Snowy Road

Last Saturday, I made another batch of white chocolate rocky road to give to two friends I was meeting up with for a belated "Christmas" get-together. With the inclusion of red cranberries, and green pistachios this really is a winning, seasonal recipe. You'll see from my "bakin' with berries" blog entry of 30/12/13 that I'd made lots of this to give as gifts over the holidays. I love the appearance of it, and it tastes lovely too! 

Black and White Chocolate Cheescake bars

So, last weekend, I undertook another baking project using the Hummingbird "Cake Days" app on my phone. The recipe was for Black and White Chocolate Cheesecake Bars.

Chocolate Cheesecake fresh from the oven

The recipe is rated as "easy". I would agree that it is fairly straight-forward, but it is quite time-consuming as you have to allow time to chill the dough before baking the base, time to let the cooked base to cool and a couple of hours to let the finished cheesecake chill in the fridge so, whilst it is indeed quite easy to throw together, it's not something you can whip up in an hour. You may have read my thoughts about the frustrations of baking with an app, as opposed to a good, old-fashioned book, in my last blog. Should you choose to make this (using either the Cake Days app, or the book), here are a few observations, tips etc.peculiar to this recipe. I hope they are of some use to you:

• Tip #1: when you come to press the dough into the baking tray, use the heels of your palms to press down if your hands are warm! The dough doesn't stick to your fingers this way.
• Observation/panic #1: When I took the base out of the oven, I was concerned to note that it had risen quite high on the baking sheet, leaving little room for the white chocolate top layer. Also a concern was that it felt undercooked. I was worried that the voluminous, molten mound before me wouldn't set properly and that it would be too liquid in the centre to form a distinct layer. However, I but my trust in the recipe (which I'd followed to the letter), left it to cool and was relieved to note that the centre of the base had deflated (leaving room for the next layer), held its form when lightly prodded, and, happily, appeared firm enough to paste the white chocolate layer on top without disturbing. In the end, I wondered whether this was all intentional as the sunken middle left a helpful lip around the edge of the baking sheet (as if by design).
• Fail #1: I deviated from the recipe in my method (only once!) and attempted to melt some Belgian chocolate chips in the microwave rather than making a bain marie. This backfired horribly - the chocolate seized/curdled and I had to throw it away. Such a waste! Fortunately, the night before I executed this project, I had bulk bough four 100g "milkybars" in Tesco as the had 20% off, and I knew they'd be useful for baking projects of some description.
• Observation/panic #2: When making the white chocolate layer, I feared that I had added the melted chocolate to the Philadelphia, icing sugar and egg mixture when it was still too warm causing the egg to react to the heat and form a grainy texture. I think it should have been a smooth batter. Once the cheesecake had been baked and set, this didn't seem to affect the flavour or texture though.

 

 

All in all, this is a really good recipe. I would say that the bake tastes better and better with age (to a point, obviously!) I also advise letting it stand for a good 20 minutes before eating as you taste the flavours more when it's closer to room temperature. I will definitely be making this again!

 

Bakin' with berries (cont.) and an aside

White Chocolate & Cranberry cookies:
So today is the 11th day of Christmas. I can scarcely believe how quickly the season has passed this year. Or that it's nearly time to take down all the decorations (apparently it is bad luck to have Christmas decorations up beyond 12th night...)

In attempt to squeeze as much Christmas as possible out of the remaining days of my holiday, I decided to do a final bit of festive baking this weekend. Below are a selection of the white chocolate and cranberry cookies that I made using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe that can be found in the Christmas section of the "Cake Days" iPhone app.

They taste really good (even if I do say so myself) with a squidgy, chewy consistency - just as cookies should be. You can detect just a hint of cinnamon when you taste them which, together with the cranberries, gives them they're Christmass-y flavour. I think that, if you packaged them up nicely in a kilner jar with some nice red and white gingham ribbon (or similar), these cookies would make great Christmas gifts. I'll have to bear that in mind for next year. They were very easy to throw together, so you get a lot of reward for not too much effort. That's always good in my book.

Speaking of books, I'm not wholly convinced about using baking apps. Call me old-fashioned, but I definitely prefer to follow a recipe from a book. The problem with using an iPhone/tablet is that it goes into snooze mode between each step, so you end up having to unlock the keypad every few minutes with increasingly buttery/sugary/dough-y fingers. You're also guaranteed to get your device covered in a film of flour/sugar as you weigh out your dry ingredients. Oh well. As you've gathered, I was still pleased with the final outcome, so I'll not grumble too much.

