It's time, again, soon... I can't wait, so I do what I always do, have a Great Bake-off marathon, and dream about baking along :-D
First day's challenge is "signature cake".
"Maybe something you have been given, handed down by your grandparents or your mom, or something you just found in a restaurant and liked the look of. It's something that means something special to you, something that says something about you."
This is difficult... I don't think I have anything like this. Or... I have the Saver's Cake, an old Finnish recipe I used to bake for my dad since I was about 10 or so. I have the Sand cake, another old Finnish recipe my aunt used to bake. It's wonderful, because it really has amazing sand like texture without being dry or gritty. It's baked with potato starch.
This is an old Finnish recipe, perhaps from war times. The recipe was published in a cookbook written for "homes and school" and published 1908. It has been updated through the times, I have my grandmother's, mother's, and sister's book, and the recipes differ somewhat. :-D They published a centennial celebration version that's 74th printing :-D
It uses coffee cups as measurements, and with a coffee cup they mean the old fashioned small, dainty ones, that fit only 1 1/2 dl or 15 tablespoons.
Anyway, the recipe goes like this:
1 cup of eggs (though 2 is enough, if you don't have enough to fill the cup.)
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of milk, cream, buttermilk, or just water if you don't have milk. Though don't use a whole cup of water, only a half a cup.
1 cup of fat (butter, margarin, oil, what have you)
3 cups of flour (can do with 2 1/2)
1-2 teaspoons of baking powder (if you use buttermilk, use baking soda in stead)
Some vanilla to flavor it. You can use anything you like, like pumpkin spice ;-). The original recipe calls for cardamon.
Whisk eggs and sugar.
Add milk and melted butter.
Add dry ingredients. Mix.
Bake in 175°C/350°F for 1/2-1 hour, until done.
This is a very forgiving cake, you can basically replace all of the ingredients with what ever you have. If you don't have butter, use margarin, oil, apple sauce, mashed banana, mashed avocado... If you don't have milk, use water, orange juice, what ever liquid you have. Now, if you use water, use only half a cup.
It's very, very basic, though, not at all deserving at a Bake-off. They are judging a) technical skills, b) creativity and innovation, c) artistic merits, looks, and d) taste.
Maybe I could flavor it with liquorice. Especially salted liquorice ;-) I love that stuff! There's a marbled cake (which is called the tiger cake in Finland) where the light part is flavored with lime and the dark with salted liquorice, and it's called the puma (or cougar) cake. That might be a thing.
And maybe make it a "hidden image" bundt cake?
Technical challenge: Mary Berry's Victoria Sponge
Finnish tiger cake (marbled cake)
200 g / 7 ounces / 14 tbls of butter
2 dl / 3/4 cups of sugar
3 eggs
3 dl / 1 1/4 cups of flour
1 dl / 6 tbls of almond flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla sugar (vanilla powder) or corresponding amount of vanilla flavoring of your choice. I assume it's less of vanilla extract, but you should be able to figure it out.
1 dl / 6 tbls milk or half and half
2 tbls cocoa powder (unsweetened baking cocoa, not drinking cocoa)
100 g / 7 oz chocolate (good quality eating chocolate, not baking chocolate or chocolate chips) chopped
Butter the pan. Normally the tiger cake is baked in a big bundt cake pan, but for this it's baked in a flat cake tin. All in one go, not in two different tins.
Preheat the oven to 175°C/350°F
Make sure all the ingredients are at room temperature.
Cream the butter with the sugar.
Add three eggs one at a time, whipping well between eggs.
Combine 4 dl flour (all purpose), 2 teaspoons baking powder, and vanilla sugar. (If you use vanilla extract, add it to the egg foam).
Shift the dry ingredients to the egg foam and mix. Add the milk/cream if the batter feels dry. The batter is quite thick, you can't pour it like normal cake batter, it's more like cupcake batter, maybe even thicker.
Don't whisk, but make sure all the ingredients are well combined.
Separate about 1/3 of the batter in a different bowl and mix in the cocoa powder, chopped chocolate, and a little milk. (You can replace the milk with some very strong coffee, that will accentuate the flavor of chocolate). Add a pinch of salt, also.
(And perhaps add a dash of almond liqueur to the white part, maybe a little bitter almond extract, and chopped almonds. As you please.)
If you want to make it even more festive, you can add white chocolate to the white cake layer, or almond, or some other white, delicious things, like candied pear, etc.
Spoon half of the white batter in the tin, then all the brown batter, top with rest of the white batter, and with a knife or something else thin and strong, swirl a little through the batters so you get a marbled effect. You can also just draw lines, to make more tiger stripe kind of pattern.
Bake about 30-50 minutes, until the cake is done. (How to test a cake to see if it's done). I also smell the baking. When the cake starts smelling like cake in stead of nothing or just batter, it's about ready :-D Obviously. ;-). You can also hear the cake bake, as baking is in a way drying the batter out :-D Wet batter will bubble and sizzle differently than cooked batter, and if the bake is totally quiet, you might have overbaked your cake. Start paying attention to these things.
Let the cake cool and cut it into three layers. Of course you can make it easier for yourself and bake three thin cakes (and in the bake-off challenge that's what I should have done, because three layers cook in a shorter time - maybe even bake it in a swiss roll tin). but I am used to baking my layer cakes in one tin and cutting them into layers. I have an extra long serrated edge bread knife I use to cut my cake layers and I use small building blocks to guide my knife, but the toothpick/floss method is also recommendable. It doesn't need to be unflavored, the floss just travels through the cake and doesn't leave flavor. You can also use fishing line or piano wire. ;-) What ever you have. Sewing thread is too fragile.
... and the White Tie
Make white chocolate mousse and dark chocolate mousse using your favorite recipe. (Mine uses gelatin to keep it sturdy enough to se as filling for the cake, you don't need to.)
Fill the cake by putting dark chocolate mousse on the bottom layer and white on the top layer. The filling should be quite generous, at least as thick as the cake layer.
Make chocolate frosting of your favorite kind
- Sacher cake frosting
- chocolate ganache
- Swedish "love yums" frosting
- chocolate mirror glace
- chocolate buttercream
I normally use the chocolate fudge icing , but I suppose for this the mirror glace would be in order.
And maybe a marzipan tiger :-D Marzipan is pretty easy to make. Maybe modeling chocolate? Maybe chocolate leaves behind the tiger, give it a jungle? I mean... we have reached season 12, and the expectations are quite a lot higher than they were during season 1 :-D Now one should be able to do at least some chocolate art :-D
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