buttermilk | Lewis & Kim

Week 130 and I apologise for the lateness of posting this blog, hubby and I have had a well earned rest and break in our caravan in South Wales and it was really needed. I did a bake just before we went away but didn’t get a chance to blog it and haven’t got the energy to bake today after the unpacking, washing etc. I have now put little bookmarks in my Mary Berry Baking Bible so that I can see at a glance where the remaining recipes are and how many are left. I had pulled out Mary’s devil’s food cake first. The sponge recipe was not quite one of Mary’s throw every thing in and mix ones but it wasn’t too complicated and once mixed, I put it into two prepared sandwich tins. Once baked, I had two lovely dark chocolate sponges. The next part was to make the American frosting and I had already made this once with one of my previous challenge recipes so I knew what I was doing……kind of!

I made the American frosting and then the race was on to spread it over the cake before it set and I kind of lost that battle but although it wasn’t pretty, it tasted better than it looked!

The second recipe was Mary’s Jane’s fruit cake. I have no idea who Jane is and Mary doesn’t explain in her recipe but hey-ho! All Mary says about this recipe is that it is a good family cake that goes quite dark when baked because of the wholemeal flour. I also had to go and find some buttermilk in the supermarket which I have never seen before. I found it in the cream section!

The bonus of this recipe is that it is one of Mary’s throw all the ingredients in and mix recipes. I did this and poured the mix into the prepared tin. This cake is baked long and slow- over three hours of cooking time! Once baked, I wrapped it and put it in a tin and it travelled to Wales with us and kept us fed and energised for our holiday!

The Great British Bake Off is now going into it’s third week and I have been avidly watching. I was pleased to see that in the first week, Mary asked the contestants to bake her frosted walnut cake which I had already done so I watched with great interest having already done this one and commenting as they made their frosting. The biscuit week was interesting, I have not hear of or made Arlette biscuits and having watched the contestants, I think I will be giving them a miss! The next episode is bread week- always a giggle!

the countdown continues and I have now reached the giddy heights of

recipes left to bake!

Week 113 and I decided to choose just one recipe this week as I was very conscious that I had an uneven number of bakes left so I decided to even it up by doing just one bake this week, at least that was the theory! I delved into Mary Berry‘s Baking Bible and chose one of the few cheesecakes left. I hadn’t been overly keen on the last baked cheesecake I made but hoped that this one would be more to our taste.

Mary asks you to buy a flan base from the supermarket for the base and use this to line the base of a springform tin. This certainly cut down on the preparation and I am all for making life easier when baking! I then followed Mary’s instructions for the topping and poured it onto the flan case bottom and put it into bake. I had never used buttermilk before but as Mary advises in her book, you should be able to find this with the creams in the supermarket, and she was right. I set the timer and did the usual weekend stuff…housework, dog walking, baking, the usual multi tasking and juggling!

When the timer pinged, I brought out the cheesecake and allowed it to cool thoroughly before removing it from the springform tin. It looked more like a cheesecake than the last one I had attempted and it definitely tasted better but we still found it quite dense and filling so another recipe to add to the not to be repeated list!

People have been asking me what I will do when I have completed this challenge. I have given this a lot of thought and I have to say that it will be nice to bake something because I want to or it’s what I fancy rather than having to complete the challenge I set for myself. I probably won’t bake every week , I will use the time to improve my photography , or set some more time aside for my artwork which I very much enjoy but never seem to have the time to do anything of worth.

So, having completed just one recipe this week, the number of recipes left to go is …