Muffins!

Gosh, it's been a while since I've posted stuff here. That is not because I've not been baking, I should point out. I've been baking. Oh, yes. I've been doing my usual cake and whatnot, but also kicked off a sourdough starter and made a loaf from it; this is quite exciting and will take up a post all of its own, but for now I want to talk about muffins.

Y'see, I had a quiet weekend planned. I was going to go to a brunch event on Sunday organised by Culture Vultures, called (in it's shortened form) Platespinning. Held at Armley Mills it was a discussion about how to keep as many projects going for as long as you can without them all coming crashing down amongst your ears. Sounds like fun, so I signed up.

On Friday I got a message from the delightful Bake Lady asking if I wouldn't mind doing some muffins for the event, for various reasons. The main catering was being done by Fish&, so I didn't mind pitching in. And, yanno, I like baking.

So I made three batches of muffins (actually four, but that was because one batch was so good I didn't get to try any of them!): some Raspberry & White Chocolate, something I made up on the spur of the moment, Bakewell, and something else I made up on the spot, Carrot & Ginger.



The raspberry & white choc ones are a staple repertoire muffin - I make them a *lot* - but they're delightful. If you use chunks of chocolate instead of drops they're even better, but sometimes it's just easier to open a bag of drops and pour them into the bowl.

Recipe
Oven to GM5, or 190°C-ish. Use a muffin tin, line with muffin cases (that fit!) and this will make 12 muffins.

Ingredients are; 250g self-raising flour, 200g caster sugar, 100g white chocolate drops, 150g frozen raspberries (or fresh, but they're out of season at time of writing and frozen are perfectly acceptable), 2 medium eggs, 100g milk and 100g sunflower oil.

Note: yes, that's 100g there on the liquids. 100g milk is 100ml of milk, but 100g of oil (because it's less dense) is 125ml of oil. I like to use digital scales for weighing stuff out and because I can't be bothered trying to read those tiny, raised numbers on plastic jugs I'll just read the scales.

First, in a jug, whisk together the eggs, milk and oil. Next, in a bowl put together all the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the raspberries and mix them in too. Then add the liquid, pour it all in and with a metal spoon fold the liquid into the flour until just mixed. Don't worry about lumps, and don't over mix otherwise the muffin will go chewy and the razzies will break up too much. Just get the flour combined, and you'll be fine.

Pour into the cases, put in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes, or until golden on top and not wobbly if you tap the tin. DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN FOR AT LEAST 15 MINUTES. Really, don't, they'll collapse and be awful.

Easy peasy!



The other two follow the same basic principles but use slightly different ingredients. Let's do the bakewells first.

Same oven, muffin tin and liquid rules as before (ie, 100g milk, 100g oil, 2 eggs). In a bowl mix 150g self-raising, a half-teaspoon of baking powder, 100g ground almonds, 175g caster sugar. Add a big handful of frozen cherries (cf what I said about razzies above) and mix as before. After putting the mix in the cases dab a half-teaspoon of cherry jam on top, and then top with some flaked almonds. Bake as before.

The carrot & ginger ones are just as simple. Same liquids, and the dry ingredients are 250g self-raising, 150g caster sugar, 1tsp ground ginger, 100g grated carrots (from the bag in my fridge that's about two medium carrots, peeled, topped & tailed) and 50g mixed dried fruit, and four chunks of stem ginger that have been finely diced. Add a couple of tablespoons of the syrup from the stem ginger to the oil/milk mix. Bake as before.

See? Muffins are easy, and coming up with ideas for them are, if you follow the right basic guidelines, almost as simple.

Anyway: in addition to my muffins were some superb examples from Lynn (some chocolate chip ones, and a batch of apple & cinnamon) and the food done by Andrew & Debs was excellent: kedgeree, smoked salmon blinis and sausage-in-a-bun. Top marks all round, I think!

And the event was enormous fun, with conversations from the Queen of the UK Supper Club Scene amongst many other plate-spinning luminaries, artists and clever people. My photos from the event are on Flickr; I had fun, and I hope everybody else did too. (And that they liked my muffins!)

Rhubarb & Egg Custard tarts

You know how I have a bad recipe book habit? I bought a copy of Peyton and Byrne.

Don't get me wrong; this is a lovely book. Great photos, clear text, sensible design. But I wonder about the recipes; Peyton & Byrne has a recipe for egg custards that I looked at and thought "what?" as it required 2 whole eggs, 4 yolks, and only 60ml of cream. No, no, no. It'll make the custard very eggy and have a strange, bouncy texture. Way too much egg to cream. A proper egg custard is one of the prerequisites for a good recipe book but I couldn't imagine this working tremendously well. Still, there's no reason why I couldn't tweak the recipe a little...

