Tooty’s Tapas Cakes – New and Improved

The first bunch of tapas cakes were fine, but they weren’t so scrummy that Tooty the Chef found that the cake tin had suspiciously emptied itself whilst his back was turned. Obviously, for such a gifted wielder of the ladle and other kitchen paraphernalia, this simply wasn’t good enough. So he set himself to the task again…

This time he substituted the soft brown sugar with white sugar and artificial sucrose.

The sugar / egg combo was then beaten for twice as long. Then after adding the cake mix…

…he beat that for twice as long too. Tooty doesn’t do things in half measures, you know! Now any regular cook would have been content to carry on as before; but not Tooty the Chef. No, he peeled, chopped. and stewed two apples (that he found laying at the side of the road in a shopping bag), and added them to the mix…

The result, after careful and attentive baking, looked precisely like this…

And after he’d done his top and tailing with the fondant icing between the layers, the result appeared rather more visually pleasing that the original effort…

Better still, they disappeared with alarming alacrity. Definitely a success – even by Tooty the Chef’s bullshit standards!

 

 

The Christmas Chainsaw Massacre

For uncounted eons my wife and I would bake and decorate a cake for Christmas. The cake was always nice because she baked it. The decoration was always humorously terrible because I was the major contributor. In her final couple of years she gave up the baking, so we bought a cake instead, which we decorated in the usual manner – that being ineptly. It always caused a giggle, and we always gave it a title too. Whilst browsing through the quadrillion-or-so photos on my computer I chanced upon this one. From 2016: a rather macabre Christmas cake. The Christmas Chainsaw Massacre. I’ve not seen Santa in the same light since.

Does it make a nice Christmas wallpaper though? I’d like to think so.

Tooty’s Tapas Cakes

Tooty the Chef has endured the presence of a Spanish ‘Bizcocho’ cake mix in his cupboard for several years. His late wife bought it in a branch of Mercadona  yonks ago, but failed to use it because her propane oven was guaranteed to burn the bottom of the resulting cake. Although, by the time he decided to throw caution to the wind and risk a horrible burning smell permeating the structure of his modern cottage, buried deep within (or actually at the very edge of) the South Downs National Park,  the mix was two years out-of-date, he bravely ‘went for it’. As expected the base was burnt and the cake failed to rise. No result. The second attempt, though, was a work of genius – naturally. Tooty mixed up the goo, added eggs and all that other stuff, then (instead of pouring it into a baking tin) he pulled eight tapas bowls from the kitchen cupboard and baked it in them…

They even popped out of the tapas bowls in one piece – and not even slightly burnt!

“Not too bad,” I hear you gasp in wonderment. But he wasn’t finished there. He then proceeded to coat the bases of four cakes with Membrillo…

He quickly followed with a heavy smearing of caramel fondant…

Then it was a simple matter of slapping the naked four cakes on top to form a kind of sponge thing…

Okay, they were a bit chewy, but they tasted nice, despite the fact that he didn’t have any sugar in the house – except a half-tub of soft brown sugar that was (at the least) five years out-of-date. So, all in all, when all things are considered, another triumph for Tooty the Chef!