Linzer Cookies - Home Sweet Home Bake Along (3/100)

Week three of this 2 year adventure that Pigling Bland and I have started on. (Aside - do you think it's okay that I call her Pigling? She has self-styled as such in the bio of her blog, but in real life I'd certainly only ever call her Gill, hmmm.)

Anyway, a fairly standard cookie recipe, with a fairly ordinary method of manufacture, (cream butter and sugar, add rest of ingredients, chill, roll, chill, cut, bake,) in contrast with the last two bakes from Home Sweet Home.

I did ignore the instructions slightly, because I thought these looked better with a smaller centre cut out - the instructions advised one about twice as big, but I preferred the semi-jammy-dodger type look.

These are quite big biscuits really, about twice the size of your normal jammy dodger, but standard linzer cookie size (based on my somewhat limited experience - the coffee shop where I used to work sold them, but at £1.50 each I was somewhat reluctant to buy one...)

Linzer cookies have a spiced biscuit dough, which contains ground almonds, and are generally filled with raspberry or strawberry jam. I substituted the jam with wild plum and apple jelly, which I feel gives them just the right deep red centres. 

Ingredients:
280g unsalted butter, softened
150g caster sugar
380g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
60g ground almonds
200g seedless strawberry jam (or any red, smooth, jelly or jam)

Next week: Blackbottom Pie

Please do join us in this crazy bake along. Here's a badge if you do, and do pop a link in the comments so we can have a nosey!

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A Lake District Adventure

In a brief break from baking, The Kindred Spirit and I took a holiday in the Lake District (like other fashionable people.)

We stayed at High Wray Farm, which I would highly recommend - a lovely B&B on part of the Claife Estate (formerly belonged to Mr William Heelis, husband of Miss Beatrix Potter,) with excellent food, rooms, and an excellent hostess - nothing was too much trouble.

The welcome was warm (as were the rooms, which is always appreciated with Lake District weather!)

We sampled Grasmere Gingerbread and explored as many National Trust treasures as we could, including Hill Top (Miss Beatrix Potter's house,) The Beatrix Potter Gallery (housed in what was Mr William Heelis's office,) Allen Bank (an unusual property where you can touch everything, because only the shell is original, following a fire a few years ago, but the very first tennant there was William Wordsworth,) William Wordsworth's grave (quietly unassuming,) and admired the beautiful scenery of Lake Windermere and its surroundings.

Well worth a visit, and one I hope will be repeated.

Chocolate Macarons (Ladurée Sucré Bake Through)

Sometimes, even with plenty of macaron experience, they just go a bit wrong, and sometimes, you just don't know why! All had seemed well with these shells, but they never developed feet, and the shells were thin and cracked.

The ganache split, when I was adding the second "part" of the cream. On the upside, that was fairly easily rescued by chilling then beating with some liquid glucose. The leftover ganache is now sitting solidly and innocently in the fridge awaiting being turned into truffles.

Still, they tasted pretty good - sweet shells, with a deep, bitter, chocolate filling - despite the liquid glucose, the ganache still had a wonderful dark chocolate bite. They just won't be winning any competitions for looks.

Ingredients:
Chocolate ganache
290g 70% cacao solids chocolate
270ml double cream
60g butter
Macaron shells
260g ground almonds
250g icing sugar
15g cocoa powder
65g 70% cacao solids chocolate
6 egg whites + 1/2 an egg white
210g granulated sugar

Recipe - Macarons Chocolate from Sucré

Macarons in the past: Macarons, Almond Macarons, Almond Cake with Macaroon Top

Almond Cake with Macaroon Top - Home Sweet Home Bake Along (2/100)

Another unusual cake method from Hummingbird Bakery! Butter and marzipan are creamed together, before icing sugar (rather than the usual caster sugar) is added. The marzipan replaces the need for almond extract, and despite the small quantity, imparts a good flavour - not overpowering, but not so subtle that you miss it.

This is also a cake to make you nervous - it requires removing the cake from the oven before it is done, at a stage the recipe terms, "almost done," then applying a macaron batter directly to the top of the cake. It flies in the face of just about everything you're taught about baking - don't open the oven door before the cake is ready, and certainly don't weigh down a cake that is liable to sink (because it wasn't ready) with a wet macaron batter!

