Wet Weekend

There is nothing like a wet weekend to make me want to hole up in the kitchen and make comfort food.  Equally, nothing says comfort food like hot bread slathered in butter. This weekend, after having helped out on a charity bike ride by sitting in the car in the middle of nowhere waiting to make sure mad cyclists hadn't disappeared in the mist and wet of the Peak District, we stopped off at a garden centre.

The Riverside Herb Centre just outside Hathersage is a very small garden centre specialising in (yes you may have guessed it) herb plants.  It has plenty of other plants too but is a small plot with a small selection.  What it also has, is a deli and cafe so I spent as much time inside as I had outside with the plants.  The fist thing to catch my eye was a display of bread flours and I had to try a couple.  Sadly, they have gone for a Wessex brand rather than anything milled more locally but that didn't stop me buying.

I thought I would try a loaf of each and mixed the dough up to the recipe on the packet using the kenwood. Both doughs rose beautifully, although the Honey and Seed was a  little more reluctant.  The Six seed made a light and high rise loaf which is delicious (it is the prud loaf at the back of the picture below).   The Honey & Seed was a denser affair and wasn't as sweet as I had anticipated.  You would certainly be able to use it a salty soft cheese such as a goats or even a milder blue such as dolcelatte.  It had odd tiny globules of what must have been some kind of honey so there was a hint of the flavour here and there but if i had tested it blindfold I don't think I would have guessed the honey content.  I might try the next loaf with some fresh honey added and maybe some apricot.

As you can see from the picture above, I also had a bash at the Sticky Toffee Tray Bake recipe form Sarah Randall's "Weekend Baking" which was delicious.  I am not a fan of jarred ginger, so substituted sultanas where that should have been.  If I had had any dates available, they would have gone in instead in true sticky toffee stylee.  It was truely lovely.  Can't help feeling it would have been nicer hot with custard for some reason.  Also pictured are smokey cheesey scones.  About which more another time......

A bit of a round up

Whilst I never seem to be too busy to fit in a bit of baking, taking time to write about it is a bit more tricky.  I can always squeeze a small bake of biscuits into an evening after work or a lager cake in a quiet afternoon, but sitting down and typing about it is a discipline I struggle with.  All of the romantic notions of what it must be like to be a cookery writer certainly get a different perspective when you realise the effort it takes to write things up.  Regular food bloggers have my utmost respect for the their perseverance!

So, for the last few weeks, writing has taken a back seat so this blog is a catch up of my favourite bakes since my last post.

Firstly, a cake inspired by a article in the Observer Food Monthly, possibly 2 months ago now.  It was an interview Chrsitina Tosi, a chef at the Momofuku Milk Bar in New York.  This is a lady whose sweet tooth makes me look positively abstemious when it come to sugar.  But, her cakes looked fantastic so i thought I could have a go at baking something that looked similar.  This was the result.

The basics were just a victoria sponge, chocolate ganache and a plain vanilla butter cream but the effect was made by putting the cooled cakes back into a springform tin lined with parchment.  This is what gives the stright sided look.  The bottom layer was then loaded with maltesers, chocooate chips, marshmallows and chocolate covered raisins, all kept in place by a covering of the ganache.

Next was the butter cream, spread right out to the sides to give a flat effect then topped with more buttercream and whatever sweets were left from the middle.  This one made it into work where the consensus was that it was almost overwhelming in its sweetness.  However, that didn't stop everyone finishing their large slice!

Pretty in Pink

Every now and then, I come over all dainty (well in attitude if not in physical manifestation) and get the urge to bake something small and pretty.

This week, as well as feeling dainty, I must have felt like a challenge because a desire to bake macarons (or macaroons) came over me.  There is something about the almondy meringue that is always a treat.This has only happened twice before with mixed success and it hasn't exactly been a relaxing exercise.

The first attempt which were supposed to be pale lilac in colour came out like splodgey grey disks with not even a faint resemblance to the beautiful discs I had bought in Paris several years ago in L'aduree - the home of the macaron.

A second attempt fared much better after following the great step-by-step instructions of Jose Marechal in his book "Irresistible Macaroons".  This follows the Italian meringue base so requires a sugar thermometer and he also recommends sieving your ground almonds.  I plumped for a lemon curd filling and this time, with a bit of patience, I produced something pretty close to my aim.

