Tamie's Bake-off - for novice cake makers

I have never baked a cake in my entire life until a few months ago ....

It all started when my older daughter Emily was doing a bake-off at her work earlier this year, which got me thinking ... could I try one too???  Then Emily and Maria did an afternoon tea for me and my mother-in-law Mary at our house for Mother's Day this March. I thought, why not try making something for that.

Since then, I have been baking almost every Sunday and my family and my mother-in-law Mary are my Guinea pigs.

The most successful cake I have baked, I think, was this Strawberry Sponge Cake with white chocolate cream.  Sponge was quite nice and moist, sandwiching fresh strawberries and white chocolate filling. At first I thought white chocolate was far too sweat for me however after a day it settled and turned out to be very nice.  I thought it looked cute too.

The very first cake I baked was this Lemon Drizzle Cake by Raymond Blanc recipe, which was for Mother's Day.  The taste was fine but it looked disaster.... it looked nothing like the one in his recipe on-line!  In fact it looked like a Thanksgiving Turkey without wings and legs!

To my defence, the taste was not bad. The problem with this funny shape was because of having used silicon cake mould that went floppy once the cake mixture was poured and put into the oven to bake.
The recipe used some dark rum. I think I sprinkled it rather liberally but this was actually alright.

Ok, sponge had air holes in them but for the first try, it was edible.


After this, I then invested on 2 cake tins and decided to try baking cakes.

2nd cake I baked was this strawberry short cake. I thought if the sponge did not turn out to be perfect, I could hide it with lots of strawberries and cream....and it kinda worked!

Maybe the oven was a bit too hot as sponges turned rather dark brown instead of light brown.... however the taste was lovely.  Fresh strawberries and cream never go wrong.  I think my husband had most of it so I did not have any slice to give it to Mary... sorry ...

3rd cake I tried to make was this Cappuccino cake with walnuts.  Finally I also managed to make the best use of blender that had been hiding in the corner of the kitchen, collecting dusts, in britzing walnuts into pieces. 

The cake looked disastrous indeed and sprinkling of cocoa power did not work, which made the presentation even worse while coffee cream was too soft. It looks like coffee 'lava' like cream was about to over flow from the volcano cake and spill over the plate. It is literally disastrous!

It tasted ok, yap, you can taste coffee alright. It went with a cup of coffee, obviously (ha ha ha!) 

My husband does not like coffee cake, Maria, Mary and I had a slice each and the rest went into a bin as this was just a boring cake.  

The 4th cake I made was this Boston Cream Pie cake.  The photo looks like a small donut. It is actually a proper cake of 20cm in diameter!  This actually turned out to be very good cake. Think of giant donut with custard cream except baked, not deep fried!

The sponge was very nice, soft and moist, sandwiching 'home-made' custard cream with melted chocolate on top!  I was quite surprised and chuffed myself to have made this this well.

This cake was everyone's favourite so far.

Having tasted the success of cake baking for the first time, I then decided to bake chocolate cake.

The 5th cake was this Chocolate Marble cake - made of two types of sponges, chocolate sponge and orange sponge, covered with chocolate icing.  

The taste was fine but the apprearance required a lot of improvement. It looked more like a children's mud-pie and I literally mean 'mud' pie!

I did not manage well in swirling chocolate and orange sponge mixture to mix to create 'marble' effect. When you cut a slice and see inside, you can see that swirling did not work well.

My husband does not like chocolate cakes in general so again Maria, Mary and I became guinea pig. After slice each, the rest went to the bin also the icing went harder after a day or so and it became less appetising although orange sponge tasted nicer. Oh, well, I just try baking something else....

Then came the 6th cake, Strawberry and white chocolate cake that I was talking about earlier.
I thought I did quite well with this!

Then next, the 7th cake was another type of Lemon Drizzle Cake. This one does not use dark rum.
To tell you the truth,  the sponge turned far too dark. I reckon the oven temperature was too hot. The taste was fine but I was not happy with the result so I baked this again the following Sunday.

This one is the 2nd attempt.  The sponge is still a bit dark but the taste was nice and sponge was quite nice and moist. I think this one might have been Maria's favourite as I think she kept going back to it, which meant that she had to put her SlimmingWorld on hold too, ha ha ha.

There are lots of lemon inside, outside and on top of it!  I call it Lemon Drizzle Dazzle Cake!
This went very well with a nice cup of tea.

And the 8th cake which I made last weekend was this, Almond with Cherry Cake.  I love this, especially toasted almonds are lovely.  This should have been 'Cherry and Almond' cake. I could not get dried cherries from M&S so I decided to use dried cranberries instead along with glace cherries. My husband said that cranberry does not work with almonds and went out his way to get me a packet of dried cherries from Sainsbury whilst I was measuring ingredients.  

After putting the cake mixture into the oven, I then realised that I forgot to put dried cherries completely, stupid me!!!   By then it was too late to add them into the mixture so I used them to decorate the cake with almond slices.  So it should have been Cherry and Almond cake but it turned out to be Almond with Cherry Cake. 

Next time, I will make sure to use both glace and dried cherries in the mix. Nevertheless the cake tastes lovely, maybe a slight dry because of almond powder but I love this cake.

You know, it says cakes are really fattening. It's really true if you realise the amount of sugar and butter going into them. However, at least with home made cakes you know what's inside. I enjoy the process of baking and how it turns out rather than eating it, so I don't feel bad about it. And I also enjoy thinking of what to bake next.  Not bad for a novice cake maker, I think.

That's all forks!