Surprisingly, however, it worked! (And, I would like to point out, better than the cake in the book, which has a dip in the middle!) I baked the cake at 150C fan, (Home Sweet Home doesn't give fan temperatures) for 40 minutes, until it was a lovely golden brown on top, and sprang back when prodded, but was still "singing" (an ear placed near the cake heard crackling noises) and then topped it with the macaron.

The recipe also notes that a springform tin is essential, or the cake won't turn out. I didn't read this until I had turned the cake out, and I can verify that if you just use a loose bottomed tin and fully line the sides and bottom with non-stick baking paper, the cake will turn out. My cake is slightly smaller at 7+1/2 inches in diameter, as this was the closest to an 8 inch diameter tin that I had.

Ingredients:
Sponge:
80g fine yellow cornmeal (I used maize meal, which I found in my local independent wholefood shop)
80g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
115g unsalted butter, softened
50g marzipan
200g icingsugar
4 large egg yolks
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
60g sour cream
Macaroon:
2 large egg whites
125g caster sugar
125g ground almonds

Oooh, look! A nice shiny badge for this bake along (thanks to my genius brother) - if you want to join us on our bake through Home Sweet Home, please do! You don't have to join in for all of it, but if you join us, why not use this badge and pop a link below so we know we're not the only crazy ones out there! (If this proves popular, I'll add a link-up tool so everyone can see what's going on)

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 Next up: Linzer Cookies!

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Jaffa Cake Cupcakes - Home Sweet Home Bake Along (1/100)

As you may remember, Pigling and I have decided to battle the post Bake Off Blues (it's a real thing) together by baking through one of our books. It took us a while to decide on a book - eventually we found one we both have - Home Sweet Home by the Hummingbird Bakery. The aim of this bake through is that we will actually try all of the recipes in a cookbook. I don't know about you, but I have several cookbooks where I have never cooked anything from it, or perhaps one or two recipes.

We're hoping to bake all the recipes, at a rate of about one a week - which, given the cover indicates there are 100 recipes, means we'll take about 2 years!! There may be some flexibility in the schedule, but this is up for negotiation. In order to avoid getting bogged down in one type of bake, we are planning to bake one recipe from each chapter in turn, then start again (i.e. week 1 cupcakes, week 2 cakes cheesecakes and roulades, week 3 cookies and biscuits... then back to cupcakes again for week 8)

If you're a baker, and fancy a little bit of light relief and baking fun, why don't you join us? You could bake just one recipe, or all of them, or just cheer from the sidelines! At some point there might be a logo/badge, but not just yet!

Anyway, onto this weeks recipe -  Jaffa Cake Cupcakes. A cupcake formation of the classic jaffa cake - a sponge base, an orange jelly filling and a chocolate buttercream - decorated with a jaffa cake (to remove doubt as to the contents!)

I love the idea of this bake. Hummingbird bakery cupcakes always intrigue me, as there is a much lower proportion of butter, higher proportion of sugar, than I would usually use, and the addition of milk. The batter is also made in an unusual (to me) way - the dry ingredients and butter and mixed together to make a crumb, then the liquid ingredients are slowly added. Normally for a sponge cake, I would cream butter and sugar, add eggs, flavourings and then flour and leavening. Milk would be unlikely to feature.

The Hummingbird method does produce a lovely tender crumb, but a rather crunchy top to the cake - which is remedied by copious quantities of buttercream (a little too much in this recipe, some ended up in the freezer, despite cakes with their volume in buttercream! Next time I would probably make 2/3 of the recipe for the icing, reduce the icing sugar and increase the cocoa content for a more chocolatey icing.)

Strangely the high sugar content makes the batter very sweet (yes, I tested it) but the sponge cake does not suffer. Altogether, this is a rather scrummy, and unusual, cupcake. I may need to invest in a cupcake corer for the future recipes, as my ability to extract cylinders of cake from cupcakes leaves something to be desired! I also couldn't find mini jaffa cakes, hence the large ones were halved to make "ears" for these cupcakes.

Ingredients:
Sponge:
70g unsalted butter, very soft
210g plain flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
210ml full-fat milk
2 eggs (large)
1 tsp vanilla extract
100g shredless (smooth) marmalade

Frosting: (but I would make only 2/3 of this)
450g icing sugar (sifted)
60g cocoa powder (sifted)
150g unsalted butter, very soft
60ml full fat milk
jaffa cakes, to decorate.

