Sunken Honey Cake

This month I have made this cake twice!  The reason?  Well its very very yummy.  However.... both times I have made it, it sank in the middle.

I have never had a cake sink on me like this before.  It still tastes great and it is cooked all the way through... just sunk.  The first time I made it, it had to wait a little while for the oven to get to temperature before baking, so I thought perhaps that was the issue.  The second time I made it the oven was ready to go and it still sank.

My only explanation now is that I am using a cake tin about an inch smaller than that recommended by the chef... would that cause the cake to sink?  I don't have the correct sized tin.  I don't usually let things like that put me off and I don't often have failures.  The other explanation could be that I am using the Spanish equivalent of Self Raising Flour - It says on the front that it is 'with yeast' but from the recipe on the back of the pack it is likely that this flour contains bicarbonate of soda because the basic sponge recipe (also on the back) calls for a teaspoonful of vinegar and you often find the two (sometimes yoghurt is used which is also acidic) go together as a raising agent.

Well my cake has risen you can't fault it on that... and I have used this flour to make other cakes that call for Self Raising flour and had no failures with them.  Mind you I can't really say this is a failure because it tastes so good.

If anyone would like to have a go: (do let me know how it turns out won't you).

Honey Cake by James Martin

Ingredients
170g clear honey, 140g butter, 85g light muscovado sugar, 2 eggs beaten, 200g self raising flour sieved, water (tablespoon).
Icing (which I didn't do) 55g icing sugar, 1 tbsp clear honey, hot water.

Preparation Method
Preheat the oven to 180C and butter and line the bottom of a 18cm (7 inch) cake tin.  measure the honey, butter and sugar into a large pan.  Add a tablespoon of water and heat gently until melted.  Remove from the heat and mix in the eggs and flour.  Spoon into the cake tin and bake for 40 - 45 minutes until the cake is springy to the touch and shrinking slightly from the sides of the tin (or sunk in the middle !!).  Cool slightly in the tin before turning out onto a wire rack.  While the cake is still warm, make the icing by mixing the sugar and honey together with 2-3 teaspoons of hot water.  Trickle over the cake.

Reine De Saba

Officially it is now spring, but we have had wild flowers and goose eggs along with other indicators of spring for a few weeks now and that includes a steady production of eggs from the hens.  What to do with them all?

I decided to make a Reine de Saba sponge cake.  It's a very moist, dense sponge that should be eaten in thin wedges and goes great with strawberries (also in season at the moment) and cream.  Although it is very easy to make and if you are careful with cutting (unlike mine being off centre) it can look very posh!

Excuse the old fashioned (Imperial) weights and measures... this is the way the recipe goes...

Ingredients: 4 oz plain chocolate melted with 2 tbsp rum, 1/4lb softened butter, 1/4lb castor sugar, 3 egg yolks, 3 egg whites, pinch salt, 1tbsp castor sugar, 2oz ground almonds, 1/4tsp almond extract, 2oz plain flour sifted.

I made double the quantity, making two cakes, one for now and one for the freezer.  Here in Spain it is hard to find castor sugar so I make my own by processing granulated sugar for just a few seconds in the food processor using the nut grinder attachment.  Always melt your chocolate first and then let it cool as you can't add hot chocolate to the egg mixture!

Method:  Butter and flour an 8inch cake tin.  Preheat the oven to gas mark 4 or 180C.  Cream butter and sugar until pale.

Add egg yolks and beat well.  Beat egg whites separately until soft peaks and then add the tablespoon of castor sugar and beat until stiff.

Blend the melted chocolate and rum into the egg yolk and butter mixture and add the almonds and almond extract.  Blend.

Sift in a quarter of the flour and then add a quarter of the egg white.  Mix it all well.

Blend in remaining flour and then fold the remaining egg white carefully into the mixture.  Spoon into the prepared cake tins and smooth the top.  Bake for 25 minutes or thereabouts checking towards the end of the cooking time.  The centre of the cake should still be a bit squidgy when you take it out.  Leave for ten minutes in the tin before removing to a wire rack to cool.

Dust with icing sugar sifted onto the top when cold and serve with a dollop of cream and some chocolate curls if you want to be really decadent!

Batch Baking

My oven is so large that I really never want to light it unless I can totally fill it.  So, batch baking is the way forward.  Batch baking takes a bit of organisation and forward planning but it's worth it to save money on fuel and in the long run, time too.

