An Engineer's Cookbook

Wasabi and apple ganache

2012-02-14T15:53:00.001Z

A while ago, I was given a copy of Adventures With Chocolate by Paul Young. I hadn't got around to trying any of its recipes until now, but they all look absolutely amazing! One in particular caught my eye though, and today seemed like a good opportunity to try it!

Wasabi and Green Apple Ganache
Ingredients

15g Wasabi paste
200g Caster sugar
250ml Apple juice
200g Dark chocolate

Method

Put the wasabi, sugar and apple juice in a pan and bring to a simmer.
Simmer for 5 minutes.
Pour over the chocolate and stir until smooth.
Pour into ramekins and refrigerate to set.

Annoyingly, I was a bit careless with it and let the chocolate seize. Ah well, I'm sure it'll be okay - just maybe not as smooth as it could be! We shall see...

Verdict: Spelt sourdough

2012-02-05T20:19:00.001Z

Well, it's good, but not altogether very different from a normal white loaf baked with regular wheat flour. In fact, there's very little difference that I could discern - it's maybe very slightly chewier, but that's it really. Nice, but nothing special.

Verdict: Lemon meringue cupcakes

2012-02-05T15:36:00.002Z

Oooh, these are really nice. The batter was indeed a little too thick, so the cupcakes themselves could have been a little softer. But the taste was just wonderfully delicate and perfectly balanced. The lemon curd was tart, but not too sour; the cake was sweet but not overpoweringly so and the meringue was just a wonderful counterpoint to everything else. This is a really nice recipe - though I'm not certain it's entirely worth the faff, it's definitely a good cupcake!

It's a baking day!

2012-02-05T14:07:00.002Z

I had been intending to go into the lab today and get a load of work done, but seeing as it's horribly snowy and icy outside, I decided that it'd be better spent as a baking day instead. So while the spelt bread's rising, I thought I'd make cupcakes. Usually, when I see a recipe I tweak it slightly to my liking - this time around though, the only thing I've changed is that I substituted 1tsp of vanilla extract for the vanilla pod, because I'm too cheap to use real vanilla pods! The recipe I used is this one, from a Channel 4 programme.

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes
Ingredients
For the lemon curd

90g Caster sugar
Juice of 1 lemon
55g Butter
1 Egg

For the cake

100g Butter
100g Caster sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract
2 Eggs
100g Plain flour
1/2tsp Baking powder
Zest of 1 lemon

For the Italian meringue

50ml Water
100ml Caster sugar
2 Egg whites

Method

Whisk all of the ingredients for the lemon curd together over a double boiler and cook over steadily simmering water for ~10mins, whisking continuously, until the mixture thickens to a custard-like consistency.
Remove from heat and set aside to cool.
Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla for the cake together until light and fluffy.
Beat in eggs one at a time.
Fold in the flour and lemon zest.
Spoon a few teaspoons of the cake batter into cupcake cases. Add one teaspoon of lemon curd, then cover with more cake batter.
Bake at 180C for 15-20 mins until golden brown and the cupcake centre springs back after being lightly pressed.
Remove to a wire rack to cool.
Dissolve the caster sugar in the water over a gentle heat to form a syrup.
Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks.
Gradually pour the sugar syrup into the egg whites while whisking continuously, and whisk until thick and glossy.
Pipe the meringue over the top of the cupcakes and gently toast with a blow torch.

Here's the lemon curd at the end of step 1.Ready for the oven. The batter feels a little thick.Straight out of the oven - they're looking pretty good!Check out my meringue! How amazing does that look?!I can't pipe very well :o(.But they still look pretty gorgeous when toasted, no?

An ancient loaf

2012-02-05T11:45:00.002Z

I've been curious about using different types of flour for quite a while now. Recently, I finally went and got myself some spelt flour, so I thought I'd see what baking with spelt was like. Spelt is a particular sort of wheat that was around back in Roman times and still survives to this day. It's the same recipe as my usual sourdough (500g flour, 200ml water, 13g salt, half of Aage), but made with (white) spelt flour. I didn't use the sponge method, so it's all just thrown together in one go.

The spelt flour is really fine - about halfway between regular wheat flour and cornflour. It has a slight tendancy to clump, but it forms such a silky dough! It's been the most satisfying dough to knead that I've found so far (although that might partly be because I used warm water and it's a ridiculously cold day!), and the gluten seems to develop incredibly easily compared with normal bread flour. Here's the dough at the end of the knead, about to start the first rise. It's rather a wet, soft dough as you can see, but remarkably, it's not actually all that sticky either.

Verdict: Olive sourdough

2012-01-08T18:21:00.003Z

It's good. Not world beating, but a good loaf. Lovely and moist with a really excellent crust - the olives give it some flavour, but really it's just a loaf of (good) white bread with bits of olives throughout. It is good, but I think I'd rather have a plain wholemeal sourdough to be honest!

Improving white sourdough

2012-01-08T12:35:00.004Z

I just realised that I never put a verdict on the white sourdough loaf up. Well... it was dull. It just didn't have anywhere near the same depth of flavour that the wholemeal loaves do; actually, it barely had any flavour at all. But it did have a lovely texture - rather a lot like ciabatta. And so, I thought I'd try baking another small white loaf and throwing chopped olives through it. I just kneaded in about 50g of drained olives after the (short) first rise, immediately before the prove - I just hope that the oil from the olives doesn't make the bread too soft when it's baked! Alas, as ever, I ran out of white flour (a problem compounded by my adding too much water), so it's not a completely white sourdough loaf, but it's probably about 80% white flour and 20% wholemeal..

How beautiful does this one look?!

A white Christmas...

2011-12-28T16:11:00.005Z

Well, it may not have snowed, but we can still have a white Christmas. Time for the first try baking a white sourdough loaf. I'm keeping the exact same recipe as before, but just substituting white strong flour for wholemeal strong flour. Aage has been fed solely on wholemeal flour though, so there are still flecks of wholemeal throughout the dough.

The round one was shaped and kneaded by me; the other one by my brother. They're both look really quite tasty!

Aage comes home!

2011-12-20T21:04:00.001Z

I'm home for the break now, and Aage came with me! He needed feeding, and my mum's been pretty keen to bake a sourdough loaf, so we're doing another standard sourdough loaf. The sponge is made now and we'll turn it into a dough tomorrow morning :o).

C is for cookie...

2011-12-04T20:32:00.002Z

(...that's good enough for me). I made Trish a batch of cookies. The same basic recipe as usual, but half were chocolate and almond cookies and half were bacon cookies. Also as seems to be normal now, I made a hash of measuring out the ingredients. This time, they ended up rather a lot cakier than usual. Still pretty tasty though :o).

I was right

2011-12-04T01:44:00.003Z

Yup, all good :o). I haven't actually tasted it yet, but it certainly looks good! The biggest issue with having such a moist dough so far is how much harder it is to slash the top of it before baking. These won't have as nice a crust as the first loaf did as a result.

An unintentionally moist sourdough

2011-12-04T01:05:00.003Z

It happened again... I ran out of flour. But I decided that there was just enough to make a workably moist dough, so all was well. I think. We'll see when it finishes baking! Anyway, here's the recipe:

An Unintentionally Moist Sourdough
Ingredients
For the sponge

200g Strong wholemeal flour
250ml Water
Decent chunk of sourdough starter

For the dough

10g Salt
180g Strong wholemeal flour

Method

Mix together the ingredients for the sponge, put in a bag and leave overnight.
Add the salt and the rest of the flour.
Knead until smooth.
Make a round, put in bag and let rise for about an hour.
Tip out, form into a round and leave to rise for another hour.
Repeat step 5.
Deflate, divide into two portions, shape into loaves, put in a bag and leave to prove (I ended up going out and left it for about 8 hours!)
Bake at the highest possible oven temperature for ~10 minutes then turn down to ~200C for a further 30 minutes.

Here are the loaves before proving.What they look like ready for the oven.

Verdict: My first sourdough loaf

2011-11-30T22:53:00.003Z

I caved. I couldn't stand the temptation any more. So what's the verdict? In a word: Gorgeous! It was almost perfect. It had that lovely sourdough acidity--not as punchy as some sourdoughs that I've had before, but unmistakeable, gentle and still strong enough to be noticeable. And the crust was perfect - softish on the bottom, medium on the sides and perfectly crunchy on the top - crunchy but not hard. And the soft inside was chewy and satisfying. The only thing I would have changed about it would have been to let it prove for a bit longer. Just the tiniest hint more air on the inside would have taken it from a really excellent loaf to the-best-loaf-ever. Really, I think this is the best loaf of bread I've ever baked!

Finishing off the loaf

2011-11-30T22:09:00.004Z

I'd left it for a few hours and decided that I didn't want to go to bed too late, so it's not quite doubled in size, but it's definitely risen at least. Let's get this thing into the oven!Out of the oven, it's looking really rather good! I'm not 100% certain it's baked for long enough, but it's been in the oven for over an hour now, and I'm getting impatient. I'm really looking forward to trying it, but I'm also resisting the urge to dive straight in - letting it cool a bit before cutting it open will help stop it going quite so dry quite so quickly. It smells wonderful!

Progress!

2011-11-30T17:23:00.003Z

What a difference six hours makes! Here's the dough when I got back from the lab.I'm a bit concerned about the yeast running out of food, so I decided to skip straight to step 7 and deflated it and formed it into a round. It's also on a plate to make it easier to judge how much it's risen and to transfer on to a baking tray.

A dough comes together

2011-11-30T10:42:00.004Z

Here we are, at the end of step 4. I'm not entirely certain that I've kneaded it quite enough, but we'll see!Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I certainly don't want my housemates to throw my bread away by accident!I'm going to head into the lab for a bit now, so my bread will have rather a lot longer than an hour to rise. But I can't see that being a problem :o).

Meet Aage!

2011-11-29T18:51:00.005Z

I'd like to introduce you all to my pet yeast, Aage. Why Aage? Well, he's named after Aage Bohr, a Nobel prize-winning physicist and the son of Niels Bohr. Aage and Niels went by the names Jim and Nicholas Baker when they were working on the Manhattan project in the 1940s, so it just kinda seemed quite appropriate. Plus, I think Aage's quite a cool name!Aage is settling in to his new home (although he's just moved from a kitchen cupboard to the fridge, so hopefully he'll be happy there too). I just fed him, so it's time to bake my first ever sourdough loaf (or make a start, at least).

My First Sourdough Loaf
Ingredients
For the sponge

250g Strong wholemeal flour
300ml Water
The discarded half of Aage*

For the dough

300g Flour
13g Salt

Method

Mix the ingredients for the sponge together and put into a clean black bin bag, tucking the end under the bowl.
Leave overnight.
Add the remaining ingredients and form into a dough.
Knead until smooth and springy.
Form into a round, place back into the bowl and bag and leave to rise for an hour.
Tip out, form into a round again and leave to rise again.
Deflate the dough and shape into a loaf.
Place back in the bag and leave to prove until doubled in size.
Bake at the hottest oven possible for 10mins and then turn down to 180C/Gas Mark 4 until done; roughly a further 30-40minutes.

*If you're a bit confused by this, when you feed the sourdough starter, you throw half of it away (or bake with it) and replace the amount you threw away with flour and water. So this probably amounts to about 200-250ml of my sourdough starter.

Here's the sponge!

Another sourdough update

2011-11-25T17:48:00.004Z

Woo hoo! I've successfully caught and tamed some yeast - Look at the frothing!I've now dumped half of the starter out and replaced it with more flour and water, so it's getting close to when I can bake my first loaf with my new pet yeast. I might even be able to bake it as soon as this weekend...

The latest advances in sourdough technology

2011-11-24T14:45:00.002Z

One day later, we've got the first signs of fermentation! It's a little hard to see from the photo, but there are some tiny bubbles rising to the surface, and there's the tiniest hint of a yeasty smell. Okay, it's not the massive frothing and pungent smell of bread dough that I'd been hoping for, but it's fermentation nonetheless.Time for its first feeding then! I think I used too much water initially, so I've added more flour than water to thicken the batter up a bit. Back into the airing cupboard it goes!

Adventures in sourdough

2011-11-23T11:36:00.005Z

I love sourdough breads. I love the slight tartness of the taste, that slightly rustic texture and I absolutely adore the concept of harvesting wild yeast. The very idea makes me think of the baker as a hunter - coming back successful from the hunt and feeding his family on the spoils. Okay, so the organisms you hunt are single-celled and rather tiny, but it's still a pretty cool image.

The problem with sourdough is keeping your starter going. It had always been that much too difficult for me to do - living in college, someone was bound to throw my starter away, thinking it was milk that had gone off or something. But now I'm in a flat with two others who like to bake, so I think they might just be willing to put up with my funky-looking sourdough starter in the fridge. The time for talk has passed - it's time to get hunting!

So here's step one of my first ever sourdough loaf. Let's go hunt and tame some yeast! I'm basically following the bread bible's procedure for sourdough.

Sourdough Starter
Ingredients

Flour
Water

Method

Whisk together ~150g flour and ~250ml water in a lidded container, incorporating as much air as possible.
Put a lid on and leave in a warm place until signs of fermentation are seen.
Whisk in another ~150g flour and ~250ml water and leave for another day.
Tip out half of the starter and replace with ~150g flour and ~250ml water.
Leave in a cool room.

