Coconut, Apricot and Cranberry Cake

This was a small loaf cake, quickly put together from storecupboard ingredients. I used coconut oil, but a slightly larger quantity of butter could be used instead.

Ingredients
200g SR flour
40g desiccated coconut
100g caster sugar
100g coconut oil (or 115g butter, cut into small cubes)
1 large egg
60g dried cranberries
60g dried apricots, chopped into pieces of similar size to the cranberries
about 100mls semi-skimmed milk to mix

Method
Preheat the oven to 180C and line a small 1lb/450g) loaf tin.
Put the flour into a large bowl. Cut in the coconut oil with a table knife or a fork, until the coconut oil is in very small pieces and well mixed in (if using butter, rub in as if making pastry).
Add the desiccated coconut, sugar and dried fruit.
Mix in the egg and enough milk to make a fairly stiff batter.
Transfer the batter to the loaf tin, level the surface and sprinkle with a tablespoon of demerara sugar,
Bake for about 60 minutes, until golden and firm, and a test probe comes out dry.

Cranberries and apricots is one of my favourite combinations of dried fruit, and the coconut flavour in the cake worked well with this pairing. It's sheer bad luck that the slice of cake I took for the photograph shows such a weird uneven distribution of the two fruits at that point; it wasn't like that right through the cake!

Not so Magic Cake, and other bits and pieces!

There's nothing wrong with the 'tiffin' style dessert pictured at the top of this post. It was made to Delia Smith's recipe for Chocolate-crunch Torte with Pistachios and Sour Cherries, following the recipe exactly, apart from using dried cranberries instead of dried sour cherries.

It was made as an quick replacement for an attempt at a 'magic' cake which I somehow knew had failed before it was even out of the baking tin. Magic cakes are so called because one cake batter separates into three layers during cooking - a thin dense pastry-like layer at the bottom, a custardy layer in the middle and a light sponge on top.

I used the chocolate and hazelnut magic cake recipe featured in this recent newspaper article, and even though I can now see where I might have made a mistake (trying to incorporate the egg whites evenly into the batter, rather than leaving it in clumps) I don't think the finished cake would ever have looked as attractive as the photo in the article, or tasted good either. 100g of Nutella-type chocolate hazelnut spread is not enough to make a cake taste strongly of chocolate, nor give it a good deep colour. This is what mine looked like - you can just about see three layers, but it was a really unattractive shade of beige, the custard was dense and slimy and it didn't really taste of anything definite - certainly not hazelnuts or chocolate. After trying one mouthful, for research, it went into the food waste recycling - and, as I've often said, food has to be really awful for me to throw it away!

I didn't bake a cake last weekend; it was my husband's birthday, and he wanted a stollen, which I buy rather than make as my yeast doughs are very unpredictable. I made a very tasty seasonal fruit crumble though, using 3 eating apples, 100g fresh cranberries, the zest of a clementine and the clementine segments, cut in half, to make 4 portions of dessert. I also added a teaspoon of mixed spice to my usual crumble recipe of equal weights (75g) of butter, brown sugar, plain flour and rolled oats.

I also tried my hand at apple-chilli jelly recently, using the homegrown apples which were too small to peel and use in any other way. The beauty of apple jelly is that the fruit is just roughly chopped - peel, cores and pips included - before cooking with water and adding some vinegar. The cooked fruit is strained, then reboiled with sugar and sliced chillies, until the setting point is reached. I used this recipe from gardener Sarah Raven, using just the regular mixed red and green chillies sold as moderately hot in the supermarket.

After cooking the apples in water and straining the juice I had about 1.5 litres of liquid; I was a little worried, as despite my careful handling of the fruit, the liquid looked cloudy at this point. I needn't have worried though, as soon as it came to the boil with the added sugar it miraculously cleared - I just wish this had been mentioned in any of the recipes I read! I used a sugar thermometer, to be sure that the setting point had been reached. I didn't manage to distribute the chillies very evenly when potting the jelly - the jar in the photo got the most - and it looked as if all the chilli slices were going to float, until I remembered a tip I'd read somewhere about turning the sealed jars upside down for about 10 minutes, then back again, and repeating as the jelly cooled and set. This procedure eventually traps some of the chillies near the bottom, despite their inclination to float! I think the chilli slices are for decoration - there's certainly a lot of heat in the jelly alone, so even the jars without much visible chilli will taste the same.

