Recipe Eleven: Christmas Town

This post is part of the "Sweet Adventures Blog Hop' Festive Favourites.

Last year I was inspired to make Martha Stewart's "Gingerbread Town Square Cake".

That said when you look closely at the recipe and realise you're going to need three days, over 20 eggs and almost a kilo of butter it was easy to get disheartened about the whole thing. 

This year I decided to make the cake with the same basic premise, flavours and visual outcome minus the heart clogging, wallet emptying and time erasing process.

So here goes:

Gingerbread Facades:

2 1/4 cups of self raising flour

1 1/2 teaspoons of ginger

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon of cloves

1/2 a teaspoon of nutmeg

95gm of butter

1/2 a cup of firmly packed brown sugar

1/4 cup of treacle

1 lightly beaten egg.

Process the flour, spices and butter until they look like breadcrumbs

Add the sugar, treacle and enough egg to bring the mix together

Turn onto a floured surface and knead until smooth.

Shape into a disk and refrigerate for 1hr. Pre-heat oven to 180C

Roll dough out between 2 sheets of baking paper until 3mm thick.

Cut out facade shapes (I found mine here)

Bake until just firm (8-10minutes)

Leave to cool completely & then ice with Royal icing.

Walnut Meringue Layers:

2 1/2 cups of walnuts lightly toasted.

1 1/2 cups of Pure icing suagr

1 cup of caster sugar

6 large egg whites.

Process your walnuts until fine.

Add icing sugar and 3/4 of a cup of your caster sugar.

Process to combine.

Whip your egg whites until soft peaks form.

Add remaining caster sugar one tablespoon at a time until dissolved.

Continue to beat until stiff glossy peaks form.

Fold walnut mix into the egg meringue.

Draw 3 18cm diameter circles on baking paper, turn the paper over and pipe out circles using the walnut meringue.

Bake for 2hrs, then stand in the oven with the door ajar for another hour.

Gingerbread Butter Cream

250gms of butter

3 cups of pure icing sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons of Ginger

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1/2 a teaspoon of Nutmeg

Milk to texture.

Whip the butter until pale, gradually add icing sugar.

If your mix becomes to stiff add a splash of milk to bring it back to the right consistency.

Beat in spices.

Whip 250mls of Cream.

Assembly:

The layers are assembled like this:

Meringue, buttercream, meringue, buttercream, meringue.

Then using remaining butter cream, frost the edges as best you can and stick on your facades.

Put your whipped cream on the top of the cake and spread.

Sprinkle the cream with cinnamon and you're done!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

xx

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