Easter Cake

Having not one but two wedding cakes to make in the foreseeable future, I thought I should probably learn how to deal with fondant or royal icing. We were also visiting T's parents for Easter weekend, so I took the opportunity to make a bigger cake than I would normally and palm some of it off on them.

I started with the Simnel cake in from the April edition of Delicious. I didn't read it through before baking it, so I didn't realise you had to bake a layer of marzipan in to the cake. I didn't have any marzipan, and I don't like the stuff, so I skipped this step. I thought this might make the cake a bit dry, so I soaked the cake in marsala, lemon juice and sugar syrup before icing it.

I initially planned to do royal icing, but life got in the way and I ran out of time to do the icing in stages. Each stage has to be left 24 hours to dry, and I only had one afternoon. I went for fondant instead.

Trusty old Leith's came out. Syrup was boiled to the soft ball stage, then kneaded on the worktop with a spatula. It then stuck to the worktop, and made such a pathetically small ball of icing when I did prize it away that I gave up and binned it. Then I spent 15 minutes chipping the remaining sugar off the worktop with a knife. On the plus side, they played "Sit Down"by James on the radio and I still know all the words. That makes me feel very old indeed.

I decided to give another recipe a go before giving up and buying ready-made icing. This was much more successful; soon I had a rather large ball of sugar paste, and a kitchen covered in icing sugar. It took me several attempts to roll the icing out large enough to cover the cake, as it kept sticking. I only used icing sugar, but with hindsight I should have used some cornflour too to make it stick less.

Once I'd done the cake, I smoothed off any bumpy bits and tears with wet fingers and a paring knife. Classy.

I dyed the remaining icing into several colours to decorate the cake with, and went crazy with some miniature cutters I was given at Christmas.

Fondant confetti shapes

They were still a bit dusty at this point from the cornflour, but I'll brush that off later when it's hardened.

Fondant chick

I had loads of icing left over so I tried to make a hatching chick. The egg part fell to pieces but the chick survived.

Easter Confetti Cake

Given that this is my first time making this type of icing, as well as my first attempt to cover and decorate a cake, I feel quite chuffed. The surface isn't entirely flat, and the shapes aren't uniformly spaced, but it looks like vaguely good.

Fondant Icing
Makes enough to cover & decorate a large cake.

450g icing sugar
50g glucose
1 large egg white
flavours and colours
cornflour for dusting

1) Put the icing sugar in a bowl, sieving it if it's very lumpy. Make a well in the centre.
2) Add in the egg white, glucose and any flavourings and colours you want to use (such as lemon, orange flower, peppermint etc).
3) Knead the mix in to a smooth dough.
4) Dust a large surface with icing sugar and cornflour, and roll the icing to the desired shapes.

TIPS
- You can use the white icing to cover a cake, and then colour and flavour the offcuts to use as decorations.
- A drop of blue colouring makes white icing seem even whiter.
- Keep the icing in an airtight bag or covered with a damp cloth when you are not using it - it dries out quickly.
- If it does start drying out, add a drop of egg white or water to the paste to make it more malleable.

Chocolate Brownies with Chestnuts & Figs

The only cookbook I got for Christmas was Ottolenghi. This was good, as my cookbook shelf is full, and I didn't want the usual semi-novelty cookbooks I usually seem to receive ('101 Biscuit Recipes' anyone?)

I had a packet of chestnuts in the cupboard leftover, so I decided to make Khalid's Chestnut & Chocolate Bars.

The digestive base was easy enough, and the chocolate mix for the top was also very simple, with the most strenuous part being chopping a large pile of chestnuts, figs and white chocolate. It went in the oven, and came out very, very, very wobbly. So it went back in the oven for another 10 minutes and was still wobbly. The recipe said it wouldn't be totally cooked, but I didn't expect it to basically look the same as when it went in. I put it in the fridge to see if that would harden it up. Maybe the chocolate would set solid.

