Not a cob!

Fiona went to Morocco again recently, and came back raving about some of the bread that she had. Not the first time this has happened after she's been somewhere on holiday, but this time around tracking down what the bread was was quite a bit easier! After a little back-and-forth on trying to describe what the bread was like and a surprisingly short bit of speculative Googling, it turns out that it's the most common Morrocan bread, usually called khobz or khubz, but it also apparently goes by kesra or agroum. I've never been to Morocco, and never eaten this bread either (at least not knowingly), so this is a bit of a shot in the dark for me. I figured given that handicap, I'd best see if I could find a vaguely "authentic" looking recipe from the many, many options available and actually follow it properly. It turns out that there was another constraint lurking - we don't have any semolina in stock at the moment, and Fiona couldn't find it in the supermarket yesterday, which further constrained that option down a bit; in the end I settled on this recipe.

Khobz

Ingredients

• 500g Strong white flour
• 15g Salt (~2 tsp)
• 10g Dried yeast (~3 tsp)
• ~2 tsp Sugar
• 315ml Warm water
• 15g Olive oil (~2 tbsp)

Method

1. Mix flour and salt in a bowl, then form a well.
2. Place yeast and sugar in the centre of the well, and stir in a small amount of water to dissolve.
3. Add remaining water and oil, and mix to form a dough.
4. Knead until smooth.
5. Divide into two balls, then leave covered to rest for 15 mins.
6. Flatten each ball into a flat round approx 5mm thick.
7. Cover and leave to rise for ~1.5hrs.*
8. Prick surface with a fork, then bake at 225C for ~20-30mins until golden brown.

*It was around ~18C in the room. The recipe I followed suggested that the dough should spring back when pressed lightly.

Here's the dough in step 5, just before resting. I'd forgotten how easy and fun low hydration bread doughs with white flour could be!

At the end of step 6, just before the rise. 5mm is really quite thin...

There's not actually all that difference after the rise; I'm hoping that it's had long enough! Regardless though, I'm impatient, so it's going in the oven...

And straight out of the oven! Compared with the photos I've seen online, I think perhaps they're a bit too thin - I did think the ~5mm seemed rather too thin at the time I was pressing it out (in fairness, the original recipe said 1/4", but that's still only just over 6mm)...

The bottom sides - I decided to flip the loaves over for the last ~6 mins of baking, as the tops were nicely golden but the undersides seemed rather pale. My understanding is that these are normally baked in a large clay oven that looks vaguely like a pizza oven, so presumably they would bake rapidly on the underside through conduction as well.

They look pretty good apart from being thin though! We'll have to see what they're like when they've cooled off!

It turned out a little over-salted in my opinion, and definitely somewhat too dense - I guess those two might have been related. But it was certainly enjoyable still. I think I may need to revisit this one soon, perhaps once I've got some semolina; it was a rather low effort, low commitment bread that I think could be nice and versatile if I get it right!

...and a partridge in a pear cake!

We're halfway through the usual Christmas family tour at the moment, and have a night back at home between visits. I learned just a couple of days ago, that we'd volunteered to sort out dessert for the Christmas meal - so I guess I'm baking tonight! Since we've been driving for nearly 6 hours to get home, only have tonight to make something, and it's two days before Christmas so I'm not even sure if the shops are still open, it doesn't feel like the right time to do anything fancy or experimental - so time to revisit an old favourite! I'm baking this pear and almond cake, which is even easier to do now that we have a stand mixer!

The thing that really strikes me is that there doesn't seem to be very much mixture - I hope we have enough to feed everyone! I really don't remember the amounts being so small, but then looking back at the recipe, there's not all that much flour or ground almonds, so it makes sense.

The pears we got were a bit on the smaller side, so I used two and a half pears, rather than the usual two. It was a little more difficult fitting them all on top as a result.

It really is a pretty cake though!

Florentines

A little while back, I picked up a copy of the "Cakes and Pastries" volume of the Good Housekeeping step-by-step cookery series, published in 1984. It's delightfully dated, in rather a charming way. I fancied baking something super simple today, so I thought I'd give something from it a go! The flavourings were somewhat governed by what I happened still to have in stock...

Florentines

Ingredients

• 90g Butter
• 100g Granulated sugar
• 100g Flaked almonds
• 25g Mixed peel
• 25g Mixed dried fruit*
• 1tbsp Milk
• 100g Plain chocolate

*This was rather dried fruit heavy, as this was what was left from the time that I'd run out of raisins and pilfered them out of this bag

Method

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the sugar, then boil for one minute.
2. Remove from the heat and stir in the almonds, mixed peel, mixed dried fruit and milk.
3. Drop into heaps onto lined trays and bake at 180C for 10-15 mins until golden brown.
4. Remove from oven and press around the edge of each biscuit with a knife to neated the shape.
5. Allow to cool on the baking sheets.
6. Melt chocolate and spread over the top.**
7. Allow to cool fully on paper towels.

**This is not quite what the recipe calls for - it actually calls for 175g of plain chocolate, which you're supposed to spread on the base of the set biscuits and then make patterns in with forks. Having got to this stage, some of the florentines were looking decidedly crumbly (I suspect that my scales were playing up and I think I added too much almond), and I didn't expect that they'd have enough structural integrity to allow me to pick them up, let alone to spread chocolate on their bases. So I figured this would be a reasonable compromise, and that the chocolate might help hold them together once set. In hindsight, I might have been a bit overly concerned, and actually it might well have been fine.

Here they are just about to go into the oven.

Straight out of the oven.

And after adding chocolate. I thought it'd be interesting to try some without the chocolate, and also it saved me from opening another bar...

I probably should have guessed from the recipe, but these are just about the greasiest things that I've ever baked. They're basically deep-fried flaked almonds; absolutely delicious in small quantities, but you really wouldn't want to eat a lot! I'm not sure whether I prefer the chocolate covered ones or the plain ones though - they each have their own charm. Overall, they're pretty nice, but I'm not sure that they're that high up on my list, and I doubt I'll bother making them again.

Pistachio pinwheels

I'm taking a mental health day off work today, and got the urge to bake something. But without prior planning and also without a huge amount of attention span available (see: mental health day), I had to find something to bake that looked pretty easy and could be done from store cupboard ingredients. Time for the next recipe from Dessert Person! I'm doing a half-quantity batch of this, because I don't actually have a food processor, and only have a small food chopper with a 1 litre bowl, and I was worried about it fitting. In hindsight, that wouldn't actually have been a problem, although the food chopper itself doesn't do a fantastic job as a food processor - though with a little patience, it was adequate.

Pistachio Pinwheels

Ingredients

• 45g Shelled pistachios (I used salted roasted ones - not sure if that's what was intended though!)
• 85g Butter
• 53g Icing sugar
• 1 Egg yolk
• 1/2tsp Almond extract
• 65g Plain flour
• 1.5g Salt (1ml of generic fine table salt)
• 80g Ground almonds

Method

1. Blitz the pistachios until finely ground but not a paste, and then remove to a bowl.
2. Blitz the butter and sugar together until smooth.
3. Add the egg yolk and almond extract and blitz until smooth.
4. Add the flour and salt and blitz into a uniform dough, scraping down as needed.
5. Remove 2/3rds of the dough (~140g) to a mixing bowl and mix with the ground almonds.
6. Place the dough between two sheets of baking parchment and roll out into a ~15cm x 20cm rectangular slab, around 6mm thick.
7. Place the parchment-sandwiched slab on a baking tray and refrigerate for ~15mins.
8. Add the ground pistachios to the remainder of the dough in the food processor and blitz until mixed. Leave at room temperature.
9. Remove the almond dough slab from the fridge and spread the pistachio dough evenly over the top.
10. Roll the two layers tightly into a log.
11. Wrap the log in baking parchment and refrigerate for at least one hour.
12. Roll the log in sugar, then slice into ~12mm thick biscuits.
13. Bake on baking parchment-lined trays at 165C for 15-20 mins until golden around the edges.
14. Remove from oven and allow to cool fully on the trays.

I've never actually been very good at rolling dough out neatly

Truth be told, I'm not terribly good at rolling pastry up either!

I just eyeballed the thickness slicing, and am pretty pleased that I managed to nail it pretty much perfectly. In theory, I should have had just over 16 complete slices.

Action shot!

Fresh from the oven. Pretty, aren't they?

These are really rather nice. They look beautiful - far prettier than most of my baking, and certainly they look more impressive than the effort that was actually required. The texture's quite shortbread-like - perhaps they could have done with a teeny bit longer in the oven though, as they're still slightly soft in the middle. The flavour's good too, but the pistachio flavouring is quite subtle, though you can certainly taste it. It's a tad over-salted; I did think that perhaps using salted pistachios might cause that issue, but I was pretty much guessing how much salt to add anyway. It's not awful, but if I did it again, I'd probably double the quantities back to the original scaling, but maybe not increase the amount of salt at all.

Easter baking

It's the long Easter weekend, and I'm finally getting around to doing some (light) baking. I'm also very excited because I've just got a copy of  Claire Saffitz's Dessert Person, and it looks fantastic. I've got very little energy at the moment, partly from being ill, and partly from having done a whole heap of DIY stuff today, but having a stand mixer and a dishwasher is like having a cheat mode for simple baking. I happened to pick up some halvah with cocoa in Lidl the other day, so I thought I'd give this recipe from my new book a go, despite the fact that I really don't like white chocolate.

Salted Halvah Blondies

Ingredients

• 170g White chocolate
• 115g Unsalted butter
• 70g Tahini
• 100g Dark brown sugar
• 1 Egg
• 2 Egg yolks
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 165g Plain flour
• 3g Salt
• 1/2 tsp Baking powder
• 115g Halvah
• Sesame seeds
• Flaked salt

Method

1. Melt the white chocolate, butter and tahini together in the microwave.
2. Whisk the sugar in using a stand mixer. Add the egg, egg yolks and vanilla extract and whisk on medium-high until thick, smooth and glossy.
3. Fold in the flour, salt and baking powder using a spatula.
4. Crumble in the halvah and fold in gently.
5. Spread out into a greased, foil-lined tin.
6. Sprinkle top with sesame seeds and flaked salt.
7. Bake at ~175C for 20 minutes until golden brown around the edges and slightly jiggly in the centre.
8. Remove from oven and allow to cool fully in the tin before removing and slicing.

As you can see, it's a pretty thick batter.

I almost forgot to sprinkle the sesame seeds and salt over the top before it went in the oven.

A rare occasion where the oven glass is clean enough to take an awfully blurry in-progress shot!

And fresh from the oven!

The finished article.

These are really quite good. They are hideously rich - incredibly fatty and perhaps bordering on greasy at times - but also delicious. You can really taste the sesame - the sesame flavour is really strong (in a good way). I'm not always a huge fan of salted desserts, but this time around, it's just perfect - the salt helps cut through the fat and the sesame, and just stops it from being too cloying. And you can't really taste the white chocolate at all, but it absolutely adds to the richness and smoothness of this. You also can't really detect the halva - I wonder if I crumbled it up a bit too small; I think the idea was that you'd come across chunks of halva, much as you would with chocolate chunks in brownies. But overall, this was lovely - as someone who's never been much of a fan of blondies, this recipe stands out as one of the best I've had.

Birthday brownies

It's Chris' 30th birthday today, and seeing as it's a milestone birthday, I thought I'd bake something for it and give it to him when I see him in the lab tomorrow. I thought I'd try one of those recipes that I'd heard so much about, but never quite got around to trying - Bravetart's brownies. The recipe is as close as I could get it, except (1) there's no vanilla extract, because I just somehow missed it when I was reading the recipe, (2) the instant espresso powder is substituted for ordinary instant coffee, (3) instead of a 9"x13" tin, I used a 9"x9" square tin and a 20cm round tin, (4) everything's scaled up a tiny bit (specifically because I happened to have 200g of chocolate available, and didn't want to have a stupidly small amount left over) and (5) I decided to add some blanched almonds to the pan for half of each tin because who doesn't like nuts in their brownies?!

Bravetart Glossy Fudge Brownies

Ingredients

• 400g Butter
• 200g Dark chocolate
• 530g Granulated/caster sugar
• 65g Brown sugar
• 5g Salt
• 7 Eggs
• 1tsp Instant coffee powder
• 150g Plain flour
• 135g Cocoa powder
• 100g Blanched almonds

Method

1. Brown the butter by heating in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring continuously until the popping stops and the butter is golden yellow and silent.
2. Remove from heat and stir in chopped chocolate.
3. Whisk sugars, salt, eggs and instant coffee in a stand mixer on medium-high speed until extremely thick and fluffy (about 8 minutes).
4. Reduce speed to low and pour in the warm chocolate butter mixture.
5. Add the flour and cocoa powder and mix until combined.
6. Scatter blanched almonds over half of a lined tin.
7. Pour batter tin and bake at 180C for 30 minutes/to internal temp of 96C).
8. Allow to cool before slicing.

100g of blanched almonds is quite a lot when spread over such a small area!

This one is definitely not one that you'd want to do without a stand mixer. Here's the finished batter just before pouring into the tin. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how dark and rich it looks.

And here they are, ready for the oven!

And straight from the oven - I think they look pretty darned gorgeous!

Time for another classic

It's Fiona's dad's birthday, and it's a milestone birthday this time - so what better time than to try out a classic recipe. I've wanted to give this one a go for a while, so it seemed like a good opportunity. This is a classic Elizabeth David recipe, from French Country Cooking, but countless variations abound online. I tried largely to stick to the actual original Elizabeth David recipe (this version is it, though rather roughly converted to metric), but naturally with a bit of deviation mostly for practical reasons (and also scaled up by 25%).

St Émilion au Chocolat

Ingredients

• 40 Amaretti biscuits*
• Small amount of cognac**
• 140g Butter
• 140g Sugar
• 180ml*** Whole milk
• 1 Egg yolk
• 280g Dark chocolate

Method

1. Arrange a layer of amaretti on the bottom of a small casserole dish and sprinkle with cognac to soak.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together.
3. Scald the milk and allow to cool.
4. Mix the egg yolk into the milk.
5. Melt the chocolate.
6. Mix the milk mixture into the chocolate.
7. Mix the butter and sugar mixture in.
8. Stir until smooth.
9. Cover the amaretti biscuits with the chocolate cream.
10. Arrange another layer of amaretti over the top and sprinkle with cognac again.
11. Cover with the remaining chocolate cream.
12. Decorate with a couple of amaretti biscuits and refrigerate overnight.

*The original recipe calls for "macaroons" (which presumably means either almond macaroons or macarons, as opposed to coconut macaroons). I'm far too lazy to make macaroons though, so I just bought some amaretti biscuits instead (which seems to be both a common, and also quite reasonable substitution). It also only says to use 12-16 of them (but don't forget that I've scaled up by 25%). I suspect the change in dish (you were supposed to use a soufflé dish, but it turns out that I've got nothing that even remotely resembles one) might fundamentally be why I ended up using so many more of them. Or perhaps amaretti biscuits are smaller than the typical macaroon?
**E.D. calls for "a little rum or brandy", so wasn't overly prescriptive about what booze to use.
***E.D.'s recipe specifies "a teacup" of milk, which had me pretty stumped. Happily though, a little bit of searching online eventually brought me to this webpage which has a quote from none other than Elizabeth David herself, saying "English teacups, breakfast cups and coffee cups used as measuring units make sense to us; there could hardly not be a teacup in the house, and, give or take a spoonful, its capacity is always about five ounces; a breakfast cup is seven ounces to eight ounces; a coffee cup is an after-dinner coffee cup, or two and a half ounces". And then at last, trusting Google, we eventually establish that 5oz is 142ml.

Here's the first layer of amaretti, ready to go. I smashed up a couple of biscuits to help fill in the gaps.

I didn't worry about leaving spaces on the second layer though.

And here's the finished article, ready for the fridge!

Edit: I forgot to update this post after having tried it! Well, there's a very good reason why this recipe seems to have quite such a reputation for being great - it really is! I think that the massive increase in the proportion of biscuits was probably a good change to have made, but this was absolutely lovely. It's incredibly decadent and rich - you really wouldn't want to have a big portion in one go - but rather delightful!

Baking freebies

I've never used a shop-bought premade tart case before, but we were recently given two of them. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it (or indeed, actually how to use it - like are you supposed to prebake the case before filling it?), but rooting around through the cupboard, I also found a jar of malt extract that I'd been given aaaaages ago, another thing that I wanted to do something with but again, didn't really know how to use it. So what better time than now? I found this very promising looking recipe for a malted chocolate banana tarte tatin, so I'm just following that recipe for the filling and pouring it into the cases.

Malted Chocolate Banana Tart

Ingredients

• 150g Unsalted butter
• 125g Malt extract
• 50g Dark chocolate
• 2 Sweet pastry tart cases (210g each)
• 5 1/2 large, ripe bananas (around 1kg before peeling)*
• Chopped, roasted hazlenuts

Method

1. Heat the butter and malt extract in a frying pan until melted.
2. Turn the heat up to high, bring to a simmer and simmer for about 30 seconds.
3. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly.
4. Finely chop the chocolate and stir in the still hot mixture, stirring until smooth.
5. Pour into the tart cases.
6. Peel and slice the bananas lengthways, and arrange cut-side-down on the malt/butter/chocolate mixture.
7. Bake at 200C for ~20 mins.
8. Allow to cool slightly so that the pastry hardens a little before removing from the tray.
9. Sprinkle hazlenuts on top.

*It was supposed to be 6 bananas, but I couldn't quite fit them into the cases!

Here they are about to go into the oven:

And straight out of it:

And a slightly better photo now that they're nearly set. I decided only to add hazlenuts to one of them initially, in case it turned out to be better without them.

As it turns out, the hazlenuts are definitely a good idea.

Overall, it's nice, but not quite as good as I thought it was going to be. I think that it could have done with longer in the oven - where the filling had cooked a bit more and started to caramelize, it turned absolutely lovely. And I'm not convinced that it needed the chocolate at all - I think it might have been more elegant and more interesting without it. But even still, it's pretty tasty!

What to do with egg whites

In the past, I've normally made a pavlova alongside the tiramisu, to use up the egg whites. But I don't actually like meringue all that much. So this time around, I thought I'd try something a bit different. I found a recipe for an easy chocolate mousse that looked, well, really easy.

Easy Chocolate Mousse

Ingredients

• 150g Dark chocolate
• 6 Egg whites
• 2tbsp Caster sugar

Method

1. Melt the chocolate in the microwave.
2. Whisk the egg whites with the sugar until it forms stiff peaks.
3. Fold the egg whites into the chocolate.
4. Pour into ramekins and refrigerate to set.

Simple, no? Still not quite simple enough for me not to make a bit of a hash of it - I lost a heck of a lot of air in the folding, and I think my chocolate was too cool to begin with and started to set immediately, so I've got flecks throughout. It doesn't look stellar, but it was ridiculously simple.

It's been a very long time...

For some reason, the idea to make a tiramisu occurred to me over Christmas, so I got stuff in for it. I've only got one recipe for tiramisu, which I'm fairly sure is a Prue Leith recipe from the Good Book, so it's the same recipe as the last time - which apparently was all the way back in 2009! As ever, I left out the wine, and was somewhat short on sponge fingers because apparently the Sainsbury's pack of sponge fingers that "serves 30" only came with 26 in it. Apparently having an entire sponge finger would be excessive...

Here it is just before going into the fridge. It turns out that not only do I still have the tupperware container that I used the last time, but I remembered that it was the perfect size for this tiramisu!

Simple cherry muffins

I don't get to bake as often as I used to, but sometimes you just wake up and feel like baking. Today was one of those days. I thought I'd try to use up the frozen cherries that we have had sitting in the freezer for far too long, so cherry muffins sounded like a good idea. I'm cribbing this recipe, which just happened to be one of the first few search results.

Simple Cherry Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 Egg
• 120g Vegetable oil
• 155g Milk
• 1-2tbsp* Vanilla extract
• 300g Plain flour
• 3tsp Baking powder
• 100g Caster sugar
• 205g Frozen cherries

Method

1. Mix the egg, oil, milk and vanilla together.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the flour, baking powder and sugar together.
3. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.
4. Fold in the frozen cherries
5. Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180C for ~25 mins.

*I didn't bother measuring this, so I don't know how much vanilla I actually used. I was pretty heavy handed with it though!

One small snag was that I didn't have a suitable cupcake/muffin tin. I had an idea though (which might end up being an awful one), which was that if I crammed the cases together on a normal baking tray, they'd push up against each other as they expanded and they'd support each other. So goes the theory anyway - we might just end up with it taking ages to bake in the centre because of the proximity. In any case, this is what they looked like going in to the oven.

You know, it kinda worked! They're all weird shapes as a result, but I kinda like that. The ones in the centre were looking rather a lot paler than the ones at the edges though, so after taking this photo, I took the edge ones off the tray and put the inner ones back in for another few minutes.

It's an awful photo, but here's the finished result. I couldn't quite get them onto a single layer on the plate...

And of course, the verdict - pretty good overall. They're not the most exciting muffins ever, but they're nice. They're also not overly sweet, which is usually my concern when trying a random recipe that I've just found online; in actual fact, I'd say that these are nicely balanced. Nothing to write home about perhaps, but they go very well with a cup of tea!

Birthday cinnamon rolls

It's Rich's 75th this week, and there's a big party planned for the weekend. I said that I'd bake something for it, and a request was made for cinnamon rolls, so that's what I'm doing! I'm doing a double-batch this time around. It's essentially the normal recipe as far as ingredients goes - I used ~120ml spiced rum and ~180ml white rum to soak the raisins, and substituted a small amount of the caster sugar in the filling with dark soft brown sugar (mostly to use up the bag of it). I also ran out of raisins (which, let's face it, are basically the same as sultanas anyway), but discovered that cheap mixed fruit is just a mixture of raisins and mixed peel, so I spent a ridiculous 10 minutes picking raisins out of a bag of mixed fruit to make up the difference.

The real change to the recipe this time around is that, in order to make the timings work, I'm going for an overnight proof. After forming and cutting the rolls, I've popped each of the trays of cinnamon rolls in a bin bag to prevent them drying out, and put them in the fridge. I'll get them out of the fridge in the morning, and give them a few (hopefully around 3) hours to warm up to room temperature, then egg wash, bake and finish as normal. Fingers crossed that this works!

------

And a quick addition from the next day - looks like it wasn't harmed by the overnight proof. They got just shy of 3 hours at room temperature before going into the oven, and while I would have liked to have got a little bit more of a rise before they went in, they're not looking bad. Here they are post egg-wash about to go in:

Straight from the oven, they're looking as good as usual!

¡ǝlddɐǝuᴉԀ

 It's a bank holiday, and I'm not teaching for once! The weather's a bit crap too, so it's a perfect opportunity to bake something. For no reason other than the fact that I saw it online and it looked good and easy, I'decided to go for this pineapple upside-down cake from King Arthur Baking, with only very minor substitutions for what ingredients I had.

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Ingredients

For the topping

• 57g Butter
• 106g Soft dark brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp Ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp Ground ginger
• 1 large tin (425g) Pineapple slices
• 7 Frozen cherries 

For the cake

• 43g Butter
• 149g Granulated sugar
• 1 Egg
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 3/4 Baking powder
• 1 tsp Vanilla extract
• 150g Plain flour
• 113g Milk

Method

1. Melt the butter for the topping.
2. Mix in the dark brown sugar, cinnamon and ginger.
3. Spread over the base of a greased cast iron skillet*.
4. Arrange the pineapple slices and cherries over the top.
5. Cream the butter for the cake and granulated sugar together.
6. Beat in the egg, salt, baking powder and vanilla.
7. Mix in the plain flour and milk, alternating a little at a time, to form a relatively thick batter.
8. Spoon over the toppings.
9. Bake at 190C for ~30 mins until a skewer comes out clean.
10. Remove from oven and wait 3 minutes.
11. Invert onto a plate and wait 30s before lifting the pan off.

*I think I've got a 10 inch skillet

Here's the topping at the end of step 4:

And here's the cake ready for the oven. The layers are both fairly thin, but I did get full coverage on both.

It released cleanly from the pan! Looks pretty darned good in my opinion.

This one surprised me with how good it was overall. The cake part is rather bland and boring, but it's thin enough that it doesn't really matter. But the topping is lovely - rather sweet, but again thin enough not to be overwhelming. For the low effort required, this cake is really rather good!