Well it’s January and everyone in my office is ‘eating healthily’ (including me, blorft).
They don’t want me to thwart their efforts by bringing in a chocolate cake, so what better time to continue on from my avocado cake experiment than test out another recipe, this time… with sweetcorn!
This recipe is from ‘Saved by Cake’ by Marian Keyes. I’ll just start by saying that I absolutely love Marian Keyes. In front of me right now as I’m writing this I have eight of her books on one of my shelves, and another one on my bedside table that I haven’t started reading yet as I got it for Christmas.
If you don’t know who she is, she’s an author (my recommendations for you are either Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, or Anybody Out There) who wrote a cookbook when she took up baking as a way to deal with her depression.
I have made about two things from her book before, but as with most of the books I’ve collected over the years, I really just spend a lot of time looking at the pictures of the cakes so I’m not able to give a fair review on whether it’s any good or not. Even though I already know it’s amazing because Marian Keyes wrote it, so there.
Anyway, as I was flicking through the book I found a section called ‘Fruit and Veg’ and I thought ‘aha! This is the section I need for dieting colleagues!’.
I chose to make the Sweetcorn, Coconut and Lime Loaf because, well to be frank… because I had four tins of sweetcorn in my cupboard and I don’t need that much sweetcorn. Who does?
(Just to clarify not all four tins went into the cake!)
The first thing that struck me when I read through the recipe is that Marian uses the words ‘texturally very interesting’ in the introduction which I found alarming.
“How’s the sprout and coffee cake?” “Yes… it’s very interesting.”
“Roy! How was your holiday exploring the chair museums of the South?” “It was very interesting thanks Tim, we must meet so I can show you the pictures of my top ten rocking chairs.”
You see, ‘very interesting’ doesn’t really ever end well or mean anything good. I was worried. Which, to be fair, is my natural state so I was basically just being normal.
I got to baking. Marian recommends you separate the eggs and add the whisked-until-stiff egg whites to the rest of the mixture at the end. I may have whisked mine slightly too much as although I used the same sized tin as specified in the recipe, the loaf exploded a little bit and found its way to the bottom of my oven:
I also left it in for a few minutes longer than the 30 minutes that the recipe says as it wasn’t really springing back.
Does it look appealing? I mean… when I think about cakes that are appealing to me they’re all four layers tall and covered in six different colours of icing with a variety of sprinkles thrown at them. So when I compare it to that… I’m going to say no. I mean it just looks like a (slightly exploded) loaf cake doesn’t it? Nothing wrong with that.
All the sweetcorn sank to the bottom which was a bit annoying.
Did it smell nice? Well… it had a very interesting (!) smell that I still can’t really pinpoint. I think it smelled mainly of sweetcorn, a smell which, up until this point, I didn’t really think I minded. Turns out I’m not a fan.
Did it taste nice? Due to the smell I actually couldn’t bring myself to try any.
Usually I taste everything I’ve made to make sure it’s ok, but I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. That meant I had to rely on my colleagues and their reactions which ranged from the negative:
“It’s not one of your best.”
“I liked neither the taste or texture, it’s not one for me.”
“It’s like you got drunk and made a cake and just picked random items out of your cupboard.”
To the more neutral:
“If you took the sweetcorn out of it, it would be alright.”
To the more positive (I think both of these were remarks by someone who had only started working in our office today – maybe she just didn’t want to offend me on the first day she met me):
“It’s got a nice texture and it’s very moist.”
“I liked it although I did find the sweetcorn a bit odd.”
Someone did say to me “I don’t think Mary Berry had success every time,” which did make me feel better.
Much like avocado, I don’t think sweetcorn belongs in a cake. My case for ‘no vegetables in cakes’ is really gaining momentum now. One day I’ll try and make a cake with beetroot in it, but you have to roast the beetroot before you can put it in a cake and honestly I just don’t really want to have to do that.
In short, I don’t think this was a great success, but in this book are many other recipes which look lovely – I might try and make the Snickers cheesecake next because even though I don’t like Snickers, it does look nice.
Maybe though, some people really, really love sweetcorn? If you’re that person, you should make this cake. It wasn’t for me, but that’s okay – we’re all different.
Marian, I think this was just a blip and I still love you and all your books.
It doesn’t sound like one for me!