GBBO 2015: Week 5 Free From - Sugar Free Carrot Cake

This was tough. I have never made anything that is 'free-from' nor ever wanted to really. This carrot cake bake was actually my second attempt at this week's task. First I tried to bake a sugar free sponge cake, but this turned out awful. As in, the cakes came out of the oven closely resembling frisbees as well as tasting god awful. So they went in the bin and I searched for a new recipe to try. This second attempt was more successful than the first, but not by much.
For the sugar free sponge cake I used this recipe, and it produced this;

So this went into the bin where it belonged and I found a new recipe to try. I tried to find a recipe which used ingredients that I already had in the kitchen, as baking a new recipe every week is pretty pricey.
I found this recipe for a sugar free carrot cake on a bbc website, hoping that being from a bbc website it would mean my cake would work.

Ingredients:

225g plain flour

4 eggs

175g grated carrot

4tbsp honey

200ml sunflower oil

2tsp baking powder

1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda

1tsp vanilla essence

pinch of salt

First preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius so it can heat up while making the cake batter. In a mixing bowl whisk together the eggs, sunflower oil and honey.

Once this is mixed, add in the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and vanilla essence. Also, grate the carrots and add this into the bowl too. I was confused here as I didn't know if it meant 175g of carrot, then grate or 175g of grated carrot - and yes these actually were two different things I found. I chose to go with 175g of grated carrot.

With all the ingredients in the bowl, stir them all together.

Then, pour this mixture into a cake tin. 

This then needs to go into the oven for an hour the recipe said. My cake was in the oven for longer - perhaps the oven temp is different for a fan oven I don't know - but the inside was still uncooked even as the top of the cake was becoming very dark in colour. 

The recipe I found came with a recipe for the frosting, but as it's main component was icing sugar and I wasn't sure if this was allowed, I altered the recipe slightly. Instead of the icing sugar I just added a ton more cream cheese than stated and added more butter, but I kept to only using 1tsp of vanilla essence. So the frosting you see here is mainly cream cheese. I was trying to drown the cake in frosting so it would taste better.

I won't lie to you, this tasted awful. I don't think it was even the fact that it had no sugar, it was the fact that I had clearly gone wrong somewhere in the recipe. You can tell from the dark colour  and lack of rise of the cake that something is wrong with it. Needless to say, I won't be putting vegetables in my cakes again any time soon. This whole baking week was not a success. Let's hope next week will be better.

GBBO 2015: Week 3 Bread - Banana Bread

I have been intending to make bread for absolute months, and now I actually have no choice but to make it! I decided to go with the signature bake of this weeks GBBO; quick breads. I had to google what these were, and found a list of examples of quick breads - and praise the gods, Banana Bread was on the list! I absolutely adore banana bread. Normally the things I bake take at least four days to get eaten by everyone in my house, but when I made this, it was gone in less than 24 hours - mostly into my mouth. This is just so easy to make and it is going to be a permanent feature in my kitchen from now on. I used Mary Berry's Banana Loaf recipe to make this.

Ingredients:

100g butter

175g Caster sugar

225g Self-raising flour

2 eggs

2 bananas

1tsp baking powder

1tbsp milk

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees celcius (fan oven) and then grease the loaf tin and line it with greaseproof paper. The bananas need to be mashed up with a fork until it is practically a liquid.

This recipe really is simple. Weigh out all of the ingredients and add them into a mixing bowl. 

Then simply mix them all together. 

And it's done! Ready to go into the oven. Let it bake for an hour. 

And voila! Heaven on a plate.

GBBO 2015: Week 1 Cakes - Madeira Cake

I was pretty happy when I read that the first week of GBBO included a Madeira cake as it is relatively simple to make - something which always gives me hope.

As I have never made a Madeira cake before, I decided to keep it plain and simple rather than trying to make it fancy and fail.

Ingredients:

200g Self-raising flour

175g butter

175g golden caster sugar

3 eggs

50g ground almonds

1tsp vanilla extract

grated zest of 1 lemon

First, prepare the scene! Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius, then grease and line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper. My papering skills aren't great so that's why mine looks a bit messy. I use the shove and hope method as I don't have the time or patience to be measuring and drawing on the paper.

Now to actually make the cake mix. Whisk together the butter and sugar.

Then add the eggs to the mixture one at a time. I'm not sure why it's done one at a time, I don't know what difference it makes. If someone does know, please feel free to leave a comment below explaining it to me!

Add the vanilla essence - I actually couldn't remember how much the recipe said to use so I dropped in a large teaspoon worth of it. Also grate the lemon so you only have the zest and then add that to the mixture. The lemon I used was on the large side and I think that was too much zest, so maybe next time I will use a smaller lemon.

Last but not least, add the flour and ground almonds to the mixture and whisk away!

Pour the mixture into the loaf tin and pop it in the oven for about 55-60 minutes.

Once the cake had cooled I dusted the top with some icing sugar as I think that always makes a cake look fancy.
I was actually really surprised and impressed with how the cake turned out. It has a good crack in the top which after watching GBBO, I have learned is a good thing, and it also tasted pretty good as my family enjoyed it and didn't complain.