lovely lovely Lemon Cake

so this is Richard's welcome home cake - lemon sponge layers with my Dad's homemade lemon curd and plain buttercream

the inside looks like this

Not wanting to blow my own trumpet or anything but it tastes GOOD. It's just a basic cake mix with lemon zest and lemon extract.

I am a bit anal about weighing things when I bake and I actually weigh the 3 large eggs, in their shells and use the same weight of butter (or margarine), caster sugar and self raising flour.

Basic Cake Mix

enough for a 6 inch cake like this one or 12 cupcakes / 16 fairy cakes / lots of mini cupcakes 

3 medium eggs

equal amounts of caster sugar, butter (or margarine) and self raising flour

1 tsp vanilla extract or grated lemon zest & ½tsp of lemon extract

3tbsp buttermilk - use milk if you don't have buttermilk, but do try and get some buttermilk.

Pre heat the oven to 160°c (fan assisted) / 180°c (normal) /  gas mark 4 / 350°f

Line your cake tin with greaseproof baking paper or line your cupcake tin with cake cases

Weigh your eggs in their shell and then crack them into a bowl - if any of, the eggs are a bit iffy or you get a bit of shell in the bowl, you can sort it out and it's easier than trying to fish them out of the cake mixture.

Weigh out equal amounts of caster sugar and butter and mix until creamy. 

Then, add the eggs a bit at a time. The mixture may look a little curdled if the eggs weren't at room temperature when they were added but it will be fine!

Add any flavouring and mix well. 

Sift the flour into the batter (I double sift i.e. sift the flour into a bowl and then sift the flour again  into the cake mixture) and then fold the flour into the mixture. 

Add the buttermilk and fold it in. As I said before, use (full fat) milk if you don't have buttermilk.The cake(s) will be fine but they just won't be as 'fluffy' and moist. 

Spoon the mixture into the tin or cake cases. I'll tell you a secret, if I'm making cupcakes, I weigh the mixture as I spoon it into the cases. Yes, I know I sound like a twat and I'm ridiculously anal but all the cakes all end needing the same cooking time because they're all the same size and they all rise the same amount.

Put the cake(s) in the oven 

a 6 inch cake will need 45 - 50 minutes

cupcakes will need 18½ minutes

fairycakes will need 16½ minutes

mini cupcakes will need 14 minutes

These times will vary, depending on your oven and things like how clean it is. If you bake or cook a lot, I thoroughly recommend that you get an oven thermometer. My oven dial is out by about 10°.

You can tell if they're cooked by touching the top - it should be springy. Or you can use a skewer to stick in the cake - it will come out clean or with a couple of crumbs on it if the cake is cooked.

 Whatever size of your cake, take it out of the tin and let it cook on a wire cooling rack. Make sure it is/ they are completely cool before you decorate it / them.

Day 5: Gingerbread Skeletons & a verruca

Nothing exciting happened yesterday. Seriously, NOTHING at all. 

Today was my Wednesday*,  the plan was to go swimming at Rothwell as soon as I dropped Edwin off at school before heading to the Asian supermarket in Leeds and then onto Sainsbury's. By 9.15, my plans had gone to pot as the swimming pool was closed. Arse. No matter I thought, I'll head into Leeds and maybe go swimming later on.  

So I got to Leeds at 9.30, paid for 20 minutes parking - I only needed a couple of things - and headed to the shop. It didn't open til 10. Bugger. I really couldn't be arsed to hang about (in your face Asian supermarket, you lost out on about £3.50 of my business) so headed off to Sainsbury's where I got caught in conversation** with the oddball trolley man. He's completely harmless but you do not want to hang around after smiling and saying hello. 

 After doing some cleaning & washing, swimming didn't really seem like a great idea so I decided to have a baking day. I wanted to make some afterschoolhungries for Edwin. 

I'd seen the idea for Gingerbread Skeletons on Pinterest and decided to give it a try. I have an ace gingerbread recipe (thank you Charlotte!) and it would mean experimenting with royal icing which, if I'm honest, scares the crap out of me.





GINGERBREAD SKELETONS (makes approx 32) ***

Pre heat the oven to 180°C (fan assisted) / 200° (normal) 
Line cookie sheets with non stick greaseproof baking parchment or non stick liners

• 350g plain flour
• 1½ tbsp ground ginger 
• 1 tsp bicarbnate of soda
• 100g butter (room temp) 
• 175g soft brown sugar 
• 1 egg (medium)
• 5 tbsp golden syrup (or treacle if you want DARK gingerbread)  

Sift the flour, ginger & bicarb of soda into the bowl of the mixer, add the butter and mix until it looks like breadcrumbs (if you don't have a mixture, you can rub the butter into the flour mixture like you're making pastry). 

