Italian Pine Nut Tart

This months random letter choice for the AlphaBakes challenge turned out to be the letter I. This is a really limiting letter - I didn't find any ingredients beginning with I and the only entries in the indexes of most of my books were 'icing' or 'iced'. I decided to follow the advice of this month's host (Caroline of Caroline Makes) and think geographically. I also decided I would only pick a recipe if it was labelled with the country of origin in it's name eg I wouldn't choose tiramisu, and then post it as Italian tiramisu, or make an Irish Guinness cake.

After much studying of my cookery books I found a recipe called Italian Pine Nut Tart with Chocolate Spread in my Green and Black's book of chocolate recipes which looked really tasty. It is described as a cross between a biscuit and a tart, and can be filled with almost anything, but a book of chocolate recipes had to go with a chocolate filling - a lot of chocolate hazelnut spread (Nutella).

Ingredients
310g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
100g unsalted butter, cold, cut into small cubes
150g caster sugar
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons water
300g chocolate hazelnut spread
1 large egg yolk
1 tablespoon milk
50g pine nuts

Method
Sift the flour and baking powder and rub in the butter, as for pastry.
Mix in the sugar, then add the beaten eggs and the water if needed, to make a soft dough. Knead gently until dough is smooth, then wrap and chill for 45 minutes.
Preheat oven to 180C and grease a 23cm(9") loose-based fluted flan tin
Roll out 3/4 of the dough on a floured surface and use to line the tart tin. The dough is soft and difficult to work with but any holes can be patched up easily.
Spread the chocolate spread evenly over the pastry, and roll the remaining pastry to make a lid. Press the edges of the base and lid together, to seal.
Mix the egg yolk and milk, and brush over the tart, then sprinkle with the pine nuts.
Bake for 35-40 minutes, until golden, watching the tart carefully towards the end of the cooking time, as pine nuts can burn easily.

This was a delicious tart. The pastry was crumbly and buttery - like a soft shortbread. The chocolate hazelnut spread was a thick enough layer to really taste and the pine nuts gave a crunchy, slightly bitter topping. Definitely one to make again!

We tried to think of other fillings which would work well, and came up with several - marzipan, creme patissiere, thick fruit compotes, chocolate ganache for nut avoiders, mincemeat, dates cooked to a purée. Other flavours could be added to enhance the tart - cinnamon or citrus zest in the pastry, for instance, would go well with a creme patissiere or marzipan filling.

AlphaBakes is the brainchild of Caroline of Caroline Makes and Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker. They take turns to host the challenge, and the randomly chosen letter must be used either as the main part of the recipe name or as a main ingredient eg N is for Nuts or Nanaimo Bars. The host for the month posts a round-up of entries at the end of the month.

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!

Pine Nut, Almond and Lemon Cake

We're fast approaching the date when CT will be moving out. This might be the last time I bake a  'low saturated fat' cake with his dietary requirements in mind (although I suspect I will still be baking him things to take back home when he visits!). Next weekend it will be something celebratory - lots of butter and chocolate - but for now, I'm delighted to have found another recipe that works well with oil. In this case I actually substituted oil for the melted butter used in this recipe for Pine Nut, Almond and Lemon Cake - this hasn't always worked well in the past, but it was fine this time.

In place of the 250g melted butter, I used 200mls of sunflower oil and an extra 50mls buttermilk; I didn't have 100g of ground almonds, so I used 50g of almonds, 50g polenta and a few drops of almond extract. Apart from these two changes I followed the recipe exactly. It was a really simple recipe to follow - mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then add the wet ingredients, and the cake was baked in the time given.

I was pleased with the amount of rise, although the texture had more holes than I like to see. The flavour was really delicate, with the pine nuts adding both a crunch to the texture and something extra to the flavour. This was one cake where using a flavourful extra virgin olive oil might have been an improvement over sunflower oil.

So, once again my baking is entering a new phase - FB has quite different tastes to CT - she doesn't really like ginger, prefers me not to bake with nuts other than almonds or hazelnuts, but does like fresh fruit more than CT. Watch this space!

Orange and Pinenut Frangipane Tart

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!

Orange and Rosemary Polenta Cake

It's officially mid-summer, if you go by the lunar calendar - yesterday was the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. Once again we've had pretty unseasonal weather here - some really cold days with north winds, but yesterday was one of those warm days which make you think of summer cooking - lighter flavours and seasonal ingredients. I'm a bit hampered by the Chief Tester here, as he doesn't like much summer fruit, so there's no point baking it into anything I expect him to eat. The next best thing would be a cake to eat with some of the fruit from the garden, and it would make it really seasonal if it could include some of the herbs we have growing at the moment.

