It's my party and I'll bake if I want to

I'm having some friends over for drinks this evening, and seeing as I'm now officially on holiday (though I might yet have to pop in to the lab tomorrow briefly), I thought it'd be a nice chance to bake something. Fiona reminded me the other week that I hadn't baked any cinnamon rolls this year, with no ulterior motive at all in drawing my attention to that fact, I'm sure. But she did raise a good point, and the cinnamon rolls are easy, satisfying to make and a bit of a crowd pleaser, so that's what I'm doing! It's the same recipe as ever (I mean, it's so good, why would I tweak it?!), though I went with apple juice to soak the sultanas rather than alcohol.

Vanquishing foes

There are one or two baking (or in this case, bakingish) things that have always terrified me into not attempting. Croissants are an obvious example. Macarons as well, though I did sidestep that one by making a cheaty version that was never supposed to look like those beautiful pillows with perfect feet. (One day I'll summon the courage to make them properly, but who knows when that'll be?). Baguettes are also in the queue. Today though, it's not a classic, highly technical recipe that I'm finally going to attempt; in fact, it's possibly one of the simplest things I could make. Rather, it's an easy technique that I've always found a little intimidating - deep frying. It's entirely irrational, but there's something about having so much hot oil in a pan that seems a little scary. But I do also love doughnuts, and it feels like a perfect way for me to dip my toes (not literally) into deep frying, so here goes. I'm using this recipe, with only very minor modifications for laziness.

Doughnuts
Ingredients

• 1 Egg
• 90ml Water
• 150g Buttermilk
• 60g Butter
• 60g Caster sugar
• 450g Plain flour
• 1 sachet (7g) Fast action dried yeast
• Caster sugar for coating
• Ground cinnamon for coating

Method

1. Put all of the ingredients (except for the coatings) in a stand mixer with a dough hook and mix until a dough forms. Continue to mix for ~5 mins.
2. Place bowl in a bin bag and leave to rise for ~1hr.
3. Knead briefly. Shape into doughnut shapes and place on parchment.
4. Leave to rise in an (off) oven, with a tray of boiling water underneath.
5. Heat sunflower oil to ~180C.
6. Fry each doughnut until golden brown underneath, then flip and fry other side.
7. Allow to cool slightly on kitchen towel.
8. Roll in a mixture of caster sugar and cinnamon to coat.

Here are the freshly formed doughnuts at the end of step 3, before the final rise. I thought I'd better experiment with different sizes and shapes.

Disaster! So funny story - it turns out, I'm not very good at thinking sometimes. I decided to put the baking paper straight onto the oven's wire rack, and then put the pan of boiling water immediately below it. Obviously (at least it's obvious now that it's happened), the steam just soaked the paper entirely, meaning that I lost a couple of doughnuts from the edge when the paper just curled downwards and fell through the rack, and all of the others are very much wet and hideously stuck to the now sodden paper.

Here they are after rescuing as best I could. I went with flipping the whole thing over to expose the wet side, teasing the soaked paper off as best I could (some scraping was needed), and I'm just going to let them dry for a minute or two before frying. The original recipe said to use the steam to try to prevent a skin from forming on the doughnuts - I'm now doing exactly the opposite and relying on a skin forming to let me get them into the oil without sticking to everything!

I didn't set anything on fire, and didn't burn myself, so I'm counting this as a success. I suspect my doughnuts might be slightly over-done, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my oil was a bit too hot, so some of the big guys might be a little undercooked in the middle. But apart from that, they're looking pretty promising, if a little misshapen.

Of course, a bit of sugar and cinnamon makes anything look tasty!

So, what's the verdict? Well, suffice to say... OM NOM NOM NOM! NOM! NOM! And just look at that crumb! Despite the minor disaster midway through, these probably couldn't have gone much better. The texture is best described as pillowy - superbly soft, wonderful doughy goodness. The outside crust has just the right amount of crunch, and they taste great. I omitted the salt from the dough on the grounds that I ended up (mostly) using salted butter, and it probably could have done with a tiny touch more salt in the end, but it's a pretty minor point. I'm super happy with these though - they were definitely worth the hassle!

BraveTart Brownies

I saw these gorgeous brownies on Reddit a while back, and saved the link because I thought I absolutely had to try baking them. It's certainly not the first time I've tried doing brownies, but they have seemed a bit of a weak spot in my baking repertoire, and previous attempts have had a pretty mixed success rate. I also don't yet have a go-to recipe, so I've got my fingers crossed that these turn out like the ones that inspired me!

The recipe is the BraveTart recipe on Serious Eats. The only changes I made were to omit the instant coffee and to add an extra egg as the eggs I had to hand were relatively small.

Brave Tart Brownies
Ingredients

• 340g Unsalted butter
• 170g Dark chocolate chips
• 450g Caster sugar
• 55g Soft brown sugar
• 4g Salt
• 7 Eggs
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 125g Plain flour
• 115g Cocoa powder

Method

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over a low heat. Once melted, brown the butter by simmering over a medium heat, stirring continuously, until the hissing stops.*
2. Remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate.
3. Mix the sugar (both types), salt, eggs and vanilla in a stand mixer on a medium-high setting for ~8 minutes until very thick and fluffy.
4. Turn the stand mixer down to low and pour in the chocolate/butter mixture.
5. Sift the flour and cocoa powder together. Add to the mixer in one go, then finish the mixing by hand with a spatula.
6. Pour the batter into foil-lined pans and bake at 180C for ~30 mins until barely firm.
7. Allow to cool in the tin before cutting and removing.

*The butter foamed up and tried to escape the pan much like pasta water does - this was when I decided that the butter was browned enough!

Check out this action shot! This is the finished batter (and it smells amazing!).

Ready for the oven. There's quite a lot of brownie...

Pretty gorgeous straight out of the oven. Lovely glossy top.

Insomnia bread

I've been sleeping pretty dreadfully this last week, and while it's been getting better over the last few nights, I've still been waking up at unpleasant hours of the night and being unable to sleep. Last night, I woke up about 4am, and by about 6am it was clear that I wasn't getting back to sleep in a hurry, so I decided to get up and get a sourdough loaf going. Given that I started this at silly o'clock, and it's been a while since I last tried baking bread, I thought I'd better keep this one simple, but it's nice to get back to doing bread. I think this is also my first loaf since getting my hands on a stand mixer, which makes life much, much easier!

Insomnia Bread
Ingredients

• 200g Aage*
• 300ml Water
• 400g Strong wholemeal flour
• 6g Salt

Method

1. Mix Aage, 200ml water and 200g flour in a bowl.
2. Wrap in a bin bag and leave to rise for ~8.5hrs.
3. Add the remaining 200g flour and 100ml water, and the salt.
4. Knead in the stand mixer with a dough hook until the dough comes together and stops sticking to the sides.
5. Knead briefly by hand**, return to the mixing bowl and rewrap in the bin bag.
6. Leave to prove in a warm place for ~3.5hrs.
7. Place a Dutch oven*** in the oven and preheat to 220C (as hot as the oven allows).
8. Transfer the dough to the Dutch oven, sprinkle with water and close up.
9. Turn the oven down to 180C and bake for ~25mins.
10. Uncover and bake for a further ~10 mins.

*In case anyone is new or has forgotten, Aage is my sourdough starter. He's fed entirely with wholemeal flour, and is typically about 50% hydration, though I always feed him by eye, so this does vary quite a bit...

**I find that once the dough has reached a certain point, the stand mixer doesn't really do anything because the dough wraps itself around the hook and just whirls around as a solid ball. By this point though, the hard work has been done, and it's pretty easy and quick to finish off the kneading by hand.

***My Dutch oven is actually a Lodge combo cooker. It's absurdly expensive in the UK (£74 on Amazon UK at the time of writing), but also absurdly cheap in the US ($34.90). Definitely worth getting at the American price, but almost certainly not at the British price!

This one tasted absolutely lovely - just the right amount of sourness - but the texture wasn't quite right. I had noticed that the dough was a bit overly wet (I think I was being a bit overly optimistic on hydration levels this time around), but I failed to account for it in the bake. As a result, it was really rather doughy in the middle - it could really have done with much longer in the oven uncovered to help dry it out - but not unpleasantly so. Not a perfect loaf, but still pretty darned tasty!

More cinnamon

We're having a weekend away with Fiona's family for her birthday. As it's a celebration, I made some cinnamon rolls, as Fiona quite likes them. Same recipe as ever- they've gone down pretty well!