80/20 cake

There's an idea (that's largely unsubstantiated, as far as I can tell) known as the Pareto Principle, that asserts that 80% of outcomes are caused by 20% of inputs. It's often abused (which is exactly what I'm about to do here) but for many of its applications, the core idea is that of diminishing returns - that the first 20% of effort/resources contribute 80% of the benefits.

"Why are you wittering on about management consulting crap? Isn't this a baking blog?" I hear you all cry! Well, I've had a jar of sour cherries at the back of my larder for quite a while (literally years... ooops!), and I decided that it's time to bake with them. I absolutely love Black Forest gateau, but by heck, making them is an enormous faff. So I figured I'd cut some corners and distract you with some ridiculous diversion in the hopes that you wouldn't notice. Did it work?

This time around, I used the same recipe as for an actual Black Forest gateau, but with half quantities for the filling (both the cherry gel and the cream). I also baked the cake in two sandwich tins (it took about 25 mins at ~175C) to save me the hassle of cutting the cake horizontally - another major faff avoided!

Last time around, I forgot to fold in the flour before the egg whites. This time around, I managed to follow the recipe more accurately, but the batter ends up very stiff before you fold in the egg whites. The batter's pretty lumpy, as you can see, but I decided to stop at this point to avoid knocking out too much of the air. Hopefully the cake itself won't be lumpy!

Ready for the oven - the quantities are just about perfect for two sandwich tins.

Straight from the oven, both cakes had enormous mounds in the centre and looked like they had far too much raising agent in them, but actually on cooling they ended up almost perfectly flat on the top. I'm pretty happy with how they look.

It came together quite nicely in the end! It turns out that there's far, far too much cherry gel - I think halving the quantities again would have been about right. But I don't think it looks half bad, especially given how many corners I'd cut. It's clearly not a Black Forest gateau, but it's certainly got hints of it.

It certainly took more than 20% of the effort of a full-blown, proper Black Forest gateau, and I don't know if it reached 80% of the quality, but it was certainly not bad at all! It was a teensy bit dry (in retrospect, I think I might have been a bit stingy with the cherry brandy), particularly at the outer perimeter of the cake - I hadn't thought about it before, but the extra layer of cream around the side of the Black Forest gateau is perfectly placed to help offset the area where the cake would be driest. The glace cherries were horrible - but that was all I had for decoration. But overall, not a bad return on effort!

A Christmas treat

We've had a fantastically gluttonous Christmas Day today, and what better way to round it off than with some cinnamon rolls. I got up at 8am to make the dough and start the process, and then we went on a ~40km bike ride before lunch, so I feel like we've at least earned the treat. I used the same recipe as usual - when they turn out this well, I'm not inclined to mess about with it!

A spoonful of honey

Rather a long time ago, I bought a cute silicone cake tin for a tear-and-share cake, and never actually got around to using it. So when I was thinking about baking this weekend, I figured it was as good a time as any to try it out at long last. I'm using this recipe, because it sounds lovely and the photos look gorgeous! Fingers crossed for my version turning out so well!

Honey Pull Apart Cake

Ingredients

For the cake

• 250g Butter
• 375g Caster sugar
• 4 Eggs
• 1 tbsp Vanilla extract
• 160ml Milk
• 315g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 60g Ground almonds

For the glaze

• 60g Butter
• 60g Soft brown sugar
• 185ml honey
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 2tbsp Water

Method

1. In a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.
2. Beat in eggs, vanilla extract and milk.
3. Add the flour, baking powder and salt.
4. Mix in the ground almonds.
5. Pour into pan and bake at 180C for ~35-40 mins.
6. Heat all the ingredients for the glaze in a small saucepan, stirring to dissolve and simmer for 1-2 minutes.
7. Turn out the cooked cake and cover with the glaze.

Ready for the oven.

Straight from the oven - perhaps a little darker than I was aiming for, but not too far off. It's rather domed though; I think there might have been a bit too much baking powder perhaps.

