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Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 5

14th May 201615th May 20161 Comment

So, everyone has a base carbohydrate, right? Apart from people on paleo or Atkins (is Atkins still a thing?), I suppose. But whether it’s pasta, bread, potatoes, or rice, I think most of us have a favourite substance for comforting after cold days, for bulking things out, for soaking up flavours, for making life a little bit nicer. For me, that carbohydrate is pasta. I could eat it by the tureen-full simply with butter or cheese and a little seasoning. I am still, after four years of student-dom, far from sick of packaged dried spaghetti with pesto from a jar. So learning to make ever-fancier pasta at Leiths is cause for celebration from this quarter.

On Monday, we made crab, prawn, and scallop tortellini, served with chives in a prawn bisque sauce. What’s not to love, really? Well, actually, I didn’t massively love grinding the beautiful scallops down into a mousseline, but the actual act of making tortellini is immensely satisfying. It all made for a very delicious and luxurious lunch.

In the afternoon we were visited by David Bailey from Wholefood Heaven. David specialises in vegetarian food, and has a very interesting background, having made the leap from being a restaurant chef to running a very successful street food van. I am no stranger to working in food vans, and it was lovely to hear his perspective on the industry. Turns out, though, that even fancy renowned foodie vegetarians still miss bacon and have nut roast at Christmas. Everything he made was delicious, and I might even have been convinced to give tofu another go.

Tuesday’s cooking session looked simple on the timetable, and then somehow turned out to be surprisingly tiring. I’m not sure why. Actually, wait, I am sure why: making sabayon by hand. Whisking furiously over a hot stove with a manual whisk surrounded by fifteen other people doing the exact same thing for twenty minutes. It’s a bit spirit-crushing. My outlook was slightly improved by the fact that the elderflower sabayon was made to be served with cinnamon maple French toast with balsamic strawberries and baby basil, which made a wonderful early lunch. My sabayon, despite twenty minutes of vigorous hand-whisking over heat, still did not have enough volume to it, but to be quite honest I was not physically capable of whisking it any more, so flat it had to be.

The afternoon brought a restorative chocolate dem with Ansobe. I love working with (read: eating) chocolate, so it was pretty much my happy place, and I only wish I had the equipment to re-produce all the beautiful chocolates at home.

Wednesday morning saw the cumulation of three days hard work: we finally baked the croissant dough we had been working on all week. As I mentioned in the last blog, croissants are not an endeavour for the faint-hearted, but like most things of these nature, they are incredibly satisfying. My croissants browned incredibly quickly in the unreliable gas oven and are thus looking a bit more bronzed than I would have liked, but I was praised for their perfect bake and lamination, so they were very tasty even though they won’t be winning any croissant beauty contests. That was also the morning we shucked oysters in order to deep-fry them and serve them with a citrus mayonnaise and pickled vegetables. I have never been particularly talented in the oyster-shucking department and was slightly worried about stabbing myself in the hand, but managed to get through unscathed and even avoided any deep-frying disasters, only to sustain a burn on my arm when the oven door swung back and caught me unexpectedly. It’s the little things. I now have a distinct oven door lock mark burn on my wrist, because I love Leiths and its ovens so dearly I’ve had to brand myself to prove it.

In the afternoon, Michael gave us a guided tour through the wonderful world of terrines, with a focus on the use of fois gras. Terrines are great because you can make them in advance and they don’t have to be too tricky (although they can be) but they can look all fancy and professional and you can pretend you know what you’re doing. Or at least, Michael’s terrines looked fancy and professional. I can’t promise the same of my attempt next week.