So I doubled the cream with the same amount of egg. So far, so normal; but I'd had a thought about some rhubarb that I'd bought that morning. A blob of stewed rhubarb in the bottom of an egg custard. Could that work? Rhubarb and custard is a time-honoured traditional dish, of course.

Next I made some ginger shortcrust; normal 2:1 shortcrust with a teaspoon of ginger added to it, and (after chilling) rolled out on icing sugar for (i) crispness and (ii) a tiny touch of sweetness.

For pastry novices; two parts flour (200g) to one part butter (100g). Rub together to a sandy texture, no big lumps, then sprinkle a tablespoon of water over it and mix in using a flat, rounded knife. Add a bit more water and carry on mixing, and it'll come together in a soft ball; overdo the water and it'll turn to mush, underdo and it'll be too stiff. Wrap in cling, fridge for 30 minutes, then roll out to desired thickness; in this case, 2mm thick, and cut into 10 circles to fit my (buttered) muffin tin.

Into the muffin tin, into the oven for blind baking, there we are.

Except everybody has an off day. It didn't work, for two reasons: I didn't fill the shells with baking beans/rice whatever and I didn't chill the pastry before putting it in the oven. I could have got away with either, but not both; in the end my pastry shells started sliding down the sides of the tins like Nora Batty's tights, and ended up looking very flat, wrinkled and sad.

After a tiny amount of swearing I redid the pastry and using fairy cake cakes as liners inside the tart shells I filled them with rice to support the structure. This time it worked; 15 minutes at GM4 and the shells had picked up some colour. Picked out the rice, filled with custard, blobbed in a teaspoon of stewed rhubarb with honey, and BAM; ended up with these little bundles of joy:



These are so good. Faint ginger notes, crisp pastry, zingy rhubarb and slightly bouncy custard. Bloody lovely stuff. Made ten, there were five left when we went to bed, I expect there will be two left by the time I get home tonight. The thing to note here is: pastry is capricious, but simple enough so that if you cock it up you can re-do it without too much faff. And making pastry interesting is not difficult.

I'd better write an article on pastry, I suppose; it isn't as scary as people so often think, but at the same time you need to treat it with respect.

Also, the book has some great looking recipes in that I have no doubt will work superbly. And - oh, such an important point - it is all about British Baking. There is much to be said for proper patisserie, but I think there is much to be said for picking a Chelsea bun over a Danish.

Minor edit to add: the non-rhubarb egg custards look like this:


Interesting bubble structure and this doesn't have the sense of fragility that a great egg custard often has. But it is still very, very tasty.

Bakewell bars

Last night I felt the need to bake so I made some bakewell bars. These can be a bit tricky, but the results are bloody lovely. You basically make a sort-of shortbread base, cover it in jam, then make some frangipane and bake it until it's properly cooked. But if you undercook it, or even open the oven door before the frangipane is cooked it will never set properly and you're effectively stuffed. Recipe for those who want it:

Base: 3oz butter, 1oz caster, creamed. Add an egg yolk, a teaspoon of vanilla, and mix well. Then squeeze in 6oz plain flour. Beat it until it forms a dough - it will all go, I can assure you. Do not be tempted to add any liquid. Roll this out to fit a deep 8" square tin that's been lined with baking parchment, then squeeze it in so it goes right up to the edges of the tin (and if you leave dimples in the dough there's more room for pockets of jam). Cover this in jam and put in the fridge. Turn the oven on to GM4.
Frangipane: 3oz butter, melted and left to cool (but not cool solid). Beat in two eggs. Then add 3oz caster, 3oz semolina and 4oz ground almonds, and mix until very well combined. Leave for a couple of minutes and it should start to set a little. Blob this onto the jam layer and join it all up with the back of a spoon if it's not runny enough to join up together by itself. Bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown^*. Leave to cool in the tin and slice into 3x4 bars. You can drizzle almond icing over the top if you like.

* DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN DOOR TO CHECK IF YOU CAN AVOID IT. Really, in my oven it's 45 minutes at a minimum (fan assists might be able to get away with 35) but if you open the door too early and the middle isn't cooked it will collapse and nothing you can do will save it.

Results: delicious, and look like this:


Bloody nom.

Poppyseed cake a la Hugh F-W

This was Huge F-W's Poppyseed lemon cake recipe from Saturday's Grauniad. Let's get one thing completely clear; this cake is, comparatively speaking, a faff and a half to make. It requires no less than three bowls and a jug, where my usual cake recipe requires one bowl and a sieve. But... it's really worth it. So! Creaming butter and sugar, so far so normal. Mixing the flour & poppyseeds seperately, ok... then mixing the egg yolks with yoghurt. Uh, what? Then making meringue base with the whites... ah. Yes, this is a pretty complicated cake.



