Challenging Mary Berry could be a dangerous thing. If you managed to rile her so much she decided to be
rid of you once and for all, surely her method of choice would be with poison. Well, she would hardly batter you with a Battenberg would she? No, in the ultimate bake-off, she would serve you a delicate array of treats in a macabre game of Russian Roulade. Would the profiterole she proffered be perfect or poisonous? Would her luscious ladyfingers actually be laced with lethal ingredients. Would her angel cake have you visiting the heavenly host? Surely her poison of choice would be arsenic – the almond flavour would go so well with a drop of finest rose water. You would consider resisting those sweet treats, but her dainty perfections would be too much temptation in this most macabre of bake-offs.
I know it sounds like I fell asleep during the bake-off and woke up to Midsomer Murders. This morbid obsession with an entirely fictional version of Mary Berry is born from a near sacrilegious task I have set myself – I have decided to alter one of her recipes. The thing is, it is bonfire night and I wanted to make something with a toffee apple theme to take for the various people I’m meeting at our local fire in the park. Mum has been going on about a molassesy ginger cake Mary Berry makes, and so I have decided to alter her recipe, and now the idea is in my head, I just can’t stop.
The original recipe is here, but instead of the crystalised ginger in syrup, I added some caremelised apple cubes instead. To make these I took 800g of desert apples cut into 1 cm cubes, heated 60g of butter in a frying pan and fried the apples. The trick is to have the pan reasonably warm when you put them in, and then only to turn them after a couple of minutes of frying, so the apples go golden without burning. Don’t stir them too much or apple purée will ensue. After turning a couple of times I added 80g of soft brown sugar and stirred one final time, then added these little half the squares of sweet toffee apple to Mary’s cake mix. The rest I saved for decorating.
Instead of Mary’s icing I made a quick toffee icing – 25g of butter and 100g of soft brown sugar heated gently in a pan until the are combined, then add 80ml of cream. Simmer gently whilst stiring for 2 minutes and then allow to cool until it is just starting to form a crust before spreading evenly over the cake and quickly levelling off with a palette knife – a good tip is to keep the palette knife in a jug full of boiling water, that way it forms a nice glaze on the icing without sticking too much to the blade. Finally I decorated with the remaining cubes of toffee apple.
Now it’s time to taste it. Oddly there seems to be a hint of almonds…
Picture Credits:
Ceramic two-tone tableware by Rice DK
All images copyright Mark Fletcher