I mostly got it out of the tin intact - I should probably have let it cool rather a lot more than I did before trying to turn it out. I did burn my fingertips quite a lot, and I suspect the cake would have been more resilient after a bit more cooling. The bake is a bit uneven - the edges are really nicely crisped up (nothing's burnt, the really dark bits are just lovely and crunchy), but the inner sections are possibly a little paler than I'd have liked.

Looks pretty good with the glaze too!

Well, overall it's a moderate success. It's not perfect, but it didn't turn out badly either. I think it's a pretty cute result. The cake itself is a little boring - somewhat bland, although the honey glaze helps. It's quite an eggy, sugary batter, which gives it a lovely crunchy texture if baked enough; I think it would have been better with a little longer in the oven, but I'm pretty sure that my nerves wouldn't have held, given how dark the top got. Perhaps I should have covered it partway through and let it bake a bit longer to try to get the top (by which I mean the bottom of the cake when it's in the tin) a bit more done. There's definite potential here, but it does need a bit of tweaking still.

The tin is a bit of a bugger to clean though!

Edit: It turns out, this is one of the rare cakes that's actually better cold than still warm. I found that I liked it more and more, the more I ate of it, and by the time it was mostly finished, I had actually come around entirely - this is actually really quite a good cake! The enormous amounts of butter in the glaze help keep it super moist, even if it is quite dense, so it keeps surprisingly well as well.

Quick and easy

I stumbled upon this recipe from Serious Eats earlier, and it looked intriguing - by which I really mean that it appealed to my lazy side. Active time 10 minutes, total time 25 minutes, and to be entirely done in a single bowl? Sounds good to me! This is roughly 3/4 proportions, but with a bit more flour than suggested in the original recipe, because sticking accurately to their amounts gave me a batter rather than a dough.

Quick dark brown sugar biscuits

Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 210g Soft dark brown sugar
• 15g Caster sugar + 40g for coating
• 3g Salt
• 1 Egg
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 250g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/2tsp Bicarbonate of soda

Method

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in the sugars and salt.
3. Stir in the egg and vanilla.
4. Stir in the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda.
5. Divide dough into small golf-ball sized pieces.
6. Pour the sugar for coating into the now-empty bowl and roll the pieces of dough in it to coat.
7. Squash the dough balls to flatten slightly, and place on lined baking trays.
8. Bake at 180C for ~10mins.

Here they are ready for the oven. I know they're going to merge together - but I'm too lazy to spread them out over a third tray (after all, it's laziness that got me this far, so I might as well roll with it!).

Yup, they merged together. I don't care though - I think they actually form quite a pleasing geometric pattern like this. They look pretty good, don't they?

I added a little too much salt, so they came out ever so slightly salty - not awfully so though, and actually the slight saltiness adds a bit of interest. But the biscuits themselves are actually pretty good! In terms of tastiness-per-effort, these are definitely a big success!

An unexpectedly fast reprise

So having decided that I wasn't likely to be adding the vegan cookies I made last time to my regular rotation, I found myself baking some thank you cookies for a vegan friend, so had to make another batch! It was supposed to be the same recipe as last time except for reducing the amount of chocolate chips to 185g, but clearly I did something different, as the cookies came out much less flat and a bit more cookie-like. I think last time I must have used a bit less flour/more fat - but even though they look rather different this time around, the texture's surprisingly not that different.

Vegan cookies

To me, vegan baking is really, really hard - eggs are just a magic ingredient. They bind mixtures, give structure, stop things from drying out too much - they're by far the hardest thnig to substitute out successfully. It's the last week of the lockdown baking group that I've been (occasionally) participating in, and so I'm going to give it a shot - this is actually from last week's choice, but I meant to do it and didn't manage to get around to it, so there you go. It's this recipe, essentially unchanged.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• 125g Coconut oil
• 100g Caster sugar
• 150g Soft dark brown sugar
• 125g Coconut milk
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 275g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/4tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 200g Chocolate chips

Method

1. Mix the coconut oil and sugars together.
2. Beat in the coconut milk and vanilla.
3. Stir in the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda to form a thick batter.
4. Stir in the chocolate chips.
5. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
6. Form into plum sized balls and bake for 12-15 minutes at 180C.
7. Allow to cool slightly before removing to a wire rack.

