We are (ginger) nuts about these biscuits!

Gingernuts are one of the most perfect biscuits ever invented. Crunchy and moreish, and as Julie can now testify, so easy to make! As Delia says (on page 138) this recipe comes straight from the original book "with not a hint of change". And why would you mess with perfection?

Julie made these for the family at the weekend. The recipe made the exact quantity it said it would (16 biscuits) and they turned out absolutely perfectly. Julie's exact words when she came in the next day were "I will never buy them again". In fact, they were so good, she made a second batch later that same day!

We challenge you to try making these and not be convinced that they are so much better than the shop-bought versions!

Shortbread fit for a three-year-old!

The second treat at our team meeting was Semolina Shortbread - this was Laura's first go at making shortbread (the recipe is on page 141 of Delia's Cakes and here) and it worked out really well. Made with the help of 3 year old Jamie it looked just as it should, and tasted great.

Most of the ingredients were pretty straightforward, it was only semolina which was a bit of a new one on Laura's shopping list. Jamie helped to make the mixture and get it into the tin. Most importantly, he was responsible for pressing a fork in around the edge to make the characteristic pattern.

The downside to making this with a child, in Laura's opinion, was that it does take quite a time to cook. After over an hour (Delia recommends between one and one and a quarter hours at quite a low temperature) of Jamie questioning whether he could eat it yet, the shortbread finally emerged. The review was "Nice Mummy, nice" and Laura said she would definitely do it again.

The recipe once again raised the question of butter (see our previous post) - Delia suggests 'block butter' and as this is very definitely a biscuit that requires a buttery taste and a good crunch, real live butter is essential for this one, without a doubt.

Another success! And only 90 or so recipes to go...

Sticky Toffee (round) Loaf!

When we first decided we were going to bake all of Delia's Cakes recipes in a year, this was one of the first ones we all picked out as a 'Yum, I can't wait for that one' recipe. Julie couldn't wait to try this, and it was truly delicious. A pudding disguised as a cake. Or vice versa. Either way, it was so good, I had a very large slice for lunch the next day.

This one can be found on page 58 of Delia's Cakes. As is so often the way, the recipe called for a type of tin that Julie didn't have (a 2lb loaf tin). The no less than eight loaf shaped recipes in the book inspired me to invest in a new one myself, but Julie tried making the right size rectangle in a Silverwood square tin where you can move the sides to make the right size (they are amazing as you can make any square or rectangle sized cake from it). The downside of this, is that a runny mixture can leak through the join at the bottom, and this is exactly what happened to Julie! Undeterred, she decided to switch to a round tin (let's be honest, it doesn't really matter what shape it is!) and it worked perfectly.

After the first little glitch, the only other issue was that when making the fudge icing, it refused to thicken, so a bit more icing sugar was added. When we talked about it at our team meeting, we had a chat about the butter question (see our last post) and thought maybe real butter might have made it thicken better - Julie tried out Stork with butter for this recipe (yet another buttery product to confuse us further!), but said she wouldn't bother with it again.

Despite these minor setbacks, the finished result tasted amazing and looked fantastic:

 Would highly recommend this one!

Team meeting treats and the question of butter...

And so the challenge begins! We started with a double for our fortnightly team meeting here at Chitty's on Friday 19th June with Semolina Shortbreads (page 141) and Sticky Toffee Loaf Cake with Fudge Icing (page 58). They both went down a treat with a cup of tea:

Our next posts will tell you all about the experiences Julie and Laura had making each of these, but I thought it would be worth taking a minute to talk about butter, as both of the recipes raised a couple of buttery issues.

On page 20 of her book, Delia says she reckons she has the final work on the question of butter. It makes sense when you're using a recipe to think about when it was written. For example, when recipes called for a pinch of salt, they probably didn't know quite how bad it was for us, and when they called for 'butter', good quality alternatives hadn't been created yet. However, this doesn't mean that in any older recipe asking for butter you can substitute it for Stork because the adverts on TV tell you it's 'best for cakes'.

Delia tells us that when the first edition of her book came out in the 1970s, you had to choose between soft whipped vegetable fat which allowed you to make a beautifully light sponge with an all-in-one method, and butter which gave you the flavour you wanted. In her new edition, she suggests a compromise of 'spreadable butter' (she recommends Lurpak) in all her recipes, except where melted butter is called for in which case she calls it 'block butter' (and means an old fashioned block of real butter).

Here at Chitty's Cakes, we have always used Stork. It makes beautifully light cakes and personally, I don't miss the rich taste of butter - if I want a lemon cake I'd like it to taste of lemon, and a vanilla sponge should taste of vanilla, not butter. We always teach people in our classes that it is personal preference whether you opt for room temperature butter or Stork (straight from the fridge - a great advantage).

