The versatility of cast iron

I like cookies generally, but I've got a particular affection for ludicrously large, whole-batch cookies. I think this is in a large part because of a time in the second year of my undergrad when my friend Valerie came over and we decided that we were going to bake cookies - but were too lazy to make individual cookies, so decided just to make one giant cookie the size of the baking tray instead and we decorated half each. I'm not 100% certain, but I'm reasonably confident that we used my regular cookie recipe, but without any chocolate or nuts - it was a spur-of-the-moment choice to bake, and this was in the days before I actually kept a decent stock of store-cupboard ingredients (I was a student, after all!).

In any case, I've been meaning to try this recipe for a while. I'm now sold on the general utility and greatness of my cast iron skillet, and this just looked like an excellent use for it. This particular recipe is the America's Test Kitchen one, but they've now put their recipe behind a paywall, so I'm actually referencing the Hummingbird High version, who handily also have weights for the ingredients - like them, I also have a 10" skillet rather than a 12" one.

Cast Iron Skillet Cookie

Ingredients

• 170g Butter
• 150g Dark brown sugar
• 100g Caster sugar
• 2tsp Vanilla extract
• 6g Salt
• 1 Whole egg
• 1 Egg yolk
• 250g Plain flour
• 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 170g Chopped plain chocolate

Method

1. Brown 130g of the butter in the cast iron skillet, cooking it over a medium heat for ~5 mins until dark golden brown and nutty.
2. Pour melted butter into a mixing bowl and stir in the rest of the butter.
3. Whisk sugar, vanilla and salt into melted butter until smooth.
4. Whisk egg and yolk in for 30 seconds. Leave to stand for 3 minutes.
5. Repeat 30 seconds whisking and 3 minutes resting twice more.
6. Mix flour and bicarbonate of soda together. Stir into butter mixture until just combined.
7. Stir in chocolate chips.
8. Press into an even layer in the base of the skillet.
9. Bake at 190C for ~20-30 minutes.
10. Leave to cool in the skillet.

Here it is, ready for the oven.

And straight out of it. I was a little concerned about how well it would rise, given that it uses bicarb without anything obviously acidic, but clearly my concerns were misplaced!

It's pretty pleasing how cleanly it turned out of the skillet.

It's really pretty good overall. I think it has a teensy touch too much salt personally, and also came out slightly greasy, so I think perhaps it could do with a little less butter too. I think it could also have stood to bake for a little longer - but overall it's really quite good. Fairly fudgy, a bit cakey - perhaps partway between a cookie and a brownie. Definitely good though, and not much hassle to bake!

Actually baking!

Very excitingly, I'm getting to see my family this weekend for the first time since the very first lockdown last year. A lot has happened recently, but one of the many interesting things is that my brother has bought and moved into a new house - so although it's not the excuse for meeting up, it's still also sort of a housewarming. So I thought I'd do the whole bread-and-salt thing (I never knew about this until I bought a house and suddenly was inundated with more bread than I could eat in one go and more salt than I knew what to do with, but I still think it's a lovely tradition). Time for Aage to shine!

Housewarming Loaf

Ingredients

• 150g Strong wholemeal flour
• 100g Aage
• 400ml Water
• 450g Strong white flour
• 13g Salt

Method

1. Make a poolish: Mix the wholemeal flour, Aage and 150g of the water in a bowl and cover tightly with cling film. Leave in the refrigerator overnight.
2. Autolyse: Mix the white flour with the remaining 250g water to form a dough. Wrap the bowl in a bin bag and leave on the counter overnight.
3. 8:45am: Add the salt to the dough, and knead the poolish in until fully combined and homogenous. Wrap bowl in bin bag and leave to rise.
4. 9:30am: Perform first set of stretch-and-folds.
5. 10am: Perform second set of stretch-and-folds.
6. 10:30am: Perform third set of stretch-and-folds.
7. 1pm: Knead dough and shape, placing on a parchment square in a bowl. Leave to prove.
8. 8pm: Preheat oven on max setting with cast iron combo cooker inside.
9. 8:30pm: Transfer to preheated combo cooker. Turn oven down to 210C and bake for 20 minutes.*
10. 8:50pm: Remove top of combo cooker and continue to bake for a further 20 minutes.