A few hours later, it was still way too wobbly. I tried to turn it out of the tin (luckily I'd used a silicone one) but it was obviously going to end in disaster. I gave it another 10 minutes in the oven, but it was STILL wobbly! I shoved it back in the fridge as I was not in the mood to deal with a massive pile of fail goo at that moment.

The next day I was immersed in the domestic bliss that is the life of the self/un-employed. After warming up with bouts of bed making, laundry and sweeping, I decided to deal with the fail. I thought I might spoon some over ice cream and bin the rest.

It had set! I was not expecting that at all. A bit of a push and it popped out of the tin in one lovely firm lump, and sliced up with a crisp finish that is just so satisfying.

After all the abuse I'd put it through, I wondered whether it would taste any good. The chocolate mix was flourless, so although it was firmer than it should have been, it was still moist, almost like a giant truffle. The chestnut and the figs were there, but weren't as overpowering as I'd worried they might be, but not really that flavourful either.

Chestnut & Fig Brownie Bars

I guess I'll have to give this another go before I reject the recipe altogether, but I wasn't that impressed. It was just digestives with a eggy ganache on top, with no stand out flavours or textures. Not offensive, but just not that amazing either.

Borscht

After my recent trip to Russia, I have been craving borscht. I've made it once before a few years ago (and stained practically everything I owned red in the process) but it wasn't as good as the stuff I had in Russia.

After reading multiple recipes, and even tweeting about it, I picked the Valentine Warner recipe from "What to Eat Now". It was in two stages, firstly making a meat broth from vegetables, stewing beef and ham hock, and then adding in roast beetroots, parsnips and apples.

Borscht with Sour Cream

The soup should take about 3 hours to make, as the broth and the roasted beetroots both took 2 hours of slow cooking. However, I ended up taking more like 5 hours, as about 2.5 hours in, there was a power cut. Not only did all the lights in the houses go out, the street lights and traffic lights also went out. It was really strange to look out in to the street and see complete black. A couple of stairwells had emergency lighting, but apart from that the only lights I could see were flickering candles or torches. As both the hob and the oven are electric, I just had to abandon the borscht until the power came back on an hour or so later.

I'm not sure if it was this enforced hiatus or the recipe that meant the soup was a little lacking. The initial stages of frying off onions and garlic with dill smelt fantastic, as did the roasted beetroot and adding the meat. I was less convinced about the apples and parsnip and I would skip this if I was making the soup again. Krysia Boo suggested on Twitter to add the juice from re-hydrating dried mushrooms, which I didn't get the chance to this time but will definitely bear in mind in future. I also think next time I would grate the beetroot instead of cubing it, as I didn't like the thin broth with massive chunks in. I prefer my borscht more texturally homogeneous.

Not Quite Up To Russian Standard

I won't bother posting the recipe, as it needs a lot of work before I'm happy with it. I think next time I'll make the meat stock as a stock rather than a broth, and add the dill and onions later on. However, the soup did tick a lot of boxes, and I enjoyed it for my lunch with a good piece of bread and loads of sour cream. It didn't have an overly earthy flavour, and the sweetness of the beetroot was highlighted. A definite starting point for further adventures in borscht.

Daring Baker's October - Macarons

I first discovered the macaron in March 2008, when I went to to visit H, who was doing her year abroad in Paris. We went to all the usual places, and eventually ended up in Fauchon. H told me I should get the lemon macaron. I did. It was yummy. I've considered making them at home a few times, but every time I searched for a recipe I was put off by how many results I got saying that they were tricky.

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe. So now I couldn't put off macarons any longer.

My first attempt failed miserably. I overwhipped the batter and it was too runny to form any kind of shape. It was still tasty though.

The second attempt was a little better. I had some freeze dried raspberries after my mum found somewhere online that sold "home-sized" portions instead of wholesale. I crushed these up to make a powder, and mixed this in to the batter. It was a lovely creamy white with flecks of raspberry powder in it, and piped easily in to rounds. I dried the rounds in a low oven as suggested, and was pleased to see the beginnings of some feet on my macarons!

