My love for Collies, Cakes, Cooking, Eating Out & Days Out.
I recently visited Amy’s Place in Torrin on the Isle of Skye. A lovely little tea room with amazing views of Bla Bheinn. Whilst I was there I purchased a jar of Butterscotch Sauce from The Wee Dairy from the Isle of Gigha. So this week I decided to create a cake to compliment the sauce. Here is my recipe for White Chocolate and Butterscotch Cake.
Simple Citrus Muffins are a quick and easy sweet treat to make. No fancy ingredients or tricky techniques are needed. This recipe makes 12 tangy muffins which can be frozen before being iced if you need to.
We were having a weekend away camping on the neighbouring island of Raasay. We needed a cake robust enough to survive the weekend and be carried in our rucksacks whilst out hiking. After a little bit of inspiration courtesy of my Gaelic tutor Weetabix Cake came out favourite.
Weetabix is fruity, tasty, packed full of energy and is nice and robust for rucksack lunches. Even better, it is very easy to make and I had all the ingredients in the pantry! I eat two weetabix and fresh fruit every day for breakfast so I really didn’t have to look very far!
I haven’t baked for a couple of weeks as we are busy refitting the kitchen.
However the new oven is all connected and our new hens have just started laying eggs so a cake was in order. I find that a lot of recipes for Lemon and Poppyseed Cakes turn out to be uninspiring loaf cakes. This recipe turns a run of the mill Lemon and Poppyseed Cake into an indulgent Lemon and Poppyseed Layer Cake!
But first a giggle – the recipe calls for 4 large eggs! Five of my girls lay medium eggs and one seems to lay enormous eggs. I picked two of the huge eggs and two medium ones thinking that would balance out to about 4 eggs. The first two huge eggs I cracked into 
the mixture were double yolkers! A fab surprise but not quite what I was looking for in my cake. I had enough yolk but probably not enough egg white, so I threw in one egg white and crossed my fingers. As you can see the cake worked out well, and is very yellow. My ladies are fairly free range and love a bit of corn every day so in turn we get very golden eggs!
Cake:
225g Stork
225g Self Raising Flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
100g Golden Caster Sugar
100g Light brown sugar
4 large eggs
zest of 2 lemons – finely grated
20g poppyseeds
Filling:
Half a jar of Lemon curd
75g softened butter
250g sifted icing sugar
splash of milk
Heat the oven to 160c fan.
Grease an line 2 x 18cm cake tins.
Put all the cake ingredients into a bowl and mix until smooth and creamy.
Divide the mix evenly between the two tins and cake for 20-25 minutes.
Remove from the oven when baked and left in the tins for 5 minutes before turning out onto cooling racks.
Whilst the cakes are cooling make the buttercream filling. Put the butter and icing sugar in a bowl and mix together, slowly add a splash of milk until the butter cream is soft and creamy.
When the cakes are completely cooled cut each one in half with a sharp knife. 
A very sharp bread knife is good and cut lengthways through from edge to edge. You should now have four circular thin sponge cakes.
Pick one to be the bottom and place onto a plate. Cover the top of this one generously with lemon curd.
Next sandwich the next sponge slice on top of the lemon curd. Smother the top of this one with a generous helping of buttercream.
Nestle the next sponge slice on top of the buttercream and cover this slice 
generously with lemon curd as you did earlier.
Finally add the top layer and cover it with the rest of the buttercream.
There you have it Lemon and Poppyseed Layer Cake.
For all you chocoholics out there, is there nothing better than a perfect
Chocolate Brownie? My Chocolate Brownie recipe is a hybrid of many recipes my husband went through when looking for a great Chocolate Brownie. After a few tweaks to a few recipes we hit the spot.
The standard recipe is for a great quality simple Chocolate Brownie but as it is Easter in a couple of weeks I have tweaked it again to make Easter Chocolate Brownies. Below is the original recipe and a few tweaks for other recipes…
After an impulsive blueberry purchase in the supermarket this week I thought
it best to bake a Blueberry and Almond Cake. There are so many recipes out there for Blueberry Muffins or Lemon & Blueberry Cake so I thought it would be good to have something a bit different. So here’s my recipe was a delicious Blueberry and Almond Cake with a cream cheese filling and frosting. Continue reading “Blueberry and Almond Cake”
This recipe for Orange Olive Oil Cake was inspired by Twitter and my recent purchase of a 12 Mini Bundt Cake tin from Lakeland. The recipe has been adapted from one shared with me by a Twitter friend in Portugal and the original recipe by Leite’s Culinaria can be found here. Made with navel oranges and fruity olive oil the cake has a deep, rich orange flavour.
As I made a Spiced Chocolate Cake last week it triggered the call for a Spiced Apple Cake, it is that time of year after all – Halloween and Bonfire Night! After a bit of encouraging on Twitter to create an Apple Cake here is my answer… Toffee Apple Cake.
This is a cake that looks impressive and seems as if it should be tricky to make. But fear not, this Toffee Apple Cake is easy to bake and uses the simplest of
ingredients. I’ve added an extra twist by covering it in Maple Syrup Buttercream and topping it with home-made Caramel Sauce. The best thing is you don’t need fresh apples, this Toffee Apple Cake keeps things simple by using shop bought apple sauce. It couldn’t be easier so lets get cracking… Continue reading “Toffee Apple Cake”
This week I dug out my 40th Edition Be-Ro book and did the Cookbook Challenge. It is a well thumbed recipe book so was hard to find something I
haven’t baked before but hiding away on page 53 is Chocolate Spice Cake.
This cake is suits Autumn perfectly, especially this week being Halloween and Bonfire Night. The Chocolate Spice Cake is lightly spiced with cloves, cinnamon and mixed spice so is a lovely alternative to parkin and gingerbread. Continue reading “Chocolate Spice Cake”
Chocolate and Orange are perfect flavours when baking cakes and never more so than in this recipe for Chocolate Chip Orange Cake. Chunks of good quality chocolate lace the moist orange sponge. This Chocolate Chip Orange Cake is reminiscent of when you bake with marmalade only this time you use a whole raw orange!
Read on for my recipe…