Category Archives: recipes

Beginning to bake #2: Raspberry muffins

This is the second in my series of Lent posts on simple baking. After pancakes we move on to muffins, and the first item that is actually baked.

The word muffins is used for all sorts of things, including split and toasted English muffins, made with yeast, and those cakey things sold in plastic wrappers with a spookily long shelf life. We’re not talking about either of those here. What we’re aiming for is a not-too-sweet bun, with some pieces of nuts or fruit adding texture, that’s moist and quite good with breakfast or a cup of tea. The classic would be a blueberry muffin, the firm berries providing little pockets of purple juice, but in this case, I’m doing raspberries, because that’s what I had in the freezer. And I like raspberries better.

The logic for moving from pancakes to muffins is that the mixture is made in a similar way: you mix dry ingredients, including flour and baking powder, and add wet ingredients, including milk and egg, and mix together very briefly. This is a thicker mix, so it is baked in a muffin tin in the oven instead of being cooked in a pan.

My preferred recipe for muffins uses mashed bananas as part of the wet ingredients. I think this gives a great flavour, and it helps to use up the over ripe bananas that I always seem to have. However, I’m trying to make these recipes as straightforward as possible, and you don’t always have bananas just lying around. So this is a plain version. But if you find yourself with bananas on the turn, I urge you to try one of the recipes in the Variations section below.

This version can be used with other berries instead – blueberries would work very well (it’s originally adapted from Nigella Lawson’s blueberry muffin recipe). Frozen berries can be easier to work with, as they don’t smush when you stir them in. Or you can use other fruit, chopped nuts, citrus zest or chocolate chips as the flavouring instead. As these muffins are quite plain, it’s also nice to add something crunchy to the top – crunchy sugar, and chopped nuts or flaked almonds are good. But all these things are optional and flexible. Start with something straightforward and go from there.

Equipment:

In addition to scales and measuring cups:

  • Bowl
  • Wooden spoon / silicone spatula
  • Jug or small bowl for wet ingredients
  • Muffin tin (can be pretty cheap, doesn’t need to be non stick if you’re using cases)
  • Muffin paper cases
  • Spring-loaded ice cream scoop (entirely optional, but really good for dividing muffin batter into cases. If you get addicted to muffins, get one).

Basic recipe:

Wet ingredients:

  • 100ml/g milk (as before, milliliters and grams are the same thing for milk and water)
  • 100g yoghurt
  • 1 large egg
  • 75ml vegetable oil (near enough 75g)

Dry ingredients:

  • 200g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
  • pinch of salt
  • 75g caster sugar

Flavourings:

  • 200g raspberries – fresh or frozen

Topping (optional):

  • flaked almonds
  • demerara sugar – a couple of tablespoons of each

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200C / 180C if it’s a fan oven.

Measure the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Use a whisk to combine them, and make sure the baking powder and bicarbonate are distributed through the flour.

Measure the wet ingredients into a large jug or a small bowl. Use a whisk or a fork to break up the egg and combine it all together.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry. Mix the two together gently. Once they are most of the way combined, but still with dry patches, add the raspberries. Frozen berries are easier to mix in, but fresh are good too.

Divide the mixture between the muffin cases. Sprinkle a few flaked almonds and half a teaspoon of sugar onto each muffin. Bake for 20 minutes at 180C.

Once they are golden brown on top, and they spring back if you press the top gently with your finger. Leave the muffins to cool for five minutes in the tin, then lift them out using the cases and set to cool on a wire rack (a grill pan will also work).

Muffins are best eaten on the same day, or the day after. If you want to keep them longer, the best thing to do is put them in a plastic box or a ziplock bag and freeze soon after baking.

Variations:

Banana muffin variations: Cherry and almond, Coffee ginger walnut

Dan Lepard has a recipe for mocha fig muffins that are both dairy and egg free.

Marmalade makes a good muffin – it adds moisture from the pectin in the marmalade.

Beginning to bake #1: the pancake plan

As I explained in my previous post, the challenge I have set myself is to set out a series of steps to help someone to learn to bake. The idea is to build each step on a platform of existing knowledge.

Thinking through possible starting points, I’ve decided to assume only the skills needed to fry things. If you can make a basic stir fry, or cook up some bacon and eggs then you should be able to make pancakes.

Although cooked on top of the stove, and therefore not strictly baking, pancakes have many things in common with baked goods. They are made of flour, eggs and milk, and in the case of these puffy Scotch pancakes, leavened with baking powder.

Cooking them on a pan also allows you to easily tell when they are cooked, one of the harder things for novice bakers.

