Cake depicts Swift wearing a sweatshirt of the Kansas City Chiefs – her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s team
A baker who has created a lifesize Taylor Swift cake for Sunday’s Super Bowl said it was the “perfect opportunity” to finally get around to making it.
The cake sculpture by Lara Mason, from Walsall in the West Midlands, has racked up more than 3m views on TikTok.
Continue reading...Every Christmas, the actor sends an extreme white chocolate coconut gateaux to close friends – by private jet, it turns out. This year, those friends include me. Twice
Reader, I am here to inform you that dreams do come true. You really can have anything your heart desires, with the proviso that you’re prepared to aggressively and repeatedly abuse your position in order to get it. What I’m trying to say is this: my year-long campaign to get Tom Cruise to send me a cake has ended in success.
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a short piece about Cruise’s habit of sending $50 (£38) white chocolate coconut bundts to his closest friends at Christmas. Kirsten Dunst, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Jimmy Fallon, Graham Norton and scores of other high-profile figures all receive a cake, lovingly made by Doan’s Bakery in California and shipped out by Cruise’s staff. I finished my article by hoping that I would one day be important enough to receive such a wonderful gift.
Continue reading...The Great British Bake Off is back! Sales of baking utensils skyrocket when the amateur baking show is on. It appears we’re all cake mad. But I’ve always been mad as a box of doughnuts for cake, long before the GBBO started. In fact, it’s one of my loves – not one of my vices.
Cake and I are friends; we go back a long way. At school, we’d bake in home economics class and sell our creations in the tuck shop – 10p a fairy cake. The whole process felt like alchemy to me: the creaming of butter and sugar, then the eggs, all beaten into a frenzy of delight. That feeling of magic at my fingertips has not left – it is why I love to bake. It’s a good lesson in life: humble beginnings can have majestic ends. Like an ode to a lover, I feel emotional when writing about it. I can smell its perfume and the tantalising sensation of it touching my lips.
Continue reading...The juicy fruit is newly in season and delicious in both savoury and sweet dishes. Here are some tried and tested delights
This is a cake made using the traditions of Italy. Sharp plums or damsons are placed atop a simple almond and polenta cake. Flourless and dairy-free, it is not intentionally health conscious; it just ends up being delicious this way. It will stay fresh for three days if wrapped in foil.
Continue reading...Who wants to turn their excess Easter eggs into chocolate fondant, chocolate cereal clusters and chocolate and hazelnut spread? Bring it on!
Can you bake with Easter egg chocolate? Sure you can. After getting my hands on a variety of Easter eggs this year (dark chocolate, caramelised white chocolate, orange-flavoured, nougat-filled mini eggs, the ones with pretzels stuck all over them … ), I found a place for them all: melted and turned into something else. For these recipes, I encourage you to use up whatever chocolate you have. Easter eggs are typically sweetened (even the dark varieties), so taste them beforehand (as I’m sure you have already) and judge if you need to add any salt, for example.
Continue reading...A three-course showpiece to prep in advance, so you can spend more time with your better half: burnt aubergine with feta and harissa oil, prawns in vanilla and rum butter, and a chocolatey coffee mousse to finish
This time last year, many of us were looking forward to a special, one-to-one supper with a loved one. The partner we live with, for example, but perhaps forget to go on dates with; a special meal, quality time, stories saved up to be shared. The past year has, of course, brought a whole new meaning to the idea of “quality time”, and I’m not sure anyone has any great stories they’ve saved for this Valentine’s dinner. Be kind and cut yourself some slack: forget about the top new chat and focus instead on a top new meal. Pat yourself on the back for making it this far, and raise a large glass of something you adore.
Continue reading...Rosie O’Donnell, Jimmy Fallon and Graham Norton are just a few of the famous recipients of the ‘Cruise cake’, a white chocolate coconut ring which might as well be a halo
Tom Cruise follows me on Twitter. Until now, I have been relatively proud of this fact, even though he follows tens of thousands of people, and only tweets three times a year, and his account is probably run by his staff, and he wouldn’t actually be able to tell you what Twitter was if you held a gun to his head. Regardless, I was proud.
But now I feel like a failure, because Tom Cruise has never sent me a cake. And it turns out that all Tom Cruise does is send cakes to people. According to Yahoo, every year he orders more than 100 white chocolate coconut bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, California, and sends them to his famous friends. Rosie O’Donnell gets one. Kirsten Dunst gets one. Jimmy Fallon gets one. James Corden gets one. Graham Norton gets one, and his staff eat it without telling him. Henry Cavill called it “the most decadent, the most amazing cake”. Barbara Walters once ate hers live on television, in a power move as yet unmatched by any mortal human.
Continue reading...Sweet, comforting and endlessly flexible, flapjack is the perfect lockdown bake. Whether you’re a vegan, a hipster or a millionaire, we’ve got you covered
Perhaps I am over-generalising, but I feel that the flapjack rarely migrates from the home economics class into everyday adult life. Yet at this moment, it hits all the notes: it is wholesome, very simple, you can bake it with children and you can throw any old nonsense in to no obvious ill effect. Plus, it needs no flour, which is great if you can’t get hold of any, and oats are incredibly good value. There is no kitchen alchemy involving things that have a habit of going wrong – no raising agent, no uncertainty from adding an egg.
I tried every which way, with the “help” of an outrageously careless 10-year-old, to get one wrong, just for the suspense. There were rumours that tin size was important, that the wrong dimensions messed with the texture. It is true that a thinner flapjack will have a more biscuity, less squidgy mouthfeel, but biscuity is still fine, otherwise why would people eat biscuits? It is also true that the finer the oats, the more they hold together in the finished product, but even jumbo oats didn’t fall apart as I had been led to believe. But if this really worries you, you can make them finer by whizzing them first in a food processor, anyway.
Continue reading...On lockdown and feeling the urge to bake, but missing something apparently vital? Then pinch some ideas from great bakers past and present
Cake has taken on a new significance now that most of us are stuck at home all day, every day. We’re comfort-eating and baking like there’s no tomorrow. But what do you do when you fancy a sponge, but can’t find eggs or your oven is broken and no one will fix it? Here are some recipes to get you through every ingredient shortfall.
If we suggest you replace one missing ingredient with another that you don’t have, or that you would normally never dream of buying, bear in mind that no two kitchen cupboards are the same and you may find that grocers can still supply “fancy” alternatives such as ricotta or flaxseeds while the staples are but a memory.
Continue reading...