I'd learnt from last week's cranberry biscuit baking experience to always ensure that each unit of batter is as similar in shape and size to its neighbour, and to allow each unit of dough plenty of room to spread. This was useful knowledge, and I reaped the rewards (and felt quite smug) when the cookies came out as uniformly as they did. From yesterday's cookie baking, I also learnt that, if you roll the cookie dough in your hands to create a glossy, smooth ball of dough before baking, you get a better outcome than heaping an untidy mound of rough-edged batter onto your baking sheet.

11 Pipers Piping (on golden flutes):
Ok. Quite a tenuous link with my opening about it being the 11th day of Christmas, but go with it... Although this isn't a berry bake, a fairy cake or, indeed, any kind of foodie confection, I wanted to share it with you as it was a wonderful Christmas discovery for me and, if, like me you're a bit of a sweet-toothed magpie,  it might be something that you'd enjoy too. The discovery in question is Smirnoff Gold - a vodka infused with cinnamon, with 23 carat gold leaf flakes in suspension - how very Christmassy (and how very beautiful), eh?

I first glimpsed this novelty liqueur in the alcohol aisle of my local supermarket whilst buying boozy presents for family this holiday, and I was immediately intrigued and captivated. The perceived decadence of sipping an alcoholic drink containing flecks of pure gold was immediately appealing to me, so I eagerly researched cocktail recipes which feature this product. As the product is, I believe, relatively new on the market, there aren't a great deal of recipes out there yet. The "Apple Bite Gold" (a long drink containing Smirnoff Gold, apple juice and lemonade, and advertised in this rather gruesome advert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p33UdhSVqs) is the most common one you'll come across. I've not yet tried this, but I can whole-heartedly recommend an alternative, called the "Golden flute" to you. I first sampled it on New Year's eve. It's as easy as pie to put together: one part Smirnoff gold to two parts sparkling apple juice (Appletiser) served chilled in a champagne flute. You must, I think, take a moment to watch the gold sparkles dance in the fizz - a mesmerising effect,  before quaffing. It's a multi-sensory experience. In terms of taste, this simple little cocktail slips down *very* easily with the cinnamon flavour slightly off-setting the potentially cloying sweetness of the apple juice. On a different note, the pretty design of the Appletiser bottle (by Eliza Doolittle, of all people) caught my eye - I'm always a sucker for pretty packaging so my new year Golden Flute really was a visual feast.

Bakin' with Berries - just call me Mary (geddit?)

Hi y'all!

Long time, no blog. I have been doing the occasional bit of baking since I last wrote, in October, but I've neglected to upload the results. Sorry about that!

So, recently, I've been baking with berries - cranberries to be specific. After all, "'tis the season", and all that. As well as the two baking projects below, I made some white chocolate Rocky Road, re-branded it as Rudolph's Rocky Runway, and gifted it to loved ones. If you want to find out more about this easy-to-make but delicious confection, see my February 2013 blog entry.

Cranberry biscuits:
Baking-wise, I have been trying a few different things recently, all of which have been a bit of a departure from the "fairy cakes" with which I first began this blog. The results have been mixed, but I'm learning lots from my experiments in the kitchen. Yesterday, I attempted to make some cranberry biscuits following a Good Housekeeping Baking Book recipe which calls for "ground rice" (an ingredient that I have never used before) along with butter, sugar, flour and cranberries. Now, biscuits are seldom as pretty as cupcakes, but mine were particularly mis-shapen! This was, in part, because I positioned some of them too close together on the baking sheet, so they spread, then merged in the oven, and had to be broken to separate. I had also been inconsistent with the width, length and height of each one so some were rather more well done than others. They taste good though, and fortunately none were actually burnt(!)

These fragile little biscuits taste nice and are especially good with a cuppa. They're quite buttery, and they melt in the mouth. The ground rice gives them quite a grainy texture, which is interesting.

I wanted to send some of these to a friend in the post, so I packaged them up in one of the snowflake cellophane bags that I've been using to present to baked goods in this season. I tried to choose biscuits that were fairly uniform in shape and size to send. Fingers cross they get there in one piece!

I'm keeping the remaining "misfits" to be shared over the new year.