A word about equipment: I am going to try and keep equipment needs to a minimum, and to increase what is needed by only one or two pieces each time. However, there are a couple of things that I think are essential for baking of any sort. One is a set of digital scales – I really wouldn’t want to ever bake without them, although American cooks seem to have avoided them for decades. Because you can zero them out with a bowl on there, you can often measure everything into one bowl. You can also more or less get away without a measuring jug for liquids, because they can be weighed too (remember that 100ml of water weighs 100g, and that goes for milk too). So, get a good set of digital scales, with a flat top and a zero button – they should be about £20. You will also need measuring spoons – at least 1 tablespoon, 1 teaspoon and a half teaspoon. Don’t use cutlery – it’s very unlikely to give you the same measure.

Apart from those two baking essentials, for these pancakes, you will also need a frying pan, a bowl or large jug, a whisk and a large spoon or a ladle (to pour the batter into the pan).

Basic recipe:

  • 120 grams plain flour
  • 2 teaspoons (tsp) baking powder
  • Pinch of salt
  • 150 millileters / grams milk
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 teaspoon sugar

This is a fairly simple ingredients list, so you may find you have everything on hand anyway.

If your baking powder has been untouched for years, it’s probably worth getting a new pot. Baking powder is just a mixture of a powdered acid and a powdered alkali. When you add liquid, the two react, producing bubbles of carbon dioxide that make baked goods light and fluffy. Modern baking powders are often ‘double-acting’, releasing gas when the liquid is added, and then again when heat is applied in the oven.

If it’s old, it can lose it’s potency.

Method:

Measure the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl.

Add the sugar. Use a whisk to combine them together, making sure the baking powder is evenly distributed in the flour. If you have a sieve, you can put that on top of the bowl before you zero the scales and sieve them all together, but the whisk does a pretty good job. Watch out for lumps in the baking powder – those are harder to remove with a whisk.

Add the milk and the egg to the centre of the bowl, and use the whisk to combine everything together.

You need to mix the liquid and flour completely, but you don’t need to beat it hard and remove all the lumps. Whenever you add water to flour, you will start to develop gluten, the stretchy protein thy gives bread it’s texture. If you beat this batter hard, you will develop the gluten more, and the pancakes may end up chewy.

Heat a frying pan over a medium heat.  Non-stick pans are very helpful, I used a cast iron pan, but use whatever you have. Add a little butter, allow it to melt, and then wipe the pan with a paper towel to coat the pan with fat, and remove the excess.

Use the spoon or ladle to add about a tablespoon of batter to the hot pan. Spread it a little to form a circle, then leave it to cook.

You’ll know it’s ready to turn over when you have little bubbles over the surface, and the top of the pancake has almost all set, with virtually no liquid left. Turn over with a spatula, and cook the other side for a few minutes. You’ll know you have the heat right if the pancake is a perfect shade of golden brown when the top is set. If it looks too pale or too dark, adjust the heat.

Continue cooking the pancake like this, on batches. Get as many as you can in the pan, without them flowing into each other. If they do touch, use the spatula once they are set to separate them, then continue.

Keep the cooked pancakes warm on a plate or baking tray in a low oven (about 120C), covered with a tea towel.

Serve hot with maple syrup and crispy bacon. Or make then for afternoon tea, and serve with jam.

You can also freeze the pancakes after they have cooled. Interleaved them with greaseproof paper or baking parchment if you want to remove them individually, and freeze in a sealed box or freezer bag. Reheat frozen pancakes a few at a time in the toaster, or wrap a larger stack in foil and warm in the oven.

Variations:

Lemon yoghurt cake

Last Sunday, the rain came down, there was nowhere in my house that wasn’t covered in dust, and I was hiding in the bedroom. Sometimes, the only way to get yourself out of this sort of slump is to bake. So I surfed around to find a regular, plain and everyday cake that I could make. The first place to look was Smitten Kitchen, a great resource for friendly home baking as well as weeknight dinners and birthday cakes.

One of the elegant things about this cake is that it requires no butter, only oil and yoghurt, so you don’t need softened butter on hand, or a mixer to put it together.

What I ended up with was a version of Smitten Kitchen’s lime yoghurt cake with blackberry sauce, which is itself a version of a traditional french yoghurt cake. Having zested part of a lemon earlier in the day, I decided to make this a lemon cake, using up the rest of the lemon zest and the juice.

  • 240g plain yoghurt
  • 80g sunflower oil
  • 230g caster sugar
  • zest and juice of one lemon
  • 2 eggs

–> whisked together

  • 190g plain flour (I used about 1/2 cup wholewheat self-raising)
  • 1 tsp baking powder (1.5 if flour is all plain)
  • 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/8 tsp salt

–> into a sieve above the wet ingredients, sifted in, and stirred together until just combined, just until the streaks of flour are gone and no more.

