Fougasse!

Along with family celebration of me aging, I got a whole bunch of lovely presents. Among these were two books I'd had my eye on for a while - Richard Bertinet's Dough and Crust.. A you perhaps remember, I went to his place for two master classes last year. They were for Viennoiserie and Patisserie, but since I started making the kneadless bread last year, I've become a bit obsessed with bread.

So today I opened up the first book, Dough, and made one and a half batch of the basic recipe for white bread. The first recipe is for fougasse, something I first experienced in 2001, when I went to Montpellier to learn French. That was my last attempt of many to learn that language and I doubt I'll succeed, but the fougasse stayed with me. There was a bakery called Paul and they had something very misshapen and with olives in it. I loved it and had done some search on the internet, but all there seemed to be is focaccia.

Ingredients
7 g quick yeast
750 g white strong flour
20 g salt
525 g water

As Richard mentions, fougasse is from the same family of breads, but the way he does it, it is just beautiful to look at, not remotely close to what I bought in that bakery. So you can imagine my joy when the first thing I spot in my new book is Fougasse.

Now, I'm familiar with the method of working the dough, I've done it a few times on the brioches, but today I really didn't feel like slapping dough for 20 minutes, so I followed the instructions for the mixer, which worked ever so nicely.

I did end up over-resting the dough, as I made the saffron sponge cake in between. And I also had to take a break and watch the DVD that came with the book, just to make sure I did things correctly. The whole was surprisingly easy, I almost felt a bit cheated on that there was no shaping etc needed.

The only thing I didn't do (although I started on it) was to use a baking stone/thick tray upside down. I've yet to get hold of a baking stone, so I put in a baking tray, but once the fougasses were ready, I didn't have the confidence to slide them onto the trays, but used my thin baking sheets and put them in. Two things really - first of all, doing it with a swing would most likely have resulted in my beautifyl breads being quickly speeded onto the flame that comes out at the back, thus requiring a brand new oven most likely. Second, they would lose their beautiful leaf shape.



Sadly I was a bit stingy with flouring the baking sheets, so a couple of the breads had to be cut off when they were done.

What I also had confirmed is that my oven is unacceptably leaky. I generously sprayed with water just before and just after I put in each lot of fougasses and yet, I ended up with a sort of dull and very soft crust.



So definitely fine tuning required - put a pan with water in at the bottom and keep it there for the duration of the baking. Also move on to olive oil dough, I think that'll work rather nicely or put stuff in before the dough is left to rest - olives, sundried tomatoes, etc.

But I was unable to resist and had one for lunch and Lundulph and I had one each with our salad for dinner and we dipped in the oil from the pickled roasted chillies I made recently.



One word - YUMMY!

Cake-off

Once again a colleague had put forward the -off. This time sponge cake. Despite it's simplicity, it's well hard to think up a good one to do, there are so many variations!



When I mentioned it to my Mum, she suggested I try with saffron. This kind of appealed and I set about baking. The recipe is a very old one and for muffins actually, given to me by my good friend Doctor Cutie. She's always been a very good baker, so I have quite a few of her recipes.

Ingredients

75 g unstalted butter
1 dl milk or water
1 pinch saffron
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 dl caster sugar
2 eggs
3 dl plain flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
dissicated coconut for lining the tin
star anise for decoration

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven at 190 degrees C (gas mark 5).Melt the butter on low heat and set aside. Add the milk and stir in.


2. Put 0.5 dl of the sugar along with the saffron in a pestle and mortar and grind it as finely as possible. Then add to the milk and butter mixture and stir in. Add the vanilla extract as well.


3. Whisk the eggs and 1.5 dl of the sugar white and fluffy.


4. Mix the flour with the baking powder.


5. Pour the milk mixture slowly into the egg mixture, still whisking it in thoroughly.


6. Bit by bit, add the flour mixture.


7. Butter a cake tin of 20 cm diameter and line with dissicated coconut.


8. Pour the cake batter into the tin, carefully place the star anise on top, turn down the oven to 180 degrees C (gas mark 4) and put it in the middle of the oven.


9. Bake for about 30 minutes, check with a skewer for readiness.

As you can see my cake went a bit volcano and the reason for this is that I baked it a bit too hot - 195 degrees C, which causes the cake surface to set before the middle has heated up sufficiently and once it does, it expands and the only way to go is up in the middle of the cake, thus a volcano.

Due to various reasons I was not able to submit my cake into the competition, but will just bring it in to work anyway. It smells very nice, I suspect the star anise might have released some flavour as well.

Second Birthday Celebrations

Well, it's that time of the year again, when I officially go older overnight. Lundulph had made up plans for the day in question, sothe family celebrations took place a bit later.

This was the perfect opportunity to repeat the Stoichkov cake with an alternative filling and see if it would collapse again or not.

Well, it worked quite a treat!

I squashed the chocolate roll slices quite a bit and used the edge offcuts to fill in most of the gaps between. This resulted in running out of Swiss roll and not having any left for the bottom of the cake. So 4 Swiss rolls next time.



This time for the cream filling, I soaked 8 pieces of gelatine. The packet had 12 and was to set 1.7 l liquid. I soaked the gelatine in cool water. I used 500 ml ready fresh custard from Sainsbury's, which I heated up, while the gelatine was soaking. Then I squeezed out the water and dropped the gelatine in the custard. Note, that the custard never started steaming, so on low heat, just to heat it through. I also added 3 tbsp caster sugar, which dissolved nicely as well.

As expected, it went runny when the gelatine melted and I set it to the side. I then whipped 300 ml double cream together with 2 tbsp icing sugar. To stiff peaks, no less.

At this point the custard had cooled down sufficiently and I stirred in the cream with a spoon very gently until it was well mixed through. The cream was still fairly runny, but it was a good thing I started filling the cake, because towards the end, it had started to set. I managed to get in one layer of really large blueberries, then one layer of bananas and finally another layer of blueberries. Each with cream on either side and there wasn't much left in the pot to lick.

Then on with clingfilm and in the fridge to set overnight. When I poked it in the morning, it seemed pretty solid.

I was intending to use the remaining four pieces of gelatine for the glazing, but was too scared to take the cake out early and risk it collapsing. Now that I know that it'll hold, I'll do the glaze next time.