Thursday was another all day health and safety session, so not much to say there, but Friday was an all day cooking session. We seem to be having all day cooking sessions every week these days, and they vary. Some are fun opportunities to work on something more involved in the kitchen, some a gruelling slog with multiple service times which leave me fit only for lying on the floor and moaning quietly. I was worried this week might be one of the latter as I heard from the group that had done it first that they had lost the will to live by the end of it. It was definitely a long day but I was really happy with some of the food I produced. Above is a seared tuna salad with fennel, asparagus, and radish, and a mixed vegetable vinaigrette. Fresh tuna steak is one of my favourite foods in the world, so getting to cook and eat it in class felt like utter luxury, even if I did need a little more colour on the crust. Below is a dish of pan-fried sweetbreads on a pomme purée with baby leeks and carrots, as well as peas and a Madeira jus. I get the feeling I am in the minority in the class here, but I love sweetbreads, and thought the dish was delicious – I was even praised for my presentation, and believe me, that doesn’t happen often.

Finally, we finished with a raspberry-themed dessert: pâte sablée biscuits and crumb, served with raspberry coulis, raspberry sorbet, and fresh raspberries. You can perhaps see that I was getting a bit tired by this point – I was aiming for abstract arty presentation and ended up with a bit of a mess – but I ate everything on that slate and the ensuing sugar rush was very welcome indeed.

We’ve got a busy week next week, with a big portfolio deadline, a field trip to a vineyard, and our WSET exams (gulp), along with an all day cooking session. It really does feel like we’re in the advanced term now, with our food getting ever more complex, and the real world of post-Leiths employment is right around the corner. If anyone wants to hire me as their private chef and fancies living on a diet of tuna steak and raspberry sorbet, please get in touch…

Easter Brownies Two Ways

27th March 201627th March 20164 Comments

Childhood Easter egg hunts are the very stuff of dreams, no? They’re one of those experiences that are utterly magical when you’re small, and it’s the sort of magic that, sadly, cannot be replicated as an adult. Never again will dashing around the garden, crazy high on sugar and looking for your next hit, basket clutched in sticky hands, hold the same delight. Now I am unlikely to run for anything unless being chased by something genuinely dangerous, and I have the means to simply go out and buy chocolate of my own accord. These developments are welcome, but they sadly come at the expense of the exhilarating Easter egg hunts I once knew.

Just a quick post today with a very simple idea: Easter brownies for kids and adults. I love brownies and I go on about them on here all the time, but so far I have only posted one recipe, so now it’s time for me to start slowly expanding my archives. Here, I’ve taken one basic brownie recipe, inspired by the standard in my Leiths textbook, and have suggested two completely different variations. For kids, a lighter chocolate, pieces of toffee, and an assortment of bright eggs. For adults, rich and dark 85% chocolate, homemade marzipan, cherries, a hefty dollop of kirsch, and some white chocolate drizzle. I mean, in theory, one was for kids and one was for adults, but there’s nothing to stop adults eating the kid version, as James proved when he took them into the office. Er, maybe kids shouldn’t eat the adult version though, because they’ve got quite a bit of booze in them.

So it’s just a quick post today, because I have eaten a horrifying and wonderful amount of chocolate and I need to go and have a lie down. Whatever you are up to on this Sunday which is both sunny and stormy (somehow), I hope you’re having a lovely time and enjoying some shameless decadence.

Source: My base recipe is adapted from the one in the Leiths book, which I use on a daily basis.

Notes: This recipe will work best in a 20cm x 20cm square tin. They keep very well and freeze excellently (simply zap a frozen brownie in the micowave for 30 seconds in a chocolate deprivation emergency and enjoy a gooey treat). I always undercook my brownies so that they are fudgy and delicious and, when hot from the oven, almost spoonable, but feel free to leave yours in the oven for an extra 5 minutes if you are looking for something a little bit more robust.

The method is the same for both versions, with slightly different additions.

