Recipes Archives - Page 8 of 12 - A Bond Girl's Food Diary

Ginger Cake with a Lemon Drizzle and Rhubarb and Raspberry Compote

27th January 201629th January 20162 Comments

I ate the most unbelievable amount of junk food when I was at school. Not only was school food itself usually pretty spectacularly unhealthy, but also any money I had usually went on books, costume jewellery, and chocolate. I could quite happily go through a 100g bar of Dairy Milk without much thought; I still could, if not for the fact that it would pain my conscience. It’s truly both a blessing and a curse, but I can really eat pretty much anything. Quite apart from being lucky enough not to have any allergies, I also have tremendous capacity: when other people are groaning that they are painfully full or feeling sick from sugar, I would usually be happy to keep going.

Of course, when you’re young you don’t worry as much about trashing your body, and it’s the done thing – or at least it was when I was at school – to make regular trips to the corner shop to stock up on all things sweet. My best friend from those years, Ella, and I did this regularly, and to be honest I can’t remember any adults fussing particularly about stopping us, although it’s entirely possible I may have just blanked any admonitions out. Ella and I lived a five minute walk apart and we were practically inseparable for years, both at school and in our free time. I have a very specific memory of us sitting in an empty classroom across the corridor from the school library and eating an entire McVitie’s Jamaica Ginger cake between the two of us in what must have been about seven minutes.

Times change, but not very much, it seems, because here I am with another massive ginger cake which I am planning to eat a great deal of. True, I’ve fancied it up a bit, but basically this is still the essence of a delicious ginger cake – moist, flavoursome, and comforting. I don’t know what Ella is up to these days, but I hope that she’d like it.

Source: The base ginger cake recipe has been adapted from Ready for Dessert, by David Lebovitz, which is a fantastic book.

Notes: This cake will keep well for about four or five days. You don’t have to make the compote, or even the drizzle – it would be good plain, too. But if you want to make it a bit fancier for a dessert then these are nice accompaniments. I also think it goes very well with crème fraîche, which cuts through it nicely.

Ingredients:

115g fresh ginger (peeled weight)
200ml golden syrup
50ml black treacle
200g caster sugar (or brown sugar would work well too if you have it in)
250ml corn oil (or other flavourless oil)
350g plain flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground pepper
200ml water
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 large eggs

for the compote

4 sticks or so of rhubarb
1 vanilla pod, if you have one kicking about
50ml water
50g sugar (or to taste)
1 punnet/ 150g raspberries

for the drizzle

juice of 1 lemon
150g icing sugar

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ gas 4, and grease and line a 23cm cake tin – you will need a pretty big tin or the cake won’t bake through, and if it’s springform it will make your life easier. Chop your ginger very finely, or whack it in the food processor and blitz it down (if you are lazy, like me). In your largest bowl, mix together the golden syrup, sugar, and oil. In a little pan, bring your water just to the boil (but don’t let it boil away), and stir in the bicarb, which will make it fizz up excitingly. Then whisk your water into the sugar mixture and stir in the chopped ginger.
Sift your flour, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and pepper over your wet mixture and slowly whisk it in. Finally, crack your two large eggs into the bowl and whisk them in too. The mixture will seem very wet and loose. Don’t worry, it will all come out okay. Pop it in your tin and bake for around 1 hour. It’s a long bake time, so if it starts looking a bit too dark a bit early then turn your oven down a touch. Make sure your cake passes the skewer test before you bring it out.
Meanwhile, while your cake is baking, make your compote. Chop your rhubarb into 4cm pieces, or thereabouts, and pop it in a saucepan with your sugar, water, and a vanilla pod split in half if you have one. Leave on a gentle heat to cook down for about 20 minutes, or until your rhubarb is soft and your compote is syrupy. Stir in your raspberries and cook for 5 minutes more. Leave to stand and thicken.
When your cake is out of the oven, make your lemon drizzle. Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and gradually whisk in drops of lemon juice, until you have a drizzle-able icing – you may or may not use all the juice. Careful, because it’s very easy to add too much liquid and make it too liquid. Drizzle it artfully over the cake and serve with the compote.

Roasted Broccoli with Parmesan

20th January 201622nd January 2016Leave a comment

When James and I had only just started seeing each other, he came round to my flat for dinner for the first time. I was still in that phase at the beginning of a relationship when you want to impress the other person and are trying to make them think you are amazing and wonderful, and so I asked him what his favourite food in the entire world was and told him I’d make it for us to eat. I was thinking maybe steak with some triple cooked chips and peppercorn sauce, or perhaps chocolate souffles, or fresh scallops, or raspberry sorbet, or roast lamb…

He told me his favourite food in the entire world was broccoli.

He could have asked for literally anything, and he chose broccoli. I realised this dinner was going to be less complicated and less expensive than I had imagined.

Since James and I have been together, I have eaten a lot more broccoli than I used to. Unlike James, though, I get bored with eating the same thing over and over, and so I started looking for another way to serve broccoli that wasn’t ‘steamed and plain’.