Sounds simple, right? Well, hopefully it should be! I'm using M&S strong wholemeal flour for mine, and I've only got as far as step 1. But here are some photos anyway! This is how much flour I used (it's a 1 litre container).
With this much water.And that makes this much batter! It's not very exciting yet...

Verdict: Rhubarb and apple crumble

2011-11-11T23:27:00.004Z

Pretty darned good! It was about the best crumble topping I've ever managed (still slightly over-mixed I think, but not bad), and the balance of flavours was absolutely spot on. It could have done with cooking for a bit longer I think; the filling was very watery and the apples a little bit too firm, but the rhubarb went beautifully soft, which is the main thing in my opinion. It tasted wonderful though!

RhubarbRhubarbRhubarb!

2011-11-11T16:44:00.013Z

I like rhubarb :o). I'm having Jen and Julian over for dinner tonight to thank them for putting me up between tenancies for yet another year, and I was wondering what to do for dessert. And then I spotted rhubarb on the shelf when I went shopping for ingredients, so I think it's time to do another crumble!

Rhubarb and Apple Crumble
Ingredients
For the filling

300g Rhubarb
300g Apples
125g Caster sugar
~1tsp Ground cinnamon
~1tsp Ground ginger
~1/2 tsp Ground nutmeg
A decent slug of cherry brandy

For the topping

120g Butter
200g Plain flour
25g Caster sugar

Method

Chop the rhubarb into ~20mm chunks.
Core and dice the apples.
Grease an ovenproof dish and pour the rhubarb and apple chunks into it.
Sprinkle the sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cherry brandy over the fruit.
Rub the butter and flour together until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
Heap the topping over the fruit layer.
Sprinkle the sugar over the top.
Bake at 180C for ~45-60 mins until golden.

Okay, it's just fruit in a bowl, but don't the colours look amazing?!I think I've made the same mistake I always make with crumbles - mixing the flour and butter together too thoroughly. We shall see...Looks good!

It's like Fight Club, only with pastry instead of blood and sugar instead of violence

2011-11-07T16:29:00.005Z

There's a small group of us who normally dine together in the Balliol SCR on a Monday evening. A few weeks ago, Bob and I had rather a nice idea; an SCR baking club. I have no idea if it'll actually get off the ground, but I thought that even if it doesn't, it'd be quite a nice one-off. I'm baking another Upside-down Tarte Tatin. It's almost exactly the same recipe as last time around. This time, I'm using Royal Gala apples instead of Braeburns, because they were on special offer, and I didn't have any lemon juice, so I threw in a little splash of cider vinegar to give it the acidity. I also chucked in a bit of cinnamon, because I'm firmly of the opinion that you can't go wrong with apples and cinnamon!

Looks pretty gorgeous, doesn't it?

More bacon!

2011-10-15T17:48:00.002+01:00

Trish wouldn't believe me either, so I had to bake another batch of bacon cookies. Same recipe as last time, although I made a little bit of a hash of it this time around. Still tasty though!

Where's the second verdict, dammit?

2011-09-28T18:20:00.002+01:00

Well, I told you to stay tuned... Unfortunately, there was a slight fridge-related mishap. A mysterious (read: we never worked out where it came from) leak happened in the fridge, soaking the galette. Seeing as we had no idea what the leak was, I didn't exactly want to eat it. Alas, the rest of the galette went in the bin; which was a real pity, because it was pretty darned good. Not quite perfect, but really rather good. Oh well, I'll have to try again sometime!

Verdict part 1: Galette des rois

2011-09-25T20:15:00.003+01:00

While it's still warm straight from the oven, here are my thoughts. As expected, the puff pastry didn't quite puff up fully - but it definitely started to puff up. Better than I'd expected, and not too far off what I remember the pastry on the ones in bakeries in Paris being like. The frangipane doesn't seem sweet enough to me; I expect frangipane to be ludicrously sweet, like marzipan levels of sweetness, but this is much tamer in that respect. That might not be a bad thing, depending on your personal preference though. It's gorgeously rich, but there's something just not quite right about it. I can't quite put my finger on it and it's so close to the galettes I've had in France, but just not quite there. I think it'll be even better cold, so stay tuned for part 2 once it's cooled down. It's pretty darned good as it is though!

The cake of kings

2011-09-25T15:36:00.010+01:00

I found myself rather unexpectedly free this weekend, so I thought I'd seize the opportunity to bake something! I settled on trying to bake a Galette des Rois; it's one of my favourite pastries, a frangipane-filled, puff pastry concoction. And naturally, I'm not wussing out and using pre-made pastry! The pastry recipe is taken from the Good Book (that's Leith's Cookery Bible, for any of you non-believers who might not be familiar with the book that guides us). The frangipane filling and the rest of the recipe is basically cribbed from this one.

Galette des Rois
Ingredients
For the pastry

200g Plain flour
170g Butter
~125ml Cold water

For the filling

100g Butter
100g Caster sugar
100g Ground almonds
3 Eggs
1tbsp Dark rum
1 Egg yolk
1tbsp Milk

Method
Make the pastry

Rub 30g of butter into the plain flour.
Stir in enough cold water with a knife to form a dough.
Knead until just smooth.
Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for ~30 mins.
Roll the dough into a rectangle ~30x10cm.
Tap the remaining 140g butter into a rectangle ~9x8cm and place in the centre of the dough.
Fold the dough over on both sides to enclose the butter, pressing the sides to seal it.
Turn the dough through 90 degrees and roll out quickly and lightly until it is three times longer than it is wide.
Fold it into thirds and rotate again.
Roll out and fold into thirds again.
Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for ~30 mins.
Repeat the rolling and folding (2 rolls and 2 folds), then wrap and refrigerate for ~30 mins.
Repeat step 12 (totalling three sets of two turns).
Refrigerate.

Make the filling

Cream the butter, almonds and sugar together.
Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Mix in the rum.

Assemble the pastry

Divide the pastry into two equal parts.
Roll each part into a circle ~25cm in diameter.
Place one circle on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.
Spoon the almond cream onto the pastry circle, leaving ~5cm around the outer edge uncovered.
Beat the egg yolk and milk together to make an egg wash. Brush the edge of the circle with the egg wash.
Place the other pastry circle on top and seal firmly around the edge.
Refrigerate for 1 hour.
Brush with the egg wash.
Score a pattern in the top with the tip of a sharp, non-serrated knife.
Bake at 180C for ~40 mins until golden.

You're supposed also to brush it with a sugar syrup while it's still hot from the oven, but I can't be bothered!

Here's the dough after kneading (end of step 3). Looks like dough (so far, so good!).The frangipane cream reading for filling.The assembled galette - I accidentally brushed the top with the egg wash before fridging it. In hindsight, maybe it would have been better to do this just before it went into the oven, but I don't think it'd make too much difference. I was a bit crap at rolling out the puff pastry early on and kept tearing the dough, so I'm not sure how well it'll puff up in the oven. We'll find out!Here's what it looks like straight out of the oven. The top seems to have shifted in the oven, but otherwise it looks pretty good!

Truffles again...

2011-09-05T22:07:00.003+01:00

I've been saying that I'd make Trisha some truffles for a while now. I'm seeing her tomorrow evening, so it seemed like as good as time as any! It's the same procedure as usual - this time, the ingredients list is 200g dark chocolate (48% cocoa), 150ml double cream and 1tsp vanilla extract, plus 100g extra dark chocolate (85% cocoa) for the coating.

Verdict: Hefezopf/Butterknoten

2011-06-17T23:01:00.002+01:00

Oh. My. Word. Wonderful. No two ways about it, this is delightful. If you like slightly sweet breads (as I very much do), this is an absolute treat - not quite the Butterknoten I remember, but very similar and just as lovely. But just don't do that horrible thing that most people seem to do to plaited breads and cut it into slices - just grab a chunk and rip it off! Much more satisfying! It's really, really good just as is (particularly while still warm from the oven!), but it'd make a lovely breakfast food with jam/marmalade/Nutella.

I'm rather pleased with this one!

Butterknoten!

2011-06-17T19:36:00.010+01:00

A few years ago when I was in Switzerland, I came across the most amazing bread in the Co-op. It was called Butterknoten (literally "butter knot"), was slightly sweet and unbelievably buttery. For the last few years, I've been looking, on and off, for a recipe for it, to no avail. But the other week, during my most recent search for one, I discovered that it's not usually called Butterknoten. There's a very similar, common Swiss bread called Zopf (literally "braid"), which looks similar but is totally savoury, and a German variant called Hefezopf ("yeast braid") which, from the recipe, looks exactly like what I remember. It's always hard to tell from the recipe if you've never baked something like it before though, so there's only one thing for it: Time to get baking! The recipe I'm using is near-as-worth-a-damn half-quantities of this one. I couldn't be bothered to make pearl sugar though, although I'm sure it'd be absolutely wonderful! If this works well, maybe I'll try it next time...

Hefezopf/Butterknoten
Ingredients

125ml Milk
80g Sugar
80g Butter
1 sachet Fast-action yeast
2 Eggs
1/2 tsp Salt
500g Strong flour
1 Egg yolk

Method

Heat the milk, sugar and butter together until melted and lukewarm.
Whisk in the yeast, eggs and salt.
Fold in the flour to form a dough and knead for a few minutes.
Place in your trusty baking bin liner and leave for ~1hr to rise until doubled in size.
Divide dough into four equal pieces.
Roll each piece into a sausage ~50cm long.
Braid into a plait*, tucking the ends underneath.
Cover with a damp tea-towel and allow to rise for ~30mins
Brush with the egg yolk.
Bake at 190C for ~30-35 mins.

*There are many ways to do a four-strand plait. I went with this method (take the leftmost strand, bring it over two strands and back under one strand so that it ends up being the second-from-the-left, then repeat on the right hand side), which is linked from a rather nice blog post on how to make Challah - a similar, plaited bread.

One unexpected discovery I made: a warm mixture of milk, butter and sugar smells surprisingly appetising! It doesn't look remotely appetising though...Once the flour's incorporated, it forms a wonderfully soft, buttery dough (not overly surprisingly, given how much butter's involved!). I did have to add a touch more flour to get to this point though.The plait coming together.Here's the finished plait, ready for the final prove.Ready for the oven! I'm excited about it, aren't you?Fresh from the oven. As ever, it's a little burnt (stupid college oven...), but I think it looks pretty darned good personally! I hope it's cooked all the way through though...

Verdict: Chocolate cupcakes

2011-05-21T23:20:00.003+01:00

They're a little disappointing. They're very like brownies, and are really rather edible, but I can't shake the feeling that they're not as good as the brownie recipe I've baked previously. I'd hoped they'd be more cakey than they are, but they're not enough like cakes to be cakes. But they're too much a halfway house between cake and brownie to be really good brownie either. It's good, but I'd rather have a good cake or a good brownie instead. I think if I'd not poked them and hadn't used any muscovado sugar, they'd have been lighter, airier and all around more cake-like, and that might be all that it would have taken. They're quite good, but they fall in a gap that doesn't really need filling.

It's cupcake time!

2011-05-21T20:13:00.006+01:00

It's time for some cupcakes I feel. Only a small batch though, as I've only got one egg in at the moment.

Chocolate Cupcakes
Ingredients

55g Butter
50g Caster sugar
50g Muscavado sugar
1 Egg
1tsp Vanilla extract
50g Dark chocolate
55g Plain flour
1/2tsp Baking powder
Splash of milk

Method

Cream the butter and sugars together until fluffy.
Beat in the egg and vanilla.
Melt the chocolate and fold into the mixture.
Sift the flour and baking powder and gradually fold in to the mixture.
Let down with milk to dropping consistency.
Pour into cupcake moulds and bake at 180C for 20-25 minutes.

Here are the cupcakes ready for the oven. I think I should have added a little bit more milk, as the batter's a little thick.And here's the finished article. It's collapsed because remembering the recent volcano cake debacle, I got a bit scared partway through baking them and poked them all with a skewer to deflate them a bit. I hadn't expected them to collapse this much. Oops. Still looks pretty good though!

Verdict: Bannock-on-a-stick

2011-04-24T17:56:00.003+01:00

Wow. Really rather good! Especially given that it takes about two minutes to make the dough, it's really rather excellent! As the recipe stands, it's a bit too buttery - more like a scone than bread. But for the second round, I halved the amount of butter in it and it's just perfect. We even added some fresh herbs to one of them which worked really nicely. It's really an excellent and incredibly easy addition to the standard barbecue fare!

Barbecue bread

2011-04-24T11:08:00.003+01:00

I'm at home for the Easter weekend this year and we're having a barbecue. I thought it'd be fun to try doing some form of bread actually baked on the barbecue itself. Unfortunately, we've got nothing that would really work as a Dutch oven, so it's really got to be a bread that will stand being grilled rather than baked. Some form of bannock seemed like a good, simple option - and then I came across this website, which shows a simple bannock being grilled over an open fire on a stick. It looks tasty and involves fires and sticks - what more could you want?!

Bannock-on-a-stick
Ingredients

100g Plain flour
1tsp Baking powder
1/4 tsp Salt
3tbsp Butter
2tbsp Milk

Method

Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together and then rub the butter into the mixture.
Add milk slowly to incorporate into a dough.
Form into a ~1cm thick slab and wrap around a stick and grill over a fire or put on the barbecue, turning as needed.

Here's the dough.
Ready for the barbecue.

