Cake Thursday: Walnut

Today's Cake Thursday cake (well, it wouldn't be a Cake Thursday lasagne, now, would it?) was walnut, as you may have guessed from the title, with coffee icing, which you probably didn't. It was, I think, one of the best yet, so I'm going to post the recipe (as ever, approximative and haphazard, and if your kitchen's not a mess by the end of it, you're doing it wrong).


Ingredients


6oz (150g) Brown flour. If you don't have any in, it's not worth making a special effort to get it. Self raising flour is fine, just omit the baking powder.
3tsp (c.à.c.) baking powder 
6oz (I'm not going to keep writing 150g each time, I'm sure you can work that out for yourselves) margarine
4oz (100g) brown sugar
2 good-sized spoonfuls honey. I think a good-sized spoonful is probably a heaped dessert spoon. If you dip the spoon in boiling water first, the honey won't stick, but then you won't be able to lick the spoon afterwards. Hmmm. Tricky one.
3 eggs from happy chickens. Battery-farmed eggs just don't make good cake. Honest. They also hatch into Duracell bunnies if you leave them long enough.
6oz walnuts. Bashed up is fine. If you have walnut halves, bash about 4oz of them up into smaller bits.


Stick everything except the walnuts in a Big Mixing Bowl (R)- every home should have one! and give it to someone else to mix mix well with a wooden spoon or similar. Preheat oven to Gas 6 or Standard Oven Cake Making Temperature about now. Mix in 2/3 of the walnuts. I made mine in a standard loaf tin, but if you want to make it as a layer cake (yay! twice as much icing!), it will also fit nicely into two 9" Victoria sandwich tins. Stick cake in oven. Wait for oven to cook cake (yes, it does it for you! Now isn't that kind?). This make take anywhere between 20 and 45 mins, depending on the temperament (no, not temperature) of your oven and the size of the tins you used. Generally, thinner cakes will cook quicker. Basic physics, yes?


Once the cake(s) is(are- catering for all eventualities here) cooked, leave it/them/him/her to cool for at least an hour. Infuriating though this is, the icing will melt if you don't wait. Talking of which...


Icing ingredients


3oz (75g) butter. Take this out of the fridge while the cake is cooling to soften up a bit.
6oz (can you remember how much that is in grammes? I hope so...) icing sugar
2 dessert spoons very strong coffee. Like, REALLY strong. Undrinkably strong.
2 digestive or other relatively plain biscuits

Mush the butter up until it's soft and creamy. Don't melt it or the results will be disgusting. Stir in icing sugar, then add the coffee one spoonful at a time- keep an eye on the consistency, if you add too much liquid the icing will be too runny.


Put icing on cake, or on both layers if you're making a layer cake. This recipe will make a bit too much icing for a loaf cake. This is where the biscuits come in. Smear remaining icing on biscuits, sandwich together and eat. Om nom.


Press the remaining walnuts into the icing while it's still soft. This cake will be happiest in the fridge, especially in summer, because of the butter in the icing.


Happy baking!

P.s. New font size- better/worse/indifferent?