In The Interest Of Science I Made A Cake

Two weekends ago I took a cake I had made to the Brit Bee Retreat. It proved to be a hit with the others and they asked for the recipe. It was a recipe I had used before, from my Pinterest boards. I had never had a problem with it. Well, some of the others have made it and there has been a varied success rate resulting.

It's a cinnamon roll cake and the recipe is very simple in that you put all the ingredients, bar one, into the mixer and combine, and then add the melted butter, combine and the job's done for the batter.

You then make a mixture of butter, sugar, flour and cinnamon and dot it all over the top.

Take a skewer and swirl it through the topping and batter, cutting that cinnamon through the cake but not too much. You to be able to distinguish one from the other still.

When it comes out and has sat for a moment you will have molten craters of cinnamon goodness, and while the cake is still warm you drizzle on an icing.

So what went wrong for some of my friends? First up a mistake by me. I pinned the recipe - twice. The recipes look exactly the same but they are not. One has more butter in the cinnamon mixture, tells you to cook it longer and insists on a glass baking dish. This is not the recipe I have used, but unfortunately the one that did get used by Sarah. Sorry Sarah! I've deleted the recipe from my pin board now. A little too late for you unfortunately. The other slip up in the making involved plain flour and self raising flour. This recipe definitely uses plain flour. Apparently self raising works. It just makes it puff up more and a lot fluffier in the eating.

Sarah also had a problem with the cinnamon mixture bubbling up and caramelising. I can only presume that this was due to the added butter in the mixture for the recipe she used, and the longer cooking time given by that blogger.

So my conclusions, if you ever want to use this recipe - and really you should as it is very yummy indeed despite the problems - are the following:

- a glass baking dish is neither here nor there but having a baking pan that is big enough is. This is a big cake, a sharing cake. You need a 9" x 13" pan, or one of comparative size.

- the baking time for the recipe I use is 28-32 minutes. It could use a minute or two more but if you leave it for longer you are in danger of the caramelising thing happening with the cinnamon mixture around the edges of the pan. Not that I don't mind a bit of caramelised cinnamon mixture mind.

- if you are used to using weight measurements instead of cups then my books tell me that 3 cups of flour equals 15ozs in weight. And 1 cup of sugar equals 8ozs. That being said I weighed the flour I measured before putting it in the mixing bowl and my scales told me I had 18ozs. I do not sift my flour. Can. Not. Be. Bothered. This may have influenced the weigh scales. If you don't have American style measuring cups then you might want to invest in some.

- I think that the full amount of the icing is too much. But that's just my subjective opinion.I like sugar but enough is enough. I make about 3/4 of the amount indicated and am happy with how much icing I have.

- 350F = 180C = Gas 4 = 160C fan oven

I hope this does away with any confusion. After all this, if you are curious, and hungry - here is the recipe. 

You know that it has to be a pretty good cake if four of my friends went home and made it less than a week after having it at our retreat. It's like chocolate flapjacks. Addictive.

Susan