*I was intending to score the top of the loaf before putting it in the oven - but naturally, I completely forgot. Oh well...

Here is the dough post-prove, about to go into the oven. As you can see, it's pretty much a liquid, so I decided to pop it into the deep side of the combo cooker rather than the shallow side, as I wasn't sure it would stay within the confines of the lid.

Isn't this a gorgeous loaf? I think this might be one of the best looking loaves I've ever baked actually - it's a real shame that I forgot to score the top. Such a pleasing colour to it. I don't think that I got the bake quite right - the crust seems incredibly thin, and I'm not actually certain that it's cooked all the way through, so I'm fairly certain I should have given it a bit longer in the oven. But never mind all that for now - look how pretty it is!

It definitely could have done with a little longer in the oven, but actually, it turned out pretty well! Not a bad crumb, though I suspect it was a little over-proved, but certainly not disastrously so.

Still not baking

While I'm posting stuff that's not-quite-baking, it's occurred to me that I never followed up on the initial bread machine post from last year. It didn't take too long to hone the bread machine recipe into one that is actually not bad - though it bears very, very little resemblance to the one in the manual that we started from. But in case it's useful to anyone out there, here is what we have settled on as our "standard" bread machine loaf:

A Better Bread Machine Loaf

Ingredients

• 270ml Water
• 7g/1tsp Salt
• ~1tbsp Olive oil
• ~1/2 tbsp Sugar
• 180g Strong wholemeal flour
• 180g Strong white flour
• 7g/1 sachet Yeast

Settings

• 1lb/1.5lb Loaf size (our machine only does two sizes - this is the smaller one)
• Dark crust
• French bread programme

The regular programme works fine, but the French bread one has a slightly longer rise time, which seems to give a marginally better result. Likewise, the 50/50 brown/white flour split gives a nice texture (in our opinion), but it does work pretty well using just one or the other.

Almost baking

By long standing convention, pizza and pancakes are not "baking" for the purposes of the blog (mostly because I make them so much more frequently than anything else and I'm too lazy to write them up every single time). But we'll make an exception this time around because, rather incredibly, I don't think I've ever made drop scones/scotch pancakes before - at least not that I can recall. Well, today I fixed that!

Drop Scones

Ingredients

• 200g Plain flour
• 2 tsp/10g Baking powder
• 1/2 tsp/3.5g* Salt
• 50g Caster sugar
• 1 Egg
• 270ml Milk

Method

1. Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl.
2. Beat egg and milk together.
3. Pour liquid into dry ingredients gradually, mixing to a batter around the consistency of double cream.
4. Fry a couple of tablespoons of batter at a time, flipping after ~2-3 mins once a crust has formed and the surface goes bubbly.

Here's about half the stack. The other half might have got eaten before I thought to take a picture...

These were amazing though! Soft, light, fluffy - and very, very easy!

*In case anyone's wondering, after struggling for years with measuring out salt accurately and screwing bread up far too many times because of it, I finally went and bought a teeny tiny set of digital scales that weighs down to 0.01g precision. While I use it almost exclusively for salt, I suspect most other people who own such scales are very keen to measure quantities of herbs extremely accurately. Still, I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who also struggles with getting quantities of salt perfect when baking!

Abracadabra!

I felt like baking something today, but wasn't sure what to do. But leafing through the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, the Magic Cookie Bars recipe caught my eye. It's a bit of a stab in the dark, as there's the usual American-to-British unit conversion required, and also some ingredient substitutions to account for what you can get in the UK (and more importantly, what I had in stock). But we'll see how it goes!

Magic Cookie Bars

Ingredients

• 190g Plain chocolate digestives* (11 1/2 biscuits)
• 115g Butter
• 85g Chopped walnuts
• 80g Plain chocolate chips
• 110g Dessicated coconut**
• 1 can (397g) Sweetened condensed milk

Method

1. Crush the digestives.
2. Melt the butter and mix with the crushed digestives.
3. Press firmly into a 23cm square brownie pan.
4. Evenly sprinkle the walnuts, chocolate chips, then coconut over the biscuit base.
5. Pour the condensed milk over the top, spreading gently to cover completely.
6. Bake at 160C for ~30mins until light golden brown.
7. Remove and refrigerate until set before slicing and removing from tin.

