o frabjous day!

Category: Cakes

  • Lemon Drizzle Birthday Cake

    This is a bit of a mash-up of recipes for lemon drizzle cake and a Swiss buttercream icing recipe from Smitten Kitchen that makes a wonderfully decadent layered birthday cake. The cake is intensely tangy and lemony, and the icing is rich and creamy without being overly sweet (and pipes on beautifully if you’re going…

  • Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake

    This recipe is from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet, and makes a wonderfully unassuming loaf cake with a rich chocolate flavour and molasses-like sweetness from the brown sugar. He notes that cakes with a high proportion of fat and sugar to flour are susceptible to sinking, which as you can see mine did. Lepard’s suggestions…

  • Recent baking

    I was moved to another area at work occupied by rather more people than the previous area I was in (I do refer to it as Cubicle Death Farm, but only in my head and mostly in an affectionate tone), which has given me a chance to try some new cake recipes and leave cakes…

  • Spiced Apple Sauce Cake

    I made this for my 31st birthday this year, because I had plenty of apple sauce, and I love cream cheese icing. You can tell two things about my baking methods from this photo -I can rarely be bothered sifting icing sugar, and I’m lazy about cutting lining paper for cake tins (so I just…

  • Apple Afternoon Tea Cake

    We’ve been getting lots of apples and pears in our box of local fruit and vegies from Food Connect, and I used some of the older ones to make this apple cake, which I adapted from a Smitten Kitchen recipe (yes, my favourite source of cake recipes online). I’ve halved the sugar in the original…

  • Sour cream and chocolate chip cake

    This is a lovely tea cake from Smitten Kitchen – I made it to celebrate our ukulele club’s first birthday. As you’ll see the batter has quite a bit of sugar, and is a nice light cake with a crunchy outing – a lovely cake to serve in squares for afternoon tea. ingredients: 1/2 cup…

  • Strawberry Cake

    Strawberries are cheap and plentiful at the moment, and I loved the look of the Strawberry Summer Cake on Smitten Kitchen, with the juicy caramelised strawberries on top dribbling through the cake. I actually used a sugar substitute that my sister-in-law had given me (decanted into a container, so I have no idea what it…

  • Raisin and Banana Bread

    This recipe is adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s Jacked-Up Banana Bread, with the addition of some rum-soaked raisins. I had a heap of bananas that were going nice and speckledly (perfect for banana bread), and I wanted to try something different to my usual Nigella Lawson recipe. But I love the addition of dried fruit cooked…

  • On an island

    A few weeks ago, we went boating for my sister in law’s birthday – putting down the Pumicestone Passage and anchoring (ie. beaching the boats, and hurling the anchors onto the sand – does that count as anchoring?) on a little beach on Bribie Island. There was fishing: And a grand total catch of one…

  • Chocolate & Peanut Butter Cake

    A slightly altered version of Smitten Kitchen’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake, for Kirsty’s birthday. I cooked it in three 8-inch square pans, rather than 8-inch rounds (because I’m always happy to find new uses for the wedding cake pans.) It is a very soft cake and definitely requires freezing before constructing and icing, but I…