Chocolate sponge cake

This chocolate cake is adapted from Cakes From Around the World (Grub Street) by Julie Duff, who says it is from Hungary. The differences from her recipe is that I used gluten-free flour (which is not for the gluten-intolerant only – you may find you prefer it), a little milk because this flour tends to make a stiffer mixture, and only half as much cream – with her quantity, I had far more filling than I wanted.

3 large eggs, separated (I had medium eggs, and used 4)
75g caster sugar
75g self-raising flour (gluten-free)
2tbsp cocoa powder
2-3tbsp milk
100g dark chocolate
300ml double cream (or 284ml, if that is the size of carton available)

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 4/180C, and grease and line a 20cm springform cake tin (see here).

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar until pale and creamy. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks (see here).

Gradually stir the flour and cocoa powder into the egg yolk and sugar. Add a little milk until you have a liquid but stiff mixture. Fold in the egg white, and spoon the mixture into the cake tin.

Bake on a baking sheet in the centre of the oven until the middle of the cake is firm. (Duff’s timing is 20 minutes; my cake took 40.)

Leave for 10 minutes, then loosen the spring and leave the cake to cool, top side down, on a wire rack. Slice it in half.

Melt the chocolate in a small bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water. Whisk the cream until stiff – you’ll find that it goes from thick to stiff very rapidly. Fold in the melted chocolate.

Spread this mixture over the base sponge. Place the other half gently on top. Put the cake into the fridge, to allow the filling to set.

January lemon cake, gluten free

I have been sceptical about the potential of gluten-free flour to produce a decent sponge cake. You need a bit of gluten, I reasoned, to give a cakey texture. Wouldn’t a gluten-free version, in spite of the egg and the butter, fall to bits? But a good friend (and excellent cook), whose mother is coeliac, insists that sponges made with a straight swap of gluten-free flour for wheat flour are excellent. So I gave this one a go, again using a recipe from Geraldine Holt’s Cakes (Prospect Books).

Doves Farm’s own recipe specifies plain flour and baking powder (you’d have to buy a gluten-free version). I don’t know what difference using Doves’ self-raising flour makes, but I note that it includes xanthan gum, the binding agent.

The butter/sugar/flour mixture may be thicker than it would be if it contained wheat flour. If the lemon juice does not produce a dropping consistency, add a little milk.

I did not top my icing with strips of lemon zest; and, as you can see, I used all the icing as sandwich filling, rather than saving half of it to put on top.

175g butter, at room temperature
175g caster sugar
1 lemon
3 eggs
175g Doves Farm gluten-free, self-raising flour

Icing
90g butter
1 lemon
230g icing sugar

Place two 18cm, loose-bottomed cake tins on a piece of greaseproof paper, draw round the bases, and cut along the pencil mark. Smear a little butter on the base of each tin, stick the round piece of paper on top, and smear a little oil on the surface of the paper and round the sides of the tin.

Cream the butter and sugar, with the zest of the lemon. I do this by hand, and may not be thorough enough. I see in the comments on the Doves recipe someone says that her cake did not rise, adding that she used butter straight from the fridge. Her butter/sugar mixture may not have been light enough.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, adding some flour as you go to stabilise the mixture. Fold in the flour, with the juice of half of the lemon. If the mixture is still too stiff, add a little milk.

Divide the mixture between the two lined tins, and bake in the centre of a gas mark 4/180C oven for about 30 minutes, or until an inserted skewer emerges clean.

Give the cakes about three minutes, pass a knife round the outside of them, and remove the bases. Cool the cakes, bottom sides up, on a wire rack (the bottoms would stick to the rack, but the crusty upper sides should not do so).

Remove strands of peel from the second lemon. Zest the rest. Squeeze and strain the juice, adding it to the juice from the half left over when you made the sponge mixture.

In a small pan, melt the butter with 3tbsp lemon juice. Bring to a simmer, and allow to bubble for 30 seconds. Remove from the heat, and stir in the icing sugar until smooth. Stand the pan in cold water to hasten the cooling of the mixture.

Allow the mixture to thicken. Spread half of it on to the top of one of the cakes, and put the other cake on top. Pour the other half of the icing mixture on top of the sandwich, and decorate with the strands of peel.

The result has a grainier texture that a wheat-flour version, but it also has the lightness that you want in a sponge. I’m perfectly happy to use gluten-free flour in cakes from now on, though I'm sure I'll want to revert to wheat-flour versions from time to time.

Gingerbread, with syrup

It is often a mistake to plan a particular recipe before you know whether you can lay hands on the ingredients. The idea is difficult to abandon, even when the ingredients are elusive; I get into my head the idea that no other recipe will do.

