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Thursday, 9 August 2012
Oh Bishampton, mon chou! .(scribbled at 13:46 )
Escaping to the antithesis of London for a Sunday afternoon is
heaven. As I type this onto Blogger right now, I'm pondering whether it would actually be feasible to grab a train once a month to the most deserted patch of countryside I can find in Worcestershire, and just lie down on the grass for an afternoon...
Anway, so back on Sunday I actually awoke at the crack of dawn just to bake a carrot cake for my uncle's retirement party. I think I'm going up in the popularity stakes amongst other family members aha, as it turned out
delicious (pretty sure it was because I opted for a cream cheese icing, which is that little bit more moreish)...
Anyway, I wouldn't normally blog about personal life, but it was such a fantastic afternoon. The band were great, and the catering was AWESOME. I was still feeling stuffed at work the following morning!
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| My sisters' cakes. Cutely decorated with a mound of marshmallows. |
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| mon gâteau aux carottes. |
The caterers prepared a delicious feast of bite sized dishes, which kind of meant you didn't feel guilty about eating what essentially was a 6 course meal...
The menu was entirely in Italian as well, which made choosing dishes to eat after you've drunk 3 Peronis and a substantial amount of Pimms was quite hilarious: even after studying Italian for a year, I cannot say 'Buongiorno' accurately to save my life.
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| Rollata di Salmone Affumicato |
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| Tartara di Pesce e Cocco |
...and the dessert platter? Well, effing hell. WOW. Well from left-to-right on my photograph below it reads like this
Foreground: Meringhatta con crema di banana e cioccolato, Tazza a
l cioccolato, Crema caramellizzata all' arancio (Baby pavlova with banana chocolate cream, chocolate pot and orange crème brûlée)
Background: Torta al mascarpone con fragole e cioccolato blanco, crostatina al limone (Strawberry and white chocolate cheesecake, lemon tart)
also, slightly cut off the photograph on the left (which surpisingly enough, I didn;t get round to eating as I actually had to run for the train back to Paddington) was a
torta della nonna, which is known as 'Grandma Cake'...
anyway, before I forget and hit 'publish', here's the carrot cake recipe. I was tempted to opt for Angela Hartnett's recipe, but due to an essential lack of lemon juice, went for the BBC variety. Evidently I'm too lazy to even take a 2 minute walk to Sainsbury's these days...
Ingredients:
175g brown sugar (recipe states 'light' but I tried it out with dark as well and both taste delish')
175ml sunflower oil (I prefer Grapeseed, it's great for baking)
175g self raising flour
3 large eggs
140g grated carrots
100g raisins
Grated zest of 1 large orange
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
Icing*:
175g Icing Sugar
1 1/2- 2tbsp orange juice
Method:
1.Preheat your oven to 180c (160 if fan oven). Grease and line an 18cm square cake tin with baking parchment
2. Lightly mix the sugar, oil and eggs into a large mixing bowl. Stir in the grated carrots, orange rind and raisins.
3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices into a bowl. Once done, sift this into the mixing bowl with the other ingredients. Lightly mix all the ingredients together until fully amalgamated.
4. Pour into your (lined) cake tin and bake it for around 45 minutes. It should be springy, and obviously, your skewer should come out clean.
5. Cool on a wire rack. To make the icing: just stir everything together, and then pour across your cake in a decorative fashion like this:
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| My first carrot cake attempt that I tested out on work colleagues. |
*I didn't follow this part. With icing, I find it's always best to use your noggin and mix/add the ingredients together as you see fit. If you want to go for a cream cheese frosting like I did, I used around 200g of (full fat, OBVS) cream cheese, with around 75-85g of icing sugar. Oh, and I added in a wee teaspoon of ground cinnamon too.
Labels: Baking and Patisserie, Bishampton, Catering, Cheesecake, Creme Brulée, Food Photography, Garden Parties, Smoked Salmon Photographs
