Macmillan Cakes

Hello again!

I thought I'd take a couple of minutes out of my afternoon to finally post the cakes I said I'd post last week (story of my life...)

In our Cancer Centre, the medical secretaries ran a cake sale as part of Macmillan's "World's Biggest Coffee Morning".  To help them out with this, I baked a few cakes.  I wanted to stick around and help with the stall, but I had to run away to go to work and leave them to it!

I was trying to think of things that would look tempting, so I settled on a "death by chocolate" recipe (I think it came from the first Great British Bake Off recipe book?) and two lemon drizzle cakes. It would have been one lemon drizzle cake, but I made far too much batter for the size tins we had in the cupboard, so I split it into two!  I think it did Macmillan more good, anyway - they got twice as many slices of cake to sell!

The death by chocolate was a flourless cake recipe - I whisked whole eggs and sugar until they went pale and fluffy (leaving ribbons behind), melted chocolate and butter, then folded the buttery melted chocolate into the eggs before baking.  This is the first time I've tried a flourless cake.  The missus has done a couple before, but I've never really done the folding thing other than to make chocolate mousse!  I think I made one fatal error.  I poured the chocolate down the side of the bowl rather than straight on top of the whisked eggs.  That meant I had to scrape fairly ruthlessly to get them to combine, and I knocked more air than I wanted to out of the eggs.  Still, the cake came off with moderate success, and was still a reasonable thickness after it had baked and sunk (it was meant to sink!).  I then made a ganache for it... at least I think that's what I did!  I melted chocolate into double cream, poured it on top, and it kind of soft-set and made a soft covering for it.  I've never made ganache before, so I don't know if that's what it actually was or not!!  Either way, it looked amazing and apparently it sold really fast.

I even bought a piece myself so I could try it!  It was pretty scrummy, but definitely need to be a bit more gentle with it next time.

The lemon drizzle cakes came out of the same recipe book, and looked amazing.  I picked them because they'd go shiny and a bit sticky on top, and hopefully be really tempting and sell well.  I can't remember anything about the recipe off the top of my head!  I'll have to make them again at some point.  Lemon drizzle is probably one of my favourite cakes!  I also don't appear to have a picture of the finished articles, which is another great reason to make it again...

I'm not sure I can post the recipes on here if they came out of books that are still in print - at what point does it become copyright infringement?! I'll try and find out, and if I can, I'll post the recipes for everything I've baked on here.

More soon, I promise!

Bob x