My latest attempt probably falls between the two.  I had seen a recipe for raspberry cheesecake macarons on the website of The Extraordinary Art of Cake when trawling the internet for inspiration.  This is the lovely website of a Brighton based baker who specialises in cupcakes but sometimes does something a bit different.  You can find the recipe at http://www.theextraordinaryartofcake.com/2012/03/amazing-raspberry-cheesecake-macarons.html

They are made of a traditional macaron shell but filled with a cream cheese filling and small dollop of raspberry jam.  My shells were the part that made this attempt a bit of a mixed bag.  Some of them came out pretty perfect, others had erupted slightly and the shells were cracked.  This doesn't affect the taste at all but isn't really the polished finish I hoped for.

Thankfully, there were enough unblemished shells to make it worthwhile and although I think I still need some practice, these were still good looking enough to get a few "ooh"s when unveiled at a family gathering. They tasted pretty fine too and I would use the filling recipe again in other recipes.

I like to pipe the filling as it gives a bit more control as to how much goes in and if you pipe in dots around the edge of one shell and then fill the middle of the ring of dots, you get a fluted edge to the filling which I like.  Overall, my self assessment would be "could do better" but not so bad as to out me off trying again.

Souper Cupcakes

One of the lovely things about being a keen baker is that friends and family can be very keen to share recipes. This is particularly fun when the recipes are ones that are so kooky that the friend concerned hasn't taken the plunge and tried it out themself.

Several weeks ago, a very good friend said that she had lots of recipes that had been given to her in just this way and that she would e-mail one or two on.  Her first offering raised an eyebrow in our house as it was a cupcake recipe calling for a tin of tomato soup.  Not, I think you will agree, a conventional cupcake ingredient.  She had warned me she thought it was form the 70s and probably American.

It has taken a few weeks to pluck up the courage to try the recipe out, but what better excuse than a very wet weekend to give it a go?

The recipe starts conventionally enough with creamed butter and sugar and then the addition of eggs but then the flour and soup go in turning the mixture a slightly off putting orangey colour rather than the vibrant orangey red I was expecting.

Not one to be deterred, into the oven they went.  What came out was a bit of a disappointment.  I have never managed to produce lopsided cakes before.  Sunken, yes. Exploded, yes.  But lopsided?  No.

But how did they taste?  Well not bad.  They were not as sweet as normal cupcakes and had a texture that looked and felt similar to a malt-loaf just slightly dryer. An almost rubbery spongey texture but not at all unpleasant.  You could almost compare them to a cornbread in terms of sweet/savoury or even a bland savoury muffin.  However, they are definitely the ugly sister of the cupcake world and I am not sure I would make them again other than for the novelty factor of telling people what went into them.

Spot the Difference

Both my sister and my mum have recently started buying bread mix from Lidl and raving about the bread they have made.  Having tried the sunflower bread, a dark bread packed with sunflower seed flavour I could see their point.  Easy and really tasty.  They do four flavours in all but the one my sister was most positive about, the ciabatta mix, has never been in stock when I have popped in to try and get my hands of a bag.  Mum to the rescue and I am now in possession of this prized mix.  I wanted to see just how good it was so what else could I do but a taste test?

Armed with Paul Hollywood's "100 Great Breads" and an afternoon to myself, I shut myself in the kitchen. Home baked ciabatta is not a thing to be undertaken in a hurry.  You set off by making a "starter" of a very wet dough made with bread flour, yeast and water.  This has to be left for at least 4 hours and preferably over-night. At this point, you really get a feel for the liveliness of yeast.  The mix bubbles away and begins to look like a lunar landscape.  By now, I have mixed the Lidl mix and they were both sat happily proofing,

As you can see, they look dramatically different, with the home made starter on the left.

After this proving, the mix was slapped on to a baking tray and left or another 40 minutes before being baked in the oven for 25 minutes.  The home made version is mixed with  more flour, some olive oil an more water and whisked for 5 minutes.  When I say whisked, I mean stabbed, poked and pulled about with a whisk.  It was not exactly a whiskable texture!

The dough is then left to rise again before going through a similar process as the packet mix.  The finished products were both pretty decent but how did they compare?  Well, on a blind tasting, you could not tell any difference in taste at all.  The packet mix had a very slightly more open texture but they were both recognisably ciabatta.

The real difference is the time involved.  The packet mix took less than 2 hours from opening the packet to tucking into the warm bread.  Making a loaf from scratch was an eight hour task.  So, if you are in a hurry for some Italian bread, I would recommend the packet mix but it is still tremendously satisfying to know you can do it yourself.