Putting this post up and calling it a recipe feels like a bit of a cheat, because the ‘recipe’ so pathetically easy. However, it is also, slightly dispiritingly, one of the most consistently praised things I cook for people, probably because it’s surprising. It’s a simple side-dish, but it makes broccoli so insanely delicious that it’s quite magical. It made a friend of mine who hates broccoli like broccoli. It made another friend of mine, who loves broccoli but was deeply suspicious of the concept of roasting it, message me to say ‘roast broccoli where have you been all my life’. It’s so good that I will fairly often just cook up a whole head of broccoli like this and call it lunch.

I mean, you know, I don’t want to big it up too much because I don’t want you all to think it’s the path to world peace or something and then be disappointed. But it’s pretty great.

Notes:

As I say, this is more of a method than a recipe, so I’m not putting down proper measurements. Use your common sense. I trust you.

See those dark bits on the broccoli? The broccoli is not burnt. Those are the best bits. They are crispy and caramelised and delicious.

Ingredients:

1 head of broccoli (not tenderstem)
sea salt flakes
black or red pepper
olive oil (or rapeseed, or whatever you fancy)
grated parmesan
chilli flakes, if you like

Method:

Preheat your oven to properly hot – 220C/ 200 fan/ gas 7. While it’s heating up, cut your broccoli into florets and pop it into a roasting tray. Season generously with sea salt and pepper, give the tray a shake, then glug some oil over the top and shake it again, making sure the broccoli is well covered.
When the oven is hot, put the broccoli in for 10 minutes. Bring it out, toss everything round in the tray a bit, and put it back in for 5 minutes more. When you bring it out, it should all be just tender with patches that are starting to catch and caramelise and crisp up. If you’re not there yet, put it back in.
When you’re happy, dust the whole thing with a handful of grated parmesan and serve hot.

See? Barely a recipe at all.

Chocolate and Raspberry Beetroot Loaf Cake

13th January 201613th January 201611 Comments

This cake taught me a lesson. Or, more accurately, this cake re-taught me a lesson that I have learned several times in the kitchen but apparently need to be reminded of because I am a special kind of idiot.

The lesson, by the way, is that some things cannot be rushed.

It was New Year’s Day and I had two recipes I wanted to test and photograph. I’ve not got any special photography lights, so I need to photograph in natural daylight, which in January means I have to get any pictures done before 3.30pm at the latest, and even that’s tricky on a very grey day. I was stressed and rushing. I’m clumsy at the best of times, but when I am hurrying it gets even worse, and I had already stubbed my toe, smacked my head on the extractor fan, and dropped sugar all over the floor. The first recipe I was testing hadn’t gone well and needed a lot of revisions. My second recipe was this cake. I was behind schedule and so, even though I know better, I tried to move the cake from the tin to a board for pictures when it was still very hot.

The whole thing completely fell apart.

I won’t lie to you: I had a bit of a meltdown. I had been working frantically all day and had nothing to show for it. I had wasted hours of time and lots of expensive ingredients. Worse, I didn’t have the time or the food to try the recipes again that day, so I was going to have to go back to the supermarket and spend money I didn’t have on getting a new set of stuff and sacrifice my plans for the next day to do everything all over again.

Quite often, I have to remind myself that this is only food, and it’s not a world-altering disaster if things don’t go well. Nonetheless, it’s hard when something you’ve put a lot of time and resources into fails, whether or not the thing is important in its own right.

So this post, then, comes with a moral: don’t rush things that cannot be rushed. Or, more specifically, don’t try and get a chocolate beetroot cake out of its tin when it’s only been out of the oven for thirty seconds, because it will collapse all over you and the floor and you will accidentally step in it and not realise and track cake all over the kitchen that you had only just cleaned that morning and ruin a perfectly decent pair of socks.

You can at least rest safe in the knowledge that this cake has been very thoroughly tested.

Source: I started with this recipe, but changed it a lot: making it into a loaf cake, adding raspberries, adding dark chocolate to boost the flavour, messing with quantities, adding decorations… I mean, it’s a different beast now.

Notes: The cake you see in the pictures has been made in my very smallest loaf tin and only uses half the mixture in this recipe. The rest I had to use for cupcakes on this occasion, for complicated reasons. This mix, then, will do for two small loaf cakes or one big one, or one small one and a batch of cupcakes, or two layers of a circular cake… whatever you fancy. It’s pretty forgiving.

Also, obviously the cake you see here is a re-make, post Disaster Cake.

Ingredients:

100g dark chocolate
250g cooked beetroot (I get the vac-pac things from Sainsburys. Not in vinegar, obviously)
3 large eggs
200ml corn oil (or other flavourless oil)
1 tsp vanilla extract
60g cocoa powder
200g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
250g caster sugar
100g raspberries

50g white chocolate and a handful of fresh or freeze dried raspberries for decorating, if you like.