In fact it was ever so nice, although some cream seeped through a couple of holes I thought were too small. So even more squeezing of the Swiss roll next time as well.

Once we'd cut the cake up, it was sufficiently stiff to stay in shape, and most people had seconds, so overall a success!

Oeufs en Cocotte

Once again Angi of Rice and Wheat has been my inspiration when she made oeufs en cocotte. I've seen this before, but never really given it much thought and it sounded very easy to make.

Besides, a couple of weeks ago, I boiled a couple of eggs for breakfast, but sadly overdid them and we couldn't dip in the runny yolk. This method seemed a bit more easy to control.



So I buttered the ramekins, cracked an egg in each, poured a little bit of milk, sprinkled salt, pepper, paprika, sage and thyme and put in a few small pieces of reindeer salami that I bought during a recent visit to IKEA. And into the oven for 10 minutes. Well, at that point, there was a lot of still transparent egg white, so I left them in for another 10 minutes. Now they seemed to be ready and Lundulph and I sat down with our buttered bread sliced into strips - soldiers he calls them.

And still the eggs were way too runny. Another 8 minutes and the whites were at a good stage, but the yolks had gone a bit hard.

So I thought I'd look up what Delia had to say about it. She'd decorated with asparagus tips, so that's a thing to try. But mainly she recommends a bain marie in the oven for these, this will give a quicker heat transfer, but hopefully also ensure that the yolk remains runny.

Overall, it was very tasty and a definite repeat.

Belated Easter presents

After my escapades in Art You Can Eat last year, I decided to try my hand at these cuties. The concept of modelling chocolate was very novel as well, I have no confidence in working with chocolate, what with failing miserably with both the chocolate eclairs and the baumkuchen.

So this Easter I thought I'd do them for Lou and Falbala. In fact, Falbala specifically asked about it, just to be on the safe side, in case I'd forgotten.

As with New Year, Easter celebrations with the family were not to be and I haven't seen either of them since well before Easter. Which worked out rather well, I'd no time to make the bunnies then.

Now, Kinder eggs are easy to get hold of. But for the modelling chocolate, the recipe called for cocoa butter. I'm aware of it's magical powers, but finding some turned out tricky and the best I could find on the topic of substitutes was groundnut oil, though the article was talking about molecules etc, not how it behaves in cooking.

But a stroke of luck, waiting a few weeks and searching slightly differently cropped up this online chocolatier supplier - Squires Kitchen. So I quickly ordered 100 g of the precious material. It was pricey for sure.

Then I read the recipe - there was no need for the cocoa butter at all! Well, perhaps there is, depending on the type of chocolate, I remember from the patisserie class, though that was mostly on the percentage of cocoa. Never mind.

I did a search for modelling chocolate and most recipes were about chocolate and corn syrup, again something that I've not been able to find in the UK. But the recipe for the bunnies listed glucose and sugar and I also found another one, which had slightly different proportions and only used glucose. I opted for the bunny one, but I halved the amounts. The recipe didn't specify the type of sugar, so I went for caster sugar.

Melted the chocolate in a bain marie, then heated up water, glucose and sugar until the sugar had dissolved, then poured it into the chocolate and stirred. The mixture didn't go as solid as some of the instructions implied, but it did go a bit harder and developed the look and feel of soft toffee. I left it to cool, then put in the fridge. That was yesterday.

Today I took it out and it was pretty solid. Leaving it on the side while we had dinner didn't change that much, but as suggested, kneading softened it up quite nicely, to the point of melting it again, so hot tip is to only do this in a cold kitchen and on a cold surface if available and only use finger tips.

I weighed up pieces of 10 g for each foot, ear and tail. Once I'd shaped each foot and the tail, I put them together in a triangle on top of a wafer, then pushed the Kinder egg in place. With a tooth pick, I carefully shaped the toes, then put the bunnies in the fridge for a bit, while shaping the ears.

Then the ears went in the fridge as well and I put some water in a shallow pan and put a small ramekin in it with a few squares of white chocolate. While it melted, I made a small cone from baking paper and spooned in the melted chocolate. Then quickly drew eyes and teeth - the stuff is well runny when it's melted and even the cold Kinder egg didn't make it go solid. I was so worried that things would just go runny, but luckily they didn't. Into the fridge again, while preparing the same arrangement for dark chocolate, with which I drew the pupils of the eyes.

I made a couple of attempts at gluing the ears with the dark chocolate, but it just was too runny and didn't work at all. I had to wipe it off, then soften the bottom edge of each ear and push gently into the egg.


Hi, hi, blind and bald.

Finally I made four small balls from the modelling chocolate and put over the teeth as well. The bunnies are now in the fridge until Saturday, when I'll give them to Lou and Falbala. I hope they like them. Which is why I won't publish this post until then. I think next time, I'll make smaller and thinner ears and pre-paint the bunny faces.

Update March 2013:
It seems the website where I found the original recipe for modelling chocolate is no more, so here it is for milk chocolate
200 g milk chocolate
2.5 tbsp corn syrup

Break up the chocolate into pieces if necessary and melt either over a bain marie or in the microwave until completely melted.
Take care not to burn the chocolate if melting in the microwave - do it in 10 s steps on maximum power, stirring between each run.
When all the chocolate is melted, add the corn syrup and quickly stir together. It will seize up and look a bit grainy almost immediately. Keep going until the syrup is completely mixed in.
Place in a plastic food/freezer bag, squeeze out as much of the air as possible and tie it tightly, then let rest in the fridge for at least 2 h.
When ready to use it, take out from the fridge, and carefully work it until it becomes pliable and feels like plasticine. If very solid, cut up into smaller pieces first. Also take care to work it using only your fingers, so it doesn't melt and separate.

Going Bananas

Last Monday was the Early Spring Bank Holiday. This is to cover for the 1st May celebrations in other countries. Lundulph and I had a lot of DIY on the agenda, but decided to also have our first barbecue of the year.

I bought suitable vegetables - courgettes, bell peppers, aubergines and green chillies. And for Lundulph bamboo skewers with tiger prawns and a packet of scallops - he's been asking for these for ages. For myself, I don't eat seafood voluntarily, so I took out a packet of Frankfurters from the freezer - part of my emergency food collection. As I was wandering around the shop, I got the idea of putting bananas on the barbie as well, so I bought 4 - two to be done in their skin and two to be done in tin foil.

