Oh, Crumbs

You may be starting to wonder something as you read this blog. 'Indy,' you might be thinking, 'when on earth do you leave school? What with your undeniable maturity and reliability, not to mention the wit and charm that you do, frequently, mention, surely you have outgrown the constraints of full time education by now? Shouldn't you be seeking your fortune, using the skills you have acquired during your formative years in the real world?'

Alternatively, you may not be wondering this. But I bet you are now.

Well the answer is: Friday. Friday is the day I leave school, forever. Except for when I have to go back to take my exams. But otherwise, Friday.

It's all very exciting and rather like the end of Grease (except without, you know, the leather and the teenage pregnancies. Well I don't know, other people might be wearing leather and getting pregnant. But not me personally), but one thing I have noticed as people sign my leaver's book is a bit of a theme.

A theme along the lines of 'so long, and thanks for all the cake'.

Is cake what people associate with me, I wonder? Is my role in secondary school not 'class clown' or 'official hottie', but 'inducer of sugar highs'?

I can live with that.

Actually, my mum said to me the other day, 'I'm quite glad you have a bit of a penchant for cake, you know, to keep you from getting too skinny.'

YOU'RE GLAD I LOVE CAKE BECAUSE IT MEANS I'LL NEVER BE THIN. THANKS, MOTHER.

She hardly deserved a cake after that, but bugger it, this looked good.

Jam Crumb Cake
Gourmet December 2007
Recipe from Gigi Cakes: American measurements at the link.

FOR THE CAKE:
140g all-purpose flour
90g of sugar
1 ¾ teaspoons of baking powder
¼ teaspoon of salt
85g melted butter
120ml of milk
1 large egg
½ cup of jam or preserves (Not sure how much this is so I blobbed a good few tablespoons on. If you want guidance: the more the better)

FOR THE CRUMB TOPPING:
85g melted butter
30g brown sugar
50g granulated sugar
¾ teaspoons of cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon of salt
140g + 2 tablespoons of flour

Preheat the oven to 400F. Generously grease and butter a 9-inch round pan.

1. For the cake: Whisk together butter, milk, and egg in a large bowl, then whisk in the flour mixture until just combined. Pour the batter into the cake pan. Dollop jam all over the surface, then swirl batter with a spoon.

2. For the topping: Whisk together the butter, sugars, cinnamon and salt until smooth. Stir in the flour, then blend with your fingertips until incorporated, then sprinkle crumbs over the cake.

3. Bake the cake until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool in pan for 5 minutes before inverting to completely cool.

Incidentally; I've just finished decorating not one, but two cakes for Leavers' Day: one as a thankyou present to the English department and one chocolate rum cake for our BBQ afterwards. Watch this space. ^__^

DB 2: A Revolution On A Stick

This is it. The Revolution has come.

They said it couldn't be done. 'Food on a stick?!' they cried. 'Don't be ridiculous. How could you eat, say, cake on a stick? Fish on a stick? Cheesecake on a stick?'

No one actually did say that, to my knowledge, but I'm sure they would have done had I proposed food on sticks.

To which I would reply airily, 'cheesecake pop?'


Yes, it's that time of the month. No, not that time of the month. Daring Baker time of the month. And because I like to start revolutions (albeit of the slightly limited, let's-eat-things-off-sticks kind, rather than the Call-in-the-Communists kind) I was ridiculously excited over it. Not least because I got to turn chocolate pink.

That wasn't in the recipe, or anything. I just saw the DB recipe and thought, 'this calls for pink chocolate'.

Now for business:

• This called for a ridiculous amount of cream cheese, so I, er, two-fifth-ed the recipe. It seemed to work. I'll give the quantities I used below.
• Lolly sticks were nowhere to be found round where I live, not even for ready money (customary Wilde quote slipped in there, sorry). I used cocktail sticks on a suggestion from one of my friends - this is the reason she got into Oxford, I think - and used a melon baller to size my pops. At least, I think it was a melon baller. I don't eat melon, so it could have been anything, on reflection.
• 35-45 minutes for a water bath cheesecake? BOLLOCKS. I upped it to almost an hour, and my cheesecake was half sized, and even so it was underdone!
• This meant I pretty much had to keep my pops in the freezer. In fact, there's no pretty much about it. I did. And I had to dip them in chocolate in batches, cause if they were out of the freezer too long they collapsed and dropped in the melted chocolate and I was forced to eat them. It was terrible. No, really.
• No, not really. But I did eat them. Yum yum yum.