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ gas 4. Grease and line a loaf tin, or whatever tin you’ve gone for. Start the dark chocolate melting in a bain marie (or microwave if you are brave).
Blitz your beetroot in a food processor until puréed and, leaving the machine running, pour in the oil and then crack in the eggs and add in the vanilla. Blitz until it’s all smooth and pink and kind of odd but lovely. In a large bowl, sift the cocoa powder, flour, and baking powder together, and stir in the sugar. Make a well in the dry ingredients, then whisk in the very pink wet ingredients until smooth. Stir in the melted chocolate, and fold in the whole raspberries.
Pop the mixture into your chosen tins and bake for around 40 minutes, although this will obviously depend on your choice of tin – the cake you see in the photo took 40 minutes at 160C in my fan oven. When it’s done, take it out and let it cool (might trick me once…) before decorating with swipes of melted white chocolate and raspberries, or feel free to leave it plain. It should taste lovely either way.

The Belazu Ingredient is King Challenge – Olive Oil Cake with Pistachios, Balsamic Peaches, and Balsamic Caramel Sauce

7th January 201617th August 201727 Comments

When challenged to make an innovative dish using olive oil and balsamic vinegar, my first instinct was to make a cake. Of course, making a cake is my first instinct in most situations.

One of the perks of being at Leiths is being visited by lots of people bringing us delicious things. The Belazu Ingredient Company set up the first olive oil and vinegar tasting I’ve ever attended, and challenged us to create an innovative dish using any combination of their Early Harvest Arbequina Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, or Freekeh. The olive oil was very good, but it was the balsamic vinegar that surprised me: it was so delicious that I ended up drinking it like a shot.

I chose to work with the olive oil and vinegar, and decided to make these ingredients – traditionally used in savoury dishes – the stars of a cake. The olive oil I used instead of butter as the main source of fat for the cake: it creates a moist and tender crumb and gives a subtle flavour and a lovely golden tawny colour. The balsamic vinegar I initially used to marinate the peaches, and then later to flavour a warm caramel sauce.

My next job was to come up with some accent flavours and textures to complement the oil and vinegar. Balsamic strawberries are a well-known concept now, but I wanted to try something a little different, and so I went for balsamic peaches. The complex richness and fruity sharpness of the balsamic vinegar works well with the softer sweetness of the peach. The peaches are then baked on the base of the cake, later to be turned over: the vinegar darkens and caramelises as it cooks and the peaches meld into the cake, ending up sitting golden on top. Pistachios are probably my favourite nut, and I included them as I thought the cake needed a little texture, and the slight saltiness they bring to the dish helps balance the sweetness of the cake and peaches. Plus they always look so pretty, garlanding a cake in green and hints of purple.

The caramel sauce is one of my favourite parts of this dish. I am a big salted caramel fan, but balsamic caramel might be even better. A high quality balsamic vinegar like this one adds both a sharpness and an interesting fruitiness to the caramel, and I had to stop myself eating it out of the pan with a spoon.

Even though it makes for a pretty long blog post title, I am really happy with my cake, and a I had a lot of fun with this challenge. I made the recipe loads of times to test all my little tweaks to the it and I am not bored of it yet, which is a good sign. Now, I’m off to go and finish the rest of that caramel sauce.

Ingredients:

for the cake

2 barely-ripe peaches
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
120g Greek yoghurt
3 large eggs
150ml extra virgin olive oil
200g golden caster sugar
220g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
100g pistachio kernels, roughly chopped

for the caramel sauce

130g granulated sugar
4 tbsp water
130g double cream
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (from marinating the peaches)
1/2 tsp sea salt flakes

Method:

Two hours before you plan to bake your cake, core your peaches. Cut them into slices and place them in a shallow bowl or dish with the balsamic vinegar. Turn the peaches in the vinegar and make sure they are covered and immersed. Cover, and leave at room temperature, ideally for two hours but for as long as you can if not.
When you’re ready to bake your cake, preheat your oven to 170C/ 150C fan/ gas 3. Grease a 23cm cake tin and line the base with a circle of silicone/ parchment paper. In a large mixing bowl, or in a stand mixer, beat the eggs together with the yoghurt. When evenly combined, beat in the olive oil, followed by the sugar. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, and salt. Stir through the chopped pistachios, reserving 2 tbsp of nuts. Fold this mixture into the wet mixture and beat to combine.
Arrange the peach slices over the centre of the base of your cake tin in whatever pattern takes your fancy. Reserve the leftover balsamic vinegar from the peaches. Carefully, so as not to displace the peaches, pour the cake batter into the tin. Bake in your preheated oven for 45 minutes, or until it’s firm and risen and a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes away clean.
While the cake is baking, make the caramel sauce. Combine the sugar with the water in a saucepan and heat gently until the sugar is dissolved. Once the sugar has dissolved, turn up the heat and continue to cook the caramel until it’s the copper colour of a penny, which should take 5-10 minutes. While the caramel is cooking, warm the cream gently in another pan until steaming, then keep warm on a low heat. Once the caramel is ready, carefully whisk in the cream, off the heat, followed by the balsamic vinegar and the salt. Cook for a further minute, then take off the heat again. Taste and adjust as needed – I often add a little more balsamic vinegar.
When the cake is ready, leave to cool for ten minutes before removing from the tin. Carefully peel off the silicone disc to reveal the peaches. Sprinkle your reserved pistachios over the cake. Serve with the warm balsamic caramel.