Spring is sprung....

A beautiful Friday afternoon up North, Friends visiting this weekend and Mothering Sunday too.  What better excuse to bake some flowery cupcakes?

I was rather taken with some new silicone cupcake cases in Lakeland and they popped into my shopping basket almost without me thinking about it.  I'm not a big fan of silicone bakeware generally.  It doesn't seem to keep its shape while it cooks and I have had some almost rugby ball shaped loaf cakes with one piece I own.  However, these cases are shaped like flower pots so were just begging to be iced to within an inch of their lives!.

I used the usual chocolate cupcake recipe and a basic vanilla buttercream coloured with Wilton's Leaf Green food colour paste.  The bit that took most of the afternoon was cutting out the leaves and flowers to go on top.  I used a combination of stamp cutters and small flower and leaf cutters and coloured some ready to roll icing to make the shapes.  It doesn't dry quite as firm as sugarpaste but I find it much easier to work with as it doesn't stick to everything it touches.

I was really pleased with the result

It was also great to get out into the garden to take the photos.  Cakes always look better in daylight and this is a sure sign that spring is truly on the way.

Still Way Out West

Well the holiday plans are definitely taking a turn towards the South West so, thoughts still facing that way, it was time to try a home made Cornish Pasty.  Unlike the saffron buns, I have enjoyed many a pasty in Cornwall, many handmade and all heaven.  Goodness knows I can even enjoy a microwaved Ginsters on occasion!  Yes, I think I can say I love a pasty in almost any form.

These home efforts are not, technically,  real Cornish Pasties as apparently they have to be assembled in Cornwall to claim that name, but this is the closest I can get in South Yorkshire.

All the traditional ingredients are here - a puffish pastry with vegetable shortening as well as butter (should probably be lard but I didn't have any in), swede, potato, beef skirt and some onion - recipe courtesy of the Great British Book of Baking again.  I have never made these from scratch before and was not all convinced that all of those ingredients could possibly be cooked in the time it take to cook the pastry.  Some kind of magic happens though and what came out of the oven looked like the real deal and smelt fabulous.

They also tasted pretty good.  If improvements are to be made, I would put a bit more beef in next time and quite a bit more salt and pepper - the taste was not as bold as I would have liked.  I think my crimping could also do with some finesse but it got more handsome as it cooked so ended up looking decent.

Holiday Dreams

I think it must have been the grey skies on Sunday afternoon, coupled with the discovery of a packet of saffron whilst clearing out some spice jars,  that made think of holidays.  No, not so much the jetting off to sunnier climes, but the several family holidays we have had in Cornwall (beautiful place but very changeable weather!).

I have had saffron buns several times in Cornwall but wasn't bowled over.  I am pretty sure what I have eaten has been mass produced and may have had only a passing relationship with real saffron.  So I dug out my Great Book of British Baking and found a recipe for the real deal.  I confess that the only packet of mixed dried fruit I had at home was the exotic kind.  I was pretty sure that cherries and pineapple weren't original to the recipe so spent a happy few minutes picking them out of the mix.  Much more fun than trudging to the shop.

This recipe makes a very rich dough and you need to put aside an afternoon to make sure you have tine for the three hour proving that the book recommends.  I made the mistake of starting these a bit late in the day and they didn't hit the oven until 9.30 p.m.

The result was an almost cakey bread bun, quite dense and smelling musky and exotic with the saffron and a beautiful golden colour.  A world away from the commercial ones I had tasted before.  Well worth the effort.

caramel trials

I'm not scared of much, but caramel genuinely terrifies me. I have scars from molten sugar that seemed to leap out of the pan and take a couple of layers of epidermis down in the fight. But, not one to give in to a foe easily, I have had a go at a couple of recipes this week that have caramel as a foundation.

Firstly, a Burnt Sugar Bundt cake from "Baked Explorations", a book of sweet treat recipes form America by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, a couple of lovely looking boys who own the Baked store in NYC.   No, I have never been there but a girl can dream can't she?

This is a dense, close crumbed and frankly enormous cake.  As the base, it uses a burnt sugar caramel which is made into a sauce consistency by the addition of  cream and coconut milk.  This is added to a fairly standard cake mixture.  The sauce is also used in the icing which is buttercream with the added sauce and a healthy slug of dark rum.  The whole thing is topped with shards of broken hard caramel so another opportunity to injure myself.

