Spelt, Lemon and Maple Drizzle Cake

This is a recipe from January's Waitrose Food magazine, and can be found online here. There were so many things wrong with this cake that I almost didn't bother doing a post about it! However, it's flavour was wonderful, which almost made up for all the things which went wrong. I say 'almost' because, if  I can't work out what went wrong, I won't be making it again, as it was quite an expensive cake to make.

So, what went wrong?

• the cake took 10 minutes longer to cook than the longest time that the recipe suggested
• it didn't rise much
• although it eventually tested as properly cooked, the cake sank in the middle as it cooled; however the area immediately beneath the dip didn't really look under-baked, just a little moist from the drizzle used
• the texture was stodgy, rather than just moist, perhaps because the cake hadn't risen properly
• despite seeming stodgy, the cake was also quite fragile - slices crumbled easily when handled

I have to confess that I made one change to the recipe - I didn't have white spelt flour so used a 50:50 mix of wholemeal spelt and plain wheat flour. 

The cake ingredients were:

190g unsalted butter

190g white spelt flour

2 large eggs

2tsp baking powder

3 lemons - zest of all 3 and juice of 1

180ml maple syrup

After beating the butter until it is soft and creamy, all the other ingredients are beaten in until well blended. The batter is then transferred to a large (900g/2lb) loaf tin and the cake is baked for 35-40 minutes at 180C/Gas 4. (Or 50 minutes, in my case!)

When the cake is cooked, and while it is still hot, it is pricked with a skewer and drizzled with 70g of caster sugar mixed with the juice and zest of 1 lemon. The cake is then cooled completely in the tin. The magazine recipe also makes candied lemon slices to decorate the top, but I didn't get to that stage.

So, why did things go wrong? I'm not sure under-baking was a factor, as the central part of the cake, under the dip, didn't look or taste as if it wasn't cooked. I think what might have happened is that the acidity of the lemon and the maple syrup affected the efficiency of the baking powder, possibly causing the carbon dioxide to be released too quickly. This could perhaps be overcome by adding a little more alkali, in the form of baking soda, to balance the acidity. This theory seems to be borne out by the fact that three recipes I found online, all using a large amount of maple syrup, added half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda along with the baking powder.

I'm going to give this cake one more attempt, trying to get hold of white spelt flour and adding bicarbonate of soda, as the combination of lemon and maple syrup gave such a great flavour. If that doesn't solve the problems I'll have to give up - a cake using 180ml maple syrup is too expensive to keep experimenting with!

Carrot and Pineapple Cake

I decided to make this cake to finish off a tin of pineapple chunks, which had been opened to eke out the remains of a fresh fruit salad. I can't remember ever having made a carrot cake with added pineapple before, although I was aware of their existence, of course - I knew I hadn't invented something new! To be honest, until I started looking for recipes, I thought I would be making a Hummingbird Cake, but soon realised that was a banana cake with added pineapple!

I also quickly realised that many carrot cake recipes make huge cakes! Is this because they are traditionally used as celebration cakes in the USA? After a bit of searching I found this recipe from Anna Olson, the Canadian TV cook, which seemed to make a cake of a sensible size for two people. It caught my attention because it used maple syrup and fresh ginger in the cake - two flavours I like, but didn't expect to find in a carrot cake. It also used just the amount of pineapple that I had available!

It was a pretty straightforward cake, once I'd translated the ingredients to metric weights. After being drawn to the recipe for it's use of maple syrup, I found my tin was emptier than I thought - I could only get a couple of tablespoons out of it, so made up the volume with pomegranate molasses. Obviously, this had an effect on the final flavour, but as the recipe only needed 60mls of syrup in total, I don't think the maple syrup would have been the dominant flavour in the cake, anyway. The only other point to note was that the cake cooked in only 65 minutes, rather than the 75-90 minutes suggested in the recipe. I guess there's a lot of leeway with cakes containing ingredients which can be variable in moisture content, such as grated carrots and crushed pineapple.

For the sake of our waistlines, I left off the cream cheese frosting, and made a glacé icing using some of the juices from the canned pineapple. Which brings me to the current controversy about Tate and Lyle adding maize starch to icing sugar instead of the previous E-number anticaking agent. Like other users, I found it harder work than usual to get the icing sugar through a sieve, and initially it clumped badly when liquid was added although it did become smooth eventually. I can't understand why change was really needed - I've never had a pack of icing sugar 'clump' no matter how long it's been stored.