Pour half of the batter into a 22cm/9 inch springform tin. Put small dollops raspberry jam onto the batter – entirely optional, but really very good. The only disappointing thing is that the jam sank to the bottom of the cake. Cover with the other half of the batter.

Bake for 40 minutes at 160C until the top springs back, and it’s very slightly browned.

We Should Cocoa: Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

As a fan of Katie’s chocolates at Matcha Chocolat, and especially her masala chai caramels, I knew I should enter this month’s We Should Cocoa, the monthly chocolate challenge co-ordinated by Choclette. This month’s challenge was tea with chocolate, a great combination. Unfortunately, I was on holiday for most of this month (I was in Mexico – so not *that* unfortunate), so I needed something I could do at short notice to get in before the deadline.

I would have loved to spend some time on different tea infusions for this, but with limited time, and the need to do this after work, I needed something more straightforward. This tea loaf is a recipe I had bookmarked some time back when going through Paul A Young’s stunning book ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘. It sounded like a potentially overwhelming set of flavours, but also one that really appealed. The recipe calls for a huge amount of crystallised ginger, no fat and lots of ground cardamom. The tea is there to moisten the loaf, and also provide a malted, caramel background to these other flavours.

[Update: Choclette also made this recipe as part of the challenge – read about hers here.]

The recipe is unusual for a cake, as it includes just the tea-soaked fruit, sugar, eggs and flour – no butter or oil is used. However, this is the traditional tea loaf recipe. Tea loaves are an old traditional recipe, and can be called Tea Brack in Ireland, and similar to the Welsh Bara Brith. Irish Tea Brack recipes date from the 1800s, and would seem to be somewhat similar to soda bread, with the leavening from baking powder.

I made very few changes to the original recipe, even though the amount of ginger – 250g – seemed potentially overwhelming. Given the strong flavours, I wanted to try the recipe on its own terms before making changes. I baked this in two small loaf tins rather than one large one, so I could freeze one. I also swapped wholemeal self-raising for white self-raising, as that’s what I had in the cupboard, and I thought it would fit well with the rustic idea of a tea loaf. As this calls for Assam tea, which is a major component of English Breakfast blends, you could probably substitute with your everyday teabag. I used loose leaf Assam to make sure I got the strong and malted flavours Paul described.

I used two different brands of crystallised ginger, because I already had a packet open, and needed to get more to make up the large amount. Both come in large chunks, and I decided to slice the chunks into fairly thin pieces, so that the final cake wouldn’t be overwhelming with chewy lumps of ginger. The softer of the two was Humdinger Traditional Stem Ginger, that came with large sugar crystals on. The Waitrose Cooks Ingredients ginger comes in a cute plastic jar, and is firmer and drier, and cut into more even cubes. That made it easier to slice into pieces, so might be worth bearing in mind if you need to chop ginger finely for another recipe.

The smell of the ginger and raisins soaking was incredibly aromatic, with both the orange and cardamom coming through clearly. Even when baking, you could smell this amazing perfume, along with the chocolate. I was right about the flavours – it’s a really intensely flavoured cake, which sets your mouth buzzing with the ginger. Having said that, I think it works really well – the chocolate comes through, the orange holds its own with the ginger, and the cardamom is just about there in the background. My teaspoons of cardamom were a bit scant, so I probably could have used the full measure. It reminds me a lot of Divine’s orange and ginger dark chocolate – that also has quite a bit of crystallised ginger embedded in the chocolate. So I’d definitely recommend making this, but it’s not for the faint-hearted!

Chocolate, ginger and cardamom tea loaf

barely adapted from Paul A Young’s ‘Adventures with Chocolate‘.

  • 250g crystallised stem ginger
  • 100g raisins
  • 75g light brown muscovado sugar
  • 2 tsp ground cardamom (about 1 tbsp green cardamom pods)
  • zest of 1 orange
  • 200ml strong assam tea
  • 1 large egg
  • 200ml wholemeal self-raising flour
  • 100g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Divine 70%)

Slice the ginger chunks into slices, and combine with the raisins and sugar in a heatproof bowl.

Warm the cardamom pods until fragrant in a dry pan, then cool. Pop the black and brown seeds out of the shells and grind into a powder in a pestle and mortar. (This step is optional – you can buy ready-ground cardamom, or grind the pods without toasting them, but this method will get you the most aromatic powder).

Brew 200ml strong assam tea (1tbsp of loose tea leaves, 200ml boiling water) for 4-5 minutes, and strain over the raisins and ginger. Cover and leave overnight or for about 8 hours. (I prepared the ingredients one evening, poured the tea over the following morning, then made the cake the second evening).