The peppers, aubergines and chillies were of course to be roasted to make kyopoolu and pickled roasted chillies.

I also bought a big packet of very nice looking button mushrooms and wild rocket, both of which I managed to forget in the fridge.

We originally planned to do the barbie on the Sunday, but due to various planning issues, this didn't happen. But Monday came and seemed decent enough despite being a bit overcast. Lundulph dug out our old rusty barbecue from under the jungle that now thrives where we plan to have our patio. Cleaned it up nicely and fired it up, while I prepared the food. I skewered the scallops on as well and cut the courgettes in fairly thin long slices.



The advantage with our tiny barbecue is that it's perfect for the two of us and Lundulph has now mastered the art of building it up properly and getting it to light up as it should.


Our Mr Blackbird came very close to inspect what we were up to, but he didn't like the piece of scallop that Lundulph gave him.

Needless to say, we had a very nice barbecue and also got the kyopoolu ingredients done and got to use Lundulph's barbecue wok for the chillies. It was a bit chilly and the wind started picking up, but we quite enjoyed ourselves, even opening up a bottle of bubbly.



As the final thing, I put on the four bananas - two in their skin and two peeled and wrapped in individual packets of foil. The skin bananas went black and I turned them to get the blackness on all sides. Didn't touch the foiled ones though. Once the skins were black through and through, I decided they were ready and Lundulph and I had one each. They were hot and gooey inside and I thought that it would be nice with a bit of sugar of some sort, they weren't that sweet. We ended up pouring maple syrup on them and that just worked perfectly.



We then moved on to the bananas in the foil. Because I hadn't turned the, they'd caramelised on the bottom and not in a bad way at all, on the contrary - it was just enough to give a bit extra sweetness and flavour and a bit of crispiness. These definitely won on account of taste and worked very nicely with the maple syrup as well. In fact Lundulph came up with a number of suggestions to try out next time - coat the banana with sugar or honey before wrapping in the foil, to give even more caramelisation. Or cutting along the length and putting bits of chocolate inside.

Looks-wise, the bananas in their skins were better. I'm sure this idea is not in any way unique, but I've never thought of barbecuing bananas before and I've never come across this concept before.



All in all, it made the perfect barbecue dessert. Next time must also try with ice cream...

Raggmunk

A few days ago, this word cropped up in my mind. Raggmunk. I've no idea what set it off, but there it was floating around and I had to look it up to work out what it was. Shortly after, I put it straight on my list of things to cook this year.



Raggmunk translates to "shaggy monk". Though mind you, the word "munk" is also used for "doughnut", but given the difference between a raggmunk and a doughnut, I root for the first meaning - monk.

Now this is Winter comfort food and one of the recipes specifically stated not to use new potatoes, but you can't always get what you want.

I chose this recipe (in Swedish), only because it required 2 eggs, most others called only for one and I still have some left over from Easter.

Ingredients

about 600 g potatoes
2 large eggs
2 dl plain flour
5 dl semi-skimmed milk
salt and pepper
butter or ground nut oil for frying
400 g unsmoked cured gammon or bacon
lingonberries stirred with sugar

Method

1. Peel and finely grate the potatoes. Then squeeze out all excess liquid to end up with about 200 g


2. Whisk together eggs, flour and milk to a fairly thin batter and season to taste.


3. Add the potatoes and stir in well, so there are no lumps in the batter.



4. Fry the gammon on medium high heat and put in the oven on the slow cook setting to keep warm.


5. Put some butter or oil in the same pan and allow to heat up well. Then using a ladle, spoon into the pan, spread a bit and fry until golden brown, turning half way through.
   


6. Serve with the gammon and the lingonberries

Now, lingonberries are not available in England, as far as I know and certainly not at this time of the year. So we made do with the excellent lingonberry jam that my Mum has given me. I also forgot to season the batter, but adding it on afterwards worked OK too. I also had some sprouting broccoli left, which I steamed.

Overall, I think more potatoes in the batter next time, they were barely noticeable and the raggmunkar (that's the plural) tasted very much like regular pancakes.

I got 9 pieces out of the above amount of batter and please note the fat is essential. I had very little butter left and used it sparingly on the first three raggmunkar, which I struggled to scrape off of the pan. When the butter ran out, I moved onto ground nut oil and was a bit more generous with it, which made all the difference in the world and the remaining raggmunkar turned out very nicely indeed.

An idea is to repeat this when there are fresh cranberries in the shops, they are fairly close to the lingonberries, so would perhaps be a good substitute. Another thing that might be nice is some sort of onion chutney or jam, that would work well too.

Fishy!

We went to our local farm shop the other day and besides getting a bunch of the first asparagus of the year, we wandered in to the little annex where a big man in a white coat sells fresh fish.

This is a new thing Lundulph keeps talking about - eating fish a few times a week. As a non-fish-eater, I find this difficult to swallow, literally, but I'm learing and developing my palette. So we bought two large mackerels. I do eat smoked mackerel with garlic, so thought I'd be able to eat this too.

We got them cleaned out and ready to cook too, which was both good as it saved a lot of time in preparations, but also bad, because it gives me a bit of a nostalgic trip back to my school days when we dissected various animals.

Anyway, I had a fairly clear idea about what I wanted to do, but ran it through with my Mum, who loves fish and seafood. She recommended barbecue as the best method for mackerel and not to bother with anything but salt and pepper. Now despite the apparent heatwave we're having in the UK, we weren't in any way ready for a barbecue, so I decided to go with my original plan and bake in the oven. I quickly checked on Delia Smith's web site to find out temperature and duration of the baking, well, she pretty much had what I had in mind but I want to point out I thought of it on my own accord.

Since there were two mackerels to play with, I decided to try my Mum's recommendation on one of them and my idea on the other.

I washed the mackerels and dried them with kitchen tissue. Then I placed them onto the grid of the grill pan and pre-heated the grill on medium. Then I opened up both of the mackerels and sprinkled salt and pepper onto both. I drizzled olive oil on the smaller one, then closed it and cut slashes through the skin on both sides like in Delia's photo.

For the second and slightly larger mackerel, I also sprinkled crushed dried chili, put in 6-7 peeled cloves of garlic inside along with a few sprigs of thyme, before drizzling olive oil again and cutting slashesh through the skin. It was tricky to get the garlics to stay in, they kept popping out.