Time for a reprise

2011-04-12T20:44:00.005+01:00

Those of you who have been paying attention may remember that I owe Trisha another cake. Well, it's her birthday next week and she's having a barbecue tomorrow, so this seemed like a good opportunity actually to bake it! As I'm pretty determined that this cake will be rather more successful than the last one was, I thought it best to bake a cake that I've already baked (and liked) before. And as the weather's finally getting rather summery, I thought the pear and almond cake would be perfect. Here's a photo of it this time around!

Verdict: Honey loaf cake

2011-03-24T22:30:00.000Z

Not good. It was dry, bland and unspectacular. I brought mascarpone for it, and it would have been excessively dry without it. You could taste the honey in the cake - but only just. It needed far more honey - and the mascarpone really could have done with being sweetened with honey too. Oh well, you win some, you lose some...

Honey Cake

2011-03-24T14:59:00.004Z

I'm going to Ellie's for dinner tonight and I said I'd bring dessert. I'm feeling rather uninspired at the moment, so it's just going to be a very simple, but hopefully tasty, honey loaf cake. The recipe is from here.

Honey Loaf Cake
Ingredients

100g Butter
175g Honey
2 Eggs
300g Plain flour
2 tsp Baking powder
75ml Milk

Method

Cream the butter and then beat in the honey.
Beat in the eggs.
Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and fold in.
Add the milk and combine gently.
Pour into a greased loaf tin and bake at ~200C for ~45-55 mins until golden.
Turn out onto a wire rack and brush with honey before allowing to cool.

Looking at the batter, I don't think I added quite enough milk. It's hard to tell, but the cake mix was a little on the firm side. I don't think it'll make too much difference though. Here's the cake ready for the oven.Here's the cake straight from the oven. I think it's a little dry, possibly due to not having added enough milk, but looks edible. I think it looks pretty good though.But the honey glaze just finishes it off beautifully!

Verdict: Jewish apple cake

2011-03-06T19:46:00.005Z

Put quite simply, it's a good cake. The sponge is nice and moist, a little on the dense side, but not too bad. The chunks of apple are absolutely gorgeous, slightly tart still, but with a wonderful texture. Like most apple cakes, it's screaming out for custard or ice cream - unusually, for this particular cake I think I'd go with vanilla ice cream actually. The sweetness is about right for me, which means it's probably not quite sweet enough for most people - but that'd be fixed by the ice cream I think. The cinnamon is a bit too faint in my opinion, and perhaps a tiny little bit of nutmeg would have been good, but overall it's a pretty darned good cake. It's not going to win any awards, but this cake'll go down well with anyone!

A plan comes together

2011-03-06T16:14:00.009Z

Some days, everything just works out quite neatly. I found myself at a bit of a loose end today, and as often happens when that (rather unusual) occurence happens, I decided that I felt like baking something. I needed to go buy some apples too, and M&S happened to have a special offer that meant I ended up buying rather a lot more than I had initially intended to. And luckily, a couple of weeks ago, I came across a recipe for an apple cake that looked rather good - so this seemed like just the perfect opportunity! The recipe is from here, and is pretty much just anglicised and scaled down slightly...

Jewish Apple Cake
Ingredients

4 Small apples
2 1/2tsp Ground cinnamon
4tbsp Caster sugar
1tsp Lemon juice
175ml Sunflower oil
285g Caster sugar
4tbsp Orange juice
2tsp Vanilla extract
200g Plain flour
2 1/2 tsp Baking powder
3 Eggs

Method

Dice the apples into ~1cm cubes, discarding the cores.
Toss the apple chunks with the cinnamon, caster sugar and lemon juice.
Whisk the oil, caster sugar, orange juice and vanilla extract together.
Gradually fold in the flour and baking powder.
Beat the eggs and fold in gradually.
Pour half the batter into a lined cake tin and cover with half of the apple chunks. Pour the remaining batter over the top and cover with the remaining apples.
Bake at ~180C for ~1 hour until cooked through.

Four small apples is actually quite a bit more apple than I had thought. Here's how much I used.And the cake just ready for the oven. If only you could smell how good this smells!Here's the cake straight from the oven.What's that you say? Burned? Yup, as ever. Stupid bloody college ovens. Still looks good though!

Verdict: Nuterocher cake

2011-02-13T21:35:00.000Z

No, I didn't eat the cake I was supposed to give to Trisha - I finished and decorated one of the cupcakes in the same way to test. It was... well... frankly bad. No, actually, that's definitely far too harsh, but it certainly wasn't great. I think I've lost my touch through lack of practice - somewhere down the line, the cake went hard. I mean, really hard. I think it's a combination of the treacle and overcooking, but it was definitely hard. The cherry brandy did help soften it up a bit, and the hard bits were actually quite nice and chewy after a few bites, but it's definitely a bit of a workout for the jaw and not what I was aiming for! On the plus side though, the treacle flavour was wonderful - surprisingly powerful, given how little of it went in - and the chopped hazelnut/melted chocolate is a definite winner. The cherry brandy and treacle stop it being the Nutella/Ferrero Rocher combination I had initially intended, but the balance is actually rather good. The only real problem with the taste is that it's just a tiny little bit too sweet, but not horrendously, and I think I like my cakes to be a bit less sweet than most people anyway. It's good enough for me to give to Trisha, but not without some warning and a promise of a better cake. I think the best verdict is a mitigated failure though. I think I might bake her another one using a more standard sponge cake recipe and finishing it off in the same way - I think that would work wonderfully!

Nuterocher cake

2011-02-12T23:11:00.000Z

I decided to bake a little cake for Trisha. This also gives me an opportunity to use my newest cake tin - bought entirely on impulse because it was cheap! But I didn't feel especially inspired and was running a little low on ideas for what sort of a cake to do. It kinda had to be chocolate, I guess, but a plain ol' chocolate cake seems a tad dull. Then I thought back to where it all began, and I had an idea. So, here's what I think would happen if you were to cross Nutella with Ferrero Rocher...

Nuterocher Cake
Ingredients

70g Butter
70g Dark chocolate
55g Plain flour
1/2 tsp Baking powder
70g Caster sugar
70g Dark muscovado sugar
1tsp Black treacle
1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
1 Egg
25ml Cherry brandy
Nutella
More dark chocolate
Roast, ground hazelnuts*

Method

Melt the chocolate and butter together and set aside.
Mix the flour, baking powder and sugars in a large bowl and stir in the melted chocolate and butter, treacle and vanilla.
Beat the egg and stir in.
Pour into a well-greased and lightly cocoa dusted cake tin and bake at ~180C for ~20 minutes.
Remove from tin and allow to cool on a wire rack.
Slice in half horizontally and pour the cherry brandy over the inner surfaces.
Spread Nutella over the lower half and replace the upper half.
Melt some chocolate and pour/spread over the top of the cake.
Sprinkle the chopped hazelnuts over the liquid chocolate and allow to set.

*Yes, I could have roasted and chopped them myself, but I was feeling lazy.

Ready for the oven.
But hang on a minute... that smells like burning. Oh yes, cakes rise in the oven, don't they?I think this qualifies as a baking disaster. But looking at the symptoms and having a little think about it, I realised that I'd added far too much baking powder. Baking on such a small scale is so much harder! So time for take two, in which I took a bit more care in measuring out the raising agent and also divided the batter up into the mini ring mould and three cupcake moulds. It looks rather a lot better this time. Not quite perfect, but definitely much better!
It looks quite good after decoration (at least, I think it does!).

Bake off II

2011-01-23T15:48:00.007Z

I'm back at home this weekend, and so we thought we'd have another bakeoff! It's the same rules as before, except we only used single quantities for the dough and so made pretty small loaves.

Top left was Mum's, bottom left was mine and right was Andrew's. This time around, Andrew won, but again, only just. He was helped rather a lot by his decision to form it into a plait, which made a surprising amount of difference to the texture. It was pretty too...

Pauper's longbrioche

2011-01-11T20:32:00.005Z

My sister baked what she called millionaire's shortbread over the Christmas break, and it was absolutely fantastic. It looked a lot like millionaire's shortbread and I'm not sure what it actually was, but it wasn't actually millionaire's shortbread. For a start, the base is really a chocolate-light brownie rather than shortbread (which is probably why I liked it so much) and the caramel layer was a bit more like a fudge than a caramel. Nonetheless, it was very, very nice, and I thought I'd try baking it myself. The recipe is this one, with the hazelnuts left out.

Chocolate Caramel Bars
Ingredients
For the base

200g Butter
50g Cocoa powder
300g Caster sugar
2 Eggs
225g Plain flour

For the topping

125g Butter
1 tin (397g) Condensed milk
2tbsp Golden syrup
75g Caster sugar
200g Dark chocolate
1tbsp Olive oil

Method

Melt the butter for the base and stir in the cocoa powder and sugar for the base.
Beat the eggs and stir in.
Fold in the flour.
Spread into a lined tin and bake at 160C/Gas Mark 3 for ~20 mins until the top is firm.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
Melt the butter for the topping and stir in the condensed milk, golden syrup and sugar for the topping.
Cook on a low-medium heat, stirring continuously, for 12-15mins until dark caramel in colour.
Pour over the base and allow to cool.
Melt the chocolate and stir in the oil.
Pour over the caramel and allow to set.

I think I should have used a bigger tin! In hindsight, my roasting tray is almost exactly the 20cmx30cm suggested in the original recipe. Oops. Here's the base batter before baking. It's rather difficult to see in the photo, but it's really quite thick - almost a paste really.After baking, it looks just like a normal brownie though.I'm not sure how much I was supposed to cook the caramel layer - I hope this is dark enough and that it sets!Anything looks pretty if you cover it with chocolate and smooth it down!

Bake off!

2010-12-20T13:26:00.004Z

I'm home for the break, and we're having a whole roast suckling pig! The only trouble is, we don't have any nice fresh bread. So my brother, my mum and I had a bread bakeoff - I made up double quantities of the standard bread mixture and which we split three ways and each kneaded our own dough. We'll see who makes the best loaf!

Here are (from left to right) Andrew's loaf, mum's loaf and my loaf, ready for the oven.And now, straight from the oven (Left to right: Mine, Andrew's, mum's).They all look rather good, but that doesn't answer the big question: Who bakes the best loaf? Well, mum's was a bit denser and heavier than the other two, so that was eliminated from the running fairly quickly, but mine and Andrew's were pretty much neck and neck. I think my loaf won by a whisker - it had a slightly better, chewy texture in the middle, and the crusts were virtually indistinguishable - but it won only by the narrowest of margins. But most importantly, all three loaves were much, much better than any mass-produced loaf of bread!

Just another batch of cookies

2010-12-15T21:34:00.003Z

I met up with Helen for dinner earlier and we decided that we weren't overwhelmed by the dessert options. So instead, I baked a batch of cookies. Same recipe as ever.

Verdict: Lebkuchen

2010-12-04T23:55:00.003Z

It's really tricky baking with the crappy college ovens. There's no real indication of the actual oven temperature and the fact that everything's half-baked and half-grilled really makes things difficult. That's my excuse anyway - the Lebkuchen were really overcooked. They should be soft, but mine mostly came out crunchy. Not bad, but not quite what I was hoping for. The taste is actually pretty good - I initially thought that the spice balance wasn't quite right, but actually the more I eat, the more I think that it's actually pretty close to the real thing. And the few which did end up soft and chewy really do taste a lot like Lebkuchen are supposed to taste. I'm undecided as to whether I prefer the iced ones or the plain ones; it does work well either way. I'm pretty pleased with this really - they're really good especially when you consider how easy they are - I'll have to try baking it again sometime when I have a better oven available!

Lebkuchen

2010-12-04T16:52:00.003Z

It's getting near Christmas, and what would Christmas be without Lebkuchen? Time to get baking! This recipe is largely based on this one, but with a few minor tweaks here and there (chiefly, I've replaced the cardamom with nutmeg and also made a few other changes to make the ingredients easier to obtain in the UK).

Lebkuchen
Ingredients

4 Eggs
200g Sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract
1tsp Lemon juice
1 1/2tsp Cinnamon
1tsp Cloves
1tsp Allspice
1/2 tsp Nutmeg
200g Ground almonds
125g Mixed peel
250g Plain flour
2tsp Baking powder

Method

Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract together.
Add all the remaining ingredients, combining to form a dough.
Shape into portions roughly 10mm thick and bake at ~180C for 15-20 mins.
Allow to cool. Cover with melted chocolate, icing or icing sugar if desired.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, as it turns out, it is mostly - the hardest part is shaping the dough into biscuits for baking, as it's so sticky. Here's the dough.
After a bit of struggling with the stickiness, eventually it looks like this when ready for the oven. I was expecting them to merge into one giant Lebkuchen.And straight from the oven. They didn't spread out very much in the end!I iced some of them with a plain icing. I think they look pretty good overall!

Marbles...

2010-11-19T17:03:00.007Z

I'm off kayaking this weekend, and I thought I'd try to ingratiate myself in advance to the people who will probably end up spending large chunks of their weekend pulling me out of the river. And what better way than by baking cake? It's got to be quick and easy though, so I've gone for a marble cake, taking the recipe out of The Baker.

