Pulla

Scandinavia gets a heck of a lot of stuff right. Its constituent countries consistently top indices of population well-being and happiness, and the general demeanour and approach to life sits rather well with me. There is one thing in particular that Scandinavian countries do extraordinarily well on the whole that I think is not as widely reported as should be - they do marvellous breakfast breads. I've had them in Denmark, Norway and Finland, and they've always been wonderful. Now I think it's no real secret that I'm a big fan of sweet breads - I absolutely love them  (my admittedly not entirely successful experiments with pineapple buns illustrate this). But I came across this recipe for pulla/nisu recently, a Finnish cardamom-spiced bread, and I thought I'd have to try making it (plus, if it's successful, there are some pretty interesting other variants I'd quite like to try too!). I needed to procure a pestle and mortar and figure out where to buy pearl sugar nibs (Waitrose is the answer - although Google does suggest that they're pretty easy to make yourself too) before I could give it a go, but I'm finally ready!

Pulla
Ingredients

• 250ml Milk
• 1 sachet (7g) Dried fast-action yeast
• 90g Caster sugar
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 2 Eggs
• 2 heaped tsp Cardamom pods
• 500g Strong white flour
• 85g Butter
• Pearl sugar nibs to sprinkle

Method

1. Mix the milk, yeast, sugar, salt and one egg in a large mixing bowl.
2. Shell the cardamom pods and grind the seeds with a pestle and mortar, then add to the mixing bowl.
3. Add the flour and butter and combine.
4. Knead until not-entirely-smooth-but-not-very-sticky, then wrap and leave to rise for ~1hr or until roughly doubled in size.
5. Divide the dough into 8 evenly sized portions and shape into balls.
6. Place dough balls widely spaced on greased/lined baking sheets, cover and leave to rise for ~30 mins.
7. Beat the remaining egg with 1tbsp water and brush over the risen dough balls.
8. Sprinkle generously with pearl sugar nibs.
9. Bake at ~220C for 10-15mins.

Here's the dough at step 4, just before the first rise.

Ready for the oven!

They baked a bit unevenly, but no harm done

 They look good, don't they?

 Ever so slightly under-baked, but not horrendously so.

They were a little under-done, and under-proofed, so they were a bit denser than I had hoped for. But they were also wonderfully soft and buttery, which was just what I had hoped for. They were right on the limit of having too much cardamom though, so in future, I think I'll reduce how much I use a bit - the original recipe called for 2tsp of ground cardamom and I was guessing how that translated to - I think it turned out to be about 2 1/2tsp once ground. I also think that the dough could have done with quite a bit more sugar to sweeten it up - as it was, almost all of the sweetness came from the pearl sugar on the top. Overall though, it was a definite success, but with room for improvement still!

Next loaf

It's time for the next attempt in my bread making odyssey! Because I like really sour sourdoughs, I'm going to use much less of Aage in this loaf to try extend the fermentation period which is supposed to help increase the sourness. I'm keeping the rest of the recipe pretty much the same as the last loaf though (with minor changes in timings to fit in with a weekday schedule), so hopefully they'll be similar enough to be a reasonably fair comparison.

Reduced Aage loaf
Ingredients

• 100g Strong white flour
• 200g Strong brown flour
• 200g Water
• 10g Olive oil
• 6g Salt
• 75g Aage

Method

1. Mix together all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
2. Wrap the bowl tightly in a black bin bag and leave for ~20hrs.
3. Knead until no longer sticky.
4. Place on a sheet of baking parchment and rewrap in bag.
5. Leave to rise for ~4 hours.
6. Preheat oven to its maximum setting with Dutch oven inside.
7. Transfer dough still on its baking parchment to hot Dutch oven and bake for 25mins, then remove lid and bake for further 5-10 mins.

A bread making revival

Yesterday, I made some sourdough pizzas from scratch*, and it reminded me of how magical baking bread is. I'm going to try to bake smaller loaves more often, so hopefully there'll be more bread to be seen here soon. I've also realised that I don't actually know all that much about baking bread, and I think that I need to spend a bit more time just playing around and experimenting. Also, I just got a Lodge Combo Cooker which apparently makes a great Dutch oven. So with that in mind, it's time to get started!

A Breadmaking Revival Loaf
Ingredients

• 120g Strong white flour
• 180g Strong brown flour
• 210g Water
• 10g Olive oil
• 6g Salt
• 250g Aage

Method

1. Mix together all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
2. Wrap the bowl tightly in a black bin bag and leave overnight.
3. Knead until no longer sticky.
4. Place on a sheet of baking parchment and rewrap in bag.
5. Leave to rise for ~4 hours.
6. Preheat oven to its maximum setting with Dutch oven inside.
7. Transfer dough still on its baking parchment to hot Dutch oven and bake for 25mins, then remove lid and bake for further 5-10 mins.

