Blackberry tea loaf

I've been a bit slow in posting this, but back at the beginning of September I made this delicious tea loaf as a way of baking with blackberries while they were still in season.  The recipe comes from the National Trust "Teatime Baking Book" by Jane Pettigrew and along with the blackberries, lemon and black treacle help to give this loaf a lovely deep flavour.  A yummy teatime treat I will definitely be making again next year.

Incidentally, the National Trust has a variety of recipes available on its website.  Among the recipes ideas for puddings and cakes is one for a blackberry and apple upside-down cake.  The blackberries may be over, but I have just come back from Herefordshire with a bag of hand-picked Bramleys (courtesy of the P's) and an apple upside-down cake sounds a very appealing idea...

Learning to make bread - month eight/GBBO Challenge Week 3: ciabatta

Before #bingate, Bake Off did bread; rather fortunate for me as August was running out and I needed to make some bread for my New Year's resolution challenge.  So this wasn't any bake - this was a two challenge bake!

As Paul Hollywood advised the Bake Off contestants, ciabatta is a bread which requires patience.  To patience add planning; Hollywood's recipe calls for half the dough, water and yeast to be left to ferment for at least six hours (I left mine overnight), which apparently adds to the flavour.

As with baguettes, the dough for ciabatta is very sticky - a bit like working with chewing gum - and I find my machine (a Magimix 3200 compact) can't cope with it, which means I had to roll my sleeves up and (quite literally) get stuck in. 

With the luxury of time (unlike in the Bake Off tent), making bread can be a relaxing process.  It was certainly worth the wait; these ciabatta went down very well with my friends.

GBBO Challenge Week 2: florentines

I must confess that I have always thought of florentines as chocolate with topping rather than a biscuit with chocolate...more fool me.  Second week of the Great British Bake Off was all about biscuits, and the bakers faced florentines for their technical challenge.

Second confession - I didn't use Mary Berry's recipe!  I was given the Green & Black's Chocolate Recipes book for my birthday and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to use it.  Unlike Mary's recipe, this one uses double cream - an extra touch of decadence that seems rather appropriate for a biscuit that is at the fancier end of the biscuit scale!

Fresh from the oven

The recipe itself is easy enough to follow.  These biscuits are full of flavour, and you can easily adapt to suit your taste.  Almonds feature heavily, with cherries also in there.  Orange peel is usually added - not being able to find this in my local supermarket I substituted mixed fruit and peel.  (The result, when combined with the milk chocolate topping I opted for, was a bit like eating Cadbury's dairy fruit and nut in biscuit form!)

The Green & Black's recipe didn't specify which type of sugar to use.  Mary Berry uses demerera sugar; not having this I went with light brown sugar which I thought would complement the flavour of the almonds and fruit.

Green & Black's suggest using a fork dipped in cold water to flatten the spoonfuls of biscuit mix before putting in the oven, and this certainly did seem to help.  The tricky bit is cooking them for just long enough - and no longer!


I erred on the thicker side with the biscuits - but at least that meant that I didn't get any chocolate bleeding through and it made for a good biscuit.

Dark chocolate is what you would expect, but I went with milk chocolate (having been given some when I was given the book it seems appropriate to use it for the first recipe I tried).  Of course, milk chocolate takes longer to set than dark (I was impatient and used the fridge to speed things up!).

For my first attempt, I am really pleased with these.  They aren't as delicate as the florentines that you might find in Betty's, but they were rather tasty - lovely with a cup of tea - and they certainly seemed to go quickly, so I must have done something right!

GBBO Challenge Week 1: cherry cake

It's back!  Did you watch?  Last Wednesday the Great British Bake Off was back on our screens.  Thankfully the jump to BBC1 seems to be the only thing that has changed; it is the same gentle show it ever was, inviting you to put aside your worries for an hour and indulge.  For a competition, its surprisingly soothing, even as I wait to see how the bakers' showstoppers will turn out.

Never mind the trolls (it's a baking show for goodness sake - more cake less hate people!), I love all the bakers; they are there doing what they love and, with the technical challenge, they're always prepared to have a go.

This year I'm going to try doing the technical challenge from each show (although I reserve the right to pick something else if the technical challenge looks particularly impossible!).  Unlike the bakers, I won't be baking against the clock or having to worry about what Paul and Mary might say.  I fully expect to make mistakes - but hopefully in doing so I'll learn something as well.  And it should be fun...

Cherry cake
The first week's challenge was a cherry cake.  I used a Linda Collister recipe from The Great British Book of Baking.

