The first of many.......

Hellooooo! 

Well after months of hard planning, our first ever Hot, Sweet and Yummy Baking Club got off to a sweet start last Monday. Eight starving friends arrived at Jane's house clutching various tupperwares and tins containing sweet, sticky but most importantly yummy things to eat! I don't think any of us had eaten much all day in anticipation of eating our own bodyweight in cake and I have to say that we all managed to pack away a fair amount of calories between us! It is only once a month so we don't plan on getting fat any time soon!!!
The brief was to bring along your 'signature sweet dish' whereas at future meets we will work to a theme but this month it was 'free baking' all round! Some people went all out and created contemporary delights and some of us stuck to some good old fashioned home baking but everyone went to great effort and the results were amazing. Many of us are hoping to improve our baking skills but the bar has been set high so I cannot wait to see what everyone brings for the next meeting!
All the dishes were photographed and the recipes were collated (well some of them!) and we plan to add them all to this Blog over the next few days for everyone to use. The Blog will also contain random musings from all our members, baking books we love, must have equipment and lots of other delicious bits of info.

So after we all had a glass of fizz to celebrate our little adventure, we set about tasting everyone's cakes. First up was an Jan's Slovakian apple and blueberry crumble cake with custard! Jan is from Slovakia and an accomplished cook. He wanted to bring something along that not only tasted nice but looked beautiful and it was! He told us that he despairs of some of the puddings and cakes he sees over here, whereas in his country everything is made to be visually tempting as well as delicious - a bit like Jan actually. So, we all gobbled up a slice of his cake with custard and it was fab.  I hope you like the picture...it did taste as good as it looks. I am still waiting on a recipe from Jan as he told us he just threw in a bit of this and a bit of that and voila - crumble cake! I suspect his recipe is a well guarded secret but I promise to extract it and post if here ASAP!
After that there was no stopping us and the yumminess just kept on coming...cake after cookie after muffin after tart after biscuit not to mention pancakes, coconut loaf and an All-Bran cake!!! The chat was also brilliant and we laughed long and hard for most of the night. There was also a smattering of drama and intrigue but I cannot divulge any of that I'm afraid - this is after all, a gentile and sophisticated Blog!  
We have set the date of our next meeting for February and the theme is Valentine's - lots of chocolate and strawberry things going on I'm sure! So, I'm now drooling with all this cake chatter - must get to the kitchen immediately but we hope you will come back soon. Please follow us, post comments and also send us your favourite tried and tested recipes which we will publish here. You can also follow our group on Facebook and click here to email us!
Lots of love,
Hot, Sweet and Yummy xxx


added13th Feb
Here is Jan's long awaited recipe for apple and blueberry crumble cake! Enjoy xxx

Slovak  apple crumble cake

Ingredients:

The dough:

350 g  flour

15 g yeast

100 ml milk

3 soup spoons  of sugar

100 g margarine or butter/no salted/

2 yolks

A little of salt

The crumble:

100 g margarine or butter

100 g castor sugar

100 g flour

Apples and blueberries  or you can mix different kinds of fruits 

Method:

• Put half of the flour, warm milk, yeast and sugar into the bowl and mix together
• Leave it to rise for  20 minutes.
• Add the rest of the flour, margarine, yolks and salt and mix together, to the point when the dough doesn't stick to the walls of the bowl and the dough makes bubbles. If the dough is too hard you can add a little more milk. 
• Now leave to rise again for 1 hour mixing a couple of times in the hour.
• Put the dough into a cake tin and put the fruits on the top. You can add cinnamon, cloves and vanilla sugar to the apple
• Put the crumble (sugar, margarine and flour mixed together) on top of the apple layer
• Bake in the  oven  for 20 - 25 minutes until the edges are a little brown. 
• Sprinkle cake with icing sugar.