Tag Archives: cakes

Beginning to bake #7: Cupcakes (or fairy cakes)

Icing on top

To most people, cupcakes and muffins are pretty much the same thing. Certainly, if you buy them in supermarkets, both will be very sweet, quite dense, and come in individual paper cases. Cupcakes are likely to be differentiated by a swirl of thick icing or perhaps a glaze of shiny royal icing.

But in baking terms, the two are very different. Muffins have relatively little fat or sugar, and are combined very carefully. They produce moist, not-too-sweet buns, which often have fruit mixed through the centre. They rely on a big boost of baking powder or bicarbonate of soda to make them airy, and because they contain so much moisture (and water + flour = gluten), you have to mix them very gently so they won’t be tough.

Cupcakes, however, are just sponge cakes made in little cases. Think of fairy cakes or butterfly cakes you might have made at school. Although the recipe in this post is for cupcakes, you can also bake it in a larger cake tin to make a sponge cake. For that matter, almost any cake recipe in this format (where you cream the butter and sugar together first) can be converted to cupcakes by just baking it in paper cases (a useful thing to remember if you don’t have the right sized tin, or the mixture looks like it won’t fit – bake the excess as cupcakes). You just need to make sure you adjust the baking time (and in some cases, the temperature).

Structure of the batter

The structure of a cupcake is a foam, a web of flour starch and egg proteins, with many tiny bubbles. The big difference between making cupcakes and any of the previous recipes in this series is that incorporating the air is much more important. The batter you end up with is quite delicate, with just enough connection between the ingredients to hold the all-important air in there.

The starting point for incorporating air in this type of cake is creaming, mixing butter and sugar really thoroughly to create bubbles. Both of the biscuit recipes started by mixing together the butter and sugar, but this is not creaming. Creaming involves beating the butter and sugar together for a long time, to allow the sugar to create little bubbles in the butter – what Hannah Glasse in 1774 described as a ‘fine thick cream’. This is work that calls for electric assistance – Hannah Glasse suggested that using your hand, this should take an hour. Another 19th Century book suggests it is “the hardest part of cake making” and you should have your manservant do it.

In the absence of a man-servant, a handheld electric mixer or a stand mixer like a Kitchenaid makes this much, much easier. With a small quantity it can be done by hand, but expect a decent workout. You need the mixture to change colour – as the air is incorporated, the bubbles make the mixture look paler. The texture also becomes much fluffier.

Basic recipe:

(adapted from Nigella Lawson’s cupcakes in ‘How To Be A Domestic Goddess‘)

This recipe is for a plain sponge, more of an old-fashioned fairy cake than a fluffy American cupcake. However, if you master the techniques for this, then most other cupcake recipes will look familiar*.

  • 125g butter, room temperature
  • 125g caster sugar
  • 2 eggs, room temperature
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 125g plain flour
  • 1½ teaspoons baking powder
  • 2-3 tbsp milk

Diagram of recipe

To make sure everything mixes together easily, you need to make sure that everything is at room temperature, and that the butter is really soft but not melted. To warm eggs up, put them in a bowl with warm water for about 5 minutes. To warm butter, microwave on the lowest setting, or use a very, very low oven (60C or so.)

I’m also going to assume an electric mixer of some sort, although with enough elbow grease, you can do the same with a wooden spoon.

Start by beating the butter on its own to make sure it’s soft. Add the sugar and mix together, then beat really thoroughly until creamed – pale and fluffy. This should take at least 5 minutes with an electric mixer, probably longer.  It’s almost impossible to do this for too long.

Creaming-montage

Beat the eggs in a small jug or bowl. Add a little at a time to the butter and sugar, beating really thoroughly after each addition. Add the vanilla, or any other flavouring (such as lemon zest for lemon cupcakes). It’s at this point that the mixture can curdle, especially if things started out a bit cold – the mixture will look lumpy and a bit scrambled (see photo, ahem). If this happens, the answer is just to keep going – it might not be as light, but it will come back together when you add the flour, and the end result should be fine.

Curdled mixture with eggs

Sift in the flour and baking powder. Mix very gently, ideally by hand, just to combine and mix in any visible streaks of flour. A silicone spatula is good for this, as you can scrape the sides and right down to the bottom of the bowl.

