100 years young – making Swiss buttercream

Jun2

Buying a 100th birthday present is a difficult task. Any birthday present purchase can present problems, at least for me. I want to make sure I get it right. Something that will be valued, something that will be loved. Something that will last.
A present for someone completing a century on the planet is a little different. Concepts like ‘lasting a lifetime’ take on a completely different hue. It’s almost impossible to get something useful that they don’t already have. Beautiful things seem trivial, ephemeral.

When my gran, my closest and only surviving grandparent, turned 100 a few weeks ago, I wanted a gift to express love, but just buying an expensive thing doesn’t cut it with grandparents.

Born in 1912, the year of Titanic, she went to Jersey to celebrate her 21st birthday in 1933, hanging out with chaps in blazers and lasses in swimming costumes. Her older brothers fought in the First World War, and her husband in the Second. She was a smart and funny white-haired lady when I was born, her first grandchild, and she still is. She’s an incredible woman, as sharp and funny as ever, and coming up with a suitable gift was daunting.

We gathered as a family for a weekend of celebrating – dinners, lunches and finally an afternoon tea with cards and presents. I bought her a painted silk scarf so there was something to unwrap. But I think my main contribution to the weekend was helping with the birthday cake.

This was a real joint effort between my mum, my sister and me. Although it needed to be celebratory, and bear decoration, she didn’t want either chocolate cake or fruit cake. As she doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, we went for lemon sponge, but that posed the question of how best to decorate it.

Having done a bit of research on smitten kitchen and sweetapolita, I decided what we really needed was Swiss buttercream. The reason for using this is that it is very stable, and can be made ahead; it is not too sweet and sickly, unlike quick buttercream or fondant; and it can be made into a smooth surface to support piped icing decorations.

Swiss buttercream is made of a mixture of meringue and softened butter. The meringue is made using the Swiss method, dissolving the sugar into warmed egg whites before beating (as opposed to the French method:whisking sugar directly into whipped egg whites; or the Italian: pouring a hot sugar syrup into whipped egg whites).

You begin by measuring the sugar and egg whites into a large heatproof bowl. I used egg whites from a carton – I know there are virtually no problems now from British eggs, and you are heating them in this recipe, but I didnt want to take any chances with a 100 year old consumer. In any case, the carton whites (available as Two Chicks in a number of supermarkets in the UK) are very convenient for weighing out a precise amount.

This mixture is then heated over a barely simmering pan of water, stirring constantly, until it reaches 60c and the sugar has all dissolved into the whites. You can check this by rubbing the mixture between your fingertips to check that all the gritty sugar crystals are gone.

Then the warmed egg white syrup is whisked into stiff meringue peaks. We made two batches of the buttercream, fearing that my mum’s handheld electric mixer might not handle a full batch. Neither batch reached stiff peaks at this stage – both were still flowing a little, one more than the other, although the mixture was quite thick and opaque.

We pressed on anyway, despite the lack of stiff peaks, and it turned out fine. I don’t think there was any difference in texture between the two final batches. The process of adding the butter tends to deflate the mixture at first anyway. As long as the mixture is very thick and holds a ribbon, it should still be fine, even without peaks.

Once the meringue is thick, and has cooled to not far above room temperature, you can start to whisk in the butter. The butter should be cubed and a room temperature, so you can easily create an impression in it with your finger, but not so soft it starts to get shiny and greasy.

Whisk in one cube at a time. The mixture will deflate, and become thinner, perhaps quite soupy. It might also split and curdle. Keep whisking and adding butter. Once the butter is almost all incorporated, the texture suddenly changes, and it snaps to a thick mixture, that holds its shape very cleanly.

This can be kept in the fridge for several days, or frozen. When chilled, the texture is much like that of butter – quite firm and almost waxy. For this reason, you should make sure cakes frosted with Swiss buttercream are served at room temperature. To bring the the buttercream back to a working consistency, bring it slowly to room temperature, or give a couple of very low power bursts in the microwave, just as you would do when softening butter from the fridge. To help the process along, return the batch to a bowl and use an electric whisk or stand mixer to whip the buttercream until it is soft and spreadable again.

For the final cake, we layered my mum’s 8 inch square sponge layers, flavoured with lemon zest, with most of a jar of bought lemon curd.

I trimmed the edges square, and covered the cake with a crumb coat of buttercream. After chilling for about an hour, the cake surface was firm, like a block of cold butter, and we could layer on the rest of the buttercream.

Starting at the sides, this task looks a lot like plastering – apply a decent sized blob, and smooth it to an even layer. The great thing about Swiss buttercream is that it can be spread and smoothed out many times, and it will hold its texture. After covering it with a more or less even layer of frosting all over, I used a long palette knife to drag along the sides and over the top to make the surface as smooth and flat as possible. Then the cake went into the fridge overnight.

The next morning, we mixed up some fairly thick royal icing with yellow colour paste, and my sister, practiced from many school holidays working in a Thorntons shop, piped 100 on the top of the cake, and scrolls in the corners.

The final touch was to add my mum’s crystallised primroses, made with flowers from her garden, brushed with egg white and dusted with sugar.

The final cake went down well – it was moist in the centre, not too sweet. And a fitting cake to bear candles for a 100 year old to blow out.

Sugar and spice: Recipes for fruited buns

Apr27

In the last post, I talked about shaping buns and rolls. In this one, I thought I would review some of the components of a great fruited bun recipe.

I like buns, I have a stash of home-made hot cross ones in the freezer at the moment, and I think, like Azelia, that you can make them all year around, not just for Easter. All you need to do is leave off the cross, and have them for breakfast, a mid-morning snack, afternoon tea or something to finish the day when you get in late.

Before chemical leaveners, like baking powder and bicarbonate of soda became available, a bit of yeasted bread, perhaps with extra butter and sugar added to it, and some currants thrown in, was what a cake was made of. Eliza Acton’s book ‘Modern Cookery for Private families’ , first published in 1845, featured many more yeast-risen buns and cakes than butter and sugar ones. Before sugar became inexpensive and easy to buy, adding dried fruit to bread was a good way to add sweetness. You can find these ancestors of modern cakes in every part of Britain. The Irish Barm Brack, Welsh Bara Brith and Scotch Black Bun were all based, at least originally, on a yeasted fruit bread. Some of these developed into tea breads and tea bracks, where cold tea was used to soak the fruit, and the whole mixed with flour and an egg to make a soft sliceable loaf.