Cheesecake Pops
These are the reduced quantities I used. For the real quantities, look on the DB blogroll and you should find them on more or less any blog there. For the actual directions, below, my adaptations or metric-isations are in red.

448g soft cheese
320g caster sugar
15g plain flour
pinch salt
2 eggs
1 yolk
1 tsp vanilla
25ml double cream
180g chocolate (in theory, but I used a huge amount, haha. About 300gish? Say 100g of each kind of chocolate, if you're doing it my way)
1 dessertspoon vegetable oil (rather than buy shortening)

Boiling water as needed
Thirty to forty 8-inch lollipop sticks/ cocktail sticks.
Assorted decorations such as chopped nuts, colored jimmies, crushed peppermints, mini chocolate chips, sanding sugars, dragees) - Optional

Position oven rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 180C. Set some water to boil.

1. In a large bowl, beat together the cream cheese, sugar, flour, and salt until smooth. If using a mixer, mix on low speed. Add the whole eggs and the egg yolks, one at a time, beating well (but still at low speed) after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and cream.

2. Grease an 8-inch cake pan (not a springform pan), and pour the batter into the cake pan. (I then wrapped this in foil to stop the water bath making it soggy; a little bit got in anyway but I'd definitely recommend using foil around the cake tin). Place the pan in a larger roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with the boiling water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Bake until the cheesecake is firm and slightly golden on top, 45mins to an hour. It needs to be fully cooked!

3. Remove the cheesecake from the water bath and cool to room temperature. Cover the cheesecake with plastic wrap and refrigerate until very cold, at least 3 hours or up to overnight.
When the cheesecake is cold and very firm, scoop the cheesecake into 2-ounce balls and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Carefully insert a lollipop stick into each cheesecake ball. Freeze the cheesecake pops, uncovered, until very hard, at least 1 – 2 hours. I used a melon baller, which worked. But my cheesecake was so soft I had to keep the pops in the freezer full time.

4. When the cheesecake pops are frozen and ready for dipping, prepare the chocolate. Microwave half the chocolate and half the shortening on high at 30 second intervals, until chocolate is melted and chocolate and shortening are combined. Stir until completely smooth. Do not heat the chocolate too much or your chocolate will lose it’s shine after it has dried. Save the rest of the chocolate and shortening for later dipping, or use another type of chocolate for variety.

5. Quickly dip a frozen cheesecake pop in the melted chocolate, swirling quickly to coat it completely. Shake off any excess into the melted chocolate. If you like, you can now roll the pops quickly in optional decorations. You can also drizzle them with a contrasting color of melted chocolate. Place the pop on a clean parchment paper-lined baking sheet to set. Repeat with remaining pops, melting more chocolate and shortening (or confectionary chocolate pieces) as needed.

Refrigerate the pops for up to 24 hours, until ready to serve.

These did take a long time, mostly I think because I got so excited over decorating them (crushed biscuits to make it more cheesecakey, sprinkles, chocolate chips...) but they were such a hit with my family it was worth it. The crack of the chocolate and the soft cheesecake when you bit into them = total win.

The Tempter, Or The Tempted, Who Sins Most...?

I know I'm late for St. George's day, but these cupcakes are actually from yesterday - I wasn't able to post as in the evening I went with school to see Measure For Measure (our A-Level text) in the theatre - and on Shakespeare's birthday, too! (It's a bit of a British-birthday themed week; if there are any other British icons with a birthday this week you probably shouldn't tell me, or my mother will be putting me on flour rations).

