Taking a Break

I won't be posting here for the next month, as tomorrow we are off for a three week tour of New Zealand, with stopovers in Singapore on each end of the holiday. The holiday is in a bit of disarray at the moment because of the earthquake in Christchurch, but I'm sure that whatever new arrangements are made we will have a great time. We really loved the whole country on our last visit, and are looking forward to seeing some different areas this time.

I'll be missing the March 'We Should Cocoa' challenge, but I look forward to seeing what the rest of you come up with. A month away from the kitchen should give me renewed energy to start again in April with lighter summer baking.

Blond Marbled Brownies

The best of both worlds - blondies and brownies marbled together! Could it get better? For me, yes - these fantastic brownies are made with oil, so they are low in saturated fat too. The recipe isn't perfect, but it's close and won't need much adjusting to get it nearer.

My inspiration came from Bakeaholic, but the recipe can be traced back another couple of steps by following links on each site. As I didn't follow the recipe quantities exactly, and  plan to make more changes next time, I'm going to write out the whole recipe.

The biggest problem was the huge difference in stiffness between the chocolate batter and the plain half. The blondie batter was quite runny, but the chocolate batter was almost like cookie dough and very difficult to spread - it will need loosening up next time!

Ingredients
150g sunflower oil
450g light muscovado sugar
330g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
100g plain chocolate chips
50g chopped hazelnuts
35g cocoa
50g 74% plain chocolate, melted.


Method
Preheat the oven to 170C and line a 12 x 8" (30 x 20cm) baking tin with baking parchment. The tin needs to be at least 1.5"+ (4cm) deep.

Mix the oil and sugar until smooth, making sure there are no lumps in the sugar.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and stir into the batter.

Divide the batter into two fairly equal halves and stir the chocolate chips and nuts into one half. To the other half, add the cocoa and melted chocolate and mix until well blended. (This results in a really stiff batter, I think if I were doing this again I would add a little milk to thin it down a bit.)

Place alternate blobs of batter into the baking tin - using the thickest batter first, if there is a difference, and allowing the thinner batter to spread between these blobs. Use a knife or spoon handle to swirl the blobs together to create a marbled effect.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a probe comes out with damp crumbs clinging to it. (I underbaked mine - the blondie mixture was too gooey in centre pieces after cooking, as you can see in the photo above! I would add another 5 minutes and bake for 40 minutes next time.)

Cool in the tin then cut into the desired size - I cut into 24 small squares.

The brownies rose during cooking, but sank back when cooled to give the right degree of fudgy chewiness. Despite the large amount of sugar they did not taste oversweet. The chocolate chips and nuts gave a texture contrast, but the overall flavour depended on the variations of the amount of blondie or brownie you got in each piece!

This is definitely a recipe to keep and make again, if I can sort out the chocolate batter stiffness, although it doesn't appear to have affected the final outcome. 

Wordle

Thanks to Joanna at Zeb Bakes, I've found a new pastime on the computer - making word clouds at Wordle. The picture above is what I made when I put in my blog address, and played around with the settings to get something aesthetically pleasing. I like the way the whole cloud stands on a chocolate stem - it sums up my baking philosophy, I think!

The picture below is from words associated with chocolate cake:

It took a while to find out how to publish them here. Long story short - screen capture, save in Paint Shop Pro, crop off unwanted bits, convert to a .jpg file.

Chocolate Brownie Cookies

This looks like a simple recipe for chocolate brownie cookies. It comes from the book and TV series Economy Gastronomy, by Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merrett, although I can't see any economy in a recipe using 250g chocolate at the current prices for chocolate! The series was meant to show families with huge weekly food bills that cooking more from scratch, and planned use of the leftovers, would save them money, but I can't imagine that these cookies were cheaper than buying a packet off the supermarket shelf.

The recipe wasn't as simple as it looked though - my cookie batter was very thin and produced cookies which were very flat. FB recommended the recipe and said that her cookies were double the thickness of mine, when she made them. I may have not let the chocolate and butter mix cool for long enough.  I thought I had followed the recipe exactly, apart from using plain chocolate instead of white, and toasted hazelnuts instead of macadamias (another extravagance!), but too hot chocolate is the only reason I can think of for  my limited success. I also used too much batter for each cookie, as I didn't get 20 biscuits out of the batch, only 15.

Is it possible for something to be too chocolatey? I wouldn't have thought so, but that's what I felt about these cookies! They were light and insubstantial and tasted of nothing but too sweet chocolate. Perhaps if I'd made thicker cookies the texture might have been different and I'd have liked them more.

