F1 Foods: USA Roundup and the next challenge: Mexico

 

 

Lewis Hamilton’s victory in Austin, Texas, means he has won the 2015 Formula One World Championships – his second in a row, which he is the first Briton to ever do. But more importantly (to me anyway) the fact that the Grand Prix took place in the US was an excuse to share some great American-inspired recipes.

 

I had hoped that more people would take part in the challenge but I suspect the name puts people off – it’s not about racing really!

 

Suelle at Mainly Baking has been great at taking part in this challenge and this time she made peanut butter and jelly brownies (jelly meaning jam to us Brits). It looks great with the peanuts scattered over the top and I bet the flavours are lovely.

 

 

 

I went to the US in September and brought back some goodies including mini Reese’s Pieces cups and Reese’s Pieces chocolate spread, which I used to make this chocolate peanut butter bundt. It was very rich and delicious!

  

  

 

I also made a layered butterscotch Oreo pudding, using butterscotch morsels I got in the US on a previous trip. I actually made this dessert in the summer but only blogged about it recently. It’s really easy to make and doesn’t involve baking though it needs a bit of time to set.

 

  

Similarly this fridge cake is a no-bake recipe and just needs to set and is a great one to make with the kids during half term. I used caramel apple flavour Oreos and candy apple popcorn that I got in the US, mixed it with melted chocolate and a little butter and that was it! It made for a good dessert after lunch when I had friends over as it’s so rich people only want a little bit.

 

 

 

The next F1 Grand Prix takes place in Mexico this weekend which is a good opportunity for you to send in your ‘Day of the Dead’ (or Halloween) inspired recipes if you like! I’ve got a Mexican dinner planned though was supposed to make it last weekend and we ordered a pizza instead! Hopefully I will have time to make it this weekend.

 

I’m opening the linky today and it will run until Sunday 8^th November so you’ve got plenty of time to send in your recipes.

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Mother of the Bride and Groom Decorated Notebooks

These notebooks are a lovely gift for a mother of the bride or mother of the groom – they can use them for wedding planning notes and ideas.

 

 

I’d been thinking about decorating notebooks as gifts for a while but hadn’t gotten around to it, then when I got engaged – and was seeing my mum the following weekend, I thought it would be a really nice thing to do.

 

I had a small square notebook that was perfect – it had blank pages and a stiff, plain cover. I got it from Tiger for I think only £2 or £3 (I love that shop!).

 

I wanted the notebook to say ‘mother of the bride’ as I thought my mum might enjoy getting it out of her handbag in shops or at wedding fairs and letting people see the cover. I imagine she’s relieved that at the age of 36 one of her daughters is finally getting married!

 

I found the perfect die-cut on Ebay that was made of thick cardboard so all I did was stick that on and let the words take centre stage. I decided it did need something else so found a cream die cut heart in my card stash. I added a few hearts and flowers stickers around the edge as well.

 

I found the ‘mother of the groom’ notebook a bit harder but did want to make one for her as well. I spent ages looking online for a sticker or die cut with the correct words but couldn’t find anything.

 

 

In the end the only thing I was able to get were the words spelled out in diamante (luckily that’s more her style than my mum’s) for ironing onto clothes. I decided to give it a go anyway and covered a larger but thinner notebook with thick purple paper, and ironed the letters on. It worked!

I stuck a heart print ribbon strip along the top and bottom of the notebook and added some silver outline stickers from a wedding sheet, of champagne glasses, hearts and a lucky horseshoe.

 

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Meal Planning Monday Week 44

It's half past 10 on Sunday night and I'm only just getting around to planning my meals for the coming week - I have about a million other things I needed to get done this weekend as well. I've had a really busy few days with my sister and another friend staying, going out with my uni friends for the first time in months and most importantly wedding dress shopping! So I really do need to step up the weight loss now I've found a dress, unfortunately I ate and drank quite a lot this weekend!

Monday: sausage, beans and mash for him, salmon and veg for me

Tuesday - out at a blog event

Wednesday: chicken kiev and chips for him, stir fry for me

Thursday: gammon for him, rest of stir fry for me

Friday: homemade chicken curry

Saturday
Lunch: French toast stuffed with cream cheese (on menu but didn't make last week)
Dinner: Chicken Chilaquiles from my Mexican recipe book  (on menu but didn't make last week)

Sunday
Lunch: bacon sandwich for him, Quorn sausage sandwich for me
Dinner: roast dinner

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Toffee Apple Oreo Popcorn Chocolate Fridge Cake with Haagen Dazs ice cream

With Bonfire Night just around the corner I wanted to find a recipe I could make to use two things I bought on holiday in America: toffee apple (or candy apple) flavour popcorn and caramel apple flavour Oreos.

 

In the UK we have only ever been able to get chocolate Oreos - with Golden Oreos recently launching over here. But in the US there are a whole host of limited edition flavours at different times of the year, and I've never been able to get hold of any of them before, until now. The caramel apple cookies have a part green, part caramel colour filling and are very sweet and quite different but do taste quite nice!