Most fruit or spiced buns will aim for a soft texture, with a thin, soft crust, and a slightly sweet flavour, complemented by the fruit and spices. Getting a good soft texture can be tricky, especially if you’re used to making bread with thick crusts and open, holey textures.

Here are the important elements for a fruit bun dough that I’ve assembled from advice in a whole series of sources (see References), as well as my experiences.

Fat

I used to make bread and discover that although the result seemed pleasing, sometimes the coarse, rustic nature of the bread, with big jagged holes and chewy crumb, wasn’t what I was after. What I needed for those loaves was a little fat. Even just a tablespoon of oil will make a big difference to the softness of the bread. A small amount of fat is needed for fruit buns – butter is good – to keep the crumb soft, and also to make sure it stays soft a little beyond the first day.

You can rub butter or another hard fat into the flour at the start of mixing, or add melted butter or oil with the liquid to the flour. In both cases, the fat will be evenly distributed and will have the effect of coating the flour granules. This gives them a little raincoat, waterproofing them a little so that the water on those granules doesn’t create gluten, or creates less of it. Remember, flour + water + time = gluten.

The effect of this in the finished loaf or roll is to give you a softer crumb, something that feels fluffier. For some reason, it also helps the bread to last after it’s baked, keeping it soft for longer, and delaying staling.

You can also use fat to coat the dough at the shaping stage, giving you separate pieces of pull-apart dough when it is baked. This is what helps to separate the layers in a Chelsea or a cinnamon bun, and what makes monkey bread pull apart. Those streaks of fat prevent the dough from meeting and sticking together, so you still have separate pieces of dough, nestled into each other.

You can see these layers dramatically in the Nordic bakery cinnamon bun.

Roux

You can also get the effect of a soft crumb by doing something different to part of the flour: heating it to explode the starch granules. When you make a roux or a white sauce, you heat the flour with butter, then add milk (or stock) and create a thickened sauce. The thickening comes from the starch granules that burst in the heat and swell with the water added to them. This starchy gel can be used, when cooled, as an ingredient to make fluffy white rolls or burger buns. (Dan Lepard has a great recipe that he developed for the Hawksmoor restaurants).

Sugar

Small amounts of sugar will speed the dough along as well as sweetening it, so be careful that it doesn’t over-rise or over-prove, and then collapse. However, larger amounts act to dehydrate the yeast cells, slowing down their growth. For this reason, be careful when adjusting the amount of sugar in a recipe, and keep a careful eye on the dough as it rises – if it over-rises before you can get to it, you may find the yeast is exhausted before it can get to the final rise.

Fruit

Dried fruit can absorb moisture from the dough as it rises, drying things out. For this reason, you can soak the fruit overnight first, as Dan Lepard does in his stout buns recipe in ‘Short and Sweet‘. Alternatively, you can increase the liquid in the recipe to compensate. Fruit also adds sweetness, and will not affect the yeast in the same way as sugar added directly to the dough (I think), so it can be a good way to make a sweeter bun without affecting the yeast too much.

Of course, you can always make a fruit bun without fruit – using just spices or perhaps chocolate chips, as they do at Gail’s bakery for their Soho bun.

Spices

Spices including cinnamon and cloves have an anti-microbial effect, so they will slow down the yeast, by killing off or slowing a proportion of the cells. A long, slow rise before you add the spices can help giving the yeast time to get going. Or the spices can be rippled through when shaping, as they are when making Chelsea buns or cinnamon rolls.

Milk

Milk seems to be beneficial for soft buns, but I can’t really pin down the reasons why. Harold McGee does highlight that scalding the milk and then cooling it before using in the dough helps to destroy an enzyme that would otherwise interfere.
Elizabeth David notes Eliza Acton’s insistence that milk makes a big difference when you want bread or rolls with a thin, soft crust. This effect seems to be mainly due to the fat in the milk.

Some good fruit bun recipes:

Dan Lepard’s Cider Hot Cross Buns

Azelia’s Dairy Free conversion and notes on the same recipe

and if you don’t want fruit you can always try:

Nordic Cinnamon buns from Nordic Bakery

Debs’ Hot Choc Buns

References

Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery is a comprehensive look at all sorts of breadmaking, covering the role of different ingredients, the history, and lots and lots of recipes.
Dan Lepard, ‘Short and Sweet‘ is full of all sorts of baking recipes and advice, but has good section on sweet breads, including fruit buns, teacakes and sticky buns.
Harold McGee, ‘On Food And Cooking‘ is the bible for finding out exactly what’s happening with your ingredients and recipes

Round and round: making buns and rolls

Apr22

There are many types of bread that you might want to make into rolls. Enriched doughs can make soft white baps or burger buns. Fruited and spiced doughs can make hot cross buns, teacakes or cinnamon rolls.

Getting neat and even shapes for these things can be tricky. Yeasted dough which has just has its first rise can be puffy and uneven.

Going from that lumpy mass to a tray of neat and even shapes can take a little practice.

I recorded some video of making rolls some time ago, and I have now finally got around to editing it together with some instructions to show the steps involved:

In addition to the video, I wrote a few tips that provide some more detail:

Make sure you dimple and pat the dough down to remove and redistribute the large air bubbles. You don’t need to ‘punch it down’ as some recipes say, but you do want to make the texture of the dough more even so that you can create even shapes out of it. You can also
Use this process to make a symettrical shape out of the dough which will make it easier to divide into even pieces. This can be a rectangle, a round boule shape or a long stick. You can also weigh the pieces as you cut them off to be sure they are even.
Try and preserve the skin of the dough when you’re shaping. This is a tip I got from this video of Richard Bertinet with Tim Hayward. The surface of the dough after it has risen is smooth and even. If you can use that surface as the outside edge of all your rolls, it will make it easier to get a smooth surface.
Start with this smooth section face down for each piece of dough, and draw the edges into the centre to make a ball.
To tighten the surface of the dough and make a really neat round shape, you should rotate the dough on the work surface. This motion (demonstrated in the video) draws the surface of the dough down, stretching it out and tucking it under at the same time.
Place the rolls and buns a little distance apart on a baking sheet. When they start to touch, you will know they have risen enough to bake.
To get really crusty bread, you should start at a high temperature, and then turn down and bake for longer at a low temperature. With rolls you’re usually after a soft texture and thin crust, so bake at a fairly hot temperature – 200C or so – and don’t overbake or the crust will start to dry out. Little buns might need only 10 minutes; larger burger buns more like 20 minutes.

