Party Size Strawberry, Vanilla and White Chocolate Jubilee Cake

 The Perfect Cake for The Children To Make

Light vanilla sponge, sandwiched together with lashings of strawberry jam and cream, topped off with fresh strawberries, blueberries and white chocolate.  Oh this is a seriously glorious cake indeed!  I know that using strawberries and blueberries to make a union jack is quite a well known idea, and I loved this one in particular in the Telegraph .. so I'll make no claims to this being my original idea, but my twist is in the addition of white chocolate Maltesers because I wanted to add a but of texture and fun for my children.   

Of course not everyone is a monarchist, however the jubilee is a day where you meet your neighbours, chat, laugh eat and drink with people in your community and I think that it's a good thing to celebrate all that is best about being British, including our food and this cake is perfect for a street party - it's delicious and is really very simple to make and serves 20  ... and if ever there was a time to make the extra afford to make a cake special then if you can use the very best British strawberries, fairtrade vanilla and free range eggs.  Enjoy the celebration!

Serves 20

Prep time 30

Cooking time 30 minutes

Suitable for freezing? Yes before filling or decorating

For the cake

500g butter or margarine (suitable for baking)

500g Cardamom Sugar

500g self-raising flour

9 large eggs

For the filling

400g of cream cheese

800ml double cream

8 drops of Ndali vanilla essence

175g icing sugar (sifted)

1 pot of strawberry Jam

To decorate

A large punnet of strawberries

60g of white chocolate buttons

100g of white chocolate maltesers 

a large punnet of blueberries

1 Preheat the oven to 180˚C/gas mark 4.

2 Using a food mixer, cream together the butter or margarine and Sugar Beat well until white and fluffy.

3 Add 3–4 tablespoons of flour to the mixture, then add the eggs. Adding the flour like this prevents the mixture from curdling. If it does, just keep adding flour a little at a time, beating the mixture to ensure it is evenly distributed. Continue mixing and add the rest of the flour,

4 Divide the mixture between 28cm x 22cm x 6cm rectangular cake tins and bake in the oven for 30 – 35 minutes, until firm to the touch. Cool on a wire rack.

5 Once fully cooled you can carefully cut the slight dome off each cake to make the cake top flat using a large bread knife. Then make the filling. Whip the cream cheese, cream, vanilla essence and icing sugar until thick.  Spread the jam on the base of one cake and the cream on the other and sandwich together using just over half of this mix.

 

6 Sandwich the two halves together and spread the rest of the cream on the top of the cake.  Using a reference to the Union jack decorate the top in the shape of the flag, using the strawberries, chocolate and blueberries to represent each colour.

TIPS Use the leftover sponge, from cutting off the dome and make summer fruit trifles with the spare blueberries and strawberries for your party.

 There are lots of other wonderful Jubilee cakes .. here are some more!


Ren has some beautiful Jubilee cupcakes on her site ! 


Edd Kimber has this gorgeous Jubilee cake .. in layers. 

Peggy Porchen Jubilee Cake by Made with Pink 


Fit for a Queen

Pebble Soup Jubilee Cake


I Love Helen's Jelly Bean Jubilee cake 


The BBC have a  simple Jubilee cake to make

Discovering My Grandmothers Recipes

This morning I called in early to see my parents. They were sitting in bed reading The Times.. as they do every single morning, for as long as I can remember. We chattered about the recipes and I talked about the fact that I am thinking about Christmas recipes, in particular Christmas cake and pudding. My father smiled as he recalled my grandmothers cakes. It was my grandmother who taught me to bake.

People use to come from miles and miles away to order cakes off your grandmother he said. Christmas cakes, wedding cakes, christening cakes. She was renowned for her amazing fruit cakes. He told me that the making these cakes were a social occasion. Made before the invention of television. Oh yes - they could bake and gossip. No one was immune to the gossip.. and boy they could gossip.

Whilst Dad was lost in the memory of cake baking and a bunch of chattering aunties busy baking, my mum disappeared downstairs to reappear with an envelope. You might like this. There was spidery writing over an old yellowing envelope. I opened it gingerly, sitting on the end of my parents bed like a 7 year old girl again. Inside was treasure. My grandmothers Christmas cake and pudding recipe. She made this cake from the time she was married. Over 85 years ago. Tears prickled my eyes as my mother said you can keep it. Safe.

She sent me out into the stables to find my grandmothers original tins. So here I have it. The original recipes and the original tin still wrapped in brown paper and string that my grandmother tied on to stop the last cake she baked burning too quickly in an old fashioned oven. She died over 20 years ago.