*I would have gone with plain digestives if I had any in stock. I had to bump up the quantity of digestives by eye, as there's less biscuit per unit mass with chocolate digestives than plain ones.

**This is where I think I will have gone most wrong. The original recipe called for sweetened shredded coconut, and I didn't realise that dessicated coconut was different (it's dried out far more than shredded coconut). I'm pretty sure that I've used waaay too much coconut as a result. But dessicated coconut is unsweetened at least, so hopefully it'll still be okay.

Straight out of the oven:

Well, these turned out to be a surprise hit! I (inevitably) didn't have quite enough patience initially, and tried to retrieve a couple of pieces before it was properly set, which meant that the biscuit base just crumbled into dust. But despite that, these are really rather nice especially if you consider (a) how easy they are and (b) that it's made out of standard (at least for me) ingredients. The topping is a delight. The condensed milk turns into that gorgeous, gooey caramel than threatens to glue your jaws together, there's a bit of crunch from the walnut but not too much and then there's a little bit of chewiness from the coconut  - there might be a touch more coconut than perhaps there ought to be, but it's certainly not a problem. And all of that is balanced by the (relatively plain) biscuit base, which helps tone down the sweetness to more manageable levels and prevents the topping from actually gluing your jaw shut.

But while it's rather enjoyable and something that anyone with a sweet tooth (who doesn't object to coconut or walnuts) will appreciate, neither is it all that special. It's certainly not one of those sublime, delightful baked goods that gives you a moment of silent rapture - in many ways, it's rather ordinary. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Given how easy this was (and it was, indeed, extremely easy - with little washing up too!), I think it's a great one to keep in the repertoire. It'd be perfect for coffee mornings with friends, or maybe even as cycling/hiking food on the go (that is, assuming we'll ever be able to do those things again!).

Time has no meaning

Or at least it's felt that way for the last year or so. But for once, I'm using that to my advantage. I'm declaring that it's still Christmas, so I'm baking stollen! I've tried doing stollen once before, many years ago, and while it wasn't bad, I remembered thinking that it was a bit dry. So I'm going to try a new recipe this time around. It's fundamentally cribbed from this one from the Guardian (which actually seems to have been published again), but also with some elements nabbed from this recipe too.

Marzipan Stollen Take Two

Ingredients

• 160ml Milk
• 1 sachet Yeast
• 80g Mixed peel
• 150g Raisins
• 50ml Kirsch
• 425g Plain flour
• 50g Caster sugar
• 7g (1tsp) Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 150g Butter
• 40g Blanched almonds
• 320g Marzipan
• Icing sugar

Method

1. Warm the milk to ~40C and whisk in the yeast, a tablespoon of flour and a teaspoon of sugar. Cover and leave for a couple of hours.
2. Mix the mixed peel, raisins and kirsch together. Leave to absorb.
3. Mix the flour, sugar and salt together in a mixing bowl.
4. Mix in the egg, vanilla and yeast mixture.
5. Melt the butter and incorporate into the flour mixture to form a dough.
6. Knead for ~10 mins.
7. Return to mixing bowl, wrap in a bin liner and leave to rise for ~2 hours.
8. Chop the almonds.
9. Knead the dough, add the fruit and almonds and knead to distribute.
10. Shape dough and fold over the slab of marzipan.
11. Place on baking tray, return to bin liner and leave to prove for ~3 hours.
12. Bake at 180C for ~50 mins until internal temperature is 90C.
13. Brush with melted butter and dust heavily with icing sugar.
14. Repeat step 13.
15. Leave to cool fully.

No, the amount of marzipan isn't a typo - I'm always disappointed by how little marzipan there is in when I get a slice of stollen. I also significantly bumped up the amount of fruit and nuts, because, well, why not?

Here it is at the end of step 11, just before the final proof.

And ready for the oven. I'd have liked a little bit more of a rise, but it already had 3 hours of proving, and I didn't want it to get too late before it came out of the oven.

Fresh from the oven. It got a little bit darker than I would have liked - I did end up turning the oven down to 160C for the last part.

Without any exaggeration, I think that this might possibly be the most unhealthy thing I've ever made. The topping means that there's pretty much an entire block of butter in this one stollen, and there's really quite a lot of icing sugar added as well (the recipe did say to dust heavily...). And on top of that, remember that there's three quarters of a packet of marzipan in there for good measure. It does look good though!