10 tips for baking from American blogs in the UK

Nov17

I lived and cooked in the States, in Palo Alto, for a little over a year. Many things about it frustrated me to tears – although that was partly my fault for being determined to make mince pies and Christmas cake in a fit of homesickness. But that was where I learned to really cook over six months at Tante Marie’s cooking school in San Francisco. It gave me a huge affection for American food writers, restaurants and recipes.

There are many differences in the ingredients and equipment available in the UK compared to the US. Although we share a language (just), many aspects of American life are completely foreign to us. US food bloggers had a head start on us Brits, and many of the very best blogs are by American writers, so it’s a shame to avoid them because the recipes are hard to tackle. With a few tips, its very easy to adapt US recipes to make in the UK – and some bloggers, such as Smitten Kitchen, have become such converts to using a scale, they provide gram measures as well as cups.

The first thing to know about American baking is that almost no publisher or blogger can assume that a home baker owns a scale – a very small proportion of homes own them, so most will only provide cup measures. Where they do provide weights, it is likely to be in ounces (the US being almost the only country on the planet still sticking to the Imperial system of weights).

I have put together a list of the key differences to be aware of when using American recipes, particularly in baking, with suggestions on how to convert and appropriate substitutions. I hope you find this helpful, and try to tackle a few more recipes from the huge array of inspiring American bloggers.

A stick of butter weighs 4 ounces (110g) and is the same as half a cup. American butter has more water than European butter – it’s usually around 80 per cent fat, compared to 85% or more in the UK. This won’t make a difference for most recipes, but is worth bearing in mind if something turns out overly heavy or greasy.
While we’re at it, 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces and 1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons. You will sometimes see references to tablespoons of butter – you can assume that 1 tablespoon of butter weighs half an ounce.
American granulated sugar is somewhere between caster sugar and UK granulated sugar in the size of the grains. Superfine sugar means something similar to caster sugar and confectioners sugar refers to icing sugar.
A cup of all-purpose flour is somewhere between 4oz and 5oz – there is no standard weight, it all depends on the cook. I generally start with 130g per cup and adjust if the texture seems wrong.
All-purpose flour is slightly higher in protein than British plain flour, but most of the time you can substitute without any problems. If the recipe is particularly delicate, you can reproduce a similar protein content by using half plain flour and half strong white flour. Cake flour in the US is very low in protein, and usually bleached, a process which is outlawed in Europe. This makes it very hard to reproduce the superfine sponge used for American layer cakes.
Golden raisins are the same as sultanas. When it comes to other dried fruit, you almost never see currants, candied peel or glace cherries in America, so you won’t often find them in recipes.
Molasses is a dark syrup, much like black treacle, but usually more liquid. I will usually substitute about two-thirds black treacle and one-third golden syrup if molasses is called for.
Kosher salt is not Jewish salt – it simply means a flaky salt, used for koshering meat. Kosher salt is widely available in the US, and isn’t as expensive as sea salt here. It is best approximated with a fine sea salt, or with about half the volume of fine-grained table salt.
American baking often makes use of buttermilk, which can be bought in any grocery store in quart cartons like the milk. I usually substitute a mixture of two-thirds plain yoghurt and one-third semi-skimmed milk, which works well.
American cream is a sad thing, and their heavy cream (the thickest) never gets past the fat content of our whipping cream. So feel sorry for them, but bear in mind that when using cream, they are dealing with much less fat. Half and half is more or less what it says: half (whole) milk and half cream – single cream let down with a little milk would be about right.

Beginning to bake #9: Apple and blueberry cake

May2

I wanted to finish this series with another cake – a bit of an occasion cake that you could make for a birthday or dinner party. The obvious choice is a Victoria sponge, which you can make plain or chocolate, and fill with buttercream. But to be honest, you just need to follow the cupcakes recipe from this series, double it and bake it in two 20cm sandwich tins. Very easy.

Instead, I wanted to explore one of the best things about baking – experimenting.

Experimenting with food

One of the joys of baking is that you can play around and invent your own recipes. There are some rules to be followed, and weighing accurately is important, but the rules create a framework that you can work within to be creative. Once you understand what’s going on in a recipe, and the ratios that make things work, you *can* play around with baking recipes. Understanding that is really liberating and opens up a whole creative world.

To do this successfully, you need to understand which elements are important to the structure of the cake, and which you can safely play around with.

This weekend, I made a cake with fruit baked into the top. This can be pudding, with custard or creme fraiche, a cake for afternoon tea (or even a late breakfast). It doesn’t require filling or icing, and can be served warm, so it’s a great last-minute option for dinner.

The recipe I started with is from Donna Hay’s book, ‘Off the Shelf’ – a book about cooking from the pantry. This one, and several earlier Donna Hay books are hard to find now in the UK, but they are really lovely. Donna is the Martha Stewart of Australia (but nicer than that sounds). She is a great food stylist and photographer as well as a cook, so all her books and her bi-monthly magazine are beautiful, with big pictures of all the dishes.

This recipe is for a peach and raspberry tart with a sponge base. The original recipe is as follows (converting the cup measures to grams):

125g butter, softened
225g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
185g self-raising flour
2 peaches, halved and cut into thin wedges
150g raspberries
2 tablespoons icing sugar

[You can find the full recipe (American version) here: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2002-06-02/entertainment/18194663_1_raspberries-tart-peaches]

Just looking at the ingredients list, and the order they are presented in, I can guess at the method and which ingredients I need to leave alone. And the method confirms this – you cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy, add the vanilla and eggs, mix the flour in gently, and then top with the fruit when the mixture is in the tin.

