Mainly Baking

Cinnamon Cake with Chocolate and Hazelnut Streusel

2012-02-01T09:54:00.001Z

I know that I am my own harshest critic; much of what I see as bad about my baking probably wouldn't be noticed by anyone other than another perfectionist! That's why it makes me unreasonably happy to say that the outcome of this recipe, for a cinnamon flavoured cake with chocolate and hazelnuts in the streusel topping, really pleased me - it was much better than I expected!

I used this recipe from CD Kitchen, adding a couple of modifications to the streusel to give the topping more flavour. This was one of the few recipes I found which used oil instead of butter in both the cake and the streusel - in fact the same base mixture was used for both, which made mixing the cake that much easier.

At the point where the flour mixture was divided into the cake and topping, I added 2 tablespoons of cocoa, 50g of finely chopped 70% chocolate and 50g finely chopped toasted hazelnuts, instead of the walnuts stipulated in the recipe.

The unusual steps of mixing the oil into the dry flour and sugar mix, and allowing the raising agents to start to work in the liquid, gave a really light, well-textured cake. The batter was quite thin, and I was worried that the streusel crumbs wouldn't stay on the surface, but that was an unfounded fear! The cake took quite a lot longer to cook than I expected, but the recipe is a little ambiguous on timing - I'm not sure whether it meant 45 minutes after the initial 10 minutes at a higher temperature, or 45 minutes in total. It didn't help that I didn't notice the initial time at a higher temperature until I'd had the cake in the oven for 30 minutes at the low temperature, either!

My only criticism was that the volume of streusel crumbs was a bit too much, although I may have been a little too generous taking out 3/4 of a cup from the basic mixture. After baking, some of the crumbs were still loose on the surface - next time I will make a little less, or perhaps try putting half the crumbs in a layer inside the cake.

Sorry about the bad photos - a dull brown cake with a dark brown topping isn't easy to make look attractive!

Chocolate Chip and Orange Cake

2012-01-29T10:19:00.000Z

Reading my list of posts for January, it looks as if it's ages since I made chocolate cake for CT. In fact, the recipes I've posted have been interspersed with batches of brownies made with mayonnaise, about which I've already posted.

However, it's about time a chocolate cake crept back into the cake tin; this time I returned to the basic oil/yogurt recipe which I've used several times before. It started as this Ina Garten recipe, although it's had so many tweaks that it doesn't look much like it now. The main tweak has been to reduce the liquid by leaving out the volume provided by lemon juice in the original. I like this recipe because it's quick to mix and get into the oven. All I do is mix the basic dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet in another, and whisk the liquid into the flour until no patches of flour show. Then any lumpy ingredients such as chocolate, in this case, or fruit and nuts, are folded in. The slowest part of making this cake was chopping the chocolate!

The ingredients were: 200g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 200g caster sugar, the zest of a medium orange, 250mls yogurt, 3 large eggs, 115g oil (I used sunflower), 1 teaspoon orange extract, 150g chopped plain chocolate (I used 70%).

The batter is put into a prepared 20cm round tin and baked at 180C for around 60 minutes, until a test probe comes out clean. Cool in tin for 15 minutes before removing to a wire rack to finish cooling.

It's hard to tell on the basis of cutting just a couple of slices, but it looks as if the larger pieces of chocolate sank as the cake baked, although I don't think this is a major issue - there are plenty of smaller pieces in the upper half of the cake.

Pear, Pecan and Ginger Cake

2012-01-25T14:05:00.000Z

I can't put my finger on what was wrong with this cake, but I didn't really enjoy it. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with it, and it's just my taste buds which weren't satisfied. To me there was strange aftertaste to the cake, but I'm not sure it was because of the pecans or the fresh ginger - perhaps I shouldn't have used the ginger, but it seemed a good flavour combination in my head! On the other hand, the ginger couldn't really be tasted, although I could feel it as a warmth at the back of the mouth. CT didn't realise it was there at all until I told him!

The recipe originates from the Magnolia Bakery cookbook, but I found it here, on Rolling Pin Tales, complete with a translation to British weights and measurements! The only change I made to the cake batter was to add a large 'thumb' of fresh, grated ginger. I didn't add any frosting at all - just a dusting of icing sugar.

The cake was quite dense and heavy, although the pear chunks kept it moist. The crust of the cake was really hard too, and split during baking, so that the cake rose with a peculiar ridge around the top, as if a lid was being opened up. The hard crust made it difficult to slice the cake neatly as it cracked when a knife was inserted.

I think the cake needed something more than just the pears and pecans, to boost the flavour but perhaps ginger didn't fulfill that need. I have seen versions of this recipe which add lemon zest to the batter, or perhaps some cinnamon would have worked better. I'm not sure this will be a recipe I try again.

Coconut and Lime Drizzle Cake

2012-01-21T09:12:00.000Z

This is another adaptation of this fabulous Annie Bell recipe, which is turning out to be very adaptable and versatile, as I'd hoped. The fact that I can take out flour and substitute desiccated coconut, without affecting how well the recipe works is very encouraging.

This flavour combination was delicious, very light and delicate, and the texture of the cake was light too, quite unusual for coconut cakes, which often turn out quite stodgy. I kept the topping simple - just a dusting of sugar on top of the lime drizzle - but a lime flavoured glacé icing and some shreds of toasted coconut would have made the cake more interesting if it was being used for a special occasion, rather than an everyday cake.

Ingredients

180ml sunflower oil
270g caster sugar
3 eggs
zest of 2 limes (reserve the juice for topping)
100ml milk
250g plain flour
50g desiccated coconut
2 teaspoons baking powder

Topping - 2 tablespoons golden syrup, juice of 2 limes, granulated sugar for sprinkling

Method
Prepare a 23cm(9") square baking tin and preheat the oven to 190C.
Whisk the oil, sugar, eggs, lime zest and milk together in a large bowl, until the oil appears amalgamated.
Sift in the flour and baking powder, add the coconut and whisk until smoothly blended.
Transfer the batter to the baking tin and bake for about 30 minutes, until a test probe comes out clean.
While the cake is baking, blend the golden syrup and lime juice together.
Prick the hot cake all over with a fine probe, such as a cocktail stick, and drizzle over the lime juice mixture. When any puddles of juice have been absorbed, sprinkle over a little granulated sugar, and leave the cake to cool in the tin.

Pineapple and Blackberry Crumble

2012-01-16T08:02:00.001Z

This crumble was inspired by one of the dishes made in the third heat of the Celebrity Sport Relief Bake Off Challenge, shown on TV last week. TV presenter Anita Rani, who went on to be the overall winner, made a Pineapple and Blackberry Crumble with the coconut added to the crumble topping. No recipe was given for this, but it wasn't difficult to figure out a recipe which at least featured the same flavours in the dish. Anita added (I think) cinnamon and vanilla to her pineapple, and flamed it with rum while it was cooking. She then mixed in raw blackberries before adding the topping.

As usual, with this sort of thing, my recipe is a bit 'thrown together' as I don't weigh the fruit. I know that if I half-fill my large Pyrex dish with fruit and top it with a crumble mix made from 80-100g of each ingredient, I'm going to get 4-6 portions depending on appetite. I also took the opportunity to use more of the Light at Heart sugar/stevia mix that I've been given to try. The added stevia reduces the calories by half as you only need to use half as much sugar as usual.

So, this is roughly what I did!

Peeled, cored and chopped 2/3 of a standard sized supermarket pineapple into chunks.
Thawed a roughly equal volume of blackberries.
Melted about 40g unsalted butter in a frying pan and added the pineapple. As it started to cook I added 1 tablepoon of brown Light at Heart (or 2 tablespoons light muscovado sugar), a half teaspoon cinnamon and a teaspoon vanilla extract. I then poured on two tablespoons of rum which I mixed in and then flamed. I then turned up the heat and reduced the pan juices to a sticky caramel. The fruit was then cooled.
For the crumble mix, I rubbed 80g unsalted butter into 80g plain flour, 80g whole rolled oats and 40g white Light at Heart (use 80g regular white sugar). I then stirred in 20g desiccated coconut. I think it's important not to make the mixture too fine - leaving a few lumps of butter and some clumps of crumble adds to the texture.
The cooled pineapple was mixed with the blackberries, and 1 tablespoon of cornflour, to thicken any juices. The fruit was put into a deep casserole dish with a 1litre capacity, and the crumble mix was sprinkle evenly on top and pressed down lightly.
The crumble was baked until the top was golden brown and the fruit bubbling. I usually do this at 180C for about 45 minutes, but I started at a much higher temperature with this dish because I was cooking something else in the oven too. It had the first 10 minutes at 220C which didn't seem to do it any harm. It then finished off at 180C, with about 25 minutes cooking overall.

This was a really good combination of flavours - the pineapple, cinnamon, vanilla and hint of rum gave a tropical flavour, and fantastic smell, when added to the coconut in the topping. I'm not sure I'd have recognised the blackberries in a blind tasting but they added another taste dimension and a lovely colour to the dish. Coconut in the crumble topping is definitely an innovation I'll be using again with suitable fruit! Using the Light at Heart sugar in this context was fine too - I didn't notice anything different in the volume, taste or texture of the crumble mix.

Orange Layer Cake

2012-01-12T08:39:00.001Z

I used the two cakes I made yesterday to make this Orange Layer Cake.

As it seemed the flatter of the two, I used the cake made with Light at Heart as the bottom layer. It was a little lopsided so I attempted to level the bottom by shaving off a little of the cake. I then sandwiched the cakes with half a jar of orange curd, and made a glacé icing with icing sugar, two heaped teaspoons of orange curd and a few drops of water. The result was a very well flavoured cake, but it threw up a couple of questions:

1) Why can't I level off cakes properly? This was still lopsided and I was contemplating pushing in cocktail sticks to stop the top layer sliding off!

2) Why didn't I know that orange curd isn't suitable for a cake filling? I'm sure I've seen recipes which fill cakes with fruit curd, but as soon as I set the top layer in place, it just pushed the lemon curd out at the sides.

This cake wouldn't win any prizes for appearance, but it was very tasty, and as yet another adaptation of this Annie Bell recipe, it convinced me that this is a really useful recipe.

Baking with Light at Heart

2012-01-11T23:07:00.001Z

I think we all know that it's difficult to reconcile a love of cakes, pastries, cookies and chocolate with healthy eating and even more difficult for some of us to keep a steady weight, let alone lose weight while eating these regularly. There are things we can do to make baked goods a little healthier - reduce saturated fat, use wholemeal flour, add fresh fruit and vegetables, and so on, but these tweaks don't really address the issue of calorie intake.

Now Tate and Lyle have introduced a new product called Light at Heart which may be able to help - it's a mix of sugar and stevia. Stevia is a plant extract which is so sweet that even though only only 1% is added to ordinary sugar, it makes it so sweet that only half as much is needed, thus cutting the calories contributed by sugar by half too. It is available in brown and white varieties, and Tate and Lyle claim it can be used in baking, as well as a substitute for sugar in things like drinks and on cereals. I think it's ingenious of Tate and Lyle to adjust the use of stevia so that exactly half the usual amount of sugar is needed - easy to remember!

When I was offered free samples of Light at Heart, I was only too happy to try them, even though it's not the sort of product I would usually consider buying. However, I had doubts that it would be suitable for every baking situation, as much of the success of a cake depends on the amount of sugar used. Sugar contributes to moistness, texture and volume when used in cakes, as well as sweetness, and I've read that you can only reduce the sugar by 20-25% before these are affected. Cutting it by 50% seemed a big step to take!

Left-hand cake baked with Light at Heart

I decided the best way of comparing the use of sugar and Light at Heart was to do a side by side bake of two cakes, where the only difference was whether sugar or Light at Heart was used. I picked an oil-based sponge recipe which is simple and quick to mix. This enabled the cakes to be mixed side by side in just a few minutes. Each was then baked in a 10 x 5" rectangle - two halves of a 10" square tin.

There were no other factors affecting the cakes apart from the use of either sugar or Light at Heart.

Each cake was made by whisking 120ml sunflower oil, 2 eggs, 70ml semi-skimmed milk, the zest of half an orange and 1 teaspoon of orange extract together with either 180g caster sugar or 90g Light at Heart, until well amalgamated. Then 180g plain flour and 1 rounded teaspoon baking powder was sifted in and whisked just enough to give a smooth mixture with no flour showing. The cakes were baked at 190C for 30 minutes, when a test probe came out clean.

Left-hand cake baked with Light at Heart

It was obvious as soon as the cakes were baked that there was a significant difference between the two. The cake using Light at Heart didn't rise as much and was paler, with a speckled unevenly coloured surface. When the cold cakes were cut, there didn't seem much visible difference between the two, apart from the volume, but the cake made with Light at Heart seemed a little drier when eaten. The speckling was due to the Light at Heart having larger crystals than caster sugar - it was more like granulated sugar, which I don't usually use in baking.

These differences aren't great, and if you really want to reduce calorie intake and still eat cakes, then you might be able to overlook them and be happy with cakes baked with Light at Heart. I'm not sure you'll be able to overlook the price difference though - Light at Heart costs around £2.50 for 500g which makes it about 4 times more expensive than sugar.

Left-hand cake baked with Light at Heart

I'm going to try Light at Heart in other baking situations, where I think it might be more succesful. The issue of volume and texture isn't as important in things like pastry and crumble toppings, where sugar is used mainly for it's sweetness. I'm hoping that using Light in Heart in cookies will be successful too. However, I don't think I'll be using Light at Heart in cakes where lightness, moistness and volume are important.

Cinnamon Buns - A Tea Time Treat

2012-01-08T21:35:00.004Z

Tea Time Treats is a monthly challenge set in turn by Kate at What Kate Baked, and Karen at Lavender and Lovage; the rules can be found here. This month it was Karen who challenged us to bake a sweet Tea Time Treat based on either bread or pastry. This caused a dilemma for me - I'm not very good at yeast cookery, but pastry doesn't really fit into our low saturated fat diet. I decided to have another go at yeast dough, as that would at least present me with a challenge, and hopefully I could keep the fat levels down too.

There are two types of baked treats for tea time - small items which look highly decorative, and sit on a cake stand for afternoon tea, and the less dainty items which are just grabbed from the cake tin when you need something sweet with your afternoon cuppa. Buns definitely fall into the second category - there's nothing dainty or refined about a cinnamon bun - just sweetness and spice and a feeling of contentment after it's finished.

Although I haven't had consistent success with yeast baking, I have had the best results from Dan Lepard's recipes, so his recipes were my first port of call. I really liked the look of the Lemon and Almond Buns, published in both the Guardian and his recent book, Short and Sweet, but in the end chose the Cinnamon Buns recipe from his column in the Guardian. I think one reason I chose it was because of the incredulity of the commentators on the recipe, about including Ryvita crumbs in the filling! It made me want to reassure myself that of course Dan knows what he's talking about! There was also less butter in the cinnamon bun dough, and I could be cautious about how much I added to the filling. Another reason for using Dan's bread recipes is that his almost 'no knead' method suits my old arthritic joints - if I overdo any physical activity, it's quite likely that any joints involved will be immobile the next day; hands that don't work are not a good thing!

Buns before proving

After proving

I followed the recipe quite closely, and only made one change to the ingredients. I didn't want the buns to be too dark, so used a 50:50 mixture of light and dark muscovado sugar for the filling. When it came to dabbing a little butter over the dough, I used as little as possible, about another 50g. I think that either my yeast wasn't in the best condition, or my kitchen was very cold, because it took well over an hour for the shaped buns to rise enough before cooking. They also took 25 minutes to cook to a rich golden colour.

I'm really happy with the way these turned out, although I think they would have been a little lighter with a new batch of yeast. Hubs thought they were too large, so that's something to consider if I make them again.

The lemon and cardamom flavours were noticable in the plain dough, and the Ryvita crumbs gave some texture to the spicy filling. In a world where there were no worries about fat consumption, I might have added twice as much butter to the filling, to make it richer and stickier, but these were perfectly adequate for an everyday Tea Time Treat.

Mocha Swirl Bundt Cake - We Should Cocoa

2012-01-04T14:01:00.005Z

As we all recover from the excesses of Christmas, Chele at Chocolate Teapot has set an apt challenge for this month's We Should Cocoa - to make a something healthy using chocolate in some form. The full rules for the We Should Cocoa challenge can be found on Chocolate Log Blog, the blog written by Chele's co-host Choclette.

Of course, 'healthy' has different meanings to everyone, often based on their own health issues. For us, or at least three of the four people that I cook for, reducing our intake of saturated fat is the main aim, as both Hubs and I take medication for high cholesterol, and my son, CT, is controlling raised cholesterol by diet. Since I started reducing the saturated fat in my baking, both Hubs and I have seen reduced cholesterol levels, and CT, who has made other dietary changes too, has brought his cholesterol down to acceptable levels.

So this challenge has been relatively easy for me; I am entering a variation of one of my favourite cakes made with oil instead of butter. Another way of making cakes made with chocolate even healthier is to use cocoa rather than chocolate, as cocoa is lower in fat than the same weight of chocolate, and in most cases less cocoa is required to give an acceptable chocolate flavour. This recipe uses 4 1/2 tablespoons, which is less than 50g.

I usually make this bundt cake as a chocolate, orange and chilli cake, but this time I have made a mocha version - flavouring the cake layers with coffee and cocoa. The original recipe is from Alice Medrich, but I have reduced it in size to fit my bundt tin, and converted the ingredients from cup volumes to weights.

As always, this cake had a lovely close, moist texture. The coffee and chocolate flavours were quite subtle, and I think the cake may have been even better made with a flavourless oil, rather than olive oil - on this occasion I thought the flavour of olive oil was too much for the flavours of the cake.

Ingredients

4 1/2 tablespoons cocoa
4 1/2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 teaspoons instant coffee granules
4 tablespoons water

320g plain flour
2 scant tsp baking powder
pinch salt
320g caster sugar
200ml light olive oil
4 cold eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
200ml cold semi-skimmed milk
2 teaspoons instant coffee granules, dissolved in the milk

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and prepare a 10-cup bundt tin (a tin which is at least 2.4 litres in capacity).
Put the first 4 ingredients into a small bowl and mix until they form a smooth paste; set aside.
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a small bowl; set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk the sugar, oil and vanilla until well blended and smooth. Whisk in the eggs 1 at a time, then continue whisking until the mixture is thick and pale - about 3 minutes with an electric hand whisk.
Reduce the whisk to a slow speed, then mix in 1/3 portions of the flour mixture alternately with the milk, whisking only as much as necessary to make a smooth batter.
Weigh out 400g of the batter into a bowl and mix in the cocoa paste mix.
Using 1/3 of each batter at a time, layer them alternately into the bundt tin, starting with the light coloured coffee batter.
Bake for about 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean; cool for 15 minutes in the tin, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Dust with a mix of cocoa and icing sugar before serving.

Marbled Chocolate Cheesecake

2012-01-01T10:47:00.001Z

One last decadent dessert, before returning to my usual style of baking, with lowered saturated fat content. This was made to use up the cream cheese bought 'in case' before Christmas. I chose this recipe because it suited the amounts of cream cheese and sour cream I had in the fridge. One change I made was to use gingernut biscuits and 2 teaspoons of cocoa for the crumb crust, instead of the Australian biscuits specified. The other change was a mistake - I inadvertently picked up half-fat sour cream, which was a bit of a worry when I realised (as I was pouring it on top of the cream cheese!).

Chocolate wouldn't be my first choice for flavouring a cheesecake, but when I asked FB what she would like, chocolate is what she chose! I was considering a refreshing lemon, or even a tongue-tingling ginger, but it was not to be.

This is the first time I've made a cheesecake in a full crumb case, rather than just on a base, and I'm pleased at how well it turned out, although I only just built up the sides high enough. The crumb crust was very thin, and it wouldn't hurt to use a few more biscuits - another 50g, perhaps - but a thin crust is easy to cut and keeps the calories down a little.

Another thing I need to learn is to recognise the end-point when cooking a cheesecake. When I opened the oven door at 1 hour, the mixture was still very wobbly, and 7 minutes later it was still wobbling a lot! However, after another 5 minutes the cheesecake was solid, which inevitably lead to cracking as it cooled, so the mid-point is where I should have stopped cooking and turned off the heat.