This one was far better than the first time I tried making stollen - the huge amount of butter made a real difference to how moist it was, and the ridiculous butter-sugar-butter-sugar coating really makes it special in my opinion (I've seen some recipes say that you should go for three or even four coats!). But I'm also glad that I managed to pass on just over half of the stollen to friends - I think Fiona and I might have ended up with heart attacks if we'd eaten it all ourselves! This definitely needs to be a (very) occasional treat, but it's well worth the effort I think!

80/20 cake

There's an idea (that's largely unsubstantiated, as far as I can tell) known as the Pareto Principle, that asserts that 80% of outcomes are caused by 20% of inputs. It's often abused (which is exactly what I'm about to do here) but for many of its applications, the core idea is that of diminishing returns - that the first 20% of effort/resources contribute 80% of the benefits.

"Why are you wittering on about management consulting crap? Isn't this a baking blog?" I hear you all cry! Well, I've had a jar of sour cherries at the back of my larder for quite a while (literally years... ooops!), and I decided that it's time to bake with them. I absolutely love Black Forest gateaux, but by heck, making them is an enormous faff. So I figured I'd cut some corners and distract you with some ridiculous diversion in the hopes that you wouldn't notice. Did it work?

This time around, I used the same recipe as for an actual Black Forest gateau, but with half quantities for the filling (both the cherry gel and the cream). I also baked the cake in two sandwich tins (it took about 25 mins at ~175C) to save me the hassle of cutting the cake horizontally - another major faff avoided!

Last time around, I forgot to fold in the flour before the egg whites. This time around, I managed to follow the recipe more accurately, but the batter ends up very stiff before you fold in the egg whites. The batter's pretty lumpy, as you can see, but I decided to stop at this point to avoid knocking out too much of the air. Hopefully the cake itself won't be lumpy!

Ready for the oven - the quantities are just about perfect for two sandwich tins.

Straight from the oven, both cakes had enormous mounds in the centre and looked like they had far too much raising agent in them, but actually on cooling they ended up almost perfectly flat on the top. I'm pretty happy with how they look.

It came together quite nicely in the end! It turns out that there's far, far too much cherry gel - I think halving the quantities again would have been about right. But I don't think it looks half bad, especially given how many corners I'd cut. It's clearly not a Black Forest gateau, but it's certainly got hints of it.

It certainly took more than 20% of the effort of a full-blown, proper Black Forest gateau, and I don't know if it reached 80% of the quality, but it was certainly not bad at all! It was a teensy bit dry (in retrospect, I think I might have been a bit stingy with the cherry brandy), particularly at the outer perimeter of the cake - I hadn't thought about it before, but the extra layer of cream around the side of the Black Forest gateau is perfectly placed to help offset the area where the cake would be driest. The glace cherries were horrible - but that was all I had for decoration. But overall, not a bad return on effort!

A Christmas treat

We've had a fantastically gluttonous Christmas Day today, and what better way to round it off than with some cinnamon rolls. I got up at 8am to make the dough and start the process, and then we went on a ~40km bike ride before lunch, so I feel like we've at least earned the treat. I used the same recipe as usual - when they turn out this well, I'm not inclined to mess about with it!

A spoonful of honey

Rather a long time ago, I bought a cute silicone cake tin for a tear-and-share cake, and never actually got around to using it. So when I was thinking about baking this weekend, I figured it was as good a time as any to try it out at long last. I'm using this recipe, because it sounds lovely and the photos look gorgeous! Fingers crossed for my version turning out so well!

Honey Pull Apart Cake

Ingredients

For the cake

• 250g Butter
• 375g Caster sugar
• 4 Eggs
• 1 tbsp Vanilla extract
• 160ml Milk
• 315g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 60g Ground almonds

For the glaze

• 60g Butter
• 60g Soft brown sugar
• 185ml honey
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 2tbsp Water

Method

1. In a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.
2. Beat in eggs, vanilla extract and milk.
3. Add the flour, baking powder and salt.
4. Mix in the ground almonds.
5. Pour into pan and bake at 180C for ~35-40 mins.
6. Heat all the ingredients for the glaze in a small saucepan, stirring to dissolve and simmer for 1-2 minutes.
7. Turn out the cooked cake and cover with the glaze.

