Cake Club success!

The first meeting of the Market Deeping Cake Club was a resounding success!

There were 7 members altogether, and hopefully more will join as the group gains momentum. To put it simply, we baked cakes, took cakes to the pub, ate cakes, talked about cakes, and took cakes home. The perfect sort of club...

Rhubarb & lemon curd cake

The first meeting's theme was 'Step into Spring'. There was lemon drizzle cake, spiced apple & raisin cake with a pastry base, vanilla sponge with chocolate buttercream, blueberry and lemon bundt cake, chocolate cake, and orange cake... Oh, and my rhubarb and lemon curd cake. All delicious! We sampled each cake in turn, just a small piece of each (so that we didn't all roll out of the pub and gain a stone in weight during that hour and a half...)

It was great to meet some really different people, a mix of ages, backgrounds, and interests, but to all have this one yummy thing in common. There was a variety of cake textures, flavours, and styles, and it was inspiring to hear how other people baked, the problems they come up against, and the ideas and advice they had about new approaches and problematic areas I talked about.

Me & my cake

I felt confident to talk about something I was passionate about, even though I didn't know these people... Never having been part of a group or club before, I was incredibly nervous beforehand. Nervous about the cake, nervous about my 'performance', worried about what people would think of me. But in the end, everyone was so friendly and approachable, and accepted me as a fellow baker - just as I accepted them in the same way. It was refreshing, to say the least, and I felt happy to share my enjoyment of something as simple as cake.

But cake isn't always just 'simple' - neither in terms of the science behind the bake, nor the emotional attachment I and other people have with baking. For me, baking calms me, gives me a sense of purpose, gives me something to learn and create, and a product to be proud of.

My rhubarb & lemon curd cake went down well. I was more worried about this one cake than any other (except, perhaps, the Christening cake for my godson, George). It was different to what I normally bake, as I haven't often cooked using fruit. Such a wet and unpredictable fruit as rhubarb certainly created a nervousness and critical element in my mind. But it was moist and fluffy, with a delicate but definite flavour, although not quite enough of the tang of rhubarb as I'd like. It seemed to go down well, although I think the whipped double cream and lemon curd topping was everyone's favourite part of the cake.

The Cake Club spread

So here's to the next Cake Club - it'll be held once a month, and the next theme is 'chocolate'. Perfect! 

If you want to join a Cake Club, check out the Clandestine Cake Club website and see whether there's a local club you could become a member of.

Get ready for cake club

Tomorrow I will be attending the first meeting of my local Clandestine Cake Club - a new phenomenon gripping the cake-baking nation. Find out more about CCC here.

Sneak peak of my CCC cake...

I don't yet know how many cake makers will be joining me at the secret location to eat, talk about, and show off cakes, but however many people turn up, I'm looking forward to meeting new people and hopefully making some new cake-loving friends.

Requirements of the club include baking a cake that can be cut into 8 - 12 slices, bringing a cake stand or similar recepticle for showing off said cake, and then eating other people's cakes. Now that sounds like my sort of club.

The club has featured on BBC1's 'The One Show' and soon will be featured in 'Women's Own' magazine, and the idea has really captured the imagination of bakers across the country. A fun and informal way to meet like-minded people just to enjoy each others' creations and talk about why we love to bake. For me, baking is a way to relax, learn new techniques, hone skills, and enjoy lovely cakes. I've found baking to be a way to escape from the stresses of everyday life, to help me overcome impending bouts of depression that haunt me some days, and a way to feel fulfilled that as yet a career has yet to do. Seeing the faces of your friends and family as they devour some tasty creation that you made fills the heart with happiness. I can say, "I made that, I did that, I'm good at something". It's also great to test my perfectionist nature, as inevitably things will go wrong in the kitchen, the cookies will only taste good if you dunk them in tea otherwise you risk a trip to the dentist, or the cake sags and is a bit claggy, or perhaps the cheesecake doesn't quite set and slides off the plate. But, who cares? I'm not a professional baker or chef, and everyone still loves the tasty things even if in my eyes they've gone hoo-har.

