Spiced bundt cake

'Tis the season for gingerbread! There's something about falling snow and cold nights that call for spicy sweets on the table. If rolling and pressing out cookies is too much work for you, why not try this fragrant cake instead?

This cake is heavy and dense, and very reminiscent of gingerbread, with a slight smokiness and heat from the Chinese five spice powder and the crystallized ginger. This thing has serious bite. I mean, how often do you bake a cake that calls for a hefty dose of black pepper?

So, let's get started, shall we?

First I tackled the ginger. I buy it at the Mid East Food Shop, where you can get all sorts of dried fruits and veggies -- quite inexpensively too. The recipe calls for the ginger and sugar to be blitzed in the food processor, but I opted just to chop instead. I love these wee bites that manage to be both hot and sweet at the same time.

And a note about the sugar: the recipe specifies white, but because there was molasses going in the mix, I opted for half and half of white and brown sugar. I think it worked out well.

Once the wet and dry ingredients had been blended together, I dumped everything in my new silicone bundt pan, which I had buttered and floured, just in case. It came out a breeze.


Ta da! Finished cake, sans pan and lightly dusted with icing sugar. But don't ask me why the picture is vertical instead of horizontal.

And this picture of a slice doesn't quite do it justice, but you can just make out a tiny piece of ginger tucked inside. This cake keeps quite well and I think gets better with age.

Spiced Bundt Cake (recipe Rachael Ray Magazine Nov 2009)

3 cups flour
1 tablespoon Chinese Five Spice powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 cup granulated sugar (or half and half with brown sugar)
1/2 cup packed crystallized ginger
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter at room temp
2 large eggs, at room temp
1 cup dark molasses diluted with 1 cup hot water
icing sugar, for dusting

1. Position rack in the lower third of the over and preheat to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 10 cup bundt pan. In a bowl, whisk flour, five spice powder, baking soda, salt and pepper.

2. Using a food processor, mix the granulated sugar and ginger until the ginger is coarsely ground (or chop it up like I did)

3. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter, sugar-ginger mixture and vanilla at high speed until fluffy, about 5 mins. With the mixer at medium speed, add 1 egg at a time, beating after each addition. Mixing at low speed, add the flour mixture alternately with the molasses in 3 batches until combined. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake until the cake begins to pull away from the side of the pan and is springy to the touch, about 1 hour. Transfer to a rack and cool for 20 mins. Invert cake onto a rack and cool completely. Dust with the icing sugar.

Enjoy with a cup of coffee!

Apple Blackberry Cake

My mum and I made this great little cake at the cottage over Labour Day weekend, and then I made it again last weekend for friends. It's from the September issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine.

The recipe's extremely easy, mostly because it skips the typical cake step of creaming butter and sugar. The butter's melted, which means you don't have to worry about having soft butter, which is never the case for me.

Both times I've made this cake with raspberries instead of blackberries, because that's what I happened to have. The problem with them is that they tend to burn a bit on top as the cake bakes, which doesn't make them look all that pretty, but doesn't affect the taste.

When I added the berries last time, three beetle-like bugs fell out of my punnet of raspberries and I had to fish them out of the cake. I bet Martha doesn't have to deal with disasters like that!

Peeling the apples for the cake. I used two very large Honeycrisp apples instead of Macs.

Ready to go in the oven. I had to use an 8 inch cake pan instead of a round 9-inch springform, because I don't own one. This is about the third recipe I've made this summer that calls for that size pan. Think it's time to buy one!

One thing to note is that with the amount of fruit called for, it's difficult to press the fruit down into the batter as the recipe calls for. There's not much room in a crowded pan!

Ready for a piece? The cake has a nice texture and the apples get soft, but still hold their shape. The berries kind of melt in alongside the apple chunks. Result? Yummy!

Apple Blackberry Cake

Granulated sugar for pan

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

3 oz. (6 tbsp.) unsalted butter melted, plus more for pan, plus 2 tbsp. cut into pieces

1/4 c. plus 2 tbsp. packed light-brown sugar

1/2 c. whole milk

2 eggs

4 McIntosh apples (about 1 1/2 pounds) peeled, cored and cut into 8 wedges

1 c. blackberries

1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 9-inch springform pan, and dust with granulated sugar. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Whisk together melted butter, 3/4 c. brown sugar, milk and eggs in another bowl. Whisk into flour mixture.

