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.