Yesterday's display of patriotism reached its crux just before the performance, when my friends ran up to me wearing party hats at jaunty angles, asking me for Measure For Measure quotes (they then wrote quotes all over the hats). This is apparently how Shakespeare's birthday is celebrated in the more elite circles.


It worked out quite well actually, when I was able to reel off a load of quotes -'ever till now, when men were fond, I smiled and wondered how'- in class today.

'Wow, have you been revising?'

'...Actually, I have it written on a party hat.'

These are just vanilla cupcakes with Union Jack and St George's Flag designs in fondant icing over blue buttercream, but I liked how they turned out. The two flags were so people could decide what they were celebrating - the St George fans went for the red crosses, and the more literate picked the Union Jacks.

I didn't tell them that was how I was categorising them at the time, of course.

Vanilla cupcake recipe
Adapted from 'Cupcakes' by Elinor Klivans
Makes 12 cupcakes

180g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg
1 egg yolk
200g caster sugar
120g butter
1 tsp vanilla essence
120ml sour cream

Preheat oven to 180C and line 12 muffin tin cups with paper liners.

1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a mixer on medium speed until pale and fluffy. Add the egg & yolk, stopping the mixer and scraping the sides of the bowl as needed. On low speed, mix in the vanilla and sour cream until no white streaks remain.

2. Sift (ha!) the flour, baking powder, bicarb & salt together and mix into the batter slowly until it is incorporated and the batter is smooth and pale. Bake at 180C for about 20mins, until a toothpick stuck into the centre comes out clean.

Happy Birthday, Your Majesty!

Picture the scene. The Queen walks into her drawing room early tomorrow morning (does she have a drawing room? Don't spoil the magic with particulars) and sits down, picking up her china teapot to pour herself a nice cup of earl grey. She pulls her favourite teacup towards her (she definitely has a favourite teacup. The Queen and I, we're like this), glances down - and instead of a cup of tea, she sees .... a muffin of tea?

Don't panic, Ma'am! This isn't any old commoner muffin - this is an earl grey and white chocolate muffin, especially for your birthday!

In fact, the Queen should probably panic anyway, because for me to do this I'd have to break into Buckingham Palace some time tonight, probably hotly pursued by the Royal guards, all shooting to kill - but for the Queen's (unofficial) birthday, I think it's worth it. And I think she'd appreciate it (like this, remember?), if her love for tea/cake/royalty is anything approaching mine.

So rather than a birthday cake, a muffin that could just fit in a teacup seemed perfectly fitting.

I'm taking this into school tomorrow, as my friends love the Queen almost as much as I do (almost. I think I'm a very infectious sort of person?), so we'll probably eat them with our cups of (liquid) tea in our free periods tomorrow, while cheerfully discussing how great the Queen is. Man, she is so great. I wish I was the Queen. All it needs is a birthday candle stuck in the middle of one, and things would be perfect.

Actually, I might do the candle thing. Worst case scenario is that the fire alarms go off and I miss History. Sorry, did I say worst?

I found the recipe for these on Eat Me, Delicious - my muffins look pretty different, but I think that's cause I didn't really have enough Earl Grey - I only drink proper, manly tea, so I had to flutter my eyelashes at my previously mentioned friend Alex a bit to scrounge an Earl Grey teabag off her. It seemed a bit cheeky to ask for two - not that that usually stops me - particularly as I spend a large proportion of my time mocking her for drinking flowery, girly tea. You see; the Queen's influence has me being all polite, and civilised! The woman deserves more than a muffin.

Earl Grey White Chocolate Chunk Muffins
American measurements here on Eat Me, Delicious.
Metric conversion by me.
Adapted from Baking From My Home To Yours

Makes 12 (so enough for all the corgis)

120g sugar
280g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground Earl Grey tea (or more)
360ml sour cream
2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
115g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
100g white chocolate chunks (I used 150g, because you can't have too much chocolate when it comes to royalty)

1. Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 190C. Butter or spray the 12 molds in a regular-size muffin pan or fit the molds with paper muffin cups.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and ground Earl Grey tea. In a large glass measuring cup or another bowl, whisk the sour cream, eggs, vanilla, and melted butter together until well blended. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and, with the whisk or a rubber spatula, gently but quickly stir to blend. Don't worry about being thorough - a few lumps are better than over mixing the batter. Stir in the white chocolate chunks. Divide the batter evenly among the muffins cups.

3. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes, or until the tops are golden and a thin knife inserted into the center of the muffins comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing each muffin from its mold.

Happy Unofficial Birthday to the Queen for tomorrow!

Worth Waiting Four Years For

It's needless to say, but I don't remember everything I make. I remember Psychology revision pretty well, and I can recall conversations or emails word for word; but I can't remember important documents, where I leave things, or traumatic events. (That last one is, I think, repression; the Psychology revision comes in somewhere).

Anyway, the other day I was reminiscing with my friend Alex about the good old days of Home Ec. GCSE (well it FEELS like a long time ago), and she said, 'do you remember when we both got into the finals of that cooking competition thing?'

'Er,' I said, 'no.'

I have very cold and stiff fingers cause I've just been walking the dog so I'm tempted to say that the conversation ended there, but actually she perservered a bit: 'The 'Taste of Success' thing. We had to go into the university and you made something with chicken and shallots, and this white chocolate pudding thing which I really wanted the recipe for.'

It was beginning to sound familiar. 'I don't remember the food... did I give it you or what?'

'No.' Oops. 'You forgot. But it was in little ramekins, and there were all berries at the bottom - raspberries and stuff - and white chocolate cream and then it was like a creme brulee top that you did on the grill.'

I stared at her. 'Alex,' I said, 'I made that recipe, once, four years ago. That's almost a quarter of your life. (No, I'm not so hot at maths). Are you sure I didn't give you the recipe? Because you seem to have memorised it.'

She looked melancholy. 'I just really wanted that recipe,' she sniffed.

I think the reason I'd blanked this entire episode from my mind was that a cooking competition = pressure, and I don't perform well under pressure (I once announced in a French oral exam that my dream was to be a 'chaussure'. Chaussure means SHOE. I was trying for 'chanteuse'; singer). Alex, apparently, had not, so when I went home I started going through my mum's books to try and find the recipe I'd promised her four years ago.

This is it.

White Chocolate Berry Gratin
Adapted from one of my mum's recipes (so probably originally from Good Food).
Ready in 15 mins plus cooling.
Serves 4; 356 cals p/s

140g strawberries, hulled and quartered
140g raspberries
140g blueberries (I missed these out as my sister won't eat them, so used more of the other two)
grated zest of one small lemon
100g white choc
142ml pot double cream
2 tbsp icing sugar

1. Scatter the berries into medium ramekins. Sprinkle with the lemon zest, cover & leave to chill in the fridge until ready to serve.

2. Meanwhile break up the chocolate into a small bowl. Heat the cream in a pan until almost boiling, then pour over the chocolate. Leave for three mins then stir slowly til dissolved (Alex objected to my use of the word 'dissolve' here - she is a sciencey type - until I offered to stick the recipe up her nose, at which she relented). Allow to cool to room temp until thickened.

3. To serve, use a small kitchen blowtorch or heat the grill for a few mins until hot. Spoon the chocolate cream over the berries, sprinkle over the icing sugar and blast/grill for a couple of minutes until it starts to brown & caramelise. Remove & serve immediately.


(I copied the recipe out a couple of weeks ago and stuck it in her birthday card. How could I not, after a freakishly amazing feat of memory like that?)

Soulmate Cookies

I'm thinking of changing the aim of this blog. Rather than being a general food blog of whatever I make, I'm thinking maybe I should just dedicate the whole thing to The Best Chocolate Cookie Recipes The World Has Ever Known. Because I just keep coming across them.

I'm not doing it on purpose. I don't even eat cookies anywhere near as much as I eat, say, cake (which is more or less my staple food group. Yes, I'm going to die young; why do you ask?). But somehow these recipes keep wandering across my computer screen, or else recipe books conveniently fall open on them, or else I'll be tidying my room (okay, I'm using artistic license on this one) and come across something I printed off aeons ago and happen to have peanut butter in the fridge that no one in our house eats.

