Tag Archives: Donna Hay

A deceptively plain but tasty cake. Spiced chai bundt cake.

Leave a reply

This is a Donna Hay recipe, from a few of her books, most notably Modern Baking which is an, I think, under-celebrated baking bible. I’ve made this cake for many years and it’s a firm favourite in our house and needs few ingredients – we keep a stash of chai tea on hand especially for it and the rest are store-cupboard/fridge staples. It’s also a good way of using up too much milk.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon of loose chai tea (if you can only find tea bags just open them up, one tablespoon is about two tea bags’ worth)
Two tablespoons of boiling water
375g of self raising flour
330g of caster sugar
two teaspoons of mixed spice
4 eggs
375ml of milk
250g of butter, melted
two teaspoons of vanilla extract.

What you do

Preheat oven to 180C. I use a 9′ savarin/bundt tin for this – specifically this one. Butter the tin and dust with flour and shake off the excess.

Put the loose tea in the boiling water and let it steep for 5/10 minutes, whilst you melt the butter and let it cool.

Note: you’ll need all the tea mixture for the cake, ie the tea leaves and the water.

Now you can go ahead and put all the ingredients, including the tea mixture, into a freestanding mixer and whisk it until combined, or if you want to do it the old fashioned way then you can do butter and sugar – cream together, then add the vanilla extract, eggs, flour, mixed spice, tea mixture and milk.

Pour the batter into the cake mould and bake for about 35 minutes. Mine usually takes 40 but you can check after 30. Do check it’s done with a skewer inserted – it should come out clean. Leave it in the tin for about ten minutes, I loosen mine around the edge and the middle ring bit with a knife and then turn out.

It’s a really lovely, moist cake that keeps for a good few days and is so much nicer than you think it might be.

White chocolate and amaretti cake

2 Replies

I don’t often have cake failures. I’ve been baking since I was seven. But when I do, they hit me hard.

The first time I made this – a Donna Hay recipe – it went wrong. It looked fine, coming out of the oven, but when you cut into it there was a hole running the whole width of the cake, so that each slice had a hole right through it. The sort of thing which, if you’d tried to achieve, would have been impossible.

It tasted delicious, but it was a failure. I whizzed the whole sorry thing up in a food processor and froze the crumbs. They will be delicious on some ice cream, as a topping, or put in milk shake mix ins.

I had a rare afternoon nap and then it came to me: I had forgotten to put the milk in. I had made it in a bad mood, and got distracted. The original method is also a ‘bung it all into the food mixer’, which is where I also went wrong as I lost track of the ingredients.

This is a simple cake – simple to look at, simple to make, but the ingredients add up. It has nearly £5 of white chocolate in it. Of course, you could put any old white chocolate in it, something cheap, but I think good quality white chocolate makes a difference. I use Green and Black’s white cooking chocolate. Then there’s the amaretti. The rest is regular baking fayre: butter, eggs, flour. Oh and milk.

I have adapted this so it’s all done by hand. I felt I got a better result. If you want to, you can bung everything save the amaretti crumbs into a food mixer and mix away until smooth, then rejoin the recipe at the putting into the tin stage.

Because this recipe contains amaretti – almonds – it is not suitable for anyone with nut/almond allergies.

This is what you need:

185g very soft unsalted butter

220g caster sugar

3 eggs

a teaspoon of vanilla extract

250g melted white chocolate, slightly cooled

300g self raising flour

310ml of milk

160g crushed amaretti biscuits

A few amaretti, crushed, for decoration after cooking.

This is what you do:

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease and flour a 3l bundt/ring tin.

Cream together the butter and sugar, add the three eggs, one at a time, then the vanilla extract. Now gently mix in the melted chocolate. Then add the flour and, little by little, the milk.

Pour half the mixture into the prepared tin, sprinkle the amaretti crumbs (I pulse them in a food processor) over the cake mixture. I use a skewer to gentle feather them through the mixture, but you don’t have to. Now top up with the rest of the cake mixture.

img_0611

Bake for about 45 minutes. Check with a skewer to make sure it’s cooked. Make sure it comes out clean.

Leave to cool for ten minutes, then turn out and sprinkle a few crushed amaretti over the top if you’d like.

This cake fills the kitchen with amazing Viennese coffee house smells as it cooks. It’s even better the next day. The white chocolate gives the sponge an amazing lightness and a taste you can’t quite put your finger on. And the amaretti crumb layer is just amazing and marzipan-ish in taste (so absolutely no good if you hate marzipan).

 

Egg and bacon pies

Leave a reply

This little recipe was from one of Donna Hay’s books – Fast, Fresh, Simple. It makes for a great Saturday lunch but involves no pastry (sorry) – perfect for when when you want something hot, tasty and quick but would prefer to avoid falling into the predictability of sandwiches.

Obviously my children hated this and just ate the buttered sourdough I provided as a prop, and the bacon. But hey-ho. We loved it.

The recipe is here. But for convenience this is what you need for four people:

6 rashers of thin cut bacon

6 eggs

240g creme fraiche (I used a jar of it that was slightly less than that)

2 tablespoons of flat leaf parsley (I use frozen Waitrose herbs they are great for this sort of thing).

Oven preheated to 180C. You need four small oven proof dishes/tins of about 10cm across. We used these little ceramic ones we got some free pate or desserts in years ago. We seem to have accumulated hundreds of these dishes, hardly any of which are the same size. Butter said dishes and place on a baking tray.

Put the rashers around the dishes, one and a half in each, so they make a rim. Whisk together the eggs, creme fraiche and parsley and decant equally into each dish. Bake for 20-25 minutes until cooked but firm to the touch. They puff up like little souffles.