The cake sunk a little, as it cooled, leaving a lip around the edge, which contained the glacé icing, but could have been covered up if I'd used a cream cheese frosting.

This cake was more moist and denser than the carrot cake I usually make. This didn't make it better or worse, just different! What was a disappointment was how bland it was. Considering the ingredients, I expected it to have far more depth of flavour, but there wasn't enough of either the fresh ginger or the cinnamon, and the pineapple wasn't noticeable in the taste of the cake. I'm also used to carrot cakes with either sultanas or nuts in, to add to the texture, and this was an element sorely missing here - perhaps if I'd left the pineapple in larger pieces that might have been  an improvement in that respect. A touch of citrus to lift the flavour wouldn't have come amiss either - another ingredient often found in carrot cakes, obviously for good reason! It wasn't an unpleasant cake, just not memorable enough to add to the 'cook again' list!

Note: (added 31/08/15) Silver Spoon and Aldi own brand icing sugar don't have maize starch added, so  icing sugar that is easier to work with isn't going to be difficult to find. Tate and Lyle will be losing out bigtime, I suspect!

Butter Tart Squares

I decided that Butter Tarts would be my contribution to the next Formula 1 Foods challenge. Caroline, at Caroline Makes, has challenged participants to cook something inspired by the location of each race of the F1 Grand Prix season. This year, the Canadian race, held in Montreal, takes place on the first weekend in June.  Having spent a few days in Montreal, at the end of a tour of Nova Scotia and the Eastern Canadian coast, I know that maple syrup is used in many dishes in that region, both sweet and savoury. This is what made me decide on Butter Tarts rather than that other well known Canadian traybake, Nanaimo Bars, which have their origins in Western Canada.

Butter Tarts are traditionally filled with raisins and a butter/egg/corn syrup mixture which sets like a custard when baked, but there are lots of versions of the recipe around using nuts as well as raisins, adding chocolate or coconut, and using maple syrup instead of corn syrup. I was delighted to find, while researching recipes, that Canadian Butter Tarts could be made as a traybake; as one recipe said - all of the flavour with none of the fiddle! That sounded just the sort of recipe for me.

Once I'd decided to use maple syrup, and make a traybake version of butter tarts, it didn't take me long to come across Anna Olson's recipe for Maple Pecan Chocolate Squares. This was fortuitous, as Anna is a Canadian celebrity TV cook, perhaps best known for her baking recipes, so most appropriate for this challenge. I followed her recipe exactly, although I had to use walnuts instead of pecans (showing my support for the British drivers, is one way to look at it!).

I liked the deep filling on these squares, but I thought the base was a little too thin. In places the filling had seeped through the shortbread base, although that might have been because I didn't realise the significance of cooling the cooked base properly before pouring on the filling. If it had been really cold it might have resisted the liquid poured on top. However, if I were to make these again, I would make a thicker base - say half as much again of the shortbread mix. I would also like to try a version without chocolate - the walnuts stood out as a dominant ingredient but the chocolate overwhelmed the flavour of the maple syrup.


These squares need refrigerating, but are best allowed to warm up at room temperature for 20 minutes or so before you eat them, to get the best flavour. More than that and they become too soft and difficult to handle - something else that might be remedied with a thicker base.

Maple Syrup Gingerbread

Although this is one of the low-saturated fat recipes I tweaked into something good a couple of years ago, when CT was at home and needed a low fat diet, I've carried on using it as it produces a light, but moist and sticky, gingerbread. The surface of the cake goes on getting stickier with time, as should all good gingerbreads!

This time, I didn't have the golden syrup I expected to find in the store cupboard, so I used maple syrup instead. This is a cake strongly flavoured with ginger, cloves and black treacle, so I think the maple syrup was somewhat overwhelmed, but it did mean I could get on and make the cake I'd planned - comfort eating for cold weather!

The recipe can be found on this post, and it's simply a matter of mixing the syrups and the flour mixture into the beaten egg, sugar and oil, in alternate portions. I've never had it fail before! This time, however it ended up with a huge dip in the centre. Strangely, even with the dip, the texture seemed uniform throughout the cake, so I'm not sure what happened to produce it. It certainly wasn't undercooking, but may have been over mixing or mis-measuring the raising agent.

Date, Maple and Pecan Loaf

I've talked before about the difficulty of finding recipes which use enough maple syrup to justify putting the ingredient name into the title, especially if you're looking for a plain, everyday kind of cake. There are plenty of gateau-type cakes, with maple flavoured frosting, and plenty of cakes which use only a tablespoon of maple syrup, yet still thinks this is enough to add a maple flavour. It isn't, believe me!