Pork Belly Ramen

6th January 20166th January 20161 Comment

I am calling this dish ‘ramen’ because ‘bowl of broth with things in it’ isn’t a great title for a recipe. However, this is in no way authentic ramen, and I am sure that any Japanese people would be completely horrified that I am calling it that. I have never been to Japan so I have probably never even eaten authentic Japanese food.

It is delicious though, so it’s not all bad.

I fed this to James and he gave it the thumbs up, so you can rest safe in the knowledge that is has been tested on, er, one other person. Still, it feels right for the season to me: it’s warm and fragrant, and feels quite wholesome and nourishing.

In other news, I am not such a fan of January. I know this is not scientifically true, but it does actually seem to be getting darker in the mornings rather than lighter. I was planning to do some food photography first thing today, and then realised I couldn’t because at 8am it’s still properly middle-of-the-night pitch black outside. Also, if it keeps raining like this then it’s definitely going to flood here.

Anyway, instead of moaning (okay, fine, as well as moaning), I am going to re-watch one of my favourite YouTube videos. It’s of J.K. Rowling being a goddess. The woman can do no wrong.

She’s amazing. Yes, technically watching that video was twenty minutes of procrastination, but now I feel much more positive about the world.

What were we talking about? Oh right, ramen. Or ‘ramen’.

Notes:

Since this is not real ramen and there is no authenticity to be corrupted, there is no disadvantage to messing with the recipe below and using whatever you have in the fridge. Try another meat or cut it out entirely, switch it up with the vegetables, up the chilli if you like it spicy: anything goes. I’ve listed the ingredients I used as a basic guide.

If you wanted to start with raw meat, you could cook it in the broth to add flavour and make that stage of cooking longer.

This should make enough to serve two people generously.

Ingredients:

300g cooked meat – I used pork belly, but leftover chicken would be great, and duck would be lovely
Handful of dried mushrooms (say about 10 g)
Thumb sized chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and diced
1l vegetable stock (or dashi, if you can get hold of it, which I can’t)
1 tsp miso paste
1 tsp umami paste
2 pak choi
handful of radishes
1 fresh chilli
1 large or three small spring onions
2 eggs
2 nests of rice noodles (or insert your preferred noodle here)
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil

Method:

Put your dried mushrooms and chopped ginger in a large, deep frying pan (preferably one with a lid) and cover them with the stock. Stir in the miso paste and umami paste. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer gently for 15 minutes with the lid on.
While the broth is simmering, prep your pak choi by separating the leaves and the stems and slicing them. Thinly slice your radishes, chilli, and spring onions. Add the stems of your pak choi to the broth to cook. Bring a small pan of salted water to the boil, add your eggs, turn the heat down so the water is simmering gently, and cook them for 6.5 minutes – use a timer. When the time is up, immediately get the eggs out of the pan (saving the water) and run them under cold water until the shells no longer feel hot, then peel them and set aside.
For the last 3 minutes of broth cooking time, add the sliced pak choi leaves to the stems that are in there already.
Pop the noodles into the pan of boiling water and cook them according to pack instructions – usually only 2-3 minutes. When cooked, take them out, run them under cold water, and drain them well. By now, your broth should be nice and flavoursome. Take if off the heat, add the soy sauce and sesame oil, stir and taste. Adjust seasoning as needed. When you’re happy, put your drained noodles into the broth to warm through.
When ready to serve, put the noodles and broth into wide, shallow bowls and top with the vegetables. Halve your eggs and add one to each bowl, and then finish with the meat and any additional garnish.

Beef Shin and Black Garlic Stew

1st January 201631st December 20154 Comments

January is an absolutely ridiculous time to introduce dramatic dietary restrictions, no? Your house is still full of leftover Christmas chocolate and cheese, it’s grey and rainy outside, the excitement of the holiday is behind you, and you’ve got going back to work hanging over your head. Why deprive yourself of the pleasures of food and drink? Sure, if you feel a little weak from Christmas indulgence – so overwhelmed by your consumption of cold meat buffets and Prosecco that you are no longer able to physically lift yourself off the sofa, say – then you might want to hesitantly reintroduce green vegetables to your limping system and gently nourish yourself with restorative avocado-based meals. But that’s no reason to eschew all the hearty meat-and-carb based fare and warming puddings that are our birthright in the bleak mid-winter. Have it all, that’s what I say. Then have some more. Then have an apple, for balance.

In the spirit of this, here is a very hearty beef stew. By all means, serve it with vegetables if you wish. But relish in its warming, protein-laden deliciousness, have it with a glass of wine under a duvet in front of the TV, cuddle up with a loved one or pet, and be kind to yourself.

