Snowball cake pops

As promised, here is the second part of my New Year's Eve recipe.

Over the past few years, I have been on a nostalgia trip during the Christmas period, by indulging myself with snowballs. I mean the drink not the real ones. It is a mixture of Advocaat, lime, lemonade and a cocktail cherry, and is like an alcoholic cream soda....delicious! So as a little treat I decided to make my favourite drink into a confection.

You will need the cake recipe from yesterday. Fortunately for today I have lost the rabbit!

Slice off any brown bits from the sheet cake. Crumble it into a bowl.

Pour in about three tablespoons of advocaat and squidge the mixture together with your fingers.

Measure out 30g of the mixture and roll into a ball between your hands. For some balls measure out 25g and flatten the ball, then place a cocktail cherry in the middle.

Then squidge (this is a very squidgy recipe!) the cake around the cherry and roll into a ball.

Take 400g of good quality dark chocolate and melt. Add a teaspoon of Trex. Dip the cake balls into the melted chocolate and swirl until covered.

Let the excess chocolate drip off and place the balls on baking paper to dry. I sprinkled these with gold lustre dust. 

Enjoy your New Year celebrations and I hope 2012 is happy and full of cake! 

xxx

Mystery cake recipe

Hello all, is your Christmas going well? Here at Amelie's House we have been having a super time. I have put on a stone, mostly in chocolate and paprika crisps! But the New Year is just around the corner with all it's resolutions and diets. Before we get there though I thought I would try and quickly whip up a recipe for a New Year's Eve treat. It's still a mystery what I am making so you have to trust me. This is the first stage, a simple sponge cake.

As it is the holidays, I have little people helping me, I don't normally put up photo's of them but this one insisted on joining in!

Here he is buttering the baking tray and adding 200g of sugar and butter into the bowl.

Then he kindly creamed the  butter and sugar together and added four large eggs.

Being careful of his paws he grated the zest of a lime into the mix and beat it all together.

He sifted 200g of self raising flour into the bowl and folded it in with a large spoon.

He got a little camera shy at this point, you can't see the photo, but he added three tablespoons of lemonade and mixed that in well. Then, regaining his composure, he poured the cake mix into a lined baking tray and cooked at 170C (with the fan), 200C without, for 25 mins. Then left the cake to cool on a cooling tray.

Of course you have to sample the cake to make sure the taste is good....and it was.

I shall be back soon with the second part of the recipe (hopefully I can loose the bunny!)

xxx

Book Club Cake of the Month...November

Due to an extreme workload, I had to miss two book clubs, and the last one I did attend, (True Grit) I never got round to writing up (an average of 8.5, I made cheesy corn balls), so apologies for the lack of book club cakes recently. Hopefully I can make it up to you with this post.

This month (well I mean November) we read "The Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys. As with many books we tend to read, it was the story of a woman's 'descent into madness' (say this in your head in a movie trailer voice).  It is written as a prequel to Jane Eyre, focusing on the mad woman in the attic, and turning Mr Rochester into a most dislikeable character (not that he is attractive to begin with).

I found reading the novel like reading someone's dream, which swiftly turns into a nightmare. We all enjoyed it and some even went on to re-read Jane Eyre, which I am tempted to do. We gave it an average of 8.5.

I made a Jamaican ginger cake, which went down a storm. I used the recipe I found here. I then made a syrup with 100ml of dark rum and 100g of sugar. I heated the two ingredients in a pan until the sugar dissolved, then cut up a pack of mixed tropical fruit, (pineapples, mango and passion fruit) and steeped the fruit in the syrup for a hour. Then before serving I tipped the boozey fruit and sauce over the cake. I also whipped some cream with sugar and rum, for some extra fun. It was delicious!

Hopefully I will be able to attend more book clubs in the New Year.

xxx

Previous book club cake of the month

July

June

April

March

February

November

October

September

Happy Christmas

I hope you have a lovely Christmas with lots of cakey goodness!

xxx