Thankfully, it all passed uneventfully but I think I may have wussed out a bit.  The cake wasn't quite as dark as the one ion the picture but it still went down a treat with colleagues!.

The second, and much less conventional recipe was Yottam Otolengi's Surprise Tarte Tatin form his beautiful book Plenty.  The surprise it that it is a savoury tarte, using potato as the main ingredient rather than fruit.  When I saw the recipe for a pie using potato, tomato, onion and cheese, all topped (or bottomed) with puff pastry, I just had to make it.  It was the first thing form the book I made and this is my third attempt.  I have made sure it is on a weekend when there are no visitors though to ensure that I get a decent sized slice this time!

All of the ingredients are cooked separately so a caramel of sugar and a little butter goes in the base of the dish.  You have to be pretty quick spreading this on the dish as it hardens really quickly.  Then it is just a case of arranging the potatoes, tomatoes and onions, slicing on some cheese and tucking it all under a puff pastry sheet (shop made this time).

Once it is done, it looks pretty good before it is turned out...

but it is a thing of beauty when it is properly finished.

Even better, it can be assembled up to 24 hours before you bake it so perfect if you have people coming to eat but son't want to get too stressed about cooking.  Finally, although it comes from a vegetarian cookbook, I haven't found a carnivore yet who hasn't loved it.

And it was a scar free week of caramel - not bad.

Easy Chicken Pie

The best thing about a roast dinner is making an easy Monday dinner with the left overs.  In this case, roast chicken on Sunday means chicken pie on Monday.  The easy bit is a cheat with some ready made puff pastry.  Although I love making my own, a working week day is not the time to be trying to get puff made from scratch.

As I rarely manage to find the  motivation to make my own chicken stock, the sauce that goes in this pie is made from instant vegetable stock.  I use Marigold vegetable stock which has a great depth of flavour and the most funky bright yellow colouring thanks to the turmeric in it.  The sauce is a simple roux (40g of butter to 2 tablespoons of plain flour) cooked out to take the raw taste off the flour and then the stock is slowly added (about 450ml) until you get a thick consistency.  The low fat of this sauce is what soothes my conscience when using all-butter puff which is hardly health food.  Be warned though, salt is the highest ingredient on the list of contents for the stock powder so don't add any to the sauce!

It is then just a case of adding some softened shallot, the cooked chicken and a handfull of frozen peas to the sauce, pouring it into a suitable pie dish (mine is a 1 litre volume, 8.5 inch pie dish) and topping with the pastry.  Pop it in the oven at 200 degrees C and in  40mins or so it is all ready to be eaten.

From the Jaws of Defeat

I have a dangerous habit of logging on to Amazon late at night after a glass or two of wine too many.  This often leads to the buying of some interesting cookbooks.  As some of these come form overseas they can take a while to be delivered so when "Baking With Julia" turned up yesterday, I had forgotten that I had even ordered it.

A flick through made me determined to have a go at Cardinal Slice, a meringue and genoise layer slice made more complicated by the fact that the meringue and sponge mixtures are piped in stripes.  It is supposed to look like this when fully assembled.

I have had some trouble with American recipes before so I shouldn't have been surprised when this didn't turn out quite as planned.  The meringue, rather than being crisp was soft and soggy whilst the sponge was cooked through but had spread out into a flat covering.  It tasted OK but there was no way it was coming off the paper. What I ended up with was a flat mess.

I may have a go at this again in the future, but I think if I did I might try cooking the meringue a little first, before adding the sponge into the gaps in the piping.  This may make them crisper and mean that the slices may have half a chance of holding together and making themselves into a cake.I would also use my standard genoise recipe as it is less likely to leave three pints of mixture left over.  There really is only so much sponge mix you can deal with in one go.

Not one to give up, the book suggests that you use the left over sponge mix (there was tonnes of the stuff) to make ladies finger biscuits.  That sounded like a bit of a faff to me so I thought I would just bung the mixture into a swiss-roll tin and see what happened.  Well it has made a soft thin sponge which has made the house smell heavenly.  I thought rolling it was asking for trouble so took the easy route and cut it into three pieces and layered them with raspberry jam and fresh cream.

 Not quite a victory, but pretty tasty and at least means that the whole mixture didn't go to waste.