I wanted a recipe that would allow me to use both the cookies and the popcorn and the obvious thing seemed to be a 'fridge cake' - basically melted chocolate mixed with broken biscuits, and often marshmallows like a rocky road, but this time I was going to use popcorn instead.

To serve, you can cut or break it into pieces and eat it as it is, or make into a dessert as I did. I was sent some vouchers for Haagen Dazs ice cream to celebrate National Chocolate Week and I used one of the vouchers to buy some of their pralines and cream ice cream. I actually thought pralines were something to do with chocolate - and it often is. Pralines are frequently chocolates containing small pieces of nut though in the case of the Haagen Dazs ice cream it was 'smooth vanilla flavour ice cream, crunchy praline pecan pieces and sweet caramel swirls'. Either way the ice cream was absolutely delicious.

I served a few scoops of the ice cream and a few pieces of the chocolate fridge cake in a tall sundae glass which made a very good dessert. Here's the recipe for the fridge cake

Toffee Apple Oreo Popcorn Chocolate Fridge Cake
an original recipe by Caroline Makes

400g plain chocolate
50g butter
250g caramel apple Oreos
100g candy apple popcorn
to serve: Haagen Dazs ice cream

Melt the chocolate and butter in a large pan and remove from the heat. Add the popcorn and broken up cookies (into large chunks - not crushed). Stir in gently until well combined.

Line a small oven tray or serving dish with greaseproof paper and spoon in the chocolate mixture. Leave in the fridge until set.

Remove from the fridge at least half an hour before you want to serve or the chocolate will be too hard to cut or break. Remove the ice cream from the fridge about 15 mins before serving so it softens a little.









I found it easiest to break up the fridge cake using a dinner knife (that is, not a particularly sharp one) - do be careful! I then alternated pieces of the fridge cake with scoops of ice cream in this dessert. The ice cream was lovely - very creamy and luxurious. It was very popular in my house!

Thanks to Haagen Dazs for the ice cream vouchers

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Reese's Pieces Chocolate Peanut Butter Bundt Cake

I never particularly liked peanut butter until I discovered Reese’s Pieces. The combination of chocolate and peanut butter is amazing and every time I go to the US I bring back a big bag of the peanut butter cups. This time I found a bag of mini cups, which I thought would be perfect to sprinkle over the top of a cake or dessert (or eat by the handful, of course).

 

 I also bought a plastic tub of Reese’s Pieces peanut butter chocolate spread – which is like Nutella but with peanut butter flavour – which is so yummy! You can get it in the UK as well- I found it in Tesco.

 

I decided to make a cake with the chocolate and peanut butter flavours and as a filling might make the cake too rich, there was only one thing for it – a bundt.

 

Here’s the recipe I created

Reese’s Pieces chocolate peanut butter bundt – an original recipe by Caroline Makes

 

200g butter

400g caster sugar

4 eggs

3 tbsp peanut butter

250g self-raising flour

100g cocoa powder

Splash of milk (optional)

To decorate

½ tub of Reese’s Pieces peanut butter chocolate spread (if you can’t get this, you could use regular chocolate spread with peanut butter mixed in)

To decorate: mini Reese’s Pieces (if you can’t get these, you can decorate with chocolate chips)

 

Preheat oven to 180C.

 

Cream the butter and the sugar then add the eggs, mixing well. Stir in the peanut butter until combined.

 

 

Fold in the flour and the cocoa powder. If the mixture looks too thick, add a splash of milk.

 

Grease your bundt tin and spoon in the mixture and level off. Bake in the preheated oven for about 45 minutes, checking with a metal skewer when the cake is done.

 

When baked, allow to cool in the tin then turn out of the tin onto a wire cooling rack. Put kitchen towel or newspaper under the rack to help keep your worktop clean if you like, as the next stage is a bit messy!

 

Spoon half a tub of the Reese's Pieces peanut butter chocolate spread (or nutella etc) to a microwave-proof bowl and heat in the microwave until it is a thick pouring consistency. Pour over the bundt and spread with a knife if needed so the glaze comes down the sides.

 

 

Decorate with mini Reese's Pieces or chocolate chips.

 

I made this for a bake sale at work and it went down very well - I only just managed to get a small slice to try it myself! It was a really good cake but you probably knew that from reading the name alone - if you like peanut butter anyway!

 

I'm sharing this with We Should Cocoa, the blog challenge started by Choclette of Tin & Thyme and run this month by It's Not Easy Being Greedy. The theme is USA and I bought the main ingredients for this cake in America!

 

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Three-Tier Red and Gold Wedding Cake - for BakingAddict

It was a great honour to be asked to make a wedding cake for a friend - and not just any friend, but a talented baker herself - Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker. She's given me permission to show you all pictures of the cake and to blog about how I made it.