Source:

This stew takes inspiration from recipes in both Nigella Lawson’s Simply Nigella and Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana, but is very much my own meandering take on things. Both of them use lamb, for a start.

Notes:

Black garlic. It sounds like quite an annoying, esoteric ingredient to include here, doesn’t it? Normally I would not put such a thing in a recipe, because I hate recipes which require you to find odd ingredients (not that I don’t like the odd ingredients, you understand – I just resent having to go out and buy them) but I was given a tub of it for my birthday by my brother-in-law to be and it smelled so delicious that I knew I wanted it to find its way onto the blog. Then I found that you can buy it in my local Sainsburys (in the speciality section, admittedly, BUT STILL), so I feel much more comfortable about it being here now.

This serves about 4-6 people generously, dependent on sides. I tend to make the full amount for the two of us and we’ll have it pretty much all week. Luckily James has a very high tolerance for eating the same thing over and over again.

You can get beef shin from a butcher, but you can also get it from Sainsburys these days, usually from the butcher counter but sometimes just in the beef section of the meat aisle. I would really recommend using it over any other cut of beef for a stew. It’s my favourite by far for texture and flavour. Unless you have a really decent knife, cutting beef shin is a bit of a pain, because it’s tough. I tend to just use scissors, because I am a ridiculous excuse for a cook. Try to cut against the grain, as it makes it more tender to eat.

You will see the technical term ‘ish’ lots in the ingredients. This is the nature of stew. A bit more or a bit less of anything won’t really hurt.

Ingredients:

glug of olive oil
1 large white onion
2 heads black garlic, peeled and separated into cloves (see note)
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp tumeric
2 tbsp dukkah
750g (ish) beef shin, cut into 4cm (ish) chunks
handful (say about 10) baby onions, peeled and left whole
2 tbsp plain flour
2 bay leaves (fresh if possible)
leaves from 2 thyme sprigs
2 cans chopped tomatoes
3 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Pop a big pan on medium heat and cover the base with the oil. I am sure proper cookery people have cast iron pots that can go in the oven and fancy tagine dishes and stuff, but all I have is a big saucepan with a lid, so I use that. Blitz the large onion and one head’s worth of black garlic cloves in a food processor until roughly chopped, and pop them in the oil. Cook them off for about 3 minutes until they start to soften and release delicious garlicky smells. Pop all of the dry spices into the pan and stir everything up. Cook it all off on a gentle heat for about five minutes. Scrape the mixture out into a bowl and turn the heat up high.
Add a splash more oil to the pan, season the beef with salt, and pop it in to brown. Move it around occasionally. When the beef is well browned and golden on all sides (about 10 minutes, depending on your pan and heat), pop the baby onions in for around 3 minutes to brown. When everything is caramelised and yummy, turn the heat down to medium and add the flour, bay, and thyme. Mix everything around until the flour is absorbed. Add the chopped tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, then fill the chopped tomato cans with water and add to the pan until the contents are well covered with liquid. Bring the stew to a simmer, then turn down the heat as low as you can and leave to cook for 3 hours, stirring occasionally and adding more water if it gets dry.
After three hours, grab a bit of the beef on a fork and have a poke at it. It should be completely falling apart – collapsing into melting flakes with almost no resistance when you press it against the side of the pan. If it’s not, give it half an hour’s more cooking time and check again, and keep going if you need to. It’s very difficult to overcook shin if you’re going on a gentle heat, so don’t worry about it going tough – it will fall apart before that happens. When you’re happy with the meat, make sure you’re happy with the sauce too. If you want it a bit thicker, whack up the heat and bubble it down for ten minutes or so. Take the second half of the black garlic cloves, stir them in, and let them warm through. When that’s done, check and adjust the seasoning of the sauce.
Serve with brown rice, cous cous, or whatever carb you fancy. Probably could add some green in there too but you are not obligated. This keeps very well and will be delicious reheated even after a few days have slipped by.

Chocolate Orange Macarons

17th December 201517th December 20152 Comments

Hey, remember when I had a semi-proper food blog on which I often posted recipes, instead of moaning about how busy and exhausted I was and listing all my new burns? No? I don’t. I had to plough back through the archives to find the last recipe I posted, and it was only for what is essentially a fridge cake. A delicious fridge cake with an exciting name, but still.

My first term at Leiths finished a couples of weeks ago, and I am metaphorically (and sometimes literally) spinning round in a circle going ‘wait, whoa, wow, what just happened to me?’ I’ve been ambushed by term. I’ve been completely immersed for ten weeks and I haven’t thought about anything else. I’ve been muttering choux pastry recipes to myself and having nightmares about underproved bread. Term ended, and as soon as I got home and relaxed for the first time in months, I immediately got ill, and spent a few days wrapped in duvets on the sofa, holding the cat hostage, slipping in and out of sleep while watching box-sets.

It’s time for me to start cooking for fun again.