I started by choosing my recipes.  They could be any sort of cake but they must have one thing in common - the cooking temperature.  I chose two citrus cakes (lemons and oranges are at their best over winter) and an almond cake.  All baked at 190C.  Both almonds and citrus fruits grow in Spain and although this year we had very few almonds and the price of them in the shops is quite expensive, normally both citrus and almonds are cheap and plentiful.

I prepared the baking tins and lined them up ready.

I weighed the ingredients for the first cake and began mixing.

Once the cake mix was done I put it into the tin and left it on the kitchen work surface.  With some cake mixes it is best to get them into the oven straight away, but other's can happily sit for a little while before baking, without any harm at all.

I organised things so that I only had to wash up the bowl between each cake mix and I left the almond cake until last because it contained beaten egg whites and they collapse if you leave them to sit for too long.

The middle cake was a bit unusual - the recipe (from Leiths Baking Bible) stipulated semolina (quite a lot of semolina) but I only had ground rice, so I figured I could substitute, it seems to have worked.

As I began to mix the third and final cake I preheated the oven and just as the cake was ready the oven was at temperature.

Alas the oven is so large that when you open the door a huge amount of heat escapes and the oven thermometer dropped all the way down to 160C , 30C below what it should be.  This meant that the timings were going to be all wrong.  I set the timer for the cake that should have taken the least amount of time.

When it pinged I checked the cake and as predicted it was still not ready but the other two were almost cooked....  If you are prepared to be flexible and keep an eye on your cakes you can usually be assured of a reasonably successful outcome.  Another few minutes and all three cakes were ready.

While the oven was hot I made some cheesy snacks... cheese pastry with various extra flavourings (sweet chilli, oregano, onion seed) cut into tiny shapes and then baked with a sprinkling of salt.  (Six Nations rugby begins this weekend and hubby has to have something to nibble with his beer in front of the tv).

If I'd been even more organised I could have squeezed in a batch of biscuits or scones at the same time but alas I was not as clever as I thought!

The two citrus cakes have lemon and orange syrup poured onto them while still warm.  The one with ground rice in it is definitely a different texture, perhaps more like a pudding than a cake, certainly once I had fed it all the syrup.

All in all, I am rather pleased with the days baking.  Now to decide which ones go in the freezer and which to eat first!

Er.... Long Time no Post!

You might think we don't cook or eat here at Finca La Reina - so NOT TRUE!  But huge apologies for not updating and not posting recipes in more timely a fashion.  I have been cooking and I have been taking photographs of food, but then one thing leads to another and days and then weeks go by and I don't write the post and finally I am not sure if I remember what it was I photographed!

Suffice to say... I plan to do better from now on.  I am thinking that I might have to update how I arrange the recipes so that you can find stuff easier... but then we do try to eat seasonally so perhaps I should simply label the food by the month along with some stuff that I do all year round like eggy things.  With four hens in full production we have a lot of eggs.

So... my first post of 2014 is going to be a Treacle Loaf.

January is cold and wet here in Extremadura and so we have the estuffa (wood burning fire) going every evening and sometimes during the day too.  Ours has a little oven on the top - the temperature guage on it isn't very accurate and controlling the fire is not easy but I am very proud of my first attempt at a cake in it.

Treacle Loaf

4oz wholemeal flour
4oz plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2oz castor sugar
3oz sultanas
1oz butter
1tbsp black treacle
1tbsp golden syrup
1/4 pint milk

Sieve the flours together and add the baking powder, sugar and sultanas.  melt the butter and mix with the treacle and syrup then add to the dry ingredients along with the milk until you have a stiff dropping consistency.  Spoon into a 1lb loaf tin and bake in the oven for 45 to 55 minutes.  The temperature should have been 160C.  It's anybodies guess what I baked it at... certainly around 125C to start with and then towards the end it was alot more than 160C.

Given the vagaries of the oven I reckon it turned out pretty well.  At 45 minutes in I checked it and it wasn't ready but then at 55 minutes in it was ready but burned at the back and when I turned it out of the tin the bottom was very dark too!

It makes sense that the back and the bottom of the oven are the hottest parts so perhaps I will have to turn cakes half way through baking and lining the tins might help protect the base.  Anyway, I am still declaring this one a success since it tasted absolutely delicious!  Very rich and treacly and old fashioned but in spite of being over done it was still moist in the middle so I think this recipe will have to go into the Book of Favourites for doing again in the future.