Cakes & Bakes: Courgette loaf cake

We’ve begun to harvest a couple of nice crops from our little veg patch now (apart from the strawberries, which provided a running fruit buffet for the local mice). We had some lovely new potatoes this week, and the courgettes are doing very well indeed.

So, what to do with them? They’ll be perfect in all manner of stir-fries and other savoury dishes, but we decided to start with a courgette loaf cake.

They’re incorporated into the batter as you would with carrots in the better known carrot cake. In this recipe they’re combined with walnuts, sultanas, nutmeg and cinnamon.

The resulting cake was a great success and has proved very popular here at H is for Home headquarters. We’ve had it for the past few days with our afternoon brew. It’s very moist as it is, but we’ve found that a scrape of butter works fantastically well. There’s not a huge amount of sugar in the recipe – but I think it works. It’s well worth giving this cake a try… with either shop-bought or home-grown courgettes.

Gardeners and allotment-holders often say that they have a glut of courgettes, so this is a perfect use for some of them. Also, if you have trouble getting vegetables into your kids, they’re wonderfully well hidden – they’ll never know!

You can be very versatile with this recipe. Substitute pecans for the walnuts. Swap raisins and/or prunes for the sultanas. Add a couple tablespoons of orange juice instead of the vanilla extract. Use honey or maple syrup as an alternative to the brown sugar… or you can sprinkle golden granulated over the top just before it goes into the oven, if you’d like it sweeter. Similarly, for additional sweetness, you could top it with a cream cheese frosting.

Click here or on the image below to save the recipe to Pinterest

Buttered slices of home-made courgette loaf cake | H is for Home

Courgette cake

BBC Good Food

Print recipe Pin recipe

Cook Time 1

Course Dessert

Cuisine British

Servings 10

Ingredients

2 large eggs
125 ml/4fl oz vegetable oil
85 g/3oz soft brown sugar
350 g/12oz courgette coarsely grated
1 tsp vanilla extract
300 g/10½oz plain flour
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp baking powder
85 g/3oz walnuts roughly chopped
140 g/5oz sultanas

Instructions

Heat your oven to 180ºC/350ºF/Gas mark 4
Grease and line a 1kg/2lb loaf tin with baking parchment or paper liner
In a large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs, oil and sugar
Add the grated courgette and vanilla extract
In another bowl, combine the remaining (dry) ingredients with a pinch of salt
Stir the dry ingredients into the wet mixture, then pour into the loaf tin.
Bake for an hour or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes away clean
Allow to cool in its tin for a few minutes before removing it and leaving to cool completely on a wire rack

The cooked cake can be frozen for up to 1 month

It's delicious sliced and spread with a little butter

Keyword courgette, loaf cake, tea loaf, zucchini

Cakes & Bakes: Bottle of beer bread

A friend of ours has a micro-bar that sells an ever-changing selection of beers produced by micro-breweries all over the world. Doesn’t everyone want a friend like that?

Anyhow, we looked after their dog for them on occasion, and they thanked us with a few different bottles of beer. One of the bottles, a Buxton Brewery IPA, didn’t get drunk for ages, so I decided to use it to make a bottle of beer bread loaf.

I used my usual liquid to starter to flour ratio, but I felt the resultant dough was a little too wet, so I’ve upped the flour content by 50 grams in my recipe below. Perhaps I needed to weigh how much 330cl of beer weighs compared to 330cl of water!

The time this loaf takes to prepare can vary widely depending on the temperature of your kitchen (ours rarely gets above 15ºC… in the summer), and whether you refrigerate your dough whilst it bulk ferments. Sometimes, if it’s really cold, I shut the covered dough in the microwave (pre-warmed by leaving a mug of boiling water in there).

It is helpful to know when estimating rising time according to room temperature that the rate of fermentation, or rising, is about double for every 15°F [8°C] increase in temperature. The Bread Bible

The resultant loaf was hoppy, tangy and flavoursome. It was delicious with a bit of mature cheddar or just with butter and gorgeous a few days later toasted.

Click here or on the image below to save my bottle of beer bread recipe to Pinterest

Bottle of beer bread

2020-07-23 11:05:05

Yields 1

Cook Time

30 min

Cook Time

30 min

Ingredients

330ml bottle of beer
115g/4oz starter @ 100% hydration
175g/6oz wholemeal flour
375g/13oz white flour
8g/¼oz salt

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Instructions

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the beer and the starter, getting rid of a lot of the fizz from the beer
Mix in the flours and salt, then turn out on to a work surface (I like to use a large marble board as it's very non-stick) and knead for 5 minutes
Form the dough into a ball, put it back into the mixing bowl, cover and leave to prove until double in size (the warmer your kitchen, the quicker this will happen)
Scrape the dough out of the bowl back on to the work surface, fold and shape the dough into a round and place it in a well-floured, circular banneton (smooth-side down). Prove again until double in size
Preheat the oven to 250ºC/475ºF/Gas mark 9 (put your cloche or stone [if using] in the oven to preheat as well, at this point)
Once the oven has reached the correct temperature, carefully remove the dough from the banneton, score and bake for 30 minutes (you can take the lid off the cloche for the final 10 minutes to get a lovely brown crust)
Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely on a wire rack before attempting to slice

H is for Home Harbinger https://hisforhomeblog.com/

Cakes & Bakes: Oat biscuits

Ahhh, tea and biscuits – one of life’s little pleasures… and an important one here at H is for Home headquarters!