Macarons are fun. I mean, they’re a complete pain in the arse, but they’re beautiful, and delicious, and fancy. These chocolate orange macarons are decorated with nuts, and I think they look pretty enough to be rather nice gifts for Christmas. I mean, for someone you really actually like.

I do not claim to be a macaron expert at all. They’re notoriously tricky, and there are dozens of very good, comprehensive, and knowledgeable articles and blog posts floating about that will give you dozens of tips about how to make them perfect. BraveTart‘s writing on this is a fantastic resource that I would recommend you reading if you’re interested. I’ve found a method that works for me now and I am sticking with it, but it’s certainly not inherently better than any other method. Much to my own surprise, I’ve found the Italian meringue route actually easier than the French one here – which is odd because any recipe which involves heating sugar syrup to precise temperatures usually freaks me out a bit – as it tends to give me more consistent results. And it’s not as scary as I thought it was.

Notes:

For this, you will need at least three baking sheets (I sometimes go onto a fourth) and parchment to line them, a sugar thermometer, a food processor, an electric hand whisk or a stand mixer, and a piping bag fitted with a plain nozzle, as well as the normal bowls and scales and stuff. Sorry, lots of kit I know, but that’s just how it is for these.
This recipe makes around 50 shells, or 25 paired macarons, although this obviously depends on how big you pipe them.
I don’t personally think you need to bother ageing your egg whites unless they are stupendously fresh to start with – perhaps you have your own chickens or something, who knows – but I do always make sure mine are room temperature.
I am not awesome at piping, and so my personal preference is to line my baking sheets with disposable parchment and, using a cookie cutter, draw circles onto it in black Sharpie as a guide, then flip it over ready to be piped on to. You can also buy templates that are already on silicone mats (which I should do but I am cheap) or print them off the internet, or just pipe freestyle if you are confident. You want to end up with something like this.
I could go on and on about macarons but I have been quite brief in the recipe below. If anything needs clarifying or you have specific questions, do ask. I am also happy to add step by step pictures if they are needed.

Ingredients:

for the shells

200g white caster sugar
75ml hot water (from a hot tap is fine, but boil a kettle if you like)
200g icing sugar
200g ground almonds
25g cocoa powder (this obviously makes the chocolate shells, but leave it out if you want plain ones)
160g egg whites (divided into two bowls of 80g each)
Pinch of salt

for the ganache filling

100g good quality dark chocolate
100g double cream
20g butter
2 tsp orange extract
zest of 1 orange (you can skip this if you want a totally smooth ganache but I like the flavour)
1/2 tsp good sea salt (or more to taste)

to decorate

50g good quality dark chocolate
a mixture of nuts and dried fruit of your choice – whatever you’ve got in the cupboard

Method:

Get out three baking sheets and line them with parchment (or silicone), and create a template if you need one. Pop your water and caster sugar in a saucepan, stir it gently together with a wooden spoon, and put the pan on a low heat to dissolve the sugar (starting with hot water speeds this up). While that’s happening, pop your almonds, icing sugar, and cocoa in a food processor and blitz for 1 minute. Scrape the sides down, then blitz for an additional minute. Pass the sugar and nut powder through a sieve into a large bowl. You will be left with some chunkier almond mixture in the sieve. Chuck this away, don’t force it through – you want smooth macarons.
If your sugar has dissolved into your water (the liquid shouldn’t feel gritty), turn up the heat on your syrup, stick your thermometer in it, and start to bubble it up to 115 degrees celsius (which is your target). Meanwhile, mix 80g of egg white into your sieved almond mixture with a spatula to make a thick, stiff paste. It will look like there isn’t enough liquid, but keep working it and it will come together. Pop the other 80g of egg white into a clean glass bowl with the pinch of salt and whisk to stiff peaks.
When the sugar syrup hits 115 degrees, pour it into the egg whites in a thin stream while still whisking them on high speed. The mixture will become shiny. Once all the sugar syrup is in the whites, keep whisking for five minutes or so while the bowl cools until you have your stiff meringue mix. Whack 1/3 of the meringue mix into the almond paste and beat it in any old how to loosen it.
Now gently fold the remaining meringue into your macaron batter with a spatula. You need to make sure it’s well incorporated and there are no streaks, but the more you mix it the more air will be knocked out, and the looser the batter becomes. If you don’t mix enough, there will be unincorporated meringue and the batter won’t smooth out when piped. If you go too far, it will run everywhere when piped. You want to be able to lift the spatula up and draw a trail of batter across the surface of the bowl and leave a line which stays there for around 10 seconds, but then gradually disappears back into the body of the mixture. People say it is supposed to look like lava but that’s totally unhelpful to me as I don’t know what lava looks like. Go slowly, one fold at a time, and keep checking it. If in doubt, go for under rather than over mixing, as the process of piping the batter will knock more air out too.
When you are happy with your batter, put half of it into your piping bag and begin to pipe out your rounds. I find it easier to only use half the mix at once or the weight of it makes it come out of the bag very fast, which is tricky to pipe. Piping these just takes practice. Give yourself space, pipe directly down rather than at an angle, move quickly and get into a rhythm. Your batter will spread a little so aim for batter circles slightly smaller than your template circles. Once you have finished piping, pick up each tray, lift it a good few inches off the surface, and drop it straight down. Do this a couple of times. You need to knock out any air bubbles that have accumulated. After this is done, leave your macarons to rest for around half an hour. Once rested, they should have a slight skin. Leaving them for longer – up to a couple of hours – shouldn’t hurt them.
While they are resting, make ganache. Break your chocolate into small pieces and pop it in a bowl. Heat your cream in a pan until it’s just steaming and little bubbles are appearing at the edges. Pour it onto the chocolate and leave it alone to sit for a couple of minutes. Beat the mixture until smooth, then beat in the butter, then add your salt and orange extract/ zest to taste. Leave to set in the fridge.
Heat your oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Bake your macaron shells for around 20 minutes. This is obviously dependent on your oven and the size of your macarons, so keep an eye on them. Check after 17 minutes. When your shells are cooked, they should lift off your baking parchment without leaving much residue behind. If they are leaving lots of very sticky mixture, give them more time. If they are completely dry and hollow then they are over-baked (but will still be yummy when filled). When they are done, get them on a cooling rack and once they are cool enough to touch, take them off the parchment.
Get your ganache out the fridge – it might need a couple of minutes at room temperature to become pipeable, depending on how long it’s been in there. Match the shells of your macarons into pairs of similar sizes. Pipe a circle of ganache onto the base shell of each pair and gently sandwich on the top shell.
You are now free to decorate. Here, I dipped a (clean) paintbrush into melted chocolate, brushed the top of each macaron, and then sprinkled cranberries, pistachios, and toasted chopped hazelnuts on top. But go wild – or don’t. They will be lovely plain or with a simple dusting of cocoa powder.