Now I must decide if I can bear to untie the string she once tied on to clean up this tin to re use it as she once did.

I think I’ll sit and wait a while.

She would have told everyone, everyone about this book.

She would have been so proud.

Whoopie .. pies and Vanilla

Chocolate and Vanilla in any combination is terrific, but when it is combined in a biscuity cake sandwiching soft folds of whipped vanilla cream it is heavenly. Any good quality vanilla paste would do for this Whoopie Pie recipe; however, I do have a preference for Ndali vanilla, which my sister introduced me to several years ago. It is a little more expensive than other vanilla, but not much .. and to be truthful ,any really great cook will tell you that half the taste experience is in the quality of the ingredients, so the little bit extra is well worth it. Given a choice I prefer fair-trade and organic products, but I am also realistic in that some ingredients are not always available or affordable. With one of the chapters in the book dedicated to vanilla I wanted to get the very best from the flavour so I contacted Lulu, the owner of the Ndali Vanilla estate in Africa to see if she would help me out. I was absolutely delighted when she agreed. Originally from nearby Oxford she has an amazing story to tell, inheriting the vanilla plantation out of the blue about seven years ago. Whichever vanilla you buy it’s worth checking out her site.
As a box of darkest, sweetest delicious vanilla pods arrived straight from Uganda, arrived it was just in time to play with the taste combinations for the latest must have Whoopie Pie phenomenon from America. Originating from the Amish people in Pennsylvania, women made these chocolate mounds with butter icing sandwiched between them from their husbands. The husbands would be so pleased to find it in their lunch box they would shout whoopie .. which was exactly what I shouted as I was opening the beautiful box packed with Ndali vanilla pods. Whoopie!

Chocolate and Vanilla Whoopie Pie Recipe

Ingredients


120g of butter
200g of vanilla sugar or caster sugar & 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

2 medium eggs
280grams of SR flour 4 large heaped tbsp of cocoa powder
Pinch of salt
250ml of buttermilk

Filling
1 Level teaspoon of vanilla paste
3 tablespoons of icing sugar
300 ml of double cream

Method

Preheat heat the oven to Gas 4/350 F/ 180C
Grease two baking trays.
In a bowl combine the dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl beat the sugar and butter until pale and fluffy and then add the eggs. Add the dry ingredients and the Buttermilk and combine the ingredients. You should be left with a relatively stiff mixture ready to spoon onto the baking tray in round bite size blobs. To get 16 pies you will need 32 of these.
Bake in the oven for 10 – 12 minutes. They are a cross between a biscuit and a sponge, however there is a fine line between biscuit and burnt because of the high sugar content, so don’t leave them in too long. I found a much better bite to them if I left them in the oven to cool, but if you haven’t time transfer cool on a wire rack.
Add in the teaspoon of vanilla paste and icing sugar to the cream and whip. Make sure the cream is a nice thick consistency before sandwiching a dollop between the chocolate cakes. There you have a taste of America - 16 chocolate and vanilla Whoopie Pies.

Too Much Cardamon makes a girl sad...

I shouldn’t be disappointed. But I am. The cardamom in the cake knocked out the Rhubarb. Yes yes.. there were plenty of compliments and even a helping of seconds but the trio combination was cardamom heavy. The cake should have been lighter and it was a mistake to add cardamom into the chocolate topping .. I guess I got carried away. Don’t get me wrong .. it wasn’t disgusting .. it just didn’t have the balance I was hoping for ..so back to the cooker to do another one.

I am thinking as I am writing. I really need to get some testing sheets written and tasting sheets. If they are anonymous then tasting sheets I think will give me a better response..people are just too polite to say .. Yeah you are right it’s not great. As I am asking of the cardamom is too much then it is something which may have been fine until I asked.

So I shall be up later starting on the tasting sheets and a standard testing sheet for the recipe testing.

Also I have bought a book on how to write recipes called the recipe writers hand book by Barbara Gibbs Ostmann. I have only just flicked through it so I am looking forward to reading it later .. perhaps in the bath. I wasn’t initially taken with what I read .. it looks tedious.
The Allotment is just 50 yards from where the Birthday party was held so I dashed up and picked more Rhubarb. My 6 year old son very kindly took a photo ..well actually he took several pictures and most were of my nostrils .. so I put him on a chair and bent down to show off my posy of stems.


The geraniums as decoration looked lovely.. I will use that idea again with the photo shoot on Tuesday