Lame-ington Cakes

The last time I wrote a wonderful baking pun filled blog post was almost a week ago now and I feel I have the obligation to share with you the numerous wonders I've created in those days. Admittedly, the fact that I've been very busy means that I have missed out on a couple of day's worth of baking but I'm sure I will catch up in the very near future.

A few days ago my attempt at making English Breakfast muffins went about as well as you could possibly hope for something as uninspiring and boring sounding as breakfast muffins. What I was amazed by is that they are not - as I had assumed - made by baking them in the oven like any other kind of roll (or muffin for that matter). But are instead fried in pan once they have risen to about as much as they can. It does explain why they do sometimes come out with the griddle marks on them, but for some reason this just never clicked in my mind! They are very tasty and the best bit is I get to make myself eggs benedict, a treat I've always been too hungover to manage to get from a Wetherspoons on a weekend out!

The Result:

Mmmm.... Umm Plainy?

The next baking misadventure which crossed my path in the week was the weird and wonderful world of cookies and biscuits. Last time I tried making biscuits I ended up with the most beautiful gingernut biscuits I've ever had, and I mean PERFECT (See for yourself here), they looked shop bought and tasted far better than shop bought ones so it was a wonderful evening for all! Yet, here only a few days later I tried Chunky Apricot and Nut Cookies and the results were, let's say, not as successful.

On the one hand, they were very tasty and were well cooked and the rest of it. On the other hand they look like devil's spawn. I seriously do not understand just how cookie companies can get cookies to look the way they do so regularly, I mean just look at these abominations! They are misshapen, malformed, malposed misfits... even though they do taste rather marvelous. I would say it is luck but it clearly isn't if manufacturers are managing it just right every time, what on earth is their secret to the perfect art of cookie making!? Perhaps only relentless and daily baking will solve this problem... How fortunate for me!

The Second result:

Mmmmalformed

Which is brings us to this fine summers Sunday afternoon (which just so happens to be father's day) on which I suddenly realised that I ha barely baked at all for the last few days. Yes, I had traveled from here to there for a few days of drinking & debauchery and returned in time to squeeze into a suit for a wedding but there should always be time for baking and so I simply had to get cooking as soon as my increasingly unwilling body was ready to take another dose of sugar, eggs and butter. 

- It is with extreme sorrow that I say that my once willing body is now not only lacking the desire to eat such large quantities of baked goods but it is also scarily addicted to them. I literally cannot manage a day without a daily (and usually large!) dose of some form of unhealthy food. My once healthy body has become a chugging, lumbering, butter fueled behemoth. I'm not even halfway through this challenge God help me! -

So I decided to try out Lamington Cakes. These are essentially a form of sponge cake (though it is certainly not one I've ever encountered before!) which is made from furiously whisking a few eggs with sugar whilst gently heating them over hot water. When I say furious I mean that this whisking session was brutal. Not only was it a lengthy and painful whisking but it also barely made the product I was aiming for ("something pale a fluffy but which had some body to it"... No, I have no idea to make something fluffy and have body to it!).

Finally having almost permanently paralysed my right arm whisking I went straight to sieving the plain flour into it (another recipe misnomer; why not self raising?) which promptly made my "fluffy" egg and sugar mix sink into its original form. So basically, thoday hasn't gone well!

Yet, after half an hour or so in the oven it came out looking pretty solid (suspiciously so I would say...) so I wasn't too fussed. Dipping them in chocolate icing and then rolling them about in dessicated coconut was also a difficult process and certainly nowhere near as enjoyable as it sounds. Essentially I got chocolate icing everywhere; on my fingers, arms, face, trousers, elbow, hair, work surface, fridge. Yet I ended up with some rather pretty looking Lamington Cakes!

The Result:

Mmmm, Coconutty

They may have been way too hard in the middle (I can only attribute this to either my lack of arm muscles in the whisking process or -less likely - that it should have been self raising flour not plain for the recipe), they cerainly weren't the spongey morsel I'd hoped. However,the icing on the cake (pun intended of course) was the delicious layer of chocolate and coconut on the outside something which worked tremendously!