After soaking, the tea should almost all be absorbed, with some syrup where the sugar has dissolved. Don’t remove any liquid, but add 1 beaten egg directly to the fruit and mix in. Mix in the flour, then fold in the chocolate to combine. The texture is very similar to a traditional fruit cake at this stage, fairly stiff but still moist.

Put the mixture into two lined 1lb loaf tins (or one large loaf tin).

Bake for an hour at 160C. Check with a skewer that it is cooked through. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then remove and cool completely. Wrap in fresh paper and store in a tin for a day before cutting and eating, on its own or buttered slices.

Raspberry Truffles

Every year I make elaborate plans for all the biscuits, cakes and other food presents I will make for friends and family at Christmas. And every year, my ambition exceeds the time available, after I’ve accounted for time to buy presents, go to parties and travel to see family. I usually end up with some sort of cooking marathon or a couple of evenings where I’m in the kitchen until midnight, wrapping caramels or dipping orangettes or whatever I decided was a good idea this year.

For 2010, I made brownies (obviously), chocolate balsamic vinegar (which not everyone was wild about, but was worth it just for me), mini chocolate walnut cookies and … homemade chocolates. I made raspberry truffles, described below, but I also made Azelia’s caramel truffles, which were amazing and easier to work with (I increased the proportion of chocolate to make the centres a little easier to dip). I definitely recommend trying that recipe, and as a great side effect, you get to make Dulce de Leche.

As I noted in my 2010 review, this was something of a year of chocolate. I went to demos, tried tempering again, and generally immersed myself in the world of UK fine chocolate.

Probably the most surprising chocolate recipe I came across was the raspberry ganache recipe I made at Divertimenti with William Curley. It is made only of raspberry puree and melted chocolate, but tastes creamy, and yet with such pure fruit flavour. It’s also so easy and impressive to make for other people.

About ganache

Ganache is usually described as an emulsion of chocolate and cream. This is used to make chocolate truffles, but also often used as a simple, sophisticated chocolate icing for cakes, a filling for a chocolate tart or a starting point for chocolate caramels.

However, a ganache can also be made with water or something water-based like a fruit puree (after all, cream is mostly water, even if the rest is fat).

Truffles

The simplest way to make a truffle that I know is to heat cream, pour it over finely chopped chocolate, stir until you get a smooth ganache, and then pour into a foil-lined square tin. Leave until set, preferably overnight, refrigerate (or freeze if it’s a very soft mixture) and then cut into 1 inch squares.

I saw this simple method demonstrated by Alice Medrich, and it was a revelation. She made mint chocolates, by infusing the cold cream overnight in the fridge with a bunch of chopped fresh mint, straining it out, then heating the cream. It avoids the need to scoop or roll little balls, and if you’re eating them fairly quickly, you can just set out the squares on a plate and hand them around.

I made some of the raspberry ganache this way in the summer, and just coated the squares lightly in cocoa, and then kept them in an airtight container in the fridge.

But for sending gifts, I needed something more robust and more long lasting – and that means a chocolate coating for the truffles.

Tempering

Tempering chocolate is a tricky enterprise and always, always ends up with you, the kitchen, and a range of utensils coated in a layer of chocolate. But it is what gives you that lovely shiny, snap on chocolate, that crisp crack as you bite into it.

Chocolate is a really complicated material. It consists of cocoa butter, cocoa solids (the cocoa powder) and sugar (or at least the good stuff does). But cocoa butter is a very complicated fat, having seven different types of crystals it can form. I’m not going to go into huge detail about the mechanism for tempering here, as Katie has done a much better job over on her blog, so go look there. She also has a great primer on truffles. And you can buy her lovely tea-flavoured chocolates here.

The short version of tempering is to heat the chocolate to melt all the fat crystals thoroughly, melting it quite hot, then cool it in a controlled way to the temperature where the ‘good’ fat crystals form, which is below body temperature, and when the chocolate is quite thick. FInally you heat it very slightly again, so it’s thin enough to work with, but not so hot that the crystals all melt out again.

Recipe: Raspberry truffles

  • 320g raspberry puree
  • 320g chocolate
  • 50g softened butter
  • 1 tbsp vodka

This makes a huge amount, enough to pour into an 8 inch square pan or even larger. You can certainly make half this quantity or even less. And this also gives you less work to do when dipping them.

I made the raspberry puree at the end of the summer, with fresh raspberries that were on special offer at the supermarket, close to their expiration date. It doesn’t matter if they are a bit soft and bruised, but they shouldn’t be mouldy. I heaped them in a pan with a tablespoon or two of water, and heated it with a lid on to break down the berries and release the juice a little bit, but didn’t bring it quite to the boil. I then pureed with a hand blender and passed it through a fine sieve to remove the seeds. I then froze the puree until Christmas.