Ingredients:

200g chocolate (60% for the kid version, 85% for the adult version)
140g butter
225g golden caster sugar
2 large eggs, plus 1 extra yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp salt
90g plain flour for kid version, 120g plain flour for adult version

For kid version

2x 90g packets of little eggs (I have used Cadbury and Galaxy here, but anything will work), half left whole and half chopped roughly
3 Creme Eggs cut in half (I find a knife dipped in hot water best for this)
50g toffee pieces

For adult version

100g marzipan, cut into roughly 2cm chunks (I made my own but shop bought is fine – let me know if you want a home made marzipan recipe and I am happy to post one)
4 tbsp kirsch
100g pitted cherries, chopped roughly (I used tinned here)
50g white chocolate

Method:

Break your chocolate into pieces and chop your butter into rough cubes and place them both in a glass or metal bowl over a pan of gently simmering water and leave them to melt, stirring occasionally. Preheat your oven to 180C/160C fan/ gas 4. Grease your square tin. I line the base too, because, you know, belt and braces, but if you have a good non-stick tin or one with a removable base then you can get away with not doing that.
While your chocolate and butter melt, mix your eggs with your extra yolk and your vanilla, and weigh out your sugar. Chop and prep whichever additional ingredients you are using. When your chocolate and butter have completely melted, beat in your sugar (I use an electric hand whisk), followed by your eggs. Sift the flour and salt over the mixture and then beat that in too. For the kid version, stir through some chopped and whole eggs and half your toffee pieces. For the adult version, stir through your cherries, marzipan, and kirsch. Pour the mixture into the tin, smooth the surface, and bake for 25-30 mins or until done to your satisfaction. You want a crisp and crackly top, but remember they will firm up a bit as they cool.
For the kid version, grab your brownies out of the oven 5 minutes before they are due to be done and press the Creme Egg halves and remaining mini eggs into the surface of the mixture, then continue to bake for 5 mins until they are slightly melted into the surface. For the adult version, melt the white chocolate while the brownies are cooking and let them cool for five minutes before drizzling it over the finished product.

Chocolate Vortex Muffins

1st March 20166th March 20163 Comments

This is a ridiculous name for a recipe, and yet it’s what I have always called these muffins, and now, try as I might, I can’t seem to think of another name for them which works for me. I think that once you have moved past chocolate, and double chocolate, and triple chocolate, you are not really supposed to start calling something quadruple chocolate: the thing has surpassed all the normal chocolate categories and become something else. If we can think of a vortex as something regarded as drawing into its power everything that surrounds it, then the title of this post doesn’t seem so odd, at least to me – I was certainly drawn into the power of these muffins and somehow ate three in a row without really thinking. It also sort of reminds me of one of my favourite things on the whole entire world wide web.

I feel like muffins have been slightly forgotten in the cupcake craze of the last decade, which makes me sad. I love a cupcake, as evidenced by the many cupcake recipes on this blog, but I still have a great deal of time for the lesser-spotted muffin, delicious as they are unadorned with pretty frosting and edible glitter. Muffins are solid, dependable, a vehicle for all manner of loveliness. Their pleasing heft and straight-from-the-oven gooey warmth should not be underestimated.

Baked white chocolate is a wonderful thing. I know a lot of chocolate lovers who spurn the white stuff, insisting that it’s ‘not real chocolate’ and is vastly inferior to the stuff with actual cocoa solids. While I know they are technically right, I don’t mind white chocolate – although it’s certainly not my favourite – and would quite happily gnaw away on the better quality varieties. However, white chocolate becomes truly lovely when baked. I don’t know why (maybe because the sugars caramelise?), but it melts more quickly than milk or dark chocolate, turns a beautiful toasty colour, and develops a surprising depth of flavour.

I feel honour-bound to admit that I was making these in a great rush, and initially forgot to add the milk. I looked at my dry, lumpy batter in confusion for a moment before remembering, and quickly dashed in the milk, swearing and beating the mixture rapidly. The muffins came out absolutely fine, so I think it’s fair to say the batter is pretty forgiving.

Notes: These muffins are best when slightly under-baked in the centre, when they become gooey, volcanic, and irresistible, so do err on the side of caution and don’t leave them in the oven forever. They do keep fairly well, though, and are very hearty and chunky beings. You should get 12 good size muffins from this recipe.