Love is all around (well nearly)

Preparations have been under way for a Valentine's Day bake sale at work on behalf of St Luke's Hospice in Sheffield.  Each year, the firm I work for chooses a charity to support and this year is St Luke's.  A strange coincidence as I did volunteer work there many year's ago,starting as a sixth form thing an then into my early twenties.

So, what to cook?  Having tried heart cookies last weekend, I went a step further and turned them into cookie pops.  using flood icing and taking the opportunity to practice some piping, this is what I came up with:

Valentines day also reminds me of the many single years I spent under the duvet each February 14th.  I know not everyone wants hearts and slush on this day so I thought I would come up with something a bit more light hearted for those singletons out there. What better than froggie biscuits?  The saying is, "Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your Prince".  Whatever shape, size, age or gender your prince may be, I made these as a sign that you should never give up hope of finding love - whatever form that love may take.

And finally, because tradition still has a part to play, a set of old fashioned, heart-laden chocolate cupcakes.  I got the Hummingbird Bakery cake Days cookbook for Christmas and this is the first recipe I have tried from it.  I was a bit sceptical as 80g of butter to 200g of sugar was very different to any other cake recipe I have come across but they turned out very well. Really light and much less faff than my previous go-to chocolate recipe from the Primrose Bakery cookbook.  I didn't abandon primrose completely though and used their buttercream recipe.

And finally, I have to show that it sometimes takes practice and a scatter-gun approach to getting a decent finish - piping hearts is not easy!

Self-Assembly Bread?

On a recent trip to Ikea for some new shelves (the cookbooks are now big enough to need a place of their own), I had a peek through the food shop at the end of the trip.  I wouldn't usually go for a bread mix as I am capable of making bread from scratch but I  couldn't resist this carton of bread mix.

Not only did it look as if it would make a lovely, dark, rye type bread, but who could pass up the opportunity try making a loaf of bread by just adding water and shaking it in the carton?  Self-assembly bread!

After a bit of shaking, the mix is poured into the bread tin and has the texture of a thick cake mixture.  I could see the oats and wheat flakes and it already smelled pretty good.  Forty-five minutes of rising and then into the oven for an hour.

And the verdict?  Well, it had a look and texture disturbingly similar to haggis but was really tasty.  It tasted a bit like an Irish soda bread with added oomph in the added oats and linseed.  Definitely not just a novelty. I would get another carton if I was at Ikea again but don't think I will be making the 30 mile trip just for this bread.  I also ended up feeling a bit of a cheat for using a mix so made some standard white to settle myself back down.

Biscuits Galore!

With my son off school with tendonitis, I have had an unexpected afternoonm of babysitting while he watches bad cartoons with is leg up.  As I can't bear to be in the same room as the cartoons, I banished myself to the kitchen with a view to making biscuits to cheer him up.  As I had a flamingo cookie cutter just begging for its virgin flight, I thought pink was the way to go.  I seem to be getting better at flood icing, with fewer wonky bits and was rather pleased with how these worked out.  Rather than tiny piping, I used an edible ink pen for the eyes and that seemed to do the job rather nicely and kept the glossy finish.

I was so pleased in fact, that I thought I would use some of the extra dough to make some little hearts as a practice for a work based Valentine bake sale.  Cute huh?

I thought I was pretty much iced out but there was still some dough nagging me from the fridge.  I have always been unable to resist a good nagging so eventually  gave in to the dough and made my first ever "cookie pops".  I have never really seen the point of cake pops.  Cooking a cake just to squidge it into a small ball seems a little like vandalism to me.  But a whole cookie on a stick, now that I can see the point of.  It was a bit of an operation making sure the stick was firmly embedded in the dough before cooking, but a gentle pressure on the top as I slid the stick in seemed to do the trick.  Not bad for a first attempt.

That was some gap!

Wow, can't quite believe that it is three months since I started my blog.  My baking enthusiasm has not waned.  There was a bit of a family crisis in October which has had some fairly long-term effects and although I still managed to find time to bake, I really couldn't fit in a blog too.  But, here I am, ready to have another shot.

Starting off gently, I have gone for bread today, based on a recipe from Paul Hollywood's "100 Great Breads".  A seedy loaf with sesame, caraway and black onion seeds on the outside and just a touch of fennel in the dough.  This is a loaf I have made a few times and love to take a couple of slices to work for breakfast in the morning.  Delicious with peanut butter and makes great toast!