To make the ganache, heat the raspberry puree until warm but not boiling. Taste it, and if it is very acidic, sweeten it a little with some icing sugar. You want the bright, fresh fruit flavour, but too much acid combined with the bitter of the chocolate may be too astringent. It’s up to you how much you sweeten it.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave, in short bursts, until it’s barely melted. Stir to melt the remaining pieces until it’s just smooth. Add the raspberry puree and stir until it is completely smooth.

Stir in the softened butter, and the vodka if using,  until completely combined. The vodka is optional, but helps to preserve the ganache a little longer.

Pour and scrape the ganache into a 7 inch or so square tin, lined with foil or baking parchment. Tap on the kitchen counter quite firmly to make sure that any air bubbles are expelled. Leave at room temperature to set, then put into the freezer. This is a very soft ganache, so you will need to freeze it in order to cut it easily. Alternatively, you can add more chocolate to the recipe to make it firmer and easier to handle.

Once you have cut the ganache into one inch squares, it is a good idea to leave them to cure for a while in the fridge. This seems to set the outside of the truffles, making them firmer and easier to dip.

You then need to take them one by one, dip them quickly in the tempered chocolate, and then tap to remove excess chocolate before putting onto parchment. As this is a very soft ganache, you need to do this fast, so that the ganache doesn’t start to melt into the chocolate or stick to your fingers too much.

Once the truffles are set, you should store them in a cool place in a sealed container. Storing them in the fridge will make them last longer, but you need to make sure they don’t get wet from the condensation, and allow them to come to room temperature before eating them. You can also wrap them in individual squares of foil, to make them look like Quality Street (as my sister described them)! I ordered mine from the Cakes Cookies & Crafts Shop.

Making chocolate caramels

Chocolate caramels on Flickr

Buying a sugar thermometer seems like the sort of thing only crazy people do. It seems to sit along deep fat fryers and foam-generating siphons as the sort of equipment only professionals and obsessives really need.

The crucial thing about a sugar thermometer is that it allows you to measure a very simple property – the concentration of sugar in a syrup. That’s it.

Water  boils at 100°C (at sea level), and adding sugar to the water raises the boiling point up and up. Caramel is just very hot sugar, that has started to develop complex flavours, a little like browning meat. So a sugar thermometer makes caramel as well as jam a much more predictable affair, and removes much of the guesswork. I have both a glass thermometer, and a new and shiny digital thermopen. If using a glass one, be careful that you have enough liquid to immerse to the line it indicates, or the temperature won’t be accurate. You also need to make sure you put the thermometer in the pan early on – adding a cold thermometer to boiling caramel is a recipe for broken glass in your caramel. A good idea would be to warm the thermometer in the cream, then put into the caramel mixture once the cream is mixed in.

I like making caramel, because the ingredients are so simple and cheap: sugar, butter, cream – but the results are so complex in flavour. Depending on how long you cook this, and to what temperature, you can have a caramel sauce, soft, chewy caramels or hard toffee. I prefer a fairly soft caramel, that is still firm enough to slice and wrap.

These chocolate caramels are a beautiful combination of the buttery flavour of caramel with dark chocolate to balance the sweetness. I was surprised that the recipe asks you to cook the caramel with the chocolate in to a high temperature – I expected the chocolate to burn. I stirred fairly frequently to make sure it didn’t catch on the bottom of the pan, and there was no trace of burnt flavour in the caramel, so I guess it worked.

For more on regular caramels (without the chocolate), Dan Lepard has a great all-purpose caramel recipe he wrote for the Guardian a while back.

Salted chocolate caramels

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who in turn, adapted from Gourmet

Usually I would list the ingredients as I go, but it’s especially important to have everything prepared in advance for caramel making, so I have separated the preparation and cooking stages.

Preparation:

Line an 8 inch square pan with foil or two strips of baking parchment at right angles. If using foil, brush with a thin coating of vegetable oil. Set aside.

Chop:

150g dark chocolate

into small pieces and put into a heatproof bowl.

Place

240ml double cream

into a small pan.

200g granulated sugar

Put into a thick-bottomed pan, something quite tall as it will bubble up later (use your best pan for the sugar, and second best for the cream)

Measure out:

60g golden syrup

and

30g butter

and

1/2 tsp coarse sea salt, crushed into fairly small crystals

(this is optional, but very good. Maldon salt or fleur de sel is good. Table salt is not – it will be far too salty).

and put aside, near the stove.

Cooking:

Heat the cream until tiny bubbles start to form at the edge of the pan

Pour immediately over the chocolate, and stir gently until the chocolate is completely melted and the whole thing is smooth.

Add a tablespoon of water to the sugar in the pan, just enough to make it a little damp, and put over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Keeping a lid on will help it heat faster, and make sure that the sugar gets dissolved properly. Once it is all clear and liquid, remove the lid, turn the heat up to high and boil furiously to make caramel. You want to bring it to a fairly dark amber, without burning it. When it starts to become golden, turn the heat down a little so you can control the process a little better.