I like to make these in the tulip muffin cases in the photos – you can get them from any supermarket, or even fold them yourself out of greaseproof paper if you are crafty – but obviously these are not essential and feel free to use whatever muffin cases you have kicking about.

I tend to keep back a few bits of chocolate from the main mix and push them into the top of the muffins once the mixture has been divided between cases, just before baking, to get the full effect of the glorious bronzed white chocolate.

Source: I got this recipe off the internet years and years ago and saved it to my hard-drive, and have since played about with it a bit. I’m afraid I have no idea where it was from originally, so if you do recognise it then please let me know.

Ingredients:

175g good dark chocolate, 70% cocoa solids
325g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
70g cocoa powder – not the drinking chocolate stuff, proper cocoa powder
125g light brown soft sugar
365ml whole milk
100ml vegetable oil or other flavourless oil such as corn oil
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
125g milk chocolate – either break a bar into pieces, or use chocolate buttons, which work well here
125g white chocolate – as above, buttons work well

Method:

Get your dark chocolate melting slowly in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water. Preheat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ gas 4. Line your muffin tin with paper cases. Sieve your dry ingredients – flour, baking powder, and cocoa powder – into your largest bowl and stir in the sugar. Make a well in the middle.
Measure your milk and oil into a measuring jug, pop in your eggs and vanilla, and whisk it all up to combine. Slowly pour the wet ingredients into the well of the dry ingredients, stirring to combine until evenly mixed. Working quickly now, fold in your melted dark chocolate and your pieces of milk and white chocolate.
Divide your mixture equally between muffin cases and bake for 17-2o minutes, or until risen and mostly set but slightly gooey in the middle. Cool on a wire rack, or shove muffins into your mouth hot, by the handful.

Leiths: Intermediate Term, Week 4

6th February 20166th February 20162 Comments

To kick off Week 4, we were visited by two very charming men who dismantled a large amount of cow for our learning pleasure. Also a pig. And a lamb.

It was awesome.

Peter Holmes and Graham Portwine are two retired butchers who have a wealth of fascinating knowledge regarding all things meat, which they were kind enough to share with us. It was a lovely way to spend a Monday: being gently eased into a new week spending hours drooling over unusual and premium cuts of meat and watching expert butchers turning an intimidating carcass into a hundred viable dinner options with consummate skill. I still cannot be completely relied upon to accurately butcher a chicken, so I gazed on with envious admiration as they delineated joints I had never even heard of. There was a hacksaw and about six different types of knife involved. They sold off all the meat at cost price at the end of the day and I went home with a rucksack full of bavette steak, shin beef, and Barnsley chops.

It was a good job we had a relaxing Monday, because we needed it to gear up to Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday, it was our group’s turn to do the Cooking for 50 challenge. For context, I am going to pause briefly and explain how the teaching structure at Leiths works, because I don’t think I ever have before – do skip the next paragraph if you’re not interested or you already know.

There are roughly 100 students in a Diploma year group at Leiths, and we are divided in half into the White group and the Blue group. One week the White group will cook in the mornings and have dems in the afternoons while the Blue group does the opposite, and then the next week the schedule switches so that the White group are having dems in the mornings and cooking in the afternoons, and so on. Within each half of the year there are three classes of sixteen students, organised roughly by age, named A, B, and C. So I happen to be in White and in the middle group in terms of age, thus I am in class White B. Each class has a class teacher who looks after the class as a whole in terms of all the administrative issues, marking collation and progress reports and the like, and who also leads their own class for cooking sessions the majority of the time. So this year, both B classes belong to Heli, who is my class teacher. We usually have Heli for two or three cooking sessions a week, and the others are led by other teachers at Leiths who aren’t responsible for a specific class but take classes (seemingly at random) when they’re not being handled by the designated class teacher.

Back with me? Lovely.