A long search online, using various ideas for herby cakes eventually turned up this Cornmeal Rosemary Cake with Orange Glaze from the blog Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Punch. I didn't really want to put the glaze on top, if I was going to use it as a dessert cake, but otherwise it fitted the bill perfectly - basic ingredients and flavours that the CT would eat, and it used a herb which I had growing in abundance. I've never used rosemary in sweet baking but was willing to take a chance on it.

I did a quick conversion to metric weights, and followed the slightly unusual method for the cake exactly.

Ingredients: 200g plain flour; 100g polenta; 35g pine nuts (toasted and coarsely chopped); 1 tablespoon finely chopped rosemary leaves; 1 tablespoon finely grated orange zest; 1 teaspoon baking powder; 1/4 teaspoon salt; 165g cream cheese; 4 eggs; 270g sugar; 115g unsalted butter, melted.

For the syrup to brush over the cake I used the juice of one large orange and 2 tablespoons of sugar, and after heating, I left 3 small sprigs of rosemary infusing in the syrup while the cake cooked.

I left the cake in it's springform tin while I slowly poured the syrup over the top, as brushing seemed too tedious for the volume of syrup to apply. This was a bit of a mistake as it was then difficult to get the cake off the base, as the top was so sticky (the rosemary sprigs in the photo are an attempt to hide where the surface came away on my fingers). There didn't seem to be excess syrup seeping from the cake so I think putting the cake on a plate first (as advised) would have been better.

This recipe made quite a shallow cake, with a light, close texture. Even after adding the syrup to moisten the cake it was still quite light. I'm always surprised that using polenta doesn't affect the colour of cakes more. It was only 1/3 polenta and 2/3 flour, but I still expected a more yellow colour. I had chopped the rosemary really finely so the tiny specks of green don't show up as well in the photograph as the toasted pine nuts.

This is a really well flavoured cake, which I will certainly be making again - perhaps adding the orange glaze to make it a tea-time cake. The orange was the predominant flavour, with occasional bursts of the more pungent flavour of the rosemary coming through. The pine nuts added more to the texture than the flavour - perhaps a stronger flavoured nut would have been better, but pine nuts add to the overall Mediterranean feel to the cake and give a nice crunch.

After the event, I traced the original recipe through Fine Cooking, where I don't have a membership, so couldn't read the recipe, to Once Upon a Plate. Here I found out that the original Tom Douglas recipe used mascarpone cheese, rather than cream cheese - a possible improvement for the future. I was also slightly out in my conversion of the polenta and cream cheese, using a little less polenta and more cream cheese than specified - it didn't seem to affect things greatly.

Citrus Olive Oil Bundt Cake

with pine nut topping.

This was a very successful cake - light, but still moist; a good texture and a very delicate flavour, despite using a strongly flavoured extra-virgin olive oil, with quite a peppery aftertaste.

I used the Giada de Laurentiis recipe from the Food Network site, but left out the crumbled flaked almonds, and baked it in a bundt tin. Instead of almonds I sprinkled about 70g of pine nuts around the base of the greased and floured bundt tin, for a different flavour element and a textural contrast. I changed to a bundt tin after reading several criticisms that the cake took longer to cook than specified (and because I wanted an excuse to make a bundt cake again!).

The recipe was simple to follow - it took about 7 minutes to whisk the eggs to the point where they had thickened, and reached a pale and fluffy stage. I had no intention of measuring out teaspoons-full of citrus zest, so I used all the zest from one large lemon and one medium orange - that way I could grate the zest straight into the mixing bowl and not lose any of the flavourful oils. The end result didn't suggest that I had used too much zest.

The cake took a little longer to cook - about 45 minutes at 175C; this was probably because the depth of the batter is greater when using a bundt tin. I left it to cool for 15 minutes, as advised in the recipe, before turning out. This was the only difficult moment - it seemed the cake had stuck, but I gently eased it away from the sides with a nylon spatula and it then dropped out easily. I think the problem may have been greasing the tin with olive oil - in future I will use butter, even if there isn't any in the recipe.

As I said, this was a very delicately flavoured cake, with a lovely close textured, moist crumb - I think it will keep better than a butter sponge cake. The pine nut topping made a nice contrast, although I think it would be good to try the recipe as written, with added flaked almonds. I also think the cake could take stronger flavours on top of the citrus notes - chopped rosemary or lavender perhaps - although I'm not sure the very wet batter would take any heavy additions such as chopped nuts or chocolate chips. I was also slightly disappointed that the flavour of my peppery olive oil did not show through, but I'm not sure using a poorer quality oil would work as well.