What made it worse was that the instructions said "add flour to the butter, then egg/yoghurt, then flour, then egg, then flour" and after putting the egg mix on the countertop I promptly knocked the second half of it over, covering the kitchen, me and my camera in glop. I had to guesstimate how much I'd already put in - it certainly wasn't an accurate half - and as any parent will tell you, a small bit of yoghurt can go a long way when it comes to making a mess.

The results, though. Oh, so worth it.



The acidity of the yoghurt with the bicarb and the egg whites both make this an incredibly light cake, with lots of air and a great texture. It could perhaps have done with ten minutes more in the oven at a slightly lower temperature (180C for 40-45mins said the recipe, I had it at 170 for about 50 and it would have worked with 160 for an hour), but it was very good nonetheless. The lemon syrup was fun, too; if you've ever tried to zest a lemon using a vegetable peeler you know it doesn't work (which is why I have a microplane grater) but the recipe wanted strips of peel, so I had to depith the zest. That worked but only because I have insanely sharp knives. The whole thing is really very tasty; the poppyseeds give great texture, the lemon is sharp and sweet, the texture is sublime. As the kids say, this cake is full of win.



So, give it a go! The cake really is worth it but I can't yet vouch for the keeping qualities claimed in the recipe because there's only half of it left.

Macarons, attempt one.

Macarons are perhaps past the peak of their popularity now, but they're still incredibly tasty. A French confection, a bit like our very own macaroons but smaller, more delicate and filled with tasty creams and coloured like flowers, macarons are starting to be found in locations outside London. Quelle horreur!

The usual suspects in London are Ladurée and Pierre Hermés in Selfridges, but I noticed Maison du Chocolat had started knocking them out in little boxes and other places - bakeries and patissieres - experimenting. They are highly flavoured, delicate, soft and crunchy at the same time, very sweet and also often bizzare. The classics are peerless; I have a particular fondness for Ladurée's caramel-filled and their coffee macaron are heaven. You can only eat a couple at a time because they are rich and sweet, but the texture and flavour explosions are sublime.

Finding them in Leeds, of course, is not likely to happen anytime soon so the only way to get them here is to make 'em. If you've ever tried making meringue before you'll know it takes more than just a smile and a quick whizz of the whisk; everything can affect how well they come out, and macarons are worse. A friend's father-in-law is a genuine, honest-to-goodness French patissier and even he steers clear of macarons because they are a faff to make. The sugar you use, the almonds, the humidity of the kitchen, and even the heat distribution of your baking sheets can make a huge difference, and if you over or under-mix by the tiniest amount the difference can be a soggy puddle or a cracked brick.

Sounds like a challenge to me.

Having read the delightful Not So Humble Pie's macaron 101 I decided that simple would be better, and I wouldn't start messing about with colours just yet. Concentrate on getting the macaron right first, get a decent filling and then start making them look pretty. This, obviously, wasn't going to happen on my first attempt. I'd picked up a copy of Hisako Ogita's I Love Macarons and decided to follow the recipe for French macarons, just because I didn't like the idea of making sugar syrup in the microwave just yet.

I'm not detailing the recipe here (not until I have a fully working example!) but basically you go through the following steps:

• Mix ground almonds and icing sugar.
  
• Whisk egg whites.
  
• Add sugar to egg whites and whisk some more.
  
• Add sugar/almonds to egg whites.
  
• Pipe onto baking sheet...
  
• bake!

See? Simple. Except it isn't; I have a fear of overwhisking egg whites, after doing it a few years ago and turning my lovely, stiff peaks back into mush (by hand, too). And there are certain rules that you have to follow to enable the results to be called "macarons". I didn't really get the results I should have, so all I can call them is "almond cookies". Very tasty almond cookies, though.

First of all; they didn't rise the way they should have. I didn't beat the egg whites enough, and they cracked, and coloured too much, so the oven was too hot (despite the oven thermometer) and I didn't leave them to dry out enough. I suspect the mix was too runny, and the foot (la pied) didn't rise anywhere near as much as it should. Indeed, on many it didn't rise at all. My baking sheet wasn't totally flat and I cooked them on parchment, so didn't lift off as easily as they should have. The edges got a little singed, and one batch accidentally caught on fire when the parchment got a bit too close to the oven flame.

But, they tasted fantastic. I made a coffee buttercream filling for half of them, and some lemon curd (well, I needed to use the yolks) for the other half. The coffee ones looked like this:


Seriously tasty.

Hints for next time: after filling, put in the fridge in an airtight box, not on a plate. These things soak up atmospheric water like... well, like meringues. They are very hygroscopic. The filling needs to be stiffer, too. I need new baking sheets (if anybody reading wants to send me review copies of baking sheets, I'll happily give them a try!) and I should try using Teflon instead of parchment. Colouring, and flavouring the macarons themselves should be attempted. And I need to be braver when it comes to beating the egg whites.