So, the Cooking for 50 challenge involves groups of four people cooking for 50 people, i.e. the other half of the year group. I cooked with three fellow students from White B for the whole of the Blue group: we had the morning to make them lunch. It was so hectic that I did not take a single picture, so instead have a screenshot of our Mexican-themed menu.

I did not sit down or eat or drink anything from 9am to 2pm while we cooked and, later, cleaned up. It was manic and exhausting. I think (I hope) that the food went down reasonably well, and I am so pleased to have the challenge behind us. The upside of the whole thing is that we, the White group, are fed by teams of students from the Blue group throughout the term, so we have been the lucky recipients of many different and delicious lunches.

Due to the vagaries of timetabling, Wednesday (when I could really have used a nice sit-down) was an all day cooking session. With no dem in which to relax, absorb information, and be fed, we were in the kitchens all day and made (deep breath): steamed steak and kidney suet puddings; slow-roast pork belly with choy sum, mange toute, and a peanut chilli dressing; wholemeal beer bread, and Arnold Bennett omelettes glazed with hollandaise sauce. We were also supposed to be making stock, but it was decided that there simply was not enough hob space.

To be honest, I was worried about all day cooking right off the back of Cooking for 50, but I needn’t have been. The kitchen gods seemed to be smiling upon me, and somehow the session felt almost relaxed. Admittedly, this might have been because anything would have felt relaxed after Tuesday’s madness, but you take what you can get. I would also like to point out that the pudding pictured above wasn’t actually served like that: I just forgot to get a photo before the teacher cut into it for marking.

By the time Wednesday drew to a close I felt like so much had happened that it may as well have been Friday. The universe doesn’t really work like that though, so back into the kitchens we went. Everyone seemed pretty tired and there’s a nasty bug going around that meant there were a few people absent, so it was a rather languid morning really. We made our first attempts at an Espagnole sauce (think really, really fancy and time-consuming gravy), pastry cases from pâte sucrée, and vanilla soufflés. What’s that you say? We seem to be making an awful lot of soufflés lately? Why yes, I concur. This was our third or fourth attempt in recent weeks, and I am happy to say that mine was deemed to be a good effort this time around. I’m not going to pretend that’s due to any particular skill on my part though: the complete randomness of soufflé achievement does seem to have little to do with technique in my case. It must be almost entirely determined by karma or fate or star-signs or something.

In the afternoon we had our first normal dem for ages, after a few days of unusual timetabling, and it was a good’un. Led by Heli, we explored fresh pasta and shellfish (yes, it does seem like quite a random combination, but I love both of these things so I’m not complaining) and were shown examples of the perfect pasta dough, alongside examples of what happens when the dough becomes too wet, too greasy, too dry and so on. We were also shown how to properly prepare squid, followed by the serving of some deep fried salt and pepper squid that was so delicious people were essentially elbowing others out of the way to get samples. We finished with matelote, a classic fish stew made typically with eel and red wine, that lots of people were unsure about but which actually turned out to be delicious. Well, I thought so anyway.

Above, you have a rare action shot from Friday’s session. We’re not really supposed to take pictures during cooking time, but I had just managed to flip my potato rosti over – after much worrying – and I was so proud of it sitting there all golden and delicious in its butter-bath that I couldn’t resist taking a quick snap. The rosti was served with a veal steak, green beans, the dreaded turned carrots, and a Madeira sauce, and made a very satisfactory lunch. We also used our pastry cases from the day before to make chocolate tarts topped with honeycomb. My pastry lacked some finesse (I am going to have to put ‘lacking in finesse’ on my CV for the sake of honesty), but the tart itself was so tasty that I didn’t particularly mind.

Finally, we ended the week with a wine session. Friday afternoon is the perfect time to do a wine tasting, and this time we were particularly lucky as we were visited by Nancy Gilchrist, who took us through an introduction to the art of food and wine pairing. We sampled six different wines with varying combinations of the food on the very odd little tasting plate you can see below. There’s brie, blue cheese, dill, a strawberry, apple, grissini, basil. dark chocolate, salt, curry sauce, and black pepper. We like to have all the bases covered.