Straight to the result - I genuinely think that this might be the prettiest loaf I've ever baked. It's a little flatter than I had originally wanted, but that's at least in part because the dough was so moist. I can't wait for this guy to cool so we can crack it open!

I had been a little worried that the underside might either burn or not be done, but just look at it! I needn't have worried - it's absolutely perfect!

*For anyone wondering, it has been a long-established convention that pizza isn't close enough to baking to make it to this blog! I did throw half the dough into the oven to make a sort-of-loaf for lunch, which probably should have counted, but oh well. For the record, the pizzas were basically made to the Serious Eats foolproof pan pizza recipe, which is genuinely brilliant.

Salted caramel chocolate tart

A while ago, I found this recipe for a salted caramel chocolate tart, and thought it looked amazing. Time to give it a try! The recipe is pretty much untouched, except I went with my own sweetened shortcrust pastry recipe for the case.

Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart
Ingredients
For the pastry

• 170g Plain flour
• 100g Butter
• 20g Caster sugar
• ~3tbsp Cold water

For the chocolate filling

• 180ml Double cream
• 120ml Milk
• 340g Dark chocolate
• 2 Eggs

For the salted caramel

• 190g Caster sugar
• 85g Butter
• 120ml Double cream
• 1 1/2 tsp Salt

Method

1. Rub the flour, butter and sugar together until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs.
2. Add the cold water and form into a dough.
3. Seal in a freezer bag and refrigerate for ~30 mins.
4. Roll out to ~4mm thick and line a pie tin.
5. Prick the base with a fork and weigh down with baking beans.
6. Bake at ~180C for 10 minutes, remove the baking beans and bake for a further ~20 mins.
7. Remove to cool.
8. Scald the cream and milk in a pan, then pour into the dark chocolate. Stir until glossy and smooth.
9. Beat the eggs in a bowl.
10. Slowly pour a quarter of the chocolate mixture into the eggs, beating rapidly to prevent them from scrambling. Once fully incorporated, pour the chocolate/egg mixture back into the chocolate/cream/milk mixture and mix.
11. Pour into the pastry shell and bake at 160C for ~30 mins until set.
12. Heat the sugar in a pan until it melts and turns brown.
13. Add the butter and stir until the butter is melted.
14. Add the cream and boil for ~1 minute, beating rapidly.
15. Stir in the salt and allow to cool for ~15 mins.
16. Pour the caramel mixture over the tart.
17. Refrigerate for ~2 hours.

So the first thing to note is that the original recipe said that it made a single 10" tart... but my pie dish is closer to 6" in diameter. I didn't notice this until I was making the chocolate filling, and thinking "that looks like a lot of mixture". Whoops. If I'd halved the quantities for the filling and the caramel, it would have been about right. In the end, I decided to pour the leftover filling into a bowl and cooked it in the oven in a bain-marie; so there's effectively a second pastry-less tart!

Here's how much filling I had left over! This is after cooking, which is why it doesn't look all that smooth.

About to pour the caramel on!

Looks lovely, doesn't it?

After about an hour in the fridge, I was brave enough to remove the tart from the pan. It almost stayed intact!

 Not quite set, but we got impatient. Garnished with a little coarse salt, I think it looks fabulous!

Okay, we should have waited until it was fully set, so the caramel has at least partially run off where it's been cut. But don't tell me that it doesn't look good!

So how was it? Gorgeous. Decadent. Oh-so-unhealthy. Essentially everything a dessert like this should be. It was definitely better once it had cooled fully and set properly, but even while still a bit warm it was absolutely delicious. The chocolate is so intense and decadent - it's essentially one giant chocolate truffle - and the caramel is wonderfully rich. This is not a dessert that you'd want more than a thin slice of, but definitely one that's worth the effort of making!

Mk2 Pineapple

Way back in 2010, I tried making pineapple buns. For those of you who aren't familar with pineapple buns, it's a soft, sweet bread from Hong Kong with a distinctive crunchy crust. It was also officially declared a part of the cultural heritage by the Hong Kong government in 2014. Not that I care about that at all - I just like the taste of the things! Well, my first attempt was a partial success. My Hong Konger (yes, as weird as it sounds, I am led to believe that that is the correct term) friend, Pok, said that the topping tasted completely authentic, but we both agreed that the bread was far too firm and not nearly soft enough. I think a second attempt is well overdue now, so I'm keeping the recipe for the topping, but throwing the bread recipe out of the window. In its place, I'm adapting one from an old Chinese cookbook that I happen to have on the shelf - "Chopsticks Recipes More Dim Sum" by Cecilia J. Au-Yang.