Then into the oven for about 20 minutes, where the fish pretty much opened up and went whitish.

As an accompaniment, I boiled potatoes, but I only had roasting floury ones, so decided to crush them. At the last minute I got the idea to mix some mustard in for a bit of oomph, sadly once again I turned my back at the pan and it boiled dry and added a nasty tinge of burnt to the tatties. Lundulph didn't like them at all, he's not too keen on mustard and combined with the burned flavour, he just refused to eat it. I thought it was sort of OK, would have been better with just the mustard of course. A least I didn't have to scrape the pot too much, it was black, but not too bad.

Finally I steamed the asparagus for precisely 5 minutes and it turned out beautiful, I've got the hang of asparagus cooking these days, the special pot was well worth it. This asparagus was grown only a couple of miles from where we live and it tasted a bit sweeter than the stuff we get in the supermarket. It was a bit bland though, but I guess it depends on the variety. In a few weeks time, the farm will start their Pick-your-own activity and I'll get to pick asparagus myself.

So overall, it was an OK-ish meal (or would have been, if I hadn't messed up the potatoes). The fish wasn't too fishy and the texture was mostly good, but it was a bit on the slimey side. When Lundulph had it later on and re-heated in the microwave oven, he said the texture improved. I didn't have any of the leftovers at all. One thing is that I should have taken some time to remove as much of the bones as possible. One thing about mackerel is that it's quite full of bones, so getting a large specimen means the bones are a bit bigger and once cooked, they come out fairly easily. But we were hungry that day, so everything was a bit rushed.



Still Lundulph thinks it's encouraging and wants to continue experimenting. The photo looks better than it tasted. Next time I'll tie them, so they don't open up during baking.

A Special Dessert

One of the blogs I read regularly is Rice and Wheat and just over a month ago, Angi had written an entry about a Baumkuchen or a tree cake. Her photos were so beautiful and the whole method of making was so different from what I've come across so far, it went straight to my list of things to cook in 2009.



Her lovely version can be found here.

And the Easter week-end was this opportunity. Angi also kindly allowed me to publish her recipe, albeit in metric.

Ingredients

2.5 dl flour, sifted
2.5 dl cornstarch, sifted
1 ml salt
0.75 dl ground almonds
227 g unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and softened at room temperature
1.77 dl sugar
8 eggs, separated
2 tbsp dark rum
zest of 1 lemon
1.18 dl apricot jam

Chocolate Icing

114 g unsalted butter
170 g dark chocolate
3 tbsp light maple syrup
3 tbsp dark rum

I don't have a broiler in my oven, but I've guessed that this corresponds to the English grill - so I pre-heated it on medium-high. I only have an 8" cake tin and a 12" one, so I opted for the smaller one and I greased it with butter. I think this is one cake where a springform really makes sense, by the way.

I also have not been able to find corn flour and from what I remember from my readings it's quite popular in making confectionery since it prevents other sugars from crystallising. I made the choice of swapping this for maple syrup, without any scientific basis.

I followed Angi's instructions on the batter, but I think I should have sifted the flours first and then measured them, as my batter was a lot thicker than I expected. That's a problem when you measure by volume - sifting incorporates air into it and the same volume will weigh a lot less and thus result in a thinner, runnier batter. The whole mixing took me just under an hour and a half, so in hindsight, I should have started pre-heating the grill in the last 20 minutes or so.

Even after folding in the egg whites, it was fairly stiff, so when I tried to brush the first layer of the cake, most of it stayed on the brush.



So from layer two onwards, I used a ladle and a dough scraper. Half-way through the layers, I began to worry that dropping half an inch in cake tin size relative to Angi's recipe would result in leftover cake mix. But somehow it all went in, just about. Here is the last layer, nr 12.



I did get hold of some wonderful apricot jam. I only bought it because it seemed to be the smoothest one on the shelf, the other brands seemed to go for chunky style. And I was surprised that there were quite few options on apricot jam, I've always thought it's a staple alongside of strawberry and raspberry jams. What also seemed good about this one that it claimed to be made with no added sugar, but with some sort of concentrated fruit juice. I don't know, but it was very tasty. It's called St Dalfour Fruit Spread Thick Apricot.

It melted nicely, at which point I worried that it wouldn't stay on the cake, but I let it cool a bit and it just about stayed on.



Obviously the layers should have been a lot thinner, but these 12 layers took also an hour and a half in total.

And now comes the difficult part - the icing. I've never had any success with mixing chocolate and butter - it keeps separating. Admittedly this time wasn't as disastrous as the icing for the eclair challenge from The Daring Bakers. I spread it over the cake despite everything. The sides were particularly difficult. And I put the candied violet flowers on top. They started soaking up some of the fat, so I put the whole cake in the fridge overnight. The next day, the whole looked well set and dull with small areas of yellowy fat. I tried scraping them off, which didn't really work. But luckily, with the given amount of icing, I'd only used half the amount and was able to remove most of the fat from the leftover icing, stirred it round a bit and put a second layer on the cake, after removing the violets. This worked better, so my new chocolate - butter theory is that if there's too much butter, it'll separate out, i e there's so much fat chocolate will take. To be on the safe side, I don't intend to try experimenting further, chocolate is too precious for that.

I served the cake as dessert and it was impressive.



Though Lundulph's first reaction was to comment that it needs cream. And he's right - the cake was very dry indeed, so some sort of moisturising exercise is definitely in order. And as I said before - sift before measure for a runnier cake mix and thinner layers. Angi said she finds the brushing on of the layers relaxing and I suspect it is, once you've got the hang of it.

Many thanks Angi for this interesting recipe.

Kneadless Bread Experiment

The much loved bread machine is gathering dust in the far corner of the cupboard, I can't remember the last time I took it out, I've been making the fabulous kneadless bread every week, ever since my second attempt, when I sussed it.

And the last few times, I've become confident enough to start experimenting. Generally I quite like seeds in bread, so I've been doing that, but last week I swapped 1 dl of the flour for rye flour. I added half a teaspoon of vitamin C powder. This is something recommended in the recipe collection for the bread machine and the reason for this is because rye doesn't develop gluten and so doesn't rise and the vitamin C is supposed to help as a rising agent. It turned out very nice, though I couldn't tell much difference to the non-rye breads.

