Verdict: Hazelnut cake

This is, without doubt, one of the best cakes I have ever baked. At first, I thought it was a little bland, but the more I ate, the more and more I became aware of the wonderfully subtle flavour of hazelnuts. There is the slightest hint of lemon too from the lemon zest, but that is much more noticeable as a scent rather than a flavour. The cake was wonderfully moist, with a fantastic texture - soft but not soggy, but also with a wonderful bite from the nuts. The sweetness was perfectly balanced and I thought it was complemented really well by the mascarpone. Between the three of us, we finished over half of the cake. This was truly an unmitigated success!

Hazelnut cake

Valerie and James are coming over for dinner tonight, so decided it would be a good opportunity to bake a cake that I'd been wanting to try out for a while now. It's from The Silver Spoon, which is an absolutely gorgeous book - translated from Italian into English only in 2005, but originally printed back in 1950. It's wonderful just to flick through - I use it mainly to get ideas. Anyway, this is actually the first recipe from it that I've actually followed, despite having had the book for about two years now.

Hazelnut Cake
Ingredients

• 200g Hazelnuts
• 200g Self-raising flour
• 200g Caster sugar
• Zest from one lemon
  
• 100g Butter
• 2 Eggs
• 50ml Milk
• 2tbsp Icing sugar
• 250g Mascarpone
  

Method

1. Toast the hazelnuts (either in the oven or in a dry frying pan) and allow to cool.
2. Chop the hazelnuts finely (crushing them first in a pestly and mortar or just with the flat of a chef's knife saves a lot of time!).
3. Mix the chopped hazelnuts, flour, caster sugar and lemon zest in a bowl.
4. Melt the butter and add to the dry ingredients along with the eggs and milk.
5. Pour into a greased and floured (or lined) cake tin and bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 30 minutes.
6. Combine the icing sugar with the mascarpone. Serve the cake with the sweetened mascarpone.
   

The main reason I wanted to bake this cake (other than the fact that it sounds utterly delicious) is that the photo in the cookbook just looks unbelieveably gorgeous. Hopefully mine will turn out that well!

Verdict: Tarte tatin and chocolate bites

Oh my word! The tarte tatin was amazing! Absolutely gorgeous taste, just of apples, apples and more apples. The pastry was fine, though not spectacular in any way, but the filling was spot on - not sickly sweet. The fact that the apples didn't fit into a single layer in the frying pan meant that some of the apples were cooked to a wonderfully soft pulp while others were still soft but also had a little texture to them. A really, really delightful combination. This tart just screams for vanilla ice cream, but alas I didn't have any.

The chocolate bites were fine, though naturally they were nowhere near the tarte tatin for satisfaction. They were exactly as you'd expect chocolate wrapped in a sweet shortcrust pastry to be like, though the melted chocolate interior was actually really nice. They did work a heck of a lot better than I had expected - though I suspect that as soon as they cool down and the chocolate solidifies a lot of their appeal will be lost. But anyway, not a bad use for the leftover dough given that they took about 20 seconds to make!

Tarte tatin and chocolate bites

I decided that my flan ring hasn't seen nearly enough use since I got it. So what better thing to bake than an apple tart? This recipe is heavily based on the Tarte Tatin in Leith's Cookery Bible (which is excellent and highly recommended).

Tarte Tatin
Ingredients
For the pastry

• 230g Plain flour
• 130g Butter
• 75g Caster sugar
• Very cold water

For the topping

• 55g Butter
• 70g Dark soft brown sugar
• 750g Apples (I used Braeburn apples)
• Splash of lemon juice

Method

1. Sift the flour into a bowl and rub the butter in until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
2. Mix in the caster sugar.
3. Add just enough water to bind into a dough and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
4. In the mean time, make the topping. In a frying pan, melt the butter, add the sugar and remove from the heat.
5. Core the apples and slice into thick wedges.
6. Lay the apple slices over the butter/sugar mixture in the frying pan and heat over a moderate heat for ~20 minutes until the apples start to caramelise.
7. Roll out the dough to a thickness of 5-10mm and line a flan ring.
8. Pour out the apple mixture into the flan case including the remaining butter/sugar mixture.
9. Bake at 190C/Gas Mark 5 for 25-30 minutes.

