Saved by Cake - Marian Keyes

"Saved by Cake gives an extremely honest account of Marian Keyes's recent battle with depression, and how baking has helped her. A complete novice in the kitchen, Marian decided to bake a cake for a friend, and that was it - she realised that baking was what she needed to do in order to get her through each day. And so she baked, and she wrote her recipes down, and little by little the depression has started to lift, along with her sponges..."

The opening blurb to this book intrigued me as it’s a story I keep hearing in the cake world – how baking and cake decorating has helped someone through grief, depression or illness. I’ve heard the same story from people in other creative fields too such as painting and gardening. Mary Berry described here how baking cakes helped her when her teenage son died (sorry, it’s a link to the Daily Mail – just read the article and don’t look left or right). I found baking such a help in difficult times that I had to set up a cake business just to find a home for the procession of baked goods coming out of my kitchen. As Marian Keyes writes in the introduction to her book “Baking makes me concentrate on what’s right in front of my nose. I have to focus. On weighing the sugar. On sieving the flour. I find it calming and rewarding.”

Some people see baking as a hidden art that they don’t dare try. If that’s you and you fancy a dabble – buy this book. Marian Keyes admits she hadn’t baked a thing since Home Economics at school and her lighthearted approach debunks some of the more po-faced attitudes in recipe books that presume you’ve already got your Cordon Bleu certificate. Equipment lists can be daunting but not if they read: “Purple silicone spatula – if you can’t get purple, I suppose another colour would do. Apron – maybe it’s not vital but it’s a laugh. Sugar paste gun – I’m joking, I mean you can if you want, but you’d want to be in a bad way, obsession-wise”. At which point I glanced shiftily at my sugar paste gun.

The 80 or so recipes start with Classics and the very first one is these rock buns, the stuff of school cookery lessons but way, way tastier.

Yes, I've discovered Instagram!

The recipes move on to Cupcakes, Cheesecakes and Liquid Cakes, from which I chose this wonderfully moist coconut milk cake and took it to cake club. It's a big cake that serves about 25 people. It must have gone down well because there was none left for me to bring home.

The recipes move on to Pastry, Meringues & Macaroons, Biscuits & Cookies, Fruit & Veg, and Chocolate. I made these biscuits using the Shoe and Handbag Biscuits recipe but instead of using vanilla, took her advice and tried new flavours: cardamom and rosewater; orange and mixed spice; and maple syrup, all of which I'll making again in the near future.

I lasted at least 5 minutes before I re-arranged the letters to make rude words

The recipes are easy to follow, fun to read and delicious. The book covers baking rather than decorating but Marian offers some gentle encouragement on icing biscuits and a word of warning on addiction – enter the wonderland of cake decoration and before you find the exit you’ll be thinking “I simply MUST have some of these tiny sugar cats!”

Photo from "Saved by Cake"

She admits since starting baking she’s become a dab hand with a piping nozzle and it’s true – I met her on a course on London and saw her neat handiwork. Admittedly I didn’t recognise her and treated her to the conversation Irish people must simply LOVE when they’re in the UK (“ooh I was in Dublin last year and it’s so expensive, I paid €500 for a cup of tea and a scone”...) I'm also sure she was delighted to hear how good those chips were in Rosscarbery. 

This is a well-written guide to some basic and to some more adventurous and unusual recipes. It is beautifully photographed and if you’ve not bought a baking book before, this would make a great start. Within the year you might be stocking up on tiny sugar cats and sugarpaste guns. Just don’t say you weren’t warned...

Clandestine Cake Club - February

Last night the theme at Newcastle's Clandestine Cake Club was "If you were a cake, what cake would you be?" I was stumped - I can't claim to be spicy or fruity and the last person who described me as nutty got a punch in the cakehole. My sister suggested lemon: "any unexpectedly defective or undesirable thing or person, usually said of bad choices". Not only  what the divorce papers said but also one of my favourite cake flavours.


I've always wanted to make a lemon meringue cake and decided to try this recipe from Nigella Lawson's website. It is fairly simple to make, smells like pancakes when it's baking and is one of the most delicious cakes I've ever made. A perfect combination of lemon, double cream, sponge and meringue.

My guest at cake club was my sister Lucy, who was made to eat her lemony words along with several other slices of cake. The ladies at cake club described themselves variously as  friendly, sparkly, passionate and, less flatteringly, messy, bananas, bad ass, simple and deathly. 