With flour added

If the mixture is still quite stiff, you can add a little milk to loosen it up. The traditional description of this is ‘dropping consistency’, meaning if you scoop up a big spoonful and hold it upside down of the bowl, it will drop off. Mix the milk in very gently – remember that the liquid in the eggs, plus the milk will activate the gluten in the flour, and too much stretching at this stage will make the network of protein in the cake too tough.

Divide the batter between the muffin cases. Bake for 20 minutes at 190C/170Cfan until the tops are evenly golden and the centres spring back when you push them gently (meaning the centres are cooked through).

Into cake cases

Cool on a wire rack before icing. The simplest icing is to use icing sugar or royal icing sugar mixed with a very small amount of water or lemon juice and spread over the top.

Baked until golden

* There are some sponge or cake recipes that ask for you to mix the fat and the flour together first, waterproofing the flour as much as possible, and relying on the baking powder for the rise.

Variations:

The most obvious variations are flavour ones. The main thing is to use concentrated flavours so that you don’t add too much liquid or too much dry ingredients and change the balance of the mixture.

  • Replace some of the flour with 2 -3 tablespoons of cocoa to make chocolate cakes. Ice with chocolate ganache (an equal mixture of cream and chocolate, melted together).
  • Flavour the mixture with lemon zest (or Boyajian lemon oil) and use lemon juice to make the icing. Leave out the vanilla in this case.
  • Use instant coffee to make a coffee-flavoured sponge.

For further variations, see the next post on sponge cakes.

Lemon yoghurt cake

Last Sunday, the rain came down, there was nowhere in my house that wasn’t covered in dust, and I was hiding in the bedroom. Sometimes, the only way to get yourself out of this sort of slump is to bake. So I surfed around to find a regular, plain and everyday cake that I could make. The first place to look was Smitten Kitchen, a great resource for friendly home baking as well as weeknight dinners and birthday cakes.

One of the elegant things about this cake is that it requires no butter, only oil and yoghurt, so you don’t need softened butter on hand, or a mixer to put it together.

What I ended up with was a version of Smitten Kitchen’s lime yoghurt cake with blackberry sauce, which is itself a version of a traditional french yoghurt cake. Having zested part of a lemon earlier in the day, I decided to make this a lemon cake, using up the rest of the lemon zest and the juice.

  • 240g plain yoghurt
  • 80g sunflower oil
  • 230g caster sugar
  • zest and juice of one lemon
  • 2 eggs

–> whisked together

  • 190g plain flour (I used about 1/2 cup wholewheat self-raising)
  • 1 tsp baking powder (1.5 if flour is all plain)
  • 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/8 tsp salt

–> into a sieve above the wet ingredients, sifted in, and stirred together until just combined, just until the streaks of flour are gone and no more.

Pour half of the batter into a 22cm/9 inch springform tin. Put small dollops raspberry jam onto the batter – entirely optional, but really very good. The only disappointing thing is that the jam sank to the bottom of the cake. Cover with the other half of the batter.

Bake for 40 minutes at 160C until the top springs back, and it’s very slightly browned.

We Should Cocoa: Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

As a fan of Katie’s chocolates at Matcha Chocolat, and especially her masala chai caramels, I knew I should enter this month’s We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate challenge co-ordinated by Choclette. This month’s challenge was tea with chocolate, a great combination. Unfortunately, I was on holiday for most of this month (I was in Mexico – so not *that* unfortunate), so I needed something I could do at short notice to get in before the deadline.

I would have loved to spend some time on different tea infusions for this, but with limited time, and the need to do this after work, I needed something more straightforward. This tea loaf is a recipe I had bookmarked some time back when going through Paul A Young’s stunning book ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘. It sounded like a potentially overwhelming set of flavours, but also one that really appealed. The recipe calls for a huge amount of crystallised ginger, no fat and lots of ground cardamom. The tea is there to moisten the loaf, and also provide a malted, caramel background to these other flavours.

[Update: Choclette also made this recipe as part of the challenge – read about hers here.]