My understanding from the show was that there were two things which could have a major impact on how good my finished cake was: how I prepared the cherries and the consistency of the cake mix.

Following the recipe, I rinsed the cherries under warm water (to remove their sticky coating), dried them in kitchen paper and mixed them with a little flour, before adding to the (well beaten) mix.

The cake was supposed to be in the oven for one hour, but when I checked it after 40 minutes it was done!

The recipe I was using was for an unadorned cake, but in the spirit of GBBO I decided to decorate mine as they had in the show - with lemon drizzle icing, toasted almonds and cherries.  This was also a good excuse to use a piping bag for the first time.

The icing, while delicious, could have been thicker and my piping skills leave something to be desired, but it was my first time so I'm not going to judge myself on that!

I will allow myself one moment of smugness though - the cherries didn't sink to the bottom!  And, perhaps most importantly, the finished cake is rather yummy (even if I do say so myself!).  This is one I will be making again.


Perhaps not something I would want to present to Mary Berry
but I'm proud of it all the same



Success - the cherries didn't sink!

Have blackberries, will make jam

It's that time of year again and I have a wonderful abundance of blackberries at the bottom of my garden, so I made some time last weekend to make some jam.

Having had the experience of making jam for the first time last year, I felt a lot more confident about it this year; hopefully I had learnt from last year's mistakes!  Plus, I now had a jam thermometer to help me (a Christmas present I was looking forward to trying out).

I picked about 700g of fruit; to this I added about 900g of jam sugar.  Note to self: pick less fruit next time or get a bigger pan!

The jam thermometer makes the process so much easier, as it takes away the element of uncertainty.  I have to admit I still did use the "plate" test (putting a small drop of the hot mixture onto a cold plate to see whether it sets when cool), but this was simply a consistency check measure.

I am really pleased with the colour and consistency of the finished jam; I think it is a little too sweet and so I think with the next batch I will use less jam sugar - although it will be interesting to see how this affects the cooking process, as blackberries are a low-pectin fruit and so with this batch I used more sugar-to-fruit to counter this (jam sugar contains added pectin).  Watch this space...

Sweetness aside, I can confirm that there is a sweet(!) enjoyment in having your own homemade jam spread on your toast for breakfast; a very satisfying way to start any morning.

Learning to make bread - month seven: teacakes

A good toasted teacake, with a cup of tea, is one of life's simple pleasures.  Like many good things in life though, making teacakes requires patience.

If, like me, you find it difficult to pause, always seem to be trying to do several things at once and are constantly thinking about what you should be doing, baking can be a break from this.  It's an opportunity to focus on one task, on what you are doing in that moment. 



Kneaded, risen and
ready to shape

One of the things I have enjoyed in my "learning to make bread" challenge is finding how relaxing the process of kneading dough can be.  It is one of those repetitive tasks that allows you to focus on the moment; kneading can't be rushed, it will take as long as it takes.  I can stop rushing about and just focus on the task in hand; the feel of the dough and how its texture changes in my hands as I work it.

An hour and a half for the dough to rise, another forty-five minutes for second proving; was it worth the wait?  For a homemade toasted teacake, absolutely.

I used a recipe from Linda Collister's Bread book, which I have mentioned before.  The finished teacakes were rather good (even if I do say so myself!).  Definitely one to make again. 

There's a wealth of information on the internet about mindfulness and the benefits that focusing on the present moment can bring for mental wellbeing.  This NHS guide is a good place to start. 



Shaped and left for second proving, now ready for the oven...

The finished teacakes

Toasted, with a side of blackberries from the garden.
Perfect tea-time treat.

Personalised wedding print

For a recent wedding I decided to try to make something to personalise the photo frame we were giving the couple as a wedding present.  The idea was a silhouette of a couple running with the couple's name and the date of the wedding.  The design is based on the idea of the personalised wedding prints you can buy at notonthehighstreet.com; however, I wanted a homemade touch and thought I would give it a go myself.

Slight problem: drawing people is not my forte!  Despite that, I surprised myself with the final stencilled silhouette.  Initially I had the couple facing away from the viewer (the first two sketches) - running off into the distance as it were!  However, I decided that it looked better to have them running towards the viewer (running towards their future perhaps?).

From initial doodles to final design

Doing the initial sketches, I did start to despair and consider whether to come up with something else.  However, this was never going to be a detailed picture.  What was important was to try to get an elegant, simple stencil design and I was pleased with the final stencil.