Eventually, I found a suitable looking recipe for a Pecan Maple Loaf, and adapted it a little to make this Date, Maple and Pecan Loaf. I did a very rough conversion of the ingredients to metric weights, then rounded up to produce a recipe which looked right to my experienced eyes. I also added 100g of roughly chopped dried dates.

Ingredients
200g SR flour
180g softened butter or baking spread (see note)
100g caster sugar
3 large eggs
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
75mls maple syrup
100g roughly chopped dried dates
50g roughly chopped pecan nuts

Note - I used non-dairy spread, suitable for baking, as I had a tub to use up. I also left the tablespoon of milk out of the recipe to make this suitable for a dairy-free diet - the batter was very loose, so I couldn't see the point of adding the milk. Interestingly, I watched a TV programme (The Icing on the Cake - Nigel Slater) earlier this week, where the food scientist Peter Barham explained that baking spreads often make better risen cakes than butter because the water content is higher than that of butter. This turns to steam during baking and helps give a bigger rise to the cake, as it is trapped within the setting batter.

Method
Prepare a 2lb loaf tin. (I lined the base and long sides of a non-stick tin with baking parchment). Pre-heat the oven to 160C.
Rub the fat into the flour and stir in the sugar.
Whisk together the eggs, maple syrup and lemon zest. Stir the wet ingredients into the flour mix, but do not over-mix.
Fold in the dates and pecans.
Transfer the batter to the prepared tin and bake for 70 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean. Cover with foil if the cake seems to be browning too quickly (mine needed covering after 45 minutes).
Cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack.

The optional frosting would probably have been very nice, but I didn't want to add extra sugar to an everyday cake, and it was fine without!

This was a delicious and light-textured cake, although the raw batter was very wet, and I worried needlessly that the dates and nuts would sink during baking. The maple syrup and lemon together gave a lovely flavour and was a good background flavour to the dates and pecans. The crumb texture wasn't super-fine, but I think that came from the rubbing-in method, which left little lumps of fat in the batter. A creaming method might have given a tighter texture.

Apple, Pear and Maple Crumble

Producing a fruit crumble is nothing to boast about, but I just wanted to keep a note of the flavour combination, as it worked so well. 

I  briefly sizzled the chopped fruit, a mixture of three apples and three small conference pears (still very hard), in 30g of butter. When the fruit showed signs of softening I added a heaped tablespoon of cornflour and 3 tablespoons of maple syrup. I left the fruit to cool while I made the crumble.

I reduced the sugar in the crumble, and added two tablespoons of maple syrup after rubbing in the butter; this made the crumble a little lumpy, but that's a good thing - several recipes I've seen lately advocate adding a little liquid to improve the texture! The crumble recipe was 100g plain flour, 70g light muscovado sugar, 100g rolled oats, 100g butter, 50g chopped walnuts, 2 tablespoons maple syrup. Sprinkle the crumble over the fruit and bake for about 40 minutes at 180C, until golden and the fruit juices are bubbling.

I was aiming for a maple toffee flavour to the crumble and think it worked quite well. Using pecan nuts would have been better than walnuts, but I didn't have any.

Maple, Hazelnut and Lemon Loaf

Now that we've booked another holiday to Canada, I'm no longer reluctant to finish the stock of maple syrup I have in the fridge. Next time I think I'll splash out on a better quality syrup, as the brand I'm using doesn't have a strong enough flavour to compete with other ingredients. It's hard to tell what it added to this maple, hazelnut and lemon loaf, apart from sweetness. I'm sure a cake made with just sugar would taste different, but it was hard to detect the actual maple syrup flavour. Not to worry - it was still a very tasty cake.

I adapted a recipe from Chocolate and Baking, a small book by Flame Tree publishing which I picked up in a charity shop. The book is divided incongruously into two sections, one on general baking and one on all aspects of baking and dessert making with chocolate. I can't help feeling two separate books would have been better, as I hardly ever pick up the book to look at the general baking section because the title suggests it's all chocolate recipes. This time I was working my way through my baking books, looking for something "different" and this book was near the top of the stack.

