Fitness Friday| Low Cal Cake| Chocolate & Beetroot Cake Recipe

Living a healthy lifestyle means everything in moderation and not depriving yourself of anything! If you want a cake, eat a cake, just don’t them all! I am a massive cake fiend! I love baking them, I love decorating them and I obviously love eating them! So as I would quite happily eat cake most days I thought why not try and make my cake recipes a bit healthier, so if I do indulge I’m not going completely overboard. So I was over the moon when this month Women’s Health magazine featured 5 wonderful health boosting, low cal, cake recipes. I decided that as it was my trainer’s birthday yesterday, I would bake him some healthy Birthday Cake, so everyone at my Kendal Bootcamp Class could try some and be my little guinea pigs!

I made two batches as it was my first attempt at a “healthy cake”, the first batch wasn’t so great. I don’t think I used enough chocolate and didn’t bake it for long enough as it was a little too moist, a little bitter and tasted a lot like beetroot. The second batch was much more successful, it was baked for a few minutes longer so the consistency was cake like but still moist, and there was a little more chocolate in this one, so it tasted like a chocolate cake! The pictures are of the first cake which I dusted with icing sugar, the second cake I topped with a thin layer of buttercream icing… a little bit naughty I know, but it was a Birthday cake! The cake went down very well with everyone at Bootcamp and was a great treat for our hard work. So as it was a success I thought I would share the recipe with you!

You will need;

300g cooked, unseasoned beetroot, peeled and purred, 4 large eggs, 4 tbsp honey, 1tsp vanilla, 1 tbsp cocoa powder, 1 tsp baking powder, pinch of salt, 125g ground almonds, 135g good quality dark chocolate (It HAS to be good quality!), 8 tbsp olive oil.

Start by pureeing your beetroot in a food processor. Once smooth tip into a bowl and mix in the eggs, honey, vanilla, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Mix well. Next gently fold in the ground almonds.

Now melt your good quality dark chocolate. Once melted, pour in the olive oil and mix thoroughly; you should be left with a liquid that isn’t separated and is smooth and shiny. Now gently pour the chocolate mixture into the rest of your cake mixture in the bowl and fold gently.

Once everything is combined, pour the cake mixture into a greased cake tin, and bake in your preheated oven at 180c for 35-40 minutes. Try the trusty skewer test to ensure your cake is cooked through!

Finish by either dusting with icing sugar or cocoa powder, or if you are feeling naughty give it a thin layer of buttercream icing! Cut into 8 pieces and at only 260 calories per slice you can really enjoy it!

Have you ever tried chocolate and beetroot cake? Do you have any other favourite healthy cake recipes that I should try next? Do you think you will give this one a go?

Be sure to check out my blogger of the week and fellow Cumbria Blogger Anna from On The Dressing Table. She has the most amazing beauty blog, full of insightful and honest reviews, plus she is the sweetest girl!

Nutella Melt Cupcakes

 

It seems to becoming a bit of a habit of mine these baking posts. I do actually post quite often, as we have a weekly “Cake Day” at work. I also come from a long line of cake bakers. My mum bakes, my Nana bakes, my Great Grandma bakes and my Grampy bakes. There is very rarely a time when there isn’t cake around in one of my family member’s homes… which is of course very homely but not great for the waist line! Hence the mountains of running I now do!

On Friday night I came in from work and had the urge to bake. So Friday night I took over the kitchen, turned the music up and came up with the idea of Nutella Melt Cupcakes. I had a jar in the cupboard and thought it would be a great addition to my usual vanilla cupcakes.

I wanted to have a Nutella melting middle and was unsure how to go about this. I decided to make the cake mix, place that in the Cupcake moulds then add a dollop of Nutella in the middle and finally another spoonful of cake mix. This turns out not to be the answer. As you can see from pictures above the Nutella sunk to the bottom of the cakes. They are still yummy, but a little messy to eat! Next time I will be adding the Nutella to the cake after its been baked, either by scooping out the top and adding the Nutella before topping with icing, or try piping the Nutella into the middle. Anyways here’s my recipe for a simple vanilla cupcake, which you can alter as you wish!

You will need(makes 12 small, or 6 large cupcakes like above) ;

Cake Mix- 110g butter, 110g caster sugar, 2 eggs, 1tsp vanilla extract, 110g self-raising flour, 1-2 tbsp milk

Buttercream Icing- 140g butter, 280g icing sugar, 1-2 tbsp milk

Preheat your oven to 180c/ Gas 4 and line your muffin tin with paper cases. Cream your butter and sugar together in a bowl until smooth and pale. Beat in the eggs gradually and stir in the vanilla extract.

Fold in the flour, adding a little milk until the mixture is of a dropping consistency. Spoon the mixture into the paper cases. Now bake in the oven for 10-15 minute of until they are golden-brown on the top and a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Set to cool for 10 minutes, then remove from the tin and cool on a wire rack.

For your icing, beat the bitter in a large bowl until soft, then add half the icing sugar and beat until smooth. Now add the remaining icing sugar with one tbsp of milk, add more milk if necessary. Beat until the mixture is smooth and creamy. If you want to make the above cake, mix a coupe of tbsp of Nutella into your icing sugar.

