Sweet Cafe & Bakery

Like, I suspect, a lot of avid home bakers, I had a long term hankering to run my own bakery, come cookshop, come purveyor of interesting, cakey-bakey things.

While I was happy in my career, life has a funny way of intervening and in 2014 I had to leave my job for health reasons. Not knowing what to do next gave us an opportunity, and Sweet Cafe and Bakery was born in March 2015 when we bought a local coffee shop and rebranded it to fit our own vision.

For a while, we entertained North Cardiff with our barista skills and culinary escapades. We sold a lot of hot and cold drinks, snacks and lots, and lots of slices of cake. All home made.

Like all good things, it came to an end and in August 2018 we sold the shop on to new owners.

After a lengthy hiatus I am slowly returning to baking and blogging.

Susie

Comments

Dark Indulgent Chocolate and Walnut Brownies for the Weekly Bake Off

It's been a great couple of weeks in the Bake Off , as Amy has chosen some fantastic chocolate recipes from Mary Berry's 100 Cakes and Bakes . Although I made last week's American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake, I didn't enter it. Not because it was a disaster (it was incredibly delicious though very rich - Josh has been able to eek it out all week as he only needs a little piece to get his daily chocolate fix!), but I simply ran out of time. So this week, I decided to get my skates on and make the bake early. Particularly as it's brownies. Yes. Brownies. Those dark, fudgey, chocolatey little bites of heaven. But for me, this week was an experiment. You see, I already have a fantastic brownie recipe . It's been made countless times and been played around with to give an endless variety of treats. (Have I ever mentioned Maya Gold in brownies? Yes? Well I'll have to post about them someday soon because they are amazing - like some sort of out of body exp

Farmhouse Orange Victoria Sandwich for the Weekly Bake Off

I was really pleased with Amy's selection for this week's Bake Off - Mary Berry's Ultimate Cake Book was the first Baking book I bought, back in 1995 (it was first published in 1994 and by the time I bought a copy it was already on its eighth reprint). The very first recipe I did was her small all in one Victoria Sandwich, and consequently the very first cake tins I purchased were Silverwood 7" sandwich tins. They have seen many, many outings over the years, by way of this cake and the Sunday Best Chocolate Fudge Cake, also from the same book. I still have them and used them for this recipe. Interestingly, in flicking through 'Ultimate Cake Book', I caught sight of an Orange Victoria Sandwich, which is practically the same recipe as this one (size aside), with the exception of the filling, where Mary instructed that it should be 'about 4 tablespoons of orange mamalade and a little caster sugar'. Hmm, not sure about that one. I certainly loved the

Devil's Food Cupcakes

It's been a while since I blogged - or I suppose made - anything that was specifically designed to appeal to my boys. I felt I was starting to neglect them, so I decided to rectify that. Chocolate is usually a sure fire hit in that regard. These little cakes certainly fulfilled that part of the brief, as the sponge is dark and intense, and richly chocolatey. The frosting is a US-style 7 minute frosting and is very similar to the marshmallow filling in the teacakes I blogged recently. So, it is very, very sweet. While I seem to have developed an incredibly sweet tooth since falling pregnant with Sam, I must admit, I found it a little much, and given that I had piped big swirls of frosting, ended up scooping about half back off in order to eat a cupcake. Devil's Food Cupcakes Ingredients (makes 12) 125g plain flour 30g cocoa powder 1/2 tspn bicarbonate of soda 1/8 tspn salt 90g softened unsalted butter 125g golden

Fold in the Flour ...

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