Ricotta Apple Cake

I was meant to do a bit of a brownie experiment this weekend - had planned it out perfectly except for one thing... I forgot to buy eggs. What the hoohay? So I had only 3 eggs on hand and a hankering to bake this evening and quickly pivoted from the brownie experiment plan to make this stunning cake I had seen on Food52's instagram. It's called Louisa's Cake, an elegantly simple recipe to pull off yet yields such wonderful results.

It's made with just a small bundle of ingredients, and chances are you will only need to run to the shops to get just two items - a fresh crunchy green apple and a tub of ricotta. It's also so easy, that I made two this weekend! One for Kak Yati's birthday, and another to bring to dinner at my sister-in-law's place.

I'll save the brownie experiment for another night this week, and I'd really still like to do it before I fly off this Thursday for my 30th birthday weekend getaway. Oh well, who needs sleep? I'm still in my 20s, I'm sure I could pull it off! Hehehe

Recipe for Louisa's Cake or a Ricotta Apple Cake
From Food52

• 117g butter, room temperature
• 225g caster sugar
• 3 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 250g fresh ricotta
• 1 large green apple, peeled and shredded (and squeezed of excess moisture)
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 160g all purpose flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• Pinch of salt

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and line a 9" springform tin with parchment paper 
2. Beat the butter and sugar until creamy, then add the eggs in one at a time while mixing on low speed
3. Add the vanilla then beat in the ricotta, apple and lemon zest and continue to beat the mixture until combined (1-2 mins on low speed)
4. Add the flour, baking powder and salt and fold in with a spatula until the dry ingredients are just wet then pour the batter out into the prepared tin and bake for 35 minutes (fan) 
5. Cool the cake in the tin for about 10 minutes then move to a wire rack and cool completely before dusting with icing sugar and then cutting a slice out to "photograph" but really it was just in time for the hot mug of coffee you just made. 

A Very Happy Unbirthday

I've definitely moved past the pretense of having reasons for baking anything. As you can see from the image above, every day is cake day if we go by the the Mad Hatter's habit of celebrating Unbirthdays. Which I wholly subscribe to.

This beetroot chocolate cake was long overdue, however, as Jessica and Angie have been asking me to make it since I made it last (Angie's birthday). So as we were due for a lunch meetup, I thought I'd bring a treat for the Unbirthday girls.

For this particular rendition of the cake, I used the exact same recipe that I used here, but added a touch of Wilton's delphinium blue colouring to the cream cheese frosting (in 2 different degrees of colour) to create the effect that the lovely Miz Rosie posted over at her crazy cool blog, Sweetapolita.

Didn't quite pull it off as she did, as my frosting was a little too runny, but I think it's still quite adorable.

If you're looking for a heavy, beautiful chocolate cake, I suggest you give this recipe a shot and treat yourself to an Unbirthday Cake.

I'm saving my recipe share for the next post, and this one is more of a picture dump of the stuff I've been up to in the past week, so please bear with me as I share the more mundane details of my personal life with you.

Above is a collection of iPhone pictures I took of the wedding cake and cupcakes order that I received a few weeks ago. For the cake, I used 4 layers of my favourite white cake recipe, with lemon curd filling and lemony swiss meringue buttercream. To decorate the cake, I used the Wilton 127 tip and swirled around on my revolving cake stand. The cupcakes were in 3 flavours: chocolate, earl grey, and the white cake, using plain swiss meringue buttercream, piped on with Wilton's 104/103/61 tips. I made 2 full batches (the recipe in the link is a quarter portion of a full batch) of the frosting recipe for both the cake and cupcakes, and coloured them in 4 shades of pink.

Then my two favourite Sarawakian Siblings and I decided to finally get down to business and try our hands and making our own pasta. The first batch (you can see the cling wrapped roll on the lower left hand side of the picture above) didn't turn out very well as we might have used too few eggs (note to self: always read the whole recipe twice before trying)...

For the second batch, we got some valuable advice from a very skilled friend of the families, on the optimal egg to flour ratio (100g flour:3 eggs), and went a little gentler with the mixing. I'm not too sure what went into the sauce, as that was J's area, while Al and I worked meticulously on the rolling, filling (ricotta cheese), and cutting out of the ravioli.

All in all, we had a great meal, and so much fun preparing it. I've had a great time these past few weeks with the baking and cooking, and general experimenting with flavours and ingredients. Honestly, I can't wait to see what the coming weeks will have in store for me. 

I leave you with this gem that J found, as it's been my kitchen soundtrack for a week now, and I love it!