However, I found the 7 minutes cooking time suggested in the recipe to be too long, and my macarons went too brown. I sandwiched them with raspberry buttercream (also made with powdered raspberry). While these macarons had the chewiness of a proper macaron, they didn't have the smooth, crisp shell.

Raspberry Macarons with a tiny foot!

So on to the third attempt! This time I used lime zest, and a drop of green gel colouring. I sieved the almonds and sugar twice to make sure it was superfine (although I think if I had a food processor and could have ground the nuts even more it would have been better) and folded the mixture carefully. I watched the macarons like a hawk to ensure they didn't brown (although a couple at the back of the oven still did a little).

Lime Macarons and Fauchon Mug

As it was late, and I didn't have enough time to cool and reheat the oven for drying the second batch, I experimented a little. I left the tray of piped macarons in the oven overnight, once the temperature had dropped below 90c, then baked them this morning for 5 minutes. These ones are the smoothest, but they don't have a foot or a crispy shell! Curses!

What they lack in aesthetics they somewhat make up for in taste.

I sandwiched these with lemon curd, which gives them a good citrus hit. They taste ok, but they need a lot more work. However, the process was easy enough that I'll give macarons another go sometime soon.

Lemon Sundae

Generally I am fairly organised in the kitchen, and like to have all my ingredients and equipment out before I begin. I found some lemons in the cupboard that were on their last legs, so I decided to give a recipe for lemon biscuits a go. As I'd never tried this recipe before, and it looked a bit tricky, I went super-overboard on the mise-en-place. As well as getting my ingredients out, I pre-weighed them all, and left them out for a couple of hours to reach room temperature.

To cut a long story short, despite the extreme prep, it was an unmitigated disaster. What were meant to be crunchy little lemony biscuits turned into a big old cakey mess that was stuck to the baking tray. My first thought was to bin the whole thing, but it seemed such a waste. When I was a child, any leftovers were greeted with a remark about starving Africans, so throwing food away just makes me feel guilty. Instead, I chipped it off the baking tray and made the rest of the lemons in to some yummy lemon curd.

Lemon Sundae

It might not be very sophisticated, but the cake/biscuit fail crumbs, mixed with the fresh lemon curd and some plain yoghurt was delicious. The thing I really like about cooking is that you can be creative. As well as trying out different flavours and presentations, if something goes wrong it's usually salvageable if you are a bit creative. In this case, I liked the way the sweet biscuit, the sweetly tart curd and the plain yoghurt balanced each other out. The biscuits on their own were a bit tooth-hurtingly sweet anyway.

I love lemon curd

I might give the biscuits another go, or I might just content myself with eating this for breakfast for the next few days. Who needs a balanced diet when you can have cake sundaes?

PS - Check out the ridiculously loud coasters I bought in Russia!

Strawberry Baked Cheesecake

I knew this day would come. "Bake" has finally let me down.

While moving in to the new flat, we somehow acquired a pack of coconut biscuits. As neither T nor I are particular fans, I decided to use the biscuits to make a cheesecake base. I found a recipe in "Bake" for a blueberry cheesecake, and set to work.

The base was easy enough, and was the usual mix of crushed biscuits and melted butter. On to that, I arranged plenty of chopped strawberries, as the blueberries in the shops were ridiculously expensive.

Next up was the cheesecake mix. Cream cheese, vanilla, sugar and eggs were whisked until smooth and creamy. Although I know you are not meant to eat raw eggs I couldn't resist a spoonful of mix, just to test it was alright... As it was delicious I poured the mixture over the strawberries and put it in to the oven.

It might be a tad unfair of me to totally blame Rachel Allen for my cheesecake fail. It was my first time cooking with the new oven, which is a combined oven and grill. I had an oven thermometer in there to see how accurate the oven was. Despite turning the oven up to full blast, it seemed unable to get hotter that 170C. Since the cheesecake wanted to be at 180C, I thought this was close enough and ploughed on regardless. It was only after the top of the cheesecake started burning after 5 minutes that I realised I had set the dial to grill instead of oven. In my defence, both symbols had a fan on them, and the only difference was a slightly thicker black line at the bottom!