Special mentions must go to the chocolate orange fudge cake with home made candied orange peel; the hazelnut and raspberry meringue cake (mmm more meringue!) and the German friendship sourdough cake (feed the dough for ten days, split in into four and give three quarters to friends to bake). Thanks as ever to Lisa for organising the event and to Chalk and Paper cafe for hosting it - why not visit them in the centre of town for a lovely cup of tea and some free wifi? 

Sky TV visited cake club and filed this report about the burgeoning interest in low-cost socialising through the medium of cake. It's fair to say that the Newcastle events are booked out very quickly, almost as if Geordie women are a massive bunch of greeders, so much so that a second monthly event is about to be added to the calendar - check the events page for details. The Sky article mentions that cake club members "are keen to get some men along to join in". I think we all know what that means don't we? Howay, Geordie lads - we're passionate, fruity, friendly and usually offer a side serving of double cream - what's not to like? 

Quick and easy chocolate decorations

I love anything that is very easy to do but looks amazing, like adding killer heels to an outfit or executing a perfect two & a half somersault pike from a relatively low diving board. 

Look at the red flowers on these cakes. Pretty, eh? All you need to make them is:

• chocolate
• a piping bag
• caster sugar
• edible dust

Shake the edible dust and the caster sugar together and spread it on a plate. Be careful to use an edible dust - these are clearly marked with a gold sticker and must not be confused with the white sticker ones, which are non-edible

<<<< NO!                                                 OOH YUM! >>>

You really only need to buy red, yellow and blue because as you'll remember from primary school, you can mix these to make all the other colours. And if you want pink or a lighter shade, simply make the coloured mix paler by adding more sugar.

Melt your chocolate, put it into the piping bag and thickly pipe whatever shape you want onto the  coloured sugar. Leave this to set - you can put in the fridge. Then simply lift it off the sugar and stick it onto your cake.

The decoration can sit flat on a cake like this Pink Floyd cake I made for my friend Mark at the weekend (I'm not sure why I thought urban graffiti screamed Pink Floyd but he didn't complain). The shape will also be robust enough to stand up unaided, so you can put it  on top of a cake. 

You can use white, milk or dark chocolate but white chocolate shows up the colours best. If you want to pipe a brief insulting message with the chocolate, remember that you will need to do the letters in reverse. Have fun!

Clandestine Cake Club - January

Last night the glamorous world of film came to Newcastle's Clandestine Cake Club with the theme "Inspired by the Silver Screen".

The red carpet tablecloth played host to some of the world's most beautiful cakes from Chocolate Cake, head to toe in ganache by Chanel; Blue Velvet, sporting two robins by Valentino, like that time Bjork wore a dress made from a swan; Strawberry Daiquiri, barely covering herself in an exquisite array of fruit by Versace, and Swedish Princess Cake, draped in green marzipan by Primark.


I'd chosen to represent the film "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". I'd enjoyed reading the trilogy and pictured the Swedish hero Blomkvist - blond, blue-eyed, 40, irresistible to women - as Daniel Craig. Imagine my joy when he was cast in the English language remake of the Swedish films! I don't remember much mention of cake in Stieg Larsson's books, but they make a coffee on every other page and at one point there is an unflinching mention of a cheese & marmalade sandwich. You'd need a slice of cake to wash that down. I chose to make a traditional Swedish prinsesstårta and followed the instructions on this great blog by an American lady living in Sweden. The cake is layers of genoise sponge and vanilla custard, topped with a dome of whipped cream and covered with green marzipan. It is traditionally decorated with a little pink rose.

I ate as much cake as I could but disappointingly got stage fright and hit the wall after only five slices. I loved the pistachio & rosewater and mango & cardamom cakes - one of the great things about Clandestine Cake Club is that you get to try all sorts of different recipes and flavours.


Naturally for a glamorous night of film we had press coverage and were joined by the lovely Jonathan Miles from BBC Newcastle who tried to interview us while we stuffed our faces with cake. Thanks to the Knit Studio for hosting CCC again and for the exclusive after-show party with wine, Doritos and drug-fuelled celebrity orgies (heh, I made that bit up. There were no Doritos). Huge thanks as ever to Lisa for organising it. I'd also like to thank my mom, my dad, my wife, my brother, my dog, my neighbour's dog, a dog I once saw a cute picture of on the internet and now I'd like to do some sobbing.