Who am I to argue with fate?


Incidentally, yes, I am apparently incapable of taking photographs of entire cookies. I did try, and I did take a couple, but they just didn't make me happy. Boo. So then I started breaking cookies in half and eating bits and taking photos of that, and then I was extremely happy and also well on my way down the road to obesity.

Fate seems to have delivered me my soulmate. Unsurprisingly, it's edible.



So let me tell you about these cookies. It's important that you know how good these are. This information might just save your life one day. For starters, you don't even bake them, just melt a load of stuff on your stove top, so once they're cool and set the consistency is more like fudge; but it's not at all grainy, just gooey and melty and dsnkjfnjksn hang on a minute while I regain my composure. Secondly, they don't call for chocolate in the ingredients but somehow these are ridiculously chocolatey and mood-boosting. Thirdly, I was suspicious of peanut butter (I'm British, okay? Peanut butter is practically foreign to me) but it's not at all overwhelming, and the presence of oats means you can trick yourself that it's doing you good.

Can we recap here? No chocolate. Oats. I even used low-fat peanut butter (part of me obviously recognising that I would be eating about twenty in the space of ten minutes). This is practically a health food.


The recipe for these is from Fancy Toast (it hasn't been updated in ages, but I'll link to it anyway as it's far funnier than any of my blog posts and outstrips my photography by miles. You have to promise to come back, though? Don't go off marauding through Fancy Toast and forsake me, 'kay?) so obviously I've translated the recipe into metric.

No Bake Oatmeal Chocolate Fudge Cookies of Love (or just No-Bakies)
Recipe from Fancy Toast: American measurements here.
I got about 20 out of this.

115g butter
400g sugar
4 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla
120ml milk
120ml peanut butter
282g quick oats

1. In a saucepan over medium-high heat, melt butter. Add next four ingredients and heat until the mixture comes to a boil. Boil for one minute, then remove from heat. Stir in peanut butter and oats.

2. Drop mixture by the spoonful onto a sheet of waxed paper, parchment paper, or aluminum foil. Allow no-bakies to cool until firm, approximately 20 minutes.

I'm taking these to a meal with friends tonight (yes, I do take my own food to meals X__X). I'm guarranteed to have a lot more friends by the end of it.

DB 1: Brave, Courageous and... Daring!

I'd been wanting to join the Daring Bakers for a long time before this month, but somehow I'd never got up the nerve. I think perhaps it was the name; 'daring' made me think of pirates, or ninjas, and as much as I may aspire to be a ninja pirate (or a pirate ninja?) I wasn't sure if I was cut out for it.

When I finally decided to go for it, I was pretty relieved to learn that my first DB challenge was going to be a cake. I may not be the most daring of Daring Bakers, but I'm alright at cake.

I was so petrified of doing something wrong and being cast from the DB fold forever (do they have hitmen? I fondly imagine them having some sort of secret service at their beck and call) that this cake did take about a decade to make, and I kept having to take breaks to hyperventilate and frantically email Pixie, but all in all I think I was pretty successful.

That said; this cake was far more effort than I'd usually put in, and while it looked impressive (my mum said it looked like a wedding cake), I actually prefer normal sponge and regular, non-classy buttercream to the Swiss buttercream used here. So it was a good experience, but I think I'm sticking with my Gran's tried-and-true cake recipe ^__^.


Thanks Morven for hosting, and the recipe is in Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home To Yours.

Also; sorry for posting this late - I was in Bath visiting my sister, without an internet connection. Fail. Looks like the DB secret service will be on my trail anyway...

Why Choosing Between Desserts Is A Thing Of The Past

On Happy Love Strawberry, 'excess' is not a word that I know the meaning of.

Well, I mean, I know the meaning of it. I'm not stupid.


What I'm trying to say is: I love brownies. I love ice cream. I had six egg yolks rocking out in the fridge (you know, I swear they started reproducing at one point? I'm not pointing any fingers, I'm just saying; one day I had three sharing a mug, the next day, there were four in there. No one else uses egg whites in my house, so the logical conclusion is that they had a baby. Anyone know anything about the reproductive cycle of an egg yolk?). It made sense to me - and I don't mean in the weird, egg-yolk-multiplication way - to make both.

