Macmillan Coffee Morning bakes!

After a month or two of baking lots of Delia's cakes for our blog, Julie suggested we offer them up to the public by holding a Macmillan Coffee Morning. Most people have heard of them - they're a fantastic idea. You hold an event whenever and wherever you like, bake a cake or two and invite people to come and eat them and donate money for Macmillan. There aren't many people who don't know someone who has suffered from cancer, and Macmillan do so much great work for sufferers and their families so it really is a good cause.

We (Chitty's Cakes) donated lots of cupcakes of our own - Red Velvet (always popular) and our flavour of the month for October, Toffee Apple Crumble - as well as a few cakes with the iconic Macmillan dusting on top. We set up a Delia table with some information about the blog, and all the Delia bakes we had done for the day.

Having been such a success the first time around, Julie recreated the Chocolate Beer Cake which went down a storm. I tried out the Rich Fruit Scones and served them with homemade strawberry and Pimm's jam and fresh cream.

The star of the day was The Ultimate Carrot Cake from page 186 of Delia's Cakes which Julie also donated. It's one we've had our eye on from the start as the picture makes it look so appetising. Not a fan of walnuts, she replaced them with pecans. It was moist, spicy and delicious. The sponges themselves were soaked with a syrup glaze (sugar with orange and lemon juice) after baking with made everything extra moist, and the icing was really tasty. Two tubs of mascarpone made it very cheesy tasting up against just one tablespoon of golden caster sugar, so Julie added some icing sugar (I think knowing my sweet tooth I'd have done the same!). Lots of people at the coffee morning had a slice and it got fantastic reviews.


One other bake worth mentioning from the day was the Peanut Butter Biscuits from page 161 of Delia which I made the night before. They were so easy to make - just a case of mixing everything together, shaping them into walnut sized balls, dipping them in Demerara sugar and popping them in the oven. They were crisp, sweet and really peanutty. Not only that, but as there were a few leftovers from the coffee morning I carried on snacking on them for a week, and they stayed really crunchy and delicious so a great biscuit to make and keep in a tin for a week (if they last that long!).

A massive thank you to everyone who came along to our Coffee Morning - we had a lot of support from our neighbours at the Custard Factory and really enjoyed meeting some of our neighbours. We raised almost £200 which we were really pleased with, and the fundraising continues as I will be running the Great Birmingham Run (a half marathon) in a couple of weeks time and am raising more money for Macmillan. If you would like to sponsor me, head to www.justgiving.com/rebecca-chitty. And if you like the sound of a Macmillan Coffee Morning, it's not too late to hold you own - just head to the Macmillan website for ideas. We would highly recommend it!

Bolton (or Eccles) Cakes

As my next bake was to take 'up north' to Bolton for my other half and his co-workers, I thought Eccles Cakes would be appropriate. Although not actually a cake, more of a pastry, they have the word 'cake' in the title, so they are surely entitled to be in the book. They're found on page 112 of Delia's Cakes. I was a big fan of these growing up, often making the mistake of heating them in the microwave for too long and making the filling painfully hot on the tongue! They date from 1793, where they were first sold in (you guessed it!) Eccles in Lancashire.

The recipe is fairly straightforward (thankfully Delia does not require you to make your own puff pasty - you've seen the Bake-Off, you know what a faff that is!). The first part is making a sticky dried fruit mixture that smells just like mincemeat.

The second part I found a bit more challenging (mainly because I'm never good at following instructions to the letter). Delia asked me to roll out a rectangle 32cm x 40cm (which I estimated) and to cut it 5 squares by 4 squares so each one would measure 8cm x 8cm. Well, I ran my pizza cutter down and across a few times and ended up with 20 squares, but whether or not they were 8cm, or even vaguely similar to each other in size, is debatable. In retrospect, this may have led to my downfall.

After putting a heap of the mincemeat smelling mixture in the middle of each square, I then had to dampen the edges with water (this got a bit sticky!) then turn all the corners inwards and seal them together (harder than it sounds!). Then I was to flip it and shape it into a round, put it on a baking sheet, brush with egg white and sprinkle with sugar. I was feeling pretty confident when they went in the oven, and they did smell great. Although not a complete disaster, a lot of the juicy part of the inside did seep out of the bottom (clearly my seals were not sealed!) and they got pretty stuck to the baking sheet - it reminded me very much of when mince pies overflow and you end up prising them out of the tin with a knife.

But, the main thing was, they tasted fab. Looking back, I think I should have rolled the pastry a bit thinner and been a bit more careful about the sized of my squares and sealing them up at the bottom (so, I failed at every step basically!). Plus, personally, I would have preferred a higher ratio of filling to pastry, but maybe that's just me. The cast of The Family Way at Bolton Octagon Theatre all tasted one and I'm told everyone liked them (but they are actors, they could easily have been acting...).

Chocolate Chip Cookie mistakes!

Two weeks without a day off can do strange things to a person, and in my experience one of the best ways to delay madness is to bake. And eat. So this week, that's exactly what I did. Having a couple of hours spare, but not a lot of time to get to the shops, I decided to bake a Delia recipe that I could make from what was in the cupboard. I almost had everything I needed for the Chocolate Chip Cookies (on page 149) minus the hazelnuts. I did have a handful of almonds though, so decided to make do.

They were pretty straightforward to make, nothing complicated about it. I had a bar of chocolate so made my own chocolate chips - this meant that some were pretty chunky (no bad thing there) and roasted and chopped my almonds. The raw dough was irresistible - it tasted just like chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream (well of course it did you idiot, it's chocolate chip cookie dough!!).

Delia suggests a rounded dessertspoonful of mixture for each cookie arranged on baking sheets. Now, I may have licked the bowl just a little, but not so much that her suggested 28 cookies could be reduced to just 14. I hate to criticise Queen Delia, but something clearly went wrong with the measurements here as the recipe I followed made exactly half the number it should have done. Julie tried this recipe a few weeks back too and said the same thing, so a word to the editors for the next edition - either double the recipe or halve the number it says this should make! There is a history of mistakes with this recipe in fact - in the first edition of Delia's Book of Cakes she left the chocolate chips out of the recipe!

 

Anyway, back to some more positive comments - these were pretty fantastic cookies. They helped Julie and I though a long Sunday at work, and a couple of long car journeys for me. Quick and easy to make - just bear in mind the recipe will only make 14 and not 28!

Banana Bake-Off!

Laura doesn't do things by halves. For her latest Delia bake, she decided not only to try out the Banana & Walnut Loaf (on page 53), but to also make the Hummingbird Bakery's much more modern version of Banana Bread. Delia's Banana & Walnut loaf is an old classic, appearing in every edition of Delia's Book of Cakes. It's something I often choose to make when I have a handful of bananas going brown in the bowl (great excuse to bake something tasty).

They both appeared here at Chitty's on a Friday morning - we didn't have a team meeting scheduled, but it was a busy day and we collectively decided that a sit-down to judge the banana cakes was in order.

The two cakes were really quite different - Delia's was a traditional banana and walnut loaf, although was a lot more citrusy in flavour that I thought it necessary (zest of a lemon and an orange in a cake that should taste of bananas and walnuts seems a bit OTT to me) but tasted delicious all the same. Laura's version looked almost identical to the picture in the book and tasted great.

However (sorry Delia) the Hummingbird Bakery version won hands down - it was moist, sticky and spicy. No walnuts in that one, just bananas, but of the two we all preferred it.

I have to say, I love a banana cake, but I think next time my bananas are turning brown, I'll be reaching for the Hummingbird Bakery book and not Delia!