Today I made fairly drastic changes - not only did I swap 1 dl of the wheat flour for wholemeal, I used fresh yeast - about 20 g, which looked like 2 tsp. At least according the sachets of quick yeast, they weigh 7 g and correspond to 15 g fresh yeast. True 1 tsp of quick yeast is about half a packet, so my calculations were well off. But the yeast was a bit old and dry at the edges, so I didn't think there would be too much life in it.
Well there was...



This was after less than 3 h. I let some of the gas out that was pushing the cast iron lid up, but an hour later, I was forced to move the whole goo to the big salad bowl and keep it there. That did the trick.

But after I set it to rise, I decided that there's no way it would fit back into the usual casserole I bake it in, so I went for my deep ovenproof frying pan. This doesn't have a lid, so my next improvisation was from my Focaccia escapade the other week (which I didn't follow at the time). Place a small dish at the bottom of the oven and let it heat up at the same time as the main bread dish. Then immediately after putting the bread in, pour a cup of cold water into this heated up dish, thus creating a lot of steam, which is crucial for a good crunchy crust.

Well, the bread baked, it's bigger, but flatter. It did make the right crackling noises when it started to cool.

We'll try it tomorrow for breakfast. I think it worked.

One thing that has started happening is that despite being ridiculously generous with flour and polenta on the towels where I put the dough to rise etc, it still manages to seep through and sticks to the towel and makes things quite messy. Maybe I need to reduce the liquid a bit. Today, after I mixed the standard recipe, it looked almost as dry as my very first attempt, so I added a further half a decilitre of water, it's tricky.

Lundulph came over to inspect the situation too and called it porridge bread. It really did look like porridge.

Good Friday

Today is Good Friday and it's been raining almost non-stop since early morning. Due to an administrative error we got up as early as for work and got to see a beautiful sunrise. After that, the dark clouds moved in and are still here.

As has become a bit of a tradition, Lundulph's family come over on Easter Sunday and we do all sorts of Easter activities then. Unfortunately my nieces Lou and Falbala won't be able to make it this year and I was going to skip the egg painting. But then again...



These are the candidates. Some will be used on Sunday as a starter, the others will be given a make-over they'll never forget.

First of all, I made small holes at the bottom end of each. I have a special drill that came with an egg blowing kit I bought from a hobby shop, but any darning needle will do. The idea is to prevent the eggs from cracking when they are boiled. I'm not sure if it makes any difference, but I thought I'd do it just in case.

Then I lined my pressure cooker pot with a tea towel and placed the eggs in it. Topped up with lukewarm water and put on the hob on fairly low heat, so that they would heat up slowly - also to prevent cracking. I left them to simmer for some 30 minutes - hard boiled definitely. Then allowed them to cool in the pot, as I was already working on my next project. A way to speed up the cooling is to put pot, eggs and water under the cold water tap and let it run and thus cool the eggs fairly quickly, but it's wasteful on water, so I only do that in emergencies. Only one out of 18 had cracked! Result! And the stamps disappear during the boiling too.



Once cool, I set aside 7 for Sunday and prepared the paints. These are small packets with 4 colours each that my Mum gave me years ago. She'd bought them in Bulgaria, where everyone pains eggs for Easter. They are powdered food colourings, so quite safe to use. The instructions were to dissolve each colour in 100 ml warm water, add two tablespoons vinegar and start painting. Well, dying more like it really. Lundulph joined in to help on this one. The vinegar in the paint made the eggs produce bubbles, so we didn't keep the eggs in for too long, but the colours came out OK, given the brown shells. It's these brown shells that are my main annoyance around Easter. It's not possible to get hold of white shelled eggs. There are of course Bantam eggs, but they are tiny. There are also some blue shelled ones from the Old Cotsworld Legbar, but they don't give good enough colours either. I complain about this every year and Lundulph explains that when he was young, there were only white eggs and then someone introduced brown ones and for some reason people started believing that these are better and healthier etc. Of course there's no difference between white and brown eggs, apart from the shell colour. Bah! And unfortunately we don't have the facilities to get hold of a couple of hens that do lay white eggs, I'd do it otherwise. So the colours are a bit dodgy.



Of course any food colourings will do the job. In previous years, I've used the standard ones they sell in the baking section of the supermarket, dilute in a little water and add a couple of tablespoons of vinegar. But as you can see in the photo above, the colour of the liquid needs to be a lot "stronger", remember the egg will soak up some of the paint, so if it's too weak, there won't be much to soak up.
I also have friends that use textile paints, these give fantastic colors, but are not edible and since the shell of an egg is porous, I don't think they should be eaten. I've polished the eggs with a bit of cooking oil, it makes quite a difference - dab a bit of oil on one piece of tissue and use that to transfer onto the egg. Then use another clean tissue to rub it off.



These cute chicks and bunnies are the latest collaboration between my Gran and my Mum. They've produced hundreds of them over the past weeks and they are basically tiny egg cosies. We got 6 in a small package a few days ago and I suspect they've sent sets to all their friends.

Moroccan-spiced pork with bean mash

This is the second in the Ye Olde Recipe Collection series, again Lundulph's choice.

The recipe can be found here.

I had originally intended to make it for our fancy Sunday dinner, but what with baking, computer games and various end of the week activities, it got too late by the time I was ready to start cooking and so we postponed to tonight.

I'd prepared the spice mixture on Saturday. The recipe calls for "Ras el hanout" - a spice mixture that can be done at home and since I already had all the ingredients I made my own blend:

1 tsp each of
ground coriander
ground cardamom seeds
ground allspice - had to grind these myself
grated nutmeg - too big to fit into the grinder
ground dried chillies - extremely hot crushed chillies bought at our local farm shop, put through the coffee grinder
ground cloves

I put everything in a jar, closed the lid and shook well.

I used two whole pork fillets adding up to just over 1 kg. There was very little need to trim too, I just rinsed them and patted dry before rubbing in salt and all of the above spice mixture.

For the browning, I did that on quite high temperature and also allowed the fat go smokey hot. Now putting the fillets with all the strong spices resulted in the whole kitchen going smoggy and set off the fire alarm, so I had to open the door out into the garden and stand with a tea towel and flap around for a bit to calm it down. This browned the fillets a bit too much on one side, I was careful with the rest of them.

