Bake Day Wednesday 2016: Week 9: Patisserie week

Phew, the past couple of weeks have been busy and I am a little behind on baking (yes, I know I skipped Week 8, this will be rectified over half term next week), but I managed to bake something for patisserie week (and on a Wednesday!): choux buns.

I don't tend to make patisserie as it requires several stages of chilling, which doesn't work in a house where the inhabitants think food should be eaten the second it leaves the oven, but I decided that I would give it a go this week. I browsed a couple of my favourite baking books (Gorgeous Cakes and Great British Bake Off: Big Book of Baking), before deciding that I would make eclairs. I have made choux pastry before, once, over 20 years ago (about the same time I made puff pastry at school), so had pretty much no idea what to do, apart from what I had picked up from watching various baking programmes. Choux pastry is apparently not all that hard, but does require constant attention - lots of carefully melting, vigorous beating (very vigorous - it looks awful when you first start to beat the eggs in!), two oven temperatures, and piercing the pastry near the end of the cooking time to release the steam - so I was pretty surprised that it turned out ok, and the buns didn't collapse when I took them out of the oven (they became buns rather the eclairs as it took longer than I'd planned to make the dough, so dolloping the mixture on the tray was the only option I had time for)!

The buns are pretty much hollow, so it didn't take too long for them to fully cool, ready to be filled with cream and coated with chocolate, both of which were easy compared to making the dough, and the buns were ready in time for pudding on Wednesday evening, just before Bake Off. The buns went down well with my family, with everyone enjoying them, but they did feel pretty decadent for an everyday bake, so if I make these again they'll be baked for a special occasion.

Next week is the final of Bake Off, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've enjoyed this series more than the past couple; the bakes have been simpler and I've managed to pick up the odd tip along the way. I really want Andrew to win, and I think it'll be either him or Candice. I'm less excited about the programme moving to Channel 4 next year, and this might be the final series that I watch as I think it's Mary, Mel and Sue that make the programme, and whatever happens it's not going to be the same. There might be some amazing combination of presenters that I haven't thought up that would work as well or better, but I can't think of any, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Bake Day Wednesday: Week 7: Dessert week

So last week on Bake Off it was Dessert Week, and I decided that I would postpone baking a dessert until I'd seen the show as I needed some inspiration. I don't often cook desserts (I make puddings, which are much less refined, far more frequently), so wasn't sure what I fancied. I really liked the look of the mousse cakes that the contestants made, and I don't think I've made mousse before, so that seemed like enough of a challenge. I searched through a couple of recipe books and decided to make the chocolate and raspberry cream pie from Gorgeous Cakes by Annie Bell (my favourite cake book, all the recipes work really well; the lemon drizzle cake is the best I've tasted).

I went to the supermarket on Friday and picked up the ingredients, then life started getting in the way. By the time I had emptied and painted my daughter's bedroom and nursed my poorly son, it was Monday... Undeterred, I set about making my rather belated Bake Day Wednesday bake. The base was easy: chocolate digestives and melted butter, all left to set in the fridge for a bit. And the mousse was surprisingly simple - melt the chocolate, beat in egg yolks, then whisk up the egg whites to peaks and fold them in carefully. There's also a layer of dulce de leche in there for extra decadence. This is a recipe to prepare ahead (as with most desserts, another reason I rarely make them), so we finally got to eat it for pudding on Monday evening (after it had been decorated with raspberries) and it was good. Squidgy, chocolatey and delicious. I'll definitely make it again, although my husband has requested that I leave out the dulce de leche as neither of us felt that it added anything, and it needs more raspberries as a contrast to all the richness, but very much a success!

I'm not going to be baking today, Tudor Week definitely requires quite a lot of additional inspiration (and probably quite a lot of research), so I'll be back with more baking in a few days. Hope you're all having a good day.

Bake Day Wednesday 2016: Week 3: Bread week

Bake Off is now in its third week and the baking theme of last night's episode was bread.
 

Cheese and ham swirls

Yesterday was a busy day as my son went back to school, but I did manage to fit in bread making between other chores. I've made quite a lot of bread over the years, so I decided to invent my own recipe based on basic white bread: cheese and ham swirls. The swirls were made over several hours (mixing, kneading, proving, rolling, filling, proving, baking!), but were ready in time for my son to eat after school. He really liked them! They'd also be a great snack to eat whilst playing board games or watching Bake Off.

If you fancy having a go for yourself, here's the recipe.