The apples in the pan (start of step 6). As you can see, there was too much apple to make a single layer.The flan case ready for the gooey apple mixture (end of step 7).Ready for the oven (end of step 8)! I thought it looked so good, I wanted to eat it right there and then...
...but it's even better straight from the oven.

I had a bit of dough leftover that I didn't really know what to do with, so I thought I'd experiment. I just rolled it out and wrapped a few chocolate squares in it and stuck it in the oven below the tart to see what would happen.

Chocolate Bites
Ingredients

• Leftover pastry from tarte tatin
• Dark chocolate squares

Method

1. Roll out pastry and wrap chocolate squares individually.
2. Bake on shelf below tarte tatin.

Here are the uncooked chocolate bites. Not looking particularly promising at this stage.But they look rather a lot better coming out of the oven.And even better than that... break one open and here's what you get!

It's bread, but chocolatey

A while back, on a whim, I bought a copy of The Baker. I bought it almost entirely because it's absolutely filled with lovely photos of the baked delights contained within the covers. As a result, it's a gorgeous book and a joy just to flick through. I bought it at the same time that I'd bought the bread handbook, and I'd not baked anything from it yet. But when looking through it, one recipe in particular caught my eye: Chocolate Bread. And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like - bread, but chocolatey - so I had to give it a go. It just happened that Anita coming to visit presented the perfect opportunity!

Chocolate Bread
Ingredients

• 50g Butter
• 185g Dark chocolate
• 1 Egg
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
• 55g Caster sugar
• 375g Strong flour
• 30g Cocoa powder
• 1 sachet Fast-action powdered yeast
• Milk

Method

1. Melt the butter and half of the chocolate over a double boiler.
2. Remove from the heat and beat in the egg and vanilla extract.
3. Add to the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, yeast) and form a dough, adding enough milk to form a dough.
4. Knead for 10 minutes and return to a clean, oiled mixing bowl. Cover and leave to rise for around 1 1/2 hours until doubled in size.
5. Knock the dough back and press out into a rectangle roughly 1cm thick.
6. Chop the remaining chocolate and sprinkle over the dough.
7. Roll the dough into a log and transfer to a greased baking tray. Cover with a damp tea towel and allow to prove for 1 hour or until doubled in size.
8. Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 45-50 minutes.

Anita kneading the dough. Actually, Anita really did most of the work baking this...
The kneaded dough ready for rising (step 4).And straight from the oven (yes, it's somewhat burnt - that was my fault).Anita cutting the finished bread. Everyone should have a glamourous assistant!So what was it like? The crust was burnt, but that was stupidity on my part ("it looks really good, but let's give it 10 minutes more..."). We also didn't have any strong flour so we used plain flour which may have affected the texture somewhat and it seemed not really to rise when we left it, but actually, it still ended up pretty well! It was really was like chocolatey bread (duh!), but in a really good way. Not too sweet (actually, not very sweet at all), but definitely not savoury. The book suggested eating it with sweetened marscapone, which I think would work really well. But a definite success. I think I'll have to bake it again using strong flour and hopefully see what it's like when it's not burnt on the outside...

There's never a bad time for cookies

Jen and Julian have been both putting me up and putting up with me for the last month - for the second year running - so I thought the least I could do would be to cook them dinner as thanks. Dessert was another batch of cookies, and went down rather well! Alas though, I made one mistake - I managed to bring a bottle of wine that completely overshadowed the rest of the meal. It was rather good though...

Verdict: Peach, apple and grapefruit crumble

Pretty good really. I had been worried that it wouldn't be sweet enough, but the sweetness was pretty nicely balanced. The grapefruit worked really well and the peach was lovely - though I probably should have cut the apples a bit smaller; the apple peel was a little disconcerting. The overall flavour was excellent, I thought. The crumble top was a little bit mushy, but not too bad. Some seeds and oats would probably have helped that - and I probably shouldn't have made it quite so fine. But actually, it was quite a success!

Crumble!

I love crumble, absolutely love it, so I thought I'd bake one. I popped down to the Co-Op earlier to buy some fruit, so the choice was a bit limited, but hopefully it'll work. The peaches aren't really ripe, but I'm hoping it won't matter too much...