The recipe is unusual for a cake, as it includes just the tea-soaked fruit, sugar, eggs and flour – no butter or oil is used. However, this is the traditional tea loaf recipe. Tea loaves are an old traditional recipe, and can be called Tea Brack in Ireland, and similar to the Welsh Bara Brith. Irish Tea Brack recipes date from the 1800s, and would seem to be somewhat similar to soda bread, with the leavening from baking powder.

I made very few changes to the original recipe, even though the amount of ginger – 250g – seemed potentially overwhelming. Given the strong flavours, I wanted to try the recipe on its own terms before making changes. I baked this in two small loaf tins rather than one large one, so I could freeze one. I also swapped wholemeal self-raising for white self-raising, as that’s what I had in the cupboard, and I thought it would fit well with the rustic idea of a tea loaf. As this calls for Assam tea, which is a major component of English Breakfast blends, you could probably substitute with your everyday teabag. I used loose leaf Assam to make sure I got the strong and malted flavours Paul described.

I used two different brands of crystallised ginger, because I already had a packet open, and needed to get more to make up the large amount. Both come in large chunks, and I decided to slice the chunks into fairly thin pieces, so that the final cake wouldn’t be overwhelming with chewy lumps of ginger. The softer of the two was Humdinger Traditional Stem Ginger, that came with large sugar crystals on. The Waitrose Cooks Ingredients ginger comes in a cute plastic jar, and is firmer and drier, and cut into more even cubes. That made it easier to slice into pieces, so might be worth bearing in mind if you need to chop ginger finely for another recipe.

The smell of the ginger and raisins soaking was incredibly aromatic, with both the orange and cardamom coming through clearly. Even when baking, you could smell this amazing perfume, along with the chocolate. I was right about the flavours – it’s a really intensely flavoured cake, which sets your mouth buzzing with the ginger. Having said that, I think it works really well – the chocolate comes through, the orange holds its own with the ginger, and the cardamom is just about there in the background. My teaspoons of cardamom were a bit scant, so I probably could have used the full measure. It reminds me a lot of Divine’s orange and ginger dark chocolate – that also has quite a bit of crystallised ginger embedded in the chocolate. So I’d definitely recommend making this, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!

Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

barely adapted from Paul A Young’s ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘.

  • 250g crystallised stem ginger
  • 100g raisins
  • 75g light brown muscovado sugar
  • 2 tsp ground cardamom (about 1 tbsp green cardamom pods)
  • zest of 1 orange
  • 200ml strong assam tea
  • 1 large egg
  • 200ml wholemeal self-raising flour
  • 100g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Divine 70%)

Slice the ginger chunks into slices, and combine with the raisins and sugar in a heatproof bowl.

Warm the cardamom pods until fragrant in a dry pan, then cool. Pop the black and brown seeds out of the shells and grind into a powder in a pestle and mortar. (This step is optional – you can buy ready-ground cardamom, or grind the pods without toasting them, but this method will get you the most aromatic powder).

Brew 200ml strong assam tea (1tbsp of loose tea leaves, 200ml boiling water) for 4-5 minutes, and strain over the raisins and ginger. Cover and leave overnight or for about 8 hours. (I prepared the ingredients one evening, poured the tea over the following morning, then made the cake the second evening).

After soaking, the tea should almost all be absorbed, with some syrup where the sugar has dissolved. Don’t remove any liquid, but add 1 beaten egg directly to the fruit and mix in. Mix in the flour, then fold in the chocolate to combine. The texture is very similar to a traditional fruit cake at this stage, fairly stiff but still moist.

Put the mixture into two lined 1lb loaf tins (or one large loaf tin).

Bake for an hour at 160C. Check with a skewer that it is cooked through. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then remove and cool completely. Wrap in fresh paper and store in a tin for a day before cutting and eating, on its own or buttered slices.

Chocolate and Courgettes (Zucchini)

Chocolate courgette cupcake

Courgettes are innocent enough looking when they first arrive

IMG_1336 copy

– but soon they expand and take over your life like triffids. Beware the courgette.

Mini courgettes, waiting to strike

Mini courgettes, waiting to strike

Little did I know when I took delivery of my spiffing Rocket Garden of baby veg plants in April that it would be the courgettes that were the real trouble makers. They were so innocent, with just one or two oval leaves – looking no larger than any of the other plants, and much smaller than the strawberries, for instance. The directions recommended a distance of 45cm between plantings, which is more or less what they now have, but they now seem so large that they tower over the long since bolted lettuces and shriveled brown pea plants.