Inhaling the spice mixture was dangerous before it went in the pan, but it was equally bad afterwards. Not sure how that can be worked around.

When they were ready, I turned them to have the brownest side up and put in the oven and baked for 30 minutes. I stuck my meat thermometer in the thickest part and let it reach 75 degrees.

I also didn't bother with getting cannellini beans, I had some black eye beans that I used instead and skipped the celery stalk altogether. I've said it before and I'll say it again - celery, just say no! I replaced it by doubling the amount of onions.

When the bean and onion mixture was ready, I had a bit of a predicament in that I don't have a potato masher, so I tried my best with the wooden spoon. It was tiresome and I stopped fairly quickly. But who needs a potato masher when you have a potato press? Though the beans and onions wouldn't have gone through that, not without some brute force.

As greens, I steamed asparagus again. A couple of the stalks had started to go off and ended up yellowish, but overall, I did it again - successfully steaming them to the point where they are done, but at the same time are still bright green.

Overall, I'm very proud of the result.



And assuming the spice mixture is ready, this is a very quick meal, perfect for a work day evening, yet nicely festive at the same time.

Definitely a keeper this one.

Easter Preparations

Yesterday it was time to make kozunak once more in preparation of Easter next week. I used my Mum's old trusty recipe, but with a couple of modifications, now that I've been to baking masterclass and also have read up on what the different ingredients do.

First of all, I used fresh yeast - 30 g.

Second, I held off the butter completely until after the dough had formed gluten.

Third, I also added half a deciliter of sugar for the poolish, in addition to the listed 2 dl sugar.

And fourth, I only used 900 g of strong flour.

I left the Kitchen Assistent to knead for about 10 minutes at which point the gluten seemed to have developed almost completely.

So I poured in the melted butter and grape seed oil mixture. Of course, the dough wouldn't just soak the fat up and the machine ended up just spinning. So I had to incorporate the fat by hand. That took another 10 minutes, but worked a treat and I didn't get too tired either.

The kitchen was a bit cool and so I left the dough to rise for 2.5 h. Actually I was playing a new computer game and forgot the time. Ahem.

The dough was ever so nice and soft and I divided it into two equal parts. From one half I made two plaits that I took in to work today. This turned out to be very popular indeed.

The other half I made a braid with five strands, which I've never done before so wanted to try out. There are plenty of videos on how to do that on youtube.



I barely managed to keep Lundulph away from it. It's now in the freezer to keep fresh for Easter Sunday when the rest of the family will come to visit.

A few further things that still require adjustment - try to reduce the mount of flour further and use more yeast, 50 g next time and also try adding the fat slowly, to see if the machine can incorporate it, rather than have to do it manually. Though of course if you're angry, kneading is a very good way to get rid of aggressions.

Baking Mojo

I'm happy to say that the baking mojo seems to have returned.



I had 4 egg yolks left over from the other day when I made the Coffee Masala Cake and the only thing I could think of making was pasta.

I was going to stay well clear of the Cordon Bleu book after last time. I briefly searched on the Internet and right on top was Jamie Oliver's web site. I don't like him much, but skimmed through the article. It said either eggs or egg yolks. So far so good.

The packet of pasta flour (durum wheat flour that is) said whole eggs and less flour per egg.

So I improvised a bit.

Ingredients

4 large egg yolks
160 g pasta flour
approximately 1 dl water

Method

1. Mix the eggs yolks and the flour with your fingers into a crumbly dough.


2. Add water, a little at a time, and keep mixing until the dough comes together and is smooth, fairly pliable and a bit sticky


3. Sprinkle flour on the work surface and knead the dough for 5 - 6 minutes. If the dough keeps sticking, add pinches of flour until it stops sticking.


4. Cover in cling film and leave to rest for at least 15 minutes.

Divide into 8 pieces. Keeping them in the cling film, take out one at a time and roll as thin as possible on a floured surface, making sure it doesn't stick.

5. Leave to stand for 10 minutes, then cut to a desired shape and allow to dry a few more minutes.


6. Store in an air tight box in the fridge or freeze if the pasta won't be used within 24 h.

I made the pasta on Sunday and kept in the fridge overnight. We had it for dinner today and I over-cooked it a bit, while I was fiddling with our usual mixture of tuna, sweet corn, peas, olive oil and crushed chillies.

Not only did it smell like pasta when it was done, it tasted like pasta too, though a bit on the soggy side. I could easily have left it a bit thicker and cut into thinner strips or smaller pieces. I cut tagliatelle of about 1 cm width and various lengths.



Both the flour packet and the article on Jamie Oliver's web site said to divide into small pieces before rolling, particularly when doing so by hand. Divide and conquer is definitely the way to do it. I didn't even think of trying to roll the whole lot in one go. This is definitely a thing I'd repeat and will then add spinach or tomato puree. I'll also cut into smaller pieces, it'll be easier to handle after it's cooked.

Aromatic Asian Steak

With sweet and sour cucumber salad.



As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have a large number of recipes that I haven't tried.

I decided to start getting through all the recipe cards I tend to pick up every time I go to Waitrose. I laid my collection on the worktop and asked Lundulph to choose. He picked out two, the first of which is the title of this post.

I wandered down to the butcher on Saturday morning and got a nice piece of sirloin steak. It was just over 1 kg - given the amount of fat on it, I thought this would result in a doubling of the recipe.

To be on the safe side, I trebled the marinade. I had to swap out the lime juice for lemon juice, I had all other ingredients.

I took off most of the fat from the steak and put it out for the foxes. Then I sliced it into three 2 cm thick steaks. I'm not sure how it was supposed to be cut, it wasn't too clear from the photo on the Waitrose web site. I put the pieces to marinate in the morning on Sunday, so they had some 8 h to marinade.

Unfortunately, I made the salad shortly after I'd put the meat to marinade. That was sort of implied in the instructions, but since radishes were involved, they leached red colour everywhere, which is why the salad looks so manky.

I browned the steaks briefly on hot, turning several times every 30 - 40 s or so, then put in the oven along with all the marinade for 11 minutes. The marinade formed a thick sauce that mostly covered the steaks.

I boiled white basmati rice to go with it and we had a nice Georges Duboeuf Fleury from 2006, which, as Lundlulph put it, had passed it's Ribena stage and tasted like proper wine.

