Baking | 30 Something Dreamer

Hello All!

Sorry for my delay in writing but I don’t have the full Office suite on my work laptop and editing images seems rather tricky. By editing, I do just mean cropping as let’s face it, my images are pretty basic!

Anyhow, one of the things I was doing this weekend which meant I failed to post was making a cake with beans instead of flour. Yes, I did just say I made a cake with beans. I chose not to make mine dairy free but you could essentially make this a sugar-free, dairy-free, grain-free cake. The cake I made is sooooooooo super rich that it really needs cream or custard or something with it to break up the flavour but I think simply adding less cocoa powder would help.

As this isn’t really a cookery blog, I’ll just provide you with a link to the recipe on my other blog and tell you that this really is a moist, tasty cake and well worth a try. I’ve even had one of my male friends who is an awesome chef try it and he agrees that it’s good cake. Mine doesn’t look as pro as the original recipe but here are some images. AND HERE IS THE RECIPE – CLICK ME!

The Whole Cake

It Cuts Like Cake

Tastes Like Cake

Sorry about the grainy photography, it always looks so good on my phone! This is a seriously rich, tasty chocolate cake. It’s easy to make and perfect for those of you needing a healthier but devilishly tasty treat or anybody who’s following a prohibitive diet. Get baking! x

Somehow, despite pay day having only just been and gone, pretty much everyone I know seems to be totally broke and I am definitely at the helm of this pauper-style living! With that it mind, it was time to get creative on the weekend just gone as there’s nothing worse than spending a whole month of weekends doing nothing because of a lack of funds. So, the girls and I decided to spend Saturday baking and watching movies; proper girly fun, the good old fashioned way.

Since gluten and I don’t seem to get on very well at the moment, I found a recipe for gluten-free cupcakes (and then amended it slightly) and off we went. The recipe I stumbled upon can be found here; we doubled up for the first batch of 12 so they came out huge and then made another batch of 12 on the recipe sizes. We also added some xanthan gum and baking powder to the mix to make sure the cakes weren’t crumbly and that they rose enough.

Well, the first batch were pretty huge and consequently quite hard to ice so we were glad we made the second batch smaller! With the actual icing mix, we ended up adding a fair bit of icing sugar as well as we couldn’t get the mixture firm enough to be able to sit on top of the cakes. We then piped the icing on amateur style, (no nozzle, just a bag) and got round to the fun part of decorating those bad boys! Check out my amazingly edited video of us in full on piping action!

Bare naked cakes

Piped and ready to go

Some of our best work

All of our beautiful babies!

As you can see, we got a bit carried away with the decorating. We started off quite refined, creating sophisticated little numbers and then we went wild sticking on a whole array of sweets and decorative bits! It was brilliant fun!

The cakes themselves are not as moist as my friend over at Cuppies and Cream makes but they weren’t dry which is great considering they are GF. We also made one batch with lemon icing which I really love, a pretty good effort considering we were first-timers. Now however, my thighs are approx. 6 times the size they were last week because I’ve eaten so much cake!

I thought I’d share because it was such great fun and I’d really recommend getting back to basics with your friends when the pennies are tight. Do as they did in the old days and fill your time without using computer games, Facebook or the TV and you might just surprise yourself in just how much fun you can have! x