Birthday Baking

While dd is lying under the duvet trying to shake her virus which has been hanging around for weeks I'm getting on with the week's baking which this week includes a birthday cake for a soon to be 16 year old. This week I made the normal flapjack recipe but I added a fruit and nut mix to half the mixture. Ds loves the plain flapjack but I like to add something a bit different to the mix. This is what it looks like this week. I hope it tastes as nice as the cranberry flapjack I made.

I then moved on to making the birthday cake. I used the chocolate cake recipe from my kid's baking book - 'my first baking book'. I used my new recipe holder which I was given for my birthday. Definitely a useful and lovely addition to our kitchen.

To make the cake you need:

100g softened butter or margarine
250ml milk
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 large eggs
250g caster sugar
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
50g cocoa powder
225g plain flour

Add the lemon juice to the milk and set aside. Set the oven to 180 degrees centigrade. Grease and line a 22cm deep cake tin. Cream the butter and half the sugar until pale and fluffy, beat the eggs in one by one (I used medium eggs so we'll see how the cake turns out). Stir in the rest of the sugar.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder and bicarbonate of soda together. Add half of this mixture to the wet ingredients and fold in with half the milk mixture. Add the rest of the milk and then the flour. Pour into the tin and cook for one hour.

The plan is to make the cake into a dinosaur! Watch this space. In the mean time I'm going to clean the kitchen while I finish listening to the Archers where Lillian is just about to start a relationship with Matt's brother. If you don't know what I'm talking about then maybe it's time to start listening to radio 4. I'm sure you can access it on the Internet wherever you are in the world.