When life gives you lemons, make cake.

Today wasn't the brightest day for my PhD. Nothing totally disastrous that will stop me from ever finishing but one of those days that means I left early and bought a bottle of wine from Waitrose and, of course, some eggs for baking!

I did have a massive craving for lemon polenta cake after a friend mentioned they were making something with polenta on facebook.  But I could not find polenta anywhere on my way home.  Sad times.  This made me want to open the wine whilst walking home, but it started to snow and I thought it might be a little impractical.  Don't want the snow to dilute the wine!

So with my lemons, I decided to bake lemon and almond cupcakes.  Kinda winged it again with the recipe.  The finished product was quite nice, very moist in the middle and super crumbly.  If I were to be eating gluten I think I might have put in a little flour to hold the bad boys together.  I topped them with some blueberry jam (which I made from some blueberries that were heading towards the bin with lemon juice and sugar) and rolled icing.  I had no inspiration for decorating them but then after I did a few random designs I realised that philosophically I had depicted how I feel about my PhD- lots of clocks denoting the running out of time!

Check out the recipe below:

Recipe
(makes 18 large cupcakes)
8oz butter (or dairy free sunflower spread)
8oz caster sugar
4 eggs
9.5oz ground almonds
1 tsp almond essence
2 lemons, both zest and juice
1/2 tsp baking powder
(if non-gluten free then add 1oz of flour)

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and place cupcake cases in the tin.  Cream together the sugar and butter, do this until very pale.  Add eggs whisking well (I almost always split my batter at this point so little bits at a time!).  Then fold in the almond along with the lemons, baking powder and the almond essence (this is when you can add the flour).  Fill the cupcake cases just over 2/3 full as it wont rise much.  Bake for about 18 mins but keep looking at them through the door as mine caught and browned quite well on the top.

Is it a slippery slope? No its a rocky road!

I have a new addiction.  Its gluten and dairy free rocky road.  And having sampled many a glutenous version, I have to say there is very little difference (yipee!)

But then this snowy Friday I can only say that my addiction took a turn for the worse.  I combined a flapjack base with a rocky road (- the biscuit) top. OH MY DAYS, that is definitely the way to get over snow day blues.

And as its one of mine, here is the recipe:

Recipe
Flapjack base
4oz Butter
4oz Dark Brown sugar
3 tbsp Golden Syrup
8oz Oats
Rocky Road topping
2oz Butter
5oz Dark Chocolate
2 tbsp Golden Syrup
2oz Mini Marshmallows
2oz Cherries (optional!)

Flapjack first.  Pre-heat the oven to 180C.  Grease a baking tray, mine is 20cm by 20cm and it gave me quite a shallow flapjack but that is fine as the topping helps add bulk later.  Melt the butter, golden syrup in a sauce pan over a medium heat.  Then add the oats and pour into the tin.  Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes and this should give you a sticky flapjack base.  Leave to cool for a while (15-30 mins) and then get on with the Rocky Road topping.

Melt the butter, golden syrup and chocolate in a pan over a medium heat.  Once melted remove from the heat and leave for a few minutes.  During this time, chop up your cherries.  Then add the marshmallows and cherries to the mixture.  Pour and spread over the top of the flapjack and pop in the fridge to set for a few hours.  Take out of the fridge, cut into squares and stuff your face!

Sadly, there are no photos as I was too busy eating them but here is one of some snow.

Beetroot...mmm

I'm a big fan of vegetables in cakes.  I love a good moist carrot cake and not just for the icing.  A muffin filled with spiced butternut squash is a wonderful with a cup of tea and a fairly recent discovery is has been courgette cake.  But my absolute favourite is chocolate and beetroot...mmmm!

After an unsuccessful and slightly disheartening day in the lab I decided there was no better way to make myself feel brighter than a some lovely chocolate and beetroot brownies.  So I ran off to the big Sainsbury's and picked up the last bunch of raw beetroot and rushed home.

Instead of following a recipe I decided to wing it and I think this had a mixed level of success.  I was aiming for a gluten and dairy free gooey delight, however it was a bit crumbly and sugary but I still enjoyed baking it.  I think next time I might need to add some xanthan gum, cook it for a few minutes less and use less sugar.  Here is the recipe anyway!

Recipe

9oz cooked beetroot (peel, chop, place in a bowl with some water and microwave for 10 minutes)
4.5oz chopped dark chocolate 
1 tsp vanilla essence
180ml sunflower oil
3 eggs
4oz light brown sugar
5oz golden caster sugar
3oz gluten free plain flour
2oz cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and grease a brownie tin.

Blitz the beetroot and chocolate together, as the beetroot is warm it will melt the chocolate and the kitchen will smell amazing.  Then add the oil and vanilla essence.

In a separate bowl whisk the eggs and sugar until it thickens and turns pale.  You should be able to move the whisk around the bowl and it will leave a trail. Then pour in the beetroot mix and fold in.  It looks a bit odd at this point but almost there.  Next sieve in the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder and fold together.

Once its completely mixed in, pour it into the tin and cook for 25-35 minutes.  Leave to cool and then cut, hopefully it will be less crumbly than this bad boy was!

I think I will take these in tomorrow and offer then to the analytical machine that isn't working as some sort of ritual peace offering.  Maybe it might start working, who knows!

Red Velvet Cupcakes

The 1st of January should be a time for lie ins, hangover, ridiculously grand and never obtainable resolutions and tidying up from the night before.  However, for one of my lovely friends its time to celebrate some more (hair of the dog all round) as its her BIRTHDAY.  And every birthday needs, not matter which day of the year it is on, a CAKE!  This is always my favourite excuse to bake.

So my wonderful friend is an adventurous old soul and this gives me license to go wild with the cake.  Last year I tried cake pops with a limited amount of success, although I did discover that if you add enough glitter to something it always looks beautiful.  This year I decided that I wanted to do something bold, something bright and something yummy and Red Velvet Cupcakes sprang to mind.  I have never made them before and always wanted to.  They are a pretty stunning cake especially when you use a cream cheese icing.  I used the Hummingbird cake days recipe for these cupcakes and they were really fun to make.

You add so much red colouring, I was quite surprised when I almost run out of food colouring.



And the finished product! Yummy yummy.

How to start the first blog post on a new blog?

With a little light comedy maybe?

Or a philosophical message?

Or maybe just an glimpse into what to expect from the rest of the blog?

After a brief flirtation with blogging last summer during my field work for my PhD I had this feeling I should start doing it again.  But the question of what I should blog about arose.  Should it be about the end of my PhD, my geeky love of real and made up science, my idolisation of Sean Bean or about my one true comfort in life- baking.  In short it will probably be about all of those things and more.  

As the title of the blog suggests, I am a stress baker.  Its an addiction and I just can't help it.  And at the moment, I am possibly doing the most stressful thing I will ever do....a PhD.  I'm sure when I become a grown up and get a job, potentially even have babies, those things will eclipse the stress I am feeling now. If that is the case, dear lord I will need one BIG oven and a lot of eggs!

At the moment I currently am not eating dairy (sadly I'm lactose intolerant, sometime I embrace the intolerance but this is not one of those times) nor gluten which means when I bake, I bake for the special people out there with various food issues.  When I blog about the baking, which might be most of the time, and not the science I will try and include the odd recipe.  This is more for my own reference as I look so much up online that it will be good to have it all in one place.

Also I apologise in advance for the poor wordmenship, I'm a baker not a writer!