The full size courgette plant

The full size courgette plant, on Flickr

Courgette gluts are a gardening cliché, but with good reason – once they start producing, they don’t stop, and if you leave them for more than two days without checking, you will turn around to find a marrow has appeared.

So far the production has been a pleasant trickle – two or three courgettes every 4 or 5 days is very manageable, and can easily be converted into pasta – linguine, lemon juice, parmesan, oiive oil – or substitute for aubergine in a parmigiana.

However, we are now well into production on all four of my plants, so it’s more like 4 courgettes every other day. Serious help is clearly needed.

Courgettes

So when my mother-in-law asked me yesterday if I had any good courgette cake recipes, it occured to me that in fact I had the perfect one, but hadn’t tried it yet. I am referring, of course, to Chocolate and Zucchini cake from Clotilde’s Chocolate and Zucchini book (and from the blog of the same name).

Having once made a Jamie Oliver beetroot cake that was a disaster, I am wary of baked goods with vegetables in, but I have complete faith in Clotilde and I knew she would not lead me astray. And so it proved: as she notes in the book, if you didn’t tell anyone this had courgettes in, they would never tell. It’s just a really soft, moist chocolate cake, not too sweet. In fact, it could probably bear icing with something like buttercream and still be good. Even the olive oil I used in place of butter (as she suggests) is all but undetectable. So if you have courgette problems this summer, simply make endless batches of this and freeze where necessary.

Chocolate and Zucchini cake

Adapted, just barely, from Clotilde Dusoulier’s ‘Chocolate & Zucchini’

Ingredients

  • 240g plain flour
  • 60g cocoa
  • 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
  • 180g light brown sugar
  • 120ml extra virgin olive oil
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tsp instant coffee granules or instant espresso powder
  • 350g courgettes (zucchini), grated – about 2 medium courgettes
  • 150g chocolate chips or chunks

Method

Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan/350°F.

Put the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl and use a whisk to mix everything together thoroughly and distribute the baking powder and bicarbonate.

Flour and cocoa mixture

Put the olive oil and sugar into a mixer bowl or food processor and combine for 3 or 4 minutes until thoroughly mixed together. It won’t cream as butter and sugar would, and may form clumps – don’t worry. Add the eggs one at a time, and mix thoroughly after each one, until the mixture is smooth again.

Oil, sugar, eggs, vanilla mixed together

Add the vanilla and coffee granules or powder to the egg mixture.

Meanwhile grate the courgettes fairly finely – I used the grating disc on my food processor, but it wouldn’t take too long with a hand grater.

Grated courgette

Add just over half of the flour mixture to the eggs and very gently mix until the flour hasn’t quite disappeared.

Toss the remaining flour with the grated courgettes and chocolate chips to coat them.

Mixing in courgettes and chocolate chips

Add this on top of the rest of the batter, and fold together gently with a large spoon or spatula.

Pour into a greased or lined tin.

Chocolate and courgette cake, ready to bake

I used a 2lb (large) loaf tin and 6 muffin cases. Clotilde recommended a 25cm springform tin. You could also do them all as cupcakes, which I’m guessing would make around 18.

Bake at 180°C (160°C fan)/350°F for about 20 minutes for the cupcakes, and 45 minutes for the loaf cake.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes before removing from the tin. If you use a springform tin, unclip the outside at 10 minutes, but leave in the tin to cool completely.

The cupcakes are especially good when they’re still a little warm.

Chocolate and courgette goodness

Birthday cake

Chocolate - from iStockphoto

Chocolate - from iStockphoto

Birthday cakes need to be so many things: celebratory; they need to fulfill the wishes of the birthday boy or girl rather than the baker; and demonstrate an appropriate level of effort. It’s this last one that can give me trouble. While I love to make a cake, and will use any excuse to do so, it sometimes feels odd to create something really elaborate for a work colleague or boss. And besides, I don’t often have the time to go overboard. This is where the chocolate torte comes in.