I switched it over to oven mode, and kept an eye on the oven thermometer (which E, my old flatmate, once described as "a gadget for calling your oven's bullshit") so the temperature stayed around 180C the whole time. After 40 minutes, the cheesecake was mostly golden (except the burnt patch) and wobbled pleasingly.

Baked Strawberry Cheesecake

After chilling in the fridge, and topping it off with a strawberry and white wine syrup, it was time to eat. Although the strawberry flavour was good, the texture was a little too eggy in places. Instead of being smooth and custard like, it was granular and coarse. I can't decide if this was my complete inability to work an oven or just the wrong ratio of cream cheese and eggs.

The texture wasn't bad enough to scrap the cheesecake totally, and I've been working my way through it over the past few days. The flavours have matured nicely, and it does seem a little less granular after a few days in the fridge.

Strawberry Cheesecake - slightly granular

Hopefully now I have mastered how the new oven works, I can start making up with "Bake".

Strawberry Jam - Why You Should Stick To Just One Recipe

Almost as soon as we got home from the PYO farm, it became obvious that we had way too much fruit, and unless we wanted to eat strawberries and cream at every meal for the next week, there was no way we would get through all of it. The cashier in the farm shop had asked if we planned to make jam, so on the way home we'd picked up some jam sugar just in case the mood took us.

The recipe on the back of the jam sugar packet said boil the jam for 4 minutes. The recipe in Leith's Bible said it could take up to 30 minutes for the jam to set, as did a recipe on BBC food. I also had a sugar thermometer with a handy "jam" marking on it. I've seen plenty of jars of homemade jam that are too runny, and have to be poured, but I couldn't imagine what jam that was too hard would be like. I decided to boil the jam until the sugar thermometer was satisfied. I also chucked in some vanilla seeds and a squeeze of lemon juice for fun.

As I am greedy and curious, it was only a couple of hours later when I broke in to the first jar. Instead of spreadable jam, I had some kind of fruit toffee. It was like a giant wine gum in a jar. I managed to chip a lump out of it, and it tasted fine. The only problem was the texture.

Strawberry Jam

After googling various phrases about hard jam, I discovered what had gone wrong. The "up to 30 minutes" recipes were using ordinary sugar, but the jam sugar I'd used had added pectin. This had caused the jam to set quicker and at a lower temperature than relying on the pectin in the fruit alone. The lemon juice had also bumped up the pectin levels. Luckily, I also found that melting the jam down and adding in over-ripe fruit would probably give the jam a slightly better consistency.

A few nights later, when trying to get rid of the last few strawberries, I put the two jars of jam I'd made in a saucepan of cold water, which I slowly warmed up. In another pan, I mashed up the remaining fresh strawberries with a splash of water. Once the jam was warm enough to be stirrable (this took some time) I added in the mashed strawberries and their juice, and mixed it in to the existing jam as best I could.

I left the jars overnight, and consoled myself that a jar of strawberry toffee was not the worst thing that could have happened. The next morning I made toast while staring at the jars of jam with apprehension. Opening the jar gave no clues, and the jam still looked firm. As I dipped the knife in, I knew the fix had worked. The jam was spreadable! Success!

Jam on a petit pain

I've been eating the jam all week, just on bread or crackers, sometimes with butter and sometimes without. I've even substituted jam and bread for dinner, in a move reminiscent of my grandmother. When my mother would tell her to eat a proper dinner, she'd reply that jam and smoking were the only pleasures left in life at her age. I haven't started smoking though.

I wouldn't say this jam is life changing, but it is very fruity, with the right balance of sweetness and tartness. The vanilla adds a little something, but the flavour is not obvious. For a first foray in to the jam-making world, I'm pretty happy. I've also learnt my lesson about not trying to combine 3 different recipes when I have no idea what I'm doing!