Remove from the heat and add the golden syrup, and then, gradually,  the chocolate and cream ganache. Stir after each addition. It will bubble up furiously as the water in the cream is liberated to steam all at once – the caramel will be much hotter than the boiling point of water.

Once everything is combined, return to the heat with a sugar thermometer and bring to the boil again. Heat until the temperature reaches 255F/124C. Any lower, and you risk a pourable, liquid caramel (although if you want caramel sauce, that’s fine). You can take it higher, and get a firmer caramel, until it starts to become toffee.

Immediately remove from the heat, stir in the butter and the salt if using. Stir to incorporate the butter thoroughly, then pour into the prepared tin, and leave to cool and set.

Once completely cold, lift the caramel out of the pan with the paper or foil, and turn upside-down onto a cutting board. Use a large knife to slice into strips and then squares. Wrap each piece in a square of baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Or just eat quickly 🙂

Store in a sealed container – exposure to the air will allow the caramel to absorb water from the air, and it will start to become too sticky.

Mini chocolate walnut cookies

There’s something in the air about miniature desserts. Dan Lepard profiled mini-cakes in Sainsbury’s magazine last month. Yotam Ottolenghi wrote a piece for the Guardian‘s weekend food column on miniature financiers, mini cheesecakes, mini cookies. Could the mini-dessert become (gasp) the New Cupcake? (or the new whoopie pie, by now). But foolish food trends aside, there is something quite compelling about demolishing a little cookie or a baby cake, in its entirety.

Mini chocolate walnut cookie on Flickr

Although this might look large, this is an espresso cup and saucer.

It was this that attracted me to Heidi’s Itsy Bitsy chocolate chip cookies when they appeared on her blog. I returned to the recipe recently when I wanted to make some cookies, and only then remembered that I had adapted it to be almost a one-bowl recipe, if you have a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can head over to 101 Cookbooks, and Heidi has great instructions for making this by hand. But I love the simplicity of this method, combined with the cute-factor of the tiny cookies, and the amazing toasted flavour that comes from the walnuts and the crisp edges. These are not chewy chocolate chip cookies – they are crisp little discs, with a nubbly quality from the nuts and chocolate rubble – perhaps invoking a souped-up hobnob? They are flavourful, but not cloying; crisp but not too crumbly or greasy – ideal cookie jar-cookies in other words.

Mini chocolate walnut cookies:

(adapted from 101 Cookbooks’ Itsy Bitsy Chocolate Chip Cookies)

Preheat the oven to 180°C /160°C fan / 350°F.

  • 140g dark chocolate (I used Green & Blacks cooking chocolate, 72%, but something sweeter would also work)
  • 70g walnuts

–> Break the chocolate into pieces, add the walnuts and process to rubble in a food processor.

  • 140g wholewheat self-raising flour
  • 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt

–> Add to processor with the nuts and process again to mix everything together, and grind the chocolate and nuts a little finer.

–> Empty the processor contents into a separate bowl (you’ll add them back later).  Add to this bowl:

  • 110g rolled oats

–> Add to the empty processor:

  • 110g butter, softened
  • 120g dark brown muscovado sugar
  • 120g caster sugar

–> Process together until fairly smooth and creamy. Add

  • 1 large egg
  • 1.5 tsp vanilla

–> and process again until smooth, scraping down the sides to make sure it is combined fairly evenly.

–> Return the chocolate, nuts and flour to the processor.

–> Process fairly briefly to mix everything together – you don’t want to overmix, or the gluten will start to develop and the cookies will get tough. Scrape down with a spatula to make sure there are no more floury patches.

Either refrigerate (for up to two days) or use immediately. Scoop off teaspoons of mixture, roll into a small ball, less than an inch across, flatten a little with a fork and bake at 180C/160C fan for 10-12 minutes, until slightly cracked around the edge and crisp. They will crisp up further as they cool.

[Refrigerating chocolate chip cookie dough is a NY Times recipe trick, attributed to Maury Rubin of City Bakery, and it does seem to develop a bit of extra flavour, but these are fine without it as well.]

Ribollita – robust vegetable soup

Ribollita ready for freezing

Ribollita is really just a robust vegetable soup, but the Italian name gives it an air of the exotic that plain old mixed veg doesn’t have. And it’s quite a plain thing, and even boring if not done carefully.