Marble Cake

Ingredients

185g Butter
230g Caster sugar
3 Eggs
1tsp Vanilla extract
280g Plain flour
3tsp Baking powder
185ml Milk
2tbsp Cocoa powder

Method

Cream the butter and sugar together.
Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract.
Fold in the flour, baking powder and milk, alternating additions of dry ingredients with the milk.
Divide the batter in two. Beat the cocoa powder in a bowl with a little milk to form a paste and add to half of the batter, combining thoroughly.
Spoon the batter into a greased 1lb loaf tin, alternating spoonfuls of light and dark batter.
Draw a skewer through the batter a few times to create the marbling.
Bake at 180C for 40-60 minutes until cooked through.

Here's the cake in the tin (end of step 5).

And after marbling (end of step 6).

It came out of the oven slightly compressed, as I'd covered it with foil and baking paper in an effort to stop the stupid college oven grilling the top. It sort of worked - at least it's not burnt to a cinder on top!

It looks rather better when turned out of the tin though. The photo looks a bit more anaemic than the cake does in real life.

The marbling didn't work though. One day, I'll get it right, but today was not that day.I also baked a (half-quantities) flapjack to bring with me too. Slightly overcooked it, and then forgot that you have to let flapjacks cool in the tin before removing, or they disintegrate. Oops.

Verdict: Yes! We have n̶o̶ bananas!

2010-11-14T11:23:00.002Z

Well, I've tried one of the cupcakes now. The flavours aren't as coherent as they were in my head, so it's a slightly strange mish-mash of tastes. But it's pretty decent overall - I'm not convinced by the chocolate chips though; I don't really know if they go that well with the rest of the cake. But the sweetened mascarpone works wonderfully and the texture is absolutely wonderful. It's mostly a good recipe I think, but needs a bit of tweaking - perhaps just going down the plain banana bread cupcake route is the way forward.

Frank Silver and Irving Cohn lied!

2010-11-13T21:43:00.009Z

I owe Rob a cake. I bribed him a few weeks ago with the promise of cake, so it's time to make good on my promise!

Yes! We Have No Bananas!
Ingredients
For the cake

4 Very ripe bananas (~350g peeled weight)
310g Honey
2 Eggs
3tbsp Olive oil
3tbsp Milk
78g Self-raising flour*
130g Plain flour*
80g Strong bread flour*
3tsp Bicarbonate of soda**
~1/4 Nutmeg (just over a gram)
110g Chocolate chips

For the filling/decoration

250g Mascarpone
35g Honey
Dried banana chips

Method

Mash the bananas with the honey.
Whisk in the eggs, oil and milk.
Fold in the flour, baking powder and nutmeg.
Fold in the chocolate chips.
Divide the mixture between a greased 1lb loaf tin and 5 cupcake cases and bake at ~180C for ~15mins (cupcakes) or ~30mins (loaf tin) until cooked through.
Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.
Cream the mascarpone and honey together.
Cut the loaf cake in half horizontally.
Sandwich the loaf cake with the mascarpone/honey mixture and spread the rest on the top of the cupcakes.
Embed banana chips in the top of the cakes.

*Yes, I ran out of flour. How did you guess?
**Honey is slightly acidic, so no cream of tartar should be necessary. I think...

Here's the mixture at the end of step 1. As you can see, there are still quite a few lumps of banana - I should have mashed the bananas on their own first and then added honey afterwards. Well, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.Ready for the oven - check out my new cupcake moulds!The cupcakes out of the oven. They're slightly overcooked, and one has an elephant man thing going on, which will need amputation at some point. But they look like cupcakes at least!Here's the loaf cake out of the oven and finally cooked through. It's a bit... what's the word? Oh yes, BURNT TO HELL! I've now discovered that the stupid crappy college-provided oven has the heating element on the top of the oven - so when you bake things, they also grill simultaneously. A complete pain for baking cakes! Oh well, I'll just have to hack the top off.But at least it released from the tin nicely. :o)The finished article.

Verdict: Red velvet cupcakes

2010-10-16T23:29:00.004+01:00

In my opinion, they were slightly disappointing. They were reasonably good, but ultimately pretty boring. They don't taste of much, and although they are quite nice and moist... they don't taste of much. And I still don't really like icing, although this particular icing was much better than the regular sugar-and-water types. All in all, it's a success, but I really don't understand why this cake has such an incredible reputation. Give me an Elizabeth David chocolate cake any day...

Red velvet

2010-10-16T21:46:00.006+01:00

There are few cakes whose reputation really precedes them. One is the Elizabeth David cake, whose reputation is entirely justified. Another is a very American recipe - the Red Velvet cake. I think it's time for me to try this one out, and to give it the best chance possible, the recipe I'm using is out of the Magnolia Bakery cookbook. I've decided to bake it as a batch of cupcakes though and the buttercream isn't actually what's suggested as icing, but the creamy vanilla frosting that they actually suggest looks like way too much hassle.

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Ingredients
For the cupcakes

170g Butter
430g Caster sugar
3 Eggs
76ml (two bottles) Red food colouring
3tbsp Cocoa powder
1 1/2 tbsp Vanilla extract
355ml Buttermilk
330g Plain flour
1 1/2 tsp Cider vinegar
1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda

For the buttercream

115g Butter
390g-500g Icing sugar
60ml Milk
1tsp Vanilla extract

Method

Cream the butter and sugar until fluffy.
Beat in the eggs.
Whisk in the food colouring, cocoa and vanilla extract.
Fold in the buttermilk and flour a little at a time, alternating buttermilk and flour.
Mix in the vinegar and bicarbonate of soda.
Pour into cupcake moulds and bake for ~20mins at ~180C/Gas mark 3.
Remove to a wire rack to cool.
For the buttercream: Cream the butter, 260g of the icing sugar, the milk and the vanilla extract together.
Gradually add the remaining sugar, beating after each addition, until the buttercream is thick enough to be of good spreading consistency.
Spread or pipe buttercream on top of cooled cupcakes.

It turns out that this makes quite a lot of batter, so some of it had to be baked in a loose-bottomed tin as a regular cake.

Here's my glamourous assistant, Veronica.
The finished cake batter. Just look at that colour!
How much it made - twelve small cupcakes and about a sandwich tin's worth of batter.The cupcakes were a bit burnt on the top, but actually it's not as bad as it looks by a long shot. Even the most badly burnt bits were very edible.But just look at how pretty the cupcakes were when turned out!Me looking somewhat gormless while checking on the big cake.The cupcakes removed from the trays.The big cake.After icing. I think they look pretty good!

Verdict: Quick and easy Kugelhopf

2010-09-11T19:21:00.003+01:00

Mmmm. It's a very slightly sweet, fairly buttery bread. With sultanas in it. Nothing special you might think, and you'd be absolutely correct. But it is rather good. I think it'd go well with a glass of milk, or possibly a cup of coffee (of course, it'd go very well with a cup of tea, but I think you should have been assuming that). All in all, quite a pretty and pleasant thing, but not terribly special.

[Edit]Incidentally, I've just noticed, this is the 100th post - thanks for reading![/Edit]

A quick and easy Kugelhopf

2010-09-11T17:08:00.011+01:00

I wasn't going to bake at all today, but Kenny put the idea into my head earlier and it just sort of stuck. But I'm moving this weekend, so it's got to be quite a quick and easy recipe. As you may recall, I bought a Bundt tin a while ago. It's not had nearly as much use as it deserves though, so I thought I'd bake a nice and easy Kugelhopf (Incidentally, does anyone know the difference between a Bundt tin and a Kugelhopf tin? As far as I know, they're basically the same, so if anyone knows, I'd be interested to find out!).

This is based on this recipe, but either I screwed up the conversion to sensible units, Kugelhopf is nothing like I think it is or the recipe is really quite rubbish. The recipe below is approximately what I did, which is very different from the recipe I was cribbing - my recipe is far from ideal I'm sure, but it should be good enough...

Quick and Easy Kugelhopf

Ingredients

500g Plain flour
1 sachet Fast-action dried yeast
40g Caster sugar
2 Eggs
240ml Milk
115g Butter (I only had 85g butter in stock, so I substituted the rest with olive oil)
75g Sultanas

Method

Mix the flour, yeast, sugar, eggs and milk into a dough.
Work in the butter.
Knead for a few minutes.
Knead in the sultanas.
Put into a well-greased Kugelhopf tin, cover and allow to rise for ~1hr.
Bake at 180C for ~50mins until the top (i.e. the base of the cake) is brown.
Remove from tin and allow to cool on a wire rack.

Here's the Kugelhopf ready for rising (middle of step 5).

And here it is after rising and ready for the oven (end of step 5).Out of the oven.Look, it came out of the tin!

Verdict: Pear and almond cake

2010-09-05T20:21:00.003+01:00

Wonderful! This is a fantastic cake; the cake itself is lovely and moist and nicely sweet. The almond taste really comes through as well, which I hadn't been expecting. The pears are soft and sweet and taste lovely from the caramelising. But the juxtaposition of the two is really spectacular. I really love this cake - it looks beautiful, it tastes fantastic and it's moist enough that it really doesn't need to be served with anything (although I did serve it with custard, and that did work nicely). One of the best cakes I've baked so far I think!

Pear and almond cake

2010-09-05T18:43:00.004+01:00

This is a cake that I've been intending to bake for aaaages. It's actually one of quite a long list of recipes I want to get around to trying but haven't found time actually to bake. Until now! The recipe is taken from here with a few very minor modifications.

Pear and Almond Cake
Ingredients
For the pears

2 Large pears
25g Butter
1tbsp Caster sugar

For the cake

150g Butter
125g Caster sugar
2 Eggs
1tsp Vanilla extract
75g Self-raising flour
75g Ground almonds
1tsp Ground cinnamon

Method

Peel and core the pears, then cut into quarters.
Heat the butter and sugar together in a large frying pan. When the butter is bubbling and the sugar has dissolved, add the pears and caramelise over a medium heat, turning occasionally.
Remove the pears from the pan and allow to cool. (I did this much the previous day and put the pears in tupperware in the fridge overnight).
Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.
Beat the eggs and vanilla extract into the mixture.
Fold in the flour, ground almonds and cinnamon.
Pour the mixture into a lined baking tin. Arrange the pears on top.
Bake at 170C/Gas Mark 3 for 40-50 minutes.
Allow to cool for a few minutes before removing from the tin.

Here are the pear quarters just after being put into the pan (start of step 2).Now partway through and at the end of step 2. Quite a lovely change, isn't it?After staying in the fridge overnight, the pears have survived remarkably well!The batter's a bit thicker than normal cakes (I'm guessing this is because of the ground almonds - they'll release a lot of oil when baked). I'm also unconvinced that the proportions of pear to cake are correct; I'd already reduced the number of pears from 3 to 2. But anyway, here's the cake ready for the oven (end of step 7).And here it is again after baking. I think it looks really rather good!

Why won't anyone believe me?!

2010-08-29T18:32:00.005+01:00

Bacon cookies really work. Neither my mum nor my brother believed me, so I had to bake them a batch. It's the same recipe as last time, except without walnuts and I used dark brown sugar instead of caster sugar.

Here are the cookies ready for the oven.
And ready to eat!
Both my mum and my brother were sceptical at first. They tried the cookies and said they didn't like them. But they continued eating the cookie and finished it. And then went for another. And another. And eventually conceded that it really genuinely works. What we learned from this time around though is that the walnuts actually do add something, even if I didn't realise it at first; you really notice the absence.

Verdict: Spiced honey, sultana and nut roll

2010-08-25T22:42:00.007+01:00

Honestly? A bit of a disappointment, really. It's tremendously pretty, but the taste just doesn't quite live up to the looks. I thought it somewhat bland - actually, I thought it needed more of everything: more honey, more sultanas, more nuts and definitely more spice! But being a bit more specific, I think it really needed a bit more sweetness, so honey would be the first thing I'd increase. Or rather, I'd add some brown sugar on top of the honey. The sultanas worked really well and I think having a bit more would definitely be an improvement - the same goes for the nuts, but they were closer to the right amount. And the spices were barely present - I needed to add a heck of a lot more. Overall, it was a disappointment, but it shows a lot of promise. A few minor tweaks to the recipe, and this could be excellent. Maybe some mixed peel and possibly a little ground ginger or cloves too would benefit matters, but really it's just the overall balance of flavours that needs tuning.
This rather arty photo is courtesy of Kenny.
And if you'd like to know why Kenny's photos always look so much better than the ones I take, this gives you an idea of the lengths he goes to when he takes photos. This time around, it was a relatively simple shot; usually he also goes to the hassle of getting a couple of table lamps positioned to improve the lighting!

Roll over Beethoven? No, there are no berries here...

2010-08-25T18:57:00.014+01:00

It's been a while since the last entry, but I've been busy. I felt like baking today though, which seemed like a good reason to bake! I got the idea for this from a recipe for Beigli from The Baker, but it bears only a fairly small resemblence really. This is just a sweetened bread turned into a sultana, nut, honey and spice roll. It's not a massively adventurous recipe, but I think it ought to work nicely.

