Apple cake

It’s been a while again! Life just sometimes gets hectic, doesn’t it? It’s been a really busy couple of weeks for me – running around to get a lot of errands done and having a lot of fun with friends. Jess came down from Sweden to celebrate her birthday with us in Belgium, which was amazing. My parents were on vacation so I was in charge of all the house work. And I’ve been intensely looking for a job – it’s slow going but I’m booking progress, little by little.

There has been time for baking, though. Just not a lot of time for editing pictures and making posts. I’m going to try to change that soon though. First I bring you these pictures of a simple pound apple cake I made for my aunt a couple of weeks ago. I just love a good apple cake, and those little fondant red and green apples really lifted the cake up, I think. It was for my cousin’s school bake sale and apparently the kids liked it too! Success!

Rhubarb crumble

 

When I found a bag of rhubarb in my freezer I felt like making that amazing buckle from two summer ago. There’s just something about rhubarb that makes me feel like spring. The weather’s been really nice here lately as well, warm and sunny. So I’m sure that had something to do with it as well. The crumble turned out really great. I swapped the cake recipe from the original post for a simple pound cake one. I made a little less – cause my family wasn’t up for eating a whole buckle. Instead I used my favorite round cake dish. It turned out really lovely and super yummy. Great for a cold night with some tea.

Chocolate layer cake

 

One of my brother’s friends is having a birthday party tonight. Every guest is supposed to make  something sweet; of course my brother took the easy route by asking me to bake something. He said I could make whatever I wanted. It can get a bit overwhelming, when you get complete free range like that, can’t it? There are so many things I want to bake, and sometimes it’s hard to decide. Especially when you’re not the one who will be doing the eating. What if my brother’s friends – and the birthday boy! – don’t like what I chose? In the end I decided to go with chocolate. Because, honestly, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’m very pleased with the end result and, to be honest, slightly bitter that I have to give this whole cake away without being able to have a taste!

I took this Devil’s Food cake recipe from this post; I decided to go with a vanilla butter cream instead of the meringue frosting they used. I got some inspiration for the decoration from this lovely post but ended up using (store bought) meringue to top off the cake instead of piping even more butter cream on top of the ganache. I was afraid it’d be a bit of a butter cream overkill!

whole wheat apple cake

It’s been way too long again. I have a couple of sets of pictures that I took a while back. It’s just about finding the drive to edit and post them, yelp! Here’s some pictures of the Whole Wheat Honey Apple Cake I baked!

Special apple cake

When I was doing my internship in a local bakery I got to help make some cakes one day. Not just any cake, though, one of the best cakes I’ve ever had. This beauty was built up out of a Breton shortbread base, a pound cake body, and apples and almond flakes on top. Heaven. Apple cake is one of those things that’s beautiful either way, you can’t go wrong with a good apple cake to be honest. I had this friend who once told me (and I could tell she was rather embarrassed about it) that she could only really bake apple cake. And I remember thinking that if you can make a good apple cake you really don’t need to know much more to be able to entertain people and offer them something to snack on with their coffee or tea.

This was my first attempt at recreating this lovely cake from the bakery. While it wasn’t perfect it was really good and scored points with my family! Next time I’m going to make the Breton shortbread base a little thicker, I’m going to substitute half the flour in the pound cake recipe with almond powder, and I’m going to leave bigger chunks of apple in my chunky apple sauce.

Runeberg Cakes

In October I went to Finland to visit my close friend, Heleen. We spent time in Helsinki, Turku and Porvoo, and I had an absolutely wonderful time with her and our Swedish friend Jess, who took the boat out to hang out with us for a couple of days :) It was ice-cold, we walked around lots – but sought shelter for freezing fingers and tired feet more. We had yummy food, cooked in hostels, drank lots and lots of tea, and just enjoyed each other’s company :) it was great.

In Porvoo Heleen told me to get a Runeberg cake, because it was a local baked treat. And I’m happy I did! It was so yummy, and not really like anything we have here in Belgium. The cake was moist, drenched in a clear liquid (sugar water, I found later), it was nice and fragrant with spices like cinnamon and cardamon. It was extremely yummy. I decided to bake it myself a couple of weeks back – and while the cakes came out great, the pictures aren’t my best.

I’ve found that a set of below-average pictures can really bring my enthusiasm for blogging about my adventures in the kitchen down. I like to put out beautiful, awe-inspiring pictures that make people really excited about eating and baking. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, but oh well :) maybe with my little break I’ll have some new visual inspiration for next time!

Strawberry layer cake

I sometimes have those days where I want to bake something – but I have absolutely no idea what. My pinterest boards are so full of wonderful pictures and amazing recipes that I want to try, that amidst all of it I just don’t know what to choose. Yesterday was one of those days: I just didn’t know. But I wanted to bake something. So instead of choosing something from all the recipes I’ve put aside to try one day – I went and looked for another recipe. Typical. I ended up searching for   and finding a strawberry layer cake recipe with orange zest and vanilla that sounded divine. Since strawberries are the food of spring – even though sometimes it looks more like autumn that spring in Belgium, these days – I thought: yes. This’ll be the one. 

Mini gooey-brown-butter-cakes!

I made this cake for the first time last December. While it tasted really really amazing, I forgot to take some at least semi-decent pictures so I’m afraid I wasn’t really able to sell the recipe. So let me try again. This is a gooey brown butter cake with apples. It’s made with brown butter and apples. And it’s gooey. It’s truly one of the best cakes I’ve ever had. And I hope these pictures do the recipe a little more justice!

Find the recipe here; and I hope you like this gooey mess as much as I do!

Gooey brown-butter cake

This is one of those awkward past-Christmas and pre-New Years posts. Because, let’s be honest. That week between Christmas and New Years is kind of a weird week. And this is kind of a weird post. It’s not that I haven’t been baking lately, and it’s not even that I haven’t been taking pictures of my baking – it’s just that I haven’t been posting about it. Thank god 2013 is coming because I need some New Years resolutions – 01. blog more. (02. stop eating baked goods like it’s your job.  03. but don’t let that mess up resolution #01)

So this post is a couple of pictures I failed to upload earlier – and a recipe for gooey brown butter cake.