Happy Halloween! I was hoping for one or two witchy recipes for this month’s Alphabakes as the letter we chose was W, but instead we had a lot of wedding-related entries!
There was a good reason for that: once again, congratulations to the lovely Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker, my co-host for this challenge, who has become a Mrs! It was a beautiful wedding though I probably had as many nerves in the morning as the bride herself, as I was making the wedding cake! Luckily it arrived at the venue in one piece and went down very well; you can read more about it below as it was one of my entries into the Alphabakes challenge this month.
But as always I will go through the entries in the order in which they were received. First, I took the opportunity to publish a post I have been working on for a while – a wedding cake decorated with rose petals, brush embroidery and a wire flower on top. It took me a while to finish the post as I’d done separate ‘how to’ posts for each separate element first! This isn’t the cake I made for Ros, in fact it isn’t actually a real cake – we used a polystyrene cake dummy –so strictly speaking it isn’t something I baked but as a lot of baking blog posts are about decorating techniques I wanted to share it with you all as well.
The next entry comes from Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary; she made this Hungarian plum cake from a recipe given by a neighbour, who in turn received it from a Hungarian friend. She says that despite the sugar content, the cake is almost savoury. The W in the recipe comes from chopped walnuts, though Elizabeth actually used almonds instead. Still, I guess if I can enter a cake that isn’t real, she can enter an ingredient she was supposed to use but didn’t!
Stuart at Cakeyboi made this chocolate pecan cake, which is topped with whipped cream; he says it’s perfect as a Sunday afternoon treat with the howling wind outside.
Jean at Baking in Franglais made this beautiful gluten free wedding cake for her friend and the recipe for the cake itself is very versatile - you could make it for a birthday or Sunday tea just by decorating it differently.
These raspberry fudge brownies come from Choclette at Tin and Thyme; she made them using dark chocolate containing raspberries and are slightly healthier than many brownies as they are made with wholemeal flour and less butter, but still taste really fudgy. They also contain white chocolate chips as well as raspberries.
Suelle at Mainly Baking made a date and walnut pudding which is gluten free and dairy free; she replaced butter with coconut oil which is something that wouldn't have occurred to me, so I might have to try it! This looks delicious:
More walnuts, this time in these sweet potato, cranberry and walnut cupcakes from Lili’s Cakes. She lives in Barcelona where October 31 is celebrated with the Catalan tradition of la Castanyada, which translates as chestnut time. Sweet potatoes as well as chestnuts are eaten so Lili has made these cupcakes and decorated them in Halloween colours. The contrasting flavours and textures sound really good.
These ‘easy-peasy’ five ingredient waffles from Family Friends Food are very simple, but you do need a waffle maker of course- though you can pick them up quite cheaply these days. You can serve them however you like as they are very versatile. Have a read of Helen’s blog post to find out what to look for when buying a waffle maker as well.
Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen sent in these white chocolate blondies, a version of chocolate brownies, which she says are very sweet and best eaten while warm - now why didn't I think of that?
Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker decided to bake cakes to give out as favours to guests at her own wedding – I know she had a lot of other things to do in the run-up to the big day so I was very impressed! The cakes tasted very nice (I was a guest at her wedding) and had cute little discs with her and her husband’s initials on. I loved the way they were packaged up as well – there was one at each place setting.
And finally, Ros’ wedding cake itself, which I made. The bottom layer was actually fake, which made my task a lot easier! The middle layer is chocolate and the top layer is lemon, and I made the roses on top myself. I was very pleased with the way that it turned out and thoroughly enjoyed my first experience of making a wedding cake!
As I'm slightly late with the round-up Ros has already announced which letter we are baking with in November - enjoy!