This overcooking, and the use of half-fat sour cream, didn't seem to affect the texture too badly - the cheesecake was still soft and creamy, with enough chocolate to give it a good flavour.

Truffle Torte

2011-12-26T07:58:00.002Z

One of our Christmas traditions is a chocolate dessert, as one of the choices at Christmas lunch. I don't often have a proper Christmas Pudding, as most of the family prefer other things, but this year we gave in to the mass hysteria and bought one of Waitrose's Heston Blumenthal Hidden Orange Puddings. Sometimes you just have to know what the fuss is about! This was deliciously orangey, as it oozed orange syrup, and the candied orange was a lovely texture to eat, but the pudding part itself wasn't anything special.

For anyone who didn't want to try the Christmas Pudding, and for the few days following Christmas, I made a version of Delia Smith's Truffle Torte, something I've been making occasionally over many years. This year I made 2/3 of the truffle mixture, and set it in a 8" diameter springform tin, on a crumb base made using half digestive biscuits and half crisp Amaretti, crushed to fine crumbs and mixed with half their weight of melted butter. I decorated the top with chocolate flutes, getting them to stick to the top of the truffle mix by melting the flat bottoms with the back of a spoon heated in a gas flame. I then dusted with cocoa and icing sugar.

Delia doesn't warn you about this, but it is very crumbly and difficult to cut while really cold, and needs about 30 minutes out of the fridge to soften up before serving. This makes it a nicer texture for eating, too. I forgot to do this, of course, and really struggled to get the first slice out. This is a really rich dessert, and can only be eaten in small slices, but it really allows the true flavour of the chocolate you've chosen to shine through, so needs to be made with a good quality chocolate that you enjoy eating.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T11:14:00.000Z

I'm pacing my baking, to stop us all ballooning up over the holiday period. I don't think I'll need a cake until Boxing Day, as there will be leftover desserts from Christmas Lunch, as well as the inevitable presents of biscuits and chocolates. I don't mind leaving some of the cooking until Boxing Day, as coping with The Lunch will take enough of my time and energy.

We do need mincepies though, and these turned out quite well. The sweet shortcrust pastry, which I make with SR flour to increase the crumbliness, is flavoured with orange zest, and the bought mincemeat contained 7% dark chocolate. Another reason for using SR flour at this time of year is that it keeps the pastry soft, so the mincepies last for several days in good condition. Saves baking every day!

The pastry is made by rubbing 125g of lard and 125g unsalted butter into 450g SR flour, 50g icing sugar, a pinch of salt and the zest of a medium orange. When the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, add 1 egg and enough cold water to give a soft but not sticky dough. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for 20 minutes before cutting into quarters and rolling out thinly on a floured board. I find that it's best to deal with the pastry in smaller amounts, then incorporate the trimmings into the next piece of pastry. That way there is always some fresh pastry in each pie, and you don't end up with the last few circles being from pastry that has been re-rolled several times.

Cut out an equal number of bases and lids to fit your mincepie tray, or use seasonal cutters to make pastry shapes for the top, instead of full circles. Fill the base with a good teaspoon of mincemeat and fix on the lids by brushing the undersides with water and pressing together where the lid meets the base. Brush the tops with water and sprinkle over some granulated sugar. Bake at 200C until golden, about 15-20 minutes. Cool the pies in the tins for a few minutes before removing to a wire rack. Dust with icing sugar before serving, if desired.

Although delicious, the chocolate mincemeat was quite sweet, and not very spicy; we all decided that we preferred the Cranberry and Port Mincemeat that I used in the Bramley and Mincemeat Pasties last weekend.

I'd like to wish all my internet friends a

very Merry Christmas

and everything they wish for

in the New Year!

Gingerbread with Lemon and Ginger Buttercream

2011-12-23T13:26:00.001Z

The smell of gingerbread baking is another seasonal scent which is really uplifting - one of my favourite Christmasssy smells.

This was going to be an unfrosted plain gingerbread, but the first bite told me that would it be a mistake to leave the cake as it came out of the baking tin! The molasses was so overwhelming that the cake was quite bitter. Add to this the fact that there wasn't enough ginger in the recipe and the flavour of the cake was quite disappointing. However, the addition of a lemon and ginger buttercream perked it up a lot and counteracted the bitterness. I found the recipe here, while trawling the internet looking for a recipe using oil.

I made the buttercream by beating 70g of unsalted butter and 40g full fat cream cheese with 200g icing sugar, the zest of a lemon and 2 tablespoons of syrup from a jar of preserved ginger. I then folded in three nuggets of preserved ginger, finely chopped.

Leaving aside the flavour, this was a really well textured cake, and won't need much adjustment to make it worth repeating - I'll try replacing half of the molasses with golden syrup, and at least tripling the amount of ginger. I think a flavourless oil such as sunflower would be better too, as the other flavours are so strong - any flavour inherent in the olive oil is lost.

Bramley and Mincemeat Pasties

2011-12-19T09:25:00.000Z

Another recipe from Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet, although it was Nigel Slater who reminded me of them a couple of weeks ago. The recipe has also been published in Dan's column in the Guardian Weekend magazine. The thought of making my own puff pastry, even rough puff, has always been offputting, but FB wanted to try these, and was willing to put in the work while I pottered around the kitchen giving advice (!!).

We made one major mistake, by not following the folding and rolling instructions properly, so spoiling the first half batch of pasties, but once we realised the fault we corrected it with the second batch, which came out much better. Our misreading of the instructions meant that we only built up half the number of layers in the pastry, which didn't incorporate the butter properly, resulting in much of it running out of the pasties onto the oven floor! By re-folding and rolling the second half of the pastry before using it, we got a much better result, although I think we were still short of a few layers. Still, it's a good learning experience, and means the mistake won't be repeated!

One gripe I have with the recipe is that you can't cut a 30 x30cm square into 6 even squares - you need a more rectangular shape to be able to do that - and you do need squares to get a neat triangular pasty. We rolled the dough to a rectangle which was roughly 24 x 36cm, giving 6 squares that were 12 x 12cm. There was also far more apple than we could get into the pasties - one apple would have been enough! We couldn't work out how to fold the pasty edges to seal them properly, either - I need to find a video of someone making a Cornish pasty, I think.

As always, the success of a mince pie or pasty depends on the mincemeat, and we used a Cranberry and Port mincemeat which was very strongly flavoured. It still allowed the flavour of the apple in the filling to come through, but masked the ginger in the pastry, I think. The tart Bramley apple lessened the sweetness of the pasty - I often add grated apple to a jar of mincemeat for this reason.

These were really tasty, and well worth the time spent making the pastry. It wasn't really difficult, just time consuming, and really needs attempting when you won't get distracted by other chores.

Dan Lepard's Stollen Bars - A Tea Time Treat

2011-12-15T16:29:00.002Z

Tea Time Treats is a new challenge jointly hosted by Kate at What Kate Baked and Karen at Lavender and Lovage. Obviously the baking side of treats for tea time is what appeals to me, but anything that could possibly be eaten at tea time can be entered into the challenge, which gives a pretty wide remit. Each month there will be a theme for the challenge and in December what better theme could this month's host, Kate, pick than Christmas?

The recipe for these Orange and Pistachio Stollen Bars, by Dan Lepard, was published in the Guardian Weekend Magazine a few weeks ago, in the Christmas Party Food Supplement and had instant appeal for me, as I love Stollen but am rubbish at yeast doughs - even Dan's recipes! This unusual take on the traditional recipe is raised with baking powder and contains large lumps of marzipan throughout the mixture - utter bliss! As Stollen is usually only eaten around Christmas time, these bars seem ideal for the Tea Time Treat challenge.

Although I liked all the flavouring ingredients in the bars, I was tempted to swap the sultanas for dried cranberries, as they seem more festive and seasonal. In the end I decided to stick by my view that unless something serious like an allergy forces a change, every recipe should be tried as the cook has written it, at least for the first time.

The recipe was straightforward and quick to follow, so within an hour of starting to assemble the ingredients, I had a fragrant tray of stollen cooling on the counter, ready for brushing with melted butter. The only forethought required is to get the butter, cream cheese and egg out of the fridge to bring to room temperature. As I didn't expect to have to keep the bars a long time, I only used about 25g of butter to

brush on top - this seemed to me to give a generous coating anyway.

When it came to cutting and tasting, I was glad I had kept in the sultanas, as the flavours of orange and pistachio are very delicate and would have been overwhelmed by dried cranberries. I loved finding such large pieces of marzipan nestled within the bars. The texture of the bars is hard to describe - it's somewhere between a cake and a biscuit, doughy like a bread but quite light and open textured too. After a night's sleep I realised that what it most reminded me of was biscotti dough before the second baking!

I'm sure these will be repeated, although I already have two bought Stollens stashed away for Christmas and New Year. Hubs liked them, but he didn't think they matched up to a traditional stollen so I might need to call them something different next time. I thought they were comparable, in texture, to some of the stollens I've bought in the past, but not as good as a slice of stollen with a really big piece of marzipan in the centre, which is what Hubs missed most too, I think! However, for a homemade treat, these are quick, unlike yeast dough, and successful, unlike most of my attempts at yeast dough.

Orange, Cranberry and Chocolate Muffins

2011-12-07T22:39:00.004Z

What could be more seasonal than the smells and flavours of oranges, cranberries, chocolate and cinnamon? All are present in abundance in these muffins, which would make a tasty light breakfast on Christmas Day morning. These muffins may be my entry to December's We Should Cocoa Challenge, but for the moment I want to hold them in reserve; I have other plans using orange and chocolate together, but at this time of year, my plans are often greater than my achievements! If I run out of time or energy, these will be a worthy entrant to the challenge.

I've used this recipe for Orange and Blueberry Muffins, from Dom at Belleau Kitchen, as the base recipe as it's one of the most successful muffin recipes I've tried. It isn't oversweet and the use of oats and oil give more than a passing illusion of healthiness! Instead of fresh blueberries I used dried cranberries presoaked in orange juice, and plain chocolate.

Ingredients
125g dried cranberries
roughly 300ml orange juice (I used juice from a carton; see method for explanation of amount)
100g rolled oats
375g plain flour
200g caster sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt (reduced from original recipe)
250ml sunflower oil
3 beaten eggs
1 egg white*
225g blueberries
finely grated zest and juice of 1 large orange, separated
100g plain chocolate, finely chopped

Topping, mix together - 70g turbinado (or demerara) sugar
50g toasted hazelnuts, finely chopped
1 teaspoon cinnamon

* the extra egg white was just to use up one that was lurking in my eye-line in the fridge!

Method
Put the cranberries into a small bowl and cover with orange juice. Soak for at least 4 hours.
Drain the berries, reserving any juice not absorbed. Measure the juice into a jug or cup and make up to 250ml with the fresh orange juice and more juice from the carton if necessary. (I found I needed only about another 30ml of carton juice)
Pre-heat the oven to 200C, 180C fan
Mix the rolled oats into the orange juice and set aside while you mix the batter.

In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.

Make a well in the centre and add the oat mixture, eggs + extra white and oil, and mix until the flour is just incorporated. Stir in the orange zest, cranberries and chocolate.
Fill muffin cases 3/4 full and sprinkle the top of each with just under a teaspoon of the topping mixture.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a test probe is clean (mine took 22 minutes this time, perhaps due to the extra egg white).

I made 22 muffins from this mixture.

These muffins don't appear to rise a lot, but they still have a good light, but moist, texture. All the separate flavour elements in these muffins could be tasted, and the turbinado sugar and hazelnuts gave a lovely crunchy contrast to the soft crumb and chewy cranberries. The only improvement I could see was perhaps a little more cinnamon in the topping - perhaps another 1/2 teaspoon.

Note Added 18th Dec - I'm pretty sure now that I'm going to run out of time. The next Chocolate/Orange combination I bake will be my Christmas Cake, which will be made on Christmas Eve. Even after it's finished, I probably won't have time to post about it by the We Should Cocoa deadline. So this is now officially my entry to the December Challenge, which was to use orange in combination with chocolate. This month's challenge is hosted by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog, and you can also find the rules on her Blog if you want to join in with future challenges.

Triple Chocolate Chunk Cake

2011-12-05T13:46:00.000Z

Yet another reworking of the basic cake recipe made with yogurt and oil. It really is a versatile recipe for a general everyday cake. For this one, I substituted 50g of the flour with ground almonds to keep the cake moist, and added 50g each of plain, milk and white chocolate, all three varieties chopped from a bar, rather than chips.

This cake didn't rise as much as usual but it was still light and moist. I changed the method slightly and mixed the sugar with the yogurt, eggs and oil, before sifting in the flour. I usually mix the sugar with the flour and then stir in the whisked together eggs, oil and yogurt, and I think the second method gives a better result. In both cases, any solid ingredients such as chopped chocolate are folded in after everything else is mixed together.

For the record, the ingredients were 150g plain flour, 50g ground almonds, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 200g caster sugar, 250ml low-fat yogurt, 3 eggs, 110g sunflower oil, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and 50g each of chopped plain, milk and white chocolate. The cake was baked in a 20cm round tin, at 180C for 50-60 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean.

Hazelnut and Coffee Cake with Nutella Frosting

2011-11-30T09:29:00.000Z

Phew! A successful cake after what seems like a stream of disappointments. It's not really that long since I baked something that I was (almost) completely happy with, but it seems like it when you're having to eat second-rate cakes!

This is my first attempt at adapting the Annie Bell recipe for a Lemon Drizzle Traybake, which I tried recently. I left out the lemon (obviously!), dissolved some coffee in the milk and substituted ground hazelnuts for some of the flour. The batter was baked in two sponge tins and then sandwiched and topped with a soft Nutella and plain chocolate frosting.

Ingredients - cake
180ml sunflower oil
270g caster sugar
3 large eggs
100ml milk
1 tablespoon instant coffee
50g chopped toasted hazelnuts
1 teaspoon cocoa (see note)
220g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

Frosting
60g plain chocolate
30g butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup
3 tablespoons milk
roughly 100g Nutella*

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 190C, and prepare two 8"(20cm) sandwich tins.
Dissolve the coffee in the milk. Put the hazelnuts, cocoa and 20g of the flour into a food processor or mini-chopper and process until the nuts are very finely ground, but not turning greasy (the flour helps prevent this).
In a large bowl whisk the oil, sugar, milk and coffee, and eggs until emulsified. Sift in the plain flour and baking powder, then add the ground nut mixture; whisk together until just combined.
Divide the mixture between the two sandwich tins and bake for about 20 minutes, or until done when tested.
Cool in the tins for ten minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.
When cool, sandwich with half the frosting and top with the other half.

While the cakes are cooking make the frosting - melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl, over a pan of simmering water. Remove from the heat and beat in the other ingredients. Allow to cool to a spreading consistency before using.

* I tried to add an extra 50g of Nutella and the mixture started to split. I rescued it by adding a little extra milk, but this meant that the frosting didn't set as firm as I'd hoped. If you like thicker layers of filling and frosting, I suggest increasing all the ingredients by 50% (or even more!).

note - adding a little cocoa to cakes containing nuts is a tip from Dan Lepard to increase the nuttiness of the flavour.

This was a really well-flavoured and textured cake. The coffee flavour was a little overwhemed by the Nutella frosting, but I think the amount of coffee I used was enough - any more would have been bitter. The flavour of the nuts in both the cake and the frosting was very good.

With a differently flavoured frosting - perhaps a vanilla or coffee buttercream - this would make a good coffee and nut cake with the coffee flavour more predominant. I'm really pleased that the recipe adapted as well as I'd hoped, and will be experimenting further with this.

One Bowl Chocolate Cake

2011-11-27T19:02:00.001Z

Another quick and incredibly easy recipe from Eating Well, and again, the result was a bit of a mixed bag. The flavour of the cake was fine but the texture was bordering on unpleasant - it felt like a dense bath sponge which needed wringing out.

I like dense moist chocolate cakes but not those that are so moist that they could be called wet! I'm not sure where, or if, I went wrong, but there was definitely too much liquid in the recipe - even after 45 minutes in the oven a test probe showed the cake was still damp in the centre. I'm pretty sure I didn't make any mistakes in measuring or weighing the ingredients, but my experience was nothing like that of those who commented on this recipe online.

At least it wasn't a large cake - we'll only get 6-8 portions out of it! My next bake is going to have to be a cake I know will work, or my family will rebel against my experiments, but I'm going to give Eating Well another chance, I think.

Ginger Citrus Cake

2011-11-25T08:38:00.000Z

I don't know why I haven't come across the Eating Well website before now - it's certainly full of recipes which suit my current style of baking. I think my baking mojo is back after a very lacklustre couple of weeks, but it's getting increasingly harder to find new recipes which are low in saturated fat ie made with oil. Which is why I found Eating Well somewhere around page 25 of a Google search! I don't understand why it doesn't come up sooner - I guess my search terms are wrong.

This Ginger Citrus Cake came from there, and was a very interesting cake. It didn't rise as much as I expected and had quite a dense, and slightly dry, texture, but the flavours were really complex.

I used the zest of a large orange and the juice of 1 lemon and half the orange in the cake, with a Spanish Citrus Blossom honey. I chopped the crystallised ginger quite small and this added a good extra flavour and texture. The honey didn't seem to make the cake as sweet as an equivalent amount of sugar would have.

Despite adding beaten egg whites, there was very little rise - this could have been due to the relatively small amount of baking powder, or the fact that there were only two eggs in the recipe, for 200g+ of flour. This was an effort to keep the cake healthy, I suppose, although eating eggs seems to be no longer a problem for those trying to keep cholesterol levels down. This recipe was written before the health guidelines on eggs were rewritten!

My only mistake was to try to turn it into a 'tea' cake rather than a dessert. I used some of the leftover orange juice and some honey and icing sugar to make a glacé icing, and decorated with some more chopped crystallised ginger. Once the cake was cooked, however, I realised that it would have made a much better dessert, served with fruit, so that the juices could soak into the cake.

This is certainly a cake to which I will return, although I suspect I will be trying to make it a little lighter. I will be checking out more recipes on the website too - I'm just a little worried that trying to make cakes healthy sucks all the joy out of them when several aspects of healthy eating are addressed in one cake!

Another Low Fat Brownie Recipe

2011-11-22T16:07:00.000Z

I wasn't sure whether to even bother writing about these brownies. The flavour was good, although CT didn't really like the tang from the sour cream, but the texture was nothing like a brownie. The crumb was moist, but very delicate, so it was difficult to even pick up a piece without it crumbling, and the pieces wanted to cling to the baking parchment. This wasn't helped by the brownie being less than 1cm high - twice the amount of batter in the same sized tin would have just about made a decent batch.

Additionally I couldn't get a good photograph because of our current grim Autumnal weather, even with Hubs holding a light source for me, so I can't show you a decent photograph of what I'm complaining about!

I decided to include them in the end, because it's the first time I've baked with a lower-fat butter replacement spread. The recipe can be found here, at Joy of Baking.

Food Bloggers Unplugged

2011-11-21T13:57:00.002Z

I've been tagged by Kate at What Kate Baked to take part in Food Bloggers Unplugged, a little exercise started by Susan at A Little Bit of Heaven on a Plate as a way of getting to know fellow food bloggers. The idea is that we answer 10 questions about ourselves, then tag five other food bloggers to take part, if they want to.

So, here are my answers:

What, or who, inspired you to start a blog? Other bloggers! I'd been reading food blogs for a while, and decided that it might be fun to join in.

Who is your foodie inspiration? I'd have to say my late mother-in-law. Until I got married food was just fuel. My mother wasn't a great cook, although like me, she was quite a good baker. However my M-i-L was a fantastic cook and showed me that there was more to food than just eating it.

Your greasiest, batter - splattered food/drink book is? The first cookbook I bought which was just about baking - Cakes and Cake Decorating by Zoe Leigh. It was published in 1974, which was probably the year I bought it, and I still use some of the recipes in it. Not only is it batter-splattered, it's so worn out that it's falling apart. The start of a well-travelled road!

Tell us all about the best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it, what was it? I've travelled a lot over the last ten years, with good memories of the food in many places, including Japan (which had worried me a bit before we went) but the single dish that stands out as the best thing I've eaten was a dish of fried rice with chicken, lobster and egg, at a Thai restaurant in Montreal. We ate it with a whole fish served with sweet and sour sauce plus another dish I've forgotten, but the whole meal showed us that Thai food could be much more delicately spiced than we'd experienced up until then. That rice was sublime!

