Country Farm Cakes Blog

Jam Jamboree !

Posted on May 21, 2011 by admin

Are you like me a Jam Fan!

I’m not taking you back to your mis-spent youth wearing staypress trousers and Doctor Martin’s in a town called malice.

I am however referring to that delicious sweet fruity spread for which bread was invented. There is nothing more English than Strawberry Jam sandwiches and a cup of tea, or the epitome of Englishness, The Victoria Sponge.

I have been working today with some great new jam from our good friends over at Southdown Farm. Their preserves, all handmade and bursting with whole fruit make any sponge cake come alive.

Bramble and Apple made with juicy blackberries and bramley apples, Goosberry and Elderflower, Rhubarb with a hint of warming Ginger and in my opinion their very best, Strawberry Preserve. These cakes take me back to when I was a nipper and Mum would make a Victoria Sponge for Sunday tea.

What is your favourite jam recipe?

Do you have a penchant for jam roly poly and custard, or crave peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches.

My weakness has to be a slice of Victoria sponge and a mug of tea. All very English.

Now back to those boys from Woking, there is no better single than ‘Town called Malice’.

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Fabulous new desserts

Posted on April 30, 2011 by admin

Last week saw us growing our range even further, and experimenting with roulades. We’ve created two recipes, one for a chocolate roulade and one for a white roulade with raspberries. The chocolate roulade was made on Thursday and it certainly was pretty good, filled with fresh whipped cream  and dusted with icing sugar. It didn’t last long when we tasted it on Saturday!

We’ll be making the white roulade this week, and filling it with whipped cream and fresh raspberries, anyone interested in sampling? These will be available very soon from our usual resellers’ stores and online through our webstore. We’ve more desserts up our bakery sleeves though, white chocolate cheesecake, raspberry and lime cheesecake, chocolate and cherry cheesecake and key lime pie.

I’m hoping to have all these gorgeous desserts into our stores by mid May, in time for late spring when the weather starts warming up and our thoughts turn to chilled desserts. To make life easy, these will be frozen, so they just need to thaw in the kitchen and no one will any the wiser that you did not knock this up earlier in the day.

For a taste of our new cakes, puddings and desserts follow us on facebook where we highlight all our latest bakes and let you all see our creations.

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It’s Easter soon and time to think about a handmade Simnel cake

Posted on April 12, 2011 by admin

With Easter looming, our attention turns to the great British tradition of The Simnel cake. These handmade fruit cakes, traditionally made by young girls in domestic service as a gift for their Mother on Mothering Sunday are now only associated with Easter. Each region in England had their own local variation on this recipe and no two cake recipes were exactly the same.

It was the recipe made in around Salisbury several hundred years ago, that has been accepted as the general basic Simnel Cake recipe that is now in use. This consists of a rich fruit cake with half the mixture spread into the bottom of a round cake tin, then a disc of Almond paste laid ontop of this mix. The trick is to keep the marzipan away from the outside of the tin. The remaining half of the mixture is then spread on top of the marzipan to finish the cake.

Once baked the cake will have a gorgeous almond paste seam running through the centre of each slice. The real skill is in keeping the marzipan in the exact middle of the cake and not disturbing the layer when testing the cake in the oven. It is a skill that Jamie, our master baker has off to a tee. Traditionally this cake would have been decorated with a marzipan topping that is scored and browned, just lightly, we use a giant gas blowtorch to do ours. The small chef torches just aren’t up to the job! The final touches were sugar flowers on the top.

As this cake now celebrates Easter we decorate or version with 11 marzipan balls to represent the eleven faithfull disciples, minus Judas of course, who some say doesn’t deserve a place on the top!

Whatever you believe, this cake, available for mail order and handmade by us is a fabulous tasting cake with a soft almond centre and chewy almond marzipan topping. With 11 balls per cake and a lot of cakes to decorate we have a hell of a lot of small balls to roll, all exactly the same size. We even manage to cram 11 balls onto the top of our small 4″ gift size cake.

What are you buying your Mother for Mothers Day?, go on rekindle an old English tradition, treat her to a handmade Simnel cake. It’s much better tasting than chocs from M&S food and will last a lot longer than fourcourt flowers.

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What’s For Pudding?

Posted on March 28, 2011 by admin

After what has seemed like an eternity and a monumental uphill struggle, we finally have our puddings ready and available for retailing. I’ve lost count of how many different variations of sticky toffee pudding we have sampled and how many sauces we have made.

Our new range of gorgous handmade puddings comprises two family favourites and two new additions.

First we have that great Birtish tradition of Sticky Toffee Pudding, a mega mixture of dark soft sponge loaded with soft chewy dates and all smothered in our own fabulous toffee sauce. Our second pud is a rich Chocolate Fudge Pudding coated in a dark rich chocolate sauce. Thirdly we have given the bonfire night tradition a twist and created Toffee Apple Pudding. This rich Bramley Apple and Sultana sponge in drenched in a gorgous toffee sauce. Finally and by no means least is Dad’s fabulous Sticky Stem Ginger Pudding. His dark Ginger sponge is topped off with a warming Stem Ginger Syrup sauce.