The essential elements are:

  • Onions, carrots and celery – a standard  soup or stock base, although I wouldn’t worry if you don’t have celery in the house.
  • Beans of some sort – a white bean like cannellini usually, but I have also subbed chickpeas in the past
  • Kale – usually cavolo nero, also called dinosaur kale which has long narrow green-black spears. You could instead use chard, regular kale, spinach, Brussels tops.
  • Even more starch – traditionally toasted bread is layered with the soupy part to make an almost sliceable bake. Skye Gingell’s innovation is to use farro (spelt), making it much more reheatable. You could probably use pearled barley to similar effect
  • Water

And that’s it. You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound very tasty so far, and I have some sympathy with that. Combined without care, it can be very dull. To make this work you need some patience and attention – not something I can always be relied on to provide. The vegetables need to be softened to extract and develop flavour before being swamped with water; you need a good amount of salt to season it properly, and some umami. Umami is the taste of savoury. It’s the flavour of glutamate, a type of amino acid, that is found in grilled meat, porcini mushrooms, parmesan, ketchup, soy sauce – almost anything that is used a condiment.

To get the umami flavour into the soup, using good stock helps, or just a stock cube, which are fully of precisely this flavour. Parmesan rinds (they freeze really well) cooked with the soup are very useful – the whole thing starts to smell of faintly of melted cheese, which can’t be a bad thing.

This soup, with perhaps a slice of bread, is a really filling lunch, freezes well and clears out pretty much your entire vegetable drawer in one go. What more could you want?

Ribollita

(adapted mainly from Skye Gingell’s ‘My Favourite Ingredients‘)

  • olive oil
  • 2 medium onions, chopped
  • 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 2 sticks of celery, chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
  • large pinch dried chilli flakes
  • 4-5 sage leaves, finely sliced
  • 2 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
  • about 150g farro, rinsed
  • 1 can peeled plum tomatoes, chopped
  • 1 can cannellini beans (drained) – I used chickpeas because it was what i had in the house, but I think the creamy texture of the beans would have worked better
  • Chicken stock or water, around a litre
  • 1 bunch cavolo nero (or kale), thick stalks removed and roughly chopped
  • parmesan rinds (optional)

Heat olive oil in a casserole or large saucepan. Soften the onions over a medium heat. Add the carrots and celery, and fry gently for a few more minutes. (I tend to chop the onions before heating the pan, then just chop each vegetable as I go, adding to the pot, then moving on to chop the next one.) Add the garlic, sage and chilli and stir to fry and make fragrant. Add the potatoes, and farro, stir and heat again. Add the tomatoes and their juice, then add chicken stock or water to just cover the vegetables, and the parmesan rind, if using. Simmer for about 20 minutes until the potato and farro are cooked. Add the beans and the cavolo nero, and simmer for about another hour. Then either serve, or cool down, divide into portions and freeze.

The Great Brownie Bake-off

Saturday was a momentous day for me. My first piece of competitive baking – and my first win! Yes, my brownies were voted the best of 25 entries on Saturday at The Great Brownie Bake-off. I was amazed when I found out. Firstly, I was convinced I had underbaked them, so when my back started to give out on the day, I headed home a mere 20 minutes before the results were announced. And secondly because the judging panel included the amazing Paul A Young, as well as a host of other professional cake and chocolate experts.

If you’ve been here before, you’ll know that brownies have appeared before. I make them pretty regularly because they can be mixed quickly in one bowl, but the results still feel special enough for a celebration. So when Louise Thomas, The Chocolate Consultant announced that she was organising a brownie bake-off, I thought I would give it a go.

I started with my old recipe, which is a hybrid of a couple of versions in Alice Medrich’s book ‘Bittersweet‘ (one of my favourites) and gave it a few different tweaks to try it out on my work colleagues.

Brownies

I baked more for the Macmillan Coffee morning a couple of weeks later. These were tougher and overbaked, so I knew I had to do something different for the final version.

I went back to the drawing board to make the result softer and less dense. I toasted hazelnuts to give a subtle flavour compared to the more aggressive Frangelico or alcohol. Leon’s brownies include ground almonds which make them very gooey, so I ground some of the nuts to create the same effect. Finally, I replaced the caster sugar with some soft brown sugar and golden syrup for extra stickiness, and I hoped a little extra caramel flavour.

The bake-off was a great day, with demonstrations going on throughout the day. It was pretty packed though, so hard to get to the samples, and I wish I had muscled in a bit more firmly and introduced myself to more people.

Thanks so much to Louise for organising the day, all the judges: Paul A Young, Abigail Phillips, James Hoffmann, Tom Kevill-Davies, Lee McCoy and Jennifer Earle, Jane Manson, Kavita Favelle and Mathilde Delville and Fred Ponnavoy from Gu Chocolate Puds.

Also lots of thanks to the demonstrators: Fred Ponnavoy, Caroline Aherne from Sugargrain Bakery, Edd Kimber, winner of the Great British Bake-off (and doing his first live demo!) Sasha Jenner from Hobbs House Bakery, and Stacie Stuart from Masterchef.

