wholemeal | Lewis & Kim

Week 120 – phew that’s a lot of baking weeks and I delved into Mary Berry‘s ever shrinking Baking Bible and found her wholemeal ginger cake and baked apple lemon sponge- another hot pudding.

Mary’s wholemeal ginger cake was a tray bake and after melting all the liquid ingredients together with the sugar, all Mary asks you to do is to then blend the liquid with the dry ingredients and bake. She does suggest you put the tray bake tin in a roasting tin and I am glad I did as mine over-spilled and would have made a mess of my oven! I set the timer and began to read what to do on the next recipe.

After the pinger went, i took a lovely gingery brown sponge out of the oven and let it a cool a short while before turning it out onto a rack to finish cooling. Mary then suggests you use lemon juice and icing sugar to make the icing, I decided to go with the juice from the ginger jar and cut up some ginger to decorate it with. This ginger cake has a twist in that it has some marmalade in it and you can definitely taste the orange in this cake. This was yummy and a tray bake I would be happy to repeat.

The second recipe was Mary’s baked apple lemon sponge. This is a very rich pudding involving oodles (technical term) of cream, apple slices and lemon curd. The next step of the recipe is to make a sponge mixture which then goes on top of the apple/lemon mix.

The pyrex dish then goes into the oven and bakes for about 40 minutes until the sponge is golden brown. I had to give mine another ten minutes or so as mine was still pale. Then Mary asks you to cover the dish with foil and bake for another 45 minutes or so.

I took a very lemony smelling dish out of the oven and it looked okay but smelled better. Again, like last week, it very quickly sank in the middle and didn’t look much but it tasted better than it looked. Again, I am undecided as to whether i would make this pudding again….

The countdown is now ticking loudly and has reached the heady heights of….

As the weather has got better, my thoughts have turned to my garden and trying to get it into some kind of shape for the summer for hubby , me and the dogs to enjoy. I spent most of the day on Saturday in the garden, cutting the grass, putting in edging stones and cementing them in and laying some pieces of turf left over from the Chief Tasters garden turfing . I didn’t think I had done that much but my back is telling me otherwise….If anyone has any good tips for dealing with a sore lower back/sciatica, please tell me your secrets.

My poor mum is seriously struggling with a severe case of sciatica at the moment and as she is a few hours away, all I can do is support her by phone . I want to dedicate this post to my mum and hope she feels better soon x

Week ten, so what to choose to bake this week? Well, I know one of my previous posts told the tale of the scalded hand……well this week has been influenced by the fact that I have strained the collateral ligaments in my thumb. It doesn’t sound much but I couldn’t even take the plastic screw lid off the milk without excruciating pain so I took myself to get it looked at and it needed to be strapped and I have to take regular ibuprofen and try not to use it.

SO with this in mind, I sat with a cup of tea and Mary Berry’s Bible and looked through to see what I could make where my mixer could do all the work and this is what I came up with. The only bit I needed help with was grating an orange for the rind and that’s where my angel of a hubby came to the rescue – what a star!

So, I (carefully) weighed everything out, stuck it under the mixer and hey presto – one mix with no fuss. I put it into the tin, Mary does say it doesn’t look like it will fill the tin and she was right!

Timer on , 40 minutes later, this is what came out. I must say, it rose beautifully, was a great golden colour and the aroma wafting upwards was lovely.

It needed a topping when it was cool, of softened butter, icing sugar and marmalade. I think even Paddington Bear would approve of this recipe!

I am going to start looking now at other recipes i can use the mixer to do all the work as I get the feeling my hand will need to heal for a while yet……..sigh.