The Pink Cake.

For May's Cake Slice Bakers, we were to make The Pink Cake which is the pretty cake adorning the front of the book we are baking from this year - Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson.

The cake itself is a gorgeous chocolate cake layered with the raspberry buttercream.  It is only the raspberries making the beautiful pink colour.  We served the cake at our friends' house as dessert with cream and raspberries and it went down very well.

I am wondering about trying it with blueberries to make a purply kind of buttercream.

I'm sorry I haven't been baking along so much this year with the Cake Slice Bakers.  I am struggling with time and a lot of the recipes in this book are quite time consuming and more like celebration cakes than the every-day cakes I prefer to make (like those in Cake Keeper Cakes).  I'm not sure I will do next month's cake as it is another big, calorific, celebration cake similar to this one.  I enjoy being in the group but it is probably unfair of me to take a place and not bake consistently. Cake Slice Bakers - let me know if you are happy for me to tag along for the last few months of this book or if you would prefer for me to bow out.

Two Breads.

For this month's Random Recipes, we were asked to choose a random bread recipe.  Steve was more than happy to join in with this one as he loves making bread and is really the official bread maker in this house.  We have two dedicated bread books in the house - Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley and Dough by Richard Bertinet.  These were the ones we randomly chose. The other book I had in the mix was Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard - I love his bread recipes too.

Steve chose Bread Matters and randomly chose page 221 which is Cheese Bread.

He made three lovely loaves of cheesy bread.  He used mature cheddar and half white and half wholemeal bread.  This bread was particularly good for dipping into soup but Steve also liked it just spread with butter.  Obviously the kids loved it too.

I got Dough and opened it at page 88 - Ciabatta.

I must say I was a bit disappointed - how boring.  I noticed the variation called for Kalamata olives so I intended to make this.  Unfortunately, despite having bought some beautiful olives, I completely forgot to put them into my dough.  Ooops.
So there I was slightly bored by my white ciabattas.  However, they were incredible!  Perfect ciabattas, and full of taste (probably due to the 24 hour ferment).

They took a few steps over 24 hours but the actual work involved was minimal.  The recipe calls for avocado oil but I couldn't find any.  I'd love to give it a try again with either the olives or the avocado oil and Steve has asked for me to make them again so I guess I will.