Batch 1 fresh from the oven. The liners got a bit rucked up when I put the trays into the oven, so some of the cookies are a bit misshapen.

Batch 2 about to go in while batch 1 cools in the background

They're pretty good, though I think they're a little too sweet and have quite a bit too much chocolate in them - the balance just isn't quite right. But they're certainly nice, particularly the crisp, crunchy bits around the edge. Slightly overbaked is definitely better than slightly underbaked for these cookies in my opinion. Not bad overall, but I don't think I'm going to be adding them to my regular repertoire.

Advances in automation

As of this weekend, I now have a breadmaker (thanks Paul!). Obviously baking bread in a breadmaker doesn't count as "baking" for the purposes of going on the blog, but I tried it out for the first time today, and thought that at least was worth a note.

So how was it? Well I followed the basic white bread recipe in the manual and... well... it's not great. It's not terrible either, and certainly for the 5 minutes or so of active time that this required, it's really pretty darned good, but discounting the ease of it all and judging solely on the quality of the output, it's not great. It's a bit dense, a bit close and most definitely too sweet. The latter part should be easy enough to fix I'd imagine, but the texture seems a lot like an under developed gluten structure, which might mean that the dough doesn't get kneaded sufficiently in the machine. I'll definitely have to have a play around with it to see if I can do better, but it's also nice to see that I'm not that easily replaced by a machine :o).

Baking for fuel

Most of the time, I bake for fun. This time around, it's strictly utilitarian. I've got a ~120km ride planned for the weekend, so I need on-the-go fuel - time for flapjacks! It's basically the same as my old flapjack recipe, but using dried cranberries instead of almonds. Very quick, easy, and hopefully tasty!

Cranberry Flapjacks

Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 200g Oats and seeds*
• 115g Caster sugar
• 170g Dried cranberries

Method

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in all the other ingredients.
3. Press into a lined tin and bake at 180C for 20 minutes.
4. Leave to cool slightly before removing from tin.

*I could have sworn we had porridge oats in stock. All I could find was our homemade muesli, which happily is looking rather plain right now - oats with a small amount of sunflower seeds mixed in . It'll do!

Terrible photo, but fresh from the oven, it does look rather good!

Still not a great photo. Also I really can't cut things into even pieces.

There we go! A decent picture at last!

A Danish dream

It's Danish week! I'd never heard of this cake before, but it looks both easy and tasty, so definitely worth a try! It's this recipe.

Danish Dream Cake (Drømmekage)

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 3 Eggs
• 250g Caster sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 50g Butter
• 200ml Milk
• 250g Plain flour
• 2tsp Baking powder

For the topping:

• 125g Butter
• 50ml Milk
• 160g Dark soft brown sugar
• 40g Caster sugar*
• 100g Dessicated coconut

Method

1. Whisk the eggs, caster sugar and vanilla extract until light and fluffy.
2. Melt the butter (for the cake).
3. Stir in the melted butter and milk (for the cake).
4. Stir in the flour and baking powder until smooth.
5. Pour into a lined tin and bake at 200C for ~25 mins.
6. Heat the butter, milk and sugar for the topping in a saucepan and simmer for ~1 min.
7. Stir in the dessicated coconut.
8. Spread the topping over the cake and bake for a further 10 mins.
9. Remove to a wire rack to cool.

*Bet you can't guess what happened here...

Something tells me that I might have added a bit too much baking powder...

Sometimes when a cake has an uneven top, you can level it off using the topping. This was definitely not one of those times!

Slight spillage in the oven. I'm very glad that I had the oven liner in there!

My word though, look at that topping! It reminds me a lot of ANZAC biscuits (sweet, buttery and coconutty - I guess it makes sense). It smells incredible!

Nom I say!