You cannot find black treacle or candied ginger at my nearest shops on a Sunday morning. Not allowing their absence to deter me, I used instead golden syrup and ginger preserve (from Sainsbury’s) for this recipe from Geraldene Holt’s Cakes (Prospect Books). I also used a round cake tin, because I did not have a 20cm square one.

As you can see, the cake sank in the middle, probably because my batter was more liquid than Holt's. But the texture was good throughout, and the flavour was delicious.

Lightly grease the tin with a drop or two of vegetable oil.  Put a couple of slivers of butter on the base. Lay the tin on a sheet of kitchen paper, draw a circle round it, cut round the line, and attach the circle of paper to the base of the tin.

150g butter
150g dark brown sugar
265g golden syrup (I spooned syrup out of the tin until I had taken what seemed to be the correct portion of the contents)
2 eggs, beaten
265g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
2-3tsp ground ginger
1/2tsp cinnamon
Walnut-sized knob of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1tbsp ginger preserve

Cream the butter and the sugar. I lack a food mixer, so find this pretty hard work. I’m never sure when to stop, tending to do so when I cannot bear the effort any longer. The mixture is supposed to be light.

Stir in the syrup, and then the eggs. Mix the flour and baking powder, and stir them in to the mixture. Add the rest of the ingredients. Spoon into the cake tin, and smooth level.

Bake in a gas mark 3/170C oven for about 60 minutes, or until an inserted skewer emerges clean. I found that my gingerbread was still liquid in the centre after an hour, though the perimeter was quite dark. I turned down the oven to gas mark 1/140C, for a further 15 minutes.

Constance Spry's honey cake

My guess is that the foodie in your life, unwrapping a book on Christmas day, would be moderately pleased to find the latest offering from a celebrity chef, but absolutely delighted to find The Constance Spry Cookbook, just out in a new hardback edition from Grub Street. This 1956 kitchen bible remains the most prized work of its kind in numerous kitchens. Even if your foodie already has a copy, he or she will welcome a new one, because the old one is probably showing the effects of heavy usage.

Here is Constance Spry's honey cake.

3 eggs
2tbsp caster sugar
3tbsp honey
Grated rind of half a lemon
50g cornflour
65g plain flour

Separate the eggs. Cream the yolks with the sugar, honey, and lemon rind until white and expanded. I did this with a stick blender, which is far less appropriate for the job than a hand-held electric whisk would be. In theory, the yolks will whiten, and the volume of the mixture will expand considerably. My mixture got only some of the way towards this state before I gave up.

Fold in the cornflour.

Whip the whites until they form peaks (see here). Tip in the egg mixture with the plain flour, and fold everything together gently, until well amalgamated. The mixture is quite loose.

Spry does not specify the size of the cake tin. I used a 20cm springform one. Line the bottom with greaseproof paper cut into a disc (see here), grease the sides with a little vegetable oil, and pour in the cake mixture. Put the tin on to a baking sheet, and bake in a gas mark 3/170C oven for 35-40 minutes, or until set. (As you can see, I overdid it somewhat.) Allow to cool before turning out.

The honey compensates to a certain extent for the slightly dry texture of this butter-less cake. Still, it would be a good idea to serve it with cream, or buttercream, or perhaps a fruity concoction. The lack of butter, which is an anti-staling agent, means that you need to eat the cake soon after you've baked it.

A non-Victorian sponge

Most Victoria sponge recipes (this one, for example) instruct you to cream butter and sugar, mix in the eggs, and fold in the flour. An alternative way of making sponge cake is to blend the butter, sugar, and flour first, before almagamating the eggs. You give the flour more of a going over, developing more gluten, which helps to give the cake a coherent texture as it rises. In theory, a Victoria sponge will be lighter, because the flour is merely folded in to the other ingredients. But this version was not stodgy at all. I'm afraid that my effort collapsed slightly in the middle, in spite of the bizarre attempt I made to stabilise it (see below), probably because I took it out of the oven too soon.

These proportions are slightly different from those in the Victoria sponge recipe. But I did not use all the egg. If I had been making a sponge sandwich, I would have doubled the ingredients, dividing the batter between two tins.

100g self-raising flour (or plain flour, plus 1tsp baking powder)
100g caster sugar
100g softened butter
1tsp vanilla essence (optional)
2 eggs, beaten

Pre-heat your oven to gas mark 4/180C. Put in a baking sheet.

Place a 20cm springform cake tin on a piece of greaseproof paper, draw round it, and cut along the pencil mark. Smear a very small piece of butter on the base of the tin, stick the round piece of paper on top, and smear a little oil on the surface of the paper and round the sides of the tin.

In a food processor, blend the flour, sugar, and butter, in short pulses, until you have a stodgy mass. Tip the mixture into a bowl, and stir in the vanilla (if using) and a portion of the egg. Keep adding egg until you have a gloopy batter; it should drop off a spoon, but reluctantly. If you've used up all the egg before you get to this stage, add a little milk too.