Peach, Apple and Grapefruit Crumble
Ingredients

• 2 Peaches
  
• 1 Red grapefruit
• 2 Apples
• ~1tbsp Cinnamon
• ~1tsp Nutmeg
• 60g Honey
  
• 170g Plain flour
• 110g Butter
  
• 55g Caster sugar

Method

1. Segment the grapefruit, slice the peaches and apples and line the base of an ovenproof dish with them.
2. Sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg.
3. Drizzle the honey over the fruit.
4. Rub the butter into the flour to the texture of coarse breadcrumbs.
5. Mix the sugar with the flour/butter and sprinkle over the fruit.
6. Bake a 200C/Gas Mark 6 for ~45-60mins until hot and golden.

As you can see, I'm not good at segmenting grapefruit!
Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo with just the fruit before I covered it with the honey, cinnamon and nutmeg, but the colours were amazing! Anyway, here's a photo just before the crumble top went on.
Ready for the oven.Fresh from the oven. Once again though, the photo really doesn't do it justice!

Chocolate rum truffles

I like truffles. In case you haven't noticed already. I think they make marvellous presents and no one in their right minds doesn't like them (unless of course they're allergic). And so I thought I'd make some for Anita, and as I'm visiting Lizzie next week, I'll bring her some too. Time to make a double-batch!

Chocolate Rum Truffles
Ingredients

• 400g Dark chocolate (50% cocoa)
• 300ml Double cream
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract (yes, that is a tablespoon)
• 1 1/2 tbsp Dark rum
• Cocoa powder
• Icing sugar
• Chopped hazelnuts
  
• 100g Very dark chocolate (85% cocoa)
• 100g Very dark chocolate with orange oil
  

Method

1. Scald the cream and pour over the 50% chocolate
2. Stir until the chocolate has all melted and the mixture is homogenous (microwave with care for 10 seconds at a time if necessary)
3. Add the vanilla and rum and mix well
4. Refrigerate to set
5. Form into truffles and return to fridge
6. Cover with cinnamon, icing sugar, chopped hazelnuts, melted high-cocoa chocolate or combinations of these
   
7. Refrigerate until set
   

Unsurprisingly, you can't really taste the vanilla or the rum in the ganache - I was being somewhat cautious with the quantities, so if you want to be able to taste them, you'll have to add more. As always, I am sure it took longer than last time to make them! Don't underestimate how much time truffles will suck up...

A birthday torte

It was David's birthday yesterday. Tonight is his birthday celebration meal thing and, as I have started doing of late, I thought I'd bake him something in lieu of a present. This is particularly good for Dave, as we have a long-standing agreement that for each birthday, we would look for a present for the other, but not buy anything if we couldn't find something suitable. But I think a baked dessert will fit the bill nicely!

I also found myself in Sainsbury's last night, where I found a nice, cheap, loose-bottomed flan ring - something that I've been after for some time now (I also found a sifting thing (not a sieve, but similar) for 15p, which I thought was worth a punt!), so I thought this would be a good opportunity to christen it. So, for this birthday, Dave is getting a birthday chocolate torte.

Birthday Chocolate Torte
Ingredients
For the shortcrust pastry:

• 170g plain flour
• 85g butter
• Very cold water

For the filling:

• 140g Plain chocolate
• 170g Butter
• 340g Caster sugar
• 95g Plain flour
• 6 Eggs

For the topping:

• 80g Plain chocolate (I would have made more topping, but I ran out of chocolate!)
• 10g Butter
• 1 1/2 tbsp Water

Method

1. Sift the flour for the pastry into a large bowl
2. Rub in the butter for the pastry to coarse breadcrumb-like texture
3. Add 2 tablespoons of very cold water. Mix to a firm dough, adding more water if necessary, but it should not be too damp
4. Wrap and chill in the fridge for 30 mins
5. Roll out and line a flan case. Trim off excess, and prick the base all over with a fork. Line the base with baking parchment and weigh down with baking beans and bake at 200C/Gas Mark 6 for 20 minutes. Remove the baking beans and parchment then bake for another 10 minutes until lightly golden
6. Allow to cool in the tin
7. Whisk the flour for the filling, sugar and eggs together in a large bowl
   