The original recipe used pecans, which are often used together with maple syrup, but my nut-avoiding FB is only happy with hazelnuts and almonds, so I made a substitution. The recipe is simple to make, but the proportion of flour to other ingredients gives a dense, rather dry loaf, which might be better served as a tea-loaf (sliced and buttered) rather than iced as a cake. The cake was supposed to cook in 60 minutes, but I found it took nearer to 90 minutes, which might just have been because of the shape of my particular loaf tin, which makes a short, deep loaf.

I found several similar recipes online, using American cup measurements, which used 1 1/2 cups of flour (which would only be around 210g), so I wonder if this recipe has been mistranslated from an American recipe. If so, it makes me doubt all the other recipes in the book.

Ingredients
350g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
175g butter, cubed
75g sugar
125g pecan nuts, roughly chopped (I used 100g blanched hazelnuts)
3 medium eggs
1 tablespoon milk
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
5 tablespoons maple syrup.

For the icing - 75g icing sugar mixed to a smooth thick icing with lemon juice
25g chopped nuts (optional)

Method
Preheat oven to 170C and prepare a large (2lb/900g) loaf tin.
Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl and rub in the butter, stir in the sugar and nuts.
Beat the eggs with the milk and lemon zest and stir in the maple syrup.
Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.
Spoon into the loaf tin, level the top and bake for 60 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean (my cake took almost 90 minutes).
Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then move to a wire rack to complete cooling.
Drizzle over the lemon icing and sprinkle with nuts, if using.

Date and Maple Brownies

I don't really subscribe to the school of thought that refers to baked goods made without cane or beet sugar as 'sugar-free'. To me there are usually just as many calories in what are sometimes referred to as 'natural' sweeteners -  honey, maple syrup, fruit molasses etc - and they are really just other forms of sugar. There are too many chemicals in the old fashioned sugar substitutes to want to use them to replace sugar(sucrose) regularly. Newer sugar substitutes such as agave and stevia may be lower in calories, but they are expensive to use. In addition to all this, the health benefits of changing to sucrose substitutes aren't really proven!

Dried fruit, however, does reduce calories, increase fibre content and go a long way towards sweetening things such as bread, cakes and baked desserts if used to replace some of the sugar. It was with this in mind that I decided to combine two of this month's challenges. The We Should Cocoa challenge is to bake something free of beet or cane sugar, and the AlphaBakes challenge is to bake something either containing a main ingredient beginning with the letter D, or with a name containing a word beginning with the same letter. In this instance, D is for Dates, of course. I'll suspend my scepticism about sugar-free baking for the duration!

I looked at many recipes for brownies containing dates before deciding on this recipe from Australian chef Bill Granger. It had lots of good reviews and didn't contain a huge amount of sugar, so I didn't expect substituting what sugar was there to have a huge effect on the recipe. It also used cocoa, so I didn't have to adjust the sweetness of a recipe using chocolate containing sugar, to allow for using 100% cocoa solids chocolate instead.

I wondered about using pomegranate molasses instead of the 90g of sugar in the recipe, but thought the sour flavour notes might be too overwhelming in something with reduced sweetness, so I went with maple syrup instead. I did a straight swap - take out 90g sugar, add 90g maple syrup - but was prepared to add more flour if it looked necessary.  I changed the method slightly, by adding the liquid sweetener to the dates and melted butter, to give the dates a chance to absorb some of the liquid. The raw batter looked fine after mixing so I went ahead with baking it - it took a few minute longer to bake but turned out well.

These were light, cakey brownies, rather than the dense fudgy sort made with a high sugar content, but they were still quite moist and very tasty.  The flavour of the maple syrup wasn't strong, but that might have just been a characteristic of my maple syrup; having tasted them now, I think it would be worth trying pomegranate molasses another time, for a stronger flavour. I deliberately chopped the dates very finely in a food processor, as I didn't want to see too many lumps of fruit in the brownie. Dates have quite a neutral flavour when used in baked goods this way - even people who don't like eating the fruit on it's own usually like things such as sticky toffee pudding made with dates. I think they'd like these brownies too!

The We Should Cocoa challenge (rules here) is hosted this month by Choclette, of Chocolate Log Blog, who shares her hosting duties with Chele from Chocolate Teapot, and various guest  hosts. The AlphaBakes challenge is hosted alternately by Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline from Caroline Makes..., and the rules can be found here.

Parsnip and Maple Syrup Cake

This recipe was a the winner of a Good Food competition to create a birthday cake for the magazine's 20th birthday in 2009. I've been wanting to bake this cake since then, but haven't had the coincidence of both maple syrup and parsnips available at the same time, until this weekend. It's true, I could have made the effort to get the ingredients together, but it's only been a passing thought whenever I notice the cake in a recipe search.

