Hello World and the Ultimate Sponge Cake Recipe.

I haven't been blogging long and I'm just getting used to certain aspects of it. Lovely emails from strangers who have questions or comments are so nice to receive and I also love looking at my stats. I'm a number lover, statistics was a favourite module at Uni once I'd mastered it and I can't tell you my joy at a well put together pie chart, so I have started to check my blog stats.

As of today, I have had hits on this page from the following countries...

United Kingdom
United States
Palestine
Germany
France
Guadeloupe
Peru
Netherlands
Argentina
Malta

How amazing is that? So Hello World, Bonjour Guadeloupe, Hola Peru, Hello Malta, Marhaba Palestine, Hello everyone and thank you for taking time to read my blog. Its nice to know somebody is listening ;-)

On to the pressing matter of cake.......

This is the definitive, 'never fail', sponge cake recipe as shared by my mother who made my fabulous mountain/ski themed wedding cake. My husband and I met on a ski trip in 2008 when I was working in a hotel in the Alps. He came along with 10 friends and the rest is well documented history.......

Preset your oven to 180 oC, maybe a little less, around 170 oC for a fan oven and grease and line 2 x 9 inch  round cake tins, mum uses metal tins, I use silicon, the war continues.....

The trick is all about weighing your eggs, which is serious news to me, but on further research, my hero Simon Hopkinson also weighs his eggs so who I am I to disagree. Weigh three medium eggs, in their shells and whatever the eggs weigh, match equal amounts of butter, caster sugar and self raising flour.

Cream together the butter and sugar until pale and very fluffy. To the butter/sugar mixture, add your flavourings, the options are endless but try the following..

Half a teaspoon of vanilla essence or bean paste

or

One teaspoon of lemon juice or limoncello

or

One teaspoon of instant coffee dissolved with a few drops of hot water.

Add one of your eggs to the butter/sugar/flavour mixture and one third of your flour. Keep your mixer or whisk on the slow setting to incorporate everything together and repeat with your second egg and another third of flour, then your last egg and the rest of your flour.

If making chocolate sponge, replace 3 tablespoons of flour with 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder.

Blast your mixture on full for a couple of seconds to get some air through the mix but be careful not to cover yourself, just drape a clean tea towel over the bowl to avoid a mess.

Divide your mixture between the two tins and bake for around 20 minutes until firm and light brown. 

Remember the skewer trick if you are uncertain. Pop a skewer, kebab stick, or cocktail stick into the centre of the cake, if it comes out clean it is done. If it is still a little sticky, you might need another five minutes before checking again.

Leave the sponges to cool in the tins for a few minutes, then turn on to a wire rack and leave to cool completely.

If you are cooking a large wedding cake like mine, you can cook the sponge ahead of time and freeze them. Place your cold sponges carefully into large freezer bags and freeze them until you need them. They defrost in a few hours and are much easier to ice and handle when they are very cold.

Fillings are at your discretion depending on your tastes. Lemon curds work well in lemon sponges and really good strawberry jam is essential when making a vanilla sponge. Frosting for the filling is easy, just beat 80g of butter and slowly add 250g of icing sugar until it looks pale and tastes sweet. if you need to loosen the mixture, add a teaspoon of milk as you need it.

The cakes were covered with ready roll fondant icing, rolled out thinly and covered carefully. The bumpy snowscape was achieved by putting cherries under the icing. Dry cherries such as fresh and pitted or glace cherries work well.

All this was finished off with edible snow, available on Amazon or cooking stores such as Lakeland and decorated with easy to find plastic trees, which if you have ever made a Christmas cake or a Yule log you'll have knocking about. The pylons and ski hut were from Hornby train sets which again, are easy to find on line or at your toy shop.

Etsy.com is also a brilliant place to visit to find unique, handmade or vintage items with which to decorate your cake, like these little characters below. 

Have loads of fun and don't be afraid to make your own wedding cake, scratch that, don't be afraid of making your daughters wedding cake or your friends, sisters, families, with a bit of imagination and practice, you'll create something brilliant, make it personal, hilarious and special and importantly, you will save an absolute fortune.

Sneaky Peeky Wedding Cakey.

This piece of cake genius was my wedding cake, made by my brave and talented mother.

What you can't see are the tiny silver charms of snowboarders and skiers and the little chairlifts on the pylons which were so cute and shiny and original. It was so light and moist, tasted great and looked superb. I plan on wrenching the recipes for all four flavours of cake and where to buy edible snow, from her when she returns from her trip to the Alps. Watch this space.

