Recipe: Coffee cake
Most challenging moment: none
Lessons learnt: Coffee cake is so very delicious!
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After trying out stuff from the cupcakes and bars sections, I decided to try my hand at one of the Hummingbird cakes. The simplest one seemed to be this coffee cake. At this point, it's important for me to give you an aside about my relationship with coffee. Growing up I hated it... the smell, the taste... it just made me want to hurl. Then about three years ago, I started by drinking a cup every week, then two cups a week and now my morning doesn't begin without a good, strong coffee (with one brown sugar and skim milk, thank you!)
So this seemed like a good time to try a coffee cake. The recipe was very straightforward. It involved making a coffee essence by boiling a few tablespoons of water with two teaspoons of strong instant coffee. Once the essence had cooled, it was poured into a very standard cake mix of butter, sugar, eggs, flour and baking powder. I decided to double the recipe because I wanted two cakes (one for a friend who had just completed six years at work; and the other for a dinner party we were planning that week). I used my brand new blue, shaped silicone pan and the results were oh so beautiful.
I used my own icing because I don't like the Hummingbird icings at all - they use too much sugar. I made a standard chocolate icing with melted bittersweet chocolate, butter, sugar and milk and mixed in some more coffee essence. The first icing was too thick so the cake didn't look so great... although I improved the appearance slightly by adding chocolate shavings... however everyone at work thought was delicious.
For the second cake, I decided to add more milk to the icing to make it more runny and that turned out great. It was served with vanilla and coffee ice cream and the guests (a family that doesn't always enjoy a 'western' dessert recipe) asked for seconds - woo hoo! Converted by Hummingbird!
