It’s Valentine’s Day and I’ve gone a bit over the top

Valentine’s Day has rolled around, and once again I find myself single.

I haven’t given up hope though! Two smiley faces in one email is definite flirting isn’t it?

Sigh.

Whatever. I’m a strong independent woman who can take apart a bed, put together a coffee table and buy my own flowers; tonight you will definitely not find me drunk, in my pyjamas singing ‘All By Myself’ a la Bridget Jones. That’s because I have a date! With a man with lovely arms try again the gym one more go a green smoothie KFC.

Anyway, there’s too much hate in the world and so even though it might not be for everyone, this year I am choosing to celebrate Valentine’s Day, love, kindness and happiness, and therefore I’ve gone a bit OTT on the baking. Because cake makes most people happy, you know?

Also I had some making up to do to my colleagues following the sweetcorn cake debacle.

Now the purpose of this blog is to bake my way through my cookbooks, so I looked for books with specific Valentine’s Day recipes. It just so happens that ‘Feast’ by Nigella Lawson has a whole chapter of recipes dedicated to Valentine’s Day.

Previously when I’ve used Nigella recipes they haven’t really worked. I’ve made a couple of cakes from this book and they weren’t great, but that was a very, very long time ago. So I dusted this book off and decided to make the three sweet recipes in the chapter. Here’s how I got on…

‘Love buns’

‘Love buns’. Come on Nige. For someone who says in this book that she doesn’t like Valentine’s Day, she’s doing a good job of hiding it.

The Valentine’s chapter kicks off with these. They’re just vanilla cupcakes with frosting but they do look brilliant.

Nigella says to put them in the oven for between 15-20 minutes… spoiler alert; they do not need 20 minutes. Mine were in for 15 and they were a bit too brown.

The icing is like a marshmallowy meringue; I’ve not made icing like this before. You whisk your eggs and sugar etc. in a bowl over a pan of simmering water for five minutes, take it off and add some vanilla extract until the mixture cools.

I’m a bit wary of putting eggs in icing but they must have been cooked as I ate one two and I didn’t get food poisoning.

I think they look really lovely. I’m unsure how I feel about the frosting – it’s lovely and light and fluffy so really there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, I’m just conditioned to like buttercream icing.

Custard cream hearts

I must confess, biscuits are not my strong point. I am much better at cakes than I am with dough or pastry and so I tend to steer clear of those things. Really that should mean I practice them more I suppose.

Anyway, one of the Valentine’s recipes is custard cream hearts so despite my reservations, I just threw caution to the wind and flipping went for it. I put everything in the food processor and mixed it all up.

Nigella urges that you proceed with caution when adding the egg and milk to the dry ingredients. I tried, I really tried! But it all ended up in there and I was a bit worried that the dough would be too soft.

After an hour and a bit chilling in the fridge (it was only supposed to be 20 minutes but somewhere along the line I got a phone call and had to pause the baking for a moment) the dough seemed fine and I rolled it out with no problem.

That old saying about keeping your dough moving is true and I was able to keep this one moving without too much breakage.

My heart cookie cutter was too big so I had to do a bit of DIY and cut around a heart shape I’d cut out of greaseproof paper. It’s fine, I was going for the rustic look anyway. (I wasn’t).

Nige needs to get her timings sorted – she says these need 15 minutes. Second spoiler alert – they don’t. I cooked my first batch for 15 minutes and they came out looking very crisp indeed, so I did the rest for ten minutes and was much happier.

I was a bit nervous about the buttercream – when I tasted it from the bowl it tasted a bit too custard-y but actually when it’s sandwiched between the biscuits it’s fine.

They actually taste like custard creams and I don’t think they’re too burnt! I’m calling it a success. Hooray!

Chocolate raspberry heart

I don’t have two 23cm heart shaped cake tins, but I do have two 23cm round cake tins. Because there are enough hearts in this blog post as it is, I hope you’ll forgive me but I decided to leave the cake round.

This isn’t a Mary Berry ‘whack it all in a bowl and mix it up’ type cake. This is a ‘whisk the eggs and sugar until they’re really fluffy and then add everything else but be careful you don’t knock the air out’ type cake. I prefer an all in one to be honest but we’ve got to try these different methods haven’t we? #cakescience

Now bearing in mind the timing issues we’ve experienced with the other two recipes I covered, I actually sat in front of my oven watching this because I didn’t trust what the book said (20 minutes). However, 20 minutes seemed about right and they smelled amazing when I got them out of the oven. There is A LOT of vanilla in this cake.

Nigella does say that the cakes are “flat and thin” at this point which is true, but that’s just because they’re cooked in a massive cake tin.

The filling is easy – whip up some cream, mash up some raspberries, bam.

The topping is ganache which is a bit hit and miss for me to be honest. I think this is definitely a technique I need to practice; it’s worked before when I made it and it needed to be thick for filling stuff, but I’m not so good when it needs to be runny so I can pour it. I was nervous (nothing new here). It didn’t quite turn out the same way it looks in the book but I think I resolved it by just pouring a load more cream in until it was the right consistency. Whoops!

Anyway, the whole thing together was very nice. I did think that if I made this again I’d use a 20cm tin rather than 23cm but actually the cake probably doesn’t need to be any thicker or I think it would be too much.

In conclusion… Yeah I think it all went alright. This is definitely the prettiest blog post I’ve written.

Final thoughts

If you’re in love, good for you. Tell your other half you think they’re great and if they do the washing up all the time, maybe offer to do it once or twice. It can’t hurt.

If you’re single like me, or for whatever reason your love life is a bit complicated and you aren’t really enjoying today, I hope you know that you’re fantastic. I will raise a Pepsi to you tonight as I enjoy my KFC Boneless Banquet (I’m sure there’s some kind of pun here about enjoying a Boneless Banquet and being single on Valentine’s Day but my mother reads this blog so I can’t possibly elaborate).