Important Meals

It's been a while since I've updated this blog.  Not, I might add, because I've stopped making things.  I've been working on a really big project, but sadly it's top secret.  Yes, I'm rolling my eyes at myself so you can do it too.  Actually it really is top secret, and more importantly it's not my secret so I can't write about it - yet.  I'll show you what I've been doing next month.  Probably some time after the 13th....

Anyway, I had a night off the big project and I had promised that I would make dessert for an important dinner on Sunday night with the lovely Charlie and Simon.  I wanted to make something a little bit different.  Charlie requested something light and chocolate is off the menu because of allergies.

One of my lovely friends on Urban 75 had been posting about making possets recently.  They sounded delicious and as a side note I learnt that posset is also used to refer to baby sick.  Nice.  But don't let that put you off the pudding.

I found an awesome looking recipe from Nigel Slater on the Guardian website

Lemon Posset
Makes 4 small glasses.

Ignore the large glass of gin

500ml double cream
150g caster sugar
75ml lemon juice

Put the cream and caster sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar.


Reduce the heat so that the mixture doesn't boil over, and let it bubble enthusiastically for about 3 minutes, stirring regularly.
Remove from the heat, stir in the lemon juice and leave to settle. Pour into four small wine glasses or cups and leave to cool. Refrigerate for a couple of hours before serving.







I served mine in ramekins rather than glasses, as I figured they would be easier to transport that way and garnished them with a curl of lime.


I needed to make something to serve them with so I decided to experiment with making some brandy snaps.  How hard could this possibly be after all.  The sort of phrase that usually gets me into trouble. 


But I found a really good (and by that I mean simple) looking recipe on the trusty BBC Good Food recipe.



Brandy Snaps

55g butter
55g demerara sugar
55g golden syrup
50g plain flour
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp lemon juice

1.  Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Line two baking trays with baking parchment then oil a thickish handle of a wooden spoon and lay it on a cooling rack
2.  Measure the butter, sugar and syrup into a small, heavy-based pan.
3. Heat gently until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved. This will take about 15 minutes over a low heat. Don’t let the mixture boil as it may crystallise
4.  Leave the mixture to cool slightly, about 2-3 minutes, then sieve in the flour and ginger. Pour in the lemon juice and stir well to mix thoroughly. Drop four teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto each of the prepared baking trays to make neat circles, about 10cm/4in apart.
5. Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 10-15 minutes really not true.  8 minutes tops.  You can see what happened to the 15 minute baked versions in the photos below, or until the mixture is well spread out, looks lacey and is a dark golden colour. Once baked, you need to work fast to shape the brandy snaps, so its easier if you bake one tray at a time. Not actually true.  If you put each tray in as it's ready, you've just about finished with the first by the time the second is ready.
6.  Remove each tray from the oven and leave for a minute or so to firm up slightly, then lift from the baking parchment using a fish slice. The mixture needs to be just firm enough to remove, but pliable enough to shape And you need to have fingers made of asbestos.  Seriously this stuff is HOT and has about a three minute window in which you can work with it before it needs to go back in the oven
7. Quickly roll a circle of the warm mixture around the handle of the wooden spoon, having the  join underneath. Press the join lightly together to seal, then slide the brandy snap off the spoon and leave it to firm up on the wire rack, again with the join underneath.
8. If any of the circles on the sheet harden too much to work with, put them back in the oven for a few seconds to soften again. Repeat until all the mixture has been used. If the mixture in the pan becomes too firm to drop in neat spoonfuls, roll a teaspoonful of it into a small smooth ball in your hands, sit it on the baking tray and flatten slightly with your fingers. When cold, store the brandy snaps in an airtight tin or container; they will keep for at least a week. 

And do you know what - they worked really well.  They were a bit fiddly to make but they taste delicious.

See what I mean about the 15 minute versions?

I'm confident that I've fulfilled the brief and that my contribution to dinner will live up to Charlie's high standards.  Oh and as to why the dinner is important?  It just is.

Nervous Cows

The literal translation of this dish - Luc Lac - is shaking beef, which always makes me think of a herd of cows panicking in a corner.  It's delicious though, and as I'm trying to eat more protein at the minute is becoming something of a favourite.

