Clandestine Cake Club and Confetti Ice Cream Sandwiches

I have been baking away the past few weeks, using a new recipe book I was bought - The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook

The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook by Lynn Hill

Its an awesome recipe book filled with lots of fun, unique and easy-to-follow cake recipes! Now I do like challenging myself with the more fancy pants recipes, the likes you'll find in The Great British Bake Off: How to turn everyday bakes into showstoppers (which is a good book too)! But I have recently come to realise that baking isn't all about doing the most complex recipes or intricate bakes, you want something that tastes lovely and magical - and you can achieve this in very simple recipes, which can still 'wow' a group of people! (Plus, we are only blessed with 48 hours for the weekend and theres only so much baking you can squeeze into that time sometimes)!

ANYWAY, I loved the look of the Caramel Cake, so thats what I made.

All the good things in life right in that bowl

And mix!

The recipe used canned caramel, which was a relief. I don't have the greatest luck with making my own caramel! So it was just a case of beating, sifting and folding the ingredients to get these bad boys:

Woo, mama!

I whipped up some caramel buttercream whilst the cakes cooked and ended up with the glory you see before you!

The layout of the book is clear and concise with a big photo featuring the cake for
each recipe - which is always useful to see!

Grated milk chocolate on top - used a regular peeler (like you'd use for an apple)
to get the chocolate - so much easy then using a grater!
(Thanks Barefoot Contessa)!

The cake was delicious and a pinch of ginger and ground cloves (I had no cloves so used a bit of nutmeg instead) gave the cake a subtle spice flavour.
I also used my new recipe book to attempt my first ever Swiss Roll:

Strawberry and Cream Swiss Roll

And it was a success, hooray! I stupidly didn't read ahead in the recipe to realise you need to leave the swiss roll sponge rolled up whilst its cooling (I just rolled it up and out again several times during the cooling phase) but the sponge still rolled up great with the filling in it! You whip up a super fast strawberry syrup to layer into the roll - which was delicious and wish I had made more of!

So I fully recommend The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook to any keen baker out there! There is a large variety of recipes, the book is well-designed and features some beautiful close-up photos of all the cakes involved and is very easy to follow! Apart from one or two recipes, all the ingredients for the cakes are easily found in your local shops - which is always a plus!

Now, just to finish, a quick glimpse of some ice cream sandwiches I made for my boyfriend's birthday last week:

Assembly line to make the ice cream sandwiches - that ice cream was
melting fast!

Covered in hundreds and thousands

Chocolate chips and M&M's are in the cookie dough 

I watch a lot of the Food Network channel on Freeview and this is a recipe that gets repeated a lot in the ad breaks: Confetti Ice Cream Sandwiches. So I thought I would give it a shot! The cookies were quick and fun to make - who doesn't want M&M's in their cookie dough? Although I would say take those cookies out of the oven when the recipe tells you to cause I was over cautious and left them in longer - which I think resulted in them being a bit too crunchy for an ice cream sandwich - the cookies were too hard to bite into when taken out of the freezer (making them impossible to eat if you wear braces like myself)! So you have been warned! Take those cookies out of the oven when the recipe tells you too! They will harden up once cool.

So thats all my baking for the past two weeks! I'm aiming to do Macarons from my Nerdy Nummies recipe book next week, I'm excited!