Valentines Brigade

MEETING 23

DATE: 10th February 2011 (I think?)
PLACE: Faulkner's
MEMBERS: Faulkner, Bradley

Once again, this Brigade meeting was a fair amount of time ago, so I can't recall the details precisely. However, I do recall finding heart shaped cake cases in Sainsburies. Whether or not this was the inspiration behind this meeting, or whether we were going to make cupcakes anyway, I don't remember.

VALENTINES CAKES

 Using a basic sponge recipe, we intended to make one batch of plain cakes, and one of chocolate. As such, we halved the mixture for the plain cakes before adding coco-ah to the remainder to make the chocolate ones. I think, however, we used too much coco-ah, or something went wrong that ended up with us hurriedly adding more butter and eggs and flour to even up the mix. As such, we ended up with a hell of a lot more chocolate cakes than we had originally intended.
I'm sure we put iced them some way or another, but I neither have the photos nor the memory.

RATING ****
As far as I can remember, they tasted good. But as you may have guessed, I don't remember much about them at all.

















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Experiments with Coffee, by Non-Coffee-Consumers

MEETING 22

DATE: 3rd February 2011
PLACE: Faulkner's
MEMBERS: Faulkner, Bradley, Polson


The purpose of this meeting was to make a 'thank you' cake for a certain now-revealed-to-be-a-douche male friend of the Faulkner clan, and as such, a Coffee Walnut Cake was decided upon due to said douche's preference. However, none of the brigade members like coffee, or walnut for that matter, so we followed a recipe down to the finest detail, although whether this was a good thing or not has yet to be determined.

I have a feeling that we also made flapjack, I may be wrong though. It was a long time ago.

COFFEE WALNUT CAKE

 To make this cake, we followed the recipe from a bakery book donated to the Cake Brigade by Bradley Senior. Now, as I have explained previously, none of us like coffee. None of us drink coffee. So when the recipe said to add 4 teaspoons of instant coffee, we added 4 teaspoons of instant coffee. NOWHERE DID IT SAY TO MAKE IT INTO LIQUID FIRST. We only realised our mistake after the coffee grains didn't dissolve in the cake mix. None the less, we carried on anyway, and I have to admit, it at least looks pretty good. It matches the photo in the book almost perfectly.
We don't know how it tasted, having not tried it, but I believe it all got eaten so it cant have been that bad, surely. Maybe a bit strong, or grainy, but edible all the same.

RATING ***
An average score purely for the presentation. Next time, make the coffee into liquid before adding it to the mixture, obviously. I doubt we will make it again.
















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The One Where Members Bradley and Edkins Were Super Helpful

MEETING 21

DATE: 13th December 2010
PLACE: Faulkner Base
MEMBERS: Faulkner, Bradley, Edkins


Member Faulkner has a male friend that appreciates Faulkner making him lemon drizzle cakes. He also appreciates Terry's Chocolate Orange. He also celebrates the anniversary of his birth in December, and so Faulkner invited the Brigade around to help her make a Chocolate Orange Drizzle Cake.

This was something she had experimented with before and had given to Member Bradley to taste test as she doesn't like it herself. Bradley thought that it was good.

As such, Bradley and Edkins showed up to help with good intention, but then spent the entire evening out of the kitchen with Faulkner Senior buying Avon from Bradley while Faulkner slaved away on her own.

THAT my friends, is true dedication to the meaning of the Cake Brigade.

CHOCOLATE ORANGE DRIZZLE CAKE

Having not been present for the making of either version of this cake, I cant tell you much about the making of it. I believe she adapted the recipe from a Lemon Drizzle Cake recipe, instead using orange with chocolate buttercream and chocolate orange segments to decorate.

As far as I am aware, she encountered no major problems, and I don't believe there is anything that we would change if we were to make this cake again.

As you can see, it looks great and I can assure you that the first version at least tasted great, too.

RATING *****

I would like to make this again one day, just so I know how. The best bit was eating the left over chocolate orange, although we did so quickly and consequently felt sick.

I don't remember much else about this Brigade meeting, other than that I made quite a lot of money for Avon.

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LAAAAZZZZYYY

I have a LOT of catching up to do on this blog. And I mean A LOOOOTTTT.

I have at least Chocolate Orange Drizzle Cake, Coffee Walnut Cake, Valentines Cupcakes and several loner brigades to update on, but I am lazy, and thought I would blog about how I have yet to blog about them rather than actually doing it.

This is called procrastination, my friends, and I am an expert at it.

Fellow Brigaders, I hope you know that YOU could blog this stuff as well, rather than waiting on me to do it. Just sign up on blogger, and I'll add you on to this blog so you can update it. However, I will not be held responsible for my editing your posts. God knows I go back and edit mine enough.

This is called perfectionism, my friends, and I am an expert at it.

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Loner Brigade: London Edition

Meeting 20

Date: 21st January 2011
Place: Neilan's (London Branch)
Members: Neilan. On her own. Like a loser.

On Friday, I got a text message from Neilan, telling me how she was jealous of our brigading without her, and so had endeavoured to brigade on her own, making a Cheesecake WITHOUT A RECIPE. Although it looks to have turned out well, if Neilan would like to send me details, I could make this post less skeletal. *hint hint*

WHITE CHOCOLATE, HONEY AND BANANA CHEESECAKE:
 I have nothing to write here, having neither made it nor tasted it. Neilan mentioned lots of Philadelphia, she could let us know if she used light or full fat. She could also tell us any problems she may have had, or anything she particularly was proud of. For example, did Detective Vlad the kitten like it? Why did she put celery in it?

