The date of the Muswell Hill Horticultural Society Spring Show has been set and the cookery categories have been announced – exactly the same as last year.  Hence much good-natured rivalry between myself and Battenburg Belle has commenced.  Coffee Cake is the only category I have a hope of winning as BB doesn’t like coffee cake so probably won’t be making one.  She is THREATENING to make a coffee and walnut Battenburg that we saw in the Mary Berry cookbook and if she does that I am sunk.  She may just be teasing me though…

(photo from a new discovery – the Twinterest blog – another lovely blog to follow)

I have begun trawling my recipe collection for film star coffee cakes and have found quite a few.  I have recipes from Andrea Leeds, Bill Lundigan, Gail Patrick, Gary Cooper, Gloria Dickson, Helen Mack, Joan Fontaine, Lizabeth Scott, Sonja Henie and Rochelle Hudson.

Rochelle’s took my fancy straight away as it is baked in a tube pan so I figured it would take the “cost per use” factor of my expensive Divertimenti Angel Food Cake pan down a notch.  I made a schoolgirl error though.  I didn’t really check through the ingredients with my mind engaged.  There is no coffee in this cake.

It’s a cake to have WITH coffee.  I fear that many of the other stars’ recipes will be the same.  No matter, it was lovely, despite the fact I overcooked it a bit. 

I was at BB’s house and I don’t know the vagaries of her oven very well.  Or MAYBE she turned the temperature a notch when I wasn’t looking just to scupper me? 

I put lots of chocolate icing on the cake to disguise its over-cooked-ness and bunged some strawberries in the middle and on top.  It looked rather splendid… 

Mr R saw the photos and said “I want one of those for my birthday”.  Well yes of course! I will bake his at a lower temperature and probably do the cake in two sandwich cake tins with a stripe of nuts in each one.  I thought the second layer may have weighed down the top of the cake, stopping it from rising. 

Whatever, the recipe is here if you’d like to have a go…  The texture of the sponge was gooood and I thought it was very tasty.

I am c-o-n-s-i-d-e-r-i-n-g entering this into CATEGORY 51 at the Horticultural Show if I can perfect it – but don’t tell Battenburg Belle…

 

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