Cake in a Train Arch: Comptoir Gourmand

What's summer for if not wandering through London streets and searching for coffee and cake? 

A few days a go my dear friend, who among other things, shares my love of good cake introduced me to Comptoir Gourmand, a small bakery in the train arches of Druid Street, SE1 2HQ. 

Tucked away in the heart of Bermondsey away from the river by Tower Bridge, the winding streets make this difficult to find but once you know where it is you won't forget. 

It shares the street with very little other than Lassco, an architectural antiques company, and a few bars that in the middle of the day had very little to show for themselves. This secluded street makes the cafe quiet and intimate and off the main path of the 'yummy mummy' crowd. 

The bakery itself is industrial in size as I assume the cafe is just a side business to the mass producing of fine cakes and tarts.

We decided to split to tarts as the choice is overwhelming and why try one when you can try two? We had the salted caramel cchocolate and the raspberry lemon tarts.

Despite the underwhelming presentation on paper plates with plastic cutlery the tarts themselves were divine. Although we both agreed the fruit tart was better with the sharp lemon custard complementing the sweet raspberries perfectly, the chocolate caramel with its oozing salted caramel sauce under a thick layer of dark chocolate was excellent also.

If you are searching for a new place to find excellent cake which is off the beaten track, Comptoir Gourmand in Bermondsey should be one for you to test out soon. 

Comptoir Gourmand, 98 Druid St, London, SE1 2HQ, is open from 9:30am - 4:30pm. http://comptoirgourmand.co.uk/

Coffee in Covent Garden

Peyton and Byrne in Covent Garden is a lovely place for tea and cake and this is what it was like.

Look how much cake they have! But it was first thing in the morning so I decided instead to have one of their blueberry and yogurt muffins. 

Next time you are in the Covent Garden area be sure to check it out. 

New Zealand Madelines

While I was in New Zealand over the summer holidays I found out that my relatives who live there had a Madeline tray. So it was whipped out and the opportunity was seized by all.

The mixture for madelines is very similar to that of a sponge except it has a lemon in it.

You start by whisking the sugar and eggs.

Demonstrated by my cousin Kiri

 You then add a lemon, in this case from their lemon tree in the garden.

The lemon rind has to be grated off in to the mixture, the rest of the lemon can be discarded.

Then the remaining ingredients are added and whisked to the normal cake mixture. 

You then dollop the mixture into the madeline tray and bake for about 15 minutes. 

They then come out of the tray and due to the lovely shape of the mold they look quite nice even if they are slightly burnt. 

Blueberry and Orange Muffins

Basically I made muffins.

They are simple and delicious and great for snacking or breakfast-ing.

These are made with the normal cake stuff but with oil not butter and added orange juice and zest. Once these are all combined you lightly stir in some on the blueberries. The mixture is put in to muffin cases and the remaining blueberries and sugar are sprinkled over the top.

They are then baked, obviously and then they are ready to eat.

 

Next Recipe: A simple Victoria Sponge

Flapjacks

Flapjacks are very easy and very quick. Popular at school bake sales around the country as busy mothers don't have time to make anything else. Therefore you are probably all familiar with them. If you are not, Google a more detailed recipe, sharpish!

So due to the mundane-ness of the flapjack, this shall be brief.

To make flapjacks you mix oats, melted butter, syrup and honey together- creating something like this...

mmmmmm oats 

Then you squidge them into a grease proofed tin with the back of a wooden spoon so the mixture is flat. This is then baked.

They are pretty dull to look at, so I tried to jazz them up a bit with a bit of melted chocolate drizzled on the top. Everything dull can be fixed with chocolate. 

This may be the worst photo I have ever taken in my life... 

So that was the humble flapjack- boring, simple and comforting.

Next Recipe: Passionfruit Cheesecake

Coffee and Walnut Cake

This is my mother's favorite cake. I am not a huge fan of this cake but I don't dislike it.

The cake has also made it on to "the disaster cake list" as it was a disaster.

When I stuck a knife in the cake to check that it was done after the allotted time it was still wet in the middle so I kept it cooking for longer which burnt the outside making it pretty solid.

It was basically raw in the middle which isn't particularly appealing. But it looked okay... 

And the coffee icing in the middle was delicious. I have decided I love marscapone.

However look what happened when you stick a knife in the top of it...

Yep it stays in by itself... great.

Next Recipe: Flapjacks

Treacle Tart

Treacle Tart is a traditional English pudding and surprisingly enough it doesn't have any actual treacle in it. 

It is a shortcrust pastry filled with a golden syrup, lemon, apple, egg and breadcrumb mixture.

There was a bit of a pastry incident... nothing a bit of first aid couldn't fix....

I had so much mixture I had to make little ones too but I have no pictures of them.

It is very sweet and perfect with cream as it takes away some of the sugary sweetness.

Next Recipe: Carrot Cake

Blondies (White Chocolate Brownies)

I love brownies, and I love white chocolate so Blondies sounded amazing.