Another food bloggers table you'd like to eat at is? Foodycat, without a doubt. She is so knowledgeable about all aspects of food, an adventurous cook and even a food producer, having tried her hand at such things as cheese-making.

What is the one kitchen gadget you would ask Santa for this year (money no object of course)? As I get older I'm beginning to realise the benefits that a dishwasher would bring. Does that count?

Who taught you how to cook? I taught myself with a little help from Delia Smith and Good Housekeeping, although as a child I had learned basic baking techniques with my mother.

I'm coming to you for dinner what's your signature dish? I'm not sure I have one, as I don't like to serve the same thing twice to guests, but you're very likely to get a chocolate dessert! Probably a variation of this one - Chocolate Ginger Torte

What is your guilty food pleasure? The first crusty slice from a loaf of white bread, thickly spread with lots of butter. And even the last slice, if it's still fresh!

Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn? Despite using it so much in my baking, I don't really like the smell of hot chocolate.

In turn, I would like to tag these 5 bloggers, although I hope they won't feel obliged to join in if they would rather not!
Foodycat, at Foodycat
Snowy, at Cookbooks Galore
Anne, at Anne's Kitchen
C, at Cakes, Crumbs and Cooking
and the entity that is hungryhinny

Lemon Drizzle Traybake Cake

2011-11-18T12:08:00.000Z

I think this cake might be my Eureka! moment - I think I've found a well-textured sponge cake made with oil, which could be varied in flavour. I have baked other cakes with oil, which have been wonderful, but it hasn't been easy to see how to adapt the best of them so that I can use different flavours. For instance, this Chocolate Swirl cake is almost perfect, but will always be a chocolate swirl cake because of the way it's made!

However, this Lemon Drizzle Traybake Cake recipe, by Annie Bell, looks as if it could be adapted to other simple flavours such as coffee or chocolate. I need to experiment further to see if the batter bakes as well in other shapes such as loaves or deeper tins, and I'm not sure that it's dense enough to take solid additions such as chocolate chips and chopped nuts, but I'm hopeful that it will prove to be a really useful recipe.

As is often the case with oil based recipes, this was really simple to make - mix the sugar with the wet ingredients and the flavourings, then sift in the flour and baking powder and combine. However, I've had other similar recipes collapse after baking - I'm beginning to think that the proportions used in oil-based cakes are much more important than with buttery cakes. Fortunately we can trust an Annie Bell recipe to be as reliable as always!

The flavour wasn't anything special - just a pleasant lemon flavour - and the topping didn't add a lot, but I was so pleased with the texture! It's not quite as light as a traditional Victoria Sandwich, but I'd say it's almost as good - somewhere between a sponge cake and a Madeira cake. Watch out for more cakes based on this recipe.

Guinness Gingerbread - from Tea with Bea

2011-11-15T09:34:00.001Z

This recipe comes from the gorgeous new baking book 'Tea with Bea', which I received in the post this week from Dom at Belleau Kitchen, after winning one of his generous give-aways. I could happily cook and eat any of the recipes in the book - they all sound delicious and are really well photographed. Thanks Dom - that's another few inches on the hips!

I decided to start with a recipe using oil instead of butter, to be in keeping with my current scheme of baking with less saturated fat. The recipe for gingerbread Guinness cupcakes suggested variations to make it into larger layer cakes, so I decided to make a larger tray bake (25 x 25cm) in a single layer, and not use the cream cheese topping. You can read about Tea with Bea, the author, Bea Vo, and see this recipe here, on the publisher's blog.

Despite it being a relatively simple recipe, I still managed to make a mistake which I worried would spoil the cake - I added a whole tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda to the Guinness and treacle mixture - no wonder it frothed so much! You really do need to heed the warning to use a tall saucepan, even with the right amount of soda. However, this extra soda couldn't be tasted in the finished cake, which was my main worry, and didn't appear to affect the cake adversely in any other way.

Another point to mention, which I didn't notice until after I'd cooked the cake, is that the temperatures given in the recipes are for a fan oven - I find this quite unusual, as most recipes are still written either for conventional ovens, or give both temperatues in the text. This didn't seem to have any effect on my cake, even though I cooked it on a lower than specified temperature.

I decorated the cake with a drizzle of glacé icing and some slices of crystallised ginger, as a the cream cheese frosting in the recipe is too rich for an everyday cake, and doesn't fit in with the less saturated fat effort! The cake itself was very light but still managed to be moist and sticky. The combination of spices used was really good - the cloves and allspice gave a good depth of flavour and the amount of ginger gave a real kick to the flavour! We all liked this cake a lot, so I'm sure the recipe will be used again, with no mistakes next time, and a slightly smaller tin, I think, to give a deeper cake.

Orange and Pinenut Frangipane Tart

2011-11-13T10:18:00.001Z

We've been having a bit of an Italian themed weekend, as far as eating goes. Tonight's meal is the star of the show, as we are using some pretty striped sombrero pasta and extra virgin olive oil brought back from FB's recent working holiday in Italy. She spent two weeks helping with the olive harvest and learning about olive oil production; the oil she brought back was produced by the organic farm where she was picking.

Tonight we'll be eating the pasta dressed with the oil and parmesan and bruschetta made with the oil and garlic, followed by roast chicken.

The dessert, which was made yesterday, and eaten after salmon coated with pesto breadcrumbs and Nigella's Rapid Roastini, will be the rest of this Orange and Pinenut Frangipane Tart from Giorgio Locatelli.

I followed the filling recipe and the baking method exactly, but used my own sweet shortcrust pastry recipe, which isn't quite as sweet as the pastry used in the recipe (200g plain flour, 110g butter, 30g icing sugar, 1 egg yolk + water as necessary). The recipe was quite straightforward to follow; I chopped the candied peel really small (smaller than the pinenuts) because I wasn't really sure how the rest of the family like it as it's not something I use very often. The only snag was that it took about 25 minutes before I was satisfied that the filling was set, but I turned down the heat to 150C after 15 minutes as the tart was already quite brown.

The tart was delicious - the flavour of both the pinenuts and the candied peel was very subtle and neither overwhelmed the delicate flavour of the frangipane. I served it with Chantilly Cream or vanilla pouring yogurt for those watching the calories. I'm sure the cream would have been tastier!

Chocolate Chip, Hazelnut and Orange Cake

2011-11-09T14:01:00.001Z

I'm not sure if this cake was a result of lack of time, lack of ingredients, lack of imagination or lack of enthusiasm for baking. Although I enjoy baking 90% of the time, I hate having to bake when I'm not in the mood! To produce something quickly for CT's daily slice of cake, I went back to this foolproof cake made with yogurt and oil, loosely based on this recipe from Ina Garten. I've simplified the recipe, and now mix the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, and mix them until just combined, before folding in any lumpy additions. This time, I was limited by a rather sparse storecupboard and a wish not to repeat flavours used recently (except chocolate, of course!)

So here, I mixed 200g plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 200g caster sugar and the zest of a large orange in a mixing bowl. In a smaller bowl, I whisked 150ml low fat yogurt, 100mls sour cream, 3 eggs and 110mls sunflower oil until smooth. After mixing the wet ingredients into the dry, I folded in 100g of chopped 74% chocolate and 50g chopped toasted hazelnuts.

The cake mixture was baked in a 20cm(8") round tin for 50-60 minutes (or until a test probe comes out clean) at 180C.

This time the cake was a little heavier than usual, which may have been due to using sour cream in place of some of the yogurt. - I just scraped together enough by using a mixture of the two! It didn't seem to affect anyone's appetite for it - even FB, who isn't much of a cake eater, had a slice (although she may just have been hungry!)

Date and Apple Squares with Chocolate Crumble Topping

2011-11-05T13:38:00.007Z

When Chele, at Chocolate Teapot, announced that apples were to be the added ingredient for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, I can't say I was surprised that this fruit has cropped up at last, although I did think that Choclette would be the host to suggest it, as she has quite a few recipes on her blog using the apple and chocolate combination.

However, it's not a combination that has ever appealled to me, which is strange, as I do think that chocolate goes very well with so many other fruits. Judging by the number of recipes I could find in my recipe books and on websites with recipes from professional food writers/cooks, it's not a combination that many other people find appealing either! My books yielded two recipes - both for pies with chocolate pastry - and the internet sites I looked at weren't much better. But I rarely shirk from the We Should Cocoa Challenge and I've never actually cooked anything combining apples and chocolate, so I shouldn't let my prejudices stand in the way of possibly startling revelations!

What to cook was a problem; having made the decision to take part in the challenge I then realised that I wanted to cook something where the apple was going to be noticeable, not fading into the background, masked by chocolate and other flavours. I thought this would give the combination a proper test! I also needed to cook something that would be eaten, as I can't afford to cook just for the sake of cooking - it has to fit in with the likes and dislikes of the people who would be eating it.

Cookies were out, as I couldn't see how to get much apple in without making them too wet and I didn't want to make a cake, as in my experience, apple tends to melt into the texture of a cake and I thought it would be overwhelmed by any chocolate in the recipe. Cheesecake crossed my mind, but I didn't really want a dessert, as they usually have to be eaten quickly and so are too calorific and indulgent. Once I started thinking about apple as a separate layer it didn't take long to remember traybakes and slices, but it still took a lot of research to find something which I was confident would take the addition of chocolate in some form. Eventually I decided to adapt a date slice recipe to use apples in the filling and chocolate in the top layer of dough. I chickened out of using apples on their own, as I thought they might be too moist, so I kept some dates in the mixture which I hoped would absorb the apple juices. Thus Date and Apple Squares with Chocolate Crumble Topping was born!

It was then that I found that I didn't have a date slice recipe! I was amazed, especially as I was sure I remembered at least one in some of my old books. Of all the recipes I found online, I decided that this recipe from Joy of Baking looked most like what I wanted to achieve, with the added benefit of a properly tested recipe too.

I followed the basic dough recipe exactly, but I added 75g of very finely chopped 85% chocolate to the 1/3 of the dough which was put aside for the topping. I intended to grate the chocolate but had to chop it in a mini-food processor in the end, as grating was going to take far too long.

For the filling, I used 200g of chopped dates, 120ml apple juice, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and two apples, each weighing about 200g, peeled and cored and cut into 1cm cubes. One apple was a Bramley which would cook down to a purée, and the other was an eating apple which I hoped would stay in cubes. These ingredients were cooked together until the juice was absorbed and the dates softened.

I then continued with the recipe - pressing the plain dough into the base of a 9 x 9" tin, spreading over the filling and then crumbling over the chocolate topping - before baking at 180C for 40 minutes.

After chilling and cutting I could see that part of my plan had worked - there were still visible cubes of apple within the filling. The filling was quite moist, but the base was nicely crisped and solid, so I hope that the squares don't become soggy during storage, as it will take at least three days to eat them all. The apples were still evident as a separate flavour when tasted too, but although we all liked the squares I'm not convinced that adding the chocolate was any improvement. I think using the original plain dough, with it's slight cinnamon flavour, in both layers would have been just as good.

So although I'm pleased I tried the apple-chocolate combination, I'm yet to be convinced that they are better together than apart. It will be really interesting to see what other entrants to the challenge come up with!

The Alchemist's Chocolate Cake

2011-11-01T14:04:00.002Z

This is another recipe from Dan Lepard's new book Short and Sweet. I remember making it when it was first published in the Guardian, and not being too impressed with it, but that was back before I needed to reign in my baking extravagances and try to cook with less saturated fat. The book also amends the recipe to use three eggs rather than just one, which would make a richer cake, so I was interested to see if I liked it better this time round.

The cake uses tinned pears and some of the juice as a means of reducing both added sugar and fat. There is only 50mls of oil in the recipe which is a really low amount - the recipe stipulates walnut oil, but I used hazelnut - I'm sure light olive oil would be OK to use too. The recipe was quick and easy to follow - I used a stick blender to purée the pears with the chocolate mixture, as I don't have a large processor or blender - but the cake didn't rise as much as I'd expected from the photograph in the book.

I intended to decorate the cake with squiggles of chocolate, as suggested in the book, but my plan to mix white and plain chocolate together to give a two-colour mottled effect bombed when the white chocolate failed to melt properly. I ended up just spreading the chocolate (about 80g in total) over the top of the cake, to try to hide the small white lumps which prevented me piping the squiggles properly.

Cutting the cake revealed quite an uneven texture too - a dense layer at the bottom which might be uncooked batter, several holes and some peculiar pale patches. The flavour of the cake was better than I'd remembered; it was quite dense and moist, and not very sweet, but, on the downside, it wasn't very chocolately in flavour either. I'm sure the faults in the texture are mine - you just need to check out the photograph of the cake Dan made to see that - but I'm not sure what I could have done differently. I can't imagine that using a stick blender rather than a blender on a processor makes that much difference, and everything else about the recipe was followed to the letter!

It was interesting to make this again, and compare with my memory of making it before, and it's quite a nice plain everyday cake, but I have better recipes for that sort of cake, so can't see this being repeated!

'Short and Sweet', and Spicy - Ginger Macadamia Biscuits

2011-10-28T21:55:00.001+01:00

I'm probably one of the last of the baking bloggers to mention Dan Lepard's new book - Short and Sweet - but that doesn't mean I'm not impressed by it. As well as bringing many recipes from his Guardian Weekend column together in one place, Dan prefaces each section of the book with tips on equipment and techniques and information on why ingredients are used and how they interact with each other. While this makes it an excellent book for beginners, there are also things for experienced bakers to learn too. As always, many of Dan's recipes stand out as innovative in terms of using unusual ingredients and flavour combinations as well as for some of the techniques used - the cook has to have a certain amount of trust and just leap in, but as long as the recipes are followed carefully, success is almost guaranteed. I'm sure this book is set to become a baking 'bible' for many bakers.

My one disappointment is the lack of a photograph for every recipe, but I can see that this would have made the book huge, and unwieldy in the kitchen. As it is, the book is specially designed to stay open at the chosen page, making it easier to use when hands are floury or sticky.

For my first recipe from the book, I chose a recipe I haven't made before, and one which fitted into the 'spicy' theme I have for my October baking - Ginger Macadamia Biscuits. The recipe previously published in the Guardian is slightly different in that it uses a large egg, whereas the recipe in the book uses a medium sized egg, but that was the only change. The book also suggests that the recipe will make about 35 biscuits, but I only got 29 walnut-sized balls out of the dough. The only other change I made was to use unsalted macadamia nuts.

These biscuits were very subtly flavoured - the ginger, macadamia and coconut complimented each other without any one of the flavours standing out. Macadamias have a very strange texture because they aren't crisp or crunchy - more chewy and waxy - but they fitted well into these chewy biscuits.

Pumpkin-Apple Streusel Cake

2011-10-24T16:02:00.001+01:00

This recipe for Pumpkin-Apple Streusel Cake, from Epicurious, was chosen to use up the rest of the can of pumpkin purée, which I'd opened to make the spiced chocolate orange cake from my previous post. I'm afraid to say this cake wasn't nearly as successful. The pumpkin cake layer was very moist and dense and the homemade pumpkin pie spice was rather overwhelming - in fact CT and Hubs didn't really like it at all! The photo looks worse than the cake actually was - cutting into the dense sponge seemed to compress it, so that the texture was lost, but within the slices the sponge texture was still there!

I followed the recipe almost exactly! I substituted 100mls oil and a tablespoon of water for the butter in the cake batter and used four cups of several varieties of homegrown apples which I had in the kitchen. I've no idea what variety the apple from my mother was, but the apples I grew were Blenheim Beauty and Falstaff. I made the pumpkin pie spice from this recipe.

I like the concept of this cake - the layer of buttery, cinnamon spiced apples on top of a cake, with a crisp streusel topping - but this time the cake wasn't quite right. I could see the idea working well on a ginger cake, but you'd need to be sure that the apples wouldn't sink.

Today, I had to make a batch of our favourite 'healthy' brownies, for CT, who won't eat any more of this particular cake!

Spiced Chocolate and Orange Pumpkin Cake

2011-10-21T21:56:00.003+01:00

Since my last post, I've had a disastrous attempt at a honey and spice cake, which ended up with the cake in the dustbin and me buying (!!) cake from the supermarket. It was a Lemon and Ginger cake - I stuck to the October 'spice' theme - and a very nice cake, but expensive for it's size. Not a very good start to National Baking Week! Anyway, while I was idly scanning the cookery ingredients shelf in the supermarket, I spotted the seasonal appearance of tins of pumpkin purée. No-one here likes pumpkin pie, but I have made pumpkin swirl brownies in the past, which were very successful. So into the basket went a tin of pumpkin - and home I went, to look for a recipe combining pumpkin and spices, and using oil instead of butter.

I also decided it was time to open the second tin of maple syrup I brought back from Canada last year, but then couldn't find a recipe that I like the look of. The nicest looking recipe used maple flavouring, which I've never seen on sale - maple syrup just wouldn't give enough flavour in such small quantities. Time to ditch the maple syrup idea, and proceed on the well known baking fact that there's nothing that can't be improved by adding chocolate! So I kept the basic recipe for Pumpkin-Maple Coffee Cake, but left out the maple flavour; I added the zest of an orange to the cake batter and 75g very finely chopped 85% chocolate to the central layer of sugar and cinnamon. I also used natural yogurt instead of buttermilk, because I didn't want to wait until I could shop again, and yogurt is always in the fridge

The result was an excellent cake, although the pumpkin was well-disguised by the other flavours. Hubs was really impressed by the way the cinnamon, chocolate and orange blended harmoniously together in a very light cake. My one criticism is one that I often have with American 'traybake' recipes - the tin size stipulated was too big for the amount of batter. After spreading the thinnest layer of batter possible on the base of the tin, there wasn't enough left to completely cover the layer of chocolate. This meant that although the layers looked neat on the central pieces of cake (top photo), on the edges the layers petered out rather untidily(lower photo)! Note to self - next time bake in a 8" square tin, cook for a few minutes longer and get a deeper cake!

Now I have to look for a recipe using no more than 275g pumpkin purée, to use up what was left from the tin I opened.

Chocolate, Cherry and Chilli Tart

2011-10-16T11:10:00.002+01:00

This well-flavoured dessert, which also fits into my spice theme for this month, is my entry to the October 'We Should Cocoa' challenge. This month the challenge was set by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog, and if you're considering joining in with this monthly cooking with chocolate challenge, the rules can also be found on Chocolate Log Blog. Choclette challenged us to find a way of using chilli in our chocolate cooking this month, and I have to say I've been waiting for this particular ingredient to come up! I have several brownie recipes using chilli, and one gorgeous cake recipe (which Dom of Belleau Kitchen has baked for this challenge!), but I really wanted to use this challenge to find a new recipe.

After I had an unsuccessful attempt at some cookies - both the way the recipe worked and the spice levels were wrong - I went back to the drawing board and thought about what I really would like. I remembered how much I liked the Lindt chocolate bar which contains a chili flavoured cherry filling (the single 'l' is their preferred spelling!), and I also remembered that I sometimes make a bakewell-style chocolate tart for dessert. I didn't want to use almonds this time, but I liked the idea of a chocolate tart with a layer of cherry jam at the bottom. I decided to add the chili flavouring to the chocolate layer and that I wanted the chocolate filling to be on the cakey-side, rather than a rich custard or ganache. I also wanted to keep CT's dietary restrictions in mind, so wanted a dessert he could eat without too much guilt, which meant that ideally I wanted a baked mousse cake which wasn't too rich, to balance the inevitable high fat levels of the pastry. One day I will try olive oil pastry, but I didn't have the will to experiment with that here!

I eventually found a recipe in one of the Green and Black's recipe books for a Berry Torte, the chocolate part of which looked just right - not too sweet and not a lot of butter (relative to other recipes I found!). After that it was simple to think through the finished tart - a sweet shortcrust deep pie case, a layer of Morello cherry jam and a mousse cake layer, with added chilli flavour, on top.