Pineapple Buns Mk 2

Ingredients

For the bread yeast paste

• 1 Sachet dried yeast
• 1/2 tsp Sugar
• 60ml Warm water
• 3 tbsp Strong bread flour

For the bread dough

• 280g Strong bread flour
• 60g Sugar
• 1 Egg
• 1 tbsp Condensed milk
• 80ml Warm water
• 50g Melted butter

For the topping

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

Method

1. Mix the ingredients for the yeast paste together into a paste and leave to prove for ~half an hour.
2. Form a dough from the yeast paste and all of the bread dough ingredients except the melted butter and knead until smooth.
3. Knead in the melted butter and cover and leave to rise for ~1 1/2 hours.
4. Cream the butter with the sugar and then beat in the rest of the rest of the ingredients for the topping except the whole egg.
5. Refridgerate the topping for an hour.
6. Knead once the bread dough again, divide into small bun-sized portions, shape and leave to prove for ~1 1/2 hours on a lined baking tray.
7. Divide the topping into even portions. Roll each portion out into a disc and cover each bun with one.
8. Beat the egg and brush over the buns.
9. Bake at 190C for ~15 minutes until the top is light golden.

Here they are before the prove. Pretty, no? 

But here they are again after the prove. As you can see, they've not risen at all really - clearly, it's not fermented properly. I have no idea what I've done wrong though - it's possible that the yeast was actually just too old and no longer alive, but I'm not 100% certain. Oh well, it's not going to stop me from baking it anyway!

And now with the topping added. I only actually used half of the topping in the end - I think the quantities of topping vs dough are pretty badly mismatched.

And here they are, ready for the oven.

Disaster! I was overly heavy handed with the egg wash, and you can see that the topping hasn't come out right. Plus, the top was soft, not crunchy.

The least-bad one of them...

So, it all seemed to go wrong at the end. But how did it taste anyway? Well, obviously, as the rise didn't work properly, it was very dense. I mean really, really dense. But also lovely and soft - so actually quite pleasant actually. The topping never went crunchy though, so a bit of a failure on that front. The flavour was nice though - the sweetness was about right in my opinion. All in all, it was definitely mostly a failure, but a tasty one nonetheless. I'll have to give them another go again soon!

A birthday cake

It was Fiona's birthday yesterday, so I said that I'd bake her a birthday cake this weekend. She likes Black Forest gateaux (as, incidentally, do I), but it's one of those faffy cakes that I don't tend to bake because it's so much effort. So what better excuse than her birthday! It's the same recipe as I used last time (waaaaay back in 2009!), with the only minor changes that I let the mixture down with a splash of milk before adding the egg whites because the batter looked really stiff, and I had to halve the quantities for the cherry gel because I only had one jar of morello cherries. But that's okay, as somewhere along the line, I lost my 20cm cake tin, so had to bake it in a larger, thinner one, which means that this one only has two layers - and I still ended up with leftover cherry gel. I guess having only two cake layers means it's not a proper Black Forest gateau, but then I guess none of my cakes are ever that accurate anyway!

Here it is straight from the oven. Less burnt than last time, but more cracked!

But as expected, once flipped over, it's looking lovely. I think it may have gone a bit dry, but we'll see how it is once it's actually finished.

My word, Black Forest gateau is a lot of work. The end result is really pretty though! The photos don't really do it justice; it turns out that my new phone really does have an appalling camera.

This is one seriously decadent cake. It's as delicious as you'd expect a cake with 800ml of cream to be!

New year's loaves

Happy new year! This new year's day, I'm baking some bread. Not because it's the new year, mind you; it's because we've got some leftover salad that looks a little ropey, and I think it'd be a fine addition to some bread (and because I've got time today!). It's not going to be anything particularly adventurous (fundamentally it's just an ordinary sourdough loaf), but it's still nice to get baking!

Leftover Salad Bread
Ingredients

• A generous dollop of Aage
• 500g Strong wholemeal flour
• 250ml Warm water
• 10g Salt
• A slug (~10g) of olive oil
• ~55g Leftover salad (lambs lettuce, olives, spring onions, mustard, olive oil and salt)

Method

1. Mix Aage, the flour, water, salt and olive oil together and form a dough.
2. Knead until not sticky.
3. Put in bag to rise for ~1 hour until doubled in size.
4. Deflate and knead.
5. Divide into two portions and knead the leftover salad into one.
6. Shape into loaves, return to the bag and prove for ~2 hours until doubled in size.
7. Bake at 220C for 10 minutes, then turn down to 190C for a further 30 minutes.