The really important about this dish is that you use the best quality beef that you can get your hands on.  It makes such a difference.  I use a cubed  Aberdeen Angus organic beef from my lovely butcher.

• 400g cubed beef
• 1tbsp oyster sauce
• 2tbsp soy sauce
• 4 cloves of garlic crushed
• large piece of ginger crushed
• black pepper
• chopped onion

Combine all the ingrediants apart from the garlic and leave to marinade.  This should be left for atleast 30 minutes, but I prefer to marinade overnight if at all possible.

Cook the garlic gently until golden brown, add the marinaded meat and cook over a high heat. The meat should be a little bit rare, so don't over cook. Serve on a bed of corriander.

Death Row

Apparently there's loads of different traditions when it comes to final meals.  In America inmates on death row are not allowed to ask for alcohol with their final meal, but in France historically the condemned man was given a last glass of rum, but no final meal as they were usually told of their impending doom minutes before being introduced to the guillotine.  In the States these days it's now euphemistically called a "special meal" and is provided a couple of days before the execution.

Ted Bundy apparently declined a special meal, so he was given the traditional steak (medium-rare), eggs (over-easy), hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly.

Interestingly steak would also be my final meal.  Or more specifically teriyaki steak.

The Marinade

• Juice of 4 lemons
• 4 tablespoons of dark soy sauce
• 4 tablespoons of brown sugar
• 6 cloves of garlic (crushed)
• large chunk of ginger (grated)
• slug of olive oil
• ground pepper/pinch salt

Go to the butcher and get really thick cut rump steak.  Make up the marinade, tasting as you go.  Marinade the meat for four days.  Yes, really - four days.  Minimum.

Cook on a really hot griddle pan, searing on both side and then serve sliced into ribbons.

I love this with fresh peppery salad or asparagus.

And that would be my final meal.  More interesting of course, is the story of how I end up on Death Row in the first place.....

Some fun baking

I got the idea for these pinwheel cookies while mooching around Pinterest the other night. They looked so delicate and beautiful that I decided to ignore the fact that I usually burn biscuits.

I made up a basic vanilla biscuit mix.

250g unsalted butter
140g caster sugar
1 egg yolk
300g plain flour
2tsp vanilla essence

once these were properly mixed together I split the mixture in half, and then returned half to the food processor. I added 25g of coco powder to that and remixed. Total guess work on the amount of coco, but it looks the right colour and it's the right consistency.

Then I wrapped both of the doughs in cling film and fridged them for an hour. Once the dough had cooled I rolled out both parts before layering them together. I then flattened them out some more before rolling them up into a big dough sausage.  Surprisingly the vanilla dough was a little more brittle than the chocolate dough. The dough sausage was then sliced thinly and baked at 180 for ten minutes.

They came out rather well (by which I mean I mean I didn't burn them).  If anything they could have used another minute or two in the oven.  Mine weren't quite as delicate as the pictures I saw online, I think I need to try another cookie mix to get these totally right.  They taste ok with a cup of tea.

Dirty, Filthy, Non Practise Cakes

In my last post I wrote about the Cadbury Cream Egg cupcakes that I was planning to make.  Now I've made them, and eaten one (un-iced) and I think I want to die.  Without question they are one of the best and worst things I've ever made in my life and I am never, ever going to eat one ever again.  I am going to put one in the freezer for the very tolerant housemate, who gave up chocolate for lent, and has been looking like a kicked puppy since I started talking about making these.

To make these I froze 12 Cadbury Cream Eggs.  Then I made up the cake batter from The Hummingbird Bakery recipe.  I poured about half the usual quantity into the bottom of the cupcake cases.  Then I rested the frozen eggs upright in the batter and pushed them down well.



Unlike the picture I posted last time, my eggs did not uniformly stand up during the cooking and about half of them fell over.  The batter rose around the eggs however and the cakes came out of the oven looking fairly normal, but weighing twice as much as normal cakes should.

I am going to ice them tomorrow, but I had one after dinner.

 
It's a shocking picture.  It was an awful, awful thing to do to a cake.

I definitely have to run 5k tomorrow.  And I am never, ever doing this ever again.  No matter how good it tasted.

Practise Cakes

I've not made anything for a while, I've been manically busy with work, friends and being mean to the boys I've been dating.  Mainly work though.  I have a limit on how mean I can be before I start feeling bad about it.