I will be taking to the meeting a rhubarb & lemon cake, topped with whipped cream and lemon curd. I'm more nervous about this cake than any other I've made, but hopefully it'll taste yummy and I won't get thrown out of the club on its first outing. It smells nice, I know that much. I won't share all the pics or the recipe yet, as it should stay a secret until after the club meeting...

Time for picnics

With Spring officially sprung, and some lovely warm weather over the last few days, I've been desperate to jolly off for a good ol' picnic. We had planned one for Mother's Day - we were going to visit Sandringham and have a great treat of cakes, sarnies, and strawberries under the watchful eye of the Queen (if she'd been there...). But the weather that weekend was dull and grey, so picnic was postponed.

Hopefully the ongoing project of the other half's VW Golf cabriolet will be completed this summer (it's been going on for about 4 years now!). As soon as the car is ready, we are off to the coast with picnic basket in hand, I'll make lots of goodies, we'll put the top down on the car and zoom! Off we'll go! That's the plan anyway.

In readiness for soft-top car completion, I've been looking for a fancy picnic basket to make the scene complete - we've decided we'll wait until the car's ready before treating ourselves to a really lovely one. I've found the most wonderful picnic basket company, Life's a Picnic, and their beautiful baskets are definitely on top of my 'wanted' list now.

The willow baskets are all unique and really sum-up the brilliance of a British summer. Handmade and vintage, I'm really covetting one of the baskets, although I don't know whether I'd prefer a teatime theme, or maybe one complete with Champagne flutes, for those extra special picnics...

They're not cheap, but then you really do get what you pay for in this life, and I think these look like they'd last a lifetime. I saw one in a local shop recently, and it was about a quarter of the price - but it was so badly designed that when the lid closed, it hit the glasses inside (I know this, because I closed the lid, and I heard glass smash...and quickly exited the shop).

They also do lovely cake stands. I have about 4 cake stands already, but you can never have too many - I certainly bake enough cakes to fill them all.

So, if anyone wants to treat me to a summer present, maybe if you missed my birthday in January, you know what to do....!

The bells of St Clements

For Mother's Day, I baked St Clements muffins - orange and lemon, with a lemony buttercream on top. They were meant to just be dusted with icing sugar to finish, but who can resist buttercream.

The muffin base was quite simple:

100g caster sugar
1 egg (although I only had 2 small bantam eggs to hand)
100ml milk
50g melted and cooled butter
1 tsp baking powder
175g self-raising flour

Cream together the sugar and egg, mix in the flour and baking powder gently, and add the melted butter, followed by the milk. The mixture looked a bit of a mess at this point - but I had faith. To the mixture, I added the grated rind of one lemon and one orange, plus a few chunks of orange, chopped up into small chunks.

Bake at 180 degrees (fan oven) for about 25 minutes.

Once cooled, I creamed together butter and icing sugar, with a splash of milk, together with more lemon rind, orange rind, and a splash each of lemon and orange juice. I like to make the buttercream quite tart, so I add more lemon than orange.

The muffins are light and fluffy, but still with that chunkiness of a muffin, with added luxury of the buttercream. Happy Mother's Day!

I have to add, those paper cases were a sod. They'd expanded in the drawer, so I had to re-fold every single one of the creases on every single blummin case.... it took forever. I won't be buying that brand of paper case again!

Not cakes, currently

I haven't made any cakes for a while. In an attempt to eat more healthily than of recent times I thought giving up the cake making would be an easy way to be healthier. But don't I miss the fun of baking!

I did make some rather brilliant fish cakes the other day though.

(It's not a great photo - I'm getting used to my new iPhone)

2 white fish fillets (I used basa fish)
1 mackerel fillet
2 potatoes, boiled and mashed with a little butter
1 tsp capers
Zest 1/2 lemon
1/2 chilli, chopped
Breadcrumbs (plus flour and egg) to coat

I've found that mackerel really helps fish cakes not to end up bland and tasteless; I don't think salmon works too well. 

Other things that are making me happy, in the absence of cake, are:

Snow.