The Winning Recipe:

Ingredients

  • 100g unsalted butter
  • 100g dark chocolate(Valrhona Manjari 64%)
  • 30g Green & Blacks cocoa
  • 30g/2 tbsp Hazelnut chocolate spread (Nutella)
  • 100g light muscovado sugar
  • 85g caster sugar
  • 15g golden syrup
  • 2 large eggs, cold
  • 70g plain flour
  • pinch of salt
  • 150g whole hazelnuts

Method

  • Preheat the oven to 180ºC / 160ºC fan.
  • Toast the hazelnuts, by putting into the oven for 8 minutes. Rub off the skins.
  • Line an 18cm square tin with foil or baking parchment.
  • Put 35g of the toasted hazelnuts into a food processor and grind to a powder. Use some of the flour to prevent the mixture becoming too oily. Combine with the rest of the flour and set aside.
  • Combine the butter, cocoa, chocolate and chocolate spread. Melt in a microwave or in a pan on the stove until the butter and chocolate are completely melted and the whole thing is combined.
  • Stir in the sugars and golden syrup, then beat in the cold eggs one at a time until the mixture is glossy.
  • Add the flour and nut mixture and salt, and beat the mixture 40 times with a wooden spoon, until the mixture thickens slightly. Fold in the remaining whole hazelnuts.
  • Pour into the pan and bake at 180C/160C fan for 20-25 minutes, until it is cracked very slightly at the edges, but still soft in the centre.
  • To cut cleanly, put the cooled pan into the fridge, covered in cling film until thoroughly chilled or overnight. Remove the cold pan, invert over a board and peel off the foil or baking parchment. Cut into squares with a sharp knife.

Bakewell muffins (cherry and almond)

Cherry almond muffins
Muffins are not exactly a new topic for this blog, and this basic recipe is one I wrote up not long ago … but then I read that EnglishMum was having a bake-off competition, with the prize of a hamper of Green & Blacks chocolate, and these came out looking so pretty that I had to write about them.

This is the based on the same banana muffin recipe I’ve been making for a while now, originally from Gordon Ramsay’s Healthy Appetite. It’s a good  moist recipe and the banana flavour isn’t too dominant so they lend themselves to flavour variations. As these are a pretty healthy variation of muffins, with oil instead of butter, bananas replacing some of the fat, and wholemeal flour, I feel just fine about consuming them everyday. I like to freeze them and take them into work as a mid-morning or mid-afternoon snack.

Muffins work well frozen, as they can be quickly reheated in a microwave, or left to defrost on their own. As with any cake or bread leavened mainly with baking powder or bicarbonate of soda (such as soda bread) they will go stale quite fast once out of the oven. Freezing is a good way to capture that fresh quality.

Having some ageing bananas in my kitchen last weekend, I cast around for a new set of flavours to add to the recipe. When I found a packet of dried cherries and a half packet of roasted marcona almonds in the cupboard, the decision was made.

Bakewell muffins

Cooling cherry almond muffins

As before, these can be adapted in many different ways. Just make sure to keep the liquid ingredients separate from the dry ones, mix them both separately, then combine gently, folding in any berries or other bits at the end.

Makes 12 muffins.

Ingredients:

Dry ingredients:

  • 300g wholemeal self-raising flour (or plain flour and 1 tsp baking powder)
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
  • pinch of salt

Wet ingredients

  • 100g light brown muscovado sugar
  • 2 large ripe bananas
  • 220ml buttermilk, or 180g plain yoghurt and 40ml milk
  • 1 large egg
  • 75ml vegetable oil
  • 1/2 tsp almond extract

Bits and pieces

  • 100g dried cherries
  • 100g toasted chopped almonds (marcona almonds are really good)

Toppings:

  • 6 glacé cherries, halved
  • flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan / 350°F.

Put the flour and other dry ingredients into a large bowl and use a whisk to make sure they are thoroughly combined.

Mash the bananas into a medium bowl, and add the sugar and other wet ingredients. (The sugar goes in here, because it’s easier to get the sugar to mix in and remove all the lumps in the liquid).

Add all the liquid ingredients to the dry in one go, and mix gently together with a spatula or large spoon. Add the bits and stir just to distribute them. The more you stir the batter, the more you develop the gluten in the flour, and the tougher the muffins will be.

Divide the batter between 12 muffin cases and bake for 20 minutes or until the tops are just starting to brown and the top springs back when pressed.

Cool for 5 minutes in the tin, the take out a cool on a rack. If you’re going to freeze them, wait until completely cold, then put into a freezer bag within a few hours and freeze. Should be fine for several months.