Chocolate torte is one name for a soft chocolate cake made with ground almonds. Other names are Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba cake, or it can simply be referred to as a flourless chocolate cake.

To give some idea of the amount of variation possible, I compiled this table from books I own (oh stop: you didn’t already know I was a geek?):

Author Nigella Lawson Sybil Kapoor Gordon Ramsay Alice Medrich Elizabeth David Julia Child
Book How to Eat Taste Just Desserts Bittersweet French Provincial Cooking Mastering the Art of French Cookery
Recipe Torta alla Gianduja Catherine’s Chocolate Cake Dark and Delicious Torte Queen of Sheba Reine de Saba Reine de Saba
Butter 125g 60g 100g 140g 85g 110g
Chocolate 100g 1 cup 350g 170g 110g 110g
Eggs 6 3 4 4 3 3
Sugar 0 85g 200g 170g 85g 150g
Flour 0 2 tbsp 0 2 tbsp 0 50g
Ground nuts 100g 0 0 70g 85g 55g
Others 400g Nutella Water, brandy, coffee Brandy, almond essence Brandy, coffee Rum, coffee

As with so many of my chocolate experiments, it began with Alice Medrich’s ‘Bittersweet’. She devotes a chapter to a number of variations on this recipe, and reassures the reader that this is a recipe that will accommodate, even welcome changes. She provides us with that elusive license to create almost infinite experimental variations, and still produce an edible result. There can be few experienced home cooks who don’t read through a recipe and mentally edit it. However, we are often admonished that one really ought to follow a recipe to the letter the first time, so you can understand the starting point. While that remains good advice, the freedom to add your own stamp right away is a great inducement to try this recipe. So here at last is a recipe that you can rearrange and make your own, and still produce something that everyone will be happy to eat – and provides a suitable celebration cake at the same time.

Chocolate torte:

Prepare a 20cm/8 inch springform or loose-bottomed tin, by lining the base with baking parchment.

150g dark chocolate (I used 64% Valrhona Manjari)
150g butter

–> melt together, and stir until smooth

1 cup espresso (I used about 1/2 tbsp instant espresso powder in enough water to just dissolve it)

2 tbsp brandy

–> mix into melted chocolate, and set aside

100g ground almonds

45g flour

–> measure and mix together

4 large eggs

–> separate into yolks and whites. If you have a stand mixer, use that bowl for the whites.

110g sugar

–> combine with the yolks and beat until well blended (you can do this by hand, or briefly with a machine)

–> stir in the melted chocolate to combine.

–> separately, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks

50g sugar

–> whisk in 50g sugar to make a meringue, and continue whisking until you have stiff peaks.

–> Fold the whites into the chocolate mixture, by first adding one-quarter, and thoroughly beating it in, then folding in the remainder.

–> Bake for around 30 minutes at 190C/375F, or until a skewer inserted about 4cm from the edge comes out clean, but one inserted in the centre is still gooey.

Marbled Cupcakes

Marbled chocolate cupcakeHaving promised to make dessert for friends who were giving us lunch on Sunday, I found myself able to indulge in one my chief cooking pleasures: picking something to bake from my capacious cookbook collection. My first thoughts were for a strawberry tart, something that characterises early summer. But as the week wore on, and it got windier and wetter, I felt that something comforting and chocolately would fit the bill. I ended up with Alice Medrich’s ‘Bittersweet‘, which has chocolate recipes for every occasion you could think of. I was lucky enough to attend one of Alice’s classes in California; she combines a great depth of knowledge about chocolate with an infectious curiosity. This comes across in the recipes, which are suitable for the most elevated occasions, but also detailed and reliable: which is one reason why I felt comfortable breaking the rule that you should never try out a new recipe for the first time on guests.

Molten Raspberry-Chocolate Cupcakes with Marbled Glaze

adapted from ‘Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a life in chocolate’ by Alice Medrich

Note: I used the cup measures that Alice specifies in the book when I made them. I have given conversions to metric, but haven’t checked these, so be warned. I’ll test these out next time I make this recipe.