Overall, I think I put in too much honey, because the steak was a bit on the sweet side for me. But the whole reminded me of Mrs W's Lamb Kebabs, which I tried out last Summer.

We ate one of the steaks yesterday. One is in the fridge for Wednesday and one is in the freezer for later on in the year.

Lundulph Nostalgia

Rummaging around the freezer a few days ago, I found a packet of fish fingers. These exist in Sweden as well and were the only type of fish I'd eat while at school. The packet in question was purchased on one of the few times Lundulph would come shopping with me and last Friday seemed like a good time to tuck into it.

I bought some Heritage potatoes from Sainsbury's, they were purple and looked rather exciting. This to make mash and for a bit of colour, I had a packet of peas in the freezer too.



The interesting bit is the mashed potatoes. Despite the heritage ones being floury, i e for roasting, I steamed them along with the couple of waxy Vivaldi ones I had left over from earlier. Pushed all of them through the potato press and realised I didn't have creme fraiche as per Delia's perfect mashed potatoes.

So the way I resolved this was to use butter and home made yogurt.

I had about 1 kg potatoes to which I used 100 g unsalted butter (the only kind I use in my sweet baking escapades these days, thus the only kind in the fridge) and 6 tbsp yogurt, along with salt and ground black pepper. It tasted just as nice as with creme fraiche.

Rather nice and quick dinner, I thought.

Reduced Shopping Efforts

Well, since I had three disappointing shopping sessions at the beginning of the year, I've now moved on to Sainsbury's online services. And although they aren't as refined as Ocado - don't tell you if anything is out of stock, don't send you a reminder SMS - they have been better. The first two times they were running well early and called to ask if they could deliver some 45 minute before the booked slot. The third and fourth times, they've delivered spot on within the booked slot. So from that point I'm very happy with them.

They seem to be having some stock control issues, in that some of the things I've ordered aren't availble - cornflakes or groundnut oil - cupboard stuff that they shouldn't struggle to hold. Also milk has been a bit of a hit and miss. However as is my habit, I generally tend to re-stock my larder/fridge/freezer well in advance, this hasn't been an issue. Lundulph has commented that Sainsbury's are notorious for lacking stock control also in their shops. I think I agree.

So for now, I'll keep using them, but I do need to refine my routine.

Overall, I am biased towards Sainsbury's though, from all the supermarkets I've tried, they are the ones that have pretty much all of the things I use. Waitrose generally oozes expensive feel to it and also that it doesn't have everything you might need. But maybe it's just that they have a reduced choice of everyting. Marks and Sparks are aiming for the same thing and often when the food is in a corner of the rest of the shop, I always think that's wrong - you shouldn't have food next to clothes and shoes, that just doesn't work for me. ASDA tends to have scary people in it and along with Tesco they seem to aim for the unhealthier foodstuffs, at least that's the impression I have. Morrisons/Safeways used to have quite a few interesting tings to offer, but required a thorough search for them and nowadays the other supermarkets carry these also.

A favourite of mine is Lidl. It too has often strange and scary shoppers, but when it comes to a good selection of biscuits and wafers, I think they're unbeaten. They also have a lot of canned foods and I regularly buy crates of roasted red peppers in vinegar, not to mention pickeld baby cornichons or gherkins. The peppers are great in salads or on pizza and the cornichons are wonderfully tender and also good on pizza as it happens. They also do canned button mushrooms and canned tomatoes, so I generally get crates of them too, along with sweetcorn. We tend to have salad for dinner a couple of times a week and it's very handy to have canned veggies. As I've said before, I think a salad should have at least four vegetables in it and preferably a lot more.

Anyway, I thought I'd post an update on my online grocery shopping experiences.

Further Baking Badness

I'm in a rut, that's what it must be.

I thought I'd do something fairly simple just to get back on my baking feet so to speak, but no, this is not to be. I guess it's just too much else going on around me that's stressing me out to the point where I can't enjoy baking.

Last night's attempt was at Swedish Moccastrass. They are basically fancy looking shortbread type of biscuits. Overall, I think the dough was correct, but it said that it needed to be piped, and although soft and pliable, piping was not on its list of things to do and I spent about half an hour trying to even bring it down to the nozzle. The butter also started melting in my hands and oozed out of the piping bag. I attempted a remedy by adding 2 tbsp of grapeseed oil, which worked for about 15 flower shaped squirts, then it oozed out of the piping bag as well. I got angry and binned the rest.

The resulting biscuits weren't too tasty, so should up the sugar next time and down the amount of flour perhaps. But to be on the safe side, I've asked my Sister to give me a cake press for my birthday.

I didn't bother taking photos, it wasn't worth it. I'll give this recipe another try at some point, when my baking mojo is back.

Bad Baking Day

Last Saturday Lundulph went to a concert and I took the opportunity for some baking - I wanted to try out a couple of recipes from my "Things to cook in 2008" list. Yes, 2008, I'm well behind.

Now, first up was focaccia. Actually I'd first experienced the French version Fougasse, from the bakery chain Paul. But it seems that the Italian Focaccia is more popular, when I searched the web. So that's what I set off to make.

As usual, I didn't do too deep research, but picked one of the recipes that came up at the beginning of a google search. The recipe seemed harmless enough, not too detailed, but enough. Sadly I was a bit sloppy and put in all the olive oil into the initial dough, completely ignoring the fact that fat prevents gluten from developing, thus ruining any possibility of success - the glugen needs to develop in order to contain the gasses from the yeast that will give the bread it's structure and texture. Besides, the dough was way too firm, but the recipe said it should be oddly enough.

Anyway, I followed the rest of the instructions, apart from the baking that took twice as long and I also skipped putting a bowl of water at the bottom of the oven - gas ovens tend to have a more moist heat.



The result smelt like a focaccia and was barely edible. One of the two focaccias burnt too and both were well dry. At this point I had a gut feeling that my next project would also fail.

Project two was a Coffee Masala Cake. I can't remember where I found it - maybe The Daring Bakers or The Fresh Loaf. The name sounded very intriguing and it had cashew nuts on top, and I've never used cashews for sweet dishes, only for korma or as a snack.

The recipe was interesting too - only egg whites and it had both baking powder and baking soda.