As this month's Tea Time Treat's challenge was to celebrate it's first birthday by baking a cake, this recipe seemed quite appropriate, as it was created with celebration in mind.

I didn't want a layer cake, though, and also didn't want a fresh cheese frosting, so I baked the cake as a traybake, in a 20 x 30 cm (8 x 12") tin, and topped with a light buttercream recipe. The only change I made to the recipe was to use 50g chopped toasted hazelnuts instead of pecans, to suit my daughter's dislike of some nuts. Because the tin size I chose made a deeper cake than if it was baked in two sandwich tins, it took a little longer to bake - about 40 minutes in total. My buttercream recipe was based on that in the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, which uses only 80g butter to 250g icing sugar. I added two tablespoons of maple syrup and a teaspoon of vanilla extract as a flavouring, and then sprinkled the frosted cake with maple sugar crystals.

This cake was very moist and quite dense (but not in a bad way!). I'm glad I baked it as a traybake, as I'm not sure that I would have liked it as a layer cake - I think it was a bit too moist for that. FB reckoned she could taste the parsnips, but I'm not so sure - to me, the grated parsnip and apple added moisture and texture rather than specific flavour. Even the maple syrup wasn't a strong flavour in the cake, although I could taste it in the buttercream. In the cake, the parsnip, apple, mixed spice, maple syrup and orange seemed to blend into a unique flavour, rather than any one of them being separately identifiable. The unique flavour was a very good one, however!

 

Tea Time Treats is a monthly baking event co-hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Kate at What Kate Baked. Each month the challenge is to produce something which celebrates the (almost) lost ritual of the tea-time; this month the host is Karen, who has chosen cake in celebration of a whole year of baking for Tea Time Treats! She will be publishing a round-up at the end of the month.

Pumpkin, Chocolate and Maple Loaf

I say this every year, but I'm still going to repeat myself - I love the flavours of Autumn and the heavier, more comforting style of  baking more than any other time of year. Fresh autumn produce is still in abundance, and can be used to great effect with spices, citrus fruit and chocolate for a while longer, until winter brings reliance on stored and preserved fruit and nuts.

The use of fresh autumn produce was the thought behind the choice of pumpkin for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, and I could have bought a pumpkin and made my own pumpkin purée, but for baking I find the tins of purée much more reliable. For those less averse to risk, Hungryhinny, this month's We Should Cocoa host, explains how to make pumpkin purée and pumpkin pie spice mix, in this post.

Last year, I remember trying to find a recipe using both pumpkin and maple syrup, which is another of my favourite autumn flavours, and not being successful, but I had more luck this year and, after adding chocolate into the search, eventually settled on this recipe for a non-yeast bread containing all three. After seeing the outcome, I decided to drop the word 'bread' from the title as the loaf was nothing like bread in texture.

I followed the batter recipe closely but substituted 2 teaspoons of cinnamon for the pumkin pie spice, as I've come to realise that it is only that particular combination of spices which makes me dislike pumpkin pie so much! I may have added more chocolate too, as I used a 100g bar of plain 74% chocolate, and I think half a cup of chocolate chips would be around 80g - but you can't have too much chocolate really, can you?

When it came to icing the loaf, I made a maple glacé icing, with icing sugar, two teaspoons of lemon juice, two tablepoons of maple syrup and water to mix to a thick pouring consistency. After drizzling the cake with this I sprinkled over some maple sugar crystals - a foodie souvenir of our Canadian holiday a few years ago. I took a photo quickly at this stage, in case the crystals dissolved into the icing, but fortunately they didn't, so the photographs after cutting the cake still show the topping. Phew!

The flavour of this cake was terrific, but the texture wasn't the best. It was slightly too moist - the photos of the cut cake show a dense layer at the bottom which doesn't look properly baked, even though a tester came out clean at the end of the baking time. Fortunately this moistness didn't make the cake too dense and chewy - it was lighter than it looks! I think this might have been better baked as muffins, as suggested in the recipe, or even as a more shallow traybake cut into fingers. I'm not sure that the oats added anything to the flavour or the texture - they stayed as small chewy pieces in the crumb. I wonder if the recipe originally had nuts in it, and someone substituted the oats - I certainly think chopped pecans or walnuts would have been nicer.

We Should Cocoa is a monthly baking challenge set up by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog and Chele at Chocolate Teapot. The idea is to make a chocolate product containing that month's chosen ingredient or cooking method. This month, the guest host, hungryhinny, has chosen 'pumpkin', and will be publishing a round up of entries at the end of the month.