In a recipe like this, the ratio of the butter to sugar to flour to eggs is important. With enough knowledge, you can start playing with this too, but it’s much harder to get right.

The bits that you can safely play with are the fruit, and to a certain extent, replacing some of the flour.

For the fruit, the main thing to bear in mind is making sure that the fruit you use releases a similar amount of juice, or the finished cake could be either too dry or too soggy. Strawberries, for instance, are very juicy and get very wet when cooked. Apples and pears release much less liquid. Stone fruit such as peaches and plums, and berries, are somewhere in between.

So when I decided to replace peaches with apples, and raspberries with blueberries, I was confident that the blueberries would behave in a similar way to the raspberries. However apples give up less juice and need more cooking to become soft than peaches. I solved this problem by gently cooking the apple slices in butter before putting them on top of the cake. This made them slightly softer, giving them a head start in the cooking. They were cooked just until starting to become translucent, but still firm enough to hold together in slices.

If you did end up using much juicier fruit, you can compensate by adding something more absorbent to the flour – cornmeal, polenta, semolina will all absorb more liquid (that’s a good trick for pastry with fruit on top as well).

For this cake, I wanted to add both moisture and a different flavour by adding ground nuts to replace some of the flour. Ground nuts have a good deal of oil in them, so they don’t behave exactly like the flour. They won’t provide the structure that flour would, so the cake may sink more (although with fruit on top, this one won’t rise very high anyway). It will also keep the cake nice and moist as it keeps. I was going to use ground almonds, but then saw ground hazelnuts on special offer after passover, so used them instead.

So the final recipe I ended up with is as follows:

Apple, Blueberry and Hazelnut cake

Recipe adapted from Donna Hay’s Off the Shelf.

Oven preheated to 180C/160C fan.

2 apples (Braeburn), cut into thin wedges,

— Gently fried in butter until they have softened slightly and lost some of their opacity. Put aside to cool.

125g butter, softened
225g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

— all beaten together in the KitchenAid until light and fluffy

2 eggs

— beaten together, and then slowly beaten into the creamed mixture

145g plain flour (forgot about the self-raising part, and it was fine!)
45g ground hazelnuts

— added to mixture and mixed just to combine.

Scraped all of this into a lined and greased 9 inch/22cm springform tin.

Arrange the apples on top and sprinkle over a carton of blueberries (around 150g – 200g).

Bake for 1 hour, until the cake risen between the fruit is golden, and springs back. You can also use a skewer to test for crumbs, but pick a point in between the fruit.

Put on a rack to cool, and sprinkle with icing sugar before serving.

The final cake is firm and moist, slices cleanly and supports the fruit without it sinking through. It’s perhaps a touch on the sweet side, so I might consider experimenting with reducing the sugar in future. That is the sort of thing you want to do gradually, as you will affect the ratio of the cake.

Beginning to bake #8: A simple loaf of bread

Apr18

I’m going to give cakes a bit of a break – too much sugar around here. Instead, let’s turn to bread. Bread is probably the baking area with the greatest gap between myth and reality. It seems hard and unachievable, the sort of thing only crazy obsessives or domestic goddesses attempt. Actually the process is easier than making a cake.

So how did breadmaking acquire this intimidating aura? A few things get in the way:

It takes time

Unlike the soda bread, which came together in just an hour, yeasted bread will need at least 2 or 3 hours from start to eating. However, for most of that time, you don’t need to do anything. What you really need is a few hours when you’ll be at home so you can dip in and out of the process. One useful thing is to make bread while you’re making something else like a casserole. That allows you to chop some carrots or stir the pot while you’re waiting for the next bread step.

You can even stretch the time out so you can start it off one evening and continue the following morning or even the next evening. There are a number of tricks to use to speed up or slow down the dough and make it work to your schedule.

Briefly, you can speed things up by using more yeast or by keeping everything warm so the yeast multiplies faster. Conversely, you can slow things down by starting with less yeast or using the fridge to store the dough for a while.

It’s not predictable

Cakes can be tricky, but you can have a reasonable expectation that if you use the right ingredients, weighed accurately, and baked at the right temperature, it should do exactly what it’s supposed to. Bread making is more unpredictable, in that factors that are hard for you to control at home (like room temperature and humidity) have a much greater influence. This is fundamentally because you’re cultivating a live organism, the yeast, to do the work of aerating the bread. It’s more like gardening than cooking. The trick lies in understanding the processes and recognising what they look like, so you can proceed until the dough is ready, rather than watching the clock.

You need to know what you’re aiming for

One reason people can be disappointed with their breadmaking is that it isn’t like their favourite bought type, and there are many different types of bread. Whether you like rough, chewy sourdough, nutty wholemeal sandwich loaves or soft white rolls, you can create each of them at home, but you’ll need to use not just a different recipe but a different approach for each one.

So, with that in mind, this recipe is for a white loaf with a crust that can be baked in a loaf tin, on a baking sheet or in a pot to make a round ‘boule’ shape.

Equipment:

Bowl
Wooden spoon
A little sharp knife

For baking:

A large round casserole dish with a lid (Pyrex or cast iron – it needs to be able to withstand high temperatures)

For the best first-time results, I would recommend the casserole approach, but you can also use a preheated baking sheet, or a loaf tin and put a roasting tin of hot water on the shelf beneath to create steam.

Basic recipe:

500g strong white bread flour
300g water
3 tsp dried yeast, or one sachet
1 1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp olive oil or vegetable oil

I’ve covered lots of other tips and tricks for making bread in a previous post, so I’ll go through the recipe fairly straight. This method is adapted from Dan Lepard’s technique and a really great blog post by Azelia’s Kitchen.

Method:

1. Mix

Put the flour, yeast and salt into a bowl and mix briefly to distribute the yeast and salt. Add the oil and water. The water doesn’t need to be warm, but if you want things to move fast, then that will help. Mix into a rough dough with a spoon, stopping when there’s no more dry flour.

