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 pestle 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...