Buttermilk Maple Spice Cake

So, I found a recipe to use up most of the buttermilk I bought, just to use 2 tablespoons in the previous batch of brownies. This Buttermilk Maple Spice Cake also used oil, so fitted into my current baking criteria.

There's not a lot to say about this cake. The recipe was simple - mix the wet ingredients in one bowl, the dry ingredients in another and combine the two. I used spelt flour instead of wholemeal, and black treacle instead of molasses. The only other thing to mention is that it cooked a little faster than suggested in the recipe, but I did have the fan on, as I was baking something else at the same time.

The combination of spices used gave a very good flavour and the texture was pleasingly light and fluffy too. My only criticisms are that it was not quite sweet enough, and that the spices hid the flavour of the maple syrup. It might be better made with a sweeter syrup such as honey or golden syrup. Like a traditional gingerbread, it seems to be getting stickier with age.

Overall it was a pleasant, but not memorable cake - I will probably only come back to it if I can't find anything better in the 'spicy' category of low saturated fat cakes.

Maple, Pecan and Cranberry Cookies

Happy Thankgiving to anyone celebrating this holiday. These cookies have what I consider to be some of this season's flavours from the USA - maple, pecan nuts and dried cranberries, so could be considered my virtual contribution to the feasting.

This is another version of the cookie from this Dan Lepard recipe. I used 100g of each of chopped pecans and dried cranberries, and left out the chocolate altogether. For the maple flavouring I replaced 60g of the sugar with the same amount of dried maple syrup flakes which I brought back from my holiday in Canada, and I used two teaspoons of maple syrup instead of almond essence.

Changing the sugar seemed to alter the texture a bit, or perhaps it was removing the chocolate, because these cookies didn't spread much and reamained almost exactly the shape which I put into the oven. If I'd known that I would have flattened them a bit more before baking. Being thicker, they took about 5 minutes longer to cook through. Although they were too thick, they were well flavoured, but a little dry without the chocolate melting in the mouth. Perhaps a change, or two, too far!

Maple and Pecan Squares

I've said before that Autumnal cooking, with its use of spices, nuts and seasonal fruit such as apples and pears, suits our tastes better than the more delicate flavours of Spring and Summer. This cake is a case in point, even though I'm borrowing flavours from another part of the world, and I'm not sure maple syrup is even Autumnal - don't they harvest as the sap rises? Anyway, it's something that I probably wouldn't think of making in the Spring.

The original recipe for these packed the cake batter with cocoa nibs and butterscotch chips, and called the result Maple Blondies. I replaced these additions with a smaller amount of chopped pecan nuts and am going to call the result a cake, because it was far too light  to fit in with my ideas of what a Blondie should be! The  simple flavours of pecans, maple syrup and vanilla made this cake delicious and somehow pure, for not having a range of competing flavours jostling together.

Ingredients

200g plain flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

180g salted butter - softened

150g light muscovado sugar

125mls maple syrup

2 large eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

150g chopped pecan nuts - a mix of fine and coarse pieces

maple flakes - optional

Method
Preheat the oven to 175C and line a 9" square tin with baking parchment.
Whisk the baking powder into the flour.
Cream the butter and muscovado sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in the maple syrup and vanilla extract.
Beat in the eggs, one at a time, with a tablespoon of the flour.
Fold in the rest of the flour and the chopped nuts. Transfer the batter into the prepared tin and level the surface.
Sprinkle the surface with a thick layer of maple flakes. (Most of these dissolved during cooking to give a crisp sugary topping to the cake.)
Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a test probe comes out with a few moist crumbs still clinging.
Cool in the tin for 30 minutes, then cut into squares and leave to cool completely.

Maple Syrup Gingerbread

As I brought two tins of maple syrup back from Canada, bought for a fraction of the cost of maple syrup in the supermarkets in the UK, it seemed an ideal opportunity to find a recipe which used maple syrup in large quantities. I finally settled on this Maple Syrup Gingerbread recipe, although I made a few adjustments to fit in with the ingredients I had available - butter instead of shortening, and Greek yogurt instead of sour cream. I also left out the candied peel altogether.

My usual gingerbread recipe is dark, dense and moist - the sort that keeps well and gets stickier with time. This cake is lighter in both colour and texture, but moist and fragrant with a variety of spices. I'm not sure the maple syrup makes much of an impact on the flavour, as there are so many spices, but as it's not as thick and sticky as golden syrup or treacle(molasses), I'm sure it contributes towards the lighter texture.

