And she'll have fun fun fun 'til somebody takes her sprinkles awayyyyy

I fancied trying funfetti cake. It's a USAnian invention, plain white cake with fun bursts of colour courtesy of sprinkles in the mix (you know, sprinkles, like these)

It was featured on The Kitchn food blog this week, with a from-scratch recipe rather than the usual boxed mix version. Having been asked to bring something sweet to a birthday barbecue, I thought this would be the biz, especially as cupcakes. And I knew I had some hundreds and thousands in the cupboard to be used up.

I thought I'd make the effort and follow the linked recipe for white cake. It was quite an effort... the flour + butter + sugar + milk mixing stage could only be described as claggy. I am sure I will be finding randomly flung blobs of cake mix for weeks to come, but most of it seemed to coagulate around the stems of my mixer's beaters. Weird. I think next time I may just make a normal sponge cake! However, kudos to the author for giving grams as well as cup measurements.

So I made the cake mix, gently gently folded in my hundreds and thousands, blobbed it into a dozen silicone cupcake moulds (and then another dozen paper moulds - there's loads), and baked. After baking, it was time to try one (in the name of science of course) so I eased it in half and... no sprinkles. No Sprinkles!

Having gone ahead and shared them anyway, I can say that in some of the larger cakes, there were vague smears of yellow and pink. But on the whole - No Sprinkles. I can only assume that my use of hundreds and thousands, which were tiny sugar balls with natural colouring, was insufficient. The colours just diluted and dissolved in the cake mix. Re-reading the recipe, I see it says "The best sprinkles for baking into a cake are the longer "jimmies" — multi-colored and waxy". Darnit. Bring on the artificial colours!

Just as well I iced them and sprinkled more H&T on the top, eh? No sprinkles. Pah.

Photo: Crazy Cool Colorful Candy Confetti Creative Commons by Pink Sherbet Photography, on Flickr

And all because... (lemon and poppy seed cake)

... I only had medium-sized eggs.

This was one of those recipes inspired by one random bit of potential food waste that I wanted to avoid. Approximately 63% of a lemon lingered in the fridge after yesterday's oven-baked cod fillets with lemon (duh) and parsley, and a bit of ferreting around in the cupboard unearthed a packet of poppy seeds, albeit with a palaeolithic Best Before date. Ha - we scoff at such trivialities. Lemon and poppy seed cake was on the cards.

I even delved into a new cook book. Life on the edge, I tell you. Just like mother used to make features the following recipe:

Ingredients:
125g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
125g caster sugar
25g poppy seeds
zest of 1 lemon
pinch salt

2 large eggs, beaten
2 tbsp milk
dash vanilla essence

125g butter, melted

Method:
Combine the first five ingredients. Combine the last 3 ingredients. Add half of mix 2 to mix 1, plus half the butter. Mix well. Add the second half of mix 2 and the butter, and mix well again. Pour into a 20cm cake tin and bake at 180°C for an hour.

I found I only had medium eggs in the cupboard. I've been caught like this before so I used 2 whole eggs plus another yolk. I also decided to make a loaf cake, since lemon and poppy seed cake just should be a loaf in my book. Everything else went swimmingly. I decided to make a syrup from the otherwise-unneeded lemon juice and some more sugar, to top the cake off and make it into a lemon drizzle kind of thing.

Then I got carried away. I whisked up the leftover egg white, determined to make meringue. For some reason I chose to do this by hand. By the time I had got it to soft peak stage, the unwatched lemon syrup was lemon caramel. Rats. At this point, a quick check of the cake revealed it was a) volcanically uneven and b) somewhat toasty (ahem) at one end. And there were still 12 minutes left on the timer. An hour my arse. I dribbled the caramel on it anyway.

So, a nearly-but-not-quite burnt lemon and poppy seed loaf, with nearly-but-not-quite-burnt lemon caramel topping. Which sticks to your teeth. And is quite eye-wateringly lemony ("makes your tabs sing", I can hear mum saying) (tabs being ears, for the latitudinally challenged). It's edible, but domestic goddessicity is not at home today.

The meringues are still in the oven, but they'll have to go some to redeem the cake. [Edit: they were pretty good, but were fully crisp after 1h40 @ 125°C; glad I didn't do them at 140°C for 2h like the book gave in another recipe, and actually I would have preferred them a bit gooey in the middle...]

Note: making the mixture with melted butter made it relatively runny for cake batter. It pooled in the tin and levelled itself, when I think I could have done with making a hollow in the middle to even out the rise. Sorry, Tom Norrington-Davies, I don't know how your mother used to make cakes, but I'm not convinced this way is for me. I'm going back to Hannah Miles next time!

