Category: Recipes

Jemma over at Celery and Cupcakes has organised an amazing baking competition. You have to create a recipe that uses margarine, but make it a healthier recipe. I got my thinking hat on and decided that one of my favourite recipes is my cherry, almond and marzipan cake.

To make it a little healthier I made a few changes: I used coconut sugar instead of regular sugar. I increased the ground almonds and decreased the flour, and added in another egg (this helps the ground almonds to bind). I also reduced the amount of marzipan used, and used natural dried cherries instead of glacé cherries. I am really pleased with how it turned out and actually prefer it to the original!

Most of my ingredients:

Ingredients:

175g margarine (I used Pure spread)

175g coconut sugar

4 free range eggs

200g ground almonds

50g plain flour

2 heaped tsp baking powder

1 tsp almond extract

90g dried cherries

Optional: 20g marzipan

Flaked almonds, to sprinkle

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C and line a brownie pan with baking paper. Cream together the margarine and coconut sugar. Add the eggs and almond extract and beat well. Add in the ground almonds, flour and baking powder, and mix gently to combine. Finally add in the dried cherries.

Pour the mixture into the pan. At this point if you are using marzipan, tear it into little pieces and dot over the top. Feel free to omit this. Then sprinkle with the flaked almonds.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until golden brown and a skewer comes out clean (be sure not to test by a piece of marzipan as this will be liquid at oven temperature).

Leave to cool in the pan on a cooling rack before dusting with icing sugar.

The coconut sugar means that the cake does go a little darker than when using normal caster sugar.

Leave to cool before slicing. The ground almonds means that it may stick a bit more to the baking paper, so be gentle!

This cake has a gorgeous light texture, and a delicious almond flavour. Of course the “normal” dried cherries don’t stand out as much as the fake red glacé ones, but they still add a lovely burst of sweetness.

What cake would you like to be healthier?

But first up, the winner of the Cake book give-away is…. (chosen by putting names into a pot and taking one out at random);

Lara! Email me your address and I shall send it off.

To the recipe:

Recently I saw this fan competition on The Pink Whisk (link at the bottom) for an Easter recipe so had to get my thinking hat on!

I have a few ideas for other recipes, but here is my first one:

Not cross buns

I wanted to make something to use up chocolate, but that was less time consuming than normal hot cross buns. I also love marzipan, and fruit cake, so I fancied something with a similar flavour to Simnel cake.

The centre is based on these gorgeous dark chocolate cherry energy bites from Oh She Glows. They are then dipped in chocolate, and finally the cross is made with marzipan (if you don’t like marzipan or have a lot of white chocolate left over then you could replace this with white chocolate).

Centre:

(for approx. 24 balls)

1 cup raw almonds

3/4 cup dates

1/2 cup dried cherries (Sainsbury’s are gorgeous, but Urban fruit ones are also good)

1/2 tsp cinnamon (to get that spiced bun vibe going)

Water (if needed)

Line a baking tray with baking paper. Blend the nuts in a food processor until they look like gritty sand.

Then add the dried fruits and cinnamon until a sticky paste forms. If your dates are quite dry (mine were) then add a tablespoon of water and process again- you want the mixture to begin to stick together in the food processor.

Form into balls and leave on the baking tray.

Coating:

Easter egg chocolate- 100g approx

Marzipan- 20g approx (or use melted white chocolate instead)

Melt the chocolate- I do this in a microwave by putting it in a heat proof bowl and heating it for 20 seconds at a time. Roll out the marzipan into thin sausage shapes and cut into short pieces.

Dip the balls in the chocolate and put back on the tray. Then carefully place little pieces of marzipan over to create a cross shape.

Leave to harden on the tray and then enjoy.

I love how they look!

A little easier to make than normal hot cross buns.

How do you like to use up Easter egg chocolate? I always loved making cornflake cakes.

I am going to enter these into the Pink Whisk Easter Baking competition: run in conjunction with Two Little Fleas. (I have tried to include the badge but the code won’t work).

www.gamevillage.com could occupy your time while you wait for the chocolate to cool!

*Contains a sponsored link.

I could not decide what to make for Sunday tea this week, and when I walked into Waitrose I saw a recipe card for Coconut and Lemon cupcakes. I was sold!

The only extra bits I had to get was some coconut cream and cream cheese (why they make the recipe cards I guess…). The recipe for the cupcakes is the same as this recipe, minus the desiccated coconut, but the filling is different.

Well, it was meant to make 12, but I got 24 out of the recipe.

My kitchen is not built for making cakes on this scale!

Once cool I did the filling/ topping. Not sure it went quite as it was supposed to- you were meant to slice the cakes in half vertically and spoon in the lemon curd, but I had to squeeze the cakes to fit the curd in.

Then on went the cream cheese icing (100g cream cheese, the rest of the coconut cream, and a few tbs icing sugar). I swirled it about a bit to mix it with the lemon curd.

I took them into work on Monday and they were all gone by lunchtime- a good sign!

Luckily I saved one to try!

It was lovely. I have had lime and coconut cake before, but never thought about lemon with coconut, even though they are pretty similar. One I shall definitely make again, or perhaps as one large cake next time.

You all know by now that I am a sucker for lemon cake. It is my favourite and I would always choose it over anything else in a tea room. I was watching Mary Berry last week and she made a lemon cake which just looked amazing. The recipe is here if you fancy trying it out.

These lemons have been boiled for 30 mins. While that was going on I sliced off the skin of the third lemon and sliced it finely ready for the decoration.

The cake batter nearly filled the biggest bowl of my food processor! Shows that the cake was going to be mammoth! You save some of the lemon pulp for the filling (that is the pale stuff in the bowl). I used the quick tip of putting the zest in the oven.

The lemony smell was just so lovely and fresh too. Now the challenge after this was to cut the cakes in half. Not something I am good at- I can’t even slice evenly!

Then I made the cheesecake filling- marscapone, butter, icing sugar and the rest of the lemon pulp. This smelled amazing.

The slicing was not too even, which meant I had to stack them carefully to avoid a Pisa-esque cake.

Then I made the final part (this was truly a long project)- lemon and icing sugar to drizzle over- it was meant to drip down the sides a bit but I ended up with a cascade.

We took it around to Andy’s parents for Sunday tea- there were 6 of us but there was loads left- this was a mammoth cake!

If I made this again I would not slice the cakes in half, and just have 2 layers. I think I would also just have the cheesecake filling and use some as a topping instead of having the extra lemon icing on the top. The lemon taste was so strong, which I loved, so it would be something I would try again at some point.

Do you like kitchen projects like this? I love them once in a while- it is great to keep revisiting something and try a new recipe for a change.