Unfortunately a large part of the cake was stuck in my ring tin after I turned it out. You can see in the photo that the back of the cake looks a bit lumpy and misshapen, where I tried to reassemble the pieces. Next time, and there will be a next time while I still have the Canadian maple syrup to use up, I will bake it in a square tin lined with parchment.

Apart from that it was a simple recipe to follow - beat eggs until light and fluffy, beat in sugar and wet ingredients, then beat in the flour sifted with the spices and raising agents.

I topped the cake with a simple glacé icing made from roughly 150g icing sugar mixed with alternating dessertspoons of maple syrup and water until the correct thickness was achieved.

Here are the ingredients converted to metric weights and measures:

2 eggs

250mls maple syrup

100g light muscovado sugar

250g natural Greek yogurt

115 melted butter

280g plain flour

1 teaspoon each of baking powder and bicarbonate of soda

1 tablespoon ground ginger

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

goodly amount of freshly ground nutmeg (approx 1/2 teaspoon).

The cake had a really good moist, light texture and was strongly spiced. I found the amount of ground cloves used overwhelmed the other spices a little, so will cut that by half next time. This makes a really good alternative to the traditional dark sticky gingerbread.

Blackberry, Apple and Maple Loaf

The first wild blackberries are just appearing locally. They are small, as it has been dry this year, but my favourite patch is giving sweet fruit, as usual. It will be a week or so before picking huge quantities will be possible, but I picked enough for this cake, with some left over for a crumble.

The recipe is adapted from this Good Food recipe; I made some changes so that I could use some of the maple syrup and sugar I brought recently. I left out the cinnamon and orange zest, as I thought they would overwhelm the maple flavour, then reduced the amount of butter and sugar in the recipe so that I could add some maple syrup without making the batter too wet. I also used maple sugar in the topping instead of demerara sugar. The original recipe gets good reviews so would be worth following if you don't have maple products.

Ingredients

250g SR flour
150g butter
150g light muscavado sugar
3 tablespoons maple sugar
1 small apple (I used a Braeburn)
2 eggs
4 tablespoons maple syrup
1 teaspoon baking powder
225g blackberrries

Method
Pre-heat oven to 180C, and line a large loaf tin with baking paper, or prepare as usual. (I used a 2lb loaf tin which was just big enough, then noticed that a larger tin was specified in the recipe!)
Rub the butter into the flour and sugar until it resembles bread crumbs. Remove 5 level tablespoons of this mixture into a small bowl and mix in the maple sugar. Set aside for topping.
Grate the unpeeled apple into a small bowl (not using the core), then add the eggs and maple syrup and beat lightly to break up the eggs.
Mix the baking powder into the flour mix, then mix in the egg mixture with a metal spoon until just amalgamated - do not overmix. Gently fold in 3/4 of the blackberries then transfer to the baking tin. Scatter the rest of the blackberries on top, then sprinkle over the crumb topping as evenly as possible.
Bake for 75-80 minutes or until a probe test shows it is done. It may be necessary to cover the loaf to prevent over-browning. Cool in the tin for 30 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling.

The maple syrup and sugar added an extra subtle flavour, and also gave the cake a darker colour. The apple wasn't very evident in the flavour - perhaps adding a chopped apple too would improve this - but undoubtedly helped to give a moist texture. The texture is quite dense, but I feel this is necessary to support the fruit. As the cake is moist, the denseness is not a negative point. This recipe could easily be adapted for other fruit and flavour combinations.

Triumph from Disaster? The Tale of a Pecan Clumpy Cake

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same.......

.......Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

This part of 'If' by Rudyard Kipling often sums up my attitude to baking. It's a fine line between triumph and disaster, and it's not always obvious which way things are going.

Today's cake started off as a bid to use up half a tin of condensed milk lingering in the fridge. I'd seen recipes for condensed milk pound cake on other blogs; they seem to be an Asian speciality. The recipe on Engineer Baker, originally from Pichet Ong’s “The Sweet Spot” seemed a good place to start, although I knew I didn't have enough condensed milk. What I did have though, was Dulce de Leche, which isn't a world away from plain condensed milk - it seemed feasible to make up the weight necessary for the recipe with that.

Next, I wanted to add some flavour - a streusel layer flavoured with pecan nuts and maple syrup soon emerged as a front runner. I chose the maple streusel recipe from these muffins, although I didn't have maple extract. I used brown sugar and added 50g of finely chopped pecan nuts.

