I made something new last weekend!



Point out my suspect choice of recipe source all you like, but this one came from cookingfailures - a post about a failure to make ASDA children's Easter cakes (which sounded about my kind of level) that I was immediately inspired to try myself, mostly in fascination of the way that you cut the cake into squares before icing the pieces so that you had the opportunity to put more toothrot per square inch on to them. Here, as far as I could make out from squinting at it, is the recipe.

Alphabet Cube Cake Things

275g butter
150g golden syrup
150g clear honey
125g caster sugar
4 medium free-range eggs
350g self-raising flour
450g (yes) icing sugar
Yellow colouring
Writing icing

1. Preheat the oven to 160C (320F in the measurement system I had to use) and line a cake tin with wax paper or whatever it's called in Britain
2. Put the butter (cubed), golden syrup, honey and caster sugar into a pan and heat them gently until they've all melted together into a sort of sickly mass.
3. Pour this into a bowl and leave it to stand for 10 minutes.
4. Add the eggs and sift the flour into it, then whisk it until it's a smooth batter.
5. Pour this into the cake tin and bake it for about 45 minutes, then leave it to stand for another 15 minutes.
6. Cut the resulting plank into cubes (you can work out the logistics of this for yourself).
7. Make up the icing sugar quite thickly with the yellow colouring, then once that's set, apply random letters to the top (or other symbols as well if you get fed up, as demonstrated above).

I quickly found out that the cakes were deceptively difficult to ice, because you have to use a positively Wingeresque* explosion of it to cover the surface of them all and have it dripping the right way - the surface of the cakes will not be uniformly horizontal as the picture on the recipe would have you believe! All you can do is spoon it over them very quickly and hope that most of them settle right, without causing too much of a flood of spare icing around the entire kitchen.

It has to be said that they didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped, but they weren't completely terrible for a first attempt at them and some value is reclaimed by the way that you can play about with them - you feel a compulsion to keep rearranging the cakes to form sentences that make sense, though admittedly my batch currently spells E@T A HORSE. I had one when I was on Skype to my parents and my dad said "I can see why it says '?' - 'am I edible?'" and "I hope they're eaten by this evening, or they'll glow in the dark". (He's where I get it from.) They were nice enough when freshly made, but they quickly deteriorated.

I think that I overcooked the cake a little (the instructions say more time than I've reported here) and it came out too dry, but having used Splenda instead of sugar might also have had something to do with it - I thought that the batter was very substantial even before cooking it, so it's possible that more liquid would help. On the positive side, they're absolutely nowhere near as sickly as you would think they were from the initial sugar-honey-syrup-butter napalm that you're directed to concoct.

* Do not look up