I'd never made a wedding cake before, though I had done a short course of evening classes in wedding cake decorating, where we used polystyrene dummy cakes. You can see the two that we finished during the course here: a rose petal cake finished with a wired flower and brush embroidery and this three-tier cake with purple flowers and piping.

Ros and her husband had given me a lot of freedom to design the cake, asking me for red and gold accents on a white cake. She also told me that as the cake needed to feed 50 guests I could either make two tiers or three tiers but have the bottom layer as a fake cake. I liked that idea as it meant I could do the bottom layer well in advance, redo it if it went wrong, and not have to worry about baking a cake that would take the weight of two other layers.

She wanted the other two layers to be chocolate and lemon and I found some fantastic recipes on the BBC Good Food website. I did both cakes in advance as a practice and have already blogged about the chocolate cake here, which turned out perfectly. So when it came to making it for the wedding for real I did it in exactly the same way.





I used this recipe for the lemon cake and followed the recipe for the cake itself exactly, but didn't do the lemon syrup - I had been warned that the syrup would seep onto the layer below so I could only assemble the cakes at the absolute last minute and at the point of deciding on the recipe (when I did the practice a month or so ago) I didn't know how I was going to assemble the cake so thought it best to make without the syrup. As it worked well, when it came to the real thing I left the syrup out as well.



I used a 12 inch cake tin for the chocolate cake, which was the second layer (I bought a 14 inch cake dummy and 16 inch cake board which was huge!) and so did the lemon cake in a 10 inch tin. Those are quite big cakes but since only two layers were real, I didn't think if I did an 8/10/12 inch cake with only the 8 and 10 being real that it would be enough to feed all the guests.

The recipe for the chocolate cake turned out perfectly - 12 inches diameter and a good 3 inches deep with a flat top that I trimmed slightly. The recipe for the lemon cake said to use a 23cm tin which is 9 inches, so when I did the practice I scaled the ingredients up by a third.

That wasn't big enough by a long way so when I made the cake again I doubled the quantity given in the recipe, and found that filled the tin so the sides of the cake were 3 inches high. The cake did rise a lot in the middle so I trimmed it easily.

I thought about filling the cakes but worried that having something in the middle would mean they were less robust and when covered with fondant, if weight was applied on top the filling might spread and bulge out the sides. Thankfully both cakes were so deliciously moist and light that they didn't need filling at all.

I made a chocolate ganache buttercream which I spread around the sides and on the top of the chocolate cake, and placed the cake on a cake card (like a cake board or drum only thinner) covered it in fondant.

I made a lemon curd buttercream and did the same with the lemon cake, also placing it on a cake card the same size as the cake.

When it came to decorating, I did the bottom fake layer quite a long time in advance. I covered it with fondant and used a stitching or quilting tool  like this one PME Quilting Toolto mark diagonal lines all around the sides (I used a piece of cardboard as a guide) to give a quilted effect. I used some plastic tweezers like these Cassie Brown Plastic Tweezers Child-Safe, Blueto apply Dr Oetker gold balls (available in most supermarkets) using a little Culpitt Edible Glue 17 mlto make them stick.

I then stuck gold ribbon around the base of the bake and around the sides of the cake board, which I had also covered in fondant.

I didn't need to use dowelling in this fake layer but I did need to in the chocolate cake because it was going to have the lemon cake sitting on top.

My fiancé cut the wooden dowels to size - they need to be level with the top of your cake. Space them out at intervals making sure they are in the part of the cake that will be covered by the cake on top - this helps spread the weight.

 

I was going to leave the chocolate layer undecorated apart from the ribbon but I really struggled to cover a cake that size in fondant. I did the best I could but there were a few areas where I wasn't entirely happy with the fondant so I decided to add some red flowers - I had been thinking there wasn't enough red on the cake.

I used a flower plunger cutter from this set Kitchen Craft Sweetly Does It Flower Fondant Plunger Cutters, Set of 4to cut flowers out of red fondant and stuck them around the side of the cake using edible glue, and finished the cake with a gold ribbon.

The top layer was decorated with the same quilting pattern and gold balls as the bottom layer, and gold ribbon as well.

I made the flowers to go on top well in advance using pre-coloured red flower paste using the technique that I've previously described here. I didn't attach the flowers - or indeed assemble the cake - until I got to the wedding venue. I bought different size cake boxes and discovered they didn't fit in the boot of my fiancé's car so we had to take mine!

Ros had bought a really cool cake topper but I didn't actually know what it looked like until I got to the venue; it turned out to be the perfect thing to finish off the wedding cake!

I was very relieved that the cake made it to the wedding in one piece, and though it took a fair while to make it was surprisingly stress-free and a lot of fun. And it tasted great - I heard lots of nice comments about the cake and the main thing was that the bride and groom liked it!

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes which I host with the recipient of this wedding cake as our letter this month is W, which is very appropriate!

I'm also sending this to Simply Eggcellent hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen as the cakes use an awful lot of eggs!

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