The execution wasn't perfect, as the chocolate pulled away from the pastry as it cooled, but it was a very good dessert. The sweet cherry filling was very intense but was balanced by the chocolate layer which wan't too sweet and which gave a warm chilli after-taste. I think I would add more cayenne pepper next time to give a slightly stronger flavour, and for a special occasion would use a richer mousse cake recipe, but on this occasion, it filled the criteria I had for this recipe.

For the recipe, you'll need a deep, sweet shortcrust pastry case, about 8 or 9 inches in diameter (20-22cm), baked blind. While the pastry is cooking, slightly warm 250g Morello cherry jam and stir in 2 tablespoons Kirsch or other cherry flavoured liqueur. Spread this over the base of the pastry case when you take it out of the oven. Then make the chocolate mousse cake mixture:

Chocolate mousse cake
25g plain flour
5 teaspoons cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne powder
75g plain chocolate (minimum 60% cocoa solids)
25g butter
5 teaspoons double cream
4 egg whites
3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons caster sugar

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over hot water, then remove from the heat and add the butter and cream and stir until the butter has melted.

Sift together the flour, cocoa and cayenne powder.

Whisk the egg whites to the stiff peak stage, then add the sugar and beat until thick and glossy.

Beat the egg yolks in a large bowl and add the flour mixture. Fold in as much as possible (I found the mixture too dry to fold it all in), then add the chocolate mixture and mix well.

Add about a quarter of the egg whites to the chocolate mixture and mix in thoroughly, then gently fold in the rest of the whites.

Gently pour the chocolate mixture into the pastry case, trying to fill the edges first and working into the middle - this should prevent the jam being pushed to the edges. Spread evenly then bake at 140C for about 25 minutes or until a test probe comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack. Serve at room temperature with whipped cream or as you desire

While writing this blog entry, I got very worried about the spelling of chilli. While researching the matter, I came across this article, which in turn links to another interesting point of view on the subject. I think for the time being I'm going to stick to the most accepted British spelling - the double 'll' version!

Pear, Cranberry and Ginger Cookies

2011-10-14T13:47:00.001+01:00

A quick stop-gap bake, before I do something special for the weekend! These cookies can be in the oven within 10 minutes of starting to bake, and I just put the mixing bowl on the scales and weigh in each ingredient in turn. The slowest part was chopping a few dried pears!

I kept to seasonal dried fruits and my October theme of 'spices' and made my usual recipe for cookies made with oil, (from Cookie Madness)using 40g chopped dried pears, 35g dried cranberries and 25g chopped crystallised ginger instead of chocolate and nuts. I also added 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon with the flour.

Unfortunately I forgot I was using the fan oven, and set it to the usual temperature for conventional baking. I think this is the reason why the cookies didn't spread as much as usual - it's the only thing which was different. It didn't affect the flavour though - lots of chewy fruit and lovely tangy little pieces of ginger to bite into.

Cocoa-Ancho Chile Cookies

2011-10-11T08:13:00.001+01:00

These Cocoa-Ancho Chile Cookies were going to be my 'We Should Cocoa' entry for this month, but no-one could taste the chili, so I'm going to have to rethink this one.

However, they fit into my 'spice' theme for October and have cocoa in them, so this post will be in celebration of Chocolate Week, which runs from the 10th - 16th October.

The cookies were pleasant enough to eat and the coating of lime-flavoured sugar gave them a bit of zing, but I wasn't very happy with them, as the recipe didn't work very well, and the amount of spice stipulated wasn't enough to flavour them very strongly - as I said, no-one could taste the chili and Hubs just about picked up the cinnamon!

The cookie dough was very slack when made following the recipe, and even after mixing in another tablespoon of flour it was still very soft. I had to refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes before I could handle it at all, and it was still very sticky. I thought I was making the balls of dough the correct size, but only got 18 out of the mixture instead of 30 - I guess that's the consequence of not having any scoops!

Tamarind Spice Biscuits

2011-10-06T16:41:00.001+01:00

It looks as if spices are going to be the theme for October baking. I've still got the chocolate-chilll challenge to complete for We Should Cocoa, and my last cake was strongly flavoured with cinnamon. But that's how it should be at this time of year - warm spices such as chilli, ginger, pepper and cinnamon are great additions to autumnal baking.

This recipe for Tamarind Spice Biscuits is another from Dan Lepard. It's packed with ginger - both the ground spice and chopped glacé ginger, with the addition of tamarind and garam masala. I used well-washed stem ginger as I don't think I've ever seen glacé ginger. Crystallised ginger could probably be used too, although the extra sugar might unbalance the flavour a little.

I made my own tamarind concentrate by mixing 40g tamarind block and 60mls boiling water, then passing the paste through a sieve, leaving the seeds and fibre behind. This gave me more than I needed, but was just guess work really, this time. Next time I might try more tamarind as the spices are really powerful.

The recipe was quick to make and there were no problems along the way, although I flattened the balls of dough a little, and I think they would have been better left completely spherical.

The biscuits were delicious, although the spice levels could be a bit too much for some people - my garam masala has quite a lot of black pepper in it and this gave the biscuits quite a kick. Mixed spice might be better for the faint-hearted! I think the tamarind is lost in the amount of spice, but someone with a better palate might be able to pick it out. It's also difficult to be sure whether or not something is contributing much to the flavour unless you taste the same thing without that ingredient! They were chewy cookies rather than crisp biscuits, which isn't a problem, although Dan's description of them as 'supercharged ginger nuts' might leave expectations of crisp biscuits!

Cafe Beaujolais' Buttermilk-Cinnamon Coffeecake

2011-10-03T08:41:00.001+01:00

I don't know where Café Beaujolais is, although I guess it's probably in Los Angeles as the original of this recipe, which I found on Food Librarian, is found in the LA Times.

The method for making this coffee cake is slightly unusual to me, as it mixes oil into the dry flour and sugar mix. I haven't seen this in a recipe before, but I've read that cakes made with oil are more tender because the oil coats the grains of flour, preventing gluten forming. This method of adding the oil to the flour certainly seems to bear this out, as the cake was very moist and tender, and very light too.

The only change I made to the recipe was to use chopped pecans in the topping, when I found that both packs of flaked almonds in the storecupboard were so far out of date that they smelled rancid! I liked the combination of pecans and cinnamon, and I'm not sure that almonds would have been better.

Also, I didn't have the right sized baking tin - I used my adjustable square cake tin, set to 11 x 10", which seemed to be the nearest equivalent. Perhaps because of this change, I found the cake took 45 minutes to cook - a little longer than suggested in the recipe.

The cake was a little too sweet for my taste, but that's about the only fault I can find with it, and I'm really pleased to have found a good coffeecake recipe made with oil.

Pretty New Things!

2011-10-02T10:19:00.001+01:00

New is a relative term for some of these - the three small plates were picked up at a local Antiques Fair. I'm guessing that they are all pre-1950s.

When we got home from the Antiques Fair - hot and tired after the hottest September day on record - a mysterious parcel was waiting for me. I wasn't expecting anything, and couldn't initially find any trace of the sender on the box. Inside, well padded with bubble wrap, was another box and still no sign of a sender. This box revealed the lovely cake stand in the photo - a limited edition for Waitrose in celebration of Summer 2011. I vaguely remember entering a few competitions on the Waitrose website - this must have been from one of them, although I would have expected an email to let me know it was on the way.

It will take a lot of baking to fill such a large cakestand, although it could be assembled with just two tiers if necessary.

Pear and Ginger Cake

2011-09-28T07:53:00.001+01:00

So many British baking bloggers seem to prefer autumn to any other season, and I'm no exception! I love using the fresh autumn fruits and nuts, and being able to bake stodgier cakes meant to be eaten in front of a cosy fire after a long walk! It's also so satisfying to use homegrown products in my baking - we've been growing vegetables for many years, but have only just started branching out into fruit production, and our own hazelnuts are an unforseen consequence of planting an ornamental twisted hazelnut!

This cake, from the BBC Good Food site, certainly fits that bill! It's dense and moist, and flavoured with the warming spices of ginger and mixed spice. It's an unusual recipe for a cake, as it uses softened dates to provide moistness and density and some of the sweetness comes from ginger preserves. The use of dates also means that less fat can be used, which fits into my current baking style.

I used two more of the large conference pears from my mother's tree, and some fresh hazelnuts from our own tree (instead of pecans). The only other change I made to the recipe was to leave out the brandy syrup - and I don't think it was greatly missed, the cake was certainly moist enough without it.

As the website suggests, this cake makes a great dessert while still warm, but is just as good eaten cold, with or without a drizzle of fresh cream!

Even though I didn't manage to photograph the inside of this cake, due to lack of light at this time of year and a busy schedule, I'm going to enter it into the Autumnal Baking Challenge at What Kate Baked, as it's one of the best seasonal cakes I've tasted so far this year!

The Little Book of Treats - Part 2

2011-09-25T08:52:00.002+01:00

As part of the review of 'The Little Book of Treats', available exclusively from M&S Cafés and sold to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support, as part of The World's Biggest Coffee Morning, I decided to try a couple of recipes straight away. I was a little constrained by what was already in the store cupboard, and by the fact that I'd already made a batch of our favourite low-fat brownies, for the weekend, so didn't want another chocolate bake.

My first choice was Fabulous Flapjacks, a recipe which contained a little less fat and sugar than I usually use. This used add-ins which I often use in my flapjacks - dried apricots, dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds - but added orange zest and juice and some mixed spice.

The flavours worked really well together but I found the flapjacks a little too crisp for my taste, although this could be due to the 5 minutes extra baking I gave them before I got a golden colour on top. The mixture didn't really hold together well either - the downside of trying to reduce the fat and sugar, I think - so the flapjacks crumbled when eaten. I used a tangerine instead of the orange stipulated, so may have been a little short of enough orange juice, which might have contributed to the crumbliness.

This is one of my quibbles with this particular recipe - the imprecise nature of the measurements and instruction! "Add orange juice to taste" said the recipe - well how am I to know how much it needs, and whether it's a vital part of holding the ingredients together, or just a flavour addition? An instruction which makes sense to the recipe owner, who may have developed the recipe over several years of changes, may not mean much to anyone else trying the recipe, without the experience with it. I'd also much rather have weights of syrups, rather than tablespoons. It's also difficult to measure dried apricots in tablespoons! OK, they need chopping, but if I chop them first and then measure out 3 tablespoons, then I may chop too many and end up with waste. In the end I decide two apricots would fill a tablespoon, so chopped 7 of them (one for luck!).

The recipe - melt 125g butter in a pan, adding 60g unrefined demerara sugar (I used light muscovado) 1 tablepoon of golden syrup and 1 1/2 tablepoons of honey. Stir in 250g porridge oats, 3 tablespoons chopped dried apricots, 3 tablespoons dried cranberries, 2 tablespoons pumpkin seeds, 1 teaspoon of mixed spice, 1 teaspoon salt (I left this out as I used salted butter) and the zest of an orange. Finally stir in the juice of the orange, to taste. Spoon the mixture into a shallow base-lined 20 x 18cm tin (I used a 20cm square tin, lined with baking parchment), press down firmly and bake at 180C for 20 minutes or until golden on top. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then turn out and cut into squares. (I marked the flapjack into squares while still warm, then cooled in the tin, as I usually do!)

The second recipe I chose was Butterscotch Apple Meringue, a dessert of apples cooked in a butterscotch sauce and topped with meringue before baking. This was pleasant enough to eat, but lacked any textural contrast. It would have been more than twice as good in a crisp pastry case! We ate it still slightly warm from the oven, but I thought it was better the next day, after a night in the fridge, when the apple flavour was more pronounced.

The recipe - Preheat the oven to 150C. Cook 450g (weight before peeling and chopping) of chopped cooking apples in a little water, until tender, then drain. Blend 40g cornflour with a little of the milk from 450mls. Bring the rest of the milk to the boil with 1 tablespoon golden syrup, 50g light muscovado sugar and 25g butter. Add to the cornflour mixture then return to the pan and bring back to the boil. Simmer for 3-4 minutes. Stir in 2 tablespoons single cream and two egg yolks, then remove from the heat before the mixture boils again. Fold in the cooked apples and pour into an oven proof serving dish (you need a pie or flan dish about 20cm in diameter). Whisk the 2 egg whites until stiff then whisk in most of 100g caster sugar (I whisked in about 2/3). Gently fold in the rest of the sugar, then spread the meringue over the apple mixture. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the meringue is crisp and golden. Serve hot or cold.

NB - I received a free copy of The Little Book of Treats, from Macmillan Cancer Support, but have tried to give an impartial review of the book, and the recipes I've tried.

The Little Book of Treats - Part 1

2011-09-24T21:32:00.010+01:00

The 'World's Biggest Coffee Morning' is an annual fundraising event run by Macmillan Cancer Support. This year the event is in it's 21st year, and will be held on Friday 30th September. For the second year running, Marks and Spencer is Macmillan's official partner and will be helping to raise money in several ways detailed below.

The aim of the coffee morning is to encourage people to take time out together with friends, relatives and colleagues over a coffee, and help raise £8.5 million to support much needed funds for Macmillan's vital work to help improve the lives of people affected by cancer.

As part of their support, Marks and Spencer are selling, in the M&S Café, the exclusive Macmillan's 'Little Book of Treats' (£3) which features recipes from supporters and celebrities, including celebrity cooks Gwyneth Paltrow, Sophie Dahl, Eric Lanlard, Lorraine Pascale and Antonio Carluccio, with all proceeds going directly to Macmillan. Until 4th October, they are also donating 10p of the sale price of a range of products to Macmillan, and for every coffee sold on 30th September, an additional 50p will be donated.

It's probably too late to organise your own coffee morning by now, but you can find one to attend locally on the Macmillan's website, or you can have a coffee break in an M&S Café, and/or buy The Little Book of Treats

I have been sent a free copy of the book to review by Michael at Macmillan Cancer Support, but I am giving an unbiased opinion:

This little book contains 31 recipes, covering a wide range of baking, most being suitable for beginners but some a little more challenging. Amongst the ubiquitous fairy cakes, victoria sponges and Lemon Drizzle Cakes there were a few recipes which caught my eye - Red Velvet Cupcakes from Eric Lanlard, where the rich colour comes from vinegar and bicarbonate of soda reacting together (no added colour), which are then decorated with a cooked buttercream based on a roux sauce, some crumbly piped Polenta Biscuits from Antonio Carluccio, plus several brownie recipes!

I'm not sure an experienced and dedicated baker will find much new here, but even one new recipe that you bake again and again is worth the price of a book, and in this case the profits are going to a very good cause!

Chocolate and Pear Upside Down Pudding

2011-09-23T08:46:00.001+01:00

This was a quick mid-week dessert, to use up a couple of pears from my mother's tree. She picked them while they were still hard, and it's always risky leaving pears to ripen - so often they rot from the core outwards. I chose this recipe because it used oil in the cake batter, and a lot of chocolate! The cake batter was quick to mix together, as it was just a case of dissolving the sugar into the wet ingredients and mixing the liquid into the other dry ingredients.

This pudding was delicious, although it doesn't make a very pretty picture! I think it would have been better if the pears were riper - or cooked a little first, before using them in the cake. It seemed to me that the caramel sauce needed some juice from the pears for it to work properly. Either that, or the proportions of butter and brown sugar weren't quite right. As it was, the topping was still a little granular when the cake was un-moulded, although the excess sugar eventually dissolved in the molten chocolate.

The dessert was good served warm from the oven, but just as nice eaten cold the next day.

As my pears were unripe, and I only had two large fruit, I sliced them thinly and still had enough to cover the base of a 23cm pan. If making it again with ripe or tinned pears, I would use more and slice them more thickly, as in the recipe.

Happy 1st Birthday, We Should Cocoa!

2011-09-19T09:18:00.002+01:00

This month's 'We Should Cocoa' challenge was to produce something suitable for a virtual 1st birthday party, as the challenge itself is now a year old. In the past, my novelty birthday cake making has been almost legendary (within the family!) - dinosaurs, volcanos, a TARDIS and daleks, ladybirds etc have all been produced at party times, but I think my family would have been a little shocked to find something like that in the cake tin, for no real reason! Happily, Dom at Belleau Kitchen has made a wonderful cake, which has taken the virtual pressure off the rest of us.

I still racked my brain for ages trying to think of something suitable for both adults and small children - my best idea was biscotti with just chocolate chips for the children and added nuts and dry fruit for the adults - but the thought of making them didn't really enthuse me. I don't know what flash of inspiration put Jaffa Cakes into my mind, but once it was there, it was stuck! As well as being loved by children and adults alike, these cakes (or biscuits, if you want an argument! LOL!) would also challenge my baking skills as I'm not very confident about adding chocolate coatings to things. Never mind how messy a small child would get eating one - it would be the same with anything covered in chocolate.

I can't imagine anyone not knowing what a Jaffa Cake is, but for the uninitiated, it's a small fat-free, fairly dry, sponge cake disc topped with a circle of orange flavoured jelly. The top is then coated with chocolate to enclose the jelly.

The best recipe I found, one on the BBC from Simon Rimmer, used jelly for the topping - many just put a blob of marmalade on top of the cake discs. Commercial jelly blocks are not suitable for vegetarians, so that might be one reason it's not used in recipes, but it does give the cakes a more authentic look and taste experience.

The recipe was fairly easy to follow, although I had a heart-stopping moment when it looked as if all the sponge discs were going to stick to the muffin pan. Each individual stage was quite quick too, with just the assembly taking time, as it was quite fiddly and needed a great amount of care.

I'm quite pleased with the results, although I think the chocolate coating was too thick, which unbalanced the flavour a little. The sponge cake part was quite bland and not as sweet as I remember the real thing. (The photo of the cut cake isn't very good, as the chocolate hadn't quite set, but it does show how thick the chocolate was in relation to the sponge and jelly layers!)

The cakes had a mixed reception from the others - Hubs didn't really like them, but CT did, and was quite disappointed when I said it was a one-off experiment not likely to be repeated. The main reason for saying that is that it took 4 passes through the washing-up bowl to clean off the stuck-on layer of cake crumbs from the muffin pan, which was supposed to be non-stick! If I make them again, I need a silicone baking mould, I think - a good excuse for buying one anyway.

If you'd like to join in with future We Should Cocoa challenges, the rules can be found on Choclette's Chocolate Log Blog. Choclette shares host duties for the challenge with Chele at Chocolate Teapot, and it is Chele who has set this month's challenge, which means she will be giving us the round-up of entries towards the end of the month - I guess she will have to clear up after the party too!

Spiced Apple and Ginger-wine Loaf

2011-09-15T17:01:00.001+01:00

I had planned to spend a quiet afternoon working on my entry for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, but the internet was down and I couldn't get to the recipe I'd picked out - I hope now that I have enough time before the deadline to have another go - a whole afternoon free is a rarity these days!

Fortunately I had saved this Diana Henry recipe, published recently in the Telegraph, as a .pdf file, so had a fall-back position to make sure there was actually something to eat. It's a fairly straightforward recipe, and I didn't have any problems following it. The loaf tin size specified is a standard 2lb loaf tin. I didn't have a Cox apple so used a Jazz apple for the decoration as they have a lovely coloured skin.

The recipe makes a moist but not too heavy cake, subtly flavoured with the ginger wine and spices. We all enjoyed eating the cake but didn't really like the fresh fruit topping - not sure why really, as it looked very pretty. Perhaps that was the problem - it looked nice but didn't add anything to the enjoymernt of eating the cake - we're more concerned with flavour than looks, most of the time. I think it might have made a nicer cake if the eating apple was finely chopped and mixed into the cake batter, or the slices put on top of the raw batter and baked into the cake.

One other potential problem with the fresh apple slices on top is that they may not keep as well as the cake, so I think it's probably best to use them only if you expect the cake to be eaten all at once. I took the slices off after I'd cut the first slices of cake, so that they did not spoil the leftovers. If you do try the decoration, make sure the apple slices are really dry before you drizzle over the icing, or the moisture will soon dissolve the icing sugar and spoil the appearance.

Orange and Blueberry Muffins

2011-09-11T09:11:00.002+01:00

You know that me and muffins don't get along, so I surprised even myself when I decided to make these muffins, from Dom at Belleau Kitchen, as soon as I saw the recipe. This is a recipe that Dom's mum picked up from the chef when she was at the Peregrine Inn in Yosemite, California - she's a determined lady when she wants a recipe, apparently!