  • 1 cup plain flour (140g)
  • 1/2 cup cocoa powder (50g)
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup seedless raspberry puree (125ml) (1 punnet raspberries, pureed and sieved)
  • 3 tablespoons brandy or rum (I was stuck here, so used 1tbsp Grand Marnier, 1tbsp vodka and 1 tbsp water)
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 10 tablespoons butter (145g)
  • 1 and 1/3 cups caster sugar (300g)
  • 3 large eggs

For the chocolate glaze:

  • 6oz dark chocolate, 65-70% (170g)
  • 8 tbsp butter (115g)
  • 1 tbsp corn syrup (there’s not really a good substitute for this as far as I know – but some supermarkets stock it)

For the marbling:

  • 1 oz white chocolate (25g)

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Prepare a muffin tin with paper cases or grease the moulds. This makes about 18 muffins; I made 12 muffins and 2 little cakes in some 4″ pie dishes.

Thoroughly mix the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt in a bowl. Sift onto a sheet of greaseproof paper to help mix and get all the lumps out of the cocoa. This also gives extra lightness to the sponge.

Combine the raspberry puree, brandy and vanilla in a small bowl or jug. This will be quite liquid.

In a medium to large bowl, or the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter (*much* easier with electric assistance). Add the sugar gradually while you continue to beat the butter. Once all the sugar is in, continue to beat for 4 or 5 minutes – it should be really pale and fluffy. Don’t shortcut this part – it gets all the air in.

Break the eggs into a bowl or jug and whisk just to combine the yolks and whites. Add to the butter and sugar in a trickle, while continuing to beat. Adding it slowly prevents the mixture from curdling, but if it goes ahead and curdles anyway, don’t worry – it will mean slightly less air in the mixture, but it’ll still turn out OK.

Stop the mixer, and add one third of the flour mixture from the paper. Mix just to combine, then add half the raspberry mix and mix again. Alternate the flour and raspberry until everything’s combined. Be gentle, to keep all the air in that will help the mixture rise.

Scrape the batter into the pan or spoon into the muffin tins. Bake for 20 minutes, until the mixture pulls away from the side of the tin, and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool on a cake rack. (You can store the cakes in an air-tight container overnight at this point, or freeze).

While the cake cools, make the glaze: melt the chocolate, butter and corn syrup together over simmering water, or in the microwave, stirring until smooth. Melt the white chocolate at the same time in a separate bowl. Cool the glaze until it is thickened but still pourable, then dip the top of each muffin into the glaze. While the glaze is still wet, dip a teaspoon or skewer into the white chocolate and drizzle randomly onto the glaze. Use a skewer or toothpick to drag lines through the chocolate and create the marbled effect. I found it easiest to dip 3 muffins before decorating with the white chocolate. Leave the glaze to set.

Surprise cake


Surprise cake
Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

The picture looked quite appetising. You can see it too if you have a copy of ‘Jamie’s Kitchen’ by Jamie Oliver. Go ahead, take a look. “That looks good” I thought. “That looks moist, a little crumbly, a lovely teatime cake”. And I even had beetroot. the recipes most esoteric ingredient, lying around from my organic box a few weeks ago. So I set to work. Something should have tipped me off though. Maybe the use of olive oil instead of butter or another fat. Maybe the need for virtually a whole jar of honey to sweeten it, as there was no other sugar in the recipe. And maybe the colour of the batter after I had added the beetroot mash. It was purple – very purple indeed. But I persevered, popped it in the oven, and prepared to unveil it for pudding that evening when my parents were coming round to eat.

Everyone was suitably amused at the colour, and not a little apprehensive when they heard that this was a beetroot-based cake. But all bravely accepted and tasted a slice. I think it was my other half who first voiced his opinion. “This is terrible” he said. Unfortunately my mum and I were pretty much in agreement. There was no getting away from it – it tasted mostly of beetroot and little else. It wasn’t sweet enough to really be cake, with a harsh, bitter note which I put down to the beetroot combined with my use of Chestnut Honey. My Dad bravely finished his slice, but could not be prevailed on to accept seconds. And the conclusion? Beetroot and cake are not natural partners, so beware any recipe that calls for over 1lb of them. And Jamie Oliver must have been thinking of an entirely different recipe when he took that photo. Reassuringly, I have not been the only one to come to these conclusions – others have had a similar experience.