Baking Archives - Zeens and Roger

Quick Summer Holiday Baking – Coconut Rock Buns.

August 10, 2016cooking10 Comments

I remember making and eating these when I was little. They’re coconut rock cakes and this is a really easy recipe. The kids and I made these last week. They were made and ready to eat within half an hour! Not too bad. So, if you’re having one of those days, when you can’t be bothered to go out and the kids need something to do, then this is your summer holiday treat!

The bad news for me was that I discovered my scales were broken when I went to make them, so I had to guess the measurements. I then had a think and roughly worked out that things could be rounded to the nearest cup sizes. Surprisingly, they worked well! I’m looking at this as a positive, it means that you don’t have to be exact, which is great when baking with children.

Ingredients:

1 cup/120g self raising flour

Half a cup/100g caster sugar

115g salted butter cut into cubes. (I cut a normal 250g pack at just under the half way point).

1 cup dessicated coconut. If you don’t like coconut you can also use raisins (it’d be the weight equivalent rather the cup equivalent though and that’d be just over 100grams.

1 large egg

100-150ml milk. Take it easy and see how it goes. I just sploshed it in and didn’t measure exactly.

Method:

Using fingers and thumbs, rub the flour and butter together in a good sized bowl. This is easy and doesn’t take as long as you think it will. You can cheat and whazz it in a food processor but that just makes for more washing up.

Stir in the sugar and coconut.

Add the egg and milk and mix into a stiff dough. It’s a bit like making ugly scones, so that’s the sort of consistency you’re after. I might have added too much milk to mine, which is why they’re a bit flat. I don’t think it matters that much as they still taste pretty yum.

Plop some dollops on to two lined baking trays (we used two dessert spoons to help) and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes. I’ve got a gas oven, so it’s Gas Mark 6. Google tells me that that’s 180 degrees C for fan, 200 degrees C for not fan! Or 400 F.

Be warned, maybe you’d like to call them Coconut Rock Buns instead of cakes. I gave these to a friend’s offspring and they looked at them and delcared that they weren’t cakes at all and didn’t want them. As soon as I changed the name, they ate them all…

And then May was over…

June 1, 2016June 2, 2016cooking, crafty, crochet12 Comments

May has been a month of birthdays and flowers. It begins with one (mine!) and ends with one and there are some in the middle. I’ve made a lot of cake. Yesterday I made a flippin’ gorgeous cake for Grandma (my mother-in-law!).

I don’t often wander outside of my cakey bakey comfort zone. I stick to what I know because I will at least get something that works. However, I went rogue and found a new one on a blog!! Sometimes I get lost in all the recipes but I was very firm and decisive. I chose this moist and fluffy Vanilla cake.

I chose a stunner. Honestly, it was really good. I’m so glad I went with it because, well, I almost didn’t. I got all my ingredients ready (nothing daft, just ordinary cake ingredients) but hadn’t actually read the recipe properly. When everything was out and I was about to begin, I got all confused. This recipe is just egg whites, no yolk. Wha? Never seen that before. Thought it was just gonna be an ordinary sponge. Anyway, I went with it and out came a goodun.

I can’t leave anything alone though. I am not a strict follower of recipes. I grated in the zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange. I also only needed two cakes not three so did a bit of maths to sort that too. My insides were 300ml of double cream, a couple of spoons of icing sugar sieved in, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Whipped together and splodged inside, it made a very summery and delicious sponge cake. And I chopped strawberries and left them for a couple of hours in a weeny bit of sugar before spooning those on top of the cream. If you want a birthday cake for the summer, this is it. I ate it for my breakfast this morning too. Still yummy.

Anyway, moving on from talking about cake. I began this green crochet blanket a few weeks ago. It got sidelined by a couple of other wips but I got it out again yesterday and I’m enjoying it again. The pattern is easy to follow and I just know it’s going to look awesome. It’s called the Diamond Stitch baby blanket.

This was one of the things that distracted me. Just a granny square blanket. But I needed to see what the colours would look like when I put them all together. Needed to.

The weather was glorious at the weekend so everyone sat outside to enjoy it. I finished off the granny square (it was never meant to be a giant).

It was so lovely we decided to have a BBQ in the garden. Another Yum moment. Love a BBQ but often too lazy to bother…

It always takes a while to get going because I don’t use firelighters. Instead I cross my fingers that I’ll find enough twigs in the garden to start it off.

I’m still doing this. I started in the middle of March and haven’t got very far. It will look nothing like this once finished. I was just going to keep building up the layers to see what happened. I have a bouquet of wild spring flowers in mind. I was moving on from some mini spring flower applique/embroidery type thingies I made a a couple of months ago. A bigger project seems to have scuppered me somewhat.

And then there was the shawl I made. I really do love this, It’s a delight!