Surprise number two was that the recipe worked really well, although I didn't do it full justice, as I couldn't find any nuts to make the topping. That was surprise number three - that I'd let the baking store cupboard run down - not like me at all!

Unlike Dom, I did have some rolled oats that I could use, so apart from the topping and reducing the salt a little, I followed the recipe exactly, although the muffins took 20 minutes to bake with my oven set to 180C fan. This was a big recipe - I made 22 muffins, although the last two didn't have their fair share of blueberries - the fruit I bought was quite large (especially compared to frozen blueberries) so I wished I'd added a few extra. I sprinkled demerara sugar on the top of the muffins before baking, to give a textural contrast, but I really think they needed the topping given in the recipe, as the flavour was pleasant, but a little bland, without it.

As I said, the recipe worked very well to give light muffins with a close crumb. The oats really weren't evident in the texture, which was another surprise! The flavour was quite delicate, but would have been improved by the walnuts and cinnamon in the intended topping. I think this is a muffin recipe which could easily be varied by using different fruit juices, spices and added fruit - apple and blackberry springs to mind. As it's one of the most successful muffin recipes I've tried, and it fits into my 'low saturated fat' baking scheme, I'm sure I'll be using it again, so thanks to Dom and his intrepid mother for sharing the recipe!

I'm not going to copy out the recipe - you can visit Belleau Kitchen for that, from the link above - but as an aide memoire I'm going to list the metric weights/volumes of ingredients I used (or should have) after converting from cups:

100g rolled oats
250ml orange juice
375g plain flour
200g caster sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt (reduced from original recipe)
250ml sunflower oil
3 beaten eggs
225g blueberries
finely grated zest of medium orange
70g sugar for topping
50g finely chopped nuts for topping
1 teaspoon cinnamon for topping

Chocolate and Marzipan Yogurt Cake

2011-09-05T14:05:00.000+01:00

Another outing for the basic yogurt/oil cake recipe, this time with added 85% plain chocolate and chunks of marzipan. The bittter dark chocolate was a nice counterbalance to the sweetness of the marzipan, and as usual the cake had a moist but not dense texture.

The method has been simplified as far as possible too, including weighing the oil and yogurt:

Weigh the dry ingredients into a large bowl and mix thoroughly
Weigh the wet ingredients into a bowl or jug, and beat together lightly
Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until just amalgamated
Fold in any lumpy additions such as nuts and chocolate chunks
Spread evenly in a 2lb loaf tin or 8" diameter springform tin and bake at 180C for 50 or so minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean

I'm never without enough storecupboard ingredients to make this cake, and without having to wait for butter to soften it is very quick to assemble and get into the oven.

The ingredients for this cake were
170g plain flour
30g cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
100g caster sugar
100g light muscovado sugar
250g low fat yogurt
110g light olive oil
3 large eggs
75g plain chocolate (85%), chopped finely
125g white marzipan, chopped into small chunks - 2/3 mixed into cake batter, 1/3 scattered on top of cake before baking.

Autumn Plum Crunch Cake

2011-09-02T08:58:00.001+01:00

I love Autumn baking. Plums, apples and pears and their natural association with spices and nuts suits my style of baking much more than trying to use the delicate summer berries. Those are best eaten as simply as possible and are often spoiled by cooking into cakes, I feel. Heavier cakes, packed with fruit and nuts, are also more in tune with the cooling days

This cake is very similar in outcome to Dan Lepard's Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake, but it wasn't quite as successful. My main mistake was to misunderstand the nature of the topping - I thought it was a syrup drizzle, but I think it was supposed to be more of an icing, to help stick down the crunchy sugar topping. I cut down the sugar to make a drizzle to soak in and also added more fruit to the batter, which I think would have been OK without the extra fruit juice soak. The combination of the two was just too much moisture, and resulted in a soggy cake - fine for a dessert, but not good for a cake. The batter was also too thin to support the slices of fruit on top, and these sank into the sponge as it cooked. This might have been down to the size of my eggs, so I think I'd leave out the orange juice next time, if using large eggs.

The flavour was lovely, but the overall concept needs more work, although FB says she has made the cake with more visual success than I had - meaning the plum slices stayed on top! It would have been far too sweet for my tastes if I had used all the sugar in the topping, so I'm glad I did cut that down! I think making Dan's cake with plums and orange zest would be a better option, especially if you sliced the plums neatly to look good when the cake was turned out.

The recipe comes from the Good Food publication '101 Cakes and Bakes' but unfortunately isn't available on the Good Food website.

Ingredients
140g softened butter

140g golden caster sugar (I used 110g caster sugar and 30g light muscovado sugar)
2 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
pinch salt
140g SR flour
the finely grated zest and juice of 1 orange
200g plums, destoned, half cut into wedges, half roughly chopped (I used 4 large plums which weighed in at 350g; 200g looked a totally inadequate amount for a good flavour)

Topping
200g caster sugar (I used only 70g)
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
4 or 5 brown sugar cubes, roughly chopped

Method
Preheat oven to 160C and prepare a 2lb loaf tin.
Lightly beat the eggs and the egg yolk with a pinch of salt
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs, a little at a time, adding a little of the flour if the mixture looks like curdling.
Fold in the rest of the flour with the orange zest and 2 tablespoons of the orange juice.
Gently mix in the chopped fruit.
Transfer the mixture to the loaf tin and spread evenly.
Scatter the plum wedges on top.
Bake for about 50 minutes until firm and golden ( mine took 60 minutes to cook!)
Cool for ten minutes in the tin.

At this point the original method turned out the cake onto a wire rack, and poured over a topping made by mixing the 200g caster sugar with the lemon juice and the rest of the orange juice, then sprinkling over the crushed sugar cubes. I left the cake in the tin, pricked the top with a cocktail stick and poured over the topping I had made with less sugar, before sprinkling over the crushed sugar pieces. I then left the cake to cool in the tin and soak up the juices.

Sticky Gingerbread

2011-09-01T08:17:00.001+01:00

This is another slightly adapted version of this gingerbread recipe, made with oil, from the Australian website Taste. I made this a while ago and added stem ginger and candied orange peel to the mix, but the batter was too thin to support any solid additions and it all sank to the bottom.

This time there were no additions, but I replaced roughly 25% (70g out of 300g) of the golden syrup with black treacle to give a darker cake. This worked very well - the colour was much better and the cake got nicely sticky on the top after the first day.

This is a really light cake - the only downside really, as I prefer gingerbread to be a bit denser in texture. It's well flavoured and not oversweet, despite the amount of sugar in the recipe. It's very quick to make too, so good for days when you're in a hurry and just want something simple to fill the cakebox.

My 7 Links

2011-08-29T15:15:00.003+01:00

Kavey at 'Kavey Eats' has nominated me to take part in the '7 links' project, which started on the travel blog Tripbase. The idea, as explained by Tripbase, is "to unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavour to share lessons learned and create a bank of forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again." Obviously the idea grew among the travel blogging community first, but as bloggers nominate other bloggers from within their wider range of interests, it is spreading into other areas.

We are asked to share posts from our own blog, giving a link to one post for each of 7 categories. Then we nominate 5 more bloggers to do the same. The categories are ~your most beautiful post, ~your most popular post, ~your most controversial post, ~your most helpful post, ~a post whose success surprised you, ~a post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved, and finally, the post that you are most proud of.

My blog is quite specialised, really only looking at the products of my baking sessions, and I haven't got so many followers that I get a lot of comments about most of my posts, so it was quite difficult to decide which posts to use in each category. In the end, the only way which worked for me was to choose the posts on the basis of the product in them, and relate why I thought they fitted that particular category.

My Most Beautiful Post - Chocolate Ripple Pound Cake

I don't often set out to make cakes which look beautiful on the outside - I'm not a cake decorator. I'm much more interested in the flavours and textures in the cake and if they look good when they are cut that is an unintended benefit. The exceptions to this are 'marble' and 'ripple' cakes, where perhaps fairly plain flavours are made more interesting by presenting them in two or more differently coloured batters. For me, part of the beauty of the ripple cake is the unpredictablity of the outcome - it's never exactly the same twice, as slight variations in the thickness of the layers of batter and the currents within the cake as it cooks will produce different patterns. It's like the natural beauty of frost patterns on a window pane, or the refraction of light from spilt oil on a puddle.

My Most Popular Post - Sticky Toffee Pudding

This was chosen as one of my posts with the largest amount of comments, not counting my replies to other peoples' comments! What's not to like about sticky toffee pudding - even people who don't like dates will usually eat this pudding, and I've never known it to be turned down! This version has a touch of black treacle in the recipe, to cut down the sickliness which comes from something being too sweet!

My Most Controversial Post - Phanouropita

In all honesty, none of my posts are really controversial! How can you argue about baking? At the most, you can discuss things such as flavour combinations you don't like, or whether plain flour and baking powder is better than SR flour, but in the end, I respect other peoples' views as it always comes down to personal tastes rather than something that is right or wrong. The controversy in this case was a personal one of whether or not one can make a decent cake without eggs. Up until this point I've always maintained that you can't, but this cake proved me wrong. It lacked the rich flavour that you get with butter and eggs, but it was light and well risen, and the flavours of the nuts and spices really stood out.

My Most Helpful Post - Apple Tart 'Maman Blanc'

I chose this post about Raymond Blanc's recipe for his mother's apple tart because the detailed instructions for shaping, rolling and resting the pastry gave absolutely perfect results - lovely short pastry with minimal shrinkage and a crisp base. I've followed this method faithfully on other occasions and get equally good results, but it's very time consuming to do from start to finish, even if some of the time is only waiting time! So - this post could help you make perfect pastry!

The Post Whose Success Surprised Me - Chocolate Brownies made with Mayonnaise.

This recipe was found in response to my son needing to follow a diet low in saturated fat, to reduce his cholesterol levels. By the time he had cut out bacon, butter, paté and cheese, and reduced his consumption of red meat, it hardly seemed fair to tell him he couldn't eat cakes and biscuits either, so I started to look for recipes lower in saturated fat, including those which used oil instead of butter. Although there have been one or two less successful attempts, on the whole I'm very pleased with this baking adventure, and I've found a few basic recipes which I can produce quickly, and be sure of success. This recipe, which uses mayonnaise instead of butter, was a surprise success, as the end result was better than some brownie recipes I've tried which had no claim to being healthy!

A Post Which Deserves More Attention - Rhubarb, Almond and Orange Cake

It's inevitable that posts during the early days of my blog have attracted less attention than later posts, when the number of followers has grown, and I've got more involved with the blogging community. This is one that deserves more attention as, quite simply, it is one of the best rhubarb desserts I have ever made! I'd usually choose a crumble as my favourite dessert, but crumbles aren't as good reheated or eaten cold, whereas this is perfect either warm or at room temperature, so will still be good for a couple of days.

The Post I'm Most Proud Of - Hazelnut Meringue Roulade

I'm not a brave baker - I'd rather ignore the things I can't do than keep trying to get them right. Part of this is a certain inborn thriftiness - I hate wasting food, so don't like trying things if the results are going to be inedible. However, joining the We Should Cocoa Challenge has persuaded me to test my limitations on occasion - using ingredients I wouldn't usually cook with, or techniques I'm not familiar with. The challenge for last May was to make a roulade using some form of chocolate as one of the ingredients. This coincided with needing to make lunch for a friend whose diet is gluten- and dairy-free, so I decided to make a meringue roulade. This was a real challenge, as I haven't tackled either meringue or a roulade for many, many years. It wouldn't surprise me if my last roulade was a Swiss roll in school cookery lessons! As an added bonus in the challenge stakes, I made a chocolate mousse with olive oil, for the roulade filling, to keep the dessert dairy-free. After successful baking the meringue, and rolling it up, I was really proud of the result.

So, those are my 7 links! I'd like to nominate these 5 blogs to take part in this project, if they are interested:

Cake, Crumbs and Cooking
Kates Cakes and Bakes
Belleau Kitchen
Foodycat
Cookbooks Galore

All you need to do to participate is write a post with your own 7 links, using the categories listed above.

Sweet Potato Brownies

2011-08-25T20:49:00.001+01:00

Don't stop reading yet! The name isn't exactly inspiring, but these brownies are really, really good!

This is a Dan Lepard recipe for brownies with a lower fat and sugar content than usual. Some of the butter and sugar is replaced by sweet potato purée, which helps bind the mixture, add moisture and keep the fat and sugar emulsified, as Dan explains in his Guardian column.

They aren't totally suitable for the low saturated fat diet which CT is following, but they certainly make a great treat for him, without overloading on butter. They are really aimed at someone trying to cut down their calorie intake, particularly from excessive fat and the empty calories from sugar.

This is a more fiddly recipe than usual, as I had to plan ahead and bake a sweet potato. I did this in the oven, as I wasn't sure if a microwaved potato would be the same - I assumed the potato would lose some moisture as it cooked in the oven, but might not lose as much in the m/wave. I started with a potato weighing around 400g and used about 2/3 of it in the recipe. The only change I made to the recipe was to use toasted hazelnuts instead of pecans, so that FB could eat the brownies.

After following the recipe exactly, I found it took a few minutes longer than stated to cook the tray of brownie batter - it was liquid in the centre at 25 minutes, but by 30 minutes I was worried that it was overcooked, as it seemed so solid. So the correct end point is something to watch for closely.

The brownie was moist and dense and had just the texture that I like in a good brownie. There is no way that you would guess that it contained sweet potato, or that it was lower in fat and sugar. There were a few holes in the cooked brownie, rather than an even texture, but this doesn't spoil the flavour!

These will be made again, but only as an occasional treat for CT - he needs to stick to the oil based cakes.

Chocolate and Ginger Yogurt Cake

2011-08-18T08:31:00.002+01:00

This is another version of the Lemon Yogurt Anything cake, first seen on Smitten Kitchen. This, in turn, was originally an Ina Garten recipe for a lemon cake with no fruit. My version reduces the amount of liquid slightly, as I don't add the lemon juice, but it has turned into a really good basic cake which is highly adaptable to make many differently flavoured versions. I had a similarly versatile cake recipe using butter, which I could mix up and get into the oven in a very short time, so I'm very pleased to have found a lower saturated fat version. They are really useful recipes when all you have available are store cupboard ingredients.

Ingredients
170g plain flour
30g cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon powdered ginger
200g caster sugar
250g low fat yogurt*
110g sunflower oil
3 large eggs
150g chopped plain chocolate
4 balls of preserved stem ginger, finely chopped.

*I used 125g fat-free vanilla yogurt and 125g low fat natural yogurt, as I was short of enough natural yogurt.

Method
Prepare a 20cm (8") round springform cake tin, and pre-heat the oven to 180C.
Put the flour, cocoa, salt, baking powder, powdered ginger and sugar into a large bowl and mix with a ballon whisk.
In a large jug, mix together the eggs, yogurt and oil.
Add the wet ingredients to the flour mix and stir briskly (but don't beat) until thoroughly combined.
Fold in the chopped chocolate and stem ginger.
Spread evenly in the prepared tin and bake for about 50-60 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.
Cool in the tin for 15 minutes, then remove from tin and cool on a wire rack.

For a simple 'everyday' cake this turned out really well. The texture was light and moist and there was just the right amount of ginger to be noticeable, but not overpower the chocolate flavour. Another successful variation - these sort of cakes are different everytime I make them as the 'add-in' ingredients vary according to what's available, but I will remember how good this one was!

Rose and Pistachio Blondies - We Should Cocoa; August

2011-08-16T22:30:00.004+01:00

August's We Should Cocoa challenge was set by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog. Carrying on with the seasonal theme, she challenged us to use roses in some form, in our chocolate based product. I have to admit that I wasn't very excited by this challenge, perhaps because roses suggests something more delicate than the things I usually bake. It's also a flavour that I haven't used before, so I was unsure how a rose flavoured product would be received by other family members.

By the time I got round to baking these, I'd already had two attempts to make rose sugar, which hadn't really worked, so I bought some rose water and dried the petals of a deep red rose for this recipe.

After some thought I decided that the flavour of the rosewater would probably be overwhelmed by dark chocolate, and that if I wanted the roses to be visible in the final product I would have to use white chocolate again. Blondies were my first thought, even though I made blondies for June's challenge. To contrast with the sweetness of this I decided to add cocoa nibs. The final decision was to add pistachio nuts for a pleasing colour combination of pink, black and pale green.

Because of my concerns about using rose flavour, I only made a small batch of these blondies. The recipe could easily be doubled and cooked in a 20cm square tin for a few minutes longer.

Ingredients
30g butter
50g caster sugar
1 tablespoon water
100g white chocolate
1 egg
1 teaspoon rosewater
75g plain flour
scant 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt
40g chopped pistachio nuts
25g cocoa nibs
dried petals of 1 red rose, shredded

Method
Heat oven to 160C and prepare a loaf tin, or a 22 x 10cm (9 x 4") shallow tin.

Mix the flour, salt and baking powder in a small bowl.

Heat the butter, sugar and water in a saucepan until the butter has melted, then add the chopped white chocolate and stir until the chocolate has melted. Remove from heat.

Beat in the egg, then stir in the rosewater.

Add the flour mix and fold in, then mix in the pistachios, cocoa nibs and rose petals.

Spread the batter evenly in the prepared tin and bake for 30 minutes or until a test probe is clean. Cool in tin.

Cut the cake into bars for serving.

I was surprised at how strongly flavoured the rosewater was; I think I could easily have made something with plain chocolate without masking the flavour. I'd expected the scent of roses but these blondies also tasted strongly of Turkish Delight. The pistachios, cocoa nibs and rose petals gave a great multi-coloured speckled look to the bars (thankfully the petals kept a lot of their colour) and the nuts and nibs gave some crunch to the texture.

Overall I was very pleased with these, but I don't think they are likely to become a regular item in my repertoire.

Rose Sugar and other things.......

2011-08-12T17:00:00.001+01:00

I'm currently losing about 3 hours a day, as I take time to visit my mother in hospital. This is time that I would normally spend cooking or gardening. Consequently, the garden is over-run with weeds - although we have found time to harvest most of the vegetables that are ready to eat - and our meals are basic, to say the least. I'm not sure if things will improve much when mother is out of hospital, as I can't judge yet how much care she will need.

I have been baking a little, but it's old favourites rather than new recipes - I just don't have time to look for anything new! I've made the mayonnaise-based brownies and Dan Lepard's Marmalade Flapjacks and I've been thinking about this month's We Should Cocoa challenge - to use roses in conjunction with chocolate.

I'm not very inspired by this challenge - I'm certainly not going to spend over £4 on 4 tablespoons of rose water, which probably won't get used again once a few drops are taken out, and any other rose-based products are even less readily available or more expensive, when the postage costs of online buying are factored in! However, I do (or did) intend to attempt the challenge, and to this end, I've been trying to make rose sugar. I've had two attempts so far and neither seem very promising.

Both attempts were made the same way - rub the petals of one large, just opened, rose (either fresh or dried for two days) with 100g of caster sugar and store in a closed container. The sugar made with dried flowers (on the right in the photo) looks good, as it has flecks of dark pink petals throughout, but it smells awful - nothing like roses! The sugar made using fresh rose petals (in the left container) still smells like roses, but the petals have lost their colour and gone a nasty yellowy-brown colour! The sugar is also damp and lumpy, so I can't even sieve out the manky petals with the sugar like this.

I'm not sure what to do next - any suggestions? I'm inclined to use the sugar made with fresh petals and hope the smell survives the cooking process, as neither sugars seem to have taken on any additional flavour from the rose petals! Perhaps I could sieve out the dry petals from the other sugar and hope the colour of those survives cooking too! But first I have to find time to make something!

Chocolate, Chilli and Orange Ripple Cake

2011-08-06T20:07:00.002+01:00

It wasn't until after I'd decided to make this Alice Medrich recipe again that I realised the instructions also contained the 'jinx' phrase 'whisk until pale and thick'. I guess it proves that jinxes are just figments of the imagination - this time the recipe worked really well!

I made this cake about 4 months ago, but decided that it was too large for my bundt tin, and that the flavours were a bit too subtle. This time I reduced everything by about 20% - some ingredients were more accurately recalculated than others - and changed the black pepper for cayenne (chilli) pepper. I also used the grated zest of a whole orange in the plain batter.