I didn't succeed in getting the spice and coffee mixture as frothy as specified in the recipe and I had to add 3 tbsp milk to make it runny enough to whip in the first place. The batter ended up quite thick, but still was OK for a sponge cake. Looking at the photo in the recipe now, that one's a lot runnier. I had some doubts about the amounts for the various spices, but they turned out quite good.

Still, into the oven it went. It rose very nicely, almost threatening to overflow. I added cashews and chocolate chips as instructed after 20 minutes, at which point it had a crust, but was very wobbly indeed. 15 minutes later, it still looked a bit wobbly and I thought I'd put a skewer through it to see how much it had to go. And disaster! As soon as I pulled out the skewer, the cake sank in. I quickly closed the oven door and ran off, I really didn't want to watch that.

A further 15 minutes and the cake was shaped like a bowl and was done. I've still not managed to work out what went wrong. The baking powder and soda were well mixed in with the flour, but I guess only using egg whites makes the sponge a lot more fragile.





Lundulph suggested I fill the hole with Angel Delight. But I didn't. Still the cake itself was rather tasty, quite strong on the cloves and not too sweet. I think I'll use caster sugar next time, not granulated. Also I'll reduce the cloves a bit and add more ginger - Lundulph recommended that too.

He had it with fairly thick pouring cream and said that worked out quite nicely.

So for my next project I've picked something a bit easier. But I'll wait a while, last Saturday was very depressing. I need to fine tune the cake and work out how to make focaccia too.

Fat Tuesday

This year I finally got the opportunity to make semlor. This is a traditional Swedish pastry to be eaten on Shrove Tuesday. There's no concept of pancake day - Swedes have pancakes every Thursday after their pea soup with mustard and gammon.

But so far Lundulph has always insisted on pancakes for dinner (being a working day). However, this time I succeeded. I made the buns on Sunday night and the filling on Monday. Then did the final assembly this morning in order for them to be as fresh as possible when I took them in to work to tempt my colleagues.

As usual I didn't have too much time to research recipes, but one of the three I came across was from Dagmar of A Cat In The Kitchen. She definitely seems to know what she's talking about and the fact that the buns for the semlor required both yeast and baking soda made things even more interesting.

I followed the recipe to the spot to begin with and just after I put in the 9th (and what I'd decided it would be the last) decilitre of plain flour, I realised that this is a Swedish recipe, where all flours are strong. I'd used UK plain flour which is low in gluten and thus doesn't rise too well.

Ta-dat ta-ta, to the rescue, I threw in another decilitre of super strong flour and of course that pretty much killed the dough. From being nice and soft and just barely sticky, it went all floury and stiff. Yikes! What to do? Add more liquid, about 1 dl of it. It took ages to work it in, even with the machine, the stiff dough just slid over the milk surface and I had to stop it to give it a hand a few times. Once fully incorporated, it was a bit on the runny side, so I added two tablespoons of strong flour which brought it back to almost the original perfect consistency. It was a bit stickier, but I thought let it rise and see how it goes.

This was a good gamble. Barely 45 minutes later the dough had swollen nicely. Now I'd decided to make mini bite-sized semlor and weighed the dough to work out now much each bun should weigh. 60 g seemed good and I got 26 of these dough lumps and had 40 g piece left.

The dough was still a bit too sticky to work into balls the way my Mum has taught me, so I did what I learned in my baking course last year. Cup hand over the piece of dough as if it's a computer mouse. Then gently I made circular movements with only the top parts of my fingers touching the dough. Miraculously it forms into a nice round ball, about the size of a chicken egg.



Another 45 minutes later an my mini buns had proofed to regular size. Think small grapefruit.



I've had to throw away a number of eggs lately after using for glazing and decided against wasting yet another one on these. So I brushed them with milk only. This is the way they are in patisseries and cafés in Sweden as well.

Unfortunately I didn't start pre-heating the oven on time and they over-proofed a bit. I baked the first lot at 210 degrees C (the actual temperature of my gas mark 6) for 8 minutes, but they did not look done at all and I kept setting the timer on 3 minutes at a time and checking them. I turned the baking sheet around, as it wasn't baking evenly either. And turned down to gas mark 5, which took the temperature down to 190 degrees C.

Yes, I've invested in an oven thermometer and as it turns out, my oven is way off from what the gas marks allegedly should be.

The second tray I baked in the top oven, which underperforms at the best of times and I had to set it to 7 to get to 210 degrees C. It also works quite differently too, because the buns in it were the most successfully baked ones, I think.

For the last tray, I kept gas mark 5 and 190 degrees C and baked them for 16 minutes, which was perhaps a minute or two too long as they went quite dark on top and barely had colour at the bottom.



These were left to cool down completely overnight and on Monday morning, I put them in my fancy cake box padded up with kitchen towels to take up any moisture.

In the evening, I cut off small lids from each bun and nipped out the middle carefully. The texture was very nice.

I flipped the Kitchen Assistent machine on its side and put in the blender attachment. I diced 250 g of white marzipan and put in, then 2 tbsp icing sugar and the crumbs. Then heated up 1 dl semi-skimmed milk and poured it in, then whizzed away. Some help was required, but I got the whole lot into a smooth and fairly thick mixture, which I left on the side in room temperature.

This morning, I lined up some of the buns in my big deep baking tin and put about a tablespoon of the marzipan filling into each bun.

I flipped back the Kitchen Assistent onto it's legs again and put in the whisking bowl and whisked 600 ml of double cream with 5 tbsp caster sugar to stiff peaks. I filled my piping bag with it and squeezed out a generous amount to cover the filling and hole of the semlor.



Then I trimmed each of the lids into a triangle. This is traditional in Sweden and my boss, who's also from Sweden got very upset when we looked up photos of semlor today and there were some Swedish ones with round lids. You've got to get things right, really!

And don't forget sifting icing sugar on top.

Lundulph was in a rush in to work this morning, so didn't have one then, but I just assembled one for him now and he now has a very happy expression on his face. Definitely approved and a repeater.

But with pancakes as a savory main course he said.

They were also very popular amongst my colleagues at work, those who dared to try them. I regret that I didn't bring in more.

A final note on Dagmar's recipe. She says it makes 12 buns, but I got 26 regular sized ones and one smaller one. If I'd made just 12 buns, they would have been gigantic.