My Funny Valentine

Sweet-heart but no sweet-tooth?

It is definitely the case with my husband so, in a break from my usual rustic style, I designed these cupcake-style love buns with a Valentine’s Day brunch in mind.  With all the cutesiness of a cupcake but most definitely savoury flavour they were made with in-season beetroot, walnuts, a slow-fermented bread dough and a cream cheese topping.  They were sure to be a hit. 

Or so I thought.  My husband, my biggest fan yet most discerning critic, ‘got’ the idea and thought the bread tasted delicious but the red bread/pink icing concept was just a bit too confusing for his brain in a Heston kind of way (but not in a good way, unfortunately)!  Apparently my labour of love was ‘tasty, but weird’.  Not being a cake-man I’m not sure he understood the slightly ironic red velvet reference either.  This had been my fear from the start.  It is amazing the way the brain is wired to expect something that looks a certain way to taste a certain way.  Even when I was shaping the dough I kept thinking I could smell raspberries.

I will make this bread again but I will skip the muffin cases and pink ‘frosting’ and bill them correctly as beetroot and walnut rolls in keeping with my usual style, or maybe make a tin loaf, with plain white cream cheese served in a bowl on the side. 

This was my original recipe but, you have been warned, it might not have the effect you were hoping for.  Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t bother cooking these today and I’ve settled for pink fizz and a take away!

Ingredients

Malt house Bread Flour – 100g

Strong White Flour – 100g

Water – 150ml

Salt – 1 tsp

Yeast – 1tsp

Walnuts- 50g, chopped (plus extra for decorating, optional)

Butter – 20g (plus extra for greasing)

Beetroot – 100g (around one medium beetroot)

Cream cheese, good quality – 250g

Milk – 1tbsp

Method

Two days before baking:

Briefly mix the malt house flour with 100ml of water and the yeast in a bowl to form a sponge.  Cover and leave at room temperature overnight.

One day before baking:

Cook the beetroot until tender (I cooked a whole bunch and made a beetroot salad with the excess), allow to cool, then grate with a coarse grater. 

Put the cream cheese in a blender and add small amounts of the grated beetroot, blending between additions until you are happy with the colour (probably about one and a half teaspoons if you are aiming for baby-pink rather than shocking-pink).

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, remove from the heat and stir in the walnuts.  Set aside to cool a little.

Put the sponge in a large bowl and add the strong white flour and remaining water and salt. Mix with a wooden spoon to form a rough dough and then stir in the remaining beetroot and buttered walnuts.  Knead for about ten minutes until you see glutinous strands forming.  The dough is very soft and sticky so will not come together as a cohesive dough at this point.  If you prefer you can knead the dough in a machine with a dough hook or mix vigorously with a wooden spoon.

Cover the bowl and chill in a fridge overnight (or at least for several hours).

On the big day:

Once chilled the dough should be much easier to handle. 

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface (you can use white flour or semolina flour) and divide into twelve small pieces.  Shape each into a small ball.

Line a muffin tin with twelve muffin cases (brush the interior with a little butter).  Place a dough ball into each of the cases and leave to rise, covered, for about an hour to an hour and a half at room temperature.

Preheat your oven to the highest temperature (around 230C).  Bake the rolls for around 10 minutes, until they are lightly browned on top.

Remove the rolls to a cooling rack.

When the rolls have cooled completely add the milk to the cream cheese and use it to top the rolls.  You can make a classic ‘cupcake rose swirl’ using an icing bag and a Wilton 2D nozzle and ice anti-clockwise from the centre outwards. 

 

 

Holey Grail – Part 2 – Sourdough: Sorted!

Had I known that a hot water bottle was going to cure so many of my culinary ailments I would have invested in a dedicated kitchen one years ago.  I’m specifically talking about anything needing a bit of prolonged fermentation in conditions a little warmer than a British kitchen in winter.  My slightly floppy yoghurt-making attempts were revolutionised in the early part of last year with the simple addition of my husband’s blue hot water bottle and, just a few weeks before the year was out, I got sourdough sorted.

The temperature in my kitchen fluctuates a lot and I don’t have an airing cupboard so although I seem to remember I once got a rye sourdough started successfully (what on earth happened to that?) my attempts to bring a wheat sourdough starter to life had not been very successful.

I think I was also suffering from a bit of commitment phobia.  I mean, you hear stories, don’t you?  About how you have to feed sourdoughs on a daily basis and can’t go away on holiday anymore (unless you can find someone to feed the sourdough as well as watering the plants and feeding the cat).  I like going on holiday.

Anyway, it turns out that it was all much, much easier than that.

Once again, Andrew Whitley’s recipe from Bread Matters came to the rescue.  It involved quite a few pages of reading so it looks like it might be an involved process but, once you’ve made one loaf and adapted the process slightly to fit your lifestyle, it is no more effort than making any other loaf of bread but the results are something else.  A fantastically open-textured (i.e. holey), chewy, crusty loaf with a depth of flavour that is rarely encountered these days.  The bread keeps for around a week and is fresh enough to eat untoasted for several days.

I started cultivating the starter by putting the required quantity of flour and water in a bowl and fermenting overnight with the aforementioned hot water bottle on top.  Once the starter was established and I had made my first loaf I felