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 

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.

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!

¡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!

My First Makgeolli Experiment - Day 1

This isn't even remotely baking, but it does involve yeast, so maybe it's relevant enough anyway. I really like makgeolli, but it's really expensive to buy in the UK. But it also looks really easy to brew a basic makgeolli, as long as you can get hold of nuruk - which was where the snag was for quite a long time. But eventually, I discovered that there is a single brand of nuruk that is imported into the UK by HMart (and this is the only brand and only supplier I've managed to find after quite extensive searching). Unhelpfully, it's not labelled as "nuruk" but rather Choripdong Enzyme Powder, which explains why I had such a hard time finding it. But now that I've found it, I've bought some together with a couple of kilos of sweet rice (chapssal), and it's time to try making my first makgeolli! I'm following the basic recipe in the Primer on Brewing Makgeolli produced by the Korean government, but I've been surprised to discover that pretty much all of the basic starter danyangju recipes that I've seen agree incredibly closely on the ratio of about 1:1:0.1 for rice:water:nuruk.

First Makgeolli

Ingredients

• 750g Sweet rice (chapssal)
• 750ml Water
• 70g Nuruk

Method

1. Wash the rice until the water runs clear.
2. Soak the rice for 2-6 hours.
3. Drain the rice well.
4. Steam the rice in a steamer lined with damp cheesecloth for 40 minutes.
5. Remove the rice from the steamer and spread out to cool until it reaches ~25C.
6. Put the cooled mixed rice in the fermentation jar with the water and nuruk, and mix thoroughly until the rice absorbs all of the water.
7. Wipe down the insides of the jar, and cover loosely with the lid. I used a paper towel underneath the jar lid with the rubber gasket removed.
8. Leave in a warm place (ideally ~20-25C) to ferment.
9. Stir thoroughly every 12 hours for the first 48 hours, wiping down the sides of the jar after each stir.
10. Leave to ferment for a total of ~7-10 days.
11. Once fermentation is complete, stir the mixture together and filter through cheesecloth.
12. Bottle the liquid and store refrigerated. Mix and dilute with water to drink.

Lots of the blogs I read and videos I watched really emphasised washing the rice until the water ran completely clear. I washed the rice continuously for around 15 minutes and the water still wasn't completely clear, so I gave up and decided that was good enough. I can't see it making any tangible difference given how washed the rice was - but at least all of our houseplants got well watered!

This is the rice just before steaming - it turns out that 750g is quite a lot of rice!

This is how it looks at the end of step 7. It's taken a surprisingly long time in total - I started washing rice a little before 11am this morning, and it was 6pm by the time it reached this stage. Admittedly, the first 5 hours was essentially just letting the rice soak, but it still feels like it's been a long process!

A well-baked tart?

I saw this post on Reddit last week, and decided that baking a bakewell tart sounded like an excellent idea. And so now I'm doing just that. Sometimes there's no more backstory to my bakes than that!

Bakewell Tart

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 140g Plain flour
• 7g (~1tbsp) Caster sugar
• 2g Salt
• 70g Butter
• ~2tbsp Cold water

For the filling

• 125g Caster sugar
• 125g Butter
• 1 Egg
• 30g Plain flour
• 125g Ground almonds
• 90g (~3tbsp) Black cherry jam*
• 25g Flaked almonds

Method

1. Rub the flour, sugar, salt and butter for the pastry together until it resembles breadcrumbs.
2. Add just enough water to form a dough.
3. Roll out and line a greased pie dish**.
4. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.
5. Prick the base with a fork, fill with baking beans.
6. Bake blind at 180C for ~15 minutes, remove the baking beans and bake for a further ~5 mins.
7. Cream the butter and sugar for the filling together.
8. Beat in the egg.
9. Mix in the flour and ground almonds.
10. Spread the jam generously over the base of the pie dish, then fill with almond mixture.
11. Sprinkle the flaked almonds over the top.
12. Bake at 160C for ~40mins, then increase temperature to 200C for ~5 minutes to brown.
13. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before removing from the pie dish and leaving to cool fully.

*Yes, I know raspberry is probably most traditional, but (a) it's what I had in the fridge and (b) cherry jam is tastier than raspberry jam anyway.

**For reference, my pie dish is around 16cm diameter (quite small) - but could easily be anywhere between 15cm and 18cm depending on how you choose to measure it.

I can hardly believe it - for once, I actually got the quantities of both pastry and filling right! Here's the tart about to go into the oven.

Gosh it looks good fresh from the oven! It wobbles rather a lot more than I had expected though - I'm hoping that it sets properly when it cools. I'm a little concerned that there might not be enough egg and/or flour in the frangipane.

I don't think I needed to worry. By the time I turned it out from the dish, it had firmed up nicely. It released incredibly easily too!

And obviously, I didn't have the patience to wait for it to cool, so I dived straight in while it was still hot. Which is a terrible mistake actually - you can see that the jam started leaking out and warm frangipane isn't actually as nice as it is once it's cold. But just look at it!

First impressions are pretty good on the whole. The pastry could have been a bit shorter, but it's not tough either. I definitely oversalted it slightly though - not horrendously so, but you can taste the salt which isn't ideal. For the filling, it's hard to tell while the frangipane is still warm, but I think there might be a little too much butter in the filling, and I'm also not quite sure I got the jam:frangipane ratio right. We will have to wait and see once it's actually cooled!

Edit: The verdict once it cooled was pretty similar to what I thought beforehand. The oversalted pastry was less noticeable, but the frangipane definitely seemed too buttery - perhaps a little less butter and maybe a little more flour would have helped. Fiona and I both agreed that it could have done with a bit more jam too. I think perhaps a slightly thicker pastry would have been nice as well, and would have helped offset the softness of the frangipane. But overall, it's pretty good!

A very special birthday

Yesterday was a milestone day for a key contributor to my baking. It was 10 years ago(!) that we first said hello to Aage, and he's been a faithful companion ever since. I had hoped to be able to bake a loaf of bread to celebrate his 10th birthday yesterday, but we had been travelling back from a Thanksgiving weekend away with Fiona's family, and I was absolutely exhausted and Aage hadn't been fed. But that very first sourdough loaf ten years ago was made with an overnight rise - so today is still the 10th anniversary of the very first loaf that I baked with Aage. However you cut it though, we're celebrating a decade with Aage!

A Birthday Loaf

Ingredients

For the sponge

• 175g Aage
• 150g Warm water
• 100g Wholemeal flour

For the dough

• 100g Warm water
• 300g Wholemeal flour
• 8g Salt

Method

1. Mix together the ingredients for the sponge in a mixing bowl and wrap in a bin bag.
2. Leave in a warm place for ~5 hours.
3. Add the sponge to all the remaining ingredients and mix to form a dough.
4. Knead for ~15 minutes, then shape and wrap in the bin bag once again.
5. Leave to prove for ~1.25 hours.
6. Preheat oven to 220C with a Dutch oven inside.
7. Score and place dough in Dutch oven, sprinkling lightly with water.
8. Bake for 15 minutes.
9. Remove lid of Dutch oven, turn oven down to 200C and bake for a further 15 minutes.

This one's a bit of a quick, relatively basic loaf. It's actually quite a low hydration bread because I wanted to make it easy for myself given that I was baking on a weeknight. But it's really nice to be baking by hand again - it's been quite a long time!

I baked this one on the baking parchment. I still haven't got the hang of scoring my bread...

The cuts opened up nicely, even if they did look rather raggedy before going it went into the oven

I was rushing this one so that we could have the bread for dinner, so this loaf was a bit underdone - I knew it would be, but I was getting hungry and impatient. But it's still not bad - just a little stodgy in the centre. I think it could have done with another quarter hour or maybe even half an hour longer in the oven. But the crust has a lovely texture to it, and there's a great flavour to the bread anyway, so it's not all bad!

Bara brith

I hadn't even heard of bara brith until stumbling across it online last week, but it sounded fun, tasty and easy! From my brief dive down the rabbit hole, it seems that it's something that's evolved over time, starting off as a yeasted bread with dried fruit into something more cakey. I'm very much doing the latter here, but at some point I might also get around to baking one of the more traditional recipes I found. I'm winging it a bit, but it's essentially a mashup of these three recipes.

Bara Brith

Ingredients

• 280g Dried mixed fruit
• 300ml Strong tea
• 150g Dark soft brown sugar
• 250g Plain flour
• 2tsp Baking powder
• 2.5g Salt
• 1tsp Mixed spice
• 1tbsp Whisky marmalade
• 1 Egg
• 20g Melted butter

Method

1. Soak the dried fruit in the tea overnight.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and mixed spice).
3. Stir in the mixed fruit, tea, marmalade, egg and melted butter and mix thoroughly.
4. Pour into a lined loaf tin and bake at 160C for ~1hr15, covering with foil if it gets too dark.
5. Allow to cool slightly and remove to a wire rack to cool.

Here is the finished article! (The colour balance has gone a bit weird - it's not nearly such a strange colour in reality)

And the verdict? Well, it's nothing special - it is essentially just a tea loaf after all - but then I don't think that baking always needs to be special. It is, however, really rather nice, certainly when still warm and fresh from the oven - the real test will come tomorrow once it's cold. For now at least, I will say that it's pretty lovely - it's super moist from the tea-soaked fruit and the long, low temperature bake, and the spice is relatively subtle, but sufficient to prevent it from being boring. And best of all, it's such an incredibly easy thing to bake - something that you can really easily do on a weeknight!

[Update] I think I wasn't quite generous enough with my initial verdict - this has shot right up to pretty near the top of my list of favourite baking things! It's really not special at all, but I really think that's a big part of its charm - something that you can just enjoy without necessarily paying all that much attention to. It's stayed really moist, and the flavours are still really nicely balanced - I don't know if I'd say that they've noticeably developed though. Given how easy this one is to do, I think it's absolutely one of my best recipes now!

Cake or elaborate cocktail?

It's been a while since I baked anything, but I've still been bookmarking the interesting sounding recipes that I stumble across. This time around, it's a rum cake - but it caught my eye because the original recipe which I'm basing this cake on had 2/3rds of a bottle of rum in it! Unfortunately though, it's an American recipe, and includes instant vanilla pudding mix as an ingredient. Lots of forums seem to suggest that instant custard powder is an adequate substitute, but using this recipe as a rough guide, I've just tweaked the quantities and added a bit of cornflour instead. I've also scaled the quantities down and knocked down the amount of sugar, as I find that most American recipes are ridiculously oversweetened - and this one looked like it's got far too much sugar to me. This one's quite a step into the unknown, as I've messed around so much with the starting recipe that it's probably not fair to call it the same cake...

Boozy rum cake

Ingredients

For the cake

• 175g Butter
• 520g Granulated sugar*
• 400g Plain flour
• 30g Cornflour**
• 2tsp (9g) Baking powder
• 5g Salt
• 150g Vegetable oil
• 6 Eggs
• 180g Milk
• 180g Spiced rum
• 20g*** Vanilla extract

For the syrup

• 190g Granulated sugar
• 60g Water
• 110g Butter
• 120g Spiced rum
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract

*There's no particularly good reason why I went with granulated sugar this time around - I just didn't expect it would make any real difference to this cake, and it used so much sugar that I figured I'd go with the cheaper option!

**I had actually intended to add 40g of cornflour, but ran out. I can't see it making any real difference though.

***I couldn't be bothered to grab a tablespoon. I don't know how much 20g of vanilla extract is, but I was aiming for about 2tbsp...

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar together in a stand mixer until fluffy.
2. Add the dry ingredients (flour, cornflour, baking powder, salt) and mix until homogenous and breadcrumb-like.
3. Drizzle the oil in gradually.
4. Beat the eggs and mix with the milk. Gradually add to the mixer.
5. Gradually add the rum and vanilla.
6. Pour into greased and floured cake pans.
7. Bake at 180C for 20 minutes, then turn down to 160C for a further 25 minutes.
8. Heat the sugar and water in pan, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
9. Stir in the butter and remove from the heat.
10. Stir in the rum and vanilla.
11. Remove the cakes from the oven and turn out from the pans while still hot.
12. Brush the syrup liberally over the cakes and allow to cool.

Ready for the oven! I only intended to use the super-cute bee silicone cake tin on the right - clearly, I didn't scale the quantities down nearly enough. I think 2/3rds of the quantities I actually used would have been just about perfect 

And here they are out of the oven. I had thought this might be the case before I put them in to bake, but I think it's pretty clear that I used too much baking powder

Almost got it out of the tin intact! Maybe I can claim that this was intentional because it wouldn't fit on the plate otherwise, and after all, you always need a small mini cake to test, right?

Holy heck that syrup is boozy. This is definitely a cake that you mustn't eat before you drive...

Even having got the quantities so badly wrong, there is faaar too much syrup for the quantity of cake. And the ridiculous thing is, I'm pretty sure that I downscaled the syrup:cake ratio already. I did end up using all of it, but that's more because of my stubbornness - I'm guessing the cakes are verging on completely saturated.

Edit: I've completely changed my mind, having now finished eating it. There's absolutely not excessive amounts of syrup - perhaps it could even have done with a bit more. I'd forgotten that rum cakes are supposed to be soaked in the syrup - it's not a glaze. This cake was great though - and it got significantly better after aging for a couple of days. Definitely a special occasion cake, given the amount of rum and butter in it, but this was a definite winner!