icing sugar | Lewis & Kim

This weekend I had loads to do so I needed a quick and easy recipe that would fit in with what I needed to do so I got out Mary Berry’s Baking Bible and found the Butterfly Cakes. As it was also Mother’s Day, it reminded me of when I was small and my mum made these quite regularly and when I spoke to her, it reminded her of when her mother, my nan used to make them.

The basic cake recipe was fairly easy to mix together and divide between the 12 cake cases, they baked evenly and I left them to cool. Then the fun came with cutting the top off the cakes to pipe the butter icing on, then cut the offcut in two and artistically place like a butterfly on the butter icing!

Then when I had piped and swirled and cut and artistically made butterfly shapes, I then finished them with a dusting of icing sugar. I was pleased with the way they looked.

Happy Mother’s day mum, hope these bring back the lovely memories of Nan that you gave to me.

Happy Mother’s day too to my other mum, hope you enjoyed your fresh off the press cake!

Next week I may begin to tackle some of Mary’s Easter recipes…watch this space….

My hubby actually asked last week if Mary Berry’s Bible had any gingerbread recipes in it as he fancied some gingerbread……well when I looked, there are several gingerbread recipes so I read each one carefully as my thumb is still out of action and I needed a recipe that I could manage with one hand.

So, most of this recipe involved weighing most of the ingredients into a large saucepan, heating gently, to melt them all together, adding the flour and spices and finally beating in four eggs and some milk. The last part was bit tricky but I managed it without needing hubby’s help and only dropped one egg on the floor and the dogs thought their luck had changed!

This recipe calls for quite a lot of each ingredient and I found at the end of the mix that the tray I used, (the size that Mary Berry recommends in her recipe) there was too much to fit in this so I dug out a smaller round tin and lined that and ended up with a tray bake AND a round bake too………

The gingerbread seemed easy enough to make, loads of treacle in it though so it’s going to be very sweet. It baked well and was ready at the recommended time. I took both tins out and let them stand for a while before turning them out onto the cooling rack.

Once they were both totally cool, I made the topping, Mary recommends using icing sugar, a small amount of water and some finely chopped crystallised ginger. This is when my hubby made me laugh, he asked what the topping was made of and when I told him about the crystallised ginger, he said “BLEUGHHHHHH!!” I was highly amused that he asked me to make a GINGERBREAD cake but didn’t want TINY amounts of GINGER on the topping……..MEN!!!!!