The final stencil

The wedding was beautiful, the couple very happy and it was a fabulous day.  As for our wedding present, the lettering of the final picture could be a bit straighter perhaps (ever the perfectionist!) but I am really pleased with this, and I hope the couple like it too.




The finished picture

Learning to make bread - month six: grissini

The humble bread stick.  My first effort at these probably wouldn't impress any serious baker, but for my first attempt I was rather pleased with them.

An ever-reliable party nibble, the bread stick originates from Turin, and (according to Wikipedia) was apparently first made as far back as the 14th century.



Kneaded and ready to rise...

The recipe I used came from Linda Collister's "The Bread Book" (a gem I found in a charity shop).  Linda Collister is responsible for many of the recipes that appear in the Great British Baking series.  However, I would suggest getting your hands on a copy of her bread book if you can; it's very comprehensive and very user-friendly, even for a bread-making novice like me.



An hour later...
Linda Collister recommends that a slightly under-sized
dough is preferable to an over-risen one for this recipe

I couldn't resist experimenting with flavour, and tried sea salt, rosemary and chilli, as well as some plain (and some inadvertent combinations of the three!).  I added the seasoning as I rolled the sticks into shape.  While this worked well with the sea salt and chilli, I think the rosemary bread sticks would have been more successful if I had added the rosemary at the kneading stage.  As it was, the salt bread sticks were definitely my favourite.
 

Rolling out ready for cutting

 

Shaped and ready for the oven

These bread sticks would not win a competition for uniformity, but I like that as the lack of uniformity reminds me that these are homemade and, I think, adds to their charm.  What I would do differently next time though is to make each stick a little thinner and to cook them for longer.  These sticks did not have the "snap" that one would expect; however, they were delicious, and a perfect accompaniment to a mezze lunch.

A word on the sponge method
Collister's basic technique for bread-making includes a stage where you leave the batter to "sponge".  With the grissini, this stage comes after you have added the salt and yeast (I used fast-action dried yeast) - always remembering to add them on separate sides of the bowl of course - and poured the water and oil into a well in the middle.  The idea is to then draw a little flour into the liquid and then leave it to "sponge" for about 20 minutes - basically to become aerated and frothy.

This is the so-called "half-sponge method".  This is not a technique that I have used with any of the previous breads I have made.  I can't say that I was able to notice any discernible difference; however, I think to really notice the difference in flavour you would have to leave the batter to "sponge" for at least a couple of hours.  Dan Lepard's recipe for "the easiest loaf in the world" uses the half-sponge method (warm water, yeast and flour left for a couple of hours, or even overnight if possible).

Learning to make bread - month five: mini baguettes

With a weekend in Paris to look forward to, I decided to get in the French spirit by making mini baguettes for May's bread baking challenge.



A French supper - wine and French onion soup
 to go with a freshly baked baguette

The recipe is one from Paul Hollywood's bread book.  The only ingredients I didn't have was semolina (used to dust the baguettes before they go in the oven), but that didn't seem to matter.

I have to admit I was sceptical about how well these would turn out; as it happens, I think they are a strong contender for my best bread so far...

The dough for baguettes is very wet and sticky!

The recipe advises kneading the dough in a processor as the dough is very wet and sticky to start with.  Although my machine (a Magimix Compact 3200) has a dough blade, it did struggle with this dough.  I was able to start kneading the dough in the machine, but the dough travelled up the inside of the blade and jammed the machine(!), so I finished kneading by hand - felt a bit like handling chewing gum to start with, but rather satisfying to see the dough transform in my hands into something that could be shaped into a smooth ball.

The risen dough

Having left the dough to rise, its then knocked back, shaped, and left for its second proving.  I then dusted it with flour and cut it as instructed by the recipe before placing in the oven (with fingers crossed).



Shaped, left for second proving, dusted, cut and ready for the oven

I needn't have been sceptical - the end product was two beautiful, delicious mini baguettes which we had warm for supper with French onion soup. 

Bon appétit!


The baked baguettes, still warm and ready to eat

Bon

Easter bunting

A bit late, but I wanted to share with you this bunting I made for Easter.  The idea was a natural continuation of my bunting projects from last year (see my baby name bunting and Christmas bunting).




Cath Kidston buttons

I decided to use these Cath Kidston buttons (a Christmas present) for the tails - fortunately the pattern of the buttons went really well with some fabric I already had.



I've called it Easter bunting but we've still got it up - so perhaps it's better described as spring bunting!




Bunny template - the size I used was roughly 8.5cm(h) x 6.5cm(w)