I was super impressed by this cake. Reading the recipe, I thought that the cake part sounded really boring, and I assumed that the topping would be the only interesting part. In reality the topping is lovely, but far too sweet on its own, and is nicely offset by the cake. You wouldn't want a more interesting cake as the base. It's a really nicely balanced recipe!

Belated brownies

Last week was chocolate week in the lockdown baking group that I'm in (hence the truffles). I had originally intended to make brownies last weekend as well - but thought better of it after making such an absurd quantity of truffles. But I had bought ingredients for brownies, and also been subjected to photo after photo of frankly obscenely gorgeous looking brownies from the others in the group. So even though it's late (we're now at the end of pastry week, which I have missed entirely...), I'm bloody well baking brownies! The recipe is from Waitrose and is essentially unchanged apart from using dark soft brown sugar instead of muscavado.

Chocolate Pecan Brownies

Ingredients

• 225g Butter
• 350g Dark chocolate
• 4 Eggs
• 350g Dark soft brown sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 200g Pecans
• 225g Plain flour

Method

1. Melt butter and chocolate together.
2. Whisk eggs, sugar and vanilla in a stand mixer until pale and fluffy.
3. Stir butter/chocolate into egg mixture.
4. Coarsely chop pecans.
5. Fold pecans and flour into mixture.
6. Pour into a lined tin and bake at 180C for ~30 mins.
7. Leave to cool (a bit!) before cutting.

Super easy with a stand mixer! I started whisking by hand initially, but decided that I was far too lazy for that. Pretty, no?

It's a little under baked (yes, I know brownies are supposed to be slightly under done, but I think it's a little too under), but my word, they're tasty.

I've been wanting to find a "go to" brownie recipe for some time - I think this one might be it!

Marzipan truffles

I like marzipan. I like truffles. Why not marzipan truffles?

Marzipan Truffles

Ingredients

For the filling

• 300ml Double cream
• 550g Dark chocolate chips
• 450g Marzipan

For the coating

• 400g Dark chocolate chips
• Chopped almonds
• 30g Icing sugar
• 15g Cocoa powder

Method

1. Make a ganache by scalding the cream and pour over the chocolate for the filling, and stir to melt the chocolate.
2. Look on in minor horror as the realisation of quite how much ganache you've just made hits you.
3. Refrigerate ganache overnight to set.
4. Shape the ganache into small marble-sized balls.
5. Roll out the marzipan and wrap around the ganache balls until it runs out.
6. Melt the chocolate and dip the truffles.
7. Roll them in the chopped almonds and set on a sheet of baking parchment.
8. When bored of dipping truffles, mix the icing sugar and cocoa powder, and roll the remaining truffles in the powder.
9. Refrigerate to set.

After one and a half hours of quenelling(ish), here are the truffle cores. Mistakes were definitely made when choosing quantities. I'm pretty sure that I've got some sort of chocolate-related muscle strain right now.

Done with marzipan wrapping.

The marzipan guys turned out nice!

Yup, mistakes were definitely made. The total ended up being 1.6kg!

Lockdown loaf take two

Sainsbury's finally had more bread flour in stock the last time I went shopping, so I can take advantage of the bank holiday and bake some more bread! I'm keeping it pretty simple still, but I'm going to try adding one extra step that I've been meaning to experiment with for a while, but never quite got around to - a short autolyse before forming the complete dough. We'll see how this turns out!

Lockdown Loaf Take Two
Ingredients
100g Aage
750g Strong white flour
400g Water
13g Salt

Method

1. Mix Aage, 100ml flour and water together, cover and leave in a warm place for ~3 hours. (12pm)
2. Mix 500g of the flour with 300ml water in a separate bowl, mix, cover and leave for a further two and a half hours. (3pm)
3. Combine the mixtures from steps 1 and 2 with the salt and knead with the dough hook attachment of a stand mixer for ~10 minutes (I'm feeling lazy, okay?). (5:30pm)
4. Cover and leave to rise for ~four and a half hours.
5. Realise that your dough is closer to liquid than solid and panic a bit. Add a further 150g flour and knead - first in the stand mixer, then by hand. (10pm)
6. Cover and place in fridge to prove overnight.
7. Preheat oven to max with Dutch oven inside. (9am)
8. Pour* dough out onto baking parchment and transfer to Dutch oven.
9. Bake at 220C for 20 minutes.
10. Uncover and bake at 180C for a further 30 minutes.