Despite the hectic start to this week, the last few days were lovely, and I really feel like I have settled into term now and am completely used to the rhythm of school. Now I’d best go and practice my vegetable-turning skills like I promised I would so that I don’t end up destroying any more carrots next week.

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.

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.

Leiths: Foundation Term, Week 6

7th November 20158th November 20151 Comment

Before I started at Leiths, I basically hadn’t done any sustained exercise since being on the netball B team in primary school in 1999. I have attempted several different sports – running, swimming, cycling, walking, yoga, badminton, pilates, lifting weights, dancing, roller derby, ice skating, working out at the gym – and every time I try to exercise, the universe steers me away by making horrible things happen to me. You think I am exaggerating, but I’m not. This is neither the time nor the place, but I could tell you many harrowing stories that end with me in tears, disgrace, and/or hospital.

So, six weeks ago when I started at Leiths, I wasn’t in great physical shape. However, what I lack in core strength and lung volume I make up for in wilful, blind, stubborn determination. I essentially thought I could force my body to cycle ten miles a day while carrying heavy loads, on top of being on my feet all the time and never quite having enough sleep, by just… not giving up. This sounds stupid and naive, but up until this week it was actually going pretty well.

Unfortunately, I have now crashed. Previously unable to sleep in public places, I have now become one of those people who is instantly unconscious on the morning train and has to be politely prodded awake by wary fellow commuters when we reach London, whereupon I smush my face into the train window and moan ‘Nooooo, five more minutes.’ If I sit on the sofa when I get home, I fall asleep. I find my eyes sliding closed while waiting at traffic lights on my bike. I frequently come to a complete standstill in the school kitchens, unable to remember what I am supposed to be doing. Luckily, my name is written on all my aprons, right over the school logo, or I’d probably forget who and where I am all the time too.

Correspondingly, my cooking this week started out pretty mediocre. On Monday we had a day of delicious joy, cooking chocolate mousse, blackberry pavlova, and sirloin steak. I love all of these things. However, I managed to over-fold my mouse and over-cook my steak. This last was particularly galling as I like my meat blue, and think over-cooking steak is a very sad thing indeed. However, we were instructed to cook the steaks medium-rare, and I cooked mine for two minutes per side, which turned out to be a massive over-shoot. The picture below shows stages of steak cooking, starting off with blue and progressing up to incinerated. I like my steak at a 1 one this scale, but for class was trying to cook it to a 3, but ended up at a 4. This is sort of like the unhelpful pain scale in hospitals, yes? But more delicious.

Tuesday was another disaster day. Due to general exhaustion and my brain not being in gear, I cut the lamb for my spiced stew into pieces which were too small. That’s a mistake you can’t really undo once it’s done, so I had to get on with the long process of assembling and cooking the stew (which carried on into the next day), knowing that I’d done something fundamentally wrong at the start. We then had to make fresh marzipan for scratch to cover our Christmas cakes, which was surprisingly tricky. Actually, not ‘surprisingly’, more like ‘expectedly’. I thought it would be hard, and it was. Marzipan is delicate and prone to cracking, and so when I tried to cover my cake with it the whole sheet started to fall apart and I had to madly seal up cracks as quickly as possible, without over-working it. It was not a pretty sight. Still, the Christmas cake has been drowned in Calvados, so how bad can it really be?

On Wednesday, I slightly redeemed myself. I finished off the stew and it actually, against all the odds, tasted good. I also made autumn crumble with my table partner, which was pretty delicious. I know this because I wolfed the whole thing down cold for lunch in the dem room out of tupperware with a plastic fork, because I missed my lunch break while trying to adjust a costings spreadsheet. My life: all glamour.

I was reliably informed that the fruit juices bubbling up from under a crumble topping make it look ‘more real’, and thus they are acceptable.

