Strawberry Cake with Crumbs

This recipe and these photos have been waiting publication for over a month and I'm finally finding a couple of minutes to upload and write down the recipe.

I've already made this cake repeatedly, only a couple of days ago I tried a new version with chocolate chips in it - the best according to my taste, and it is recently one of the preferred cakes in our family.

What makes it so unique is the perfect combination of fresh fruit, sponge cake and buttery crumbs on top, but I should add, that it also works with frozen fruit - not as juicy, but still quite good.

Ingredients:

For the sponge cake:

• 2 eggs
• 100 g sugar
• 80 g vegetable (sunflower) oil
• 120 g milk
• 200 g flour
• 10 g baking powder

For the crumbs: 

• 30 g butter
• 2 table spoons flour
• 2 table spoons sugar

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and milk, mix. Sift and add the four with the baking powder and a pinch of salt. I also add vanilla.

Pour the batter into your baking dish. Half the strawberries and arrange on top. 

To prepare the crumbs, grate the cold butter and mix it with the flour and the sugar, until you get buttery crumbs. Spread them on top of the cake.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for approx. 20 min. Serve with tea or coffee, best in the morning with your Duolingo lessons :)

These can also be made into muffins, if you don't mind the additional work :)

Blueberry Cake

I didn't plan to blog about this cake that I made yesterday afternoon, but it turned out so, so delicious, that I want the recipe in my recipe book, that is my blog.

I found the recipe somewhere on FB before Christmas, wrote it down on a small flying piece of paper, made it once in the form of muffins and forgot about it. The muffins were OK, but nothing special. Yesterday I came upon the piece of paper among my German notebooks and decided to make the recipe again, but this time as a cake. I'm not sure what I made different, but the resulting cake is super soft and moist, very aromatic and just a tad sour from the blueberries. I'm definitely making this again and I mean to try it with sour cherries too (as I have them in my freezer right now :).

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g sugar
• 40 sunflower oil + 40 g melted butter
• 220 g flour
• 130 g milk
• 10 g vanilla sugar, pinch of salt
  
• 7 g baking powder + baking soda
• 140 g frozen blueberries
  

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the oil and melted butter, incorporate in the eggs mixture. Add the milk, incorporate. Add the flour with the baking powder, baking soda, salt and vanilla sugar. Gently mix. Finally add the frozen berries. I did not let them soften this time, just added them directly from the freezer. Pour the batter into a baking form and bake in a preheated oven at 190C until golden. 

Serve cold with coffee or tea and enjoy!

My Favourite Muffins

In the days before Christmas we got a package we had ordered on AliExpress, containing 500 muffin liners. And that's how it all started :)))

I began experimenting with a simple vanilla muffin recipe, trying to perfect it to make exactly 12 puffy and delicious muffins. 

After several iterations, I found this to be the final (so far) perfect proportion of ingredients:

• 180 g flour
• 200 g sugar
• 2 eggs
• 100 g yogurt
• 80 g milk
• 40 g sunflower oil
•  pinch of salt
• 5 g baking powder + 2 g baking soda
  

To the above I might add vanilla, chocolate drops, cocoa, lemon zest, grated chocolate, raisins, nuts, etc.

Preparation: Mix and stir the wet ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir. Distribute in 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 200C for approx. 20 min, until a toothpick test shows the muffins are done.

 I've made these entirely chocolate flavoured, adding 25 g cocoa to the mixture

I tried them with lemon zest, lemon flavour and lemon icing

I tried them marbled

and even with pears in a cake form. And they tasted perfect with coffee every time!

Chocolate Pumpkin Cake

We still had several pieces of the roasted pumpkin left in the fridge today, so I made it into a chocolate pumpkin cake with chocolate glazing. The taste of the cake is predominantly chocolate, the pumpkin is there for moisture and texture. If Alex was not so averse to nuts and raisins, I would have added some to the cake too, I love my cakes full of stuff :)

Ingredients 

• 320 g roasted pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• 200 g sugar
• 80 g sunflower oil
• 220 g flour
• 20 g cocoa powder
• 10 g baking powder
  

Beat the eggs with the sugar and the oil. Add the roasted pumpkin and mix. Gradually add the flour, mixed with the cocoa powder and the baking powder.  The resulting batter is fairly viscous and sticky. Pour it in a  baking form and bake in a preheated oven at 180C until a toothpick, stuck in the center of the cake, comes out dry.

Alternatively you can pour the batter into muffin forms and bake the cake into muffins - this mixture should produce about 20 average size muffins.

Let the cake completely cool and then make the chocolate glazing. I melted 50 g of milk chocolate over boiling water, added 20 g milk and 10 g butter and generously poured the melted glaze over the cake.

Serve with coffee or tea and enjoy!

Pear Cake

Our family loves fruit. Winter or summer, the fruit bowl on the kitchen table is always full. However, from time to time some fruit look better than they taste, days pass and after the first try nobody is tempted to eat them and the fruit risk going bad.

