Tasty Friday!

Yes, I know it's not Thursday, but I couldn't wait until next week to share this recipe with you. I'm not sure what the weather is like where you are, but it's really sunny here, and this is the perfect recipe for this sort of weather!

Strawberry Shortcake (from Sorted Recipes - also has a video tutorial on making it!)

You will need:

• 225g unsalted butter
  
• 100g caster sugar
• drop of vanilla essence
  
• 225g self-raising flour or 225g plain flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt
• 150g white chocolate (chocolate chips are easiest)
• 300ml double or whipping cream
• 2/3 large punnet of strawberries
  
• spoonful of icing sugar to serve

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 150oC
2. Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla essence in a bowl until smooth, light and fluffy
   
3. Sieve in the flour and stir it in to form a dough
4. Chop up the chocolate (if using a bar of chocolate) and mix it into the dough
5. Push the dough into a round cake tin so it's around 2cm thick
6. Bake for 20-25 mins depending on your oven until cooked through. It shouldn't be too dark-coloured and will look quite soft, but will harden up as it cools.
7. Leave it in the tin to cool and harden up a bit before you try getting it out of the tin (we were a bit impatient, so ours broke a little down the centre!)
8. Whip the cream (either by hand or with an electric whisk) until it forms stiff peaks and spread in over the cooled shortcake base
9. Slice the strawberries and place on top of the cream
10. Dust with icing sugar
    

We had a bit of a disaster getting ours into the fridge at uni, and unfortunately it crumbled into a big mess! It still tastes amazing though and is a really great way to enjoy the summer strawberries!

Before it broke!

Tasty Thursdays

This week's recipe should be a blast from the past for a lot of you - Crispy Cakes!

I made these on Monday after my exam as I needed a chocolate fix! Apologies for the lack of photos, my iPhone battery is playing up, so it was in my room charging.

It's a bit of an unusual recipe (I found it online when I was looking for measurements) as it uses syrup. I've never used syrup in crispy cakes before, just chocolate, but I'd definitely recommend it, it makes them more chewy and gooey than without. This is just the recipe I used, you can variate from it quite a lot - try Mars Bars or marshmallows melted in with the chocolate if you fancy something a bit different!

Crispy Cakes (makes 10-12, depending on case size)

You will need:

• 90g rice krispies
• 60g butter, cubed
• 3 tablespoons maple/golden syrup (golden is more subtle and less strong, but I only had maple!)
• 100g chocolate
• Cake/muffin cases

Instructions:

1.  Melt the chocolate, either in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water, or in short bursts in the microwave.
2. Mix the butter into the melted chocolate (you shouldn't need to heat it any more to melt it, the residual heat from the chocolate should be enough).
3. Add the syrup.
4. Spoon into cake cases and leave to set in the fridge. 

Tasty Thursdays

Yes, it's Thursday again, so time for another recipe for you to try. After last week's fiddly recipe, I'm going to share with you something that's really quick and easy for those times which you want cake and you want it NOW!

Five minute chocolate mug cake

You will need:

• 1 mug
• 4 tablespoons plain flour
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons cocoa (don't use hot chocolate powder like I did, it doesn't taste great!)
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons milk
• 3 tablespoons oil
• Optional extras: chocolate chips, peanut butter, jam, nutella etc
• Optional: cream to serve

Instructions

1. Mix dry ingredients together with a fork.
2. Add the egg, and mix well.
3. Add the milk and oil, and mix well.
4. Add in any optional extras.
5. Microwave on 1000 watts for three minutes. The cake will rise over the top of the mug, so don't be alarmed!
6. Leave to cool for 2 minutes.
7. Add cream if desired. Enjoy!

Tasty Thursdays

I've decided to christen Thursdays Tasty Thursdays in order to share some of my favourite recipes and treats. For my first Tasty Thursday, I'm going to share something I made last summer at uni with one of my volunteers.

Cake pops (from Bakerella)

As you can see from the website linked above, you can get really creative with your cake pops, depending on your skill and patience. For our first attempt though, we decided to keep it simple!

The finished product

You will need:

• Sponge cake (we used ready-made plain sponge cake from the supermarket, but you could make your own in whatever flavour you fancy)
• Buttercream icing (Again, we were lazy and used ready-made plain buttercream icing/frosting, but like before you can make your own in whatever flavour you like)
•  Decorations: chocolate, icing pens etc
• Kebab sticks/lollipop sticks
• Something you can use to stand the sticks in (we found a chunk of polystyrene which worked quite well)

Instructions: 

1. Chop up the sponge cake into chunks and combine it with the buttercream icing - you're aiming for a mouldable consistency which isn't too wet.

Me chopping the cake (with ridiculously frizzy hair, sorry!)

2. Mould into balls and spear on a stick, using a touch of melted chocolate (whatever type you're using to coat the entire pop). We used the non-pointy end of the kebab stick so we could use the pointy end to stand them in the polystyrene.

3. Chill. We were impatient so shoved them in the freezer for 20 minutes or so, and they seemed to be okay.

4. Decorate. We melted some white chocolate in a shallow bowl to coat them and then drizzled some milk chocolate on some for a marbled effect. We also used icing pens to decorate. The weight of the chocolate is sometimes an issue at this point, so keep your fingers crossed they stay on the sticks, as we had a few casualties!

Starting to decorate

Happy cake pop!

Cake pop casualty :(

Punk!

Happy baking!