It’s my husband’s birthday today! So obviously I’ve been hard at work trying to decide on what to make for him. He’s my biggest fan and my biggest critic, so while all this baking stuff is very relaxing, when I bake for him, there’s ‘stressure’. That also comes from my own need to make sure what is being presented is absolutely perfect!
For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to make a three layered Red Velvet Cake, I’ve had all this red colour lying around I wanted to use, plus it’s a nice colourful cake which makes any occasion festive. So I started off with the idea of the Red Velvet cake. And what a disaster THAT turned out to be! My baking soda didn’t send sparks through the whole batter and my cake was conveniently super flat! It tasted like it should – but my husband decided to call it, a Red Velvet pancake! So you can imagine how aesthetically wrong it all went. I didn’t need to throw the cake away, I made Red Velvet Cake Pops out of it:) But that’s for another post!
After my first disaster I just went to my husband, sat down and disappointed and just asked him what he would like. He wanted to give me a challenge – and I wanted to make something simple to bring my pride and level of confidence back to surface level to survive! His last day as a stay-at-home dad he was watching Ina Garten (with our 7 month old daughter) bake a Pineapple Carrot Walnut cake, or something along those lines (I’m not a big pineapple person, but after the Humming Bird cake, I’ve given it a shot, and Ina’s stuff is excellent anyway). That obviously stuck with him, so he wanted something of similar nature, so we eventually negotiated on a Maple Walnut Cake. There was a time,and there still is, my husband could drink straight out of a bottle of Maple Syrup! Some may find it gross – for him it was quenching a sugar craving!
The cake doesn’t wreak of maple syrup, it just has a tinge to it. But it’s moist and rich, maybe a bit too rich because of how sweet the icing turns out.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp + 2 tsp maple syrup
3 eggs
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Directions:
For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to make a three layered Red Velvet Cake, I’ve had all this red colour lying around I wanted to use, plus it’s a nice colourful cake which makes any occasion festive. So I started off with the idea of the Red Velvet cake. And what a disaster THAT turned out to be! My baking soda didn’t send sparks through the whole batter and my cake was conveniently super flat! It tasted like it should – but my husband decided to call it, a Red Velvet pancake! So you can imagine how aesthetically wrong it all went. I didn’t need to throw the cake away, I made Red Velvet Cake Pops out of it:) But that’s for another post!
After my first disaster I just went to my husband, sat down and disappointed and just asked him what he would like. He wanted to give me a challenge – and I wanted to make something simple to bring my pride and level of confidence back to surface level to survive! His last day as a stay-at-home dad he was watching Ina Garten (with our 7 month old daughter) bake a Pineapple Carrot Walnut cake, or something along those lines (I’m not a big pineapple person, but after the Humming Bird cake, I’ve given it a shot, and Ina’s stuff is excellent anyway). That obviously stuck with him, so he wanted something of similar nature, so we eventually negotiated on a Maple Walnut Cake. There was a time,and there still is, my husband could drink straight out of a bottle of Maple Syrup! Some may find it gross – for him it was quenching a sugar craving!
The cake doesn’t wreak of maple syrup, it just has a tinge to it. But it’s moist and rich, maybe a bit too rich because of how sweet the icing turns out.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp + 2 tsp maple syrup
3 eggs
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 170 C and line a 9″ cake tin
- Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, and butter) with a hand held whisk until it looks like coarse bread crumbs
- Whisk together the wet ingredients, milk, maple syrup and eggs
- Stir in walnuts and pour into the lined cake tin and bake for 40 mins, or until skewer comes out clean in the center
- Once the cake has cooled let it rest and then split with a cake leveler
- Use 1/3 of the icing to apply on top of the bottom layer and sandwich the other haolf of the cake on top
- Apply half of the remaining icing on the top of the cake and the remainder on the sides and decorate with walnuts on the top
Note:
You can divide this into separate cake tins, or bake in one cake tin and level the cake once it has cooled. I prefer to do that since I don’t have too many cake tins of the same size
Maple syrup Frosting
6 cups icing sugar
1 cup butter
2 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp milk (add 1 tsp more if you want a more runny consistency)
Directions
- Sift icing sugar to avoid any lumps in the frosting
- Add butter and whisk with a hand held mixer, slowly add the maple syrup and milk and whip until fluffy
- Add more milk if the frosting is too thick and not spreadable on the cake