The salad turned out to have quite a lot of olive oil and moisture in it, which made the half of the dough with the salad rather sticky. I opted to shape the plain ball of dough into something approximating a bâtard, but the salad-infused one ended up as a generic boule shape because it was too sticky to shape! Here they are before the prove.

Ready for the oven. As you can see, slashing the plain loaf didn't exactly go to plan. It turns out that the kitchen knife I tried to use was not nearly sharp enough. I reverted to a bread knife for the salady one, which worked better. They are clearly underproved (which I'm pretty sure is due to insufficient sourdough starter activity - I really need to plan my bread baking further ahead so that I can get Aage out of the fridge and woken up properly beforehand!)

As ever, they look gorgeous coming out of the oven.

The salady one is slightly underbaked. I did think that that might happen, given the extra moisture and oil in it, but it's not bad really - the dough is cooked all the way through, it's just a little cakey in the middle. Lovely flavour though - the spring onion gives a really nice fragrance, and the chopped up olives provide the usual lovely bursts of salty punch. The lettuce cooked away to nothing, but that's exactly as expected. I'm definitely going to add spring onion to bread again in the future!

It's always time for cookies

I'm off home for Christmas a couple of days before Fiona, and wanted to bake something to sustain her! I'm just baking a double batch of my usual cookie recipe, except for having discovered that we don't appear to have any almond extract, so I've substituted vanilla extract. It's been so long since I baked these cookies, I'd forgotten how good they smell in the oven!

Woo! Baking again!

This term has been pretty manic, so I've not really had a chance to bake. But term's over now, so I finally have a chance. By very popular demand (by which I mean that Fiona was very insistent!), it's a reprise of my cinnamon rolls - with only the minor change that I've substituted out the gin for apple juice. The glaze came out really appley, which was a bit of a surprise, but I think it works really well. And the cinnamon rolls themselves? Every bit as good as we remembered!

Apologies for the potato-quality photos. I couldn't be bothered to get my SLR from upstairs, and the Nexus 4's camera wasn't exactly great when it was brand new...

Not quite "baking" even in the loosest sense of the term

I've wanted to bake something for the last few weekends, but always seem to be lacking at least one out of time, energy or key ingredients. Today is a day where I'm lacking in energy, but I saw this recipe earlier, and thought that it looked like it could be pretty tasty - and it's the sort of recipe for which I think I've got enough energy to do right now!

No-bake peanut butter bars
Ingredients

• 140g Butter
• 150g Brown sugar
• 150g Caster sugar
• 270g Smooth peanut butter
• 180g Darkish (51% cocoa) chocolate

Method

1. Melt half of the butter and mix in the sugars and peanut butter.
2. Press into a foil-lined tin.
3. Melt the chocolate and the remaining butter together and pour over the top of the peanut butter mixture.
4. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours until set.
5. Cut into squares.

Talk about low effort! This might also be *the* most unhealthy thing I've baked made. I've already (fairly drastically) reduced the amount of sugar added (not, I hasten to add, on health grounds), but fundamentally, this recipe is just peanut butter with added sugar and butter!

Here's the peanut butter mixture in the pan.

Ready for the fridge!

The joys of working from home

I've been a bit ill over the last few days and I'm still not feeling back to normal, so I decided to work from home today. It's been the first time I've worked from home for quite a long while, and it's actually worked out quite well - I've been surprisingly productive. I'm doing some programming for work at the moment, which does mean that periodically I need to wait for 15 minutes while my code runs to give me some results for debugging purposes. As I'm home, I thought that rather than wasting that time on the internet, I'd get Aage out and have a bit of a play (yes, I'm a terrible pet owner - Aage does get horribly neglected). I just did a standard, half-quantities loaf of bread (250g wholemeal flour, 150g water, 5g salt, half of Aage), with a handful of chopped up olives out of a jar thrown in for good measure (which is why I left the oil out of the dough), but still a good use of spare time I'd say! I was really pleased with this loaf. The rise was pretty good, and the texture was lighter than my average sourdough loaf as a result, but what really made it was the crust! Not too hard, but developed well enough and with a fantastic crunch.

Cola revisited

Two years ago, I tried doing cola cookies, and it turned out to be one of the more memorable failed attempts for me. The taste of the cookies was fine, as I recall, but the texture was just not right - partly because I tried adding cola bottle sweets, and they just melted and went hard. Since then, I've had an otherwise untouched bottle of cola syrup (for a Sodastream machine), and I think it's time to try something else with it!