Grandmother's Chicken Fried Rice

T is a big fan of Chinese food, and if I'm not around at the weekend, he'll often treat himself to a take away. He'd watched a few TV shows about Chinese food, but didn't really have the know-how to cook it at home beyond basic stir-fries. When I saw Chinese Food Made Easy on special offer, I picked up a copy for T. (I am angling for a Girlfriend-of-the-Year Award...)

Even though we don't move to our new flat together (eeek!) until September, already we've begun the process of sorting through our possessions and getting rid of things. Yesterday was the turn of my old PC (I'm a Mac-girl now) so T had spent the day dismantling it and adding the best bits on to his PC to create an uber-PC. I'd spent the day clearing up the casing and getting rid of all the dust that had collected in it over the years! We decided to start off the book with Grandmother's Chicken Fried Rice, as we just wanted something fairly straightforward and quick to have for dinner after a busy day. T also gets this dish a fair bit from the take-away, so he was interested to see how it compared.

We had most of the ingredients already, as I had some rice wine (I decided that Japanese is close enough to Chinese in this case) from making sushi ages ago, so all that was required was a quick trip to the Chinese supermarket I recently discovered to get some dried shiitakes* and some glutinous rice.

As I chopped up the shallots, and grated the ginger, I soaked the mushrooms and cooked the rice. T's flat doesn't have scales, so I had to guess how much rice and how much water to use. After about 10 minutes, there was a horrible burning smell and a rice pancake burnt on the bottom of the pan! Luckily as it was non-stick it just flopped out in one lump straight in to the bin. The second attempt I used a lot more water and a lower heat. This one didn't burn on to the pan, but was very glutinous indeed! It stuck together in a big ball and it was only once I started stir-frying it that it began to separate into the grains.

Second attempt at glutinous rice

After I'd managed to cook the rice, the rest of the recipe was very easy and simple. After briefly frying the garlic, shallots and dried shiitakes, diced chicken was added. Then five spice and rice wine, followed by dark soy sauce. Finally, the rice and peanuts are added, warmed through, and then served seasoned with light soy sauce, toasted sesame oil and spring onion.

Grandmother's Chicken Fried Rice

The dish was really tasty, and I liked how the crunchy peanuts contrasted with the soft chicken and rubbery mushrooms. My main criticism of this dish was the lack of vegetables. Normally I would put in lots of veg and only 1 chicken breast, but I used 2 breasts for this. It felt very meat heavy, I guess I have got used to a less meaty diet lately. The book does have a large vegetarian section, and it seems that a lot of the dishes are meant to be served in conjunction with each other, so if I was to make this again I'd make a bit less and serve a veggie side dish too.

*I don't know why the recipe specifies dried shiitakes over fresh ones, perhaps it is because fresh ones aren't that widely available in parts of the UK? Anyone got a better suggestions?

English Muffins

Sometimes while perusing the internet, or reading a magazine or cook book, a certain recipe will jump out at me. Not in a "I should make this later" kind of way, but "I MUST MAKE THIS NOW" kind of way.

They tend to be simple, and use store-cupboard ingredients. Just as some people emotionally eat, I emotionally bake. When it's late at night, and you give me recipe using things I have in the cupboard, I'm totally going to go for it.

The last time I had an impulse bake I made raspberry muffins, but this time it was cinnamon raisin English muffins. I started just after midnight, so that was a good idea. Washing up at 3am was not fun. Watching Psychoville on iplayer while waiting for the batter to rise was more fun, although that is not the best show to watch on your own late at night!

However, the muffins were really easy to make, although I didn't have enough milk so I used watered down fromage frais instead. I have no idea what effect this had on the muffins, but the batter looked the right consistency so I ploughed on regardless.

The ongoing dilemma of the misshapen frying pan meant that it was hard to get the muffins to stay round and cook at the right speed, but they came out of the pan looking presentable enough. I left them overnight to cool, and toasted them for breakfast.

Bad muffins!

They were not good at all! They were still yeasty and uncooked inside, and unpleasantly chewy. I think I must have had them over too high a heat, as the outside was burning but the inside wasn't cooked through yet. This should teach me to attempt yeasted goods at 2am.