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!