Orange and Rosemary Shortbread

It's taken me ages to write this post, just because there has been absolutely zero daylight in Edinburgh to take pictures with. It's so depressing that there is still a month left where it will just get darker. The curtains are shut and the lights are on by about 3pm most days. So, prepare yourself for some very dodgy photos in the coming months, and I apologise for my shaky-cam poor lighting. Brace yourselves for winter.

Anyway.

I've been thinking about the Lemon Thyme biscuits I made earlier in the year a lot lately. I wanted to make them again, but they didn't seem suitable given the cold and dark. Christmas doesn't seem like a lemon time of year. Oranges and clementines are more festive feeling to me.

Orange and Rosemary Shortbread

I swapped out the lemon zest for orange, and finely chopped a couple of sprigs of rosemary. I rolled the dough thicker than I would normally. It seems more appropriate to have a massive hunk of shortbread rather than a daintily thin slice. For some of the larger biscuits, I made a hole in the top so it could be used as a tree decoration.

Orange and Rosemary Shortbread Tree Decorations

The shortbread was crumbly and buttery, and the orange flavour shone through. The rosemary wasn't very strong, so added a pleasant herby aftertaste rather than a massive kick. I decorated the biscuits with an egg white wash and a sprinkle of granulated sugar, to create a frosty effect. Without the sugar topping, it was a quite grown up, but the extra sweetness made the appeal more universal, so perhaps more suitable for feeding to less refined palates! They are incredibly moreish though, so watch out...

Orange Shortbread with Rosemary
Makes lots

225g unsalted butter, softened
150g granulated sugar
zest of 1 orange
1 tsp salt
2 tsps finely chopped rosemary
1 egg, separated (save the white for the glaze)
275g plain flour
2 tbsps orange juice

GLAZE
Granulated sugar

1) Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
2) Add in the orange zest, salt and rosemary, combine thoroughly.
3) Separate the egg, saving the white for glazing. Add the yolk into the biscuit dough mix.
4) Add the flour and orange juice. Once a dough starts forming, knead gently on a floured surface.
5) If the dough is sticky at this point, add more flour, a sprinkle at a time.Wrap the dough in clingfilm, and chill for at least an hour.
6) Preheat the oven to 180C, and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.Roll the dough out to 5mm thick, and cut circles out (I used a 2 inch diameter cutter). Keep gathering the scraps and re-rolling until you have about 40 biscuits.
7) Brush the biscuits with egg white, and then sprinkle with granulated sugar.
8) Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the biscuits are just turning golden brown at the edges.Cool on the tray for 1 minute, then move to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Lemon Thyme Shortbread - A Bake Swap

A while ago, I sent a complete stranger a mix CD of my favourite music. The stranger sent me a CD back. I liked some of the music, and thought some of it was weird. I loved getting a random CD in the post though. Welcome to the world of internet swaps!

I hadn't done a swap in ages, when I stumbled across a bake swap. I like baking and I like random stuff. I signed up straight away.

Once I'd sent the email, I began to dread the swap. What if I got someone who is vegan? Or gluten free? Or some other weird allergy/dietary requirement that I can't bothered to work around. (Part of me thinks that if you are seriously limited about what you can eat, you should stick to the mix CDs instead.)

When I received my swap partner's details I was shocked. I googled the details in the email. Woah.

Luckily, she was not on some crazy diet, but living in a flat 5 minutes away from the house I spent the first 18 years of my life in. The randomness just got even better!

She said that she liked citrus flavours, and I've been thinking a lot lately about using herbs in sweet foods. I made an awesome orange and rosemary cake once, so I wanted to do something along those lines. I eventually settled on lemon shortbread with thyme.

This recipe was a bit experimental, and was inspired by several other recipes, with this one by Sophistimom being really helpful. I've changed a few of the quantities, and presented them differently. The biscuits are very crisp and crumbly, with an immediate lemon zing, followed by an aftertaste of refreshing herbs. I would prefer a bit more of an "upfront" herb flavour, but I didn't want to go too overboard on the thyme on this occasion.

Box of Lemon Shortbread with Thyme Glaze

Lemon Shortbread with Thyme

225g unsalted butter, softened
150g granulated sugar
zest of 1.5 lemons (save the other half a lemon for the glaze)
1 tsp salt
2 tsps finely chopped thyme
1 egg
275g plain flour
2 tbsps lemon juice

GLAZE
Turbinado sugar (can use demerara)
4 tbsps icing sugar
juice of 1 lemon
zest 0.5 lemons
1 tsp finely chopped thyme

• Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
• Add in the lemon zest, salt and thyme, combine thoroughly.
• Separate the egg, saving the white for glazing. Add the yolk into the biscuit dough mix.
• Add the flour and lemon juice. Once a dough starts forming, knead gently on a floured surface. If the dough is sticky at this point, add more flour, a sprinkle at a time.
• Wrap the dough in clingfilm, and chill for at least an hour.
• Preheat the oven to 180C, and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.
• Roll the dough out to 5mm thick, and cut circles out (I used a 2 inch diameter cutter). Keep gathering the scraps and re-rolling until you have about 40 biscuits.
• Brush half the biscuits with egg white, and then sprinkle with turbinado sugar. Other half of the batch stay plain for the moment!
  
• Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the biscuits are just turning golden brown at the edges.
• Cool on the tray for 1 minute, then move to a wire rack to finish cooling.
• Once cool, mix the icing sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and thyme to make a glaze.
• Put half a teaspoon of glaze on each of the plain biscuits, spreading it out with the back of the spoon.
• Once the glaze is dry, serve with tea.

Lemon Thyme Shortbreads

I am excited to see what I get back in return!

Truffles

For Christmas, I decided to make boxes of truffles to give to people. I made some a while back, but they were plain ones just coated in cocoa. I was ready to be a bit more adventurous this time. I decided to make 5 flavours: Baileys, champagne, cappuccino, praline and plain.

After gathering a rather large quantity of ingredients (including 12 bars of chocolate!) and raiding the cupboards in my mum's house, I got to work. The first job was making the praline. I used this recipe although I only followed the praline section and used other recipes for the final truffles. It was pretty simple, and was a basic caramel of sugar and water with chopped hazelnuts added at the end. However, since the caramel cake the other week had suffered from crystallized caramel which I had to separate, I was super careful this time about not stirring it too much and regularly brushing down the sides of the pan with cold water.

Making the caramel syrup

Once the caramel started to turn brown, I added the nuts and poured it in to a lightly oiled tin to cool.

The praline as it cooled

Next up was making the basic truffle mix. I combined several recipes, and even then did my own thing for the flavourings. I used a recipe from Green and Black's for the ganache base, and then used this recipe from Suite 101 to get a guide on how to flavour them.

825g of chocolate!

I was planning to make 4 large boxes, one for my mum, dad, next-door neighbours and T's parents. The Green and Black's recipe made 36, so I tripled the quantity to get enough (plus a few extra for me to sample...)

Melting the chocolate over a pan

I melted all the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. This took quite a while as there was so much! Once that was done, I added the cream, and split the mixture into 5 bowls, one for each flavour. For the Baileys one, I added a whole Baileys miniature, as adding a small amount didn't seem to give much taste. Similarly, the champagne truffle mix (strictly it was Cava but who can really taste the difference in this context?) didn't seem to take on much flavour. Reading up about it since, I think I should have used Marc de Champagne as well as fizz to give it a more intense taste. The coffee truffles were fairly simple to do, and only a couple of teaspoons of espresso gave a good flavour. For the praline one, I whizzed up the praline in a blender until it was very finely chopped, and added a few spoonfuls of this until the melted chocolate had some taste as well as a bit of crunch in it.

Chilling the 5 flavours

Once all the flavours had cooled, I attempted to shape them into balls. This was not easy and my hands seemed too warm. Everytime I tried to shape the ganache it seemed to melt away. I also tried using a melon baller. In the end, my mum helped me , using a combination of hand rolled and melon baller, as we worked out that the only way to do it with such a large quantity was to work in batches and constantly return the mixture to fridge once it become too soft. Eventually we ended up with 5 trays of vaguely spherical truffles.

My original plan was to dip the truffles in melted chocolate, but I didn't have enough to be able to submerge them fully and quickly remove them. This meant that I had to roll them in melted chocolate, which wasn't ideal as they would start to melt instead of taking on a shell of hard chocolate. Instead, I lined them up on a tray and poured the melted chocolate over the top. This wasn't perfect, as there were gaps in the enrobing, and it would have been better to do it on a wire rack so excess chocolate could drip away. However, I eventually managed to complete all the chocolates. I decorated each type differently so they could be identified in the box.

• Plain - Piped in to swirl shapes with cocoa dusting
• Cappuccino - White chocolate coating with cocoa dusting
• Champagne - White chocolate coating with sugar dusting
• Baileys - Milk chocolate coating with dark stripes
• Praline - Milk chocolate coating with crushed praline topping

Baileys truffles

Praline truffles
Champagne truffles being trimmed

The problem with doing the coating on a baking sheet was that when it was time to pack them in the boxes they were a bit messy around the base, so I had to trim each one with a knife to get a smooth edge. I packaged them all up in petit fours cases, and packed them into three layered chocolate boxes.

Packing the chocolates (Cappuccino and a plain truffle)

For a first attempt I was quite happy with how they turned out, although they weren't as pristine looking as I hoped. I would try these again, and would quite like to go for some more adventurous flavours next time.