Weekly Bake Off : Hokey-Pokey Coffee Cake

This week's Weekly Bake Off was a Hokey Pokey coffee cake. For those that aren't in the know (like me a week ago), Hokey Pokey is a praline made with nuts. The recipe specified walnuts, but I much prefer pecan nuts, and will use any excuse to eat them, so pecan nuts it was!

As with most of the recipes in the book, the cake was very easy to bake - another one bowl batter, and as my sanwich tins aren't quite 4cm deep, I used a bit less of the batter.

The praline was a bit more exciting - I made mine while the cake was in the oven, and was very nervous about it burning, but managed to get a lovely brown colour.

 Having watched people working with sugar and read quite a few blog posts with people's attempts at sugar craft, I knew not to stir the sugar/water while it was heating, and just swirled it in the pan.

Once it had turned the right colour, I tipped in the nuts, and that's the point where I wish I'd had a bit of warning about how fast the mixture would set - I barely had time to mix the nuts in and get them onto the greased baking tray before the sugar had completely hardened.

I had a few fun moments pulling long strands of sugar and thinking that it might be worth experimenting with some spun sugar in the future!

The cake was lovely and moist, with the nuts adding a nice texture, and the addition of the praline to the middle layer of icing was a very nice touch. This is definitely a cake to make when you want to impress someone (without too much work!)

Weekly Bake-Off : Maple Syrup Cake

I won't be writing much about this week's Weekly Bake Off bake, mostly because I'm typing this in the last 10 minutes of my lunch hour! This cake really illustrated to me the value of participating in the Bake-Off - I wouldn't ever have picked this to bake myself, but it was a spectacularly lovely tasting cake, with the flavours of orange, pecan nuts and maple syrup balanced beautifully (I was under the impression right up to writing my shopping list that the recipe called for walnuts and was thrilled to see it was pecan nuts - my favorite). My cake didn't rise quite as much as everyone else's, and had a bit of a dip in the middle - I blame peeking at 1hour to check its' progress (my oven doesn't have a light)!

I decided to use an orange butter icing instead of the cream icing, as I am not the biggest fan of cream cakes and was very happy with the result, even though you can't see the middle layers, there's a nice bit of orangey sweetness as a highlight.

Experimenting a bit with photos taken on my iPod using Instamatic (background is a lovely green chopping board from Ikea!).