2. Rest

Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave for 10 minutes. This step starts the gluten working (remember that water + flour = gluten) by allowing the flour time to absorb the water properly.

3. Fold

Instead of kneading to develop the gluten, this approach folds the dough to develop and stretch the gluten. You can do this in the bowl if you’re short of space, but it’s a little easier to do on the counter. If you’re putting it on the counter, use oil rather than flour to prevent the dough from sticking. This means you won’t change the overall balance between flour and water in the recipe.

Just scrape all the dough out, push it into a single ball and then fold each side into the centre, as if it had 4 sides. Do this three times, for 12 folds in all. This should create a nice tight ball, with a smooth surface on the side away from the folds.

4. Rise

Turn the dough so the smooth side faces up in the bowl. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave to rise for a few hours or until doubled in size. To speed this up, put the bowl in a warm place, or to slow it down, if you need to leave it alone and come back later, put it into the fridge. If you do that, you’ll need to let it come back to room temperature before you carry on.

5. Shape

Once it has risen, it will be very puffy, with big bubbles. To redistribute these and form the shape of the loaf, scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a floured counter. Try to make sure the smooth upper surface is preserved, and ends up face down on the counter. Press all over with your fingertips to push down the big bubbles and flatten the dough slightly. Fold the sides into the centre again to reform the ball.

6. Proof

Put the dough onto a floured tea towel, this time smooth side down. Fold the towel over it, and leave to rise again, for somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour, until it’s expanded again and become puffy again.

7. Bake

While the dough is proving, put a large casserole dish with a lid into the oven (Pyrex or cast iron are good). A good 20 minutes before you think the dough will be done (start after 20 minutes if you’re not sure) turn the oven on and set to 220c or 200c for a fan oven.

Once you’re ready to bake, take the scorching hot pot out of the oven, remove the lid and tip the dough, fold-side down, into the hot pot. Use a small sharp knife to slash the top of the dough. Replace the lid (don’t forget to use oven gloves) and put into the oven. Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake for another 15 or 20 minutes to get the top brown.

8. Cool

Tip out onto a rack and leave to cool. Be as patient as you can – important things happen to the interior of the loaf as it cools, and you’ll find it is quite doughy if you cut it early.

The bread will keep well for a couple of days because of the oil in it, but if you don’t think you’ll get through it wrap the whole loaf or a half before freezing. You can also hand-slice it and then freeze so you can toast it straight from the freezer.

Beginning to bake #7: Cupcakes (or fairy cakes)

Apr11

To most people, cupcakes and muffins are pretty much the same thing. Certainly, if you buy them in supermarkets, both will be very sweet, quite dense, and come in individual paper cases. Cupcakes are likely to be differentiated by a swirl of thick icing or perhaps a glaze of shiny royal icing.

But in baking terms, the two are very different. Muffins have relatively little fat or sugar, and are combined very carefully. They produce moist, not-too-sweet buns, which often have fruit mixed through the centre. They rely on a big boost of baking powder or bicarbonate of soda to make them airy, and because they contain so much moisture (and water + flour = gluten), you have to mix them very gently so they won’t be tough.

Cupcakes, however, are just sponge cakes made in little cases. Think of fairy cakes or butterfly cakes you might have made at school. Although the recipe in this post is for cupcakes, you can also bake it in a larger cake tin to make a sponge cake. For that matter, almost any cake recipe in this format (where you cream the butter and sugar together first) can be converted to cupcakes by just baking it in paper cases (a useful thing to remember if you don’t have the right sized tin, or the mixture looks like it won’t fit – bake the excess as cupcakes). You just need to make sure you adjust the baking time (and in some cases, the temperature).

Structure of the batter

The structure of a cupcake is a foam, a web of flour starch and egg proteins, with many tiny bubbles. The big difference between making cupcakes and any of the previous recipes in this series is that incorporating the air is much more important. The batter you end up with is quite delicate, with just enough connection between the ingredients to hold the all-important air in there.

The starting point for incorporating air in this type of cake is creaming, mixing butter and sugar really thoroughly to create bubbles. Both of the biscuit recipes started by mixing together the butter and sugar, but this is not creaming. Creaming involves beating the butter and sugar together for a long time, to allow the sugar to create little bubbles in the butter – what Hannah Glasse in 1774 described as a ‘fine thick cream’. This is work that calls for electric assistance – Hannah Glasse suggested that using your hand, this should take an hour. Another 19th Century book suggests it is “the hardest part of cake making” and you should have your manservant do it.

In the absence of a man-servant, a handheld electric mixer or a stand mixer like a Kitchenaid makes this much, much easier. With a small quantity it can be done by hand, but expect a decent workout. You need the mixture to change colour – as the air is incorporated, the bubbles make the mixture look paler. The texture also becomes much fluffier.

Basic recipe:

(adapted from Nigella Lawson’s cupcakes in ‘How To Be A Domestic Goddess‘)

This recipe is for a plain sponge, more of an old-fashioned fairy cake than a fluffy American cupcake. However, if you master the techniques for this, then most other cupcake recipes will look familiar*.

125g butter, room temperature
125g caster sugar
2 eggs, room temperature
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
125g plain flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
2-3 tbsp milk

To make sure everything mixes together easily, you need to make sure that everything is at room temperature, and that the butter is really soft but not melted. To warm eggs up, put them in a bowl with warm water for about 5 minutes. To warm butter, microwave on the lowest setting, or use a very, very low oven (60C or so.)

I’m also going to assume an electric mixer of some sort, although with enough elbow grease, you can do the same with a wooden spoon.

Start by beating the butter on its own to make sure it’s soft. Add the sugar and mix together, then beat really thoroughly until creamed – pale and fluffy. This should take at least 5 minutes with an electric mixer, probably longer. It’s almost impossible to do this for too long.

Beat the eggs in a small jug or bowl. Add a little at a time to the butter and sugar, beating really thoroughly after each addition. Add the vanilla, or any other flavouring (such as lemon zest for lemon cupcakes). It’s at this point that the mixture can curdle, especially if things started out a bit cold – the mixture will look lumpy and a bit scrambled (see photo, ahem). If this happens, the answer is just to keep going – it might not be as light, but it will come back together when you add the flour, and the end result should be fine.