They have honey and syrup in them making them very sweet (in total 300g of sweet) so this is a sweet tooth's dream. It also obviously has white chocolate in it, hence the white chocolate brownie thing...

So you mix honey, syrup, butter and vanilla in a pan and let it melt, once cooled you beat in one egg at a time and then fold in flour and baking powder. You then chuck in the white chocolate chunks and done. Simple.

You then bake them.

Now my oven is particularly vicious so they burnt and they are a little toasted, however they were still yummy.

They didn't taste as I had expected them too, like white chocolate, but more like honey as there is so much in there. It wasn't unpleasant but I expected more from something with white chocolate in it.

Next Recipe: Treacle Tart

Lemon Cupcakes

These are basically just cupcakes but with lemon extract in them... so obviously they were pretty standard. Except they were lemony.

They then have a lemon butter cream icing on them, which I have realized that I dislike... not lemon butter cream in particular but just butter cream in general. This may be down to the fact that I don't like butter.

Next Recipe: Blondies (White Chocolate Brownies)

The Football Boot Cake

I know this isn't lemon cupcakes, but I wanted to share this as it is cake related.

Last week was my brother's birthday so I helped my mum to create these

I know right if we say so ourselves, they look pretty damn cool.

We copied the design from The Birthday Cake Book by Fiona Cairns. This book is full of loads of other awesome recipes and you can buy it here  -->
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1844009858/?tag=hydra0b-21&hvadid=9551160789&ref=asc_df_1844009858

Happy Baking!

Lemon cupcakes will be next!

Vanilla Cupcakes

The very fashionable cupcakes which are ridiculously expensive to buy -£4 for a cupcake, come one! Anyway I decided to make them to Annie Bell's recipe as I have made them before but to a different recipe. 

So vanilla cupcakes are basically a normal sponge just instead of being in one large cake it is lots of little cakes. They are baked and then you ice them!

As I had some chocolate custard and crumbs left over from my mum's birthday cake I used them to ice some of them. But for most I made a vanilla buttercream icing tinted with pink food colouring and covered it in strawberry chocolate curls. So they were cupcakes.

If you want to save money, make your own as to be honest they taste pretty much the same... except posh cupcakes have better icing... but that might come with practise. 

Next Recipe: Lemon Cupcakes (sensing a theme?) 

Brooklyn Blackout Cake

It was my mum's birthday, a while back. WOOP HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

So a cake had to be made. Now on the cover of the book there is this cake, The Brooklyn Blackout cake and it looks amazing, and my mother agreed. And that was how we decided.

Anyway it is a very chocolaty cake covered in a thick chocolate custard and chocolate cake crumbs. yum.

So you make two chocolate sponge cakes and then cut one of them in half... which is difficult if you can't cut in a straight line. Like me.

So once you have done this you make a thick custard. Be warned it doesn't look like custard. it looks COOL.

Cool thick custard not like that weird stuff from primary school...

Anyway you sandwich three of the sponges together using the custard-y icing. And then you grate, yes grate the last sponge to cover the cake with. yum.

You cover the whole three sponges stuck together with custard and then you sprinkle on the crumbs as a thick layer.

It looks like a fluffy hat, but it doesn't taste like one, thankfully.

It was very delicious and chocolaty and yummy so I will be making that again as it also looks quite impressive.  So that was my mum's birthday cake. YAY!

P.S. I have no idea why it is called Brooklyn Blackout cake... I probably should have done so research but I am guessing because it is very dark... but who knows. If you do leave a comment. 

Next Recipe: Vanilla Cupcakes

Scotch Pancakes

For breakfast I made scotch pancakes as they seemed simple to make and everyone loves pancakes! They are apparently the simplest thing to make in the book and they were the simplest thing so far.

You mix sugar, flour, salt, milk and melted butter together so it is a batter. Apparently the melted butter stops the pancakes from sticking to the pan which I was sceptical about but it did seem to work so that's an interesting tip.

Anyway they were yummy and I have already made them again, where I made double the mixture.

Next Recipe: Brooklyn Blackout Cake

Apple Clafoutis

Clafoutis is a french pudding traditionally made with cherries but in this book they are substituted with apples.

It is a very puddingy pudding with a kind of bread and butter pudding feeling, but with apples.

A simple batter is made out of sugar, milk, flour and egg, this is then left to rest for a while. You boil rum with sugar and add the apples to make them softer and the rum syrupy. You then poor the apples on top of the batter in a glass dish.

It is then baked for around 35 mins and served warm.

It was nice but kind of strange as although the rum was supposed to burn off, the apples were still quite alcoholic and crunchy rather than soft. But in other ways it was a very nice pudding and very warming.

Sorry the picture is so bad, I took this on my phone. 

Next Recipe: Scotch Pancakes

Red Velvet Cake

Or the meat cake as it will henceforth be known... 