At the same time. Together. In one glorious, hybrid, taste-explosion. Heeee.


My photos say this worked.

My stomach says something very similar, but in a more 'oh GOD, this is GLORIOUS, but STOP EATING, I'm GOING TO DIE' sort of way.

In reflection, I should have made this when I had someone to share it with.


I used The Only Brownie Recipe In The World That I Can Actually Make, which is a Nigel Slater recipe, and for the icecream, I used Donna Hay's recipe which I found on Spicy Icecream (deceptively, the icecream is not spicy). However, I've copied and pasted a bit to convert the measurements to metric, so I'll stick it all up here ^__^.

For the icecream:
Vanilla Bean Ice Cream
From Modern Classics 2 by Donna Hay
Makes about 1 litre

240ml milk
480ml single cream
1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped
6 egg yolks
115g caster sugar

1. Place the milk, cream and vanilla (including the bean) in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir occasionally until the mixture is hot but not boiling. Remove from the heat and set aside to infuse for 15 minutes

2. Place the egg yolks and sugar in a bowl and whisk until thick and pale. Remove the vanilla bean from the milk mixture, and slowly pour over the egg yolk mixture. Whisk well to combine.

3. Return the mixture to the pan and stir over low heat until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Set aside to cool. A good way to do this is to fill your sink with a little cold water and a few ice cubes and place the saucepan in there.

4. Either place the custard in an ice-cream maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions OR place the mixture in tub, cover and freeze for 1 hour. Beat with an electric hand mixer, or, you know, a spoon, and return to the freezer. Repeat three times at hourly intervals until the ice cream is thick and smooth. In the meantime, make the brownies; they need to be cool and set by the time your ice cream has been freezing for about 3 1/2 hours or is just almost ready to be left to itself.


For the brownies:
Very Good Chocolate Brownies
Recipe by Nigel Slater. Makes 12 or 16 normal sized brownies, but we're not making normal sized brownies...

300g caster sugar
250g butter
250g chocolate
3 large eggs plus 1 extra egg yolk
60g flour
60g good quality cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder

1. You will need a baking tin, about 23cm x 23cm. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4. Line the bottom of the baking tin with baking parchment. Put the sugar and butter into the bowl of a food mixer and beat for several minutes till white and fluffy.

2. Meanwhile, break the chocolate into pieces, set 50g of it aside and melt the rest in a bowl suspended over, but not touching, a pan of simmering water. As soon as the chocolate has melted remove it from the heat. Chop the remaining 50g into gravel-sized pieces.

3. Break the eggs into a small bowl and beat them lightly with a fork. Sift together the flour, cocoa and baking powder and mix in a pinch of salt. With the food mixer running slowly, introduce the beaten egg a little at a time, speeding up in between additions. Remove the bowl from the mixer to the work surface, then mix in the melted and the chopped chocolate with a large metal spoon. Lastly, fold in the flour and cocoa, gently and firmly, without knocking any of the air out.

4. Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin, smooth the top and bake for 30 minutes. The top will have risen slightly and the cake will appear slightly softer in the middle than around the edges.Pierce the centre of the cake with a fork - it should come out sticky, but not with raw mixture attached to it. It will solidify a little on cooling, too.

5. After the icecream has been in the freezer for about 3 and a half hours, and is smooth and starting to freeze, divide the tin of brownies in half (you won't need it all. Go crazy with the rest of the brownies. You can make a lot of friends that way. Alternatively, you could double the icecream quanitites and make two litres, but whatever). Rather than cut your brownies into twelve or sixteen or whatever, cut them into small, bite-sized pieces, and drop them on top of the icecream. Don't stir them in just yet, because if they're gooey they'll just marble in too much and you'll end up with muddy icecream. Cover the tub again and put in the freezer for ten minutes or so, THEN stir it in. You might need to add the brownie bites in two batches, but if you're doing it you may as well do it properly and use loads.

