Tuesday 23 August 2011

Coffee cake for a special lady

Last week it was a very special person's birthday, my mum, so of course I had to make her a birthday cake. She loves coffee cake, so I grabbed my favourite recipe book from the shelf (which I actually 'acquired' from her). It's called 'The Love of Cooking', and was published in 1972. It is very dog-eared, but I love it all the same, and it has some of my most trusted recipes.

I wanted to make a nice, simple but delicious cake, so I adapted a recipe from the book and here was the finished result:


The recipe and method was as follows:

200g butter
200g caster sugar
4 eggs
200g self-raising flour
4 teaspoons instant coffee (I just used coffee mixed with a drop of hot water, but by all means just use coffee flavouring-I suggest adding more or less coffee to suit your personal tatse)
If desired, you could also add around 50g chopped walnuts

  • Pre-heat oven to 180C and grease and line a 7cm round tin (you can split the mixture between 2 tins, or bake in one and cut in half once it's cold to fill - again it's down to personal taste!)
  • Cream butter and sugar with coffee flavouring until light and fluffy
  • Beat in eggs one at a time, adding a tablespoon of flour with each
  • Fold in the rest of the flour
  • Bake near centre of oven for around 20-25 mins until golden
For the icing, I made a simple coffee flavour buttercream, which as usual I just threw together until it looked (and tasted!) right. By estimation I think I used around about the following amounts:
  • 125g butter
  • 250g icing sugar
  • 2tsp coffee flavouring
That is just a rough guess, so I suggest adding icing sugar bit by bit until you get the consistency you want!

I finished by filling and covering the cake, and gave it a light dust of cocoa powder. I then made some dark chocolate coffee bean shapes, using a mould I bought when I visited the amazing Cadbury World last year (chocoholics heaven!) and voila! Birthday cake for my mum :)


4 comments:

  1. This looks gorgeous I'm sure mum loved it! Happy belated birthday to her.

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  2. Thank you! She was really pleased so all in all a great day :)

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  3. Thanks for following. Always good to have another baking blog on board. That cake looks lovely, I bet your mum was pleased. The coffee bean shapes are fabulous - I want some of those moulds now ;-)

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  4. Thank you Choclette! I spotted your We Should Cocoa challenge on Baking Addict's blog and thought it looked great! I will look forward to some inspiring ideas and challenges :) I love the little coffee beans, the finished it off so well. I just need to seriously improve my cake photography skills now!

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