RATING: ??
It does look good though.



That's all, kids. Neilan, if you weren't expecting that, you're an idiot.

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New Year: New Bakes (Almost)

Meeting 19 - New Year: New Bakes (Almost)

Date: 18th January 2011
Place: Bradley's
Members: Bradley, Faulkner, Polson


Welcome to 2011, fellow Cake Brigaders! I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I redesigned the CB Blog a little, what do you think? I'm going to change the content somewhat too, to make it somewhat more instructional rather than documentary. I'm also going to link what recipes we use, in addition to Faulkner and I making our own Cook Scrapbooks, so as to avoid loosing the recipes we liked!

Welcoming back Polson from her travels, we started off the Cake Brigade this year with hope in our hearts and excitement in our eyes. This year, we are going to make NEW THINGS and be more adventurous. After all, the whole point of the Cake Brigade is for the enjoyment of baking just as much as it is for the eating, if not more so, so we came to the conclusion some time ago that we needed to branch out somewhat. So, this meeting, we intended to make Chocolate Fondant, Lamingtons, Coffee & Walnut Cake, Flapjack (for old times sake) and an entirely new thing for the Cake Brigade by baking something savory, BREAD.

However, obviously we once again overestimated what we could achieve in the time we had, so only made half of these things.


CHOCOLATE FONDANT:
We used this recipe from the BBC Food website, and they turned out quite well. The only problems we encountered were that the flour didn't settle into the mixture particularly well, and even though they were in the oven for at least the suggested time, they still seemed a little undercooked, being more fondant than sponge. Other than this, they were surprisingly easy to make, and tasted great both hot and cold. They looked great when they first came out of the oven, but obviously dropped after a few minutes, which was disappointing but to be expected.

RATING: ****
Recommended and would make again, but some adjustments needed to the original instructions.





FLAPJACK:

An old favourite, this idea was thrown in at the last minute purely because we fancied it at the time. We don't use a set recipe for our CB Flapjack, instead just throwing together the melted butter, sugar and golden syrup with the oats then baking for half an hour, which is why it turns out different every time. This one, in my opinion, wasn't particularly good or up to our usual standards. It was a bit too dry, which is surprising as the mixture was stickier than normal.

RATING: ***
You cant really go wrong with Flapjack, but maybe we should start measuring the ingredients rather than just throwing them all in. We should add something new into them to make them a bit different.




BREAD
We used the basic white bread recipe from the Women's Weekly 'Muffins and Bread' bakery book, and were very happy with how it turned out. We were a little apprehensive as none of us had ever done anything like baking bread before, and we didn't have particularly high hopes. We didn't follow the recipe exactly, as it was meant to be our dinner and we were hungry, so couldn't be bothered waiting for it to rise as long as we should have done. Also, even though we topped it with oats, they didn't stick, but this was due to us cutting corners again, but despite this, it was soft and fluffy with a good crust.

RATING: ****
Highly recommended and would defiantly make it again. There is a whole host of options open to adapt this recipe, from toppings to shapes, but to get the best result, it is probably best to follow the recipe!



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Culinary Creativity

Meeting 18 - Culinary Creativity

Date: 2nd December 2010
Place: Cake Brigade Member Bradley's Unit Base
Members: Bradley, Faulkner, Palmer


You may remember how a few posts ago, I mentioned how we were bored of always making the same things. Which is true, as without anything to challenge us, we have lacked the ambition to brigade over the past few months. However, following my discovery of this and this, we found some inspiration, and gave our newest cake brigade member; Member Palmer, a baptism of fire.


As you can imagine, even though the Rainbow Cake is a simple enough thing to bake, it look time. We had to bake 6 cakes of different colours, and allow them all to cool completely before we could frost it. To begin with, we struggled with the colourings, as it is hard to tell what colour the cake will bake to and we didn't want any of the layers to be too similar. We needed it to stand out; to look as vibrant as possible without the amount of food dye compromising the density of the cake itself. The most problematic layer was the orange, but in the end, they all turned out well. We left the cake to cool overnight, and then I frosted it with a ridiculous amount of chocolate butter cream. Originally, we had be unsure about using a dark frosting as it might dull the effect of the coloured layers, but chocolate butter cream being the most tasty, there really wasn't much else we could do, so in the end we had no choice but to submit to the chocolaty goodness.


Here follows some animated GIFs. Yeah, they're cool.

For the Cupcake Stuffed Cupcakes, we first made mini plain cupcakes, and left them to cool before we frosted them with chocolate butter cream (what else). We then made the batter according to the recipe linked earlier, and filled the normal cupcake cases with the mix, squishing in a mini cake and covering with more batter. Originally, we had planned to do cupcake stuffed cupcakes stuffed with cupcakes, but had to reign ourselves in when we realised it was quite late, and so our muffin cases went unused.

In theory, they worked well; they are, after all, cupcakes stuffed with cupcakes. However, the batter did spread somewhat during baking, and the outer cupcake layer was quite thin, so it may have been better if we had used the mini cakes to stuff the muffin sized cakes rather than the ordinary sized ones.

No GIFs this time, you can have normal pictures.

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