Sift in the flour and baking powder. Mix very gently, ideally by hand, just to combine and mix in any visible streaks of flour. A silicone spatula is good for this, as you can scrape the sides and right down to the bottom of the bowl.

If the mixture is still quite stiff, you can add a little milk to loosen it up. The traditional description of this is ‘dropping consistency’, meaning if you scoop up a big spoonful and hold it upside down of the bowl, it will drop off. Mix the milk in very gently – remember that the liquid in the eggs, plus the milk will activate the gluten in the flour, and too much stretching at this stage will make the network of protein in the cake too tough.

Divide the batter between the muffin cases. Bake for 20 minutes at 190C/170Cfan until the tops are evenly golden and the centres spring back when you push them gently (meaning the centres are cooked through).

Cool on a wire rack before icing. The simplest icing is to use icing sugar or royal icing sugar mixed with a very small amount of water or lemon juice and spread over the top.

* There are some sponge or cake recipes that ask for you to mix the fat and the flour together first, waterproofing the flour as much as possible, and relying on the baking powder for the rise.

Variations:

The most obvious variations are flavour ones. The main thing is to use concentrated flavours so that you don’t add too much liquid or too much dry ingredients and change the balance of the mixture.

Replace some of the flour with 2 -3 tablespoons of cocoa to make chocolate cakes. Ice with chocolate ganache (an equal mixture of cream and chocolate, melted together).
Flavour the mixture with lemon zest (or Boyajian lemon oil) and use lemon juice to make the icing. Leave out the vanilla in this case.
Use instant coffee to make a coffee-flavoured sponge.

For further variations, see the next post on sponge cakes.

Beginning to bake #6: Cookies

Apr6

Biscuits or cookies – there are hundreds of variations. Providing a basic recipe for biscuits is hard – there are thousands of different biscuit or cookie recipes out there, and every country has it’s own favourite variations: bourbon biscuits, gingernuts, speculoos, chocolate chip cookies, macarons de Paris, biscotti, shortbread, digestives – the list is *long*.

But let’s start with some generalisations: most are a combination of flour, butter and sugar. Many also have egg to bind the dough together and to help it become crispy. Some will include some leavening – baking powder or bicarbonate of soda – to help it puff in the oven.

The shortbread-type cookies contain just flour, butter and sugar. They are mixed in the same way as pastry, but with softened instead of cold butter. This makes it hard to roll out, but gives you that characteristic shortbread crunch and really crumbly texture.

American cookies usually have a lot more sugar and some extra liquid or egg. They are usually designed to be scooped into balls and then spread out in the oven, and they usually have plenty of additions – chocolate chunks, nuts, dried fruit, oats.

Looking at different cookie recipes, there is a huge variation in them (and, because I’m a complete geek, I assembled a spreadsheet to check this. I know. But it keeps me in gainful employment). Look at different people’s shortcrust pastry recipes and you’ll probably find they are almost identical. No two biscuit recipes seem to be the same. That gives you a clue – if there is a very wide range in existing recipes, that tells you that you can probably play around and adjust recipes quite safely, and still come out with something that works/is edible.

To prove that, I tested two different but basic cookie recipes for this post. Use whichever you like the sound of. When you make such plain cookies, though, remember that the taste of the butter will be very prominent, so use something good, and definitely don’t use margarine or low-fat spread.

Make sure the butter is soft before you start. If you usually keep butter in the fridge, as I do, there are a couple of things you can do. One is to get the butter out of the fridge and put it on the counter several hours before you plan to bake. Hmm. No, I don’t usually remember to do that either. Instead, I most often slice the butter I’ve weighed for the recipe into thick slices on a plate and put it into the microwave. I use 1 min bursts on the lowest setting (90W) until I can press a finger in without too much trouble. You don’t particularly want to melt it, but if part of it does, just let it stand for a bit, and then mix it all together again. For cookies, it’s not a big deal, though it will get more important next time when we move on to cupcakes…

Cookie recipe 1 – shortbread type

This is a very plain dough, and almost the only difference with recipe 2 is the much reduced amount of sugar. On its own, it’s a bit boring, but it would work well as a thumbprint cookie (where you press a depression in the centre of the cookie and fill it with jam). The contrast with something very sweet would work with this plain dough. Because it’s quite fragile, I rolled this dough into a log, chilled it, and then sliced it into discs before baking. You can also use this method to make a sweet tart case – take the discs and press them together in a tart tin to form a complete crust.

200g butter, room temp
100g caster sugar
300g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
1 large egg, beaten

Put the softened butter into a bowl and add the sugar. Beat together – it will make a paste.

Add the vanilla. Put a sieve over the bowl, and add the flour and baking powder. Sift into the bowl and mix together. It will be crumbly.

Add egg and knead gently until it comes together as a dough.

Wrap into a cylinder in baking parchment and twist the ends. Chill for about 30 minutes.

Slice into discs about 5mm thick, and place the slices onto a baking sheet lined with baking parchment. If you want, press in chopped chocolate or coarse sugar as a topping.

Put into the oven and bake for about 14 minutes at 150C (fan)/170C. When they’re done, they will still be very pale, but should just start to colour slightly brown at the edges.

Cookie recipe 2 – cookie type

This is more recognisably a cookie. It won’t be chewy, but crisp instead. If you want chewy you can do a few things: use brown sugar instead of caster sugar; replace plain flour with bread flour, and beat the dough to develop the gluten a bit (you’ll need a mixer or a strong arm).

200g butter
300 plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
300g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg, beaten

Cream the butter and sugar together, to make a stiff paste.

Add the vanilla and egg, and mix together. Place a sieve over the bowl, and add the flour with the baking powder. Sift into the bowl to make sure the two are combined. Mix together – it will form a stiff dough.

Mix in any chunks, flavourings or other additions. For this recipe I used 70g of chopped dark chocolate.

At this point you can chill the dough for 10 or 15 minutes (especially if it’s very soft) or up to a couple of days. Use a scoop or a spoon to pull off about a tablespoon at a time of dough, form it into a ball and place it on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.