8. Melt the chocolate and butter for the filling and stir in
9. Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 30-40 minutes until the filling is just set
10. Allow to cool on a wire rack
11. Melt the chocolate, butter and water for the topping together in a bowl and mix well
12. Spread over the cooled torte
13. Refrigerate to set
    

Ready to roll (end of step 4)!The finished case ready for the oven (midway through step 5).The flan case fresh from the oven (end of step 5). Oops, I forgot that the pastry shrinks on baking - you're supposed to leave a little edge around the top of the flan ring when trimming. Oh well. I also think I was a little overly ambitious with how dry my pastry was, which is probably why I ended up with cracks in the sides. I'm going to line them (on the outside) with baking parchment and hope for the best...
Ready to go into the oven. I think it looks pretty darned good!
Quite a lot of leftover filling though. I could have halved the quantities and it would have been sufficient.
So I tipped a bit into a bowl and microwaved it for 2 minutes. Not really very appetising, I must say.It looks a bit better when spooned out though. I think the filling isn't quite right personally - based on this, I think not enough chocolate, too much sugar and definitely too much egg. But reasonable at least.The remainder of the filling got tipped into a sandwich tin and stuck at the bottom of the oven with the main torte.Here's the torte fresh from the oven (end of step 9).And here is the (almost) finished torte about to go into the fridge (end of step 12).

Verdict: ANZAC biscuits

These things are amazing! They're so simple, and they just taste so good. And in case you didn't believe me that the photo didn't do it justice, I went and grabbed my camera instead of using my phone to prove it!

ANZAC biscuits

If you've not tried ANZAC biscuits before, then you're missing out. I came across them about two years ago in shop-bought form and immediately decided that they're magical things. Time to try baking them myself! I've used this recipe from the BBC Good Food website, though the variations between different recipes is rather minor.

ANZAC Biscuits
Ingredients

• 85g Dessicated coconut
• 85g Oats
• 100g Plain flour
• 100g Caster sugar
• 100g Butter
• 1tbsp Golden syrup
• 1tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 1tbsp Boiling water
  

Method

1. Mix the coconut, oats, flour and sugar in a bowl.
2. Melt the butter and stir in the golden syrup.
3. Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in the boiling water and add to the butter.
4. Mix the bicarbonate of soda solution with the butter/golden syrup mix.
5. Pour into the dry ingredients and mix, adding water if necessary.
6. Spoon out onto a tray and bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 10-12 minutes until golden.
7. Allow to cool on a wire rack - or better yet, enjoy straight from the oven!
   

As you can see, my mixture is rather dry - I wasn't sure what the consistency was supposed to be like, so I thought I can always add more water later. It seems okay though. This is the first batch about to go into the oven - just under half of the mixture.And straight from the oven (The photo really doesn't do it justice!).

Verdict: Low calorie cake

Here's the finished cake.
As you can see, the top is rather dark - excessively so, really. What happened was I checked the cake with a skewer, and it came out gunky (that's a technical term, by the way). So I put the cake back in the oven for a bit. I checked it again, and once again, the skewer was gunky. Back it goes. Repeat a few more times, and then the top of the cake was so dark that I didn't dare bake it any longer. So I took it out and delivered it with a warning that it might not be baked all the way through and might need zapping in the microwave. It was only after I tried a slice myself that I realised that it was probably just the cooked apple that was getting on the skewer. Doh!Back to what really counts: the cake. It was actually rather good for a low-calorie cake. Because of the over-baking, the top was a bit hard and chewy, but not excessively so and I'd say not unpleasantly so either. The texture was reminiscent of Christmas cake, and quite flavourful too. The apple worked really well, as did the walnut, which provided some much-needed texture. Sweetness was about right I think, and the Splenda® worked really well. I think you could reasonably replace all of the honey with Splenda (with a bit of water to compensate for the lost moisture) and even possibly replace some of the raisins with it too if you wanted to eke out a few more calories. For an ultra-low calorie cake, losing the walnuts would be the next logical step, though I think the cake would lose quite a bit through this. Perhaps replacing the walnuts with sunflower seeds instead might be an option, but I'm not sure. But overall, I'd say it was quite a success!