Our Thursday session began with us being reprimanded for how slow we’d been in our Wednesday session. Correspondingly, in our Thursday session we worked so quickly that we were done by 11.30am rather than 1pm, and ended up making choux pastry for Friday a day in advance so that we had something to do. That came after pork tenderloin in Marsala sauce with kale, and pizzaiola sauce for Friday. I surprised myself by making a good Marsala sauce and cooking my pork well. The pork-cooking was a complete fluke and I had no idea it was cooked well until Ansobe cut into it, but shh, they will never know. (I am seriously assuming that Leiths staff will never read this blog and realise what an incompetent fool I am).

By Friday, I was not the only one rendered insensible by exhaustion. Sensing this, perhaps, Leiths gave us what I thought of as the ‘children’s birthday party day’: cooking pizza and profiteroles in the morning, followed by a jelly and ice cream dem in the afternoon. Now, please don’t hate me, but I tend to be a bit lukewarm about pizza. I worked in a travelling food van with a wood-fired pizza oven over the summer, and that produced absolutely amazing pizza which was a joy to eat. As a general rule, though, pizza doesn’t particularly excite me. I tend to think that unless you are getting the absolute best stuff available, it doesn’t taste that amazing. Takeaway pizza and restaurant pizza is usually disappointing, and I’d always go for Thai, Indian, Chinese, or pretty much any other option over ordering a pizza delivery. Unfortunately, making my own pizza didn’t change my mind. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I totally ate it all, but without a proper pizza oven and the authentic techniques, it did not even slightly rock my world. Profiteroles, on the other hand, will always be a source of delight.

The jelly and ice cream dem with Hélène was a lovely, gentle way to ease out of the week. I haven’t done a huge amount of work with setting agents and I found the theory portion of the dem really interesting – learning about powdered and leaf gelatine, what the different gradings mean, what agar agar and rennet actually are, how vegetarian setting agents are made and so on – and it definitely inspired me to be less afraid of making things like panna cotta and made me lust after an ice cream machine all over again. We got to taste lots of things, my favourite of which was a completely delicious Perry jelly with caramelised pears. And I don’t even like cider. I might even make it at home and post the recipe on here if I ever get an hour free (perhaps in 2018).

I have now decided to work through the dems backwards to Monday in a completely chronologically illogical way. Thursday’s dem was shellfish, which was brilliant for me because I love all fish. Phil slightly scared me by warning us that having shellfish poisoning feels a lot like dying and thus it is vital to make sure your gastropods, cephalopods, and bivalves (little bit of mollusc definition lingo for you there) are very fresh and of good quality, lest you kill someone. Sadly, Oxford is incredibly bloody landlocked and I don’t know any good fishmongers around here, but if I ever find one then I will be making the mussel recipe we tasted in the dem because it was great.

Wednesday’s dem was delivered by Angela Malik, who came to visit us at Leiths to teach us about Indian cooking. I knew that Indian cooking is very regional, but I hadn’t understood before what the classic hallmarks of northern, southern, and eastern Indian food are, and it was incredibly interesting to learn about how different the cuisine is in various areas of the country and why. Tuesday’s dem was delivered by Michael and was on meat preparation and cooking. Against really stiff competition, I think it was one of my favourite dems so far in terms of the food we got to taste. Everything was delicious and I wanted to go home and try every single recipe, particularly the chicken with forty cloves of garlic. Although, really, I don’t have the patience for such things and would probably end up doing seventeen and calling it a day. Finally, we began the week (still with me?) with a dem on sugar syrups with Ansobe. I’ve done a bit of sugar work before, but nothing very technical – I tend to make dry caramel by simply dumping a pile of caster sugar into a pan, whacking it on a really high heat and hoping for the best. Unsurprisingly, this approach has given me mixed results in the past. On Monday we learned about the nine stages of sugar syrup, and how to make caramel safely without sustaining extensive and hideously painful sugar syrup burns. Always useful.

Week 7 approacheth, and I have blistered feet, burned knuckles, and lots of choux pastry in tupperware. Onwards.

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).

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.