We’ve created these to be prepared at home as quickly as possible and within 3 minutes you can be sat in front of Saturday night’s trashy telly with a steaming bowl of Sticky Toffee Pud! All great stuff.

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Keep it local

Posted on February 25, 2011 by admin

Today I was able to find another great local producer for our cake ingrdeients. This time it was honey. Although we were buying English honey, I really wanted to be using honey from as near to us as possible. After a chance discission one morning a few weeks ago and a quick phone call, we were able to track down a producer of local honey. The irony is, I already knew her and had totally overlooked her as a potential supplier for us. The old saying is true, one never looks directly on your doorstep. She lives only four houses down from me in the lane!

This afternoon I visited Pam in her kitchen and we chatted about the wonders of honey, surrounded by jars and a huge bucket of honey gently warming on her Aga, so she could filter out any nasties, to leave the purest clear yellow honey. It tasted amazing. And the best thing is that her bees forage on the crops and hedgerows along our lane and around our farm. A truly local taste unique to our little corner of rural Sussex. Pam told me she also has some hives 10 miles away, further south towards the downs, where the bees forage on oilseed rape and the honey is different again. I can’t wait to try honey from those hives when it’s ready. Our honey cake will certainly be made with local ingredients. The more I go looking for local ingredients, the more I find. Like minded small scale producers dedicated to their own crop or food ingredient, who are more than happy for us to use their excellent products. Sussex is teeming with small growers, breweries, farmers and dairies who make the most amazing food for any of us to enjoy. And the best thing, is that it is just on our doorstep.

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A taste of things to come

Posted on February 2, 2011 by admin

We’ve been busy creating new recipes to add to our existing luxury fruit cakes online. This morning our bakery was filled with the aroma of warm stem ginger as Dad was honing his masterpiece Sticky Stem Ginger cake. He makes these with stem ginger pieces in a ginger syrup and then adds more ground ginger to give it a real kick! Once out of the oven and whilst warm he made a stem ginger syrup and drizzled this over the top. The finished cake looks amazing, but more importantly tastes incredible. It is a real homage to all things ginger. Definately a cake to be enjoyed with a steaming mug of tea, indoors on a cold miserable wintery afternoon. But then again, ginger cakes are his thing. Nobody makes them like he can. If you like all things hot and gingery then this cake is definitely for you.

 

Oddly enough, when we’ve been at shows or tastings and have been sampling ginger cake, the response has been as if we were sampling marmite. Some people thought there was not enough ginger and that a ginger cake should give you a firm thump in the chest, whilst others think it’s too strong. Dad’s ginger cakes fall into the former category as we are firm believers that a ginger cake should leave you with a warm glow. For a sneak preview of Dad’s sticky stem ginger cake, take a look at the picture below. This cake is only one of a range of everyday handmade cakes we will be introducing within the next two months. As you would expect, they are all made with Rob Bookham’s marvellous handmade Sussex butter, my Uncle’s free range eggs and the same luxury ingredients we always use in our artisan kitchen. Leave a reply to this post, we’d love to hear what your thoughts on ginger cake are. We can’t wait to have all our fabulous English handmade cakes online for you to try. We will have something  for your to enjoy with your morning coffee through to proper English homemade cakes to share with family and friends.

Dad's Sticky Stem ginger syrup cake, perfect with a steaming mug of tea, or served warm with custard or Creme Fraiche for a fabulous Winter pudding.

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Join the Cake Club and become a cake connoisseur!

Posted on January 18, 2011 by admin

I am just finalising the details of our new addition to our cake range; The Cake Club. If like me you are a real foodie then this is the ultimate delight. Become a member of our cake club for either 3, 6 or 12 months if you are a true food devotee and we will personally bake you a cake every month from our mouthwatering range and deliver straight to your door.  After looking at other food clubs and how restricting they are, I then undertook extensive research involving Julian and my brother in law, Derek. The outcome of all this research is our superior club which offers you total freedom and choice of cakes for your membership period. Sounds too good to be true.I decided that I did not want to follow the herd and offer only the cake that was being baked for that month, if you don’t like the cake that was preselected each month then you lose out and have to give it to a friend. I believe in choice, so you can pre order which cake you would like for which month. If you have a penchant for whisky and fancy The Huntsman’s Cake twice or even three times then select it for the months you would like. You can have it every month if you like! Similarly if you really do not like walnuts the you can choose not to order the Gamekeeper’s Cake. It is that simple. The best things in life are the simplest.

Even better, if like me you have a mate or a relative who is a bit of an awkward one to buy birthday presents for, then this is the perfect answer. Pre order and all the postage is paid upfront, everything is taken care of, we’ll do the rest. It certainly beats trawling the high street looking for inspiration. Perfect for Dad’s who have everything! Membership can begin at any time of year, to coincide with a birthday, an anniversary or even at Christmas.