Slimline baking

In an effort to avoid replicating what happened with Kate's birthday cake, I decided to bake the other birthday cake I owe now. My friend is on a very low calorie diet at the moment - aiming for a mere 1200kcal per day (For contrast, the UK Department of Health Estimated Average Requirements are 1940kcal for women and 2550kcal for men - and a large Big Mac meal from McDonald's (with Coke for the drink) weighs in at a whopping 1160kcal). I've been feeling guilty about completely messing this diet up every time we meet up (there's often alcohol involved followed by eating out somewhere), so for this birthday cake, I thought I'd try to make a sufficiently low-calorie cake that it would merely harm this diet rather than ploughing straight through it with a steamroller. There are shedloads of "low calorie" cake recipes out on the 'net, but if you actually total them up, you find that they are ludicrously calorific and often barely any different to their full-fat equivalents. So I set myself the task of baking a cake that would be 200-250kcal per portion, a portion probably being about 1/8th of the cake. So here we go!

Low Calorie Cake
Ingredients

• 100g Coarsely grated carrot (28kcal)
• 100g Raisins (291kcal)
• 175ml Water (0kcal)
• 100g Honey (304kcal)
• 20g Butter (150kcal)
• 170g Self-raising flour (584kcal)
• 50g Walnuts (345kcal)
• 100g Finely diced apple (52kcal)
• Zest of one orange (~0kcal)
  
• 13g ®* sugar substitute (52kcal)
• 1tsp Ground cinnamon (6kcal)
• 1/2 tsp Nutmeg (6kcal)
• 1tsp Vanilla extract (12kcal)
• 1 Egg (74kcal)

Energy content for the cake: 1904kcal** per cake, 238kcal per 1/8th cake.

Method

1. Put the carrot, raisins, water, honey and butter in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes and allow to cool.
2. Measure out all of the remaining ingredients into a bowl and fold in the carrot mixture.
3. Let down the mixture with a little water if necessary and pour into a cake tin.
4. Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 1 hour.
5. Allow to cool on a wire rack.
   

Here's the carrot sludge after simmering. I don't think it looks very promising......but not as worrying as the finished cake mixture ready for the oven. It looks a bit like pavement pizza to me )o:.
Well, we'll see how it is when it comes out of the oven!

*I hate artificial sweeteners, and you wouldn't catch me baking with them usually. However, I think without them, this challenge would be entirely impossible. I think that Splenda® is probably about the best sweetener readily available - certainly much better than aspartame or sorbitol, both of which have horrible tastes. Sucralose tastes much more like sugar in my opinion. The company says 100g of sugar is roughly equivalent to 12g Splenda, so this is what I used as a conversion.
**A quick note on precision: Yes, this is overly precise. Especially since most of the nutritional information is from various places on the internet found through Google and I have no idea as to the accuracy of any of this. I would imagine that 2 s.f. would be reasonable, taking inaccuracies in measuring out ingredients and inaccuracies in nutritional information into account, so 1900kcal and 240kcal would be more appropriate values. But hey, this is my blog and I'll be careless and lazy if I want to, dammit!

Verdict: Chocolate torte

In a word: Marvellous. I stand by that initial feeling I had when I had just read the recipe - just simply marvellous. It was crispy on the top, chewy in the middle and wonderfully stodgy at the bottom - a texture reminiscent of good brownies. Intensely chocolatey, though somewhat too sweet for my liking, but I seemed to be the only one who thought so. I think I might cut down the sugar a bit if I bake it again. We had it with custard, which complemented the torte well, though I think ice cream or even a splash of cream would work well too. Both Anita and Kim had a second helping, which is always a good sign, and David and Gina seemed to like it the next day too.

If you haven't been to look at Rouxbe yet, go and do so now. The recipes of theirs that I have tried so far have been truly excellent (the almond and crab apple jelly torte was based on the raspberry and almond torte from Rouxbe) and they have a lot more to offer than just recipes. I particularly liked the fact that Dawn from Rouxbe took the time to leave a lovely comment too!