Cranberry, Pecan and Orange Loaf

This was a strange recipe! The cake tasted good but managed to be both fragile and too dense at the same time; usually a dense cake holds together like a builder's brick, but every time I handled this cake I expected it to fall into a pile of crumbs. I found the recipe  here, on Sally's Baking Addiction, while looking for recipes using orange and frozen cranberries together. Although I wondered about the advisability of relying on just bicarbonate of soda to raise the mixture, the cake looked very attractive, and a streusel topping adds interest without having to add the optional glazing afterwards.

I followed the cake recipe exactly, but reduced the butter in the streusel topping to 30g and added 35g of finely chopped pecans too.

I had fun chopping frozen cranberries, but my mini-processor just about coped, although it shaved a lot of small flakes of fruit off too, which perhaps accounts for the much darker cake crumb in my loaf, compared to Sally's photos. The cake batter was very wet, and I expected to find that all the fruit and nut pieces had sunk, but they were fairly evenly distributed.

The flavour of this cake was OK, but nothing exceptional. None of the cake flavours really stood out, despite there being strongly flavoured ingredients there. The best part was the crunchy, nutty and spicy streusel topping, which was a good contrast to the rather bland cake. Overall, not a cake I'm likely to repeat.

Cranberry-Date Crumble Squares...

...with an unusual added ingredient!

The AlphaBakes challenge (rules here) is hosted jointly by Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline from Caroline Makes. This month the challenge is hosted by Ros, and the random letter generator has thrown up the letter L. That means baking something whose name begins with L, such as Linzertorte, or something containing a significant ingredient beginning with L.

In a bid to find something really different from the most obvious ingredients, such as lemon or lime, I came up with Lentils. At first I was going to make something savoury, but then I found this really awesome Canadian site which throws lentils into cookies, desserts, brownies and cakes with wild abandon. I was really spoilt for choice, but in the end chose these crumble topped squares filled with dates and cranberries.

I followed the recipe as written, but I rubbed the chilled butter into the flour and oat mixture rather than mixing it in with a fork (how would that work?). I used a 50:50 mixture of spelt and wholemeal flour, as I didn't have enough spelt flour on it's own. When it came to making the filling, the instructions weren't really clear, so I chopped the dates into pieces the size of the cranberries. I used a mixture of fresh juice (from one small orange) and water, and added the zest of the orange too.

These squares were outstandingly tasty! I think this was mainly due to the thick filling of dates and cranberries, which cooked together to make something really different from either on their own! It's a combination of fresh and dried fruit that I've never seen before, and wouldn't ever have thought of on my own, but I'm really glad I tried it. The base was quite soft, although the topping was crisp and crunchy, and you would never guess that lentils were involved in any way. Despite the amount of sugar used, in both the crumb and the filling, the squares did not seem over-sweet.

Adding lentils has all sorts of health benefits - lentils have a low GI value, contain protein and fibre and are rich in several minerals such as potassium and iron. When cooked they add moisture to baked goods in the same way as fruit or vegetable purées, which means you can often cut down on the butter in the recipe, as in this one. A comparable oat square recipe would perhaps use double the amount of butter.

In addition to the health benefits of lentils, there are other ingredients in these squares which have health benefits - oats contain fibre and may help reduce cholesterol; wholemeal flour has more fibre than white; dates contain fibre and minerals and have natural sweetness; cranberries are packed with antioxidants and sometimes called a superfood. The squares are high in sugar, which can be worrying, but most people are happy to eat some sugar as an occasional treat. The other lower GI ingredients here balance the effects of sugar and would help keep blood sugar levels steady.


I think these health benefits probably also qualify these cranberry-date crumble squares for this month's Tea Time Treats challenge, which is to make something healthy (or thrifty) for a lunchbox. I'd certainly appreciate the energy and nutrients packed into a piece of this, when balanced with a low carb salad, or something similar. Tea Time Treats (rules here) is hosted alternately by Karen from Lavender and Lovage, and Jane from The Hedge Combers, who is this month's host.