Bake for 15-20 minutes at 150C(fan)/170C, depending on how crisp you want them. As for the other cookies, you are looking for at least a little colour at the edges. These won’t colour like most cookies because they don’t contain brown sugar, so they will remain quite pale.

Variations:

The New York Times did a long article on ‘The Perfect chocolate chip cookie‘ which contains lots of useful tips and tricks. This includes the fact that refrigerating your cookie dough overnight will enhance the flavour.
Signe Johansen did her own ‘Perfect chocolate chip cookie’ analysis on her Scandilicious blog, which has a more UK friendly recipe.
Edd Kimber – winner of the Great British Bake-off, adapts a Momofuku recipe: http://he-eats.com/2010/03/09/milk-bar-blueberries-and-cream-cookies-an-adaption/
Dan Lepard – in his baking column for the Guardian, Dan recently did an egg-free, dairy-free, soya-free cookie recipe: Walnut and black cherry cookies.

Beginning to bake #5: Freeform rhubarb tart

Apr3

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Shortcrust pastry is one of the most useful baking skills. You can use it for sweet or savoury dishes, make it in any quantity, keep it for a day or two in the fridge or store it for later in the freezer. And the skills are very simple – you mix the flour and butter using the same rubbing in method as for scones.

The recipe today is for a freeform fruit tart, so you don’t need to worry about lining a pie dish or tart tin. You can use all sorts of fruit in the centre, just cut fairly small so it cooks through. Watch out for fruits that give off a lot of juice when they cook – you might want to add some breadcrumbs or cake crumbs underneath the fruit to soak up the juices. But with the rhubarb here, I just didn’t pack it too closely, and it was fine.

Making shortcrust pastry is surrounded by a dense thicket of rules and myths:

Cold hands make better pastry
You should roll out the pastry on a marble slab
You need to use ice water
All butter pastry is best
You should always use lard for the best pastry

So why all the rules? What’s with keeping everything cold? For pastry, you really need the waterproofing effect of the fat to make sure the pastry ends up ‘short’, which means crisp and crumbly, like shortbread. Butter is made of only about 80% fat (depending on the brand). The rest is a mixture of water and milk solids (seriously. Check the nutrition panel on a packet). This means that anything you do to warm the pastry up risks melting a little bit of butter and releasing some water into the flour, and you want to keep that to a minimum.

Another reason for keeping things cold is to preserve some pieces of fat in the pastry. When the dough is rolled out, these pieces will form thin layers of fat, separating layers of dough. As the pastry cooks, the fat melts and separates the layers, making the cooked pastry flaky as well as crumbly. If you want a more flaky pastry, leave more large pieces of fat in the dough. When you roll it out, if you can see big streaks of fat, you can gently fold it like a business letter before proceeding. This will gives you some of the characteristics of rough puff pastry. If you want it more crumbly, rub the fat in until all the big pieces disappear. For a really shortbread-like crust, you can use softened or melted butter, along with sugar, which also interferes with the gluten.

Similarly, you want to handle it as little as possible. Rolling it out or stretching it many times will make it tough not crisp, as it develops the gluten.

Why use lard or shortening?

Those who swear by lard or vegetable shortening for their pastry do so for two reasons. One is that both are 100% fat, so there’s no risk of releasing water into the pastry as it melts. The other factor is that both melt at a higher temperature than butter, meaning you can use warm hands with less risk of melting the fat. The down side of both is that the flavour isn’t as nice as butter, so a common compromise is to use half butter and half lard.

Equipment:

Bowl
Knife
Baking sheet or tart tin

Basic recipe:

The phrase to remember is ‘half fat to flour’ – you always start with a ratio of half the weight of butter or other fat to the weight of flour. Richer shortcrust pastries can use more butter, and can use eggs as well, but this is the basic recipe, and a good place to start.

200g flour
100g cold butter (or half butter and half lard)
4-5 tbsp cold, cold water
Big pinch of salt

For a rhubarb tart:

3 sticks of rhubarb
1 clementine or orange
Brown sugar

Method:

Weigh the flour into a bowl, add the salt, and add the cold butter, cut into chunks. Using a dinner knife, cut the butter into smaller pieces in the flour. Aim for the largest chunks to be about the size of a large pea. This will make it easier to rub the butter in.

Using your fingertips, rub the flour and butter together to integrate them, as in the scones recipe. Here, it doesn’t matter if the butter doesn’t disappear completely – you can leave some small lumps. Keep everything as cold as you can.

Once the butter is rubbed in, add about 3 tablespoons of fridge-cold water (about 45g if the bowl is on the scales). Use the knife to mix it around and try to get everything equally damp. You’re not trying to get it wet enough to form a ball on it’s own, like with scones. All you need is enough dampness that when you squeeze the crumbs together, they stick to each other and don’t crumble apart again. Try that test to see if it’s ready. You will probably need another tablespoon or two to make sure it’s damp enough all the way through, but try not to use too much more than you need. The more water you use, the tougher the pastry will be, and the more likely it is to shrink when it is baked.

Use the knife to start sticking the damp crumbs together (the more you can use a knife or a scraper to push things around, the less you will have to use your hands, and the cooler everything stays).

Tip everything out onto the counter and pat and push it into a single disc of dough. Put this into a small ziplock bag or wrap it in clingfilm, and stash it in the fridge. Leave it for at least 30 minutes and up to a day.

Remove from the fridge, put it onto a floured counter and start to roll out with a rolling pin. If it’s too cold and stiff for the rolling pin to make an impression, leave it out for a while.

The trick when rolling out pastry is to roll it only in the middle – don’t roll off the front or the back. Just roll a little, then turn the pastry gently by about 1/8th of a turn, and roll again. This stops you making any part of the pastry too thin, and turning it helps to keep it roughly round and makes sure it is not sticking.

The pastry will probably start to crack at the edges as you roll it out. You can push these together, so that they don’t spread and get bigger as you roll further. Just push the edges of the crack together with your fingers, or pat the edges to seal it up.

