Baking notes: Coffee & Walnut cake

So coffee and walnut cake was the bake of this week!

It came out pretty well, but once again the baking time was waay longer than it said in the recipe – another 20 minutes on top of the 40 it was supposed to have, so an hour in total.

I’m also a little unsure about the icing. The icing in the recipe was a cream cheese icing rather than a traditional buttercream. I don’t quite get the idea of cream cheese icing for coffee and walnut cake. I think it’s fine with carrot cake – I’m used to having it then. But with coffee and walnut, I think you want a proper coffee flavoured icing too. The recipe for the icing basically instructed you to beat a lot of cream cheese with some sugar. I did this, and then also attempted to add some coffee flavouring by mixing a little instant coffee with some water and then adding that to the mix. I can’t say it really added any flavour. Neither did the sugar specified in the recipe to be honest. The icing just tasted like cream cheese which just seems odd to me. Next time I’ll be doing the more traditional buttercream, coffee flavoured finish!