Karen Wright: A spooky apple cake for Halloween themed class
When I was a child, I don’t think pumpkins had arrived in the UK, certainly not in Featherstone where I grew up.
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Hide AdI will be leading an online baking class on the Sunday before Halloween with a spooky theme.
The company, ‘Bake with a Legend’, that I sometimes work with is following each episode of this years Great British Bake Off closely.
It is setting a class to correspond with the theme of each week.
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Hide AdI was allocated the Halloween class and my first task was to come up with a suitable bake to fit the lesson.
The signature challenge on the show was an apple cake, so that was my brief!
As it so happened, I had recently been on holiday to Italy where we were treated to a great breakfast.
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Hide AdThis included very special cakes that were baked by the in-house chef.
My favourite was the Torte de Mele, which was apple cake.
I had asked the chef about his ingredients, and I incorporated them into my recipe for my class.
Quite a bit of cinnamon and some maple syrup. He used oil instead of butter and some brown sugar.
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Hide AdI needed to think of some spooky decorations to fill the time in my class while the cake was baking.
I decided in caramelised apples to pile on top of the cake, Italian meringue spooky ghosts and mini toffee apples.
There was also a caramel drizzle and a mallow spiders web.
Quite a few processes involved so my class will have plenty of challenges on the day.
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Hide AdPaul Hollywood is always firm about flavours, if it an apple cake it must predominantly taste of apple.
So, I toned down the cinnamon in my cake to make sure that apple was the “hero”.
I hope you all enjoy Halloween and remember, if you do carve a pumpkin, the flesh can be used in cooking.
It is very useful and always worth noting. Think pumpkin pie or a hot and spicy pumpkin soup, remember the old saying “waste not want not”!