Cheese and ham bread swirls

Ingredients 

500g strong white bread flour
7g sachet of dried yeast
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tsp salt
25g soft butter (if your butter is fresh from the fridge, microwave it for a few seconds to soften it)
300 ml lukewarm water (I used 250ml cold water from the tap and 50ml hot water from the kettle)

200g Gruyere cheese, grated
120g wafer thin honey roast ham

Method

1. Mix the flour, yeast, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Rub the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Mix in the water using a blunt knife.
2. Tip the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic (5-10 minutes).
3. Return the dough to the bowl. Cover the bowl (use cling film, a clean, damp tea towel or a lid) and leave in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size (at least an hour).
4. Knock the dough back by kneading it gently a few times. Roll the dough out into a large rectangle shape. Make the dough as thin as you can, mine was 0.5-1cm thick.
5. Lay the ham evenly over the dough sheet, then sprinkle with the cheese. Roll the filled-dough up like a Swiss roll. Chop the roll into slices approximately 2.5cm thick, then transfer the slices to a flour dusted baking sheet, allowing plenty of space between the rolls for them to rise.
6. Cover the swirls (use a clean tea towel or a sheet of kitchen roll) and leave to prove until doubled in size.
7. Bake the swirls in an oven pre-heated to 200 C/180 C (fan)/gas mark 6 for 20 minutes or until golden. The base of a swirl should sound hollow when tapped.
8. Allow the swirls to cool a little, then remove them from the tray and place on a wire rack to cool fully (or eat them warm; warm bread is the best!).

Let me know how it goes! If you wish to share this recipe, please credit me and link to this post; do not copy without acknowledgement.

Hello?

Hello! I'm aware it's been a while since I last wrote a proper post; I'm now a little over three months from my PhD deadline, so I'm frantically working at that, while getting on with all the other usual life activities.

I haven't completely gone into hiding, and am still posting plenty of knitting and baking pictures on Instagram (new followers are always welcome), as well as enjoying weekends with family and friends. I'll also be getting involved in the Indie Design GAL over on Ravelry (all the information can be found here;* the fun starts on Thursday evening), which you may remember from last year, and will be posting about it here over the next six weeks.

Halloween cupcakes with bat and pumpkin sprinkles

Bonfire cupcakes for Bonfire Night

Chocolate orange cake for a charity raffle (we won a cake, but ate it before it could be photographed!)

Durham's rose window, reproduced in plastic blastic bottles for the Lumiere festival

Frankly enormous knitting. Again for the Lumiere festival, but I liked this one better unlit

The beginning's of my mystery Wyrt socks

We're also gearing up for Christmas in the Bird house. I've made a huge dent in my Christmas shopping this week as I realised it was making me a bit stressed. Many people who I'd planned to make things for now have shop-bought alternatives arranged to ease the pressure a little, and I can pass lots of presents on to friends I'm seeing over the next few weeks, thus saving on postage. I am very much looking forward to my son's first school Christmas - school shows, parties and dressing up; Christmas with small people is so much fun!

Festive knitting. These are for me

Hope everyone is enjoying Autumn. What have you all been up to recently?

*Note that you must be logged into Ravelry for this link to work.

Bake Day Wednesday: An abundance of apples

On Sunday my neighbours caught me as I was getting in from the supermarket to ask if I wanted some apples; apparently they have five apple trees in their garden and the weather this year has caused a bit of a glut. I happily accepted a large bag of apples, then had a think about what I wanted to make. We've had a lot of hot puddings recently as the weather has turned colder in the evenings, and snuggling up and eating crumbles and sponge puddings is a great way to spend an evening, but I fancied making something else, so settled on Swedish Apple Cake (which were words that had entered my head like an earworm. No idea where they'd come from, but I thought I'd run with it).

A quick Google found me this recipe by Rachel Allen (why do I own recipe books? I always ask the internet for recipes before actually looking in the books these days), which handily contains no fancy ingredients. Making the cake was really straightforward, and it smelt delicious while it was baking.

The glaze was much more tricky: the steps sounded so simple: melt the butter, dissolve the sugar in the butter and add the cinnamon. It turns out that dissolving sugar in butter is not straightforward, and I ended up with a rapidly darkening and increasingly burnt smelling, very hot, sticky saucepan. Which I threw in the sink and started again.

Rather than risk doing the same glaze wrong for a second time, I used a simple cinnamon and caramelised sugar syrup (50g water, 50g sugar, 1 tsp ground cinnamon. Stir the sugar in the water over a low heat; once the sugar has dissolved, stir in the cinnamon, then increase the heat, and reduce the syrup to approximately half its original volume. Do not stir the syrup while it's reducing. Once reduced, immediately pour the syrup over the cake). It worked perfectly first time, although if I did it again I'd use a pastry brush to distribute it a bit better.

The cake went down well at my knitting group, and I'll definitely make it again. Probably a good thing really, as I still have quite a lot of apples!