Here is the revised recipe:
Ingredients
4 1/2 tablespoons cocoa
4 1/2 tablespoons caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
4 tablespoons water

320g plain flour
2 scant tsp baking powder
pinch salt
320g caster sugar
200ml light olive oil
4 cold eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
200ml cold semi-skimmed milk
finely grated zest of one large orange

Instructions
Pre-heat the oven to 180C and prepare a 10-cup bundt tin (a tin which is at least 2.4 litres in capacity).
Put the first 4 ingredients into a small bowl and mix until they form a smooth paste; set aside.
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a small bowl; set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk the sugar, oil and vanilla until well blended and smooth. Whisk in the eggs 1 at a time, then continue whisking until the mixture is thick and pale - about 3 minutes with an electric hand whisk.
Reduce the whisk to a slow speed, then mix in 1/3 portions of the flour alternately with the milk, whisking only as much as necessary to make a smooth batter.
Weigh out 400g of the batter into a bowl and mix in the cocoa paste mix.
Mix the orange zest into the plain portion of the batter.
Using 1/3 of each batter at a time, layer them alternately into the bundt tin, starting with the orange batter.
Bake for about 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean; cool for 15 minutes in the tin, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Dust with icing sugar before serving.

As before, the texture of this cake was really good - moist with a close even crumb. Using cayenne powder instead of black pepper, and more orange zest boosted the flavour just the right amount. The cayenne wasn't overpowering, but by the time you'd eaten a whole slice you were certainly aware of the warmth of the spice. Last time I didn't really notice the black pepper at all.

This is one of the best pound cake recipes using oil that I've tried. I'll have to try it as a basic pound cake, without the chocolate ripples, to see if it works as well as a plain cake - it will then be more adaptable when wanting to try other flavours. I'm just worried that leaving out the cocoa and extra sugar will affect the balance of the cake too much.

Lemon, Almond and Elderflower Cake

2011-07-31T20:14:00.002+01:00

I've decided that I'm jinxed when I try any cake which includes a "whisk until pale and thick" step. I thought this one might be different because the eggs and sugar were whisked over simmering water, but once again the cake sank (or didn't rise properly) in the centre. The flavour was very good, and the texture was light and moist, and above all, even, throughout the whole cake, so it wasn't a case of underbaking and a soggy centre.

I chose this recipe from Good to Know, but replaced the Amaretto liqueur with elderflower cordial. Instead of putting flaked almonds on top before baking, I left the cake plain, then brushed with another 2 tablespoons of elderflower cordial, and sprinkled lightly with demerara sugar as soon as it was removed from the oven.

The only problem with the recipe was that the cake was still very wobbly in the centre at the end of the cooking time. It needed another 10 minutes baking after the suggested 25 minutes, but was already quite dark, so needed covering with a piece of foil.

The elderflower flavour wasn't really noticeable in the finished cake, but I didn't want to add alcohol, or increase the almond flavour, in this cake.

Phanouropita

2011-07-27T08:52:00.002+01:00

Also known as St Phanourios's Cake, and, as it will become in my non-religious household, Greek Walnut Cake. The origins of the cake is explained in the recipe at Leites Culinaria, and it's worth following the link on that page to read the author's personal quest with the cake.

I picked out the recipe because I was looking for a cake made with oil, with a different flavour to those I've tried before. I wouldn't usually use walnuts in a cake, but FB, who dislikes most nuts, is away this week. I happened to have an opened carton of orange juice to finish up, so that provided most of the juice, although I added the juice of one fresh orange to make up the volume. As I was using an orange I thought I might as well add the zest to the cake too, rather than waste it. I had to use rum instead of brandy, as that was all I had in stock. Other than that, I followed the recipe exactly, although I didn't beat the batter for 9 minutes, as I was using an electric mixer.

In my pleasure at finding a new recipe, I completely failed to notice that the cake didn't contain any eggs, until I had mixed the liquid ingredients. Too late to go back at that point! I put the cake into the oven with some trepidation, and if I had any religious leanings I might have been praying to St Phanourios that I hadn't lost my senses at that point. My only previous encounter with a cake with no eggs was a disaster that had to be thrown away, and if you've seen some of the disasters which we've still eaten, you'll realise how bad it must have been!

Thankfully all was well; the cake rose nicely and tasted much better than I expected. The richness you get with eggs and butter wasn't there, of course, and it wasn't very sweet either, but the plainess of the batter allowed the flavour of the nuts and spices to shine through. It was the kind of cake you wouldn't feel guilty about eating for breakfast!

Low Fat Chocolate Cake

2011-07-23T21:04:00.000+01:00

Rather than my usual practise of using oil instead of butter, to make a low saturated fat cake, I thought this cake, with a low overall fat content was worth a try. Most of the butter is replaced with plum jam and skimmed evaporated milk.

Well, it was worth a try, but it probably won't be repeated! The cake was dry, with an uneven texture - full of holes and sticky areas where there were lumps of fruit in the jam. It had a pleasant enough flavour, but that flavour couldn't really be described as chocolatey!

It also used ingredients which I don't keep in stock, and I would need it to be a much nicer cake before I kept plum jam and evaporated milk at the ready in the storecupboard.

I guess if it's necessary to cut down on all fats for health reasons, then this is probably a good way to get round the problem of having cake while on a diet, but it's a step too far for us!

Blog Comments

2011-07-21T23:22:00.000+01:00

I'm still having problems with making comments on other people's blogs. I can only leave comments on Blogger blogs if the comment box is in a separate pop-up window, not if it's embedded within the blog. So if you have a blog on my reading list, and I haven't commented recently, that may be the reason why. I'm still reading them all!

In particular I wanted to say how much I've enjoyed Kate's (from Kate's Cakes and Bakes) French Baking Month. We've had lots of holidays in France, but not the sort where I've spent time baking - this makes me wish I had!

I don't imagine I'm the only one having problems, so if any of you have noticed that the volume of responses to your posts has fallen off, you might consider changing to a pop-up window for comments!

Chocolate Chip and Apricot Bars - 'We Should Cocoa' July

2011-07-20T21:05:00.002+01:00

However much you like fresh ripe apricots, I'm sure you'll agree that they don't have an awfully intense flavour; they are easily overwhelmed by stronger flavours and really need pairing with something even more delicate for them to shine. For that reason I chose to use dried apricots for July's We Should Cocoa challenge. This month the challenge to use apricots was set by Chele at Chocolate Teapot. If you would like to join in the challenge of using a specified ingredient in a chocolate product, then the rules can be found on Chocolate Log Blog.

After a rather disastrous attempt at combining apricots and chocolate into a cake, earlier in the month, I had a rethink about the kind of thing I wanted to bake and I decided to make a bar cookie. None of my recipe books, nor an online search, gave me a satisfactory result, and it didn't seem easy to incorporate dark chocolate either. In the end I amalgamated two recipes from 'The Ultimate Cookie Book' by Catherine Atkinson (currently out of print) - one for a shortbread base and one for an apricot filling - and added chocolate chips to the shortbread and an Amaretti crumb topping to the apricots, instead of the nuts used originally. I think that gives me a new recipe, so I'll write it all out here:

Ingredients
Shortbread:
150g plain flour
90g unsalted butter
50g icing sugar
50g plain chocolate (85% cocoa solids) finely chopped

Apricot Filling:
175g dried apricots
250ml water
grated rind of 1 lemon
75g caster sugar
2 teaspoons cornflour

Topping:
75g crisp Amaretti biscuits, crushed to fine crumbs

Method:
Line the base of an 8" square shallow cake tin with baking parchment. If the tin is not non-stick, grease the sides with a little butter.
Preheat the oven to 180C

For the shortbread - either process the cold butter, flour and icing sugar until the mixture begins to come together as a dough, or rub the butter into the flour and sugar mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs and can be squeezed into a dough. Add the chopped chocolate at the end of whichever process you choose and mix in. Tip the mixture into the baking tin, spread evenly and press down firmly with the back of a spoon. Bake for 15 minutes until firm and just beginning to change colour. Remove from the oven, but leave the oven on for the next stage. Allow the shortbread to cool for a few minutes before adding the topping.

Apricot filling - while the shortbread is cooking, put the apricots and water in a small saucepan and simmer for 10 minutes. Strain, reserving any excess liquid. Chop the apricots in a food processor - they need to be quite finely chopped, but not a purée. Return the apricots to the pan and add the lemon rind, sugar, cornflour and 4 tablespoons of the reserved cooking liquid. Cook for 1 minute. Remove the pan from the heat and cool slightly.

To assemble the bars - spread the apricot mixture over the shortbread and sprinkle evenly with the Amaretti crumbs, pressing them lightly into the apricot mixture. Bake for 15-20 minutes, making sure the crumb topping doesn't get to darkly browned. Cool in the tin before cutting into bars. I cut into 18 bars, but they were very small!

These bars were really delicious. The dark chocolate and bitter flavour of the Amaretti biscuits balanced the sweetness of the dried apricot filling very well, although the chocolate wasn't a dominant flavour. I was initially dubious that apricots and dark chocolate would suit each other, but they worked together well here. My only disappointment was the shallowness of each layer - the bars needed to be cut very small to keep everything in proportion. Such dainty cookies aren't really my style - or the family's - we needed to eat three or four each to feel we had really tasted them!

Chocolate Mud Cake with Ganache Topping

2011-07-17T09:47:00.002+01:00

We've been rushing around like mad things for the last week, with our normal routine thrown out of the window. Spare time completely disappeared - or, when I had it, I was too tired to do anything - so I have only been putting basic meals on the table, and have had no time for baking.

In place of my home baked cakes, cookies and desserts, I actually had to buy stuff from the supermarket! The things bought ranged from Tesco's decorated cupcakes at 4 for £1 to Waitrose de-luxe cookies at nearly 50p each. At the bottom end of the market I think the prices are cheaper than baking myself, but the quality is very variable. The decorated cupcakes were all air and no substance, in both the sponge and the buttercream, and they were very sweet too, whereas a chocolate chip brioche at a similar price was delicious, and well worth the money. When you get into the de-luxe ranges, I'm not sure whether it's cheaper to buy or home bake, but the quality is usually better than the cheaper bought goodies, and I'm guessing the price differences are marginal. I think the biggest difference is that the shop bought stuff contains a bit less of the expensive stuff than I'd use at home - less chocolate chunks and nuts in the cookies, for example

Both my son and I happened to have birthdays in the last week, and I was quite sad that I couldn't bake anything special on the right day for him (not so bothered by my own birthdays anymore - I'd rather stop counting them!). I spent most of my birthday in hospital A & E with my mother, which is probably appropriate as she spent the day of my birth in a hospital with me! Poor Mum is finding old age hitting her all at once, with bits of her body breaking down in rapid succession over the last year or so. It wasn't a fun way to spend a birthday, although there were a lot of good looking male doctors around to please my eyes!

Fortunately it's a quieter weekend, with medical duties on hold until Monday, so I had time to bake a shared birthday cake yesterday. I used this recipe from Australian Women's Weekly, for a Chocolate Mud Cake. I used a slightly bigger baking tin, one that was 20cm square, and found the cake cooked in 1 hour and 25 minutes. The ganache split - I have a feeling what the Australians call thickened cream has something like flour or gum in it, which may stabilise it when used in ganache. I managed to rescue my ganache by adding a couple of tablespoons of sifted icing sugar, then beating like a mad thing with a rotary whisk for several minutes. Not sure this would work every time, but it saved the day here! Anyway, the fuss over the ganache meant I didn't use it as suggested in the recipe - I just spread it on top of the cake and threw on what I could find in the way of cake decorations. There wouldn't have been enough candles in town to put on the number needed for the two of us!

I was worried that I had overbaked the cake as it looked quite dry on the outside, but cutting it open revealed the dense moist centre one associates with mud cakes. The texture wasn't really cake-like at all - more like a slightly lighter version of the fudgiest kind of brownie. Despite the amount of sugar this cake was not too sweet - the large amount of dark chocolate and additional cocoa balanced the sugar quite nicely.

Overall, a successful cake, but I wouldn't use the proportions of cream and chocolate given in the ganache recipe again. If I made it for anything other than a birthday celebration I'd probably use a fudge frosting rather than one with fresh cream, but this was one occasion where I thought the CT could forget his diet for a day or two and have a fat laden treat!

Chocolate and Apricot Bundt Cake

2011-07-09T13:59:00.001+01:00

This cake looks better than it actually is! You will appreciate that if you read this description from the recipe: "As it bakes the interior layers of the swirl (which is more of a layer than a true swirl) and the top of the cake caremelize and turn into delicious viens running through the cake." Now look for the interior layers in my cake!!

This was supposed to be a chocolate chip sour cream cake with three layers of chopped apricots, hazelnuts, sugar and spices running through it. In the event, almost everything in the layers, plus all the chocolate chips, sank during cooking to produce a dense, oversweet, sticky layer at the top of the turned out cake. In addition, a lot of this sticky conglomerate stuck to the bundt tin. I had to scrape it out of the tin, spoon it back onto the top of the cake and stick it down with a chocolate frosting!

The cake is edible, and not too bad if you alternate a mouthful of the fruit, nut and chocolate mixture with a mouthful of the dense moist sour cream cake. The cake itself has a lovely texture!

I had hoped this would be my entry for July's 'We Should Cocoa' Challenge, which is to use apricots in a chocolate product, but I'm now hoping I have time to make another attempt at the challenge, as this isn't nearly good enough!

What I don't understand is why I can't tell from reading a recipe that it's not going to work! I've had enough baking experience by now, after all! I can look at a recipe and think 'I don't think I'd like that', but I can't look at it and say 'that batter will be quite thin; will it support dried fruit and chocolate chips?'

Caramel Hazelnut Layer Cake

2011-07-03T12:09:00.001+01:00

I found a forgotten jar of Dulce de Leche at the back of the refrigerator last week. After a few days, I decided that the only way to stop me eating banana and caramel sandwiches for breakfast was to put the caramel into a cake. This Dan Lepard recipe has been on my mind a while, but it's not really the sort of cake CT should be eating. I decided though, that it would only last a couple of days with four of us eating it, so a little treat wouldn't hurt him too much. I didn't have enough caramel for the frosting, so decided to make a small amount of Nutella buttercream, just to fill the cake.

I made this cake when Dan first published it in the Guardian, before I started writing this blog, and really liked it - I think the only thing that's prevented me making it since is that light sponge layer cakes with filling and topping aren't really my thing. They don't last long, as people eat larger pieces, and I find it a bit too much of a fuss to wait until the cake has cooled before filling and assembling it. Once in a while, they fit the bill though, and a light cake on a hot weekend seemed just right.

The cake is hardly more difficult to make than a plain Victoria Sandwich, and the amount of batter rises to completely fills two sandwich tins when cooked, to give a good deep cake after assembly. The nut flavour is well pronounced, unlike many cakes using ground nuts.

The original caramel filling and frosting is gorgeous, but the cake was very good filled with Nutella buttercream too! I beat 60g softened butter with 120g icing sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in about 100g Nutella. After filling the cake, I dusted the top lightly with icing sugar.

Gooseberry Crumble Cake

2011-07-01T08:37:00.001+01:00

I'm so excited by my little crop of home-grown gooseberries. They are such a rare fruit these days - I think it's about 4 years since I saw any in the supermarkets, which is what prompted us to plant a couple of bushes to grow our own. This wasn't a particularly good year; it was such a dry spring that the berries were very small. Another problem we had was that the bush producing the red fruit was damaged when we had a tree felled and is taking a long time to recover, so it isn't producing as much fruit as the green-fruited bush yet. Nevertheless, we got enough fruit for a two portion crumble (heavenly), this crumble cake and a further portion for the freezer for later use.

This cake isn't very pretty - it's not as deep as I would have liked and the top buckled where the gooseberries collapsed - but it was certainly very tasty! It's an amalgamation of a couple of recipes and my own ideas for flavouring the gooseberries and crumble topping. The sponge cake base comes from this Rachel Allen recipe; the only change I made was to use elderflower cordial instead of milk, in the batter mix. I baked it in a 9"(23cm) diameter springform tin, but I think it would have been better in an 8"(20cm) tin.

For the fruit layer, I mixed 340g (roughly 12oz) fruit with 2 teaspoons cornflour, 1 tablespoon caster sugar and 2 tablespoons eldeflower cordial. This was spread on the uncooked sponge mix base.

The crumble topping is based on an idea from Martha Stewart website, where I first read about melting the butter for a crumble topping and then mixing in the other ingredients. The resulting soft dough is then broken up into small pieces and scattered evenly over the base layers. In this case I used 100g melted butter, 75g SR flour and 75g caster sugar, plus a half teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon cocoa to give some colour contrast to the crumble mix.

The cake took about an hour to bake at 180C - it was difficult to tell if it had cooked properly as the top was fluid from the hot fruit, so didn't feel firm, and a toothpick picked up moisture from the fruit.

The only disappointment was that I couldn't taste the elderflower cordial - I had used some in the gooseberry crumble I'd made the day before, with much better results. I think it was just too dilute in this cake. The cocoa and cinnamon in the crumble added just a hint of extra flavour, and the gooseberries were still wonderfully sharp. The crisp crumble topping was a good contrast to the soft sponge and moist fruit layer. This was delicious eaten warm as a dessert with vanilla yogurt or creme fraiche, or on it's own as a cake when it had cooled fully. I stored it in the fridge, but let it come up to room temperature before eating.

Pear and Caramel Cookies

2011-06-29T20:11:00.003+01:00

Another outing for the 'cookies made with olive oil' recipe from Cookie Madness. I jotted down the quantities of ingredients on a small piece of paper before going into the kitchen, then in my rush to get them into the oven, forgot to use brown sugar. This resulted in a rather pale cookie but as I'd added fudge chips there was still plenty of flavour.

As the additions to the dough, instead of nuts and chocolate, I used 50g of soft dried pears, cut into small pieces, 50g fudge chips and half a teaspoon of ground ginger.

This recipe is different everytime I use it! This time the dough was very dry, so that I could shape it by hand and the cookies also didn't spread very far when baked. Unfortunately, the fudge chips on the outside of the cookie melted in the oven, and left little blobs of caramel sticking to the cookies. Not very nice looking, but no-one really worried about it!

The fudge chips even managed to burst open the cookie in this photo on the left. Because of all the oozing caramel, it was hard to get three good looking cookies for the top picture!

Never mind - the flavour made up for any shortcomings in the appearance. Chewy and fudgy with just a hint of spice to compliment the flavour of the dried pear. CT didn't notice the pear, but that's not surprising - sometimes I think his palate only recognises chocolate and chilli! FB thought chocolate would be a good extra addition, and I thought some nuts would be good. But we all liked them as they were, too! Must remember the brown sugar next time!

Dark Chocolate and Orange Cake

2011-06-26T11:49:00.001+01:00

I'm really not in the mood for cooking at the moment. Or, rather, I'm not in the mood for deciding what to cook! Once the decision is made I'm quite happy to get on with it, but I'm finding it difficult to make those decisions. FB suggested this Dark Chocolate and Orange Cake form '101 Cakes and Bakes', a Good Food book (also available on the website). This fitted in with the low saturated fat baking I'm doing at the moment, so I went along with her proposal. Her alternative suggestion was a healthy oat muffin from the same book, which didn't sound so good!

The cake itself was simplicity to make although I was a little concerned about the amount of oil in the recipe and had to check the book against the website, in case it was a misprint. I didn't have a Seville orange (who does at this time of year?) so I used an ordinary medium sized eating orange instead. There was also a delay while I boiled the orange for 30 minutes, so this really isn't a cake you can make on the spur of the moment.

No problems with a sinking cake this time, either, even though the method was quite similar to the previous cake, which collapsed so spectacularly.

I didn't have any cream to make a ganache, so used my fall-back recipe for a chocolate glaze, which just gave a thin coating to the top of the cake. Hubs thought the cake looked like an Artexed ceiling, but I'm not listening to that sort of criticism - the glaze did the job, quickly! The glaze is made by heating 100g plain chocolate and 20g butter in a bowl over simmering water. Once melted remove from the heat and stir in 1 rounded tablespoon of golden syrup and 1 tablespoon of milk. Cool to a spreading consistency before using.

