Fish Fingers and Custard Cake
Happy Birthday to Who!
Fish fingers and custard. If you know, you know and if you don’t know you can google it. And if you don’t care, I don’t blame you! But please do forgive me while I continue my baking-based celebration of Dr Who’s 60th anniversary.
This is where you’ll find ingredients, quantities and timings for the baked components of my Fish Fingers and Custard cake. For instructions on how to construct the cake follow my ‘how to’ video on my social media.
INGREDIENTS:
Cake:
3 large eggs
180g very soft salted butter
180g white granulated sugar
180g plain flour (for gluten free use 190g of a self raising mix and no baking powder)
1 & 1/2 tsp baking powder
Buttercream:
100g soft salted butter
75g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Custard:
300g double cream
500g milk
65g cornflour
80g white granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla
yellow & red or orange food colouring
Coffee & Hazelnut Soak:
2 tsp coffee powder
3 tbsp boiling water
2 tbsp hazelnut syrup
Construction & decoration:
Orange powder food colouring
Cake pop sticks or disposable drinking straws
HOW TO:
Cake:
• Line a 1.2 or 1.5 litre pyrex / ovenproof glass bowl with baking paper.
• Line a 2 lb / 1 kg loaf tin with baking paper.
• Add all the cake ingredients to a large bowl and use an electric mixer to beat together. Stop as soon as everything is combined.
• Weigh half the batter into the pyrex bowl and half into the loaf tin.
• Smooth the tops and bake at 160ºc in the middle of the oven.
• To bake, the loaf tin will take approximately 40 minutes, the bowl approximately 48 minutes.
• Remove the cakes from the oven when a skewer comes out clean and leave them to cool completely.
Buttercream:
Put the very soft butter in bowl and add the icing sugar and vanilla, you can use an electric mixer to combine everything but the butter should be soft enough that you can just use a spatula.
Custard:
• Add to a heavy bottomed pan the sugar, cornflour and vanilla.
• Add just enough milk to the dry ingredients to make a lump-free paste then add the rest of the milk and cream.
• Add the food colouring until you’re happy with your custard’s colour. A good match for Bird’s custard is a mix of yellow and red.
• Put the pan on a medium heat and keep stirring with a spatula until the custard starts to thicken, swap to a whisk to avoid lumps forming.
• Once the custard has thickened keep it moving on the heat to fully cook out any chalkiness from the cornflour.
Cake soak:
I used this coffee & hazelnut soak for the bowl cake but you could use different flavours like a lemon drizzle.
• Mix all the ingredients together and soak the split ‘bowl cake’ when sat in the custard.
Happy Birthday to Who x