Then you just have to leave it to freeze up properly (I went to a party, and returned late this morning feeling rather ill. I then ate lots of brownie icecream, and felt more ill, but rather smug and cheerful at the same time).

'This icecream makes you feel smug and cheerful' is not really the height of good food writing, but I'm sure you get the idea. Over-indulgence for the win XD.

For Manly Men

If I were a manly man/ If I were a manly maaaaaaann.../ I'd have --

Okay, this is what I like to call a family-friendly blog (I am quite obviously lying, as I don't recommend small children, pregnant women or the eldery be exposed to my terrible language. Next thing you know they're all on crazy rampages, and I don't want that to happen) so I'm not going to finish that particular song about manly men. Needless to say it goes on for several verses, and includes 'testosterone', 'a really really really really deep voice', 'chest hair', a liking of 'wrestling bears', 'really curly sideburns' and other such manly characteristics (my friends and I have a very accurate view of the world, along with our song-writing talents).

Anyway, it's common knowledge that one thing manly men DO do (when they're not wrestling bears or being unable to communicate emotions *sings* because I'm socially devoiiid!) is drink Guinness, the drink of Men. Men, and The Irish.

None of my friends are Irish Men (although some of them are one or the other - I'm thinking of the lovely Nirish here (the clue's in the name) or... Boy close enough) so since, at a strapping five foot two, I am the strongest and most manly of the group (sorry, Boy) I thought the time seemed right for a Guinness cake.

Technically it's a Guinness cake made with 'Irish Stout', but I am a Man, and to the Manly, that means Guinness.

I'm entering this in the St. Paddy's Day Pub Crawl event just because I can, even though I've seen several Guinness cake posts on other blogs, all far better than mine - but this is a Gary Rhodes recipe that I haven't seen on anyone else's blog, and it has a soft icing rather than a buttercream one. Actually I think the idea was to let the icing cool a bit and set over the top, ala a pint of Guinness, but I am Manly and Impatient, and couldn't be bothered waiting, basically. So it all ran over the sides and into the middle, because my cake sank. The bastard.

The icing is also oddly yellow, that's the other strange thing. It's mostly white chocolate, so I've no idea why this is. It was less yellow once it had set a bit (you can tell by the shine on the pictures that it hadn't set when I took them) but... hmm. Mysterious. Looks a bit like custard. I promise it isn't.

Guinness Cake (For Manly Men)
Recipe from Rhodes Around Britain by Gary Rhodes
Makes one 8-10" (20-25cm) cake (I used an 8.5" round tin)

225g butter
350g soft brown sugar
4 eggs, beaten
225g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsps bicarbonate of soda
400ml stout (Guinness)
100g cocoa

1. Oven to 180C. Grease/ line your tin.

2. Cream butter & brown sugar til pale. Gradually add the beaten eggs. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and bicarb, and in a separate separate bowl mix the stout and cocoa powder (whee, volcano!). Now add the flour and stout mixes alternatively to the butter and eggs until completely and evenly bound. The consistency will be quite soft. I don't recommend you lick out the cocoa/stout bowl because it tastes FOUL. Stick with me.

2. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in the oven for 1 hour - 1 hr-15 until done. (Mine didn't need more than an hour)You might need to cover it with foil after about fifty minutes or so to stop it browning too much, but with an almost-black cake it's hard to tell. Allow to cool before removing from the tin.

For the topping:

200g white chocolate
180g butter
1-2 measures whiskey

3. Melt the white chocolate and butter with the whiskey until just softened, then leave to cool. I mean it. Leave it to cool. Don't be like me. Spread it on top of the cake (clue: it should be spreadable). Unless you're feeling daring, you might also want to let the cake cool first, too.

Now cut yourself a manly hunk and toast St. Patrick!

Or at least walk around for twenty minutes or so going 'top o' the morning to ye, Moo! Oi be called Noirish, on account o' the fact tha' oi be Oirish! Oi drink Guinness by day, an' eat potatohs by noight!'.

Warning: Irish friends may not be as amused as you are.