Chocolate madness.

Oh YES!

This year I wanted to make a good chocolate cake with chocolate icing for my birthday. This was the result:

Now, you might think 'That looks amazing', but I was not so sure of that when I made it.

I know it is very stressfull to 1. organise a party and 2. prepare/make food for seven (or more) people. In some families you just do not know who is coming, so you'll have to prepare dinner for at least 15 people (you see, you want to be sure you have enough :)). Respect to all homecooks who cook on there own birthday without knowing how many people are coming!

So anyway, I did not have that problem at all, I knew who was and wasn't coming on my birthday.

No, I had to problem off: 'I-don't-have-time-to-make-a-test-cake'. And I hate that.

You know, when you've tried the same recipe for a couple of times it kind of turns into

your own recipe. You know exactly which steps have to be taken and so on.

I honestly did not have the time to test this recipe, so this is what happend.

The cake batter was made for a two layer cake, which means I had to take two cake tins and spread the batter evenly over the two tins. What I did: put all the batter in one tin, so the batter was at the top of the tin (I did not intended to make a two layer, I really wanted to make one piece of cake...). When the cake was in the oven for 40 minutes I started to realise that this was way too much batter. It was running out of the tin, and a lot of batter fell into the oven.

I had to bake it through, which took about 1 1/2 our (at least). When I tried to cut it through, to add the caramel filling, it started to fall apart.

Thanks to the chocolate icing I was able to repair the cake and this is the final result!

My birthday peeps loved it though! That's a great thing about cooking, you don't have to tell the entire truth ;).

Recipe by Primrose Bakery.

Lots of love,

Mar.

Chocolate chip.

Hi!

Okay, this is a recipe that I HAVE to share with every cookie lover. Me, a huge biscuit and cookie fan, can not live without this recipe. I could probably eat these chocolate chip cookies every day. But I shouldn't since they contain lots of sugar (really lots!) and butter.

My recipe comes from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook (that's their first cookbook). Just to clarify; this is my favorite baking cookbook. If you don't want to spend a lot of money on a good cupcake and cake cookbook, this book is in my opinion the best option. It contains all the basic recipes for cupcakes, standard three layered cakes and icings (I was looking for these types of icings for a long time). At the moment I think you can buy this book from Ebay, it should not be that expensive. (This is not an advert.)

So anyway, back to the recipe, I recently gave these cookies away to my colleagues at my internship and to my friends at my birthday. My colleagues were very impressed (some even took a second one) and my family very much loved them as well.

They are just really tasteful and gooey. And the kitchen smells amazing (that's one reason to make them, right?). I use half the recipe's semi dark chocolate morsels and the other half I use white chocolate morsels.

If you would like the recipe, please contact me via 'comments'.

Bye!

I am sad to tell you I only made one picture, sorry!

Coffee Walnut 2.

Hi there,

It's been a while, I know! The last couple of months I have been super busy with school. Next year will be my final year, so I really wanted to put all the effort into my final third (and second) years tests. Thankfully I succeeded (except for one...), so now I can finally start baking again.

During these last couple of months I had my birthday and my mums birthday. So that means that I have many pictures to show you! :)

This was the second time I tried to make the Coffee Walnut with Coffee icing, and I have to say: 'It was define!'. I made it for my moms birthday and everyone fell in love with it. It does not only look amazing (thanks to the cake decorating tips by Lorraine Pascale), but it also tasted like heaven.

I wish I had the time to make it more often, because it was really really tasteful. One of my friends said I had to sell it (in my imaginary cake store). Well, we'll see.

Until next time!

Love,

Mar.

Lemon Drizzle

So this is my second entry today.

Yesterday I tried to make a Lemon Drizzle Cake. My parent really love these cakes with a nice flavour and a fresh and buttery body.

They had this cake at Starbucks in Amsterdam the other day, so my challenge was to try to make this cake even better than the SB's one.

I made this cake before, like a year ago, but then I was not satisfied with the result. This cake should have a fresh lemon flavour, but should also be a bit 'heavy'. With heavy I mean it should taste like a high quality cake with a good amount of butter.

I used zest of 1,5 lemon's instead of only one lemon. Next to that I used two lemons for the juice for the syrup. I first thought that putting a syrup on a cake would be tragic and the cake would not survive, but this is actually a really great recipe.

Some recipes for the lemon drizzle subscribe about 200/250 grams of icing for the syrup. I used only 100-120 grams. The cake won't get a white layer on top but still has an amazing crispy crust and it will taste even better. I also warm up the syrup instead of just mixing the 'cold' icing sugar and lemon juice.

I'm quite happy with the result. It could have been a bit more 'heavy'/buttery.

That's it for today.

Cheers!

Recipe by Nigella Lawson.

Coffee & Walnut Happiness

My first entry on this blog is about my recent attempt to make a Coffee & Walnut Cake with Coffee icing. I had this cake one year ago at a high tea. I really loved the combination of both flavours. And I thought the crispy walnuts in the cake were amazing.

So I thought, it is time to make my own version of this cake. I used the Primrose Bakery cookbook for this cake (I love this book, because of it's original recipes and beautiful 'natural' pictures).

You can see some of the pictures here. I didn't make any pictures during the baking, because I forgot my professional camera (silly). So, if you love the lovely flavour of (wal)nuts and you like the smell and flavour of coffee, you should deff. try (making or) eating this cake!

Have yourselfs a delicious day!