2. Spread batter evenly into prepared pan. Arrange apple wedges over batter, and sprinkle with berries. Gently press fruit into batter. Combine remaining 2 tbsp. brown sugar and the cinnamon, sprinkle over fruit. Dot with remaining 2 tbsp. butter. Bake until top is dark gold, apples are tender and a cake tester comes out clean, about 55 minutes. Let cool. Serve with whip cream if desired.

Raspberry cake redo!

Let me just say that it really, really bugs me when a recipe doesn't turn out right. I never thought of myself as a perfectionist, but maybe I am when it comes to cooking. Ever since I baked the cake for the first time on the weekend, I've been thinking about what I did wrong. Was it the too-small pan? Did I mess up the ingredients? Was the oven not at the right temperature?

Seriously, even when I was supposed to be concentrating on pigs, I was thinking about this damn recipe!

So I bought another pint of raspberries tonight and made the cake again to take into work, and... success!

This time I baked it in a 9-inch ceramic pie plate, which I wasn't entirely sure would work. But it seems to have done the trick. And the berries somehow stayed suspended in the cake -- bonus!

The batter seemed thicker somehow tonight, so I'm thinking I maybe added too much buttermilk the last time around? Need to pay more attention to what I'm doing!

Tonight's cake. Ta da!

And might I just add, that I made this cake for the first time on the weekend, then blogged about it. And then Martha Stewart's daughter made the cake and wrote about it on her blog. I think she's copying me.

Raspberry Buttermilk Cake

It's berry overlap season! We're still getting great strawberries around here (though some of them are quite soft, due to all the rain we've had), but now the first raspberries are appearing as well.

I bought some on the weekend and made this little cake.

Raspberry Buttermilk Cake

1 cup (130 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon (2 grams) baking powder
1/2 teaspoon (2 grams) baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt1/2 stick (56 grams) unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup (146 grams) plus 1 1/2 tablespoons (22 grams) sugar, divided
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (optional)1 large (57 grams) egg
1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk1 cup fresh raspberries (about 5 oz)

Preheat oven to 400°F with rack in middle. Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and set aside. In a larger bowl, beat butter and 2/3 cup (146 grams) sugar with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about two minutes, then beat in vanilla and zest, if using. Add egg and beat well.

At low speed, mix in flour mixture in three batches, alternating with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour, and mixing until just combined.Spoon batter into cake pan, smoothing top. Scatter raspberries evenly over top and sprinkle with remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons (22 grams) sugar.

Bake until cake is golden and a wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and cool to warm, 10to 15 minutes more. Invert onto a plate.

Original recipe adapted from Gourmet, and found on Smitten Kitchen.

Here it is, all ready to go into the oven. I had high hopes at this stage.

And here's the finished product. I couldn't get a good picture, but essentially, all the berries sunk to the bottom. Still tasted good, but you wouldn't know it had raspberries in it unless you cut into it. A bit disappointing.

I think next time I might try dusting the fruit with flour? Not sure if that will help or not.

The other issue is that my cake took a lot longer to cook than the 25 minutes in the recipe. It could be my antiquated '70s-style oven, but it could also be the fact that I only have a seven inch spring form pan, and not the nine inch one called for. Time to go pan shopping, methinks!

Still, in spite of the delay and sunken fruit, this cake is really, really easy and insanely delicious. I think you could easily swamp out the raspberries for any other fruit you might have handy. Really good with a cup of peppermint tea (hint: if you have mint growing in your herb pot, snip off a few stalks and put them in your teapot, cover with water, and voila! Peppermint tea, easy peasy style).

Blood orange tart

Now that spring is finally here, I guess I should write about a winter fruit recipe I made a few months ago (okay, so the seasonal segue isn't the greatest, but it's been a long week).

Anyhoo, I'm a big fan of blood oranges for their beautiful colour and their seemingly constant supply at my neighbourhood Farm Boy. I came across this recipe and was inspired to recreate it just as soon as I finished drooling over the photos.

The pastry is a cinch to whip up, and it baked into a lovely, crispy display for the bejewelled fruit. I must say the preparation of the oranges is a bit fussy, in that you have to tediously segment so many of them, but the purple-stained fingers and hands were well worth the end result. I love rustic tarts for their intrinsic handmade quality, and this one produced a manageable sized dessert as well. Very good for just a handful of people.

I'm not sure I'd bother with the salted caramel sauce again, though I might give it another try as I think I burned the sugar a bit. A spoon or two of thinned out dulce de leche would be an equally yummy substitute.

My orangina rustica!