Egg Yolk Chocolate Chip Cookies

14th September 201514th September 20151 Comment

I have an extensive Amazon wishlist. Once upon a time it was full of all manner of things, but now it’s essentially just cookbooks. The problem with this is that cookbooks tend to cost quite a bit more than your standard paperback novel, and so buying three or four in a blinded, lustful daze can easily set you back a bit of money. So I have to ration myself, and only buy one now and then. Or when there’s something I really want, obviously.

In bookshops it’s even worse. I have to actively avoid the cooking section in most of them, because I never walk away without something new. They’re so tempting, cookbooks: beautiful and tactile, heavy and reassuring, full of delicious things. I am a big book lover in general and have curated a huge collection of fiction since childhood, but cookbooks are a different thing entirely. A novel is full of mysterious, hidden promise, and you don’t know if it will deliver until you have invested some time in it. A quick flick through a cookbook will reveal its bright offerings, and you can know in two minutes whether or not it’s a tome you want to cook from.

I’d had my eye on Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery for a while, so when our lovely wedding florist mentioned that she’d bought it and it was excellent, that was all the encouragement I needed.

The book definitely passed the ‘flick through test’. When I first get a cookbook, I tend to sit down and mark up all the recipes I want to make from it immediately. In The Violet Bakery, there were literally dozens. Inviting, interesting, delicious-looking things. Raspberry and star anise crumble muffins. Apricot kernel upside down cake. Wild blackberry tart.

And the first thing I made from the book was a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

I mean, I like chocolate chip cookies, but they are a humble delight and I certainly wouldn’t say they were my favourite thing to bake, or anywhere near the most enticing thing in this book. But the recipe called for three egg yolks, and I just happened to have three egg yolks sitting around in the fridge, waiting to be used up (all the whites had gone on macaron-related escapades). And since I had everything else I needed for this recipe in the cupboard, I thought it was worth a go.

Source: As above, the glorious cookbook from The Violet Bakery, by Claire Ptak. I really would advise you to go and buy it if you are at all interested in happiness and joy.

Notes: I only made a couple of minor tweaks to this recipe. This is very, very unlike me, but I have actually dialled the salt down slightly, because I felt that it was too much, and increased the vanilla because I thought it needed to be a clearer note. Also unlike me, but I recommend using a good quality milk chocolate, rather than dark as suggested. As you can see, I made them with a mixture of milk and dark chocolate, and I found the dark chocolate too overwhelming here.

I found these cookies were actually a bit better on the second day – they softened a bit and became more chewy than crispy, which is my preference.

Ingredients:

250g butter, softened
200g light brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract or, if you have it on hand, vanilla bean paste
3 large egg yolks
325g plain flour
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
250g milk chocolate chips, or a chocolate bar broken into chunks

Method:

Line a baking tray which will fit in your freezer with parchment paper – I had to bake these cookies in batches because I can only fit one baking tray in my freezer at a time. In your largest bowl, beat the butter and both types of sugar together with an electric mixer until just combined and even, then beat in the vanilla and egg yolks – all at once is fine.
In another bowl, sieve your flour, salt, and bicarbonate together. Add this to the butter mixture along with the chocolate and mix until combined – it will be a stiff, firm dough.
Using a small ice cream scoop, scoop the dough into cookies and pop them on your cold tray. Freeze for an hour, or up to a month. I could only do half at a time because my freezer is absolutely full of stuff, and I couldn’t fit all the dough on one baking sheet, so I put the rest of the dough in the fridge while I was waiting for the first cookies to chill in the freezer.
Heat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ gas 4, and take the cookies out of the freezer. Make sure they are well spaced on the tray as they will expand massively when baked. Let them rest at room temperature for five to ten minutes while the oven heats up, and then pop them in. Bake for 15-20 minutes (it was 16 in my oven), until the outsides of the cookies are baked and crispy, but the insides still feel soft and underbaked. Let them rest on the counter to firm up for at least 10 minutes.