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Christmas at Country Farm

Posted on January 15, 2011 by admin

We’re back in the swing of things, busy baking after a hectic December baking and packing our festive fruit cakes for mailing throughout the UK and Europe. We certainly kept Des, our dilligent local courier busy every day up to Christmas week! Of our four winter fruit cakes, the most popular was the traditional English Christmas  Cake with The Mulled Wine Fruit coming a close second. It seems more people are now wanting an alternative to the traditional iced Christmas Cake and our Mulled Wine certainly fits the bill. It’s made with copious quntities of Dark harvest red wine produced by our good friends Sam Linter and her team at Bolney Wine Estate, only a few miles from us, in the heart of the West Sussex countryside.

We take Sam’s wine and mull our own wine to a secret recipe with various spices and citrus zests, this simmers all afternoon, filling the kitchen with the heady aroma of warm spices and rich red wine. I’m sure we’re all drunk just from the smell by the time we go home! This warm mixture is then poured over the vine fruits,apricots and cherries and stirred through. The resulting wine fruit mixture sits for 24 hours allowing the fruit to swell soaking up the spiced wine. The smell the following day on opening the vat is amazing and it is hard to resist taking a spoon for a taste. The cake is ready to be made. We start with the finest English Butter, handmade for us by Rob Bookham in East Sussex. Most butters are made on a continuous churning and extrusion process but Rob Bookham believes in traditional methods. His Southdowns butter is made from matured cream, then churned, ice washed and finally extruded into the butter blocks before being packed by hand. A real labour of love, but wow can you taste the difference.  After mixing with other select ingredients, dark muscovado sugar from Mauritius, free range eggs from my Uncle’s farm in the Surrey hills, we bake each cake in our stone based ovens at a very slow mellow pace. After all the hard work and patience the cakes slowly bake for two and a half hours. The finished cakes are then ready for you to enjoy.

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Local artist creates masterpieces for Country Farm Cakes

Posted on December 3, 2010 by admin

When we first created the recipes for our new fruit cakes, it took us ages to perfect every last little detail, was there too much spice, not enough golden sultanas. Some of the recipes came from my mother Wendy’s vast family recipe archive! It was a real labour of love…many hours waiting for the trials to come out of the oven, only for Mum, Dad and myself to dissect them and start again. Finally we ended up with the current range of luxury handmade fruit cakes and we knew our journey was complete. Or so we thought!

Now all we had to do was create the correct image for each cake. The easy bit was over. I was now well out of my comfort zone, but luckily I had great advice from the team at Local Web Solutions and LWS Creative, www.lws-uk.com. Each cake had to tell as story, a culinary journey through Sussex and the surrounding counties and thankfully LWS were singing from the same hymn sheet! During an intense meeting in our office with Matt, Tim and Claire from LWS, Matt happened to mention that his brother was quite a good artist. There was our light bulb moment! Along came Adam Bowley, master artist, drafted in by his brother, Matt and the cake band concepts began. By this time Tim had the layout in mind we wanted to use, to capture the essence of the fruit cakes.

As each cake is made with fabulous local ingredients, we had to have a local theme to the images on the cake bands. We had 12 in all to create, from The Colonial Cake for January to The English Christmas Cake in December. Adam took Tim’s rough ideas and first created pencil masterpieces. I was blown away by these alone. The finished paintings would be simply stunning. Adam is a renowned local artist from the South coast, who specialises in bird life, but his ability to capture landscapes is amazing. He has just exhibited his work at a top London Gallery. Working through the night, Adam began painting each scene for the cake bands. Each one is a visual interpretation of the cake, it’s history and the provenance of it’s ingredients, telling the story behind the cake. The most local of all of the cakes is The Sussex Countryman’s Cake, This cake is made with dried fruits steeped in Madgwick Gold real ale from The Hammerpot Brewery, a microbrewery set at the foot of the South Downs in West Sussex.

The story behind this cake is that of old Sussex farm labourers working the fields high up on the Downs, and relaxing after a hard day’s graft with a pint of local real ale. The picture Adam created depict these men, high on the Downs with the Seven Sisters and Cuckmere Haven in the background.

Take a tour through Adam’s other paintings on the finished cake bands in our store.

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Time for Tea

Posted on September 24, 2010 by admin

Well Autumn’s here and the Summer has finally gone. Outside the bakery the leaves are turning on the old oaks out in the deer park. It is this time of year when afternoon tea at 4 come into it’s own. It what makes Britain great. There is nothing more British than stopping gardening for a well earned sitdown with a piping hot mug of Twinings and a slice of homemade fruit cake.

Why not try our Gamekeeper’s Cake? Bursting full of plump fruits steeped in English Sloe Gin, it is a true taste of an English hedgerow. Plus whether you are only walking your four legged friend or braving the wilds of the moors, it is guaranteed to bring out the Ghillie in all of us.

Time for tea

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