Note 2: while initially writing this post I constantly mistyped poppy as poopy. Says it all.

Coffee cake - needs tweaking?

Another recipe from Hannah Miles' Big Book of Cakes and Cookies, number 49: coffee streusel layer cake.

I found this tricky to make and, while it tastes good, I think I would try to tweak it if I did it again.

Ingredients

• 115g caster sugar, softened
• 115g butter
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 175g self raising flour, sifted
• 4tbsp milk

• 85g walnut pieces
• 115g soft brown sugar
• 2tbsp plain flour
• 1tbsp instant coffee granules
• 30g butter, melted and cooled

• 100g icing sugar
• 1tbsp instant coffee in 1tbsp boiling water
• 30g walnut pieces

Method

Preheat oven to 150°C. Grease or line an 8" square pan.

To make the streusel, whizz the walnuts (85g), brown sugar, plain flour and coffee granules in a blender, to fine crumbs. Add cooled melted butter and whizz again. Set aside.

For the cake, cream butter (115g) and caster sugar until fluffy. Gradually beat in eggs. Fold in SR flour and milk with large metal spoon.

Spread half the cake mix on the bottom of the pan and sprinkle with half the streusel mixture. Spread the rest of the cake mix on top, and finish with the remaining streusel. Bake for 1h-1h30, testing with a skewer.

To make the icing, blend the coffee and icing sugar. Drizzle over the cake and top with the remaining walnuts.

The basic tasks of the recipe were fine. The cake came together nicely, and the streusel was dead easy in the herb chopper of my stick blender. The problem started when putting it all into the tin.

The batter was very stiff; spreading half of it over the 8" tin was hard work to get it even, and it gave quite a thin layer. Spreading the streusel was fine, but then spreading the rest of the batter on top was near impossible. Any movement just caused the top layer of batter to roll over, picking up streusel with it. It was like trying to butter sand. I tried to place small blobs of batter all over the area, to cut the amount of spreading needed, but it was still tricky and I gave up trying to spread it all the way to the edges. There was plenty of streusel to cover this fact up!

Baking took 1h25 in my electric fan oven. After 1hr I covered the top with a square of foil to stop the streusel burning (it didn't show any signs, but I didn't want to risk it) - it finished a nice even brown. Once cooled, I unpeeled the cake from the baking parchment and cut a square. The streusel held together pretty well - I was worried it might all just crumble off as soon as you touched the cake. However, I was quite disappointed with the cake in that it was too shallow, and the "middle" layer of streusel was near if not on the bottom. I didn't bother with the icing and walnuts on the top.

It still tastes good, though, and the streusel topping gives an interesting texture which I like and will try again. But I would be tempted to try a smaller tin, or maybe a loaf tin, to make more of the layer effect (I guess I would only need about half the amount of streusel, too). And I would probably modify the sponge recipe (or use another) so as to get a looser and more easily spreadable mixture. I don't know if this one was supposed to be so stiff - the only thing I can think of is that my eggs may have been medium and not large as they were from an unlabelled box. I had well-softened butter, the right amount of milk, and beat the mix well with a hand mixer. Curious!

Never mind. It's a shame, as the other recipes of Hannah's I've tried have been good, but it's still cake, and it will still get eaten :)

Not such a success...

I had some bananas and butter to use up and was tempted by this "lighter" banana cake (as opposed to the usual banana bread). Unfortunately, it came out rather squidgy, and I don't think I'll bother making it again.

I followed the instructions as best I could (excellent step by step photos on the recipe), apart from not having a stand mixer (how big a kitchen do these people have?). I even included the stated amount of sugar, despite the fact that my instinct with any American recipe is to halve it. I didn't have 3 cups of plain flour, but subbed in one of self raising and reduced the baking powder/soda by a third. Was that where I went wrong?

The recipe said to bake in "three round pans". I only have one, so I baked it in two square ones instead. There wasn't a huge amount of batter (they must have been intending three very small tins) but I figured they would rise. They didn't rise much, but at the end of the baking time the skewer test indicated they were done, so I pulled them out, but they then sank while they cooled.

I cut the uneven bits off, sandwiched them together with some spare apricot jam, and there you have it. Banana squidge. Tastes OK, but less than great texture-wise. Cross that one off the list, I can't bothered faffing to find out where it went wrong.

[Edit] The cake was so squidgy it went mouldy in under a week. Big-time fuzzy mouldy. The birds liked it though!