So this was attempt number one. I'll be trying this again soon, and will let you know how I get on.

Millionaire Shortbread

This weekend saw me making millionaire shortbread. Generally speaking, shortbread by itself is lovely, lovely stuff. Adding a layer of caramel to it, and then a layer of chocolate could be seen as gilding the lily slightly. But as a delivery mechanism of high-class carbs and fat there are few things finer. But - and this is a big but - it has to be home-made. Shop-bought millionaire shortbread has a too-thin layer of chocolate and caramel, and the shortbread itself is strange stuff. Come to think about it, even the chocolate and caramel is a bit peculiar, but the shortbread is often more like cheesecake base than proper, crisp, shortbread, and is far too crumbly. The chocolate layer is far too thin and to get it that thin it has to be too warm and probably contains oil and a stabliser of some description. The caramel? Invariably it's dulce de leche, or rather an industrial variant thereof. It tastes of sugar and vegetable fat, with none of the creaminess or texture a good caramel should have.

There's a rant about caramel that I've had for a while; boiling a tin of condensed milk does not make a caramel, it makes dulce de leche, a sticky, thick-ish sauce that tastes of, well, condensed milk. A good caramel is soft and slightly chewy and creamy and has a slight overtone of whatever sugar you used to make it, which is why I make caramel with a mix of sugars (recipe below). And if you're making millionaire shortbread you can't use dulce de leche, because it's too runny. I'll admit, in certain circumstances it's ok stuff (sort of, I'm not really a huge fan), but as a sauce or flavouring, not an structually integral part. Anyway, making a caramel is really very easy, which is why my rant gland starts up whenever I see a jar of dulce on the shelves (at some ridiculous price).

(Technically, a proper caramel is just boiled sugar which has undergone pyrolysis, but for the sake of this post I'm talking about dairy caramels.)

We've established that good millionaire shortbread is homemade, and one more reason is that you can change the thickness of your layers to how you like them, and adjust portion size accordingly. Also, you know what's gone into it and if you like to experiment adjusting the various ingredients to suit your own tastes is simple, and can make some quite exciting treats. Let's look at the basic recipe.

1. Shortbread. This can be as simple or complex as you like. My base recipe (8" square tin) is 150g butter, 75g caster sugar creamed together, and 175g plain flour and 25g semolina beaten into it to form a soft, quite sticky dough. Line your tin with baking parchment so that it covers the base and sides and squish the dough into it with your fingers so that it forms an even layer, then poke the base with a fork a few times and bake at 160C for 25 minutes, ish, until it is golden brown in colour. But, tweak the recipe to suit your tastes; add lemon zest, or lavender, or cardamom to the butter & sugar. Swap some of the flour for cocoa. Add toasted hazelnuts to the mix, or finely chopped stem ginger.

2. Caramel. Once the shortbread has come out of the oven, make your caramel. Don't mess about with this too much - although experiments are good - as the ratios have to be fairly close to stop it recrystallising. I like my caramel to be chewy, but not so much that it'll pull fillings; it does have to have some structural integrity as the chocolate layer needs supporting, so it'll need to hit the soft-to-firm ball stage. In a small heavy-bottomed saucepan put 225g caster sugar, 25g butter and 140ml (a small pot, IIRC) of double cream. Over a low heat, gently stirring constantly, melt everything together, then once the sugar has dissolved turn the heat up and boil until it reaches 120C. If you don't have a sugar thermometer boil for five minutes, take a teaspoon of the caramel and drop into iced water, then try to form the caramel into a ball using your fingers; if it keeps its shape when you take it out of the water it's done, otherwise put the caramel back on the heat for another two minutes (or longer, if the caramel didn't form into a ball underwater) and try again. If it's done, add a good pinch of salt and stir, then pour onto the shortbread; it should spread itself out evenly. To experiment with this layer, you could add similar flavourings to above, but I wouldn't bother. I would, however, tinker with the sugar; use 50/50 white caster and light soft brown, or dark soft brown, or even demarera. You can over or undercook the caramel to make it more or less chewy, but be careful of this. I'll do a post on caramels as sweets in a couple of weeks.

3. Chocolate. Melt some chocolate - about 100g will cover an 8" tin - with a knob of butter and pour it over the caramel. Do what you like here; add chili, more lemon zest, peppermint oil, or melt some contrasting coloured chocolate and swirl it using a cocktail stick, whatever you like. then leave to cool, and refrigerate until completely set. Then take the whole lot out of the tin on the baking parchment and chop into squares, bars, circles, whatever shapes and sizes you like depending on how much of a diabetic coma you like.

Tadah! There's a lot of words up there, but you can summarise them as "make shortbread, make caramel (don't be tempted by dulce de leche), and melt some chocolate". And the results? Oh, so worth it. And it's really difficult to make a bad millionaire shortbread.