Stir in the sugar

Add the egg & the golden syrup and mix well. 

The mixture will come together in a big lump - if you're using a mixer, you'll probably stop before it gets to this stage as your mixer will probably be making a big noise and juddering, if so, just dive in with your hands. You might want to take off any rings you're wearing before getting your hands dirty. (I normally forget and then have to take them off after they've got a load of cookie mixture stuck to them) 


The mixture will look like a big, hopefully not too sticky, lump of ... err, cookie dough.You need to wrap it in cling film and let it sit in the fridge for about 15 minutes. Don't be tempted to skip this step. Putting it in the fridge stops the mixture from being too soft and makes it easier to move the shapes onto the baking sheet - it also stops 'bubbles' from appearing on the cookies as they're cooking.

Remove the chilled dough from the fridge and sprinkle your work surface & rolling pin with plain flour. Don't use too much or it will dry the dough out. 

Roll the dough out, moving it by 90º after a few rolls to make sure you get an even thickness and to stop the dough from sticking to the work surface. The dough should be about the thickness of a 20p coin (some of mine were too thick). 

Then use your cutter to make the shapes. I use a large pallet (palette?) knife to help move the shapes to the baking sheet.

Don't put the shapes too close together as they will spread a bit in the oven.

Cook in the oven for 8 mins 30 seconds (maybe 9 minutes for slightly thicker cookies, unless you like them to be a little softer). They'll be going a bit brown round the edges but the middles will be a similar colour to when you put them in the oven.

As you can see, a couple of the gingerbread men are holding hands because I put them too close together. 

Make sure you leave the cookies to cool on the baking sheet. They'll be soft when they come out of the oven and if you try to move them before they're cool, they'll just break and you'll be left with loads of limbs - like a gingerbread zombie apocolypse or something .. which might not be a bad thing for a Hallowe'en theme. 

While the gingerbread men and coooling down, make the royal icing *gasp* 

I bought some Silver Spoon Royal icing sugar because whenever I've tried to make it in the past, it's been a big fat FAIL. There are very comprehensive, almost idiot proof instructions on the packet. Follow them. 

I used 150g of royal icing sugar and 25ml of water ... well I did the second time round. 

The first time I followed the instructions on the packet but reduced the amount of icing sugar by two thirds. Obviously I forgot to reduce the water by the same amount - IDIOT. Sometimes it's better to start again rather than to try and faff about making things right. 

Use an icing bag & nozzle to 'pipe' the skeletons onto the gingerbread men (you can use baking paper as an all in one icing bag and nozzle but I've never managed to make one that actually worked)

Wa la bingo bango (as some random internet types used to say) skeleton gingerbread men - one does seem to have been decapitated.

I started off using the round icing nozzle #7 but the icing was spreading at an alarming rate and so I then switched to #3 (I would have used #4 but it looked a bit rusty ... bad me)

Now I think that maybe thicker 'bones' would be better - maybe a #5 or #6 would be best... dammit, I'll have to go and buy more stuff now, won't I?

TIPS:

keep squeezing the icing bag with a constant pressure or you'll end up with little air bubbles which will pop when the icing dries. 

the icing will take a good 2 - 3 hours to dry


Edwin loved them and despite initially being a bit SUSPICIOUS about the icing (he's not a fan of icing generally) he ate 2 on the way to the doctor's. 

So, the doctor said that the spot on Edwin's foot is, as suspected, a verruca. We'll be bazookaing (or cheaper own branding) the bastard, which could take months, yes months to go away. Apparently, you shouldn't make people wear verruca socks anymore because it stigmatises the unclean, who can now count Edwin as one of their number. Bastards. 

Edwin didn't really get what was going on, though he did get annoyed because he wasn't allowed to walk out of the doctor's surgery in his bare feet and had to be bribed bag of salt & shake crisps (I LOVED them as a child but I only ever had them at friends' houses. I was allowed 1 bag of crisps per week as kid, I normally had them in my packed lunch on Wednesdays and they were almost certainly own brand .. .Waitrose, probably) to put his shoes on.

And to help him get over the injustice of wearing shoes & socks, he had another skeleton when he got home.




* I normally don't work on Wednesdays but had to swap days off because the Kids Club was full today

** Conversation in a fairly liberal sense of the word, I didn't actually say anything other than Morning. He didn't even have a drink last night because it was raining too hard to go to the pub 

*** apologies for the bad pictures, I'm a shit photographer and Richard has taken the camera in India