Ready for the oven.

Straight from the oven - perhaps a little darker than I was aiming for, but not too far off. It's rather domed though; I think there might have been a bit too much baking powder perhaps.

I mostly got it out of the tin intact - I should probably have let it cool rather a lot more than I did before trying to turn it out. I did burn my fingertips quite a lot, and I suspect the cake would have been more resilient after a bit more cooling. The bake is a bit uneven - the edges are really nicely crisped up (nothing's burnt, the really dark bits are just lovely and crunchy), but the inner sections are possibly a little paler than I'd have liked.

Looks pretty good with the glaze too!

Well, overall it's a moderate success. It's not perfect, but it didn't turn out badly either. I think it's a pretty cute result. The cake itself is a little boring - somewhat bland, although the honey glaze helps. It's quite an eggy, sugary batter, which gives it a lovely crunchy texture if baked enough; I think it would have been better with a little longer in the oven, but I'm pretty sure that my nerves wouldn't have held, given how dark the top got. Perhaps I should have covered it partway through and let it bake a bit longer to try to get the top (by which I mean the bottom of the cake when it's in the tin) a bit more done. There's definite potential here, but it does need a bit of tweaking still.

The tin is a bit of a bugger to clean though!

Edit: It turns out, this is one of the rare cakes that's actually better cold than still warm. I found that I liked it more and more, the more I ate of it, and by the time it was mostly finished, I had actually come around entirely - this is actually really quite a good cake! The enormous amounts of butter in the glaze help keep it super moist, even if it is quite dense, so it keeps surprisingly well as well.

Quick and easy

I stumbled upon this recipe from Serious Eats earlier, and it looked intriguing - by which I really mean that it appealed to my lazy side. Active time 10 minutes, total time 25 minutes, and to be entirely done in a single bowl? Sounds good to me! This is roughly 3/4 proportions, but with a bit more flour than suggested in the original recipe, because sticking accurately to their amounts gave me a batter rather than a dough.

Quick dark brown sugar biscuits

Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 210g Soft dark brown sugar
• 15g Caster sugar + 40g for coating
• 3g Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 250g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/2tsp Bicarbonate of soda

Method

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in the sugars and salt.
3. Stir in the egg and vanilla.
4. Stir in the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.
5. Divide dough into small golf-ball sized pieces.
6. Pour the sugar for coating into the now-empty bowl and roll the pieces of dough in it to coat.
7. Squash the dough balls to flatten slightly, and place on lined baking trays.
8. Bake at 180C for ~10mins.

Here they are ready for the oven. I know they're going to merge together - but I'm too lazy to spread them out over a third tray (after all, it's laziness that got me this far, so I might as well roll with it!).

Yup, they merged together. I don't care though - I think they actually form quite a pleasing geometric pattern like this. They look pretty good, don't they?

I added a little too much salt, so they came out ever so slightly salty - not awfully so though, and actually the slight saltiness adds a bit of interest. But the biscuits themselves are actually pretty good! In terms of tastiness-per-effort, these are definitely a big success!

An unexpectedly fast reprise

So having decided that I wasn't likely to be adding the vegan cookies I made last time to my regular rotation, I found myself baking some thank you cookies for a vegan friend, so had to make another batch! It was supposed to be the same recipe as last time except for reducing the amount of chocolate chips to 185g, but clearly I did something different, as the cookies came out much less flat and a bit more cookie-like. I think last time I must have used a bit less flour/more fat - but even though they look rather different this time around, the texture's surprisingly not that different.

Vegan cookies

To me, vegan baking is really, really hard - eggs are just a magic ingredient. They bind mixtures, give structure, stop things from drying out too much - they're by far the hardest thnig to substitute out successfully. It's the last week of the lockdown baking group that I've been (occasionally) participating in, and so I'm going to give it a shot - this is actually from last week's choice, but I meant to do it and didn't manage to get around to it, so there you go. It's this recipe, essentially unchanged.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• 125g Coconut oil
• 100g Caster sugar
• 150g Soft dark brown sugar
• 125g Coconut milk
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 275g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/4tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 200g Chocolate chips

Method

1. Mix the coconut oil and sugars together.
2. Beat in the coconut milk and vanilla.
3. Stir in the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda to form a thick batter.
4. Stir in the chocolate chips.
5. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
6. Form into plum sized balls and bake for 12-15 minutes at 180C.
7. Allow to cool slightly before removing to a wire rack.