Spiced honey, sultana and nut roll

Ingredients

1/2 sachet Fast-action yeast
310g Strong flour
110g Unsalted butter
65g Caster sugar
1 Egg, beaten
90ml Milk
45g Walnuts*
40g Hazelnuts*
50g Almonds*
185g Sultanas
3tsp Cinnamon
1 1/2tsp Nutmeg
110g Honey

Method

Mix the yeast with the flour and rub in the butter until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
Mix in the sugar, then stir in the milk and egg and combine to form a dough.
Knead for 10 minutes, then allow to rise, covered, until doubled in size.
Knock the dough back and knead for 5 minutes. Flatten into a rectangle a little bit larger than A4 size.
Sprinkle the sultanas, chopped nuts and spices over the dough, then drizzle the honey over the top.
Roll the dough up widthways and place on a greased baking tray.
Cover with a damp teatowel and leave to prove until doubled in size.
Prick the top with a fork in several places and bake at 200C for 35-40 minutes.
Remove to a wire rack to cool.

*These quantities might possibly just have been what I had left in my cupboard...

Here it is at the end of step 5.After rolling (end of step 6).After proving (end of step 7). It's not risen very much!But out of the oven, it's looking rather a lot better. Some of the honey leaked a bit though.

Verdict: Apple and blackberry flan

2010-07-31T22:01:00.008+01:00

Sadly, it looks better than it tastes. On the plus side though, that's more because it looks amazing, rather than it not tasting good. And it does taste good... but I don't think it's better than (or even quite as good as) a tarte tatin. The sweetness is absolutely perfect - and there's a lovely gradation from the sweet pastry through the medium apple to the sharp blackberries. There's a nice soft texture to the apples; the texture of the blackberries is not so nice (but exactly as you'd expect from blackberries). But the problem I have with this one is that there's something missing in terms of flavour - it's all perfectly pleasant, but it needs just that little bit more zing. Perhaps it needs some citrus - maybe some orange zest or a squeeze of lime; I'm not convinced that this is actually what it needs, but it's just a little boring in its current form. Perfectly pleasant, but unexciting. Oh dear, I think I've just baked the Hardys wine of the flan world...Incidentally, if anyone's wondering why the first two photos in this post are so much better than the others from today, it's because those two are courtesy of Kenny!

'Tis the season for blackberrying

2010-07-31T18:47:00.009+01:00

Blackberries are in season right now - so go to your nearest hedgerow and grab an armful! (Mind the thorns!). Here's what I did with mine.

Apple and Blackberry Flan
Ingredients
For the pastry

290g Plain flour
165g Butter
95g Caster sugar
Very cold water

For the filling

50g Butter
75g Dark muscovado sugar
500g Diced Braeburn apples (3 good sized apples)
445g Blackberries
100g Honey
1 1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon

Method

Sift the flour into a bowl and rub the butter in until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
Mix in the caster sugar.
Add just enough water to bind into a dough.
Roll out and line a flan ring and a sandwich tin, reserving some dough for decoration.
Prick the base both all over with a fork.
Refrigerate for 10 mins.
Line and weigh down both cases with baking beans.
Bake blind for 15-20 mins at 190C, remove the baking beans and bake for a further 5-10 mins. Allow to cool in the tin.
In a saucepan, melt the butter, and mix in the sugar.
Add the diced apples and cook over a moderate heat for 15 mins to soften.
Add the blackberries, honey and cinnamon and stir well.
Pour the mixture into the prepared cases.
Roll out the reserved dough and decorate as desired.
Bake at 190C for 25-30mins.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted that this is basically a modified upside-down tarte tatin. Why reinvent the wheel?! Here are the flans at the end of step 12. I think they look supremely pretty, personally.
Ready for the oven! I had intended to make them both lattice tarts, but I hadn't left enough pastry to do the big one - so I made an apple and a blackberry instead (yes, that is supposed to be a blackberry!).Finished! The pastry on each could probably have done with a little bit longer in the oven, but I was worried about the top of the filling burning. I think it's okay though. It came out of the oven bubbling and just generally looking gorgeous - I can't help but think that this would simply be fantastic served hot with a big dollop (that's a technical term, by the way) of good vanilla ice cream...

Verdict: Bacon and walnut cookies

2010-07-06T19:02:00.004+01:00

Weird. But most definitely in a good way. I'm utterly perplexed - this shouldn't work, but it most definitely does. And not in a novelty way - they really stand up on their own merit. The bacon tastes exactly like you expect bacon to taste - salty and meaty. The cookies taste of bacon. But they're definitely sweet. And it just works.

I don't think the walnuts really added anything - I thought they'd provide an interesting distraction from the bacon, but they're just completely overpowered by it. And now, having tried them, I don't think that caramelising the bacon would work. But it really doesn't matter - these are pretty darned awesome in their own right.

The question is, where will it end? If bacon cookies works, how about bacon cupcakes? Or bacon cake? Bacon sorbet???!

Everything's better with bacon

2010-07-06T17:58:00.006+01:00

Almost any food can be improved by the addition of bacon. For some foods, this is obvious; salads, burgers and chicken are clearly better with bacon. Some foods don't take much imagination to see that this might be true - for example, a good steak is perfectly good alone, but a nice slice of crispy, streaky bacon would add a lovely counterpoint to it. But the argument that all food is improved by bacon is generally derailed by desserts; certainly, I don't want any bacon with my Black Forest Gateau thank-you-very-much.

But I don't see why this should be true of cookies. Well, let's see, shall we?

Bacon and Walnut Cookies

Ingredients

3 Rashers unsmoked bacon (25g cooked weight)
40g Butter
80g Caster sugar
1 Egg
1tbsp Honey
1tsp Vanilla extract
75g Self-raising flour
40g Walnuts

Method

Rinse the bacon to remove excess salt.
Trim off all the fat from the bacon and finely chop.
Fry the bacon until crispy. Set aside to drain.
Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.
Beat in the egg, honey and vanilla extract.
Finely chop the walnuts.
Sift the flour into the mixture and fold in with the bacon and walnuts.
Spoon onto greased baking trays and bake at ~190C/Gas Mark 5 for 10-12 minutes until golden.
Remove to a wire rack to cool.

Here is the bacon after frying (end of step 3). It looks surprisingly like the artificial bacon bits you can buy.

Ready for the oven (step 8).

Fresh from the oven - I slightly overcooked them, but I think I've gotten away with it.

I had (what I thought was) a genius idea just before I baked this, but I couldn't be bothered effect it - that of caramelising the bacon bits after frying. If this turns out well, maybe I'll give that a go next time around...

Quickie brownies

2010-06-05T21:34:00.008+01:00

I'm going away on a conference in about the week, so tomorrow's going to be my last OUCKC session for the year, so I thought I'd bake something and bring it along. This is essentially this brownie recipe that I did last year with less faff. And apparently some clubmembers are mildly (not deathly) allergic to nuts, so I'm doing half with nuts and half without.

Quickie Brownies
Ingredients

110g Chocolate
110g Butter
110g Plain flour
1/2 tsp Baking powder
210g Caster sugar
2 Eggs, beaten
A decent slug* Vanilla extract
A few handfuls** Chocolate chips
A handful Almonds
A decent slug Almond extract

Method

Melt the chocolate and the butter in a double boiler.
Remove from the heat and sift in the flour, sugar and baking powder.
Once cool enough, beat in the eggs and vanilla extract.
Stir in the chocolate chips and pour half of the mixture into a greased sandwich cake tin.
Add the almonds and almond extract to the remainder and pour into a greased sandwich cake tin.
Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for ~25 mins.
Allow to cool for 10 minutes before removing from the tin.

Ready for the oven (end of step 5). The nuts are the white bits in the one on the right.Just out of the oven.I've never had this happen to me before... I'm getting the impression that I didn't grease the sides of the tin quite well enough! The other one released from the tin really rather easily. Oh well, it's not going to affect the taste at least.*Yes, that is a standard unit of measurement when I'm baking.
**And so is that.

Verdict: Pretzels (Take II)

2010-06-01T22:18:00.002+01:00

Wow. I'm utterly impressed - these are exactly as I remember from Oktoberfest (except much smaller - maybe next time I'll just make one giant pretzel). Absolutely incredible! Next time I should go and get some Erdinger in...

Baked not grilled

2010-06-01T20:08:00.009+01:00

The oven's fixed so time to give it another go! Minor changes to the recipe this time around, but they are only slight changes.

Pretzels (Take II)

Ingredients

400g Strong flour
1 sachet Fast-acting yeast
1.5tsp Salt
150ml Water
100ml Milk
Coarse salt
~3tsp Bicarbonate of soda

Method

Mix the flour, yeast, salt, water and milk in a bowl and form a dough.
Knead the dough for ~20 minutes and leave to rise until doubled in size, covered.
Gently press the air out and knead the dough for ~10 minutes more.
Divide into 4 equal portions. and leave for ~45mins to prove.
Roll each portion out into a sausage shape, roughly 50cm long then shape into pretzel shapes.
Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Boil the pretzels individually for about a minute, then remove to a paper towel to dry.
Oil a baking sheet well.
Make a solution of bicarbonate of soda in a mugful of water. Dip each pretzel in the solution, sprinkle with the coarse salt and place on a well-oiled baking sheet.
Bake at 190C for 20-25 mins until dark golden brown.
Remove to a wire rack to cool.

Here are the newly shaped pretzels (end of step 5).
After boiling (end of step 6).And the finished product! What a difference an oven makes. Oh my word though, they look good!I should probably confess that the photos are very slightly disingenuous - the pretzels baked on a roasting tray stuck like crazy and I left the bottom layer on the tin. But the one baked on a non-stick tray posed no such problems. But man, don't those look good?!

Verdict: Pretzels (Take I)

2010-05-21T23:45:00.003+01:00

Disappointing. They're just bread. Very edible - actually quite nice - but they're not pretzels - it just tastes like bread. Good bread, but just bread. I think they suffered massively from not being baked. I'll give it another go at some point when I have a working oven and we'll see how it turns out!

A taste of Oktoberfest

2010-05-21T23:34:00.000+01:00

I went to Oktoberfest last year. It was really quite awesome, so I thought it would be nice to recreate a little part of it in the form of pretzels. This is the recipe that I've used. Now all I need is a Maß of Hofbräu, a Bavarian brass band and a couple of pretty girls in Dirndln...

Pretzels (Take I)

Ingredients

400g Strong flour
1 sachet Fast-acting yeast
1.5tsp Salt
150ml Water
75ml Milk
Coarse salt
~3tsp Bicarbonate of soda

Method

Mix the flour, yeast, salt, water and milk in a bowl and form a dough.
Knead the dough for ~20 minutes and leave to rise until doubled in size, covered.
Gently press the air out and knead the dough for ~10 minutes more. Divide into 4 equal portions.
Roll each portion out into a sausage shape, roughly 35cm long then shape into pretzel shapes.
Leave for ~45mins to prove.
Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Boil the pretzels individually for about a minute, then remove to a paper towel to dry.
Oil a baking sheet well.
Make a solution of bicarbonate of soda in a mugful of water. Dip each pretzel in the solution, sprinkle with the coarse salt and place on a well-oiled baking sheet.
Bake at 190C for 20-25 mins until dark golden brown.
Remove to a wire rack to cool.

There are enough photos of balls of dough up here already, so I didn't bother this time around. The first photo is from halfway through step 4 - our sausage shaped bits of dough.

And then the now (sort of) pretzel-shaped dough at the end of step 4. As you can see, I was experimenting a bit with variations on the shape. I'm not terribly happy with any of them actually - but we'll see how they look once they're baked!

But more importantly, I should have read the recipe a little more carefully. You're supposed to let it prove before shaping into pretzel shapes. Oops. Well, here's what happens if you don't (end of step 5). Ah well, you live and learn.
Ready for the oven (end of step 8).Unfortunately, there was a much bigger problem: I discovered that my oven is broken. So after about half an hour of the oven not warming up, I eventually managed to (sort of) bake the pretzels by using the still-functioning grill to heat the oven up. As a result, they're as much grilled as they are baked. Here's the final result.

Verdict: Tiger bread

2010-04-25T02:25:00.003+01:00

Well, it's not exactly what I'd call tiger bread. The fact that the crust isn't speckled is testament to that fact. But, having said that, it is rather a good loaf. The crust is, I believe, the best crust I have ever had on a loaf of bread; an almost perfect example of that elusive balance between hard and crunchy, soft and chewy, flavoursome and not burnt. The body of the bread is a little dense, but in a good way - with that lovely texture and satisfying chewiness. It's a failure insofar as it's not really tiger bread, but it's very much a success in that it's a bloody good loaf!

Tiger tiger tiger!

2010-04-24T19:06:00.004+01:00

In most supermarkets that have an in-store bakery, you can buy a type of bread called tiger bread. It's, in my opinion, probably the best shop-bought, mass-produced bread available - as far as bread that's come from the Chorleywood Bread Process, it's a definite winner. So I thought it would be nice to try making it myself... the only problem is, that there's a lot of debate as to what actually goes into tiger bread. But, going with the (admittedly dangerous) assumption that the internet will get things right when averaged across sufficient users, I've taken what I view as prevailing view (as there is clearly no consensus) from this forum thread. The base bread is a standard plain white loaf and is baked in the normal way except for being brushed with the tiger paste before going into the oven.

