baking wisdom) that the only sensible thing to do is put it back in the oven "for a bit" like a twice baked souffle type thing. Maybe that will make it better... It didn't... It was awful... It was binned.

So "A" in The Great Purple Alpha-Bake is a huge fail!! There is room to grow, i'm only just beginning.

This week it's Banoffee pie, one of my favourites. If I mess it up i'm quitting - lol