And home-made biscuits, fresh from the oven, can take the enjoyment up a further notch or two. Justin requested a few for this week’s Cakes & Bakes offering, so I reached for this little tome from my cookery book collection. Favourite Biscuit Recipes offered up these lovely oat biscuits with soft brown sugar.

As with many home-made biscuits, recipe and method was pretty straightforward – and I knocked up this batch of 24 in less than an hour. The recipe says it makes 36 – however, my biscuit cutter is a tad larger than the 2 inch recommended.

They’re not fancy – just good, honest, rustic biscuits. I might reduce the bicarb of soda a touch when I next make them as I found the taste coming through a bit. However, they’re still delicious and should last us a few days… absolutely perfect with that aforementioned brew!

Click here or on the image below to save the oat biscuits recipe to Pinterest

Oat biscuits

2020-07-08 14:23:21

Yields 36

Cook Time

20 min

Cook Time

20 min

Ingredients

115g/4oz butter
115g/4oz brown sugar
170g/6oz rolled oats
170g/6oz flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tbsps milk

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Instructions

Set oven to 150ºC/300ºF/Gas mark 2
Grease/line baking sheets
Cream the butter and the sugar together in a bowl
Mix in ther oats and sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda together into the mixture and mix thoroughly
Add sufficient milk to form the mixture into a stiffish dough
Turn out on to a floured surface, roll out the dough thinly and cut into rounds with a 5cm/2-inch cutter
Put on to the greased baking sheets and bake for approximately 20 minutes or until golden brown
Transfer to a wire rack to cool

Adapted from Favourite Biscuit Recipes

H is for Home Harbinger https://hisforhomeblog.com/

Cakes & Bakes: Lime and coconut iced loaf cake

Our food shopping habits have completely changed; both since moving to rural Wales and since the Covid-19 lockdown. We’ve been driving the few miles into the nearest town to the supermarket (after popping into the hardware store) about once every week and a half to a fortnight… much less often than usual.

I had a look in the store cupboard and fridge to see what needed to be used up before it started deteriorating. I found a few limes that were rolling around the drawer of the fridge; like us, they’ve been waiting for a sunny day to go into a gin & tonic… there hasn’t been one for a while!

Seeing as there’s been only wind & rain in the forecast, I thought that I’d better put them to another use. An afternoon tea-time loaf cake always goes down well in this house, so I whipped us up a lime and coconut iced loaf cake.

It’s very strange, I can’t stand lemons, oranges or tangerines – especially the smell of the zest when they’ve been peeled. However, for some reason, I quite like limes and grapefruit.

The secret to this cake is pre-toasting the desiccated coconut before adding it to the batter. It really brings out the flavour. It’s almost like a piña colada in cake form!

Click here or on the image below to save my recipe to Pinterest

Lime and coconut iced loaf cake

2020-07-01 17:45:08

Serves 6

For the cake

100g/3½oz desiccated coconut
150g/5oz butter, softened
150g/5oz caster sugar
2 eggs
juice & zest of 1 lime
150g/5oz plain flour
2tsp baking powder
pinch of salt

For the glaze

150g icing sugar
juice & zest of 1 lime

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For the cake

Line the base and sides of a 900g (2lb) loaf tin with baking parchment or pre-made loaf tin liner
Preheat the oven to 170ºC/150ºC fan/325ºF/Gas mark 3
Lightly toast the desiccated coconut in a heavy-bottomed frying or sauté pan, either on the hob or in the oven. Toss every couple of minutes to ensure it is toasted evenly and doesn't burn. Set aside to cool.
In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar
Lightly whisk the eggs in a medium-sized measuring jug. Slowly pour the beaten eggs into the creamed mixture while stirring constantly
Stir in the juice and zest of the lime
Mix in the toasted desiccated coconut
In a medium-sized mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt
Fold the flour into the batter using a spatula or large spoon
Spoon the batter into the prepared loaf tin, using the bak for the spoon/spatula to level the top
Bake for 50 minutes to an hour or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes away clean
Allow to cool completely

For the glaze

Sift the icing sugar into a measuring jug to remove any lumps
Pour in the lime juice and zest and mix thoroughly. It should be a thick paste consistency - add a couple teaspoons of water/icing sugar if the mixture is too thick/thin
Pour the glaze evenly over the top of the cake

H is for Home Harbinger https://hisforhomeblog.com/