And tonight it's the final of Great British Bake Off. I don't have a favourite this year, and genuinely don't mind who wins (although for reference I think Ian might win - I don't think he's necessarily best, but I think he'll do everything well enough tonight). I'm hoping the final will be a bit like last year's, when the contestants had to make something basic without instructions and do it perfectly. Not much longer to wait now anyway!

Rainbow cake

Sometimes my son comes up with excellent ideas; a few weeks ago when I collected him from school on Friday afternoon he had one request for the weekend: to bake a vanilla rainbow cake.

On the Saturday we took a trip to Sainsbury and bought all the necessary ingredients, including six colours of food colouring (Dr Oetker gel food colourings; my son was a little disappointed when I said we wouldn't be having an indigo layer - dark blue is hard to make in cake) and set about baking six brightly coloured sponge cake layers.

The following morning, I whisked up some butter icing and we make a beautiful (rather unstable) stack of rainbow cake. To stop the pile collapsing I had to push two straws through all the layers, not an elegant solution, but it did stop the cake collapsing on the floor.

This bake was really good fun, and very tasty at the end. I would definitely recommend giving it a go if you have small (or not so small) children. Use a smallish tin unless you have loads of mouths to feed (ours was 6 inches wide and we managed to finish it between six of us in a couple of days), and if you want a slightly more stable cake, make them thicker than you want them to be and trim them so they're level. I'd still recommend using some supports though, unless you like to eat your cake off the floor!

Bake Day Wednesday, week something or other...

I started watching this series of Bake Off with the intention of baking along and writing a blog post to accompany each week's episode. How hard could it be? Ten weeks, ten bakes. I managed last year with a newborn baby and a pre-schooler to contend with. This year has been a completely different story. I half-heartedly joined in with the baking for the first few weeks, then one week got delayed until the weekend, and last week we were on holiday so no baking got done, and now I'm two weeks behind and just don't feel like baking.

I started back at work a few weeks ago and feel like I've been running ever since; my baby is now a feisty one year old who needs rather more active attention than a newborn baby (newborns love a snuggle, and my baby carrier left my hands nicely free to do other things); and my favourite baking buddy started school this week. So, just this once, I'm going to give myself a break. No more committing to baking on a Wednesday, I shall bake when I feel like it instead, even if that's not until the next round of school holidays. I shall still be watching Bake Off, but possibly with some shop-bought biscuits and a nice mug of hot chocolate. After all, autumn as begun. Happy baking everyone.

Bake Day Wednesday 2015, week two: Biscuit week

Last week was cake week on the Great British Bake Off, and I baked a lemon cake and some chocolate brownies in celebration. Nothing as grand as anything the contestants came up with - when you say Madeira cake I think plain loaf cake, possibly with jam in the middle and white icing on top, or maybe a children's birthday cake, certainly no basil in sight! This week it's biscuit week on the show, so I had a think, and realised that the only biscuits I ever make are essentially shortbread to use with cutters.

I briefly considered biscotti, which will be tonight's signature bake, but I don't actually like them all that much; tonight's technical challenge, Arlettes, don't look like the sort of thing I like to eat; and I'm not making a box of biscuits out of biscuits as I have other things to do this week! So I looked on the shelf of cookery books and fished out a book I hadn't used in a while: The Hairy Biker's Big Book of Baking. The books was written to accompany a television series a few years ago, and I have used the book before, so know that the recipes have a decent chance of working, and that the writing style is nicely no-nonsense. Handily the index has a section titled biscuits, so I didn't have to browse the whole book. I plumped for Amsterdam Caramel Cookies, or Koggetjes, which are basic biscuits with caramel shards cooked into them.

 

The first step was to make the caramel, which I have done before, but have burnt it once and undercooked it once, which isn't a great record for two attempts. So I was delighted when it worked out fine first time! As I said, this book is pretty no-nonsense, so comes with handy advice, such as to make sure the sugar has dissolved fully before turning up the heat, and to not touch the caramel until it's well and truly set as it is HOT. All good so far.

The biscuit mixture was really easy: sugar and butter, flour and baking powder, stir it all together, then crush the now-set caramel and stir that into the mixture, easy peasy.

Weirdly, baking the biscuits was the most difficult thing. I'd just removed dinner from the oven, so thought it might be a little hot, but these biscuits took well over the stated 10-12 minutes to cook. No idea why (it's possible my daughter had 'helped' by turning the dials, but I don't think she did on this occasion), but after about 25 minutes minutes they looked golden brown as described in the book.

And the final verdict? Crunchy, chewy, sticky, sweet. The caramel tastes delicious, but the biscuit is a little greasy for my liking. I don't doubt that they'll all be eaten, but other things would probably go quicker.