Recipe, from Home Sweet Home, by The Hummingbird Bakery, but also available as a Waterstones Recipe Card, here.

I am entering this in Cook Blog Share:

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Almond Macarons (Ladurée Sucré Bake Through)

You may recall how, post Great British Bake Off, I felt the need for a new baking regime. I chatted to Pigling and we came up with our new bake through.

This is not it. Sorry. I usually bake twice a week, so I thought I'd bake along with her one day a week, and do an independent challenge to hone my patisserie skills separately.

If you've not come across Sucré, or indeed Ladurée, allow me explain. Ladurée is a Parisian bakery, tea salon and patisserie, that has now spread worldwide. Sucré is a book of recipes from Ladurée. It is beautiful, and completely impractical for the kitchen, being pistachio green velvet, with gilded page edges, wrapped in lavender tissue and in a pistacio green box.

The recipes presume a certain degree of baking knowledge, are a little fiddly, slightly more effort than your average cupcake, but usually produce rather spectacular results. (Unfortunately, I failed to take any pictures of the results)

I started at the beginning, with one of their famous macaron recipes (incidentally, there is an entire chapter of macaron recipes) - almond macarons. I forgot the chopped almonds to sprinkle on top, and did not make enough turns of my spatula to loosen the macaron batter (apparently this process of loosening is called macaronage, who knew?!) but the results were eagerly devoured by friends and colleagues. The recipe does produce a fair quantity of macarons, so you may wish to make just half or even just a third of the recipe if you don't have such obliging colleagues.

Ingredients:
Macaron shells
275g ground almonds (almond flour)
250g icing sugar
6+1/2 egg whites
210g granulated sugar
100g chopped almonds
Almond cream filling (adapted as neither almond paste with 65% almonds nor unsweetened almond pulp are available where I live)
150g butter
200g ground almonds
110g icing sugar
200ml double cream

The recipe is the Macarons Amande from Sucré.

Apple and Cranberry Autumn Slice

Autumn is truly here.

 Although I appreciate the beauty of the season, with the changing leaves, the legitimacy of spices such as cinnamon and ginger, and warming soups, it always makes me sad to say goodbye to the warmer weather.

The autumn rains, the low mists and the shorter days also have a habit of dampening my spirits (given the leakiness of the house I live in and my car, sometimes the dampening is literal.)

To cheer myself up, and because there was an appeal for traybakes for a fundraising event at work, I adapted a Smitten Kitchen recipe to give it a more autumnal feel.

This is warm and spicy, with a wonderful crunch on top and lovely sweet squishiness within. I removed the lemon, because with the tart apples, it was redundant, but if you're using a sweeter eating variety, you may prefer to pop it back in.

The biscuit mix is very crumbly - it will look like ground almonds in the bowl, but if you squidge it, it will come together, and it bakes up into a solid biscuit on the base and a crisp crumb on the top.

I don't have a 9"x13" tin, so ended up with a 7"x10" tin and a 500g loaf tin for the extras!

Recipe
Adapted (anglicised and metric-ified) from Smitten Kitchen

200g granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
375g plain flour
225g cold unsalted butter
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon salt
500g diced apple (skin left on, but cores, stalks and fuzzy bits removed) - I used a mixture of two heritage varieties that we grow - Winstons (when newly picked these are tart, but sweeten with storage) and Lord Lambourne) but feel free to use any apple of your choice
150g dried cranberries
1+1/2 tsp cinnamon
100g granulated sugar
4 teaspoons cornflour

1. Preheat the oven to 190 C (170C fan). Grease a 9×13 inch tin.

2. In a medium bowl, stir together 200g sugar, flour, and baking powder. Mix in salt. Use a fork or pastry blender to blend in the butter and egg. The dough will be very crumbly, and resemble ground almonds. Press half of the dough mixture into the prepared tin.

3. In another bowl, stir together the sugar, cornflour and cinnamon. Gently mix in the apple dice and cranberries. Sprinkle the apple mixture evenly over the base. Sprinkle remaining dough over the layer.

4. Bake in preheated oven for 30 to 45 minutes, or until top is golden brown (mine took about 40 minutes). Allow to cool completely before cutting into bars.