Baking for Macmillan (2)

I promised some recipes for the cakes I baked for the Macmillan Coffee Morning, and although it's taken a while I have finally got around to writing some up!  For the Victoria Sponge, I followed Nigella Lawson's recipe from 'How to be a Domestic Goddess', divided between two 8 inch sandwich tins.  I opted to fill it with a vanilla buttercream and homemade strawberry jam, and simply dusted the top with icing sugar.  The cherry cake was this recipe from bbcgoodfood.com.  It was the first time I'd tried it, and not being cherry season in the UK I had to use tinned cherries rather than fresh.  Nevertheless, it was very well received and the piece I managed to try was very tasty, but I think a better flavour would be achieved using fresh fruit, so will definitely try that next time.  It's worth noting though that as many people have commented on the recipe, the cake did take quite a bit longer to cook than suggested - I think I left mine in the oven for around 40 minutes, but testing it with a skewer was a bit hit and miss!  Ginger cake was made to a recipe from Rachel Allen, a gorgeously sticky loaf thanks to the syrup, and the fact that I use chopped stem ginger in syrup rather than crystallised ginger in the cake mixture.  It doesn't really need icing as well, but it's a nice finishing touch when making the cake for an event. 

Another first was a spiced apple cake, borne initially out of the need to use up some of the cooking apples from our garden.  There's only so much room in the freezer to fill up with copious pies and crumbles, so a cake seemed a good solution.  The recipe came from a little book of recipes from Olive magazine, '101 Seasonal Treats'.  It's a really good little book; I've cooked a few recipes from it now and all have been a success.

Squidgy Spiced Apple Cake

125g butter
225g dark muscovado sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
225g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp ground cinnamon
300g cooking apples, peeled, cored and diced
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp demerara sugar

Heat the oven to 160c/gas mark 3, grease and line a 20cm springform cake tin.  Cream together the butter and muscovado sugar (make sure before you do this that your sugar hasn't set to rock hard chunks as mine had - ten minutes of beating later I still had lumps of sugar so I just gave up and hoped for the best!), then mix in the eggs.  Sift over the flour, baking powder and spices, folding in gently.  Add the chunks of diced apple.  Pour the mixture into the tin, bake for 60 minutes or until risen and browned.  While it's cooking, combine the honey and demerara sugar.  When the cake comes out of the oven, spread the honey and sugar mix over the top and sides while still warm. 

The cake was a bit rustic looking and didn't cut into particularly neat slices, but I think that just added to the charm.  It certainly smelled good, and I'm reliably informed that it was the first to disappear at school, with several requests for the recipe.