The cake had a dense, moist texture with just a hint of orange. I think a Seville orange would have given a stronger flavour than the eating orange, although adding the grated zest from a second orange might have upped the orange factor a bit.. This is a good 'everyday' cake to add to my 'baking with oil' repertoire.

Hazelnut and Orange Olive Oil Cake

2011-06-23T19:25:00.001+01:00

I nearly didn't post about this cake as it looks such a mess, but it has such a lovely flavour and texture that I'd really like to find out what went wrong with it, and be able to make a cake which looks like the one in the recipe photo here on Taste.com.au.

I followed the recipe exactly, using Amaretto Disaronno instead of either Frangelico or orange flavoured liqueur. Everything looked fine until about 5 minutes before the end of the cooking time; when I tested the cake, I could see that it was beginning to sink in the middle. This sinking turned into a spectacular collapse as the cake cooled. Despite this the texture was light and fluffy, even in the centre - so it wasn't underbaking which was the problem. Could it have been overbeating? Too much baking powder?

The mix of orange and hazelnut, plus the liqueuer, gave a very delicate flavour which complimented the light texture really well. Although I used quite a strong tasting extra virgin olive oil, I'm not sure how much it contributed to the final flavour. The coarsely chopped hazelnuts on top were a mistake - I think they should have been much more finely chopped and perhaps reduced to 50g, so that they all stuck to the cake. this would have kept the cake looking as delicate as it tasted.

Sue Lawrence's Bulging Chocolate Muffins

2011-06-21T08:09:00.001+01:00

I'm letting the author of this recipe take the blame for the misnomer; there's quite a lot of chocolate in this recipe but it hardly makes the muffins bulge with it! They might have looked more bulging if they had risen better, but I think this was another case of me and muffin recipes not getting on. I'm trying to find a reliable muffin recipe using oil, and chose this Sue Lawrence recipe because it was the first I came across, in my cook books, from a cook who is considered reliable. I haven't baked a lot of her recipes but those I've used have been OK, and she usually gets good reviews on other blogs. I guess it's my curse not to be able to make muffins.

This recipe was slightly unusual in using some semolina with the flour - about 1/3 - but other than that it was an ordinary looking recipe - put dry ingredients into a bowl and lightly mix in the wet ingredients without beating. But these muffins rose strangely while cooking and looked neither like muffins nor cupcakes; this could have been an effect of the fan oven, which I don't usually use for baking.

The ingredients were - 170ml milk, 2 eggs, 85ml sunflower oil, beaten together, then mixed into 145g plain flour, 2 tablespoons cocoa, a pinch salt, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 55g caster sugar, 85g semolina, 145g chopped chocolate (I used a mixture of roughly equal quantities of plain, milk and white). This makes 12 muffins which are baked for 20 minutes at 200C.

To taste, the muffins were richly chocolately, but a little stodgy and not sweet enough, even with the milk and white chocolate. Not a recipe to use again, I'm afraid

Double Chocolate Ginger Cake

2011-06-15T08:30:00.001+01:00

I found this recipe on a blog which is new to me - Coconut and Lime. I have a feeling this is a blog I'm going to be reading regularly - it's very clearly written and there are some great photos (often of stages within the recipe). As all the recipes are original, the cook/writer, Rachel Rappaport has asked that they aren't copied out onto other blogs, and I'm happy to comply with this request, as it's the way I usually write anyway. Here's the link to Double Chocolate Ginger Cake on her blog.

I usually convert cup measurements to weight before I cook, and did the same here. I use this conversion list on Recipes4us, although I generally use a conversion of around 120g for 1 cup of flour, rather than the 100g suggested in the list. I couldn't find a conversion for crystallised ginger, so used 100g, and I also used a 100g bar of 74% chocolate, roughly chopped, instead of a 1/2 cup of chocolate chips.

I only had the sugar coated crystallised ginger in stock, and chopped it with brief pulses in a mini-chopper to give randomly sized pieces. The processing made the ginger quite sticky, so I added a tablespoon of flour from the recipe weight, and worked it in with my fingers to make sure the ginger pieces were separated and well coated. The carton of buttermilk contained 285mls, which was a tablespoon or two short of what was needed. I had intended to add a little milk to compensate, but forgot when it came to making the cake - it didn't seem to have an adverse affect, the cake was still moist enough.

This is another recipe using oil instead of butter (I used sunflower oil), and this makes the mixing really simple - dry ingredients in one bowl, mix in all the wet ingredients, beat until smooth then stir in the lumpy ingredients. The batter fitted nicely into my 10-cup bundt tin and the cake baked in the time given in the recipe. It slipped out of the bundt tin easily - I don't know if this was a feature of the cake or whether I've got better at greasing and flouring the tin!

This was a very good cake - the crumb was moist and quite open, and a good chocolate flavour for a cake with only a little cocoa added to the batter. The pieces of ginger added a lovely flavour, although some of the larger pieces sank. In a bundt cake this doesn't matter too much, as the bottom becomes the top when the cake is presented, but I think I'll chop the ginger a little finer next time.

I finished the cake with a dusting of icing sugar, although a drizzle chocolate glacé icing would make the cake prettier for special occasions - it's certainly good enough for that!

Blondies with Strawberries - for 'We Should Cocoa'

2011-06-10T19:47:00.003+01:00

You might think this is cheating, but eating something with strawberries on the side is the only way I'm going to be able to put an entry into this month's 'We Should Cocoa' challenge. I can't incorporate strawberries into a cake or dessert because, believe it or not, not everyone here likes them!

I'd been thinking carefully since the June challenge was announced, about flavours which go well with strawberries, and had decided on white chocolate and orange before I saw this recipe for White Chocolate Blondies from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Talk about providence - his blondies contain white chocolate in abundance, coconut, orange and cardamom and he recommends eating them with strawberries! What could be better? I could argue that the strawberries are part of the recipe, not just an afterthought!

The recipe was a little complex to follow, and seemed to use lots of bowls and spoons, but it wasn't difficult. The only part which might prove a problem is the difficulty of melting some brands of white chocolate properly, but here it is melted with the butter in the recipe, and Hugh warns not to let it overheat. I used Menier White Chocolate, recommended for baking and desserts. For once, I followed the recipe exactly!

The resulting blondies were delicious, with the orange and cardamom giving a subtle flavour which cuts through the sweetness; despite 300g white chocolate, desiccated coconut and more sugar, I didn't find these oversweet. I'm not usually a great fan of white chocolate, but I really liked these. Eating them with macerated strawberries added another dimension - the fruit really complimented the flavours in the blondie.

My only criticism comes from calling them a Blondie - they were really light in texture and I like my blondies and brownies to be dense and chewy. I think I would really describe these as squares of cake, but then the name White Chocolate and Coconut Squares doesn't sound half so glamorous, does it?

Chocolate Chunk and Hazelnut Cookies

2011-06-07T21:24:00.002+01:00

There's so much to do in the garden, and elsewhere, at the moment, that at times it's difficult to fit in any baking. I had to put aside what I planned to cook today and make another batch of these ultra-quick cookies, made with oil.

They were in the oven in about ten minutes from getting the scales out of the kitchen drawer. I used dark muscovado sugar, increased the chocolate (85% cocoa solids) to 110g and used 50g chopped toasted hazelnuts.

Delicious!

Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake

2011-06-05T11:50:00.003+01:00

The scare over E. coli carried on Spanish fruit and veg has had one benefit for me - loads of 'reduced to clear' peaches and nectarines in the supermarket, as well as salad stuff. Now that the Spaniards are deemed not to be at blame, I have no worries about using their imported produce - well washed of course, if eaten raw.

This Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake from Dan Lepard was the starting point for using some of the peaches I bought. This is a cake which is very much liked by C at Cake, Crumbs and Cooking, and every time I saw a version there it made me want to try it, but this is the first opportunity I've had to bake it using what I had in stock, rather than having to buy fruit especially for it.

If there's a choice of peaches or nectarines to eat raw, the nectarines, with their smooth skin, always win out over fuzzy peaches, which meant that the peaches were getting past their best. I skinned four small peaches for this recipe, using three sliced for the fruit topping, and one chopped and added to the cake batter. To improve the colour and flavour, I added about 50g of frozen raspberries to the topping and another 50g to the cake batter.

The instructions say to line the cake tin with foil, and then oil the foil. I cannot stress how important this is, especially if using a springform tin, and how important it is to make sure there are no holes in the foil. Despite using extra thick foil, and treating it really carefully, I must have torn it somewhere, as there was an escape of sugary fruit juices which burnt onto the oven floor during cooking, with a quite unpleasant smell. The foil also needs to be well-oiled, as I left some of the fruit behind, stuck to the foil, when I turned out the cake, and had to quickly put the pieces back into place on top of the cake - talk about a tough jigsaw! The sticking might have more to do with losing the juices during baking than not oiling the foil well, but it's a point to note for the future

This is a really lovely cake, moist and lemony with the fruit adding extra flavour and texture. The frozen raspberries had thawed by the time they were mixed into the batter and the juice gave little ripples of pink throughout the cake, as well as concentrated bursts of flavour from the fruit. The peaches alone did not have a strong flavour, but adding the raspberries gave a complimentary boost to the overall flavour.

I didn't get the really fine, close texture that C got with her cake, but I suspect this was because I hurried the mixing process, and didn't let my butter warm up enough before creaming it with the sugar. Because I've been baking with oil a lot, recently, I'd forgotten how important this stage is. And don't worry that I'm sabotaging CT's diet, he wouldn't eat this sort of cake anyway - fresh fruit is not one of his greatest loves! He's finishing up the previous chocolate cake while the rest of us eat this one.

Vanilla and Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake

2011-06-02T16:25:00.000+01:00

I wasn't intending to post about this, as I made it in a hurry and didn't think the idea had worked very well. However, when I cut into the cake, it looked so pretty that I thought it was worth writing about it.

This cake was an adaptation of the Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake I made a while ago, but I made a plain vanilla flavoured cake by leaving out the cocoa and increasing the flour. Then I stirred a cocoa paste made from 30g cocoa and some boiling water into one portion of the batter (a bit less than half, by weight).

At this point I realised the two batters were too thin to marble properly, so I poured the vanilla batter into the cake tin, added the chocolate batter on top, and attempted to swirl the two together with a fork. I had no idea how much (or little) the two batters had mixed until the cake was cut, but I was pleasantly surprised by the result!

This didn't turn out to be a spectacularly good cake - it's more the sort of thing you have on hand for people who expect a daily portion of cake, rather than something you bake for guests - but it is a moist, tasty sponge cake, with an acceptable chocolate flavour. I don't think anyone would guess it had no butter in it!

Apologies

2011-05-31T10:11:00.000+01:00

I'm having trouble staying logged in to Blogger - even on my own Blog. This means I can't easily post comments on all the delicious food I'm reading about on the Blogs on my reading list. Sometimes I can post if there are facilities for leaving just a name to the comment, but this isn't always the case. So apologies to you all; I just wanted you to know that I'm not ignoring you! Hopefully someone at Blogger will realise there's a problem (if it's happening to others too) soon, and sort it out!

Thanks to C for trying to help, but I only have one web browser, and I'm not on IE9 yet!

Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake - Take 2

2011-05-30T19:50:00.000+01:00

With the last bank holiday for a few months looking like being a long wet weekend, FB decided to spend a little time in MY Kitchen! I'm not sure how I feel about this; I don't like others in the kitchen when I'm cooking, and I certainly don't like Hubs leaning over my shoulder giving 'advice', when the last time he cooked was about 15 years ago! But FB can cook properly, and theoretically wouldn't need me around, once she had all tools and ingredients to hand. In the event it all went smoothly, with minimal input from me; she cleared up after herself properly, and in addition to other things, produced this gorgeous cheesecake for tonight's dessert.

I've made this Gordon Ramsay recipe before, but I had trouble swirling the chocolate topping, as the chocolate was too hot and liquid, as you can see here. FB works more slowly than me, and benefitted from my advice to melt the chocolate first and give it time to cool. By the time she was ready to add the chocolate to the top, it was thick enough to stay in place when piped, and she managed to make this beatiful spider's web design. In a slight change to the recipe, she used plain chocolate digestive biscuits for the base, to give an extra dimension of chocolate, and left out the almonds.

Once again, the cheesecake had a lovely clean flavour and light texture, while still tasting quite rich. It also didn't crack while cooling, cofirming it's status as my favourite baked cheesecake recipe!

In case the Times link ever disappears, I'm going to make a brief note here of the filling ingredients and method - 600g cream cheese (full fat Philadelphia), 250mls sour cream, 2 eggs, 150g caster sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Beat everything together and pour onto a 23cm base, bake at 140C for 30-35 minutes. Cool in switched off oven, then chill.

Honey and Treacle Cake

2011-05-28T13:50:00.001+01:00

Three of the four of us looked at this Dan Lepard recipe for a loaf cake full of spices and glacé peel, in last week's Guardian Weekend magazine, and said, without prompting from others, that it looked a really good cake. So what could I do, except bake it as soon as possible?

I followed the recipe quite closely, using large pieces of glacé peel which I chopped myself - there was more lemon and citron peel than orange - and making only one minor change. I reduced the amount of ground cloves to 1/4 teaspoon, as I find it quite overwhelming in large amounts.

There is one small point to note - Dan says to use a 'small' loaf tin, but the uncooked cake batter more than half filled my 2lb loaf tin (which was 17cm long, as stipulated); I would call a 2lb tin a large one! You can see from these photos that although the cake doesn't rise a huge amount, using a smaller tin could possibly have been a mistake.

The finished cake was a sturdy but moist loaf, with subtle flavours. None of the wide range of flavours - honey, treacle, spices, orange, glacé peel - were predominant, but blended together to give a very unusual, but delicious, spicy flavour to the cake. Although Dan suggests varying the spices to suit your preferences, I'd say definitely leave in the black pepper, as this gave a suggestion of heat which you wouldn't get from the other spices.

Even the glacé peel, which some people find a difficult ingredient to like, didn't stand out as a particularly strong flavour, adding more to the texture than the taste. The sweetness of the peel and honey was balanced by the bitter edge to the treacle and muscovado sugar. The orange flavoured glacé icing added a burst of fresh flavour, but wasn't really necessary, especially if you wanted to use the cake in a lunchbox, or other situation where the icing might spoiled while travelling.

All in all, this is a really delicious cake, whose flavour is difficult to describe - you'll have to try it for yourself!

Marmalade Flapjacks

2011-05-23T09:12:00.001+01:00

After making a batch of Halva Flapjacks for FB, which she didn't like, I felt obliged to make amends by baking her favourites - Dan Lepard's Marmalade Flapjacks.

I've said before that these are too soft for my taste, but they have a really good fresh taste, which isn't often found in flapjacks. Although they contain quite a bit of sugar, the bitterness of the marmalade cuts through this and also counteracts some of the richness of the butter too. Soaking the raisins also makes sure you're not biting down on hard lumps which would detract from the general softness of the bar when you eat it.

I followed the recipe exactly, with no problems. The only thing I'd change is the baking time - they were a little too fragile, so I'd give them 5 minutes longer next time.

Spiced Applesauce Cake

2011-05-22T10:17:00.001+01:00

Adding fruit purée to cakes is said to be one way of reducing fat in cakes, but many reputable baking websites argue with this point of view, saying that fat is still necessary to get a good flavour and texture. Either way, this recipe for Applesauce Cake has both - I used sunflower oil and homemade applesauce made from two medium sized Bramley apples cooked to a purée with a tiny amount of water.

This is one of those simple recipes, where the wet ingredients are mixed together, then the dry ingredients are beaten in - nothing could really go wrong. My only argument was with the size of cake tin used. The stipulated size produced a very shallow cake - less than 1" high. I'll use a much smaller tin if I make this again!

The cake is very much like a gingerbread cake in texture - it's even getting stickier on top as time goes by. The spicing is very light, and could be beefed up a bit, but it's quite pleasant to eat something with gentle flavours occasionally. The molasses and unsweetened applesauce keep the sweetness down and give a moist texture too. All in all this is probably a cake which I will make again!

Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake

2011-05-17T09:08:00.001+01:00

The halva flapjacks I made recently left me with half a tin of condensed milk to use up, and the recipe thread on Dan Lepard's forum suggested this Brown Sugar Chocolate Cake as one of the uses for such leftovers. It was a reminder, really, as I have made this cake once before, way back before this blog started.

The problem this time was the butter in the recipe, but as this was a slightly unusual method which didn't rely on creaming the butter and sugar together, I decided it was time to take the plunge and see if substituting oil for butter would work. I think, although a trawl through all the recipes using oil might prove me wrong, that this is the first time I've made a substitution, rather than choosing recipes which use oil right from the start! I used 80g of oil instead of 100g of butter, as butter is usually just over 80% fat. After re-reading the discussion about this cake, I also decided to reduce the raising agent a little, by using 100g plain flour and 50g SR flour, instead of all SR flour.

Other than those two changes, I followed the recipe and method exactly. I found it needed about 10 minutes more baking for me to be sure it was cooked right through - the cake was still very wobbly at 40 minutes, which made me worry that using oil wasn't going to work, but seemed to set properly after that. The cake sunk a little while cooling, but nothing too disastrous.

The cake was light and moist, but I felt there was something wrong with the flavour. The overwhelming flavour and smell was cocoa, which strangely, tasted raw too! I don't remember complaining of this the first time I baked it, so either the lack of butter, or reducing the raising agent, may have affected the balance of flavours. It's a shame as I was very happy with the texture of the cake, and pleased that using oil hadn't seemed to have an adverse effect. Back to the drawing board!

Halva Flapjacks

2011-05-15T08:46:00.002+01:00

This Dan Lepard recipe for flapjacks using tahini and condensed milk had a mixed reception. Hubs and I both really liked it, but I had made it primarily for FB's lunchboxes, and she didn't like it one bit! Which left us with a lot to eat, when we are both watching our waistlines, in a bid to stop further expansion. FB is not happy with lots of nuts, and, although I used mixed seeds instead of the nuts in the recipe, to her, the combination of tahini and the seeds tasted 'too nutty'.

The point of using the tahini, if you look at the link, is to reduce the amount of butter used, but there is still an awful lot of sugar in this recipe - so it's not for the calorie conscious! As usual, I made a few changes to the recipe, out of necessity - to replace the walnuts I used 50g each of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and in place of 100g dates I used a mix of equal parts of dates, sultanas and cranberries. I used the full amount of oats mentioned and baked the flapjack in a 20cm tin, but think a slightly larger one would have been better - perhaps 22cm.

As I said, Hubs and I really liked this flapjack - the basic flavour was exactly like the sesame halva which my mother-in-law used to put in food parcels when she visited us*, with the added bonus of more textures and flavours from the oats, dried fruits and seeds. The fudginess produced by the tahini, sugars, butter and condensed milk makes these much different to most flapjacks

* My nominally Jewish MIL, with whom I had a very good relationship, was a fantastic cook and inspired me to cook properly when Hubs and I first married. She insisted on giving food parcels on visits - some delightful goodies like smoked salmon, salami, halva, biscuits and homemade cheesecake, but also nasty chocolates imported from Israel and manky over ripe fruit bought cheap at her local markets. We had to thank her nicely, wait until she had gone, and then ruthlessly throw a lot of the stuff away!

Golden Gingerbread

2011-05-10T07:17:00.001+01:00

I've found another good recipe using oil instead of butter, which is just as well, as CT's diet is working really well at reducing his cholesterol - but that means he's got to stick to it!

I've called this golden gingerbread to distinguish it from the darker cakes which include black treacle - there was only light muscovado sugar and golden syrup in this recipe. I used this recipe, but made a few changes, because I didn't want to add a frosting. I included the zest of a large orange in the cake, and added 4 nuggets of stem ginger and about 50g of candied orange peel, both finely chopped. These changes were good for the flavour, but the pieces of ginger and peel mostly sank to the bottom, so were not such a good idea!

Translating the recipe from cups to weights gave me - 180g plain flour, 90g SR flour, 200g brown sugar, 180mls olive oil and milk, and 300g golden syrup. That's 500g sugar in one small cake - it sounds much less as 2 cups!!

I baked the cake in a 10" (25cm) square tin but think it would have been nicer as a deeper cake in a smaller tin. This was a pleasantly flavoured cake, with the right amount of ginger, but I think I still prefer the dark gingerbreads, where the black treacle adds a bitter edge to the sweetness.