I figured cake is probably the safer way to go, and it just so happened that Serious Eats has a cola cake recipe that I can crib. I'm not following it exactly, but it's pretty close!

Cola cake
Ingredients

• 225g Dark brown sugar
• 100g Caster sugar
• 200g Butter
• 2 Eggs
• 3tbsp Cola concentrate
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 250g Self-raising flour
• 1/2tsp Baking powder
• 1/2tsp Salt
• 35g Cocoa powder
• 200ml Buttermilk*

Method

1. Cream butter and sugar in a bowl.
2. Beat in the eggs, cola concentrate and vanilla extract.
3. Fold in the flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder.
4. Stir in the buttermilk.
5. Pour into a lined, greased pan and bake at 180C for ~45mins.

*If you happen to have a Polish food shop near you, go there for buttermilk. It's called maślanka and is absurdly cheap compared with buying it in a supermarket (assuming, of course, your supermarket even sells the stuff) - a 400ml carton of the stuff cost me 40p from my local one!

Here's the mixture at the end of step 3 (before the buttermilk got added). It's a particularly satisfying looking mixture.

And after adding the buttermilk. I don't actually know how thick the mixture was supposed to be, so I was guessing - it's very reminiscent of chocolate Angel Delight in appearance! It was also about this time that Fiona told me that she's not sure she likes cola as a flavour...

Ready for the oven. I think this batter looks particularly good!

It still looks good after baking!

It was slightly underbaked - as you can see in the last photo, it's a bit fudgey in the middle, but not horrendously. Overall, it's not bad - especially given how many unknowns there were and how much guesswork was involved in the recipe itself. I was a bit disappointed that the cake wasn't a bit more cola-ey - really, the cocoa powder turned it into a chocolate-cake-that-tasted-a-little-bit-of-cola rather than a cola cake per se. The flavour did come through somewhat though, which was nice, and the sweetness was about right (which was one thing that I had been a little concerned about). I may have to revisit this recipe at some point, omitting the cocoa powder and upping the quantity of cola syrup - I think there's still a bit more to come from this idea!

Time for a classic

I had a tub of double cream about to go out of date, but happily, I fancied baking today - and what's more, I had Fiona as my glamorous assistant* :o). What better time to revisit a classic that I've not baked in many, many years. Time for a Victoria Sponge!

*By which I really mean Fiona did all the work.

Victoria Sponge
Ingredients

• 85g Salted butter
• 145g Unsalted butter**
• 230g Caster sugar
• 4 Eggs
• 1 tsp Vanilla extract
• 230g Plain flour
• 3 tsp Baking powder
• ~3 tbsp Milk
• 200ml Double cream
• 115g Gooseberry jam***

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy.
2. Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract, a little at a time.
3. Sift the flour and baking powder and fold in to the mixture a little at a time.
4. Let down to a dropping consistency with the milk.
5. Pour into two greased and floured sandwich tins and bake at 180C for ~20 minutes.
6. Allow to cool on a wire rack.
7. Beat the cream.
8. Sandwich the cakes together with the double cream and jam.

**No, I didn't run out this time, I was just using up the leftover salted butter from the last time around!

***I probably wouldn't have opted for gooseberry jam specifically, were it not for the fact that I didn't have any strawberry/raspberry jam, but did have a cute little jar of gooseberry jam that had been Phil and Jess' wedding favours when they got married many years ago. It's specially aged, alright?!

 Here's Fiona doing all the work (did you think I was joking when I said that?).

Ready for the oven! As you can see, I didn't really let the batter down enough, so it's rather stiff. That one's entirely my fault though!

Out of the oven, they're a little dark and a little domed, but not too bad overall.

Getting them out of the tins could have gone better though. In hindsight, lining the bases with baking parchment would have been a good idea.

So I won't win any awards for prettiness with this cake. I might have slightly run out of patience while waiting for the cake to cool...

Actually though, the finished product doesn't look that bad really!

It's a Victoria sponge. Not the most exciting cake in the world, but it's become a classic for a reason. I think Victoria sponges get a bit of a bad rep because of the terrible supermarket versions - they're always pretty, but inevitably dry, bland and disappointing. This one is almost the exact opposite - not even remotely neat, but it's almost succulent. The sponge is moist, and the vanilla really comes through. The jam gives a nice zing (the gooseberry gives a bit more interest flavourwise than strawberry would have), while the fresh cream just smooths it all over. A Victoria sponge will never be my favourite cake, but a good edition is still worth baking. This one is a pretty decent one, I'd say!