Week 21: Cappuccino and Walnut Cake

The book: Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook

The recipe: p277, "Cappuccino and Walnut Cake"

Twenty-one weeks into this ridiculous project and finally something sweet! And an entire cake, no less! It's about time.

Now, I may be a hardened espresso-quaffer, but I'm not actually all that crazy about coffee cake (for, despite the fancy name, that's exactly what this is). Thankfully, this week also presented an excellent opportunity to cook for an audience of victims guinea pigs fellow parkrunners, as our local event at Hilly Fields celebrated its 200th run.

And if there's one thing parkrunners like, it's a bit of cake. Frankly, sometimes the prospect of baked goods is all that gets us out of bed on a Saturday morning and pushes us around the 5km course in the first place. So even in the knowledge that there would be plenty of competing cakesmiths (Hilly Fields on a parkrun anniversary day is a bit like Bake Off, only with more breathable neon clothing), this seemed like the ideal time to get my bake on.

The prep: Well, here's the thing: as far as I can remember, I haven't actually baked a cake since Home Economics lessons at middle school. As well as buying ingredients, then, this week's prep involves procuring a basic electric hand mixer from Argos, then embarking on a search for a pair of cake tins that aren't too wide, aren't too shallow, and (most pertinently) don't cost the best part of ten English quid each. Cue the mighty Poundstretcher, which comes to my rescue just as I'm about to bite an expensive bullet in BHS. Springform, seemingly sturdy and costing £1.99 apiece, you say? That will do nicely.

Ingredient-wise, I'm surprised at how much I have in stock already considering I never actually do the whole cake thing. The only new additions are a bottle of Camp Coffee for flavouring purposes, some walnuts (organic, don'tcha know - though only because the own-brand ones were sold out, obvi), a couple of tubs of mascarpone, and some white cooking chocolate. Those who know me will know it takes considerable effort for me to allow the horror that is white "chocolate" to cross the threshold of my kitchen - I really can't abide the stuff. But one must suffer for one's art, so cross the threshold it does.

Actually, there is another ingredient I need to buy, or at least I would if I were planning on using it. To quote the recipe: "Fresh unsprayed violets to decorate". AHAHAHAHAHA I'm sorry what now? Even if I knew where to source violets in central Lewisham, sprayed or otherwise, why would I want to scatter them over a perfectly good cake? In any case, since I'm making this not for beautiful, Bake Off-friendly presentation but to be divvied up into bite-size chunks and transported to the local park in Tupperware, it's ixnay on the iolet-vay.

Filth

The making: This is another one where the recipe is available online, so you can follow in my footsteps here if you wish.

Those otherwise reliable folks at Good Housekeeping have sneakily hidden a few cooking steps in the ingredient list (a reminder in the method would have been useful), so I make sure to melt some butter and toast a good wodge of the walnuts before doing anything else. Nice try, Good Housekeeping. Lucky I was paying attention.

To start, the cake tins are greased and lined, and the flour and baking powder are sifted in a bowl. Then it's time to wield my new piece of quality Argos kit, as four eggs and some caster sugar are whisked in a glass bowl over vaguely simmering water until "light, thick and fluffy". This, the recipe says, should take 3-4 minutes. And I know just how to pass the time!

By the time this musical war crime is over, the egg/sugar mix has become so airy it almost spills out over the rim of the bowl and all over the stovetop. (In't physics brilliant?) With disaster mercifully averted, the melted butter, Camp Coffee and chopped walnuts are folded into the mix, followed by the flour and baking powder. The general idea, as I understand it, is to keep things as light and fluffy as possible without knocking too much air out of the resulting batter - which is then poured into the tins and popped in the oven until it turns into lovely springy cake. Magic!

Making the icing involves melting the white "chocolate" (vom) and stirring it through the beaten mascarpone along with some more Camp Coffee. Two problems here: the resulting icing is really quite runny, and there's tons of it. Like, easily double the quantity needed to cover the cake. If it were thicker (e.g. if you refrigerated it for a couple of hours before use) then I suppose you could apply more of it to the cake, but it's quite rich and strong in flavour so I don't know if you'd really want to. As a cake-making novice, though, I'm happy to make sure any gaps in the icing coverage due to the aforementioned runniness are filled and basically leave it at that.

The recipe then describes a convoluted process whereby a mixture of blender-blitzed walnuts, sugar and cinnamon are supposed to be applied to the side of the cake by scattering them on greaseproof paper, then lifting the paper up to press them onto the side of the cake. In another "in't physics brilliant?" moment, you can probably guess what actually happens when you try to do this on a planet where gravity exists. Since I want more than just the bottom few centimetres of the cake to be decorated, I end up basically flinging the walnut crumbs at the side of the cake with a spoon in the hope that they'll stick, then giving up and scattering the rest over the top instead.

cep cep

Readers, the result is certainly not elegant. But it is a cake, and it looks fine once it's been sliced up and you can't see how haphazard the "decoration" once appeared. After all the stresses and strains of making the thing using (to me) largely unfamiliar techniques - or deciding not to use them, as the case may be - I'm calling that a qualified success.

The eating: I try a couple of offcuts myself the night before Saturday's parkrun, and I'm reasonably happy with the outcome. The cake is fairly moist, and while the icing is quite intense, the fact that I've ended up using it more sparsely than intended actually works in its favour. Violets or no violets, I feel reasonably confident that I won't end up poisoning any of my running friends, which - let's face it - is always a bonus.

And indeed, the cake meets with an enthusiastic enough response among the parkrun crowd, refused mainly by sensible people who don't like coffee cake (or nuts) and equally sensible people who know that eating cake immediately after doing a 5km run is unlikely to agree with them. Otherwise, though, it proves to be a decent enough addition to a typically well-stocked and well-frequented Bench o' Cake at our finish line:

Enormous thanks to the 235 finishers and 13 voluncheers who made #event200 such a special parkrun this morning. pic.twitter.com/3LNzUx2NmY

— Hilly Fields parkrun (@hillyfdsparkrun) May 28, 2016

...though obviously it's not a patch on Heather's lovingly iced chocolate Guinness cupcakes, because what is? She actually got to choose what recipe to make, though, and that's blatantly cheating.

One-word verdict: Stressful.