A Roulade for the 'We Should Cocoa' Challenge for May

2011-05-04T22:28:00.004+01:00

Hazelnut Meringue Roulade with Chocolate Olive Oil Mousse Filling

My first thought on seeing the May challenge for 'We Should Cocoa', set by Chele at Chocolate Teapot, was "No way!". Instead of asking us to bake with a specific ingredient, Chele wanted us to make a specific chocolate product - a roulade! I can't remember the last time I made a swiss roll, and I don't think I've ever made the more modern sounding roulade!

However, the point of joining in with a 'challenge' is to be challenged at times - it would hardly do to drop out this month because it was too difficult! Another challenge ahead for me is hosting a lunch for friends, including one guest who is both gluten- and dairy-free. It's always difficult to provide a dessert which she can eat alongside everyone else, particularly as she doesn't like acidic fresh fruit either. This seemed a chance to kill two birds with one stone - create a roulade which was dairy and gluten free.

Meringue fitted the criteria of being gluten free, but the filling was a little more problematic, especially if I wanted it to be a chocolate one - most recipes use ganache, or include dairy products such as butter or milk. As I'm getting used to using olive oil, instead of butter, in a lot of my baking, I decided to see if there were any recipes around to make chocolate mousse with olive oil. Of course there were!

I eventually decided to use Delia Smith's recipe for a Hazelnut Meringue Roulade, and fill it with chocolate olive oil moussse, made using this recipe. As I was using hazelnuts in the meringue, but didn't have the hazelnut liqueur specified in the recipe, I replaced three tablespoons of the extra-virgin olive oil with hazelnut oil.

The recipe for the roulade was fairly straightforward to follow, but I was a little alarmed to see how the meringue puffed up and buckled as it cooked, although this could have been because I used the fan oven. The meringue seemd to settle down as it cooled, although it was a little flaky on the surface.

The chocolate mouse was easy to make too, with none of the danger of seizing that you get when making a traditional mousse with just chocolate, eggs and butter (see footnote). The only difficulty was deciding when to add it to the roulade - too set and it would be difficult to spread, while using it too soon might mean it just oozed everywhere. In the event, I think I should have waited a little longer - it was still a little too runny.

Fortunately, I managed to roll up the meringue without cracking it too much! Most of the cracks you can see are just on the surface, and don't go deep into the meringue.The hardest part was over!

I decorated the top of the roulade with drizzles of melted chocolate and chopped toasted hazelnuts. I only used half the quantity of mousse for the filling, so the rest was spooned into small glasses and decorated with more chopped toasted hazelnuts.

The chocolate mousse was surprisingly rich tasting, but lighter than a mousse made with butter. It blended well with the meringue, which was still chewy inside, to produce a rich dessert, which didn't seem too sweet, despite the large quantity of sugar in both the meringue and mousse.

Although I'm pleased that I have tackled something which I've avoided up to now, I found the rolling stage of the roulade a bit too nerve wracking, so I'm going to chicken out of it and produce a layered meringue and mousse dessert for my guests next week. Although the process worked this time, it seems the sort of thing which you can't guarantee to work every time, and I can't afford a failure in front of others.

Note (added 15th May) - when I made the Chocolate Mousse the second time, the chocolate/oil mixture was a still little too hot when I added it to the egg yolks and sugar, so that it started to seize. I remedied this by quickly beating in a couple of tablespoons of the whisked egg white, before folding in the remainder, but I'm adding this as a note to remember - cool the chocolate a little, if necessary, before adding to the egg yolks.

Lemon Cake

2011-05-01T09:24:00.002+01:00

This recipe is from the second series of Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets, recently shown on BBC TV. Raymond Blanc has come across as a very likeable personality during these two series, and a lot of the recipes, especially from the second series, haven't seemed too daunting for a home cook.

However, some of the online recipes haven't matched up with what he was seen to do on the programme and this recipe is a case in point. I didn't see the programme myself, but while searching for lemon cakes in general I came across a couple of blogs, including Poires au Chocolate, which mentioned lemon juice added to the cake batter. As I only had three lemons in total to play with, I decided to add the zest of all three, plus the juice of two, to the cake batter and use the juice of the third lemon, and no zest, in the lemon glaze.

The ingredients of the cake are a little unusual, but the method is very simple - whisk everything but the flour and baking powder together, then fold in these last two ingredients. I chickened out of using all the batter in my loaf tin, as my instinct is to never fill a cake tin more than 3/4 full. The cake didn't rise a lot, so I think I could have got away with putting all the batter into the tin - instead I ended up with 6 extra cupcakes! The unconvention of taking the cake out of the tin as soon as it came out of the oven required a leap of faith, but all was well!

The only letdown was the complicated method of glazing the cake. After all the fiddling around with warm apricot glaze and warm sugar syrup, when the cake went back into the oven to dry out, most the glaze just ran off the cake and ended up on the baking tray. I think it would be better to build up thin layers of the glaze on the warm cake, letting each one set a bit before adding the next. Fortunately I had some glaze left over and was able to improve the appearance of the cake a little.

The texture of this cake was superb - close and tender, without being too heavy. The lemon flavour of the crumb was quite delicate, and the sharpness of the glaze made a good contrast. The small amount of added rum wasn't noticeable; without baking, and tasting, two cakes side by side - one without rum and one with - we'll never know what difference it makes, but I trust M. Blanc had good reason to add it!

This is the sort of lemon cake you would add to an old-fashioned afternoon tea spread - perfect texture, delicate flavour; nothing too extreme to put people off - not too sharp, or moist, or dry, or sweet - a good balance of flavours. For my taste it was a little underflavoured - I like my lemon cakes to sing with sharp lemon flavour, but anyone a little wary of too sharp a lemon flavour will love this cake!

Cranberry and Apricot Flapjacks

2011-04-27T09:54:00.002+01:00

This is another variation of my basic flapjack recipe, featuring my favourite combination of dried fruit - cranberries and apricots.

This time I cut down the butter to see what effect it has. The flapjacks were crisper than usual and had a slight tendency to crumble at the edges, but overall it was an acceptable change. CT doesn't eat flapjacks, so I had no concerns about using butter in the first place. These were made primarily for FB's lunchbox - she's quite happy to make up a batch of Dan Lepard's marmalade flapjacks, when she has time, but although they are very tasty I find them a little too soft and crumbly for my taste.

Ingredients:
200g butter, 100g golden syrup, 150g light muscovado sugar; 350g rolled oats, approx. 150g dried fruit, nuts and seeds*.

Method:
Melt the butter, sugar and syrup together, either in a bowl in the microwave or a pan on the hob. Remove from the heat when the butter has melted. Stir in the other ingredients. Press the mixture into a 12 x 8" tin lined with baking parchment and bake at 180C for 25 minutes. Cool for 15 minutes before marking into bars, but cool completely before removing from tin.

* I used 50g each of dried cranberries and chopped apricots, 20g each of chopped toasted hazelnuts and pumpkin seeds and two tablespoons of sesame seeds.

Macadamia and White Chocolate Brownies

2011-04-25T21:13:00.002+01:00

Easter is a busy time for the conscientious cook; even if there are no visitors, the family will probably be eating more at home because of extra time off work. It didn't take long for the previous chocolate cake and the Easter Marzipan biscuits to disappear. I'm still cooking mainly low saturated fat recipes, as CT still hasn't found out his current cholesterol levels, so spent a while going through my books, and searching online, looking for something suitable. My small repertoire seems to have already encompassed versions of most of the recipes available. I eventually found this recipe for brownies in 'The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Chocolate', which differs from other recipes I've used, as it uses vegetable oil, chocolate and cocoa. The original recipe added plain chocolate and walnuts, but I decided to enhance the visual appeal, and the luxury, by using macadamia nuts and white chocolate, as well as some plain chocolate. It's no coincidence that Julian Graves had a half price sale on all it's products last week!

Ingredients
150g plain chocolate, melted
120ml sunflower oil
215g light muscovado sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
65g SR flour
60g cocoa
75g macadamia nuts, chopped
50g white chocolate, chopped
50g 60% plain chocolate, chopped

Method
Preheat oven to 180C and line an 8" (20cm) square tin with parchment.
In a large bowl, beat together the oil, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract. Stir in the melted chocolate and then beat until the mixture is smooth and amalgamated.
Sift the flour and cocoa into the bowl and fold in. The mixture became quite thick at this stage.
Fold in the nuts and chopped chocolate. Transfer the batter to the baking tin and spread evenly.
Bake for about 30 minutes until a probe comes out with a few damp crumbs sticking to it. Cool in the tin before cutting into squares.

This was a dense and moist brownie with a good flavour, and a crisp flaky top. The only criticism is that the brownies became a little crumbly when they were completely cold. This recipe comes second so far, of those I've tried, behind those made with mayonnaise.

Easter Marzipan Biscuits - We Should Cocoa

2011-04-22T09:01:00.001+01:00

Phew! Just got my entry for this month's 'We Should Cocoa' Challenge done in time! I did have my muffins to fall back on, but they were fairly ordinary and I knew I should be able to produce something better.

This month's challenge, set by Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog, was to use marzipan in our chocolate cooking. The rules of the challenge are also on Choclette's blog, if you want to take part in the future.

My inspiration for this recipe was taken from a book called Biscuits, Pastries and Cookies of the World, by Aaron Maree, who seems to have been a prominent Australian chef in the early 1990s. I've never heard of him, but the photos in the book are irresistible, and the few other things I've cooked from it have been very good.

The original recipe called these biscuits Marzipan Macaroons, and made them quite a bit smaller, with apricot jam added to the centre before baking.

I was toying with the idea of just adding something chocolatey - chocolate spread or Nutella - to the centre of the small biscuits when the proximity of Easter gave me fresh inspiration. Larger biscuits would look like nests, even if a little pale in colour, and so could have chocolate eggs placed inside, as well as a chocolate centre.

I've never used marzipan in this way, although the book contains several similar recipes, and I'm not very experienced with piping, so it was a bit of a gamble as to how these would turn out. I'm pleased with the result, although I would do a couple of things differently if I made them again. My first mistake was to put the sugar coated eggs onto the hot biscuits - I wanted the melted chocolate to hold them in place. Unfortunately the heat cracked the sugar shell on most of the eggs, so they look as if hatching has started! LOL! I shoulkd have waited until the biscuits were much cooler - the chocolate would have stayed molten for quite a while. The other thing is a minor detail - I would make the biscuit bases a little thicker.

The almond flavour of the marzipan really shone through in these biscuits, and was complimented by the not too dark chocolate in the centre, as well as the crunch of the sugar coated eggs. It's good to have an Easter treat that tastes at least as good as it looks.

Ingredients

Base
100g plain flour

50g icing sugar

65g unsalted butter - chopped into small pieces

1 egg yolk - from a large egg

Topping
270g marzipan*
150g caster sugar
2 egg whites - from large eggs
finely chopped chocolate**
a pack of sugar coated chocolate eggs

* the marzipan must be good quality with a higher percentage of almonds than sugar. I use Anton Berg marzipan which is 66% almonds

** I chopped 125g of 60% chocolate to fine rubble in a food processor, but used less than half in the biscuits

Method

Mix the flour and icing sugar in a bowl and rub in the chopped butter, as when making pastry. Mix in the egg yolk, then use your hands to bring the dough together, kneading lightly until a smooth dough is formed. Shape into a disc about 1cm thick, wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes.

Grate or crumble the marzipan into a bowl, then work in the sugar until you have a solid mass. Add the egg whites gradually, and work in, until you have a mixture of piping consistency.

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Roll out the biscuit dough and cut out circles about 3"(7.5cm) in diameter. Place these on a well greased baking tray, or one lined with a parchment or silicone sheet. They don't spread much in baking, so can be quite close together. I got 12 circles, about the thickness of pastry, out of my dough, with a little waste - as I said earlier, slightly thicker biscuits would have been better.

Using a star nozzle, pipe a border of the marzipan mixture around each biscuit. Any remaining mixture can be piped directly onto a baking sheet, in finger or round shapes, to make extra macaroons.

Put a teaspoon of the chopped chocolate into the centre of each biscuit. Bake for 10 - 15 minutes until the biscuits are cooked and the marzipan is just beginning to brown. Cool for a while then add the sugar coated eggs to the nests before the chocolate has solidified.

Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake

2011-04-21T08:45:00.000+01:00

After the success of the brownies made with mayonnaise, I thought it was time to try one of the cake recipes which I've had in my folder for years. The copy of this recipe from Sue Lawrence, which I have, dates from 1997, when it appeared in Sainsbury's magazine. In that recipe there was no egg and 50ml more water, but I preferred the idea of adding an egg. This was a very simple recipe to follow and gave me no problems. The only change I needed to make was to use 160g white caster sugar and 40g light muscovado sugar, as I didn't have any golden caster sugar.

I didn't want to add the lemon topping used in the recipe, so used my old stand-by for a fudgy frosting - in a bowl over hot water, melt 175g plain chocolate (I used 60%) with 30g butter, stirring occasionally. When melted, remove from the heat and beat in 2 tablespoons of golden syrup and 3 tablespoons milk. Cool until just spreadable before using, although the original Mary Berry recipe says it can be used warm as a covering glaze, when it should cling to the sides of the cake. I've never been brave enough to try this, as I picture it all running offf, leaving the cake sitting in a puddle of chocolate.

This wasn't a very deep cake, and wasn't very strongly chocolate flavoured, but it was moist, dense and had a good close texture. With a cheaper buttercream frosting or a glacé icing, it would be a good everyday cake. As it's quite firm and not oversweet, I think it would also make a good cake for novelty cakes which need cutting to shape before covering with fondant or buttercream icing.

Mayonnaise is certainly a good way to reduce the saturated fat content of a cake!

Citrus Cornmeal Cake

2011-04-18T19:31:00.002+01:00

This is another simple cake, along the lines of a pound cake, made with olive oil rather than butter. The cake batter is flavoured with orange zest and juice, and lemon zest. To increase the sunny yellow colour, which isn't as good in the photo as in real life, I replaced 1/3 of the flour in this recipe from Mark Hix with fine cornmeal. I also made a small amount of lemon syrup with the juice of the lemon and 2 tablespoons of sugar, to pour over the hot cake, which increased the lemony flavour.

I used an 8" round tin which was almost filled with the batter, giving some cause for concern. It did mean the finished cake was nice and deep though. Using the smallest suggested tin meant the cake took a few minutes longer to cook than suggested in the recipe - I think it was in the oven for nearer to 55 minutes, before I was satisfied that the centre was cooked, and I had to cover it with foil for the last 15 minutes. It sunk slightly in the centre, but not because of under-baking - there was no change in texture through the cake, which was very light. There were arguments here as to the stronger flavour - some thought it was a lemon cake, but the orange flavour was the stronger one for others.

I kept the cake plain, because I wanted to serve it as a dessert as well as a cake, but the lemon juice could have been used to make a glacé icing rather than a syrup. As a dessert, I served it with rhubarb and thick Greek yogurt again; I'm making the most of my home grown rhubarb!

Chocolate Almond Muffins with Marzipan Streusel Topping

2011-04-13T20:03:00.001+01:00

I intended this to be my entry for this month's 'We Should Cocoa' challenge, but I'm not entirely happy with the results, so I'll hold it as a reserve for the moment. I was quite happy with the general idea, but the muffin wasn't chocolatey enough - it needed either some plain chocolate chips or some melted chocolate added to the muffin batter. A chopped up dark Toblerone bar might have added an extra nuance to the flavour, without overpowering the almond flavour. The streusel topping, containing grated marzipan, worked very well and gave a really crisp crumble topping to the muffins.

I used Nigella Lawson's recipe for chocolate chip muffins as a guideline, as it uses vegetable oil rather than butter. Here's one online version of the recipe. Foolishly, I left out the chocolate chips, and lived to regret it. I also used SR flour instead of plain flour + baking powder, and used 200g flour and 50g ground almonds. The only other change was to add a few drops of almond extract to the liquid ingredients.

For the streusel topping, I mixed 70g plain flour, 50g demerara sugar and 75g grated white marzipan, then stirred in 55g melted butter.

When cool this was crumbled evenly over the muffin batter before baking.

The recipe worked quite well, considering muffins aren't one of my strong points, although my efforts not to overmix left a few floury patches in the muffins. I just can't get it completely right!

Because of the butter in the streusel topping, I can't really claim these are low in saturated fat, but they're not as bad as if I'd used butter in the muffin batter too! The mildness of the chocolate flavour allowed the almond flavour to come through too.

Chocolate Ripple Pound Cake - made with olive oil

2011-04-10T08:58:00.003+01:00

This is a beautiful cake when served - I don't think I could have made the ripples this way by planning! It was also far too big for my bundt tin; when I make it again I'm going to reduce it by 20% - use 4 eggs instead of 5 and reduce everything else accordingly.The flavours are also very subtle and need a bit more oomph - it needs more orange zest in the plain cake and more black pepper (or maybe chilli instead) in the chocolate ripples - but the texture is very good, one of the best I've achieved with a cake made with oil.

Amazingly, I was about 20 pages into a Google search before I came across this recipe by Alice Medrich, which was developed for an Olive Oil producer in California. There are other recipes on the site which seem worth exploring too.

My cake didn't look much like the one in the photo accompanying the recipe, but it certainly made up for it's deceptively plain look when cut! Because the chocolate flavoured batter was thicker and denser than the plain batter, it didn't spread out evenly on top of the plain batter when poured into the bundt pan. Instead it sank into the previous layers without getting anywhere near the sides of the pan. I was a bit worried by this at the time, but it was too late to do anything about it - next time I may make the cocoa mix a little thinner.

However, as I've said, the end result were these amazing ripples through the cake! I relieved the plainess of the outside of the cake, and covered a few patches where the tin was over-floured, with an orange flavoured glacé icing, but I think a dusting of icing sugar would have been just as good.

With a few tweaks to the size and the flavour, this will be a really good cake. I will certainly be using the recipe again, and perhaps experimenting with different flavours.

I used a very mild olive oil, for reasons of economy, but it might be worth making the cake with a more strongly flavoured EVOO, to see if the stronger flavour of a better oil has much impact on the cake.

Chocolate and Cranberry Cookies

2011-04-06T08:57:00.001+01:00

I'm finding it hard to get back into the routine of housework and cooking after my holiday, and don't yet seem to be in the mood for experimenting with new baking recipes. So for the moment I'm content to keep the 'cake tin' full with some old tried and tested favourites.

This was my second attempt at this recipe from Cookie Madness, for cookies made with oil. On my first attempt, the dough was a bit sloppy and the cookies spread too far, which I though might be down to using spelt flour and oatmeal instead of the correct ingredients. This time I used wholemeal flour and rolled oats, as stipulated in the recipe and it made a much firmer dough. I also used sunflower oil this time (75g - it's much easier to weigh it!), upped the chocolate content to 100g and used 45g dried cranberries instead of nuts.

The cookies were nice and chewy, but quite thick, so perhaps I should have flattened them a bit more. I think this is going to be a good basic dough for cookies made with oil; it will take any sort of additions in the form of dried fruit, nuts, seeds, spices and chocolate.

Orange Buttermilk Cake

2011-04-04T08:44:00.001+01:00

The unfortunate thing about the lovely recipe for brownies made with mayonnaise is that it needs just two tablespoons of buttermilk (or 4 if you make a double batch, as I did last week), leaving almost a whole carton to be used up elsewhere. As I also had several oranges reaching the point where they needed using, an orange and buttermilk cake seemed a good idea. It took a while to find a recipe which also used oil, but in the end, I settled for this recipe which was simple to make - the only changes I made was to use the zest of two oranges (but the juice from only one), and to use about 50ml of natural yogurt to make the buttermilk up to the correct volume.

The cake took a few minutes longer than specified to appear fully cooked, but unfortunately it still sank dramatically as it cooled. I'm not sure if it was underbaked or overmixed, but there was a dense layer where the cake had collapsed and it had a rubbery texture which wasn't very pleasant for a cake. However, it made a tasty dessert with the first of the rhubarb from the garden mixed with some sliced oranges, and a spoonful of Greek yogurt. Not a cake recipe to keep though!