I love that edging. I have never been able to come up with something like that from my own brain (not yet anyway). I went and treated myself to Cherry Hearts’ Victoria shawl. I mentioned this a little bit on the last post but I just want to show some more pictures of it because I like it so much.

In real life my walls are a soft mossy green. Not the vommy putrescence they appear to be here.

Last shawl pic. Until I make another one that is.

And that’s it for now. Just felt like I needed a catch up. Oh! But whilst I’m here I’m going to say thank you to Hannah at a Box of Buttons for nominating me for a Liebster Award and Eleanor from Harebells Crochet for nominating me for The Creative Blogger Award. Dead chuffed to get these, thank you so much. I’m not going to have time to do it properly. Basically, the bloggers I would end up nominating are in my blog roll on the side bar, so go and check those out! In my usual half arsed way I will share 5 facts about myself (and only because I did a fact thing on Instagram a few weeks ago and I’m just going to copy those!).

1. I have a degree in Art History. I have forgotten most of what I learned.

2. The longest job I ever had was working at the Odeon in Exeter (a long time ago during uni and after, when I couldn’t get a “real” job). I still have dreams where I’m cleaning up popcorn.

3. I’m from Southampton but I’ve lived in Devon for about 16/17 years.

4. I love books, TV and movies. I used to do a lot of of watching/reading before children and crochet. Children get put to bed and crochet gets put aside for The Walking Dead and A Game of Thrones (no spoilers please, I can’t get season 6 of GoT yet!).

5. Actually these facts aren’t that interesting so I think I’ll stop. Ooh, number 5… I’m really boring!

A Really Easy Minecraft Cake.

April 15, 2016June 23, 2016cooking15 Comments

You know those amazing cakes you see on Pinterest, yeah, this isn’t one of those. I am not a baker. I love cooking, I am good at making food that tastes nice and I love eating, but I am not a baker. If you’re the same as me then you can probably make this recipe and feel half way pleased with yourself! Ok, so it isn’t Pin worthy but it’s alright. I’m not good at decorating cakes so I think simple is best. I’ve tried being fancy before but it just doesn’t work.

This recipe has evolved from a different one that a friend passed to me a few years ago. If ever I want chocolate cake this is the recipe I go to. Over the years I’ve made tweaks and changes, so much so that I now think I’m allowed to call it an original!

It’s dead easy to do as it’s an all in one method for the cake and you can cheat even further by using self raising flour instead of farting about with baking powder and bicarb!

Easy Chocolate Mine Craft Cake:

275 grams plain flour.

1.5 tsp baking powder.

1.5 tsp bicarb

3 tbsp cocoa powder

210 grams caster sugar

3 tbsp golden syrup

210 ml sunflower oil

210 ml milk

3 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract.

Half tsp salt.

Sift all the dry ingredients into a big bowl, then add the wet ingredients. Whazz together with an electric whisk and divide into two 7″ square tins (lined with greaseproof paper). Put them in the oven Gas Mark 4/160c, for 35-40 minutes. I don’t have a fan oven so I swap the tins over after 25 minutes). Sticking a skewer into the middle will tell you if it’s done. If it’s clean it’s done, if it’s not then it needs a few extra minutes. Take out the oven and leave to cool.

cake mix

The cakes won’t be 100% flat and you want them to be as flat as possible. That means slicing a bit of cake off the top of each. These can be taste tests bits, you need to taste plenty of it to make sure it’s ok.

Butter Cream Icing:

500 grams of softened salted butter (I microwave cubes of cold butter in a bowl to soften it in 4-5 second blasts, mixing around after each blast. Works for me).

500 grams icing sugar, sifted. (I like my icing buttery so this is how much I use. Most people add up to twice this amount for real butter icing. You can freeze leftovers!)

1 tsp Vanilla extract.

Mix the above ingredients thoroughly together in a big bowl. Take a generous quarter of the mix and put into another bowl. Sift and mix 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder into the big bowl. Squirt two tubes of green food colouring into the small bowl of icing and mix (Aldi do a good version of the Dr Oetker gel colouring but I couldn’t be bothered to drive just to get some).

Smoosh on the chocolate butter cream to the bottom square and then sandwich on the top one, which I place upside down to give you a square top. Before I start doing this I tuck bits of greaseproof paper under the cake to stop the board getting messy. (Next time I want to see if decorating somewhere else, then transferring it will work better because I ended up tearing half the icing off the bottom when I removed the paper…ho hum).

Once sandwiched together, put more of the chocolate buttercream around it, filling in gaps. A knife in some hot water will neaten up corners and make it more cubey.

The green icing is spread on the very top. Use the flat of a knife to pat over the top to create grass. I add chocolate sprinkles to the sides for dirt. I empty it into my hand and then gently throw/spread it on. Then you eat it!