Tiger Bread

Ingredients

For the bread

500g Strong bread flour
300g Water
10g Salt
3/4 sachet Fast-acting dried yeast
10g Light olive oil

For the tiger paste

1/4 sachet Dried yeast
5tbsp Water
1 1/2 tsp Caster sugar
1 tsp Light olive oil
60g Rice flour

Method

Mix all the bread ingredients into a rough dough.
Tip out onto a large, clean work surface and knead until smooth and elastic.
Shape into a round and return to the mixing bowl. Cover and leave to rise until itroughly doubles in size.
Uncover and tip onto the lightly-floured work surface and squash all over using your fingertips to deflate the dough.
Knead for 5 minutes, divide and shape as required - I baked it as a loaf (mainly because I wanted to use the loaf tin David bought me for my birthday).
Cover and leave to prove for ~1hr-1hr30 until roughly doubled in size again.
Mix all of the ingredients for the tiger paste in a bowl and cover. Leave in a warm place for 25 minutes.
Spread the tiger paste over the loaf.
Place into an oven preheated to the maximum temperature, with a roasting tray of boiling water in the bottom.
After 10 minutes, turn the oven down to ~200C/Gas Mark 6 and continue to bake until done - about 40 minutes.
Remove from the tin and allow to cool on a wire rack before slicing.

Here's the dough just after shaping and ready for proving (end of step 5).After proving (end of step 6).

The tiger paste.The loaf ready for the oven (end of step 8).
Here's the finished loaf. The top didn't crackle - I wonder if I spread too thick a layer of the tiger paste on the top. Oh well. Bet it still tastes good though!

Verdict: Chocolate and cherry brandy bundt cake

2010-04-08T23:24:00.005+01:00

Oh. My. Word. This cake was absolutely amazing! I don't know if it's the best cake I've ever baked, but it's certainly a contender! As you can see, it came out of the tin mostly intact, after some serious coercion with a spatula. It lost all of its pretty fluting around the edge, but at least now I know for next time that the Bundt tin needs a lot more greasing and a lot more flour. Anyway, I think it's still fairly pretty personally, but then beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. But much more importantly, it tasted absolutely wonderful. Beautifully moist, and surprisingly for me, not heavy. It was wonderfully chocolatey, perfectly balanced and the cherry & almond flavour came through really nicely. Genuinely, I can't think of any way in which this cake could be improved - the sweetness was perfect, the texture was brilliant and the flavours blended together fantastically. Apparently, the people at the Magnolia Bakery really know what they're doing!

Cherries ≅ Almonds?

2010-04-07T19:31:00.007+01:00

It's Lindsey's birthday tomorrow, so I'm baking her a cake. One of my recent purchases was a Bundt/Kugelhopf cake tin, which I'd quite like to try out. So having looked through my baking books, there was a standout recipe - the Chocolate Amaretto Bundt Cake from the Magnolia Bakery book that my friend Teia sent me for my birthday. The only snag was, I don't have any Amaretto. But looking at my drinks collection, I do have a bottle of cherry brandy that I think will substitute nicely, so hopefully it'll work well!

Chocolate and Cherry Brandy Bundt Cake

Ingredients

230g Butter
240g Caster sugar*
150g Soft brown sugar*
4 Eggs
170g Dark chocolate
235ml Milk
3tsp Almond extract
1tsp Vanilla extract
220g Plain flour
1tsp Bicarbonate of soda
4tbsp Cherry brandy

Method

Cream the butter and sugars together until fluffy.
Beat in the eggs, one at a time.
Melt the chocolate and mix in.
Stir in the milk, almond extract and vanilla extract.
Gradually sift in the flour and baking powder, beating the mixture smooth after each addition.
Stir in the cherry brandy.
Pour into a greased and floured Bundt cake tin and bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for ~45-50 minutes. Test with a skewer.
Allow to cool in the tin for ~20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.

*The recipe actually calls for 190g caster sugar and 200g soft brown sugar, but I ran out of soft brown sugar. I don't think it'll make a massive difference, though it might be a little less flavoursome!

This cake batter is amazing! At the end of step 3, before the almond and vanilla extracts went in, it smelt like Ovaltine. Absolutely wonderful. But having never baked a cake like this before, I have no idea how much it'll rise... I've got a nasty feeling that this might overflow! Yup! It overflowed. Not horrendously though. I'm just really hoping it's cooked all the way through now. And that it'll come out of the tin...But no! Disaster! The cake was absolutely stuck fast. In desperation, I tried taking a turboflame lighter to the outside of the tin trying to heat it up in the hope that the expansion might help free the cake. And when that failed, I googled for ideas, trying one that suggested doing similar but using a tea towel in the kitchen sink soaked in boiling water to heat the tin up. On the plus side, I did find out that the cake is indeed cooked through. It's also rather moist and tastes excellent too, so a big thumbs up for the recipe. It's just a shame it didn't come out of the tin. And it would have been so pretty too. Oh well, I'll let the cake cool in the tin and then we can just hack it apart when we serve it tomorrow!You saw that coming though, right? I was definitely half-expecting it...

Verdict: Plain, boring fudge

2010-04-04T22:02:00.004+01:00

Surprisingly, it's actually rather good! Surprising, for those who don't know, because I don't actually like fudge. It's definitely recognisably fudge - quite a solid, almost crunchy fudge, but definitely a fudge. It's ludicrously rich and still nauseatingly sweet like most fudges too, but unlike most fudges, I can eat more than one piece before feeling queasy - which is really quite a high standard for me with fudges. I'll bring it into the lab next week and get some more opinions...

And look! It came out of the tin in one piece! Actually, it just slid out; I'd been expecting to have to chip it out!

[Edit]It won quite a few compliments at the lab too. Maybe it really is pretty decent fudge after all...[/Edit]

The Fudge Factor

2010-04-04T17:14:00.007+01:00

I bought a 397g tin of condensed milk (anyone know why it's sold in such a random quantity?) for the pineapple buns, but had no idea what to do with the remaining 300g of it. So naturally, I asked people on Facebook and the best suggestion I got back was to make fudge. Here goes...

Plain, Boring Fudge

Ingredients

300g Condensed milk
4tbsp Water
300g Sugar
45g Butter
1tsp Vanilla extract

Method

Place all the ingredients in a pan and heat gently, stirring constantly to a temperature of 116C.
Remove from the heat and beat until the fudge thickens (about 10 minutes).
Pour into a greased tin and allow to cool.

Here's the fudge just after pouring. I think I should have poured it a bit earlier - as you can see, parts of it have already mostly set! It's not going to win any awards for prettiness...

Verdict: Pineapple buns

2010-04-02T23:01:00.003+01:00

Well, the verdict is definitely positive. It's not quite as I remember the ones that you can buy in Chinatown, but there's a distinct resemblance. The inside is very much like a slightly sweet bread - actually, as bread I would have been very pleased with it; it's delightfully chewy and has a lovely texture. As pineapple buns go though, I think it's a little too chewy. The coating is crunchy, which is also very pleasant, but not as the bought ones are. I think the coating is also a little too sweet and a little too rich - perhaps halving the amount of condensed milk or even just getting rid of it entirely would be the way to go. But overall, I'm pretty pleased with these - they rose beautifully and (as I hope you agree) they look absolutely gorgeous!

[Edit]My flatmate Kenny (who is from Hong Kong) says that the coating is actually pretty authentic. So that's quite a good bit of praise![/Edit]

Pineapple surprise

2010-04-02T21:24:00.006+01:00

It's been a while since I last baked anything, I know. Real (i.e. non-baking) life has been a little bit hectic this past term and I've been busy, mostly with teaching. But it's the Easter weekend and I've got some free time, so I'm going to bake! Now, this is pineapple surprise in the classic joke sense - there's no pineapple involved anywhere in the recipe. Eh? Have I lost my mind? Very possibly, but as it happens, this is a sweet Chinese bread that's called pineapple bread because the appearance of the baked bun is reminiscent of the outside of a pineapple. More importantly though, I quite like it and I've got hold of a recipe. So enough waffle (ooh, that's an idea - I should try making waffles at some point), on to the baking!

Pineapple Buns
Ingredients
For the bread

380g Strong bread flour
1 Whole egg
1 Egg white
1 sachet Fast-action powdered yeast
90g Caster sugar
3tbsp Milk
100ml Warm water
40ml/35g Light olive oil

For the topping

100g Plain flour
60g Caster sugar
60g Butter
1tsp Bicarbonate of soda
2 tbsp Condensed milk
1 Egg yolk
Few drops vanilla extract
1 Whole egg

Method

Sift the strong flour into a large mixing bowl.
Lightly beat the egg and egg white and add with the remaining bread ingredients into the bowl.
Combine the ingredients and knead until shiny and smooth.
Return to the bowl, cover and leave to rise until the dough has (roughly) doubled in size.
Knead for a further 10 minutes, divide into small bun-sized portions, shape and leave to prove for an hour on a lined baking tray.
Melt the butter and mix along with the rest of the ingredients for the topping except the whole egg.
Spread the topping over each bun.
Beat the egg and brush over the buns.
Bake at 190C for ~15 minutes until the top is light golden.

Incidentally, for anyone else who observes the Nestlé boycott, you might like to know that Carnation, the most famous brand of condensed milk in the UK, is owned by Nestlé. Luckily though, there are alternatives!

Here's the dough after kneading (end of step 3). The dough seemed much less smooth than a normal bread dough, and I struggled to develop the gluten - the dough was still slightly sticky at this point (when I gave up). I don't know if that's due to the recipe or the flour that I used though.

Here are the shaped buns ready for proving (partway through step 5). I know they're a bit close together, but I figure all that will happen is they might stick together a bit in the oven.

The buns with the topping applied (end of step 7). The topping is rather a lot more solid than I had initially expected.

After 10 minutes in the oven - they look perfect! Unfortunately, I cut one open and, unsurprisingly, it wasn't even remotely cooked, so back in the oven they go...

So back they went. In the end, it took 40 minutes in the oven in total, although I did have to turn the oven right down to make sure I didn't burn the crust. But here's the final result - I think they're pretty darned successful myself!

Verdict: Devil's blood cake

2010-02-16T22:49:00.003Z

Well, as experiments go, it was definitely an interesting one. The cake itself was certainly not bad, but not quite the roaring success that I'd hoped it would be. It was really lovely and light and the flavour of the wine did come through as I'd hoped it would. That said, the taste of wine was the tiniest, merest hint in the backdrop - if you didn't know there was most of a bottle of wine in it, you probably wouldn't have been able to say what the source of the flavour was. I think I used too much treacle - it overwhelmed the wine quite badly. Nonetheless, the cake has quite a distinctive flavour to it - unlike any other cake I've ever baked, that's for certain. Quite pleasant, but also slightly strange. The icing was too sweet for me by far - I'd forgotten that I don't actually like icing. But it would have made it look very pretty if I'd bothered spreading it properly! I'd say the cake overall was a qualified success!

Devil's blood cake

2010-02-14T15:50:00.006Z

Last time around, I'd been cooking with some red wine (and drinking some too) while I was baking with treacle, and it occurred to me that the flavours went together pretty darned well. So naturally, I decided to bake a cake around it. Why the name? Well, I think most of my cakes have had too boring names (though I guess most of them are boring cakes, so that suits), and I think the reduced wine is what I'd expect a devil's blood to be like - dark and syrupy. Anyway, the cake...

Devil's Blood Cake
Ingredients
For the cake

500ml Red wine
1 Star anise
4 Cloves
4 Juniper berries
275g Black treacle
150g Butter
60g Icing sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract
3 Eggs
230g Self-raising flour
3tsp Bicarbonate of soda
1tsp Cream of tartar
2tbsp Cocoa powder

For the icing

115g Butter
60ml Milk
480g Icing sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract

Method

Heat the red wine with the star anise, cloves and juniper berries and reduce down to ~75ml.
Strain the wine (discarding the bits) and add the treacle, butter for the cake, icing sugar and vanilla extract for the cake. Stir while heating gently to melt the ingredients together.
Allow to cool a little and beat in the eggs, one at a time.
Sift the dry ingredients in and fold in gently.
Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at 180C for ~30 mins.
Allow to cool on a wire rack.
Cream the butter, 260g of the icing sugar, vanilla extract for the icing and the milk together in a bowl until mostly smooth. (This is probably better done in a food mixer or with a hand-held beater if you have one - I don't).
Cream in the rest of the sugar a bit at a time until smooth.
Ice the cooled cake.

I don't think the quality of wine is critical, so I grabbed what I thought would be the worst bottle of wine from my wine rack. As you can see, I don't drink bad wine (o:.
It looks a bit like mud before going into the oven...But reassuringly, it looks like a cake coming out of it!
I couldn't be bothered to ice it properly, so it just got slopped on the top!

Verdict revisited: Cheer up chocolate cake

2010-01-25T16:08:00.002Z

Okay, it's slightly odd I know, but I think that this cake needs a second verdict. I had a really awful cold when I baked the cake and tried it the first time around - two days on now, my cold is a bit better, which means I can taste the cake a bit more and actually, it's a heck of a lot better than I had thought! The cake is, I think, one of the best cakes I've ever made - it's nicely balanced and doesn't really need any more sweetness as I had previously thought (though equally, it probably wouldn't hurt it). When eaten cold, the chocolate chips in the cake are much more noticeable and give some lovely texture, and the cake is still wonderfully rich but not sickly. The treacle is marvellous - not immediately noticeable, but it definitely gives the flavour a depth that it wouldn't otherwise have had. The two days of sitting there haven't hurt it much either - it's slightly drier, but not horrendously so. I'm really, really pleased with this one!