DIY Cheese Tower and being terribly sorry.....

The terribly sorry bit is an apology for my absence for the last 2 MONTHS! I have been preparing to legally become Mrs Burr and last Saturday this happened. We got married at Windsor Guildhall in bright sunshine to rapturous applause from a thousand tourists and most of the restaurants up on Church Street.

I was so nervous and rather stressed the night before as we had chosen to do a bit of a DIY wedding and so the prep was heinous. After tipis went up, tables were laid and cake was created, everyone left except the puppy and I set to decorating the Cheese Tower which had been delivered the day before.

Most of my greatest triumphs have occurred when I have been totally strung out, early in the morning and the Cheese was no exception.
The cheese was courtesy of The Cheese Shed, who were excellent and their website is a huge amount of fun even if you don't need a cheese tower. The Cheese builder tool provides hours of fantasy cheese shopping.

There are ready selected towers online but we decided created our own and chose a 4 kg wheel of Wensleydale as a nice sturdy base, then a Smoked Wedmore on top, all 2.4 kg of it. The smoked cheese gave the whole tower a wonderful aroma, you could really smell it coming, and the orange rind was a lovely zing of colour against the pale Wensleydale.
As we had lots of pregnant ladies we opted for all pasteurised cheeses and the hard goats cheese we sampled was creamy and so moreish. Woolsery is four month matured and from Dorset, it is now my new favourite cheese and I have it on good authority that it makes superb cheese on toast.

As a nod to our friends from the west country we topped the Woolsery with a Cornish Yarg. Covered in a nettle skin it has a very rustic look and has a satisfying crumble. The key to choosing your cheeses has got to be style as well as taste and the Yarg has both in heaps.

No Cheese Tower worth its biscuits leaves out the blue, and although we originally ordered the Cornish Blue we ended up with Colston Bassett Stilton, which was apt as working in that dairy was one of my first jobs. I was the smelliest 17 year old in the village but boy did I get to eat a lot of cheese.

The two smallest cheeses were Eve and Gevrik which are both soft goats cheeses, however in the picture you can't see the Gevrik as I believe it was nommed before the cheese hit the table. I'm giving a suspicious sideways glance to my mother.

To decorate the cheese I placed the Wensleydale on a big chopping board. Nothing fancy, just the one I use everyday but given a really good scrub and dried well.

On the board I laid some safe flat foliage and herbs. You can use fennel fronds or spicy globes, flowering chives also look lovely but hard to find unless you grow them yourselves. Place the first cheese on the foliage and layer other herbs of your choice on top of the first wheel. I used Rosemary between the Wensleydale and the Wedmore and placed small, hard white buds and Lemon Thyme between the Yarg and the Stilton.

To add some colour and texture to the tower and to provide some garnish, I used Muscat grapes and yellow and red cherry tomatoes. Muscat grapes are a lovely muted purple colour and aren't as bright or uniform as the regular black or green grapes you snack on. Muscat grapes are available at Waitrose along with cherry tomatoes in different colours and shapes. To secure the grapes and tomatoes all you need are lots of cocktail sticks, pointed at an angle into the cheese at regular intervals. Its best to put the grapes onto the cocktail sticks, stalk hole first. Obviously, 'stalk hole' isn't the technical term.

If your little tomatoes have the green pith leaves from the vine still on them then attach them through the bottom to show off some colour contrast.
I really wanted to decorate the cheese with Physalis too, as their soft orange colour and brown papery leaves are perfect for the overall natural look. Unfortunately, I just couldn't find any. Nor could I get hold of any fresh figs which would look charming cut in half and placed on the board.

As with everything, less is more and although there are so many ways of decorating a tower in line with any theme, I garnished delicately and ultimately let the cheese do the talking.

I am so pleased with the overall homespun, countrified look of the tower and it complimented the wedding styling beautifully.

I have so many pictures and ideas for brilliantly decorated cheese towers if any one needs them, but if it all seems to much, message me and if you live in Berkshire, Hampshire or Surrey, I'd be happy to do it for you. Through the fuzz of 1 AM pre-wedding day nerves, it was very rewarding and so much fun.

 P.S. 12-15kg of decorated cheese is very heavy! It took my husband, my brother-in-law and Sophie 'helping' to carry it from the house.