New Kitchen

So, last week my kitchen was re-furbished and I'm now completely Neff-ed up with a shiny new induction hob and a top of the range electrical oven. There is a snag list of course, but it's minor stuff.

And therefore I ended up baking an unprecedented amount of bread. In fact, I utilised the Kitchen Assistent to its full capacity, to the point where I had to push the dough back in the bowl, as it kept trying to escape while the machine was mixing it. I ended up with 3 of my standard loaves + a large round bread and one small round bread. All quite tasty and the first batch to be made with sourdough that had been fed Manitoba flour. My starter Luke certainly liked this flour, he hasn't been this vigorous since I first made him.

I even go to try out the built-in steam function. However, I followed the recommendations in the oven manual and it didn't quite come up to my expectations, so I will need to experiment with this, I think there is plenty of potential.

The next thing to try out was of course macarons. I happened to have two egg whites left over from the pasties, so I used the recipe I used together with Bip last year. Unfortunately I'd left the book in Stockholm, so had no way of verifying the amounts. I don't think the egg whites were quite enough for the dry ingredients, however this gave an interesting result.

I should have used a finer sieve to sift through the ground almonds, but I was worried it would take forever and opted to use a slightly larger one, which meant of course that there were far too many large pieces that came through, thus the knobbly macarons.

I intended to make some of the lovely raspberry butter cream I made for my boozy cupcakes, but as I rummaged around in the freezer for some butter, I found the piping bag with the remainder of the previous batch. What luck!

I also decided to try and make the macarons look a bit fancier, so put some freeze dried raspberries on top, getting completely carried away and forgetting that half of the blobs were supposed to be at the bottom. That's why they are all leaning to one side in the photos.

Having said that - they were very tasty. Using a bit too much of the almond/icing sugar mixture resulted in a distinct marzipan flavour to the macarons, which was a bonus for Lundulph and freshly made, they were wonderfully chewy in the middle.

The oven cooked them ever so nicely at 130 °C for 13 minutes. They did get a slight tinge of brown, I'll try baking at 120 ° next time. With the fan on, that is.

Update 24th July 2016: I tried a baking a nut-free batch at 120 °C. Not a good idea, as it extended the baking time to some 26 minutes.