Once you have a thin sheet of pastry, transfer carefully to a baking sheet. It’s easiest to move it by draping it over the rolling pin, or by folding it gently in half and then sliding it over. Using a piece of baking parchment to line the baking sheet will make it easier to move, and will also stop any juices from the fruit sticking the tart to the baking sheet when it’s baked.

Spread it out on the baking sheet, and move the whole thing into the fridge while you prepare the fruit. This will chill the pastry back down, and also give the gluten that was stretched out by the rolling pin a chance to relax.

Meanwhile, chop the fruit into small pieces and combine with a couple of tablespoons of sugar, and some clementine zest here.

Remove the pastry from the fridge. Arrange the fruit over the pastry, leaving a wide border around the edge. Leave any juices that have collected in the bowl. Fold the edge of the pastry over the fruit, and pinch it together to hold it in place.

Crimp it all the way around, then if there are some sugary juices still in the bowl, use a pastry brush to brush them over the edge of the pastry. This is not essential, but will make it sweeter and help it brown.

Bake at 200C/180C for about 20 minutes until the pastry is brown and crisp.

Variations:

You can cut the pastry into pieces when it comes out of the fridge, and roll each piece out separately to make individual tarts. The ones below are actually made with a rhubarb-apple compote and roasted rhubarb pieces on top.

French apple tart – use the same pastry to line a tart tin. Peel, halve and core about 6 or 7 medium apples. Slice thinly and arrange on the pastry. Bake for about 45 minutes, until the pastry is deep golden and the apples are all cooked and starting to colour. Brush the top with warmed apricot jam. This one adapted from a recipe in Saveur magazine.

Use the same pastry on top of a dish of beef stew or chicken to make a pot pie. Brush the dish with water or milk to make it stick, and crimp it to the dish. Cut a couple of holes in the top to let the steam escape. Brush the top with milk or egg to get a lovely golden colour. Try replacing the puff pastry in this Jamie Oliver recipe for beef and Guinness pie with your own homemade pastry.

Beginning to bake #4: Bread in an hour

Mar28

We’re on to post four of my baking mission – read the original rationale here. In this Lent project, we’ve gone from pancakes to muffins to scones. And now we’re starting bread.

But not scary yeasted bread – that comes later. A soda bread that can be ready in an hour. And that’s an hour from walking in the door to eating it (I timed it in case you didn’t believe me, and you can see the timer running in the photos).

Soda bread and scones are very closely related. Instead of yeast, soda bread again relies on baking powder or bicarbonate of soda for leavening. As the name suggests, soda bread is most often made with bicarbonate of soda (baking soda if you’re in North America) along with something acidic like buttermilk. And apart from flour and a bit of salt, that’s all you need. A little melted butter is often added to make it more tender. There are also recipes with more butter, some sugar and raisins that make something more like a tea cake or a scone – also very good, and see the Smitten Kitchen variation below, adapted from the New York Times, which suggests serving with some cheese and apples.

Back with a more austere recipe, with so little in the way of ingredients, you really need good flour, and proper seasoning to get a good flavour from the bread. Wholemeal or a mix of plain and wholemeal flour gives you a wheaty flavour and a more interesting texture. Spelt flour is also good, and small parts of rye flour mixed in will give another flavour again. Stoneground flour has more flavour than regular flour – the grinding process will incorporate the germ and more of the oils into the flour, so you can often see a visible difference, and it looks creamier than steel-ground plain flour.

Like scones, this bread will also stale fast, so it is best made and eaten warm on the same day (although it will also make decent toast the following day). But it’s so quick that there’s no need to keep it hanging around. Just make it when you want it.

Equipment:

Nothing new here: scales and measuring spoons, plus:

Bowl
Wooden spoon
Baking tray

Basic recipe:

200g plain flour
200g wholemeal plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
190g yoghurt + 140g milk (or 330ml buttermilk)
1 tsp honey (optional)

Turn the oven on and set the temperature to 200C or 180C for a fan oven.

Weigh the flours into the bowl. Add the bicarbonate of soda and salt, and combine with a whisk.

Add the milk and yoghurt to the bowl. Add the honey on top if using, then use the spoon to mix everything together until you have a sticky ball of dough.

Sprinkle plenty of flour on a board or the counter. Scrape the dough out onto it.

Sprinkle the top with more flour, and flour your hands. Fold each edge over into the centre to make it into a ball. It will be very sticky. Use plenty of flour, and don’t handle it too much. Just get it into a rough ball shape.

Lift the ball gently onto the floured baking sheet. Pat it out to about 3cm thick, just flattening it a bit.

Flour the handle of your wooden spoon, and press it into the surface of the dough to make a cross. This will give the dough room to expand in the oven, and help the loaf to rise a little, giving a lighter crumb.

Put the tray into the oven and set the time for 35 minutes. After that time, check the loaf. It should be a dark golden brown. If you’re not sure, bake for another 5 or 10 minutes. I baked for 40 minutes at 180C in my fan oven. An oven without a fan will take longer.

Leave to cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes, and then slice and enjoy warm with butter.

Variations:

Lorraine Pascale Soda Bread

Lorraine Pascale has a lovely recipe which makes a large loaf. She uses treacle to give the loaf flavour and a little sweetness.

Smitten Kitchen – Skillet Irish Soda Bread

Smitten Kitchen adapted a New York TImes recipe to make a much sweeter, more cake-like loaf, that is still incredibly good. I like to bake this one in my deep oven-proof cast-iron pan, lined with baking parchment, but it will work on a baking sheet as well.

Richard Corrigan – Whole poached wild salmon with wheaten bread

In Northern Ireland, soda bread is often known as wheaten bread. Here Richard Corrigan of Lindsay House and Bentley’s Oyster Bar in London, gives his wheaten bread recipe.

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Fat

Roux

Sugar

Fruit

Spices

Milk

Some good fruit bun recipes:

References

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Experimenting with food

Apple, Blueberry and Hazelnut cake

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It takes time

It’s not predictable

You need to know what you’re aiming for

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Method:

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Structure of the batter

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Variations:

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Cookie recipe 1 – shortbread type

Cookie recipe 2 – cookie type

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