Rye, Apple and Date Syrup Cake

Having acquired a bottle of date syrup, I needed to find a recipe in which to use it. I needed something which used enough syrup to notice the flavour, but not one which used the whole bottle in one go. After a lot of fruitless searching, I went back over the Guardian recipes on Dan Lepard's site and found this recipe for Rye Apple Cake. I'd already tried the recipe once, before I started blogging, so knew it was a tasty cake, and this also made me feel comfortable about adapting the recipe a little to suit my needs.

I used date syrup instead of golden syrup, sunflower oil instead of butter and left out the almonds altogether, replacing those in the cake batter with plain white flour, and just sprinkling demerara sugar on top. This is quite a low fat recipe anyway, producing a loaf which is more like a teabread than a cake, but as the butter is melted with the sugar and syrup, I thought changing it for oil wouldn't alter the recipe too drastically. I left out the ground almonds because FB has a severe peanut allergy and prefers to avoid other nuts as much as possible - large amounts can produce mild allergy symptoms, and allergic reactions can get worse with repeated exposure, so it pays to play it safe from her point of view!

None of the changes appeared to have a detrimental effect on the recipe - the resultant loaf was dark and moist, studded with little pieces of cinnamon-y apple. I'm not sure I could notice the date syrup as a separate flavour, but it combined with the rye and dark sugar to give rich, distinctive but not oversweet flavour. The apple pieces collapsed a little during cooking, leaving small holes above each piece, but this wasn't a huge problem.

Here's my revised recipe, with thanks to Dan Lepard for the original!

Ingredients
1 large eating apple - I used a Cox
1 teaspoon cinnamon
150g rye flour
50g plain white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
60g sunflower oil
50g date syrup
100g dark muscovado sugar
75mls milk
1 large egg
Demerara sugar for topping

Method
Prepare a 2lb loaf tin and pre-heat the oven to 170C (same temperature for fan ovens).
Peel, core and dice the apple into 1cm cubes or smaller. Toss with the cinnamon to coat the apple pieces.
Mix the two flours and the baking powder in a bowl.
In a large saucepan, gently heat the oil, syrup and sugar, until the sugar is dissolved. Do not bring to boiling point.
Remove from the heat and beat in the milk and egg.
Stir in the flour mix until evenly blended, then fold in the apple pieces.
Transfer the batter to the loaf tin, level the surface, and sprinkle heavily with demerara sugar.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a test probe is clean. Cool in the tin.

Cranberry and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yet another variation of this Dan Lepard recipe. These cookies are really quick and simple to make and, as the recipe uses wholemeal flour and oats, you can at least pretend that it's healthy. These were made to go into lunchboxes, so I didn't feel the need to be too extravagent with the chocolate - I used a standard bag of plain chocolate chips from the baking section of the supermarket. I've decided I really don't like almond extract unless it's enhancing the flavour of almonds, so I went back to vanilla extract in this recipe.

So, to summarise - I added 100g chocolate chips, 150g dried cranberries and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract to the basic dough recipe and made 20 cookies from one batch of dough. These cookies are quite substantial and nicely chewy, excellent either as part of a nourishing packed lunch or as a snack with a mug of coffee or tea.

Chocolate and Nut Yogurt Cake

I think this basic, highly adaptable, yogurt cake is becoming one of my 'everyday' staple recipes.

Because it uses oil and yogurt, making it is simply a matter of mixing the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet ingredients in another and combining the two! Even allowing a few minutes for lining the cake tin, weighing ingredients and chopping chocolate, this cake was ready for the oven in under 10 minutes. In fact, you need to think a little further ahead to get the oven up to temperature before the cake goes in.

This is a moist, quite dense cake, with the hazelnuts and Toblerone giving it a crunchy texture. It's not richly chocolatey, as the Toblerone is milk chocolate, but it's a pleasant cake for everyday eating.

Here's the recipe:
170g plain flour
30g cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
200g caster sugar

Measure the above ingredients into a large bowl, and whisk together with a ballon whisk. You can sift the flour and cocoa if you prefer, but I don't find it necessary.

250g wholemilk natural yogurt*
100g sunflower oil*
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

*I find it simpler to weigh the oil and yogurt, rather than move them in and out of measuring jugs.
Mix the wet ingredients in a bowl or jug, then pour onto the flour  mixture, and beat for a couple of minutes until the batter is smooth and well blended. Fold in the chosen flavouring ingredients, in this case:

100g Toblerone (milk with honeycomb crisp), chopped quite small
50g finely chopped hazelnuts

Transfer the batter to a prepared 20cm diameter springform cake tin, base lined with baking parchment, and bake at 180C for about 60 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean.

Cool for 15 minutes in the tin before removing the cake to a wire rack.