And there you have it. What an incredibly long recipe. It will all be worth it in the end. Really, you should store macarons in the fridge in an air-tight container for 24 hours before eating them to let the shells soften into the filling but my willpower isn’t always up to this. Regardless, they keep very well.

Nanaimo Bars

17th October 201525th October 20152 Comments

There’s some properly iconic architecture in Oxford, so they feel like they have to throw in some ugly buildings to make sure we all appreciate the good stuff. One such building is the Manor Road Building, a blocky, 60s-style concrete and glass box on the edge of the centre of town. It’s not the worst modern building in Oxford, not even that close, but it’s not the sort of place that soothes your aesthetic principles every time you visit. Nevertheless, I have a slight soft spot for it, because it’s where James and I met. And that’s all worked out pretty well.

One thing the MRB does have, besides thousands of right angles, is a cafeteria, for which a woman called Steph makes baked goods of which James is rather fond. This weekend, he asked me if I knew how to make something he particularly liked: ‘these Canadian chocolate things, sort of like tiffin… but nicer… I don’t know what they’re called.’

I did not.

Thankfully, Google is omniscient, and once James had figured out the name of the baked good in question, we were in business. Not only did I not know how to make them, I had never ever heard of them. I’m still not sure how to pronounce their name. Nah-nay-mo bars? Who knows. Since they’re Canadian and I am, technically, a Canadian citizen (with the passport to prove it), I feel almost no guilt for hideously mispronouncing the name and being pretty liberal in my interpretation of the recipe.

These chocolatey bars of goodness are more like tiffin than anything else I know of, but with the addition of a custard icing layer between the biscuit and the chocolate, and a lack of dried fruit within the base. They’re easy, no-bake, and low on prep time – although you do have to wait for them to set as you make each layer, but that just involves bunging them in the fridge. I know fridge cake isn’t quite the thing for nearly-November – I should be baking something warming and scented with apple and cinnamon – but I am time-poor these days and anything you can throw together with odds and ends from the cupboard sounds pretty good to me.

Source: A random recipe from the internet. I’ve adapted it quite a bit.

Notes: Obviously, this recipe is joyfully adaptable, so go forth and bake with whatever is lying around in your cupboards.

Ingredients:

Bottom layer
120g butter, room temperature
50g caster sugar
30g cocoa powder
1 large egg, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g crushed digestive biscuits, hob nobs, or whatever other fairly plain biscuits you have
50g shredded coconut
50g chopped pistachios (I put pistachios in everything because I love them, but go for your favourite nut)

Middle layer
60g butter, room temperature
4 tbsp whole milk
20g custard powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
225g icing sugar

Top layer
150g milk chocolate

Method:

Line a square tin with baking parchment and make sure there’s actually space to put it in your fridge (there’s never any space in my fridge).
Bottom layer first. Put a large saucepan over a low heat and melt the butter, then take it off the hob and quickly stir in the sugar and cocoa. Let it cool a little, then gradually whisk in the beaten egg and pop the pan back onto a low heat and keep stirring the contents for two minutes. It will initially look all split and weird and like a really bad idea, but then it will come together and look like a smooth, glossy, chocolate sauce. Take it back off the heat and stir in your vanilla, crushed biscuits, coconut, and nuts. Smush it evenly into your tin, cover, and chill for an hour.
Then the middle layer. Beat the butter until it’s very smooth and soft in a bowl with an electric whisk, then beat in the milk, custard powder, vanilla, and icing sugar. You should end up with a smooth, relatively thick, buttercream-style icing. You want it thin enough to spread but not so thin that it runs everywhere. Spread it on top of the chocolate base and chill for half an hour.
Finally, unsurprisingly, the top layer. Melt your chocolate however you think best, then quickly spread it over the chilled custard icing and put the whole tin back in the fridge for ten minutes to firm up the chocolate. Then get it out and cut the thing into squares before it becomes rock solid. My kitchen was pretty warm, so I put the bars back into the fridge.

These will live in my freezer and be brought out in sugar-emergencies (i.e. every night).

Raspberry and Passion Fruit Iced Buns – Bake Off Bake Along Week 10

13th October 201511th October 20156 Comments

So here we are. The Great British Bake Off 2015 has finished, and I am limping along into Week 10 of this bake along. I have had triumphs and disasters – thankfully more of the former than the latter – and I am proud to say that I baked every single week.

Did anyone else get a bit teary when they announced that Nadiya was the winner? Incredibly well-deserved, I think. When the final started I initially thought it could go any way, but it wasn’t long before it became clear that she had it in the bag. It’s always so gratifying to see someone really progress and change and grow in confidence: compare Nadiya of the final to Nadiya of Week 1. A metamorphosis.

I’ll miss having the show to watch but, although I’ve enjoyed doing it, I’m glad to be at the end of the bake along. I really don’t have time to do it any more, and although I pushed myself to finish this week it would have been the last one even if it hadn’t been the end of the show.

So, here we are. Raspberry and passion fruit iced buns. They aren’t perfect, and they look pretty messy, but they tasted delicious, and that’s all I really wanted. If anyone else made iced buns this week, I’d be interested to know how you found it. My dough was very, very wet and incredibly difficult to work with, almost impossible to knead. Part of the reason that these buns are chubby and misshapen instead of long, elegant fingers is because the dough was too wet to shape in any meaningful way. But the buns came out light and soft, and I think that’s because it was such a wet dough, so perhaps that’s the price you pay.

Here’s the recipe I used for the dough: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/iced_fingers_34133

I added my own home-made passion fruit curd, and crushed some raspberries to fold through the cream, then finished off the icing with some freeze-dried raspberries.

Thank you so much to Amanda and Ala for running this bake along and inspiring me to get involved. I’ve loved seeing all the other incredible bakes everyone else has made, and it’s been a pleasure to discover lots of new blogs over the course of the last ten weeks.

Until next year, my darlings. À bientôt, j’espère.

Chocolate Soufflés – Bake Off Bake Along Week 9

6th October 20154th October 20156 Comments

Ah, chocolate week. They really made us wait for that one, didn’t they? I feel that, after eight weeks of doing this bake along, I really earned the right to enjoy chocolate week. Also, remember back in the first week when I predicted Marie, Tamal, and Flora for the final? In a way, I didn’t do too badly. Yes, Marie had a shock early exit, but Tamal made it through and Flora was almost there. I am so glad Nadiya is in the final though – I adore her.

Week 9 of the Great British Bake Off was also the week I started commuting to culinary school in London, full time. During the week, I have zero spare minutes, and on the weekend it happened to be my lovely Dad’s birthday, so back down to London we went so that I could get a break from school by, er, cooking dinner for twelve. I thought I might have to give up on the bake along this week simply due to lack of time, but luckily soufflés were my saviour.

I know they are notoriously tricky, but for me, soufflés were a godsend. Fifteen minutes to make the batter, ten minutes in the oven, two minutes to photograph them before they fell and boom, job’s done. You literally have no choice but to make these quickly. I fear that next week I might not be so lucky, as I doubt the final will involve any recipes that you can knock up in half an hour.

I mean, I made these in half an hour, but it was a terrifying half hour. I’ve not made soufflés before, I only had the ingredients for one batch, and I knew that I’d have to get the photographs done within two minutes if I wanted to catch the rise. It was frantic. But I was actually really happy with them in the end. Quick, effective, and delicious. It was basically the exact opposite of the mokatine challenge last week.

The first photo sort of shows the rise I got, although not quite as it was taken about three minutes after I got the soufflés out of the oven and they had started to sink. They were great though. See that bottom photo? That was me ‘digging into the soufflé for photographic effect’ but then I just ate it all. And, um, maybe another one after that. To be thorough.

Once again, I am not going to write out the recipe, partly because I have no time and partly because I didn’t change the recipe one jot. I usually try to put a twist on these bakes, but not for the technical, and certainly not for the first time I made souffles. Here is the recipe I used, although I didn’t even bother with the sauce.

We made it, team! Bring on the final.