This is what happened to these red pears I bought earlier this week. They looked nice, but were kind of watery and bland. I hate throwing food, so I came up with a recipe for a fruit cake, using the remaining four pears we had in our fruit bowl.

The batter for the cake uses only eggs, oil, sugar and flour, no milk, so it forms a very tasty meringue like crust, while the pears combine with the pastry and make it moist and juicy.

Next time I might try stewing the pears a little in advance, to make them taste more like pear jam.

• four average to small pears
• 1 pack vanilla sugar
• 3 eggs (150 g)
  
• 200 g sugar
• 50 g sunflower oil
• 150 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• 5 g combined spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves)
  

Grease the baking tray with butter, cut the pears into small pieces and cover with vanilla sugar. Beat the eggs with the sugar and the oil, add the flour, mixed with the baking powder and the spices. Pour the batter over the pears, sprinkle with brown sugar.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the toothpick test indicates that the cake is fully baked. Serve cold with coffee, tea or milk and enjoy!

Orange Marmalade Cake

Several years ago we found an orange marmalade brand in our local Lidl, that was very aromatic and excellent for putting into cakes and sweets. I had a favourite cake recipe I used to bake then with this jam. I don't remember it and whether it was my improvisation or I had read it somewhere, but I remember making this type of cake several times and it was a big success with family and friends.

And then, as it often happens with some recipes, I forgot about it. Recently husband brought home a jar of the same orange marmalade with a request for some orange cake. I looked at some recipes on the Internet, none grabbed me, so I decided to try something on my own, having been baking fruit cakes for many, many years now. I am really pleased with this latest one and this time I am putting it down to have it at hand when needed.

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 150 g sugar
• 200 g yogurt
• 60 g vegetable oil
• 220 g flour
• 10 g baking powder
• 180 g orange marmalade
• 50 g sugared lemon peel
• 50 g walnuts
• 30 g dry kumquats
  

Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the yogurt, oil and flour with baking powder. Mix into a batter. Add the marmalade, nuts and dried fruit. Pour into a baking form and bake for about 30 min in a preheated oven at 180C. The cake is moist, sweet and very, very aromatic. Enjoy with your coffee or tea.

Double Layer Apple Cake

Lately I've been baking cakes almost daily, mostly with apples. Usually the apples, when sliced, not grated, being heavier than the batter, fall to the bottom of the cake. So, I've been wondering what if ...
What if I baked half the batter and then added the apples and the upper half?! Would the bottom be overdone? And today I came upon this pumpkin pie recipe, that uses the double layer method. So the question was settled, I had to try a double layer apple cake.

For the filling I used the above kilogram of apples, peeled, sliced and stewed in their own juice with 100 g sugar.
For the cake batter:

• 2 eggs
• 180 g sugar
• 50 g oil
• 250 g yogurt + 5 g baking soda
• 300 g flour + 10 g baking powder 
• cinnamon, vanilla

Preheat the oven at 180C. Pour half of the batter in the cooking dish (mine is 28 cm in diameter). Bake for half an hour. Then take the dish out of the oven, spread the stewed apples, distribute the remaining batter on top of the apples and return the dish in the oven for another 30-40 min. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

The only shortcoming of this cake - it's too delicious and is gone too quickly :)))

Zebra Cake

Here's another brilliant idea I'm sharing with you today - the Zebra cake. I'm not sure who's the original author of the recipe, I saw a reference to it today in a forum and felt the familiar urge to try it immediately.
When I come upon such simple but spectacular ideas I feel like a person, walking along the road, rolling a square wheel and coming upon a guy, rolling a round wheel. Facepalm! How did it never occur to me before!

Follows the recipe as I made it just a couple of hours ago. I modified the quantity ratio of the ingredients to my family's taste - sweeter and less oily, you might prefer it otherwise.

Ingredients:

4 eggs

300 g sugar

300 ml milk

300 g flour

60 g oil

10 g baking powder

25 g cocoa powder

10 g instant coffee

Mix the eggs with the sugar until frothy, add the oil, the milk and the flour, sifted together with the baking powder. Divide the mixture into two bowls and add the cocoa and coffee (the latter is optional, I just like the subtle taste of coffee) into the second bowl. Prepare a round baking tin, covering it with baking paper, or oil and flour.

Now comes the fun part. Pour a ladle of the white mixture in the center of the tin. Then pour a ladle of the brown mixture in the center of the white mixture. Continue alternating the mixtures. The amazing part - you don't have to do anything to make them spread into concentrated circles - the viscose fluid nature of the cake mixture takes care of that. All you have to do is just pour a ladle of the mixture into the center and it will gradually spread to cover the tin.

My ladle-fuls were not perfectly equal, but that's part of the unique stripes of this zebra :)
Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the toothpick test indicates the cake is ready.

I'm sure your family and friends will be amazed by your cooking skills if you treat them to that cake :)

Enjoy!