Verdict: Cheer up chocolate cake

2010-01-23T23:09:00.003Z

I had originally intended to serve the cake with a ganache, but I was overruled on the basis that that would have meant we would have had to wait longer to eat the cake. So we had it with cream instead. It would have been better with custard, but then I think pretty much all cakes are better with custard. But the cake itself was pretty darned good actually. It wasn't very sweet; in fact, it was slightly bitter, but not unpleasantly so. But I still stuck a drizzle of golden syrup on the top, which I think improved it significantly. The texture of the cake on the other hand was gorgeous - that perfect and oh-so-difficult balance of fudginess, moistness and crunch. The crust was just right and the inside was absolutely wonderful. A huge success I'd say, and it also won the biggest compliment - Kenny asked if he could have the recipe. A really good cake!

Cheer up chocolate cake

2010-01-23T17:55:00.003Z

My friend Helen was feeling a bit down, so I promised her a chocolate cake. Completely lacking inspiration, I had a look in the cake ingredients aisle of M&S while I was shopping, and decided to make it a treacle-based chocolate cake. It's pretty straightforward, but I think this might be a winner!

Cheer Up Chocolate Cake
Ingredients

270g Black treacle
150g Butter
1 tsp Vanilla extract
3 Eggs
150g Self-raising flour
80g Cocoa powder
2tsp Bicarbonate of soda
100g Dark chocolate chips

Method

Melt the treacle, butter and vanilla extract over a double boiler and whisk together.
Whisk in the eggs, one at a time.
Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and bicarbonate of soda and fold in gently.
Stir in the chocolate chips.
Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at ~170C for ~40 minutes.

Practice makes perfect

2010-01-13T21:13:00.006Z

I'm seeing Alan again on Friday, so it's time for the spiced honey cake take two. Slight tweaks to it this time around, so hopefully it'll be a bit lighter and a bit nicer! The major differences are: I've used self-raising flour on top of the baking powder, there's 40g more flour and I melted the butter so that it could be whisked with the honey and eggs in an effort to incorporate a bit more air into it. The mascarpone is also split between the topping and a sandwich layer now as well.

Spiced Honey Cake Revisited
Ingredients
For the cake

220g Butter
350g Honey
4 Eggs
1tsp Vanilla extract
Zest of one lemon
290g Self-raising flour
2tsp Baking powder
1 1/2tsp Cinnamon
1 1/2tsp Nutmeg
4tsp Ginger

For the sandwich layer and topping

250g Mascarpone
3tbsp Honey
1tsp Vanilla extract
55g Crystallised ginger

Method

Melt the butter and honey for the cake together over a double boiler and whisk with a balloon whisk.
Whisk in the eggs, vanilla extract and lemon zest.
Sift in the dry ingredients and fold in gently.
Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at ~160C for 45 minutes.
Remove from tin and allow to cool completely on a wire rack
Cream the mascarpone, honey for the topping and vanilla extract together.
Cut the cake in half horizontally.
Spread half of the mascarpone over the base, add the upper half of the cake and spread the remaining mascarpone over the top.
Chop the crystallised ginger and sprinkle over the cake.

Here's the cake straight from the oven (step 5). It's a bit dark around the edge - I'll trim off the burnt rim with a sharp knife before finishing it off.Here's the finished cake.

Verdict: Spiced honey cake

2009-12-31T14:21:00.002Z

The eagle-eyed amongst you may be wondering why there's a verdict for a cake I baked for Alan. Well, it turns out that I'm a muppet - I forgot to bring the cake with me. Anyway, I'm seeing him in about two weeks' time anyway, so I'll bake him another one. Aaaaannnyway, how was the cake itself? Slightly dense - I think too much liquid and possibly not enough baking powder. The spice was quite subtle; fairly nice, but definitely subtle. Perhaps a bit more would be better. The honey flavour did come through though, which lent the cake a lovely depth. I think it's a pretty good success!

Spiced honey cake

2009-12-29T20:28:00.007Z

It was Alan's birthday at the end of November. It's been rather a while since I last saw him, but we're going for dinner tomorrow evening so I thought I'd bake him a birthday cake. So here it is! It's just a variation on a standard sponge, but I think it could work quite well.

Spiced Honey Cake
Ingredients
For the cake:

220g Butter
350g Honey
4 Eggs
1tsp Vanilla extract
220g Plain flour
3tsp Baking powder
1tsp Cinnamon
1tsp Nutmeg
1tsp Allspice
3tsp Ground ginger

For the sandwich layer/topping

250g Mascarpone
3tbsp Honey
~50g Crystallised ginger.

Method

Mash the butter and honey for the cake together.
Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
Fold in the dry ingredients.
Pour into a greased cake tin and bake at 180C for 40-50 mins.
Turn out onto a wire rack and allow to cool.
Cream the mascarpone and honey for the topping together.
Spread over the top of the cake.
Chop the crystallised ginger and sprinkle over the top.

Verdict: Chocolate ganache cake

2009-12-21T21:47:00.002Z

Oops, I forgot to post this yesterday. Anyway, the cake: Pretty good actually. I think it wasn't quite cooked all the way through, but it was pretty borderline and certainly not unpleasantly raw. My thought was slightly rubbery in the centre, but others went with "fudgy" instead. The chocolate ganache was oilier than I'm used to with the addition of butter, so I think it really needs to be served cold rather than at room temperature - with the ganache slightly more solid, I thought it was much nicer. But overall, it really was rather good. Obscenely rich and fattening, but I guess lots of people will say that's a good thing! A good cake for chocolate lovers.

Mmmm... Chocolate!

2009-12-18T11:55:00.006Z

I'm off to visit Anita this weekend. As you might understand, I'm pretty happy about this fact. And I figured, no one ever complains about chocolate cake. So I thought I'd bake one to bring with me. I also owe Helen a cake as compensation for accidentally insulting her rather badly one time we met recently. I forget what it was that I said, but it was sufficiently bad that, unintentional or not, it could only be made better by chocolate cake. As a result, there's quite a lot riding on this, so it'd better be a good one. So naturally, I went to Rouxbe for the answer.

Chocolate Ganache Cake
Ingredients
For the cake

220g Plain flour
430g Caster sugar
2 1/2tsp Baking powder
95g Cocoa powder
3 Eggs
150ml Light olive oil
300ml Milk
300ml Strong coffee

For the ganache

550g Plain chocolate
300ml Double cream
210g Butter

Method

Sift all of the dry ingredients for the cake into a mixing bowl.
Whisk all of the wet ingredients for the cake separately, then pour into the dry ingredients and whisk together.
Pour into greased sandwich tins and bake at 180C for 40-45 minutes, testing with a skewer.
Turn out onto a rack and allow to cool completely.
Scald the cream and pour over the chocolate and butter. Stir until all melted and combined.
Spread the ganache over one cake. Stack the second cake on top and cover the top and sides of the double-layer cake.

This amount of mixture actually makes quite a lot of cake I found - about three of my sandwich tins worth. I only have two sandwich tins though, so the third was a lined springform which, predictably enough given how runny the batter was, leaked slightly. But not enough to be a real problem. More of a problem was actually baking it - it seemed to take forever to cook through. It didn't help that I'm still not used to having a fan oven, so the cakes started to burn slightly before they were even remotely done - I turned the heat right down (to ~140C), and they took over an hour of baking before they were cooked through. But I think they're okay!

Anyway, I bet you're expecting photos now. Well, I hate to disappoint, so...
Here are the two sandwich tins after about five minutes in the oven. Looking good so far!
Here it is after my nerve failed me and I didn't dare bake it any longer. I suspect the very centre may still be undercooked, but I really didn't want to burn the top (any more than it had already burned!).
And they came out of the tin! With a little coercion, but they came out!Nearly finished! I've always taken the opinion that it doesn't matter what a cake looks like, as long as it tastes good. While I'm gradually coming around to the idea that this might not be entirely true, it still means that I've never really learned how to decorate a cake well - hence the rather messy cake and even messier surroundings. Oh well.
And the final cake. Once the ganache had mostly set, I was finally able to spread the sides with it.Here's the finished single-layer cake for Helen. Looks pretty good I'd say! As you can see by the glossy surface, this photo was taken before the ganache set.

Verdict: Marzipan Stollen and sour cherry and marzipan tart

2009-12-13T14:11:00.003Z

Lovely. The Stollen was definitely Stollen, though it was slightly dry. But it tasted good, was as light as it should have been and the marzipan layer added just enough sweetness and moistness to prevent it being boring. A definite success there. The sour cherry and marzipan tart was also really nice - the tartness of the cherries was balanced really well by the sweetness of the marzipan and the flavours go together so well too. The crème fraîche mixture didn't really add very much as far as taste goes, but it kept the whole tart nice and moist and helped offset the buttery pastry. This recipe works really well!

A taste of Christmas

2009-12-12T13:46:00.005Z

Valerie and James are hosting a Christmas party tonight, and they've asked everyone to bring something to contribute food-wise. I thought it'd be a perfect opportunity to try making Stollen - a leavened Christmas cake from Germany, and something I love. This is certainly not a traditional Stollen, but hopefully it'll be recognisable as Stollen! I also think that cherry and almond, while a winning combination at all times, also seems quite Christmassy. I'm also always on the lookout for cakes and tarts that are more interesting than the ones I normally bake, and when I came across this recipe, I thought I had to give it a go. So I'm baking two things to bring along with me!

Marzipan Stollen
Ingredients

100ml Kirsch
1tbsp Brown sugar
75g Sultanas
50g Mixed peel
50g Butter
250g Plain flour
1 Sachet fast action dried yeast (approx. 7g)
115ml Milk
20g Caster sugar
1 Egg, beaten
35g Glacé cherries, chopped
1/2tsp Ground cinnamon
1/2tsp Ground nutmeg
1tsp Vanilla extract
50g Flaked almonds
1tbsp Cherry brandy
100g Marzipan
Melted butter for glaze
Icing sugar for dusting

Method

Dissolve the brown sugar in the kirsch.
Soak the sultanas and mixed peel in the kirsch overnight.
Sift the flour into a bowl. Melt the butter and stir in with the yeast, milk, caster sugar and beaten egg.
Knead until the dough is soft, elastic and not too sticky.
Place in a floured bowl, cover with a damp tea towel (or oiled cling film) and leave to rise for 1 hour.
Drain the sultanas and mixed peel from the kirsch and mix with the cherries, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, almonds and cherry brandy.
Knead the fruit mixture into the dough.
Turn out onto a floured work surface and flatten into a rectangle approx 20cm x 15 cm.
Break up the marzipan into pieces and scatter over the dough.
Roll loosely lengthways and transfer to a floured baking sheet.
Cover with a damp tea towel and leave to prove for ~1hr30mins.
Bake at 180C for 35-40 minutes until pale golden.
While still hot, brush with melted butter and allow to cool fully so the butter is absorbed.
Sift icing sugar over the cooled Stollen.

Sour Cherry and Marzipan Tart
Ingredients
For the pastry

175g Plain flour
3tbsp Caster sugar
125g Butter
1 Egg

For the filling

150g Marzipan
350g Drained sour cherries
3 Eggs
200g Crème fraîche
2tbsp Caster sugar
1tsp Vanilla extract
50g Flaked almonds

Method

Rub the flour, sugar for the pastry and butter together until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
Add the egg and combine to form a pastry. Roll it out and line a flan ring.
Refrigerate for 30 minutes to rest the pastry.
Bake the tart case blind at 200C for 15 minutes.
Crumble the marzipan over the base of the tart case. Place the cherries on top.
Whisk the crème fraîche, sugar for the filling, eggs and vanilla extract together and pour over the cherries.
Sprinkle with the flaked almonds.
Bake at 200C for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is cooked and the almonds are a light golden brown.
Allow to cool on a wire rack.

Here's the Stollen dough just after kneading (end of step 4).
And here it is again after rising (end of step 5). It's impossible to tell, (I should have put something in the photos for scale), but it's risen quite significantly. You'll just have to take my word on that one.After kneading in the fruit/nut mixture and flattening (end of step 8). I did have to add quite a bit of flour to keep the Stollen to a doughy consistency as the fruit/nut mix was so moist. It may not be an authentic Stollen, but I tell you, that fruit and nut mixture really smells of Christmas!Add the marzipan (end of step 9).Ready for proving (end of step 10).And here it is again about to go into the oven. See, it really did rise! Straight out of the oven (end of step 12). It's a bit darker than I really had intended, but then I've still not got used to having a fan oven yet. But it's looking rather good!With the butter glaze now absorbed (end of step 13).And finished!
Now for the tart. Isn't this the prettiest looking (unbaked) tart case you ever saw? If you're wondering about the santoku knife in the picture, it's not completely random. It's what I used to trim off the excess pastry. I had to add a heck of a lot more flour to make this pastry dough incidentally - I think I must have added too much milk to start with.But disaster! After blind baking, the pastry shrank so much, there are no sides to the tart case! The base also rose significantly - maybe I shouldn't have been lazy and not weighed it down with baking beans.
The solution - baking parchment!And the assembled tart ready for the oven.The finished product! I'm quite pleased with it actually - I was expecting this to be a horrible messy failure after the disappearance of the walls of the case. This actually looks pretty good to me. But, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the taste and for news of that, you'll just have to wait, won't you?