I've been working on a couple of other projects recently, not cake related, hopefully I'll be able to write them up when they're finished soon.  However, in my travels round the Internet I stumbled across these beauties.  I do adore pinterest, it's my new guilty pleasure.

I'm not sure if they're a work of genius, the product of a disturbed mind or just a short cut to type two diabetes.

Anyway, I am going to make them for work.  As an Easter present.  Who doesn't want sugar poisoning for Easter?

Given my complete and utter fail at baking recently, I figured I should probably road test a chocolate cupcake recipe before starting in on these.  Otherwise it could be a very expensive cake mistake.

So I knocked up some Hummingbird Bakery chocolate cupcakes.

80g butter
280g caster sugar
200g plain flour
40g coco
1tbsp baking powder (yes really that much)
1/4 tsp salt
240ml whole milk
2 large eggs.

Beat the butter, sugar, flour, coco, baking powder and salt together until they are a sand like consistency.  Mix the milk and eggs together and combine to form the batter.  Bake for 18-20 minutes at 190 degrees.  I made 14 cakes from this mix.

FROSTING
400g icing sugar
100g coco
160g butter
50ml whole milk

Whisk together to make the icing, then pipe onto the cakes and decorate.

Do you know, I think I might actually have my baking mojo back.  They taste delicious and although the icing might not quite be up to my little sister's standard, it's still a hell of a lot better than the horror that was the liquid mess of the red velvet cakes.

I love it when a plan comes together

I've thought through all the possibilities and I'm fairly sure that I have made the right choice. The worst thing about this has been that the one person I really wanted to talk to, who would have given me the best advice, is the only person that I can't discuss it with.  However, I've been an adult (for once) and made the decision on my own.  I've decided to be grown-up about a couple of other things as well, I'm not convinced they'll pan out quite as well.


I've got a couple of weeks to see how things settle down before I can go shoe shopping.  I'm tentatively hopeful that a shiny new pair of Louboutins will be mine.

While I'm waiting I thought I would try some more baking, to see if I have managed to get my act back together in this arena as well.  Because it was the icing that let me down last time, I figured that I should take that element out of the equation and try some un-iced muffins.   

The first set is a bastardised version of Abi's goats cheese mini muffins. 

goats cheese and rosemary muffins (makes 12)
100g goats cheese

100g red onion, finely chopped
3 teaspoons rosemary leaves, finely chopped
25g butter, cut into small pieces
275g plain flour
1 heaped tablespoon baking powder
1 egg, beaten
225ml milk
a large pinch of salt
sprigs of rosemary for garnish
preheat the oven to 200c.

Place the goats cheese, onion (I like to fry off the onion first, so it's soft rather than cooked), chopped rosemary and butter in a bowl so it is ready when it needs to be added to the muffin mixture.

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. add the egg and milk and lightly mix using as few folding movements as possible. the flour shouldn’t all be mixed in with the liquid. add the flavourings and mix lightly again – you should still have small amounts of flour not integrated – this rough and ready half-mixing approach ensures your muffins will be light and rise.  This is really important, not over mixing the ingredients is what makes this recipe work.

Place the mix into your muffin tray and top each with a sprig of rosemary then bake for 20 minutes, when they will be well-risen and golden.

Now these were meant to be blueberry muffins, but the supermarket had no frozen blueberries, so I opted for mixed Summer Fruits instead.  Unfortunately they turned the batter a rather alarming pink colour.

Summer fruit Muffins (makes 12)
85 g butter

280g plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder 
pinch of salt
115g light brown sugar
150g mixed summer fruit (I use frozen)
2 eggs
250ml milk
1tspn vanilla extract
lemon zest

Preheat the oven to 200C

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.  Cream together the butter and sugar.  Beat the eggs, milk and vanilla in a separate bowl.  Add the lemon zest to this mixture.  Add the eggs/milk to the butter and sugar. Fold in the flour, but do not over mix.  Stir through the mixed fruit.

Spoon into cases and bake for 20 minutes or until golden.

Fortunately the unsettling pink/purple colour seems to have baked right out.  Almost.


Anyway - enough of this pissing around, I'm going to the pub.