Nigella's breakfast bars:
Of these breakfast bars, Nigella writes "I'm addicted to these, and so is everyone I give them to", and it's true - they are addictive. I make them quite regularly now as they are super-easy to throw together, they keep really well, and people go nuts for them (sorry, I can never resist a pun). I made them for my Year 11 class who, with the exception of the girl with a sesame seed allergy(!), loved them. Indeed one of the students requested the recipe and made a batch to take on her D of E expedition. A colleague of mine also requested the recipe. I referred both individuals to the following web-page: http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/breakfast-bars-55

If I'm totally honest, when I initially tasted my first ever batch of these, I was momentarily disappointed. I think I was expecting them to taste like flapjacks, but, whilst they contain rolled oats, they don't contain any honey or syrup so they're quite a different outcome. My dad and I always joke that the legendary milk chocolate Rocky Road that I make (see my February 2013 blog entry) is, in fact, a fruit bar (as it contains a small amount of dried fruit), but these breakfast bars really are, I think, more akin to those "health bars" that you can buy than (though much nicer) than a really naughty indulgence (which is how I justify having one, sometimes two in a day). As well as porridge oats, these bars contain cranberries, mixed seeds, shredded coconut, and peanuts. Condensed milk (a favourite of Nigella's and a complete revelation to me) is used as the sweetening and binding agent. Now that I've made these half a dozen times, I'm thinking that, in future, I might experiment with creating some variations on the original recipe. I like the idea of using dried cherries and maybe some different varieties of nuts in there. These bars are a great breakfast-on-the-go and they really do keep hunger at bay until lunchtime.

Halloween Pumpkin Cupcakes with two-tone orange 'n' white frosting... (AKA Unwittingly pretty peach cupcakes)

With All Souls Day looming, I thought I'd put my Libby's canned pumpkin to good use and make some spiced, autumnal cupcakes. These turned out well - really moist with a subtle chai flavour resulting from the mixture of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg (yes, I made the same sponge batter a year ago in November).

In terms of decorating, I planned to use Betty Crocker's cream cheese frosting (rather than making my own) to create a two-tone orange and white piped effect (to give the desired Halloween-y feel). I mixed my own shade of "orange" by combining using a red and yellow food dye but the result was a delicate peach hue. Gorgeous but not very Halloween-y - note the contrasts in shades of orange below!

I must say, Betty Crocker's frosting isn't a patch on home-made cream-cheese frosting. It's overly-sweet, somewhat artificial tasting and rather looser in consistency than I am used to. I have another couple of tubs to get through, as they were on offer (3 for 2) which incentivised me to bulk buy, but going forward, I will definitely be making my own frosting. That said, I appreciated the ease of being able to simply spoon the product straight into the piping bag without first dispersing icing sugar all over my kitchen and living space as is customary with making one's own from scratch (it literally goes everywhere, doesn't it?!)

So... over all, even though these cakes didn't come out quite as intended, I did like the two-tone effect, and I plan to try this piping technique to create roses on top of some future cupcakes. Watch this space...

Classic Victoria Sponge

I've been baking a lot of Victoria sponges recently using a brilliant, all-in-one recipe by Fiona Cairns. It's a fuss-free, seemingly fool-proof recipe that calls for golden caster sugar plus the standard self-raising flour, eggs, soft butter, baking powder and vanilla extract, and it produces a lovely, moist, light-as-air sponge. Aesthetically, the humble sponge sandwich isn't much to look at so I've generally not bothered snapping my efforts these last few weeks, but this cake was a gift for a friend so I went to a bit more trouble and cut out the letters of her name for a stencil effect. Good job I took this photo actually - I dropped the cake tin with Vicky inside as I left the house on the morning I was due to deliver the surprise. She wasn't too badly damaged although the letters had lost a bit of their definition. The cake was, nevertheless, well-received :-)

Rocky Road to Romance

White chocolate rocky road - a new favourite!

"The course of true love never did run smooth", "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach..." - there are many proverbs which make rocky road the perfect valentine's day treat IMHO ;-) For this valentine's day, I made classic rocky road (using the recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook) which has been a real hit with every man whose been lucky enough to have ne make it for him. I also made something a bit different - a variation on this classic - white chocolate rocky road made from melted white choc, cranberries, pistachio nuts, ginger nut biscuits, coconut and mini marshmallows. It tastes divine! Really quite different from the milk chocolate version, but no less delicious. I will definitely be making it again. It would make a nice Christmas gift, particularly if you packaged it up nicely in snowflake-patterned cellophane food bags. I packaged up my bite-size rocky road pieces in these cute bags with pink and red hearts on which made them look very festive. The recipients, loved ones who have been very kind to me in the last couple of months, were very grateful indeed. And check out my vintage china! I got a full set of cups, saucers, sandwich plates and a cake plate from a charity shop in the centre of Cambridge for £19.95. Bargain, eh? The delicate green colour of the crockery doesn't show up brilliantly in all my pictures - I think the flash has bleached out the subtle colours, as it so often does, but hopefully you get the idea. A belated Happy St Valentine's day to you all!