If you want to make the Nutella melt cake above, before icing your cakes, scoop out the top of them, as you would when making butterfly cakes and place the Nutella into the hole on the top of the cake. Then ice your cakes as you would normally.

What do you think of my Nutella Melt Cupcakes? Do you love Nutella as much as I do?

Pink Pops| How to make Popcakes

You may or may not have seen the posts about my Mum’s wedding in September. In that post you'll have seen pictures of the above Pop Cakes. My mum and I are both huge lovers of cake; any sort will do! So when I found the above book in TKMaxx I had to buy it. When flicking through the pages we came up with the idea of making pink Popcakes for her wedding as a gift for her guests.

At the time it seemed like a great idea; who wouldn’t love cute little pink cakes! However come 10.30pm the night before the wedding when we were still decorating the Popcakes, we were soon regretting it! Despite how stressful this idea became, the end result was amazing. The wedding guests were fascinated, and in awe when they discovered that my Mum had made them herself. So I thought I would show you how we did it.

Step 1- Firstly, a cake needs to be made. We used the recipe given in the book for a simple chocolate sponge cake. For the 100 popcakes that we made we had to bake 6 chocolate cakes and leave them to cool.

Step 2- To make the cake balls, the cakes were blitzed into crumbs then mixed with cream cheese, and icing sugar. This makes the cakes into a moist mouldable texture, that is quite similar to a ganache. We also added bashed up Crunchie to our mixture to add something special to half of the popcakes. We then moulded the mixture into 100 little balls, mounted them on sticks and popped them into the freezer for 15 minutes to allow them to solidify.

Step 3- The fun part; decorating! We ended up with 3 different looks for our popcakes. One was just pink icing with a pink icing rose on the top. The second was pink icing dipped into pink sugar.The third look was meant to resemble a flower, and involved pink and white swirls (as you can see above). The joy with popcakes is that you can be so creative with them, any colour, shape or design. I have seen little teacups and tea pots, dinosaurs, people, and food items such as hotdogs and slices of cake.

So that’s a short and sweet explanation on how we made our popcakes. It took a lot of time to make 100 of them, and it was a lot of hard work, but the final product was delicious and a big success with all the wedding guests. I think they are an excellent idea for wedding favours or even for Christmas presents!

So what do you think? Have you seen or tried popcakes before? Would you make any for Christmas presents or for your wedding or party?

The days gone by| Instagram

 

Just a little update for you all. I have been quite busy recently, with work but also as my mother’s wedding is next weekend there has been a lot of preparation for that, so I actually feel like I don’t have a lot of free time; which is a lie, as I still get up to plenty. So I will run you through the above pictures, as I seem to be documenting my life through Instagram at the moment, but I suppose that’s an obsession all us bloggers have. As much as my family tire of me taking pictures of even the least significant parts of my day, they enjoy the finished product; the blog posts, so they can’t complain too much.

• Flowers For A Friend- My best friend is going through a messy divorce at the moment, but we celebrated her becoming a ‘Miss’ again the other day. It’s great for her to be back to the name that was of the girl that I befriended 20 years ago, the name of the independent, fun and flirty girl she used to, and will be again in time.
• Blogging Goodies- Monu contacted me a few weeks ago and offered me some goodies to try, I was completely over the moon with this opportunity, and am happily testing them at the moment, so a review will come in time.
• Glitter Galore- Being a desk working girl now, my obsession with nail art continues. This week was my first attempt at glitter dipper nails.
• Product Testing Central- This was me using the Soap and glory Detox mask for the first time, the review for which is below.
• Cake Pops- We have had a busy week in our house making 100 pop cakes. We are yet to ice and decorate them, but I can say that the inners are so yummy!
• Train Travels- I have been travelling around for the past few weeks, very often to Newcastle to see my boy, but other ‘exciting’ places including Carlisle and Lancaster, to visit friends and family.
• Newcastle City Games- I was lucky enough to be in Newcastle for the Great North Run weekend, which meant I got to watch the City Games on Quayside and saw legends like Mo Farrah and Greg Rutherford!
• The Great North Run- I spend an hour in the rain cheering on the 55,000 runners, in which were a few of my friends who all did fantastic! It has even inspired me, to perhaps enter next year… if I’m lucky enough to get a place.
• Pretty in Pink- Another Nail of the Day.
• Massive Milestone- I surpassed 400 followers on my blog this week! It really surprised me as I think I gained 15 followers in a day. But as always I want to thank you all; new and old for reading, commenting and sharing my blog. It is my passion and I enjoy it so much, but to know that others read and enjoy what I have to say makes it so much more fun.
• Fun with fruit- My boy gave me a choice of a sausage butty or a bowl of fruit for my breakfast last weekend, and low and behold I chose the fruit! I even shocked myself, I think my fitness kick is finally starting to change my attitude towards food, which is a great thing!
• Christmas comfies- Last night (and right now) I have been rocking my Christmas pyjama bottoms, because it is just so damn cold! What happened to out Indian summer!

What’s been going on in your life recently? Am I the only one rocking my Christmas Pyjamas far too early? Please say I’m not!