A Super Simple Birthday Cake

Coffee, Milk Chocolate and Salted Peanuts

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Hello, Happy Sunday!

If I said I had a lot going on in my life right now, that would be quite an understatement. In the last week or two, I finished a major part of a massive work project, went to Copenhagen and got engaged, came home to the start of the new kitchen installation and then, to top it all off, I turn 40 tomorrow! To be completely honest I feel like I’m stuck inside a tumble dryer, mid-cycle. But, you know, in a good way. If you know me in person, you’ll know that my brain gets easily overwhelmed when presented with too much information or too many tasks. These past two weeks feel like they’ve finally caught up with me, and the last few days I have been a little all over the place. I mention this solely because it explains how I landed on today's recipe.

corny ring picture we needed pictures to share with family...

Whilst in Copenhagen (more coming on that fantastic city next week), I did the expected thing and spent most of the trip dragging Mike from bakery to bakery. I say drag, but he is a very willing participant in my carb-based missions. I came back with so much inspiration, and this week, I had intended to put that inspiration to the test. Reader, it didn’t go well.

Juno was at the top of my list of bakeries to visit, and thankfully it lived up to every expectation. I had my eyes trained on the cardamom buns, being told by multiple people they were the best in the city, and in my rush to secure the goods, I ordered the bun and a couple of other things without truly taking in the full selection of goods on offer. We ordered a cardamom bun, a vanilla custard bun and the rhubarb cream bun - all excellent. A couple of hours later, I happened to look at the bakery’s Instagram page and got the strongest desire to immediately run back to try something else. The reason was their take on the classic Dream Cake, which I had failed to spot when I was waiting to order. Dream Cake is a Danish recipe that I’ve made many times before and always absolutely loved. It is made with a sponge cake and topped with a sticky and chewy caramel and coconut layer. In the Juno version, they make an almond cake in a loaf pan and add coffee and tonka to give even more flavour to the topping. Whilst I didn’t actually go back to the bakery, I knew exactly what I wanted to make for my birthday when we got back to London.

For reasons that are too boring to go into, the version I made was a complete disaster. A delicious but weirdly damp disaster. And, considering I have a great base recipe already, this was exceedingly disappointing. But I am determined to try again! In the meantime - I needed a birthday cake. Actually I need two, but that's just because it's a big birthday, and I didn’t think one was quite celebratory enough. The first cake ended up very simple, maybe to counter the failure encountered earlier. It is also a cake I had been meaning to share with all of you for a while. The cake is an incredibly simple loaf cake, flavoured with coffee and made with crème fraîche for a beautiful blend of texture and flavour. The glaze is also simple, a milk chocolate ganache poured over the top of the cake so that it drips down the side, covering the entire cake. Sometimes, especially when life is a whirlwind, it’s best to stick with simple! I’ll post cake number two, a slightly more involved affair, very soon. I should also correct myself because there was actually 3 cakes (maybe it is getting a bit over the top now) because my brother made us a mini layer cake too. He also used a recipe from ‘Small Batch Bakes’ which was fabulous.

The reason I love this first recipe, aside from the taste, is the method used to make the cake. Most cakes you’ll make likely fall into one of three categories – the creaming method, the muffin method or the whisked method. The creaming method is when the cake is made by beating butter and sugar together, which adds lots of lightness to a cake. The muffin method is a simpler approach where the liquid fat (oil or melted butter for example) is stirred, along with the other liquid ingredients, into the dry ingredients to form a batter. Whisking is, as it sounds, when eggs and sugar are whisked to form a light base, and then flour is gently folded in to make a particularly light cake. Today's method is completely different but no harder. It is called reverse creaming.

Instead of beating the butter and sugar together, the dry goods and the butter are mixed together first to make a crumbly mixture. The eggs are added last and mixed to form a smooth cake batter. This method doesn’t aerate the batter as much as the creaming method, so it tends to create cakes with a less open, more even texture. I particularly love it for loaf cakes, where it helpsd achieve a delicious velvety texture. The other benefit of this method is lower gluten development. Because the flour is coated in fat before the eggs and, therefore, the majority of the recipe's water content, the batter is slower to develop gluten, so recipes using this method tend to have a particular tenderness.

To flavour this cake, I add a quick homemade coffee concentrate and then serve the cake sliced and topped with a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkling of salted peanuts.