Tip the batter into the cake tin, spread it out and level the surface, and put the tin on top of the baking sheet in the oven. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until an inserted skewer emerges clean.

Now the bizarre trick, recommended by Peter Barham in The Science of Cooking: drop the cake tin from a height of about 30cms on to a hard surface (I hope the spring is secure). The theory is this: as a cake cools, the air bubbles in it deflate, like collapsing balloons. Dropping the cake allows some of the bubbles to break, letting in air, which sustains the structure. It didn't work for me - but I'm pretty sure my mistake was complacently to neglect the skewer check.

Victoria sponge

Geraldene Holt's CAKES, from Tom Jaine's Prospect Books, is a lovely book, its loveliness uncompromised by a lack of pictures. Many glossily produced works will fall into disuse while this handsome, authoritative, wide-ranging paperback endures as a kitchen bible.

Here is Holt's recipe for Victoria sponge.

175g butter, at room temperature
175g caster sugar
3 eggs
1/4tsp vanilla essence
175g self-raising flour

Cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is soft and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating them in well. Mix in the vanilla essence. Gradually fold in the flour, sifted. Divide the mixture between two 20cm cake tins, and smooth level.

Put the tins on to a baking sheet, and bake in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 4/180C for 30 minutes, or until the cakes are golden brown and just starting to shrink from the tins. Cool in the tins for 2 minutes; turn out to cool on a wire rack. Spread the filling of your choice on to one of the cakes, and make a sandwich.

Holt advises that you use the base of the tins to draw circles on greaseproof paper. You cut out the discs, butter the bases of the tins, and put the paper on top. You grease the sides of the tins with clarified butter - the solids in unclarified butter, she says, can cause cakes to stick. Not being bothered to prepare clarified butter, I used sunflower oil, spreading it on the tins with a paper towel.

I had one springform tin, and one receptacle made of some rubbery substance, and borrowed from a neighbour. The rubbery version worked fine.

I had no vanilla essence, being able to find only inferior vanilla flavouring (one bottle was sneakily labelled "vanilla flavouring essence") in the shops. I flavoured my sponge with the zest of a whole lemon.

I do not have an electric hand beater, which is supposed to ease the creaming process. I started off by crushing the ingredients with a spoon, and then had a go at them with an electric stick blender. It immediately got clogged, of course. But I think that it did help me to produce a lighter mixture.

Is it necessary to add the eggs gradually to the creamed butter and sugar? You're trying to prevent curdelling. But the flour will do that. I simply chucked in the eggs and the flour all at once. I got a sticky batter. Nigella Lawson (whose version in HOW TO EAT has 225g of butter, sugar and flour (of each of them, that is), with four eggs) says that you want a pouring consistency, and suggests that you add a little milk. But my cakes were spongy enough, I thought.

Almond cake

This is a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe from the Guardian (here - scroll down).

My springform cake tin leaks, so I used an ordinary one; it is 22cms, rather than the 25cms Fearnley-Whittingstall asks for. The cake came loose very easily. But what you see here is upside down.

Two observations. Whisking the sugar and egg mixture is quite hard work: the mixture is stiff. Perhaps in part because I used a more narrow tin but also because cakes always seem to take longer than recipes suggest they should, this cake took about 55 minutes to set.

It was good, and stayed moist for several days. I think that it would have been even nicer had I used the zest from 2 lemons.

Polenta cake revisited

My last polenta cake was a bit heavy on the polenta. Without cream or ice cream as an accompaniment, it was dry in the mouth. This one was gooier, and more readily digestible. Its shortcoming was that, once upended from the tin, it fell to bits. My mistake, I think, was failing to allow it properly to cool first.

225g butter
225g caster sugar
3 eggs
200g ground almonds
125g quick-cook polenta
1tsp baking powder
1tsp vanilla essence
2 lemons - zest and juice

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs. Recipes often tell you to add them one at a time; but you're unlikely to get a smooth mixture whatever you do, and the dry ingredients will stabilise it anyway.

Stir in the almonds, polenta, baking powder, vanilla, and lemon.

Pour the batter into a 20cm cake tin (a springform one if you like), and cook it at gas mark 3/160C for about 40 minutes. That timing comes from a majority of recipes rather than from my own experience, which suggests that the cake may take up to an hour to set.

Orange polenta cake

I have been meaning for some time to try making a gluten-free cake for my gluten-intolerant wife. This is a slight adaptation of a recipe I found on the Cake Baker website - which, unusually these days, gives measurements in ounces.

200g butter
200g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g ground almonds
200g instant polenta
1 orange, zest and juice

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs. Fold in the almonds, polenta, and lemon juice. You should have a stiff batter.

