Baking Tips: Cheesecake

Our top tip for baking cheesecake is to cook it using a water bath (sometimes called a bain marie).

You do this by placing your filled cake tin, onto a large piece of foil and fold it up around the sides of the tin. Then place the cake tin in a roasting tin and fill the roasting tin with about 5mm of water.

This water bath will stop the cheesecake drying out so you get a nice finish on your cheesecake with no little creases or cracks.

Birthday Cake

Growing up in a house full of boys, my mother-in-law has never had a birthday cake made for her, can you believe it? So, I created a yummy white chocolate and berry cake for her recent birthday.

I took some inspiration from one of Lorraine Pascale's cakes, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/i_cant_believe_you_made_90494) but changed it to a vanilla cake and white chocolate with berries, rather than a milk chocolate cake. I also used chocolate stick fingers rather than milk chocolate cigeroles.

I was really pleased with how it turned out and was devoured very quickly by all the boys!

P.S I am loving Marshmallow fluff right now - great lower calorie filler for whoopie pies and even just tastes good on a slice of toast (honestly)!!

Twitter...

We have gone all hi-tec and got ourselves a twitter account....

follow and tweet us @lottieb_bakery

Stay tuned for more!

Cardamon...

...not usually something you would associate with baking (more like curries!) but after checking out Jamie Olivers website, it is mentioned quite a lot in a few recipes, so thought I would experiment and give adding it to my baking a go.

First I made blueberry, orange & cardamon bread rolls...

They are sooo messy to make but lots of fun and really yummy!

I also tried adding cardamon to a banana loaf recipe (minus the bananas). It adds a nice spicy flavour that does work really well (and it tastes delish with a cup of herbal tea).

Super Chocolate Mousse...

This chocolate mousse is super for three reasons:

1. Super quick
2. Super easy
3. Super cheap

It seriously takes 5 minutes to make, 30 mins to set in the fridge and tastes amazing! I have also tried by adding a dash of orange juice and some orange zest (as my hubby loves chocolate orange), which also works really well.

Leftovers...

We had friends over for Pancake Day a few days ago, for pancakes, funnily enough. I got lots of different toppings in for all of our guests like the usual golden syrup, lemon and sugar.

I laos got in one of my favourite toppings; nutella and banana (it tastes amaze honestly)! Apparently not many of our guest are fans of those pancakes as we had so many bananas left over!

So with quite a cold day the following day, my baby boy and I decided to stay in and make a banana loaf and cinnamon and banana breakfast muffins - there are loads of possibilities with bananas. They aren't much to look at (hence why there aren't any pictures), but they taste great for a bit more of a savoury treat.

Bake sale

My little sister asked me to help make some buns for a charity bake sale at school and of course I jumped at the chance. Baking and helping a good cause at the same time, how can you resist!? However, I got a little bit carried away and was baking late into the night.

I didn't make any buns in the end. First I made some cake pops: Vanilla with white chocolate icing and hundreds and thousands and double chocoate with chocolate sprinkles! Yum!

Next I chose to adapt a bake sale favourite - rice krispies and made a rather delicious chocolate, fudge, peanut butter, rice krispie bar concoction. The bottom layer is corn syrup with peanut butter mixed with rice krispsies, put into a deep baking tin then I melted chocolate and fudge together to make the top layer. Wait for it to set then cut into bars! Simples.

Then I decided to experiment even more! I saw how to make honeycomb on the Great British Bake Off on BBC a while ago and thought it looked great fun and so I gave it a go. To be honest, I found it really simple and when it set I simply snapped it, weighed it into sweet bags and tied it up.

The bake sale was a success, so I hear, which is good news all round.

The honeycomb also gave me an idea for Crunchie-inspired cake pops. Watch this space....