Julie & Julia and Catching up

At the weekend I took my (extremely reluctant) husband to go and see Julie and Julia … when we came out two things had happened – firstly my husband had to admit that is was actually an AMAZING film (and I do agree it was great but more about that in a minute) and secondly I have come to the conclusion that I am going to actually do this blog thing properly.

 So, the film – it was great!  I really enjoyed it … admittedly when we got to the cinema to see that the average age of the people going to see it at 1.20pm on a Sunday was well …. significantly reduced by me and my husband and I think we were the only people NOT getting the seniors discount.  But it is a great film … very funny … very well made … both Amy Adams and Meryl Streep were brilliant and the guy in it is extremely good looking.  I definitely suggest that everyone everywhere go see it when they can.

 Secondly my blog – so I have been a bit rubbish at updating it and keeping it together so I am going to get back on with it and try and make more cakes to put on these pages and actually put all cakes up here rather than my current lack of postings!

One of the main reasons I make cakes is for my husband (and his very willing lab of taste testers) to enjoy!  Well, there is no chance I could eat everything I make so a lot goes to work with him.  Then once every so often he has to do a presentation to his colleagues and he likes to take a cake in with him (I think to occupy them so they don’t ask him any difficult questions) … and importantly this cake must be interesting and exciting (I think he likes to show off to his colleagues).  So for his most recent talk I made him a giant chocolate chip cupcake with some pretty pink buttercream icing.

  

The recipe was a very simple chocolate chip pound cake however you can use pretty much any recipe you want to use.  The buttercream is a plain vanilla buttercream coloured with pink food colouring and then sprinkled with mini chocolate chips. I don’t have the recipes at the moment but I will put them up later.

 Then, soon after finishing this cake, whilst sitting at work reading random websites I found this tri-colour marble cake and I just had to make it when I got home … so I did!  Now when I read the original recipe it said that the layers should be pink and green and the pink layer should be strawberry flavoured and the green layer should be mint flavoured.  I decided that strawberry and mint did not go together in a cake (in addition to which I didn’t actually have either of these flavourings) so I made the pink layer orange flavoured and the blue layer (I also didn’t have green colouring) I left vanilla flavoured.  Then the original recipe called for the plain layer to be vanilla at which point I concluded that I couldn’ t have two layers vanilla so added some Rum extract.

I also felt that it needed some pink buttercream icing, which I fortunately had left over from the giant cupcake (see how soon I did this one after the cupcake!) so that got added when the cake had cooled.  Below is the recipe with my changes included:

 

 Tri-colour Marble Cake

226g Butter (I only had salted butter so I used that and then didn’t add any additional salt)
220g Sugar
5 Eggs
260g Flour
4 tbsp Milk
1 tsp Baking powder
¼ tsp Salt (see above)
Food coloring – pink and green (or in fact any colours you happen to have in your cupboard)
Flavoring – mint/pandan, strawberry and Vanilla (again feel free to experiment I had rum and orange with the vanilla although it is probably a good idea to match colours to flavours e.g. pink = strawberry, green = mint but I didn’t worry about this)

1. Prepare a baking pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper and greased with some butter. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add in eggs one at a time and beat until well combined.

2. In a separate bowl, sift flour with baking powder and salt. Slow down the speed of the mixer and slowly add the flour to the butter, sugar and egg mixture. Lastly add in the milk.

3. Divide batter into 3 portions. This is where your experimentation comes in – each portion is made a different colour (2 colours and one plain) and a different flavour (2 flavours and one vanilla).   Stir well.

4. The most important part is assembling the batter in the baking pan. Drop about 3 tbsp of the batter to the middle of the baking pan, top with 3 tbsp of another colour then top with 3 tbsp of another colour and repeat until all batter is used. TRUST ME – Do not stir, swirl or shake the pan. The batter will spread on it own – just keep piling the batter one batch on top of the next.

5. Bake the cake in a pre-heated 350 degree F oven for an hour or until golden brown. Stand cake 10 minutes in pan then turn onto wire rack to cool.

Tags: Baking, Blog, blue, Buttercream, Cake, Chocolate, chocolate chip, cupcake, Decorations, film, giant cupcake, green, Julie and Julia, marble, orange, pink, pound cake, vanilla