Apricot Mascarpone Tart

I think it’s time to face up to the fact that summer is ending. It probably already ended a while ago to be fair. Looking back at my blog posts for the summer months, it may not massively look like I’ve been embracing the bounty of fruit summer offers. The truth is like I’ve said before, my family generally just eats the fruit really simply rather than baking with it. There’s also things I never got round to photographing and blogging, such as my first attempt at jam making with Apricot and Almond Jam: one little tester jar that was delicious (if very sweet) and eaten quickly, like all the best things are. But as the nights get darker, the final raspberries on the garden cane ripen and my final (!) school year is well underway, I get a little nostalgic about the summer that has just passed. So to celebrate the end of Summer 2012, I made a sunshine filled Apricot and Mascarpone Tart. My Mum is not the biggest fan of rich cheesecake type things, so I was looking forward to being able to use mascarpone for once in this tart. As expected, it gave the tart an extra creaminess and richness, but you couldn’t really taste it in a sense that you would be able to identify what it was if you didn’t know. The combination of apricots and almonds is a classic and so was delicious, and I particularly liked the slightly tart roasted apricots offsetting the sweetness of the rest of the dish. The pastry was a method I hadn't seen before – creaming the butter and sugar together before beating in the flour – and I think this resulted in a slightly different texture to normal sweet shortcrust but it was equally as tasty! The recipe came from Lucas Hollweg's recipe section in the Sunday Times Style magazine a few weeks back, which is behind the paywall currently but visible at the weekends. Enjoy :) Apologies for the photo quality – dark rainy nights aren’t the easiest conditions, especially with a hungry family waiting!

Coffee Break Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for the people in my office on my last day of my internship at the start of August, as I had wanted to make something a little bit more special than muffins for my last bake. I had found these on the always perfect blog, raspberri cupcakes, a few weeks before and bookmarked them on the off chance I would find a situation where they would be suitable. With a few adaptations they became the perfect treat.Originally, I stayed pretty faithful to the recipe on raspberri cupcakes. I made both the condensed milk icing and the cookie dough…and used neither. The condensed milk icing was gorgeous, but insanely sweet. Properly sweet. I don’t normally find things too sweet, but even I could only manage a miniscule spoonful. It was probably as close to eating pure butter as you can get! It still tasted good, but I thought it would be pretty over powerful to pile it on top of a chocolate chip cupcake. Bearing this extreme sweetness in mind, I also chose not to stuff the middle with cookie dough and baked this into cookies another day instead. So in the end I had: coffee cupcakes with dark and milk chocolate chips, coffee buttercream, mini HobNobs and milk bottles. I couldn’t find mini chocolate chip cookies, and the HobNobs seemed appropriate after an embarrassing day at the office when the the rest of the team noticed how I ate a ridiculously large amount in one day… These are fun to personalise too: I swapped in cola bottle sweets on one cake for my boss with the Diet Coke habit, and added an extra shot of coffee to the cake of the boss who drank copious amounts of black coffee throughout the day. They went down a treat at the office – I hope you like them too :)

Chocolate Owl Cake

My Mum is really good at birthday cakes. When I was little I had an ice cream cake, treasure chest cake, my name written in Smarties, a teddy bear, a princess cake and more over the years. So for her birthday this year, it was time to return the favour! She requested this owl cake, purely for its cuteness, and my sister and I obliged.It took us a couple of read-through’s of the recipe to fully understand how the cake gets carved up into the adorable owl shape, and I may or may not have cut it wrong initially but that’s nothing a bit of chocolate buttercream gluing couldn’t save! It’s actually not too complicated to make, with a round sponge making the main body of the owl and then a square cake carved up for the rest.

It was really fun to do something different and it felt pretty indulgent – chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream, marzipan, white chocolate buttons, milk chocolate buttons, Cadbury Flake’s and chocolate fingers all together, but hey, when better to indulge then a birthday? Especially when the result is this adorable. I don’t have any pictures of the inside of the cake as it felt a little morbid and also we didn’t use the original recipe. The suggested cake was made with melted chocolate and we wanted it to be a little bit lighter so used the chocolate version of this. The cake was huge when finished, and lasted a good few days, but happily it stayed moist even after being cut into lots of pieces. The link for the original instructions (with helpful step by step photos of the cake carving) is here – enjoy!!