This cake is really fashionable at the moment, so I thought I would give it a go. However, it wasn't very easy, or it was easy and I did it wrong. One of the two. 

Anyway the air gets in to it by adding bicarb to vinegar which fizzes, you then  add it to the mix and then you add food colouring. In the book she uses colouring paste...which I didn't have so I improvised using liquid instead. This may have been a mistake...

It is then baked (obviously) for a while. 

I put a skewer in to the cake and it came out clean. So I assumed that the cake was done. 

HOW ABOUT NO. 

No, the cake was not as we later found out when the inside was mushy and like meat... appetizing right? 

It was horrible, the consistency was sticky and gummy and revolting. Also the colour wasn't red enough as once the mixture was very watery, I was too scared to add more. So it was more of a salmon colour. 

It is topped with a cream cheese and sugar frosting, which is sweet but not too sweet. This was the best part of the cake. 

I didn't take a picture of this disaster of a cake because well it was a disaster, but as a visual representation... 

So that was the prize for the worst cake, woop woop!

Next Recipe: Apple Clafoutis 

Angel Cake

In order to make this cake, we had to make a trip to Divertimenti on Marylebone High Street to buy an angel cake tin which was very exciting. It is the most amazing baking shop ever. We spent nearly an hour in there deciding which one we wanted and looking at the other stuff that they sell.

Once we had eventually bought it and returned home, I started baking. It is an easy enough cake but the type of sponge is quite different. The sponge is made using icing sugar instead of caster sugar and it has 8 egg whites thus it is virtually fat free. But apart from that it is a very normal sponge in terms of ingredients.

All the ingredients are whisked together so that they are a creamy smooth mixture which is very pale. It is then baked in its really cool tin.

The cake itself is very white when baked and has quite a strange consistency which you either love or find a bit weird. It is served with blueberries which contrasts the white-ness of the cake well. 

Next Recipe: Red Velvet Cake

Cherry Crumble Cake

One slight change: It was raspberry crumble cake not cherry as 

THERE WERE NO CHERRIES ANYWHERE. So frozen raspberries were used instead.

This pudding is a layer of sponge and a layer of raspberries which is covered in a crumble. 

However although it has a lot of separate components in it they are still all baked together, rather than the sponge baked first and then baked again with all the stuff on it. This meant that the raspberry juice soaked through in to the sponge and gave it extra flavor. 

The crumble was all crispy, the raspberries were all squidgy and sweet and the sponge was soft. It was a nice combination and I will definitely be making it again at some point. 

Next Recipe: Angel Cake

Scones

scone as in gone not scone as in phone.

So scones... pretty dull, not going to lie, but it is in the book and I made it so there we go.

Scones are basically bread and are actually quite quick and easy to make, you make a simple dough of icing sugar, flour, baking powder, egg and milk. You then, using biscuit cutters, cut circular pieces out of the dough. They are then baked.

We ate them warm with jam while watching Skyfall.

So bloody British.

Next Recipe: Cherry Crumble Cake

Lemon Polenta Cake

Polenta for those who don't know is peeled barley and is used as a substitute for flour.

Anyway the cake.

It was very delicious if I say so myself and was made with very little catastrophes, thankfully. It is quite simple to make though so it doesn't say much...

You shove all the ingredients in to a bowl and cream together. The end mixture is grainy... because of the polenta, sounds really great right now doesn't it? Then you put it in the oven to do its thing.

I then had to make an accompanying strawberry compote. Now the problem with this was that it needed Kirsch. I had never heard of it before and surprisingly enough we didn't have any. After being told it was an alcoholic drink that if we bought a whole bottle of would just sit in the cupboard never used. I decided to improvise. Enter the sloe gin.

Along with the gin there is also strawberry jam, she says use Bonne Mama but that is way to fancy - I prefer Hartley's, and quartered strawberries.

This is then served with the cake along with some creme friache and it is all very yummy.

Next Recipe: Scones 

Pancakes

This pancake day was my first time making pancakes, ever. EVER!
Yes I had never made a pancake before so it seemed like a good time to try.

Anyway I began, not really reading the instructions just kind of shoving everything in to the bowl in random orders and whisking occasionally. This didn't work,
I only worked this out when I was about half way through and glanced over at the recipe book... The lumps in the mixture were also a good sign...

In order to fix this without having to start all over again (wasting 4 eggs in the process) the electric whisk came out. And after a few jooshes (no it is not a word, I am well aware of that) it was normal pancake mix again.

I left it for a few hours then began to cook them.

The first one to quote my brother looked like "wet scrambled eggs"... when were scrambled eggs dry?
But the point is it looked awful and it wasn't cooked enough.

So I tried again. After a few attempts with the pancakes being too thick, burnt or under cooked, they began to work.

So 30 pancakes later they were normal pancakes. I couldn't flip them, but I'll save that for next year.


Sorry there is no picture. You know what pancakes look like...

Next Recipe: Lemon Polenta Cake