I followed the recipe instructions exactly, even though it's counter-intuitive to mix flour into the creamed mixture before the eggs. I assume this helps give the moist, close texture that everyone is so pleased with. I had 180g of condensed milk, so added roughly 60g of Dulce de Leche to make up the weight needed. However, trouble struck as I layered the batter into the loaf tin with the streusel mixture. It should have been obvious after the first half of the cake batter went in, that the tin wasn't going to be big enough, but for some reason I blithely carried on - half the streusel mix, the rest of the cake batter then ........ the tin was full with only a couple of centimetes for expansion, and the top layer of streusel not even all on! Idiot! The worst thing possible for a layered cake. Could I take the risk that the cake wasn't going to rise much? No!

I quickly lined an 8" square tin with baking parchment and lifted the raw cake mix from the loaf tin by grasping the baking parchment liner. I plopped it down into the bigger tin with no batter lost, but it was obvious as I spread the batter that the middle streusel layer was going to be disarranged at best. With no choice left, I scattered on the rest of the top streusel layer and put the cake into the oven.

Watching the cake bake, it was obvious what the next disaster was going to be - the streusel topping was slowly sinking out of sight. At the end of the cooking time, there were only a few indentations in the surface to show where some of the streusel was still near the surface!

When the cake was cold, I cut it into 16 squares. Most of the edge squares looked like this photo, with the clumps of streusel mostly on the bottom but some distributed throughout the cake. In the four centre squares all the streusel had sunk completely.

Fortunately I could still appreciate the fine texture that a condensed milk pound cake has. As others have described, it is firm, moist and close textured without being too dense. It is also not exceptionally sweet, considering the ingredients. I don't think using a little Dulce de Leche affected the flavour much - I certainly couldn't taste any caramel.

In my cake, the little pockets of pecan, maple and cinnamon flavoured crumbs added another dimension to the tasting experience. A subtle variation of texture and flavour which worked really well - although perhaps not as well as a proper streusel topping would have! It only remained to give it a name - the only way to describe the results was to call it a 'clumpy' cake. I probably can't call the results a triumph, but it wasn't a disaster either!

I am now determined to try the condensed milk pound cake as in the original recipe, and not to be so over-confident about altering recipes (for a while).

Maple Syrup and Pecan Cake

I've spent several hours looking for an interesting cake using maple syrup and pecan nuts, over the last few days. Most seem to rely mainly on their visual appeal - multiple layers of light sponge sandwiched with fluffy billowing frosting; I wasn't convinced there would be much flavour in them, and as a family we're not keen on these types of cakes anyway. Some recipes only used a few tablespoons of maple syrup in the cake batter, others used a whole 350ml bottle, which seemed a bit excessive, not to say confusing. How could I decide what would make a well flavoured cake with so much variation? I even looked for recipes using honey, thinking I could substitute maple syrup for the honey, but still couldn't find anything that appealed.

Lateral thinking was required. Who publishes interesting and unusual recipes? Blindingly obvious answer, of course, at least to British bakers - Dan Lepard! A search of his weekly Guardian recipes came up with this Honey and Walnut Cake - it was a simple step to substitute maple syrup and pecan nuts, and I also added half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. I wanted a round cake, so used a 19cm diameter springform tin, base lined with baking parchment.

The recipe was simple to follow, albeit a little unorthodox in the method and order of combining the ingredients. My cake, in it's round tin, cooked in the time suggested in the recipe. The result, although not a pretty cake, was a triumph of subtle flavours - apart from the pecan nuts, it wasn't easy to identify any of the other flavours, but they combined to make a delicious cake with a sturdy moist, but not too dense, texture. The addition of coffee cut the expected sweetness of the cake, as Dan explained in his notes about the cake.




If I'd had more syrup available I might have added a maple glacé icing, with a few chopped pecans scattered over, but I had to empty the bottle (and use a tablespoon of honey) to get enough for the cake. Note to self for next time, I think!

So once again, I have Dan Lepard to thank for the inspiration for a really tasty cake - I guess I should try the original version with honey and walnuts sometime, as I'm usually pretty scathing about people who write that they tried a particular recipe, but added this ingredient and changed that ingredient - especially if they are complaining that it didn't work, or they didn't like it! I think it's a mark of respect to the work that recipe creators do, to try the recipe, as it is written, at least once - sorry Dan!