Rhubarb and Custard Tart

In American cooking, rhubarb and strawberries seem to be a majorly popular flavour combination. Here in England, its rhubarb and custard. Sharp bright pink rhubarb and creamy yellow custard – it’s definitely a strong rival to rhubarb and strawberry. Whether in two bold stripes in a hard boiled sweet, hot custard poured over a rhubarb crumble or both flavours combined together in a huge luxurious tart like today, it’s always a winner.I’ve been wanting to make  a rhubarb and custard tart for a while now and had several different recipes saved in my ever expanding Sweet To Make file. I was reminded of this idea when I came across an amazing looking Custard Tart in the fabulous book Street Food Revolution but decided to save that for a special occasion due to the 12 (!) egg yolks it requires. I eventually chose a John Torode recipe, because surely the co-juduge of Masterchef will have trustworthy recipes (and also something in me always trusts BBC Food recipes). It also was not extravagant with eggs, seemed simple and intrigued me as to how the 300ml of double cream would ever set into a firm filling.But I needn’t have worried, it all turned out ok. More than ok! This tart was so good. I seem to be loving the mix of tart and creamy flavours at the moment, first the pannacotta, then this combination of the rich custard and vanilla poached rhubarb that still has a hint of its sharpness. I know it’s a bit past the rhubarb season now as I made this a few weeks ago, but I didn’t want to let a whole year go by without posting this. You never know, some lucky people might still have some growing or have been clever and frozen some for the winter. If not, I’m sure the combination of raspberries or blackberries with custard would be just as delicious. Enjoy!

Raspberry Panna cotta

Note to self: don’t try and transport panna cottas. It proves rather stressful. I had to transport these, precious glasses and all, on a car journey to my Granny’s as I was providing the dessert at lunch. They were placed in a shoebox, wrapped in tissue paper, padded with tea towels and strapped in to the car with a seatbelt. Probably unsurprisingly, they and the precious glasses got there unharmed but perhaps next time I’ll stick to cake!I was inspired to make these after having these from M&S and loving the combination of rich creamy panna cotta and bright raspberries. I’ve made a vanilla pannacotta before, so I chose to combine the two layers of the supermarket version into one delicious raspberry panna cotta. I was nervous this would be too bouncy and jelly-like in texture because of the two sheets of gelatine, but I needn’t have worried as they set nicely but still stayed delightfully creamy and rich. The results were summery, absolutely chock full of raspberry flavour and a really pretty shade of pink. The recipe is from Nigel Slater’s fruit volume of Tender, but it can also be found here. You don’t taste the rosewater, it’s just there to stop the raspberries being too tart, although I suppose you could up the amount to make it a key flavour but I wanted to let the raspberries shine on their own. Enjoy!

Triple Chocolate Cookies

My friends always complain that I hardly ever bake for them. If they come round to my house they know I’ll definitely bake something for them, but I hardly ever take bakes into school. Even on birthdays it tends to be someone else who brings the cake in. I’m not sure why – I think it’s the pressure? And all the different tastes, likes and allergies to bear in mind! With my four week internship this summer, I wanted this to be different and so every Friday I’ve taken something in for the office. Blueberry and lemon cupcakes one week, nectarine and coconut muffins last week, and these triple chocolate cookies the week in between. There is definitely less pressure and fear that people won’t like something when it involves chocolate!The original recipe is from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet book, a fabulous book and one where my list of ‘To Make’ recipes is pretty much the whole book. I feel like I can trust Dan Lepard’s recipes too – I’ve made many of his ones from the Guardian and they’ve always gone down well. I did make a slight change to this recipe – just making half the chocolate chunks white chocolate rather than all dark as I simply love white chocolate and thought it made more interesting. And triple rather than double chocolate can never be a bad thing!I loved how these turned out – they were so perfectly round! They had those moreish crispy edges, a soft middle, plenty of cocoa flavour and a generous helping of chocolate. I overuse this word so much but seriously – these really are addictive. I may or may not have eaten one for breakfast. Or even more than one…Anyhow! The office liked them, I liked them, my family liked them. The only people still waiting are my friends! You can find pretty much the same recipe here – the only difference is the book had 300g of chocolate and I didn’t freeze them. Enjoy!