Rescue Recipe!

I want to share a recipe with you today that will hopefully help you if you need to rescue a cake like I did last week!

It all started when I decided to treat myself to a new cake tin - a bundt pan. I had always fancied making one of these ring cakes with the fluted design on the top. Now, because of the shape & design of the tin, you can't line it with greaseproof paper so I opted for greasing the so-called non-stick surface with oil. Can you see where this is heading...?! I mixed up my trusty chocolate cake batter, poured it in and stuck it in the oven. It rose beautifully to fill the entire pan so I was looking forward to seeing the cake once turned out with all the fluting design in full glory.

Hmmm. I left it to cool for about 10 minutes in the pan then inverted it onto a cooling rack and gave it a good old shake & tap. Nothing happened. So I turned it back over again and eased a small rubber spatula (didn't want to scratch that precious 'non-stick' surface now did I?) down the flutes as far as I could to loosen the cake. Plopped it upside down again hoping it would slide free easily now. The top half did. The bottom half, however, remained firmly in the tin. So I now had a perfectly baked chocolate cake, broken horizontally and not looking at all how I had hoped! There was no way I could successfully remove the rest of the cake to preserve the shape & design so it was looking like the bin might get lucky. But like Hugh, I'm not a fan of waste so I set to thinking how I could rescue this cake disaster.

One of my first weekend jobs was in a small cafe where the owner baked all her own cakes. One of her specialities was bread pudding ... which wasn't actually made with bread, but with leftover cakes. Into a large bowl, she would crumble any pieces of cake that were starting to go a bit dry and add a sort of custard mix to them before scraping into a tin and baking again. It made the most delicious, moist, puddingy cake that was all the more exciting because it varied every time depending on what cakes were leftover that week!

With this in mind, the power of Google and my own tweaks, I came up with the following 'rescue recipe':

Broken / leftover cake, crumbled into chunks

1 and a half cups of milk

1 and a half cups of double cream

3 eggs

1 tsp mixed spice (or cinnamon)

1 tblsp vanilla extract

Quarter cup of milk chocolate chips

Quarter cup of white chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 170c, grease & line a large tin then into it, spread the crumbled cake evenly.

2. In a bowl, beat together the milk, cream, eggs, mixed spice and vanilla.

3. Pour the mixture over the cake then sprinkle the chocolate chips on top.

4. Bake for approximately 45 minutes - 1 hour, until the custard is set.

5. Allow it to cool completely before cutting into squares and devouring.

I used chocolate chips because I had a chocolate cake to rescue. You could really add anything to jazz it up a bit - nuts, cherries, sultanas - depending on what cake you are rescuing!

Mine was destined for the cake sale at school to raise money for Children In Need so once baked (again!), I added some brightly coloured spots, Pudsey style. And so, the cake I had envisaged looked VERY different to the cake I ended up with, but I'm tempted to say that the rescued 'triple choc pudding cake' was possibly tastier...