I cannot give very helpful advice about oven temperatures. The recipe advises you use an eight-inch (20cm) cake tin, whereas the one in the picture has a base of 15.5cms. That was one reason why my cake took a lot longer to set than the 20-25 minutes specified; another may be that my oven is behaving a bit strangely, often failing to reach the temperature on the dial.

I started cooking the cake at gas mark 5/190C (but at what may have been a good deal cooler than that). After half an hour, the centre was runny. I turned up the dial to 6/200C. Fifteen minutes later, I moved the cake to a higher shelf. It took an hour in total.

You need cream or ice cream as an accompaniment, to offset the dry graininess of the polenta.

Or perhaps this Telegraph version, with less polenta but more ground almonds, is worth trying. Like many polenta cake recipes, it includes baking powder - which usually contains gluten. I don't think my cake suffered from the lack of it.

Improvised lemon cake

Is it possible to make a cake as I make most of the savoury dishes on this blog: by assembling ingredients according to general principles rather than precise recipes? That is what I asked myself yesterday, when I fancied making a lemon cake (sometimes one gets these particular urges), but could find only recipes that were more complicated than appealed, and that involved ingredients I did not have.

Butter, sugar, eggs, flour: these are the basic ingredients. So: I creamed 50g of butter and 50g of golden caster sugar. I beat in three eggs, and added the zest and juice of a lemon, as well as a tsp of vanilla essence. I have noticed that some lemon cake recipes include cornflour, so I added a few dstsps of that. Then I added self-raising flour, dstsp by dstsp, until I arrived at that gloopy, "dropping" consistency. I poured the mixture into a buttered loaf tin, and baked it for half an hour.

It wasn't bad. It had risen in the centre, and cracked; and the consistency was somewhat dense, though not unpleasantly so. Perhaps I should have separated the eggs, beat the whites, and folded them into the mixture. Or perhaps a spot of baking powder would have helped. The cake was not moist and sticky, as the best ones are (thanks often to lemon curd, I believe).

If things are not right with savoury dishes, I usually know why. But I don't understand baking nearly as well.

Yoghurt and lemon cake

This recipe comes from a lovely book, Classic Turkish Cookery by Ghillie Basan. I have adapted it, substituting the lemon zest for the 2 tbsp of dessicated coconut and 2 tbsp of sultanas she includes. She suggests that you might use a 450 g loaf tin; I used a 20 cm springform tin. The cake had a pleasingly foamy texture, with a squidgy centre.

More expert bakers than I would know what difference it makes to follow the procedure below with the eggs and sugar rather than creaming the butter and sugar.

225 g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
175 g butter
175 g caster sugar
2 eggs
175 g thick yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla essence
Zest of 1 lemon

Cut a disc the size of the base of your tin in a sheet of greaseproof paper; put a little butter on the base, and fix the paper on top. Assemble the tin.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl.

Melt the butter and leave to cool. Whisk the eggs and sugar until they are light and fluffy. In a separate bowl, beat the melted butter into the yoghurt, and add the mixture to the eggs and sugar. Stir in the vanilla and lemon zest. Fold in the flour.

Spoon the mixture into the tin, and bake in the centre of a gas mark 4/180 C oven. My cake was ready in 45 minutes (an inserted skewer came out clean). Loosen the cake from the sides, release it from the tin, and leave to cool. Wrapped in a layer of paper and then foil, it keeps for several days.

Chocolate cake

Another Elizabeth David recipe. There is a similar one in Don't Sweat the Aubergine; but hers is better. It's moist and gooey.

Unlike the recipe for cheese tart, this one needs only tiny adaptations -- except that it may take longer to set than she suggests. The cake in my book sits in a bain-marie; and I wonder if that method would cook this one more efficiently.

Serves six.

110 g dark chocolate
84 g butter

100 g caster sugar
2 tbsp flour
3 eggs, separated

Cut up the chocolate, and melt it in a ceramic bowl suspended above a pan of barely simmering water. Remove from the heat, and stir in the butter*, cut into pieces; when the butter has melted, stir in the sugar, flour, and egg yolks. Beat the egg whites until they form firm peaks. Fold them into the chocolate mixture. Pour the mixture into a buttered loaf tin -- mine, 7 cm x 16.5 cm, was just the right size.

Bake in a gas mark 4/180 C oven. Elizabeth David gives a time of 35 minutes; my cake took 10 minutes longer than that. A skewer inserted into the middle of the cake should emerge clean.

When cool, turn out the cake on to a rack. I wrapped it in a layer of greaseproof paper, then foil.

*Update, 19/11/11: This cake, delicious when fresh, becomes compacted after a day or so. I tried introducing extra lightness by creaming the butter and sugar first; then I stirred in the chocolate, flour, and egg yolks. It produced a better result.