All of these different options can create confusion when you're following a recipe. Delia is clear - 'block butter' means butter, and 'spreadable butter' means spreadable Lurpak. But if you have a half full tub of Stork in your fridge, can you use that? I'm going to add my final word on this:

• In anything cakey, Stork works perfectly, but 'spreadable butter' will give a richer buttery taste
• In any sort of icing, if it says butter, use butter (otherwise the consistency will be all wrong)
• In anything of the biscuit family, use butter.

It's the butter policy I have followed after many years of trial and error. Having said that, I would hate to contradict Delia, so I will be seeking out some Lurpak spreadable for my first recipe that calls for it!

Happy Birthday Delia!

Happy Birthday to Delia! It's 18th June 2015, and the official start date of our year-long challenge. Strangely it is also Sir Paul McCartney's birthday today (born exactly a year apart!), but I will leave it to someone else to set themselves a crazy challenge related to him.

Before we kick off, I thought a bit of history was in order. Delia Smith's Book of Cakes was first published in 1977, when it looked like this:

It's a familiar sight to me, as my mum owns a copy which has been so well-used over the years it barely passes as a book - more a pile of slightly browned pages are falling out of a copy of this small paperback (compared with modern cookbooks) which has been used to make cakes in the Chitty house since the 1970s.

Since its first publication, the book has never been out of print. That's quite a testament to those cake recipes. In 1988, a shiny new version appeared - this is the one my mum bought for me and where I still go back to for advice on timings for fruit cakes of all shapes and sizes! By the 80s, Delia's Book of Cakes looked like this:

This one has a few colour photos, and although hugely informative and packed with great recipes, it looks to a modern eye, a tad dated. A lot of the recipes have not changed one bit from their first publication in 1977 right through to the glossy colourful, fully modernised version which came out just two years ago, and looks in keeping with the hundreds of other well presented cookbooks out there. This is the copy we're challenging ourselves to cook though.

Finally, before the recipes begin (we will get to taste not one but two of them at tomorrow's team meeting, which I await with anticipation!) I should answer the question Julie asked when I suggested the idea: "Why Delia?". She is a hero of mine (some friends may recall a framed photo of her in my kitchen, before it was removed due to an overload of ingredient splattering), I grew up with her demonstrating recipes on TV (I don't remember a December without Delia's Christmas being shown) - and her recipes have been successful for millions of home bakers from before I was born, right up to the present day. It's an iconic work, and one worth celebrating. We hope to do it justice!

Delia's Cakes in a Year...

It may seem like a strange way to spend your spare time when you run a cake business, but the three of us here at Chitty's Cakes decided it would be fun to bake our way through all the recipes in 'Delia's Cakes' over the course of a year. Aside from the obvious reason of always having something new and tasty to offer to friends and family (and enjoy at our team meetings!), we are hoping to get some ideas for our own products, maybe learn some new tricks and techniques and experiment with things we have never tried before.

We're not all professional bakers. I, Rebecca, run Chitty's Cakes and have been making bespoke cakes and cupcakes to order for nearly 5 years. This doesn't mean every recipe I try will go swimmingly (I will be baking at home in my tiny kitchen, and many of the recipes involve things I have never tried!). I didn't even own a set of scales or a wire rack until this weekend when I realised in a panic my kitchen at home was ill-equipped to cater for Delia's requirements!

Julie, our bakery assistant, bakes cakes & cupcakes and makes decorations for the business and has been baking at home for years. Every week she tries out new recipes and trusted old ones for her and her teenage son, so setting this challenge caused a lot of excitement.

Laura, our admin assistant, is relatively new to baking having attended a cupcake class with us at the start of the year soon before she began to work for Chitty's. Her desire to bake at home is often hindered by the presence of small children, which I'm sure many of you can relate to!

We decided to embark on this year-long challenge a few weeks ago, inspired by the Julie/Julia project in which Julie Powell, in her tiny New York apartment, wrote a blog about her challenge to cook every recipe in Julia Child's iconic 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' in a year back in 2002. The book which followed 'Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously' is a great read for anyone who likes cooking, and the movie based on the book stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams and was screened at one of our Cupcake Cinema nights at the Custard Factory a couple of years ago.

When trying to think of a suitable start and end date, we thought we'd take a cue from Delia herself, so we are starting the project on Delia's birthday, 18th June, and by the same date next year we aim to have baked all of the recipes in 'Delia's Cakes'. Wish us luck!