Goat's Cheese, Apricot and Walnut Savoury Cake

Now that sugar has been recognised as a bigger threat to health than saturated fats, I'm wondering what implications this will have on the recent surge in home baking. Will we all switch to savoury baking? Make bread, quiches and meat pasties instead of sugar-heavy brownies and cookies? I doubt that sweet baking will be abandoned entirely though - at least with home baking, as with all types of cooking, it's easier to control the amount of sugar that you add. Perhaps the way forward is to re-run our favourite recipes and see how much the sugar can be reduced without spoiling the finished product.

Something I like once in a while are savoury cakes, although they will never replace sweet cakes entirely. There are times when a slice of savoury cake goes down well - early evening, with a glass of wine or with a lunchtime salad, but what you need with your mid-morning cup of tea or evening coffee is normal sweet cake.

I chose this versatile recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (second recipe down), and following his suggestions, changed the raisins and hazelnuts for dried apricots and walnuts, as that was what I had in stock. I also used parmesan instead of hard goat's cheese.

This was a pleasant savoury cake, but I think I would have preferred it to be totally savoury. The dried fruit in this recipe was sweet enough to overwhelm the savoury elements, even the parmesan cheese, resulting in something which didn't fall satisfactorily into either the sweet or savoury camp. In this respect, the other two recipes on the link look more interesting - the ham and olive one in particular, although another recent TV programme has warned of the dangers of processed meats!

Cake Salé - Courgette and Feta Loaf

I've been interested in savoury cakes for a while now, but never seem to have the opportunity to make one. As I'm attempting to lose weight, following CT's departure (although not related to it, except that I don't need to bake as much now), the time has come to think about eating less sugar. FB has been worrying about eating too much sugary food at work too, so any new direction in baking will benefit her too, by making her lunch boxes healthier.

Cake Salé has been growing in popularity in France for a few years now, and although the classic combination of flavours is Ham and Olives, there are dozens of delicious sounding combinations around in recipes on the internet. Anything you have, as long as it's not too wet, can be baked into a savoury cake! A slice of Cake Salé served with a salad makes a light summer lunch, or serve alongside a robust soup with complimentary flavours as a more filling winter meal.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall suggests thin slices as pre-dinner nibbles and it also seems an ideal transportable food to me, either to summer picnics or warmly spiced and served as you stand around the the bonfire, watching fireworks and celebrating the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot. If you like savoury food for breakfast, then these cakes should go down well then too as they are so versatile; I just had a small slice with my evening coffee!

My savoury cake was made primarily to help demolish the courgette mountain - because we let a few grow large while we were away, we can't seem to catch up and get back to the point where we can pick small courgettes. I based my recipe loosely on this one from The Kitchn, which in turn was adapted from an article and recipe in the NY Times. I made a few more adaptations to suit the ingredients I had in the store cupboard, and to give a fuller flavour. I also 'translated' the ingredients to metric weights:

225g coarsely grated courgette (skin on), salted with 1 teaspoon salt and left to drain while the batter is prepared.

225g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
plenty of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
3 large eggs
80ml milk
80mls extra virgin olive oil
50g crumbled feta cheese
a few sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves picked
5 garlic-stuffed green olives, halved and sliced
about 50g pinenuts to scatter on top

After mixing the flour, baking powder, pepper and oregano in a large bowl, the eggs were beaten with the oil and milk until amalgamated. The wet ingredients were mixed into the dry, then the cheese, olives and thyme leaves were folded in. Lastly the drained courgette was stirred in, after pressing well to remove as much moisture as possible. The batter was transferred to a 2lb loaf tin lined with baking parchment, levelled and sprinkled with pinenuts. The loaf was baked at 180C for about 1 hr - the original recipe suggested 45 minutes, but my loaf tin is broad and deep so cooking took a bit longer!

I really enjoyed this savoury cake. The feta cheese gave a salty tang, but the over-riding flavour was from the garlicky olives and the very green and grassy extra virgin olive oil - one occasion when a good oil makes a huge contribution. As with the sweet courgette muffins I made recently, the flavour of the courgette was negligable, but they add moistness and contribute to the appearance with the green flecks from the skin. I'm looking forward to trying some more flavour combinations in the future! As Hugh F-W says in his Guardian article - stick to the same proportions of flour, eggs, fat and liquid, and play around as much as you like with the other additons!

Parsley Cheese Scones - a Tea Time Treat

I've nothing against a good scone, but they are not something that I bake regularly. For one thing, I like to bake things that can be eaten over several days, and most scones are best fresh out of the oven, or at the very least, eaten the same day. For another, a fresh plain scone is a delight, but only when smothered with butter or jam and clotted cream - not really everyday eating. Lastly, and even more important, even if jam and cream were liberally available every day, scones aren't really the sort of thing the rest of the family like to eat.

So when Karen at Lavender and Lovage set the challenge of producing sweet or savoury scones for this month's Tea Time Treats, I decided to look for something different. Savoury scones appealed to me, although I wasn't sure how well they would fit into a traditional afternoon tea. I also feel that the monthly baking events which I take part in should be a spur for me to make it a real challenge and try something different - a new flavour or technique - so after a lot of searching, I decided to try this recipe for Parsley Cheese Scones from Dan Lepard, not least because it started by making porridge!

Dan promises the recipe is lower in fat and bigger in flavour, fibre and moistness than standard recipes. I'm not sure about the fat, as there was more cheese than I've seen in most recipes, but he used some oil and buttermilk, rather than butter, to reduce the fat a little, and the recipe lived up to the other promises. One of the good things about them was that they kept fresh for at least three days!

Unusually for one of Dan's recipes, I found that by the time I got to the last stage of mixing, I still had a bowlful of cheesey crumbs. Something wrong, somewhere! I had to add 6 tablespoons of milk to bring the ingredients together into a soft dough, which is quite a lot of liquid missing from the original recipe! I think I overdid the milk a little, because the dough was slightly too soft to cut well - the cutter left the scones slightly domed on top which meant they didn't bake to a good shape.

In the scheme of things, the shape didn't really matter as the great flavour more than made up for any shortcomings in the looks department. These scones were rich and moist with a strong flavour of the main ingredients - cheese and parsley. They were delicious still warm from the oven, lucious with melting butter, but they were also good eaten at room temperature. One way of eating them, which would be good at Tea Time, was with smoked salmon, but at other times of the day they would be good as an accompaniment to soup.

Tea Time Treats is a monthly baking challenge co-hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, and Kate at What Kate Baked. The full rules can be found here, if you are interested in taking part.