Claire Elizabeth

angelina

Okay so I know Easter was last weekend, but I thought I'd show you some of the stuff I made over the spring festival. As usual, I baked a simnel cake since me and my family do love a bit of fruit cake, especially when there is some marzipan involved aswel! I won't bore you with the history of simnel cake, as I already did that last year (!) but basically it's a light fruit cake with mixed spice, citrus zest, and a layer of marzipan running through the middle, as well as on top. It is traditionally topped with eleven marzipan balls which represent the eleven apostles-simple!

I also made some classic Lenten biscuits, which are simple but ever so tasty crunchy little biscuits, packed with currants, mixed peel and sprinkled with a generous helping of caster sugar.

I love making things that taste delicious but look pretty too, so I had a go at some Easter bonnet biscuits. These are vanilla sable biscuits with a marshmallow on top to make the hat shape, and a coating of coloured royal icing. I finished mine with some simple piping and icing flowers- pretty effective huh?

Ok, so my final Easter bake, and probably my favourite this year, carrot cake complete with marzipan bunnies, carrots and chocolate mini eggs! I actually made this for my sister's birthday as it fell on Easter Monday this year, and so it just seemed right to make her an Easter themed cake!

For the cake, I took a risk and used a different recipe to my norm-but boy I'm glad I did as it turned out to be an absolute delight! The sponge was packed with carrot and raisins but also contained dessicated coconut which gave it an interesting texture without imparting an overpowering coconut flavour. I took the recipe from Claire Clark's book, Desserts, which has a great selection of recipes and some lovely photos.

Unfortunately my icing was a bit of a disaster, as cream cheese always seems to turn into a sloppy mess when I try and convert it into a sweet icing! In the end I had to add nearly a whole pack of icing sugar just to get it to a spreadable consistency, and by the time I had done that you could barely taste the cream cheese so I may as well have just made butter icing! Never mind, atleast I didn't actually use it all and so hopefully my teeth won't be dropping out any time soon!

banana bread

Gluten Free Banana Bread

16:25

bakewell tart

Mini Bakewell Tarts

16:22

caramel

Gateau st Honore

15:56

Gateau st Honore- a classic French cake which was named for the Bishop of Amiens, Saint Honorius, in the sixth century and the French patron saint of pastry cooks (can you tell I've been doing my research?). There is also a street in Paris that bears his name; the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore - a street that I did pass by on my trip to Paris last year. Anyway, before I bore you all too much with the history, I'll tell you a little about what this extravagant gateau actually is!

The gateau consists of a puff pastry base, topped with a swirl of choux pastry which is piped from the centre of the base in a spiral outwards, and little choux buns dipped in caramel dotted around the outer edge. It is then finished with creme patisserie and spun sugar.

It is quite a challenging dessert to make, as there are so many different components involved, but time can be saved by preparing the pastry and filling in advance, which then just leaves the assembling. Of course you can save even more time by buying the ready-to-roll puff pastry, but I assure you that it is incredibly satisfying making your own, and the quality is far better than what you can buy in the shops.

There are quite a few variations you can make on this gateau- I have seen recipes that use shortcrust pastry for the base, fresh fruit fillings and even salted caramel choux buns. I stuck to a fairly classic recipe which I took from Michel Roux's book 'Desserts'. Michel makes a black and white gateau which calls for both vanilla and chocolate chantilly cream in the centre, giving a two-tone striped finish (hence the name). I'm not a fan of whipped cream, so instead I made both vanilla and chocolate creme patisserie for my topping, which I also used to fill each choux bun.

I used generous amount of caramel to coat my choux buns (since I have a very sweet tooth!) and used this to stick them to the puff pastry base. I also attempted to make a sugar cage to by drizzling caramel over a greased plastic bowl but unfortunately it broke into pieces once I tried to remove it! Nevertheless, I still used the broken bits to sit on top of the gateau, and actually, it doesn't look too bad!

Overall, I thought this dessert was a winner but it does tend to go a little soggy after a while so is best eaten fairly quickly after assembling, which is not exactly too difficult to do!