If you'd like to join Cake Club and get your crumb-covered face in next month's Heat magazine (probably in the circle of shame) visit the website for details and come for an audition. You might need a little lie down on the director's casting couch after you've eaten all that cake.

Slattery's Chocolate Cake Course

Last week I did a three day course at Slattery's in decorating chocolate cakes. If you've not visited Slattery's for high tea or a gawp at their stunning cakes, I recommend that you get yourself to Whitefield pronto.

I am going to order this rose wedding cake from Slattery's when I marry Daniel Craig

Slattery's also sells a large selection of smaller cakes and all manner of novelty chocolates. Seriously, get yourself down there.

Our instructor was Julie Oddie, a lovely lady with a real passion for and knowledge of patisserie, cake decorating and chocolate. On the first day she taught us about the different ways of tempering chocolate and we made chocolate decorations - spheres, spirals, dominos and ruffles, much of which was piled on top of a chocolate cake through the magic of ganache.  

This cake was adopted by Lucy and Mark. I hope they look after it.

At lunch time we were given a tour of the kitchen by John Slattery and saw rows of cupcakes, chocolates, novelty cakes and wedding cakes in production.


The next day was spent making chocolate decorations, some of which adorned these little boat-shaped cakes. The cakes are layers of chocolate sponge and ganache with a couple of Maltesers hidden in the middle. Maltesers are a chocolate that I wouldn't usually give the time of day, but were surprisingly good tucked inside a cake.

Well done to Samuel (3) and Isabelle (2) for each polishing off one of these fairly substantial cakes

Stripy cigarillos; chocolate water lily; marbles

Day three was <gulp> making a chocolate wedding cake. We each chose a design from Slattery's lovely book and set to. I'll be honest: I found working with chocolate quite different from working with sugarpaste and while the professionals make it look a doddle, there is a real knack to it. The "peeled layers" and roses are made by smoothing chocolate onto a frozen marble slab, scraping it off and moulding it. Get it wrong and the chocolate is either too brittle or too wet to work with. It reminded me a bit of working with blown sugar, but without the burns. Luckily Julie has a good radar for when a student is ready to burst into tears and punch the cake in its face, and was ready to step in to help.

This cake went to North Wales for Angharad's birthday. Penblywdd hapus, cariad!

Three other ladies chose the same "peeled layer" design, but each one turned out very differently. 

The other three cakes were even more diverse - one was ChoccyWoccyDooDah style, a shop in Brighton that I visited last May but only very briefly on account of being with a dog; one was a lovely box style with leopard print transfers that I really hope made it back to Dublin in one piece; and one was the bubble cake, which I absolutely love.

I thoroughly enjoyed the course and learned a huge amount. I would heartily recommend Slattery's courses to anyone who wants to learn more about working with chocolate, particularly if they want to eat a lot of it after the class. Now I just need to practise practise practise (working, not eating, sadly. I'd be ace if it was just eating).

Cocoa Sesame Biscuits

Most people have one grocery item that they stockpile for reasons they can't explain. My sister recently sent me a photo of nine bottles of mouthwash with the words "must stop". Come a nuclear winter, at least she and her husband will have minty fresh breath.

For me, the must-have grocery items are tins of butter beans and sesame seeds. I don't know what the attraction is, but when I go past the pulses in the supermarket it's irresistible. One day the tins of beans might come in handy ("hey, come over to my place! I've got LOADS of butter beans"). As for the sesame seeds, they make delicious cocoa biscuits  - not too sweet with a nutty flavour that seems a bit odd at first bite but quickly becomes as seductive as a tin of butter beans on a supermarket shelf (i.e. very).

The recipe is from this great book my mum gave me years ago. It's Australian but it gives the ingredients in cups, grams and ounces, so it is suitable for bakers of all persuasions. It's published by Murdoch Books but I don't think it's connected to THAT Murdoch. Certainly there are no tits on page 3, only a photo of an orange drizzle cake.

You need two tablespoons of golden syrup for the recipe. Ever noticed the drawing on a tin of Tate & Lyle's? It's a dead lion with bees coming out of its rotting corpse, saying "Out of the strong came forth sweetness", a reference to the Biblical Samson who went round killing people and lions and speaking in riddles like a nutter. 

