Anyway, with a bit more vegan cooking experience I have had another go this year. I used Mary Berry’s recipe (same one I used for my own cake), but instead of eggs I used Orgran “No Egg”. This is a white powder you mix with water and whisk up before adding it to recipes instead of eggs. It wouldn’t be something I’d smile on myself as it is packed with chemicals and I had to laugh at the description on the packet where it said “Can not be used to make fried eggs”. I also swapped out the plain flour in the recipe with SR to give it an extra bit of lift – but apart from that exactly the same recipe.

The mixture looked exactly like the ordinary one when I put it in the tin – and miracle of miracles it has risen and I didn’t burn it. It looks lovely and moist and smells lovely. The proof of the pudding (ha, ha) will be when we try it – but I would imagine that any nasty taste residue from all the raising agents will be thoroughly masked by the fruit, spice and of course brandy.

Try as I might, I cannot create anything which has any resemblance to a proper cake and is both vegan and low-carb. So I have decided to make a two tier (possibly three tier) cake, and make one tier vegan and one tier low-carb. I tried out the recipes for both of these and they have turned out pretty well.

For the overall look of the cake I am trying to duplicate the one Frances Quinn did for the Bake-Off a couple of years ago (recipe here – http://francesquinn.co.uk/midsummer-nights-dream-cake/). In my opinion she is the best baker ever to have been on the show. Anyway I took the sunshine cake she made for the top tier and veganized it by removing the eggs. In their place I added an extra tsp of bicarb, and made my own self-raising flour by adding baking powder to strong bread flour – instead of ordinary plain flour. I read somewhere that the gluten in the strong flour creates a structure for the rising agents to use to hold the cake up in place of the eggs. I also added some vegan milk to get the consistency right – I also read that vegan cakes should be more sloppy than ordinary ones to help the rise. Anyway – it seemed to rise reasonably well.

I decorated it with some of the brilliant ideas from the original cake, although I didn’t have a fresh pineapple to make the flowers with. I also had a bit of difficulty with my bees as I made them a bit small and was then rather impatient about leaving the chocolate to dry so I smudged them rather. I will do better when I make the real thing. For the icing – I covered the cake in a thin layer of marzipan and then iced with vegan lemon buttercream – frankly I don’t like this myself and I peeled it off before I sampled it. I would rather have used either a lemon curd or a mascarpone cheese frosting myself – but unfortunately not very vegan.

So for the low carb layer I found a Nigella Lawson recipe for a flourless chocolate orange cake – http://www.food.com/recipe/nigella-lawson-flourless-chocolate-orange-cake-303266 This one I did need to adapt as it has sugar in it. So I removed the sugar and added one third the amount of Truvia (stevia based sweetener with no carbs which is three times sweeter than sugar). This left a deficit in bulk for what would have been filled by the rest of the sugar, so I filled this with one third extra ground almonds, and one third extra cocoa. I also added a bit more baking powder and the juice of a lemon to help the rise. It definitely took a bit less time to bake than it says in the recipe – I would be watching it from about half an hour and getting ready to cover the top.

Anyway, it didn’t have a huge rise but it certainly smelt good cooking. Then for a low carb icing I adapted a recipe from the Truvia site here – https://www.truvia.co.uk/recipes/blueberry-lemon-cupcakes I took the coconut milk and instead of the lemon I added some melted dark chocolate. Then I sweetened with Truvia and thickened with cornflour.

I’m not a big chocolate fan – but to me this was very nice – quite dense compared with an ordinary cake but not too sweet and with a great orange taste. R is a great chocolate fan but I get the sense that he is not admitting that he found this cake not sweet enough and didn’t like the orange flavour. Anyway – it is about the best I can do within the remit I’ve been given.

J is a big fan of Qonqr – which is a location based mobile phone wargame (a bit like Ingress, but for WP) – so this year I made him a Qonqr cake. It was very purple because those are the faction colours for the Faceless which are the faction J belongs to (you have to play the game to really understand what I am going on about here).

So this is (was actually because we ate most of it) the cake.

Actually, underneath that horrid purple icing was a nice cake. It was a variation on Mary Berry’s “Whole Lemon” cake – basically a Victoria sponge with the addition of a lemon which had been boiled (yes really) for 20 minutes and then pulped in a food processor. It was then cut into four layers, each liberally coated with the home made lemon curd and a cream filling made with mascarpone cheese beaten up with lemon juice, zest and a little icing sugar. Whether credit is due to Mary, my new Stoves range, or my culinary genius, it was pretty good; moist and not too sweet.

It must have had a billion calories in it – so poor J was forced to take the remnants home to finish them off so that I wasn’t tempted

Back to home and the healthy regime shortly – I will very kindly refrain from bringing R a slice of the cake home with me….

I love baking but I am constantly trying to be healthy and not to put weight on, so I am not so fond of eating the results (or rather I am but I would rather not), so I always bake something for my Mum and Dad. This time it is Mary Berry’s Simnel cake and Easter biscuits. The biscuits are very nice (I have to admit I did sample one), but the cake is a little overdone around the edges. I swear I baked it at the right temperature, and actually for 15 minutes less than the recipe said – so sadly I suspect that my oven is over hot in places. This year I am going to look at getting a gas range – afraid that for all it looks as though it was monstrously expensive, I am less than enamoured with the Britannia range I inherited with the house.

The cake was supposed to have crystalized primroses on it – but unfortunately the ones in my garden aren’t quite out yet.

The mixture

Adding an internal layer of marzipan

The baked result

Finished article with biscuits

I also got my Christmas cake iced. The ready made fondant icing you can get these days really is a boon to people like me who are useless at icing cakes. When I was a child it was always royal icing which was exceeding difficult to get smooth. So my Mum always iced her cakes as a sort of ‘snow scene’; which basically means roughing the icing up with a knife blade so that you don’t have to try to smooth it out.

I see from my Fitbit that I have walked 7000 steps or nearly three miles around the house today doing all this plus general cleaning up. Probably just as well as the weather is so vile today that R and I didn’t get our walk, and I see a couple of weeks of excess calories coming on.

Recipe is on the BBC site. I followed it exactly with the only difference being that I lowered the amount of cherries and correspondingly upped the raisins as I am not fond of cherries. I also added a couple of extra tablespoons of brandy to the fruit on the second day of soaking as it looked a bit dry.

So it was supposed to cook for 4 to 4.5 hours at 140C. I checked mine after two hours and it was getting ready way too fast, so I covered the top with a double piece of greaseproof with a 50p sized hole in the middle to let out the steam, and reduced the heat to 120C. At 3.5 hours it looked cooked, but a skewer in the middle was still coming away with cake on it – so I gave it another 20 minutes. In the end I took it out after 3 hours 50 minutes and I was pretty happy with it, but now it has cooled I still think the edges are over cooked. Sigh…

So we will see what it is like, but I am starting to think that the thermostat on the oven has gone. When I combine this with the crappy grill (so many hot and cold spots that trying to cook toast you have to turn it round about six times) I am starting to contemplate buying a new cooker next year – and making it gas as part of a general drive to reduce electricity consumption (looking towards solar at some point)….

I’ll post further on icing the cake and what it ends up tasting like!