Bake Day Wednesday is back!

Tonight is the first in the new series of The Great British Bake Off, so I am celebrating with the return of bakes on a Wednesday (I can probably manage twelve weeks of bakes...).

First off was meant to be a battenberg, but I forgot that I had lemons that needed using, so I went for a lemon drizzle cake instead. Classic and very lovely.

We also made chocolate brownies at my son's request, and he made them pretty much by himself (I did help with the weighing out though, otherwise he would have added all the flour, all the sugar, all the butter, quite a lot of eggshell, possibly not that much egg, and no chocolate as he would have eaten it all). He had a lovely time mixing all the ingredients together, even if he did cover himself in batter, and an even better time washing up afterwards - I think that was mostly the bubbles. He did an excellent job, they're delicious.

Clearly we couldn't wait to get started on these!

Fingers crossed we'll be back next week with something a little more ambitious.

Super special brownies

For my day job I have been lucky enough to travel to the U.S. several times, and one of the things I was really excited about was trying some American sweets.  I am a big fan of sweets, and can tell what pretty much any UK sweet will taste like (I am led to believe that this is normal if you are British, but pretty weird if you're from anywhere else in the world). 

I tried several sweets with varying levels of success - American chocolate coated malt balls (Whoppers) are not the same as Maltesers, they were massively disappointing - no creaminess to the chocolate, no melt in the mouth texture! I really liked trying all the different varieties of M&Ms though - pretzel, peanut butter, shiny minty Christmas themed ones. All amazing. So I was very excited when I popped into B&M (a shop full of bargains) and discovered that they stocked several varieties of American import sweets, including the peanut butter M&Ms, which were my favourites.

After the success of my M&M blondes a few weeks ago, I thought I'd make some peanut butter M&M brownies. I used the Hummingbird Bakery brownie recipe, and threw in two 'video' boxes of the M&Ms, then cooked the brownies as normal.

One box?

Two looks much better!

And the result? Delicious, sweet, sticky, rich brownies. Really delicious! I can't eat more than one in a sitting though! They are pretty decadent.

Never travel without a cake

We spent a happy weekend at Center Parcs at the start of June: sunshine, swimming, good food and good company. And I took it upon myself to bake some cake.

I know that I am frequently extolling the virtues of The Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, but their blondie recipe really is one of my favourites. For those of you who have not experienced blondies, they are essentially brownies, but made with white chocolate. The recipe suggests that you might like to add chopped nuts to the batter, which I did the first few times, but one day stumbled upon my preferred variation: M&Ms. No weighing required, just throw in a whole sharing bag and bake the blondies as usual.

This batch had red, white and blue M&Ms as that's what the shop had, and I will admit that a standard coloured bag might have made a prettier result. But they are still delicious! Very moreish. And they were eaten very quickly! Having written this, I might have to go and bake some more...

 

Baking? On a Wednesday?

I am aware that the name of this blog is something of a misnomer: there is sometimes baking, but more often I waffle on about knitting, and when there is baking, it's not often on a Wednesday. So I thought I would redress the balance today, with a baking post on a Wednesday.

The baking itself actually happened last Wednesday when my son requested that we make two things: cupcakes and pizza.

We started with the cupcakes. Basic Hummingbird Bakery chocolate cupcakes. Nothing fancy, pretty straightforward and a great thing to do with a toddler. We decorated them with dolly mixtures, which are fab for decorating cakes, unless you get loads of the jelly ones, which I don't think work with chocolate, but my husband and son both disagree with me, so maybe I'm wrong. For reference my favourites are the single coloured cubes with the slightly hard outsides, so long as the yellow ones are lemon not banana (I hate bananas. Properly hate them.) - Co op own brand ones are perfect. I tried to get my son to put five sweets on each cake as we were taking them to his nursery for a snack time treat, but when I looked at the box on the way in to nursery I did notice that a couple only had four...

 

 

I'm not sure where the pizza suggestion came from; I don't think we've made pizza in well over a year, but it was a good suggestion. I helped my son weigh out all the ingredients, then let him loose on the kneading while I washed up a few bits and pieces. He did a really good job, essentially playing with the dough in the bowl, and eventually it looked smooth rather than sticky. While the dough was rising, I made a basic tomato sauce using passata and basil, then we squished the dough onto a couple of greased baking sheets (I have made the error of not greasing the tray way too many times!) before spreading on the tomato sauce, and decorating the pizza bases with pepperoni, chorizo and mozzarella. 

 

 

The cooked pizzas were delicious. So much better than any shop bought pizza - you can put way more meat on a homemade pizza! This is definitely an activity we will be repeating.