Batch 1 fresh from the oven. The liners got a bit rucked up when I put the trays into the oven, so some of the cookies are a bit misshapen.

Batch 2 about to go in while batch 1 cools in the background

They're pretty good, though I think they're a little too sweet and have quite a bit too much chocolate in them - the balance just isn't quite right. But they're certainly nice, particularly the crisp, crunchy bits around the edge. Slightly overbaked is definitely better than slightly underbaked for these cookies in my opinion. Not bad overall, but I don't think I'm going to be adding them to my regular repertoire.

Advances in automation

As of this weekend, I now have a breadmaker (thanks Paul!). Obviously baking bread in a breadmaker doesn't count as "baking" for the purposes of going on the blog, but I tried it out for the first time today, and thought that at least was worth a note.

So how was it? Well I followed the basic white bread recipe in the manual and... well... it's not great. It's not terrible either, and certainly for the 5 minutes or so of active time that this required, it's really pretty darned good, but discounting the ease of it all and judging solely on the quality of the output, it's not great. It's a bit dense, a bit close and most definitely too sweet. The latter part should be easy enough to fix I'd imagine, but the texture seems a lot like an under developed gluten structure, which might mean that the dough doesn't get kneaded sufficiently in the machine. I'll definitely have to have a play around with it to see if I can do better, but it's also nice to see that I'm not that easily replaced by a machine :o).

Baking for fuel

Most of the time, I bake for fun. This time around, it's strictly utilitarian. I've got a ~120km ride planned for the weekend, so I need on-the-go fuel - time for flapjacks! It's basically the same as my old flapjack recipe, but using dried cranberries instead of almonds. Very quick, easy, and hopefully tasty!

Cranberry Flapjacks

Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 200g Oats and seeds*
• 115g Caster sugar
• 170g Dried cranberries

Method

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in all the other ingredients.
3. Press into a lined tin and bake at 180C for 20 minutes.
4. Leave to cool slightly before removing from tin.

*I could have sworn we had porridge oats in stock. All I could find was our homemade muesli, which happily is looking rather plain right now - oats with a small amount of sunflower seeds mixed in . It'll do!

Terrible photo, but fresh from the oven, it does look rather good!

Still not a great photo. Also I really can't cut things into even pieces.

There we go! A decent picture at last!

A Danish dream

It's Danish week! I'd never heard of this cake before, but it looks both easy and tasty, so definitely worth a try! It's this recipe.

Danish Dream Cake (Drømmekage)

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 3 Eggs
• 250g Caster sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 50g Butter
• 200ml Milk
• 250g Plain flour
• 2tsp Baking powder

For the topping:

• 125g Butter
• 50ml Milk
• 160g Dark soft brown sugar
• 40g Caster sugar*
• 100g Dessicated coconut

Method

1. Whisk the eggs, caster sugar and vanilla extract until light and fluffy.
2. Melt the butter (for the cake).
3. Stir in the melted butter and milk (for the cake).
4. Stir in the flour and baking powder until smooth.
5. Pour into a lined tin and bake at 200C for ~25 mins.
6. Heat the butter, milk and sugar for the topping in a saucepan and simmer for ~1 min.
7. Stir in the dessicated coconut.
8. Spread the topping over the cake and bake for a further 10 mins.
9. Remove to a wire rack to cool.

*Bet you can't guess what happened here...

Something tells me that I might have added a bit too much baking powder...

Sometimes when a cake has an uneven top, you can level it off using the topping. This was definitely not one of those times!

Slight spillage in the oven. I'm very glad that I had the oven liner in there!

My word though, look at that topping! It reminds me a lot of ANZAC biscuits (sweet, buttery and coconutty - I guess it makes sense). It smells incredible!

Nom I say!

I was super impressed by this cake. Reading the recipe, I thought that the cake part sounded really boring, and I assumed that the topping would be the only interesting part. In reality the topping is lovely, but far too sweet on its own, and is nicely offset by the cake. You wouldn't want a more interesting cake as the base. It's a really nicely balanced recipe!