*Yes, "pour" - the dough was still halfway between solid and liquid at this point, and there was clearly no possibility of trying to shape it in any meaningful way...

So it was clear pretty early on that this one went a bit awry! The autolyse clearly did something, but in doing so, the dough just generally felt weird to me. I suspect that what happened was that the gluten developed much faster than I expected, and I accidentally made a very wet dough that didn't feel that wet - though I'm not sure that the measurements bear that theory out. In essence, I don't know exactly what happened this time around, but I did end up with a shear-thickening dough that would flow like a liquid, but stiffened up on kneading.

But look at the result! Don't try to tell me that that's not a beautiful loaf!

And how is it on the inside, I hear you ask. Well, not my best ever loaf, but not bad overall! I need to learn to keep my nerve and give it longer in the oven - it's a bit doughy and stodgy in the middle still, which I'm pretty sure another 15 minutes would have sorted out. But the crust has a lovely texture, the rise is actually not bad and the texture is lovely and elastic. A little more drying out and this would have been really lovely. As it is, it's just really good!

Lockdown loaf

Well, like everyone else, we're in lockdown, and trying to minimise shopping trips. What better excuse to bake some bread (as if an excuse were ever needed). Keeping it super simple this time around - it's a 50/50 wholemeal and white flour mix, and no frills. But I'm going for an overnight proof, and I guess we'll see how it turns out!

Lockdown Loaf
Ingredients

• 160g Aage
• 250g Strong wholemeal flour
• 250g Strong white flour
• 320g Water
• 10g Salt

Method

1. Mix all ingredients together and form dough.
2. Knead until bored.
3. Cover and leave to rise for ~2hrs.
4. Knead and shape into loaf.
5. Place on parchment paper and leave to proof overnight.
6. Preheat oven to 220C with Dutch oven inside.
7. Place dough in Dutch oven and lightly sprinkle with water.
8. Bake at 220C for 20mins.
9. Remove lid of Dutch oven and turn oven down to 200C for a further ~25mins.

Here's the dough post-proofing while I'm preheating the oven. I'm guessing by the way that it's flattened out entirely that I probably could have done with a bit more kneading. There are also some weird lumps in the surface that I'm guessing means that I've got some local, big air bubbles. Clearly my kneading and rising technique needs some work. It's also possible that leaving it to prove unsupported on a flat surface (I left it on the inside of the (cold) Dutch oven) might have been a bad idea - I guess this is why you're supposed to use proofing baskets...

Not a bad rise, all things considered. I had completely forgot to score the bread before chucking it into the oven, so perhaps it could have risen a little bit more - though given the general liquidness and lack of structure to the dough, I'm not sure how of a difference this would actually have made. The crust is a bit darker than I'd have liked, but it's not actually burnt at all, and it's got quite a pleasing colour to it. I suspect it might be a bit hard and a bit thick, but I've got to say, it's still quite an attractive looking loaf!

First, the bad: as expected, it's a flawed loaf - it's got the huge balloon of air at the top, which I suspect might be over-proofing at play. The thin skin left at the very top explains why it went so dark so quickly, and that in turn led me to underbake it - the inside is a bit overly doughy and excessively moist, and the crust could, if anything, do with being slightly thicker. But actually, despite the flaws, this loaf is quite wonderful still! The flavour is beautiful - complex and sour enough that you don't feel cheated of it being a sourdough, but not overpoweringly so. The crust has a lovely snap in the bits where it was sufficiently cooked - on the very thin top and the base (a side effect of the Dutch oven is that the bottom crust is thickened). All in all, it's a joy to eat, even if the flaws are glaringly obvious!