Verdict: Dessert party

2009-12-06T14:05:00.006Z

Well, the dessert party was a success I'd say. A lot of fun, though in retrospect, some savoury additions would probably have been a good idea. Helen suggested some savoury crackers for in between desserts, which I think would be an excellent idea. Anyway, the desserts: The pavlova was like any other pavlova - too sweet, tasteless and boring. At least that's what I thought. But everyone else seemed to like it. I think meringues just aren't my thing. But the cherry gel worked really nicely with it. Next up was the chocolate fudge tart, which I thought was a bit too sweet. Again, no one agreed, but it was definitely good - not too rich, sweet or chocolatey, but quite a nice subtle tart. Kenny said it was his favourite of all of them, and I can see why, though it was more solid and less fudgy than I'd been hoping for. I think the orange sauce really helped though. The Black Forest Gateau was absolutely beautiful and, much to my satisfaction, received many Ooohs and Aaahs when I brought it out. The sponge was a little dense (it did suffer from me knocking out air from the egg whites I think) and could have done with kirsch in the middle layer, but it was most definitely a Black Forest Gateau and I was really rather pleased with it, despite its faults! The waterchestnut cake was wonderful (I thought), but as expected somewhat polarised the others - some liked it, others hated it. It's texture is a bit like quite a firm jelly, but with the bits of waterchestnut distributed all the way through. Mainly, I served it to let people try it - I figured it would be unlike anything anyone would have had before. The tiramisu was the final dish and was lovely. I think, though, it wasn't as good as usual - I think the wine takes too much away from the sweetness, so I think I will leave it out in future even if I have wine to hand. But anyway, I really enjoyed the evening and I think most of the others did too!

Final preparations

2009-12-05T15:38:00.012Z

Only a few hours to go, so it's time to finish off the last few desserts for the party. The last one I had originally planned was to be a chocolate fudge tart, served with an orange sauce. But seeing as I've got 6 egg whites left over from the tiramisu and a rather a lot of the cherry gel from the Black Forest Gateau, doing a pavlova seemed an obvious addition too.

Pavlova
Ingredients

6 Egg whites
340g Caster sugar
1 tsp Cornflour
1 tsp Lemon juice
1 tsp Vanila extract

Method

Whisk the egg whites until stiff.
Gradually the sugar and beat until a spoon can be stood in the mixture.
Beat in the cornflour, lemon juice and vanilla extract.
Spread out into an oval ~3cm thick on a lined baking sheet
Bake at 140C/Gas Mark 1 for ~1 hour until the top is a pale biscuit colour.
Remove from the baking sheet (peeling off the lining paper) and allow to cool fully on a wire rack.

Here's the pavlova ready for the oven.
And straight out of it. The cracks are from me being somewhat ham-fisted when removing the teflon baking liner.I also reduced the remaining cherry gel down to about half its original volume and added a generous slug of cherry brandy. I'll serve the pavlova with this sauce and the remaining whipped cream.

Chocolate Fudge Tart with an Orange Sauce
Ingredients
For the case

170g Plain flour
85g Butter
Very cold water

For the filling

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

For the sauce

170ml Orange juice
2 tbsp Grand Marnier
225g Caster sugar
1 tbsp Orange zest

Method

Make the shortcrust flan case. Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
Add 2 tbsp very cold water to mix into a crumbly dough, first with a knife then with one hand.
Cover and refrigerate for 30 mins.
Roll out to line a greased flan ring and prick the bottom of the flan case all over.
Weigh down with baking beans.
Bake at ~200C/Gas Mark 6 for ~20 mins then remove the baking beans and return to the oven for a further 10 mins until lightly golden.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool fully.
Make the filling. Melt the chocolate and butter together over a double boiler. Remove from the heat.
Mix the sugar, flour and eggs in a bowl and whisk until well blended.
Stir in the chocolate/butter mixture and pour into the flan case.
Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for ~50 mins until the filling is just set.
Allow to cool on a wire rack.
Make the sauce. Mix the orange juice, Grand Marnier and sugar saucepan. Cook over a low heat stirring constantly until reduce by half.
Stir in the zest and allow to cool.

I didn't have any Grand Marnier or orange zest, so I had to leave them out. Here's the tart case finished (step 7).And the completed flan ready for the oven.And straight from the oven. It's slightly burnt, but not horrendously so...Right, bring on the party!

The completion of the cake

2009-12-05T15:23:00.006Z

Now that the cake's cooled down fully, I can finish it off! Here's the cherry gel before mashing (step 10).
The cake cut and stacked.And a little photo series of the cake being assembled.As you can see, spreading cream over the cherry layer was difficult and resulted in lots of the cherry being pushed out. I had loads of cherry gel left over, so I decided to add cherry to the second layer too.So for the second layer, I tried doing the cream first. Unfortunately, I forgot to sprinkle any kirsch over the middle portion of the cake though.Mistake! Turns out it's important to do the cherry before the cream - otherwise the liquid can't get through to the sponge and be absorbed, so it just runs everywhere.But never mind. On goes the top (end of step 16).
Sculpting of the cream over the sides (step 18). Working with the cream was reminiscent of applying tile grout...And covered with grated chocolate (step 19). If you're wondering how to do this, I actually picked up pinches of chocolate and threw them at the cake. It's messy, but it works fairly well!
I've got no piping bag and I don't know how to pipe anyway, so the "rosettes" are (pretty messy) quinelles of cream instead. The top also had more cherry gel as well as grated chocolate. But I think the end result looks pretty darned good, personally. There will be cake...

From the land of cuckoo clocks*

2009-12-04T21:28:00.002Z

Okay, I've shied away from it for too long. It's time for me to get over my fear of falling completely flat on my face (at least in culinary terms) and just bake it. I refer, of course, to the Black Forest Gateau, which will be making an appearance in the upcoming dessert party. This baking year, and hence this blog, started with a cake-that-definitely-wasn't-a-black-forest-gateau, but was definitely intended as being along the same lines. Now, I think I'm ready to give the real thing a shot, or as-close-to-the-real-thing-as-availability-of-ingredients-will-allow at least. The recipe is as authentic as I could find - at least it's very much based on a couple of recipes I found that were in German...

Black Forest Gateau
Ingredients
For the cake:

140g Dark chocolate
75g Butter
6 eggs
180g Caster sugar
100g Plain flour
50g Cornflour
2tsp Baking powder

For the filling:

800g Drained sour cherries**
500ml Cherry juice
4tbsp Cornflour
2tbsp Caster sugar
100ml Kirsch
75ml Cherry brandy
800ml Double cream
45g Icing sugar
3tsp Vanilla extract
Glacé cherries
100g Grated dark chocolate

Method

Separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites until stiff.
Whisk the egg yolks with the caster sugar until fluffy.
Melt the chocolate and butter over a double boiler. and stir into the egg yolks/sugar mixture.
Sift the flour and baking powder into the mixture and fold in.
Fold in the egg whites.
Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at 175C/Gas Mark 4 for 40-45mins.
Remove from tin and allow to cool completely upside-down on a wire rack.
Cut the cooled cake horizontally into three layers.
Dissolve the cornflour and caster sugar in the cherry juice and bring to the boil.
Add the cherries and allow to cool slightly, then add half of the kirsch.
Mash into a gel and allow to cool completely.
Spread the cherry gel over the bottom layer of the cake.
Beat the cream, icing sugar and vanilla extract until stiff.
Spread a quarter of the cream over the cherry mixture and add the second layer of the cake.
Sprinkle the remaining kirsch over the second layer.
Spread another quarter of the cream over the top of the second layer and then add the top of the cake.
Sprinkle the cherry brandy over the cake.
Reserve enough cream to pipe cream rosettes around the edge. Cover the sides of the cake with the remaining cream.
Cover the cream and top the cake with grated chocolate.
Pipe cream rosettes around the edge of the top and place a glacé cherry on top of each one.

Here's the mixture at the end of step 3, simply because I thought it looks quite pretty.
And the batter about to be put in the oven (step 5). I actually forgot to add the flour until after I'd folded the egg white in, so hopefully I didn't knock too much air out of the mixture - though I did come perilously close to accidentally baking a flourless Black Forest Gateau!Straight from the oven - the top looks a bit uneven and slightly burnt......But it looks rather awesome when turned out upside-down!Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of the story of the Black Forest Gateau!

*Yes, cuckoo clocks actually originate from the Schwarzwald in southern Germany, not Switzerland as most people seem to think.
**If anyone is wondering (as I was) where you can get sour cherries in the UK, I eventually found them in syrup in big jars in Lidl. They're cheap too - 99p for a jar with 350g (drained weight) of Morello cherries.

A different dinner party...

2009-12-02T21:30:00.005Z

I had an idea a little while ago. I really like to throw dinner parties, but I enjoy baking and making desserts more than I enjoy cooking. I also realised that it's much more difficult to cook proper food for lots of people than it is to bake for lots of people. So I decided to throw a dinner party where I would only serve my guests dessert... four times over. The party is going to be on Saturday, so preparations start now!

Waterchestnut Cake
Ingredients

100g Waterchestnut flour
600ml Water
1 tin (350g drained weight) Waterchestnuts (drained)
40g Butter
150ml Milk
250g Soft brown sugar

Method

Sift the waterchestnut flour. Stir in half of the water and beat to a smooth paste.
Finely chop the waterchestnuts. Place in a saucepan with the butter, milk, sugar and the rest of the water and bring to the boil.
Add one third of the waterchestnut flour paste and bring back to the boil, stirring constantly.
Remove from the heat, add the remaining waterchestnut flour paste and stir until combined.
Pour into a cake tin and cover with foil. Steam for 25-30 minutes.
Allow to cool and refrigerate to set. Serve cold.

Here's the mixture about to be poured into the cake tins (end of step 4). There's more of it than I thought there would be!
But sandwich tins also hold more than I expected - all of that mixture is in these two tins.
And in the steamer. Mine's actually perched on top of a frying pan full of boiling water, as that was the only pan I had big enough to accommodate the steamer.
The finished cake! It looks just like it did before steaming, except for a little wisp of steam. Incidentally, I only uncovered it to take a photo - it was recovered immediately afterwards to cool.Tiramisu
Ingredients

6 Egg yolks
150ml Marsala
5 tbsp Dry white wine
85g Icing sugar
500g Mascarpone
36 Savoy biscuits (sponge fingers)
5 tbsp Cold strong black coffee
Cocoa powder

Method

Beat the egg yolks, half the Marsala, the white wine, icing sugar and mascarpone to form a smooth(ish) cream.
In a separate bowl, mix the remaining Marsala and the coffee.
Dip the biscuits in the coffee mixture and line the base of a tub.
Pour cream over the biscuit layer to cover.
Alternate layers of coffee-soaked biscuits and cream until all ingredients are used, finishing with a layer of cream.
Sprinkle the top with cocoa powder. Refrigerate to set.

I actually ran out of Marsala, so I was a bit short on that. I also tend not to add any wine, but I had half of a bottle sat in the fridge anyway, so I thought I might as well! Here's the finished article - looks pretty good, doesn't it?

Verdict: Swedish chocolate cake

2009-11-21T22:27:00.000Z

Rather good actually. It was nicely balanced, dense and slightly chewy - really it was more like a brownie than a typical cake. I do wonder how it would compare to the brownies I did previously though - perhaps at some point I will get around to baking them both and having a back-to-back comparison!

Yet another chocolate cake

2009-11-21T17:55:00.000Z

Anita and I are off to Jen and Julian's tonight for dinner and board games. So dessert is my responsibility. It's time to try out a recipe that Lindsey gave to me and has raved about - and it's a chocolate cake, so it should be good given her Belgian roots!

Swedish Chocolate Cake
Ingredients

120g Butter
240g Sugar
2tsp Vanilla extract
4tbsp (approx 30g) Cocoa powder
2 Eggs
70g Plain flour

Method

Melt the butter and mix in the sugar, cocoa powder and vanilla extract.
Add the eggs and combine.
Sift in the flour and stir until mixed.
Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at 160C/Gas Mark 3 for 35-40 mins.

Here it is ready for the oven.And straight from it. I think it looks pretty good!

Verdict: Hazelnut cake

2009-10-24T23:26:00.004+01:00

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

2009-10-24T14:45:00.004+01:00

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

Toast the hazelnuts (either in the oven or in a dry frying pan) and allow to cool.
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!).
Mix the chopped hazelnuts, flour, caster sugar and lemon zest in a bowl.
Melt the butter and add to the dry ingredients along with the eggs and milk.
Pour into a greased and floured (or lined) cake tin and bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 30 minutes.
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

2009-10-14T20:44:00.003+01:00

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

2009-10-14T19:47:00.008+01:00

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

Sift the flour into a bowl and rub the butter in until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
Mix in the caster sugar.
Add just enough water to bind into a dough and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
In the mean time, make the topping. In a frying pan, melt the butter, add the sugar and remove from the heat.
Core the apples and slice into thick wedges.
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.
Roll out the dough to a thickness of 5-10mm and line a flan ring.
Pour out the apple mixture into the flan case including the remaining butter/sugar mixture.
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

Roll out pastry and wrap chocolate squares individually.
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

2009-10-10T23:11:00.002+01:00

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

Melt the butter and half of the chocolate over a double boiler.
Remove from the heat and beat in the egg and vanilla extract.
Add to the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, yeast) and form a dough, adding enough milk to form a dough.
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.
Knock the dough back and press out into a rectangle roughly 1cm thick.
Chop the remaining chocolate and sprinkle over the dough.
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.
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...