Thanks to Answer Me This Podcast  for bringing this to my attention. If you'd like to give your ears a weekly treat, why not download their podcast and giggle on the bus so much that people start moving seats?

Anyway, here's the recipe for Cocoa Sesame Biscuits:

• 90g plain flour
• 25g cocoa powder
• 75g rolled oats
• 150g sesame seeds
• 190g caster sugar
• 100g unsalted butter (or dairy free margarine if you want to make them vegan)
• 2 tablespoons golden syrup
• 1 tablespoon boiling water
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 185g melted chocolate

• Pre-heat the oven to 160oC and line two baking trays with parchment. 
• Mix the flour, cocoa, oats, sesame seeds and sugar; in a pan melt the butter and golden syrup
• Pour the boiling water into a cup, add the bicarbonate of soda, mix well and add this to the melted butter. Enjoy watching it whoosh up into a foam
• Using a metal spoon, fold the mixture into the dry ingredients.
• Roll the mix into balls and flatten them slightly

• Bake for about 12 minutes. They will still be wet and wobbly when you take them out, but they'll harden as they cool. Let them cool for 5 minutes on the trays, then transfer to a wire rack.
• Once the biscuits are cool, add a blob of melted chocolate to each biscuit.
• Put the biscuits into a sad and empty tin that until very recently held some Christmas treats and take them into the office.
• Remember that they fired you months ago, eat all the biscuits yourself and laugh in their stupid faces, saying "out of the strong came forth sweetness".
• Do NOT kill any people or lions. 

Vegan Chocolate Cake

My great grandparents thought it best to raise their six children as vegetarian atheists. They also thought a winter coat and a bowler hat was normal attire for a family trip to the beach. Today, half of my mum’s family are still vegetarian, including me and my sister, but we now only wear bowler hats for formal occasions.

The handsome young lad in shorts is my grandfather

In the early 1990s I decided to take vegetarianism to its logical conclusion and become vegan. This diet does take some commitment as you cut out meat, fish, dairy, eggs and everything that contains them, plus you need to have a long hard think about honey, leather, wool and silk. I stuck at it for three years before I went back over to the dark side of lacto-ovo-vegetarianism.

Look at my trusty canvas Doc Martens

Being vegan was one of the things that started me baking – it was often easier to bake at home than to seek out something in the shops that wasn’t a flapjack. My friend Adam, a brilliant cook, created this vegan chocolate cake recipe for me. I’m not usually a big fan of chocolate cake but this one is delicious – light and very moist with a crisp top. Here it is:

Preheat the oven to 170oC/325oF/Gas Mark 3 and line two 8” tins.

Stick all the ingredients in a mixer:

• 170g plain flour
• 25g cocoa powder
• 145g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• large pinch of salt
• 2 tablespoons of golden syrup
• 170ml vegetable cooking oil
• 200ml soya or rice milk
• 1 tablespoon instant coffee dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water

The mixture is runny like a chocolate sauce. Pour it into the two tins and bake for about 30 mins until the cake is springy to the touch. Leave the cake to cool in the tins before turning out as it’s delicate – see how the top has cracked here.

On the BBC's Great British Bake Off they claim you can cover mistakes with a dusting of icing sugar. I sprinkle it liberally all over my life. It does not work and sometimes simply highlights the issue.

You can also make a dairy-free frosting to sandwich the two halves by beating together:

• 125g dairy free margarine such as Pure
• 250g icing sugar
• 50g melted good quality dark chocolate (good quality dark chocolate tends not to contain milk but check the ingredients)

Or even nicer, a chocolate ganache:

• 90g coconut milk
• 180g dark chocolate

Bring the coconut milk to near boiling point, remove from the heat and add the chocolate. Leave the chocolate to melt for a couple of minutes, then mix it into a smooth glossy ganache. Allow to cool a bit then spread it on the cake.

If you crumb the cake and add a LITTLE bit of the frosting, you can roll it into balls and make vegan cake pops. It’s tricky as the cake pop balls are far more oily than usual, but they make a nice, truffle-like cake pop. I dip all my cake pops in Callebaut Belgian chocolate and their dark chocolate is suitable for vegans.

I decorated these ones as cats and made a little glittery chocolate mouse from the leftover dipping chocolate. See, who said vegans can't have fun? Now where's my bowler hat....