Easy Cake Decorating Ideas: Princess Cake with a Heart

Today, for once, we had a very late breakfast and a late lunch, so I'd thought we'd survive until dinner without having to eat any snack in between. How wrong I was! Around 4PM I started to crave something sweet, and inspired by our ladybird cake experience yesterday, I decided to bake a quick princess cake. Less than one hour later, we were devouring this raspberry-flavoured treat!

I'm not a big talent in cake decorating, but this one is really easy to make. And, as far as I'm concerned, it's more important how a cake tastes than what it looks like :)

This time, I wanted to try baking the cake with whole-grain flour, and it worked very well indeed. A small step towards a healthier treat...

For one cake you need:

• 4 eggs


• 100ml sugar


• 200ml whole-grain wheat flour


• 1tsp baking powder


• 75ml milk


• 75ml raspberry juice


• 100ml raspberry jam


• 200ml heavy cream


• 200g marzipan


• a few drops red food colouring


• 1 tsp powder sugar

This is how to do it:

Preheat the oven to 175C. Beat the eggs and sugar in a baking bowl and add sifted flour in which you’ve added the baking powder. Stir gently with a wooden spoon until the flour is well combined with the rest. Pour the batter in a round cake form and bake until golden brown, or some 15 minutes.

In the meantime, beat the cream until soft peaks form. Take about half of the cream and mix it with the raspberry jam.

When the cake is well baked, remove it from the oven and let cool, then remove from the form and cut horizontally into two pieces either using a sharp knife or a string.

Place the bottom half on a serving plate. Moisten with half of the milk and half of the raspberry juice. Spread the cream-raspberry-filling on the bottom half, then place the upper half on top and moisten with the rest of the milk and raspberry juice. Spread the remaining cream evenly on top of the cake.

Roll the  marzipan between two layers of cling film into a disc just a bit bigger than the cake’s diameter. From one corner, take out a heart with a cookie cutter. Trim the rest of the marzipan if needed. Place the disc carefully on top of the cake and fold to cover the sides as well (I wasn't very careful enough today, and the marzipan broke in two places...). Sprinkle with powder sugar. Colour the heart with few drops of red colouring. Place the heart in the middle of the cake and enjoy!

 

 

Day 15: Linzer Cookies

Ten days to go, and I still hadn't baked almost any of the iconic German Christmas cookies - Zimtsterne, Spitzbuben, Zedernbrot, Linzerschnitte...

So now it was time to get back to the track. I decided to bake Linzer cookies, the recipe of which I was almost sure I already shared last year - but I didn't... So now it's time to share it!

These sandwich cookies taste a bit like gingerbread but they are much softer! Fill them with any red jam that you like - my favourite is a mixture of raspberry and redcurrant jam.

This is what you need:

• 150g softened butter


• 50g sugar


• 1 egg


• 150g all-purpose flour


• 75 ground almonds


• 75g ground hazelnuts


• 1/3 tsp baking powder


• 1/2 tsp cinnamon


• 1/4 tsp cloves


• 1/4 tsp cardamom


• a pinch of ground nutmeg


• a pinch of salt (if using unsalted butter)


• red jam (raspberry, redcurrant...) for the filling


• some confectioner's sugar to decorate

This is how to proceed:

Beat butter and sugar until the mixture is creamy. Add the egg and stir until well combined. In another bowl, combine all the other dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar-egg-mixture and stir until you get a smooth batter. It is a bit liquid at this point, but don't add any flour!

Let the dough rest in the fridge about 2 hours.

Now, preheat the oven to 180C. Roll the dough out and cut hearts (or other forms of your liking) with a cookie cutter. Bake the cookies until the start to get some colour.

Once out of the oven, let the cookies cool down. Then spread jam evenly on the flat side of half of the cookies. Sandwich with the rest of the cookies. Sprinkle with some powder sugar and serve!

If you're planning to keep the cookies longer, do the sandwiching part only just before serving them.

Raspberry Rugelach with Hazelnuts

These croissant-shaped little sweet pastries are my new favourite! They are easy and quick to make, they look pretty, and taste fantastic. I first baked rugelach with a chocolate filling, but didn’t like them at all. The dough was great, though, so I made a new attempt with raspberry jam and hazelnuts as filling - and this time I hit the jackpot...!

For 24 rugelach you need:

• 120g butter


• 170g whole-grain spelt flour


• a generous pinch of salt (less generous if using salted butter)


• 120g quark or sour cream

For the filling:

• 200g raspberry jam


• two handfuls of coarsely chopped hazelnuts

To decorate:

• 1 Tbsp vanilla-scented confectioners’ sugar

Cut the butter in small cubes and place in a baking bowl. Add flour and salt, and work with your fingertips until the texture is like fine crumbles. Then add quark or sour cream and work with your hands until you can form the dough into a ball. Then place the dough in your fridge for at least 30 minutes, but you can make the dough even several hours before.

When you take the dough out of the fridge, set your oven to 190 C. With a rolling pin, roll the dough out into two 25 cm diameter circles. Cover both circles evenly with raspberry jam and chopped hazelnuts. Cut each circle into 12 triangular pieces, as if you were cutting a pizza. Roll each triangle and form a small crescent. Bake for about 12-15 minutes, or until golden brown.

Let your rugelach cool some 10 minutes. Then sprinkle them with confectioners’ sugar and enjoy!

P.S. To make vanilla-flavoured confectioners’ sugar, take a glass jar with a lid. Cut one vanilla pod lengthwise into two pieces and place in the jar. Now fill the jar with confectioners’ sugar, cover, and wait one week or so – and voilà, you’ve got your own vanilla powder sugar!

Linzer Schnitten

I first tasted Linzer Torte in Vienna some years ago, and immediately became a fan. The combination of hazelnut, spices, and jam together with the crumbly sticky texture is just heavenly. This recipe brings you the same flavours and texture but in a miniature size!

These cookies are much easier to bake than one might first think. You just make the dough, roll it out, cover first with jam, then a criss-cross-pattern of dough stripes, bake, and cut into small cookies. That’s it! Be careful with the clover, though; better use a bit less than too much, or the other flavours don’t stand any chance.

For about 50 cookies you need:

• 300g flour (I used spelt 1050)


• 100g ground hazelnuts


• 80g sugar


• 1 tsp baking powder


• a pinch of salt


• 1 tsp cinnamon (Ceylon, if possible)


• 1 pinch of ground cloves (or more, if you like a stronger taste)


• 200g butter or vegan margarine


• about 50ml (vegan) milk


• 100g red currant jam


• 80 g raspberry jam


• one egg yolk and 1 Tbsp milk for the wash (optional)

Combine flour, hazelnut, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and cloves in a baking bowl. Add butter (cut in small cubes) and work with your fingertips until fine and crumbly. Add enough milk so that you can form the dough into a ball.

Take about ⅔ of the dough and roll it out into a rectangular form (mine was 25cm*35cm). Place the rectangle on an oven pan covered with a parchment paper. (If you want, you can roll the dough out on the parchment paper already - that way, you don’t need to worry about whether it will break when you move it!) Combine both jams in a bowl and spread them evenly on the dough.

Now, roll the rest of the dough about 3 mm thin. Cut out long stripes about 0,5cm wide with a knife or with a pastry wheel. Arrange the stripes to form a criss-cross pattern as in the picture. If you want, you can brush the stripes with egg yolk and milk - this gives a very beautiful colour to the cookies!

Bake in a preheated oven (190 C) about 25 minutes, or until thoroughly cooked. Let cool, then cut into long rectangular cookies, about 2cm wide and 7cm long.

P.S. I first tasted Linzer Torte in Café Goldegg, a coffee shop in Vienna that just might have the best coffee in the world. The cakes were awesome as well. Service was impeccable. And yet: I’ll never go to Café Goldegg again. Why? Because happy children are not welcome there. Every time we went there with a crying child, it was just fine. But when we once managed to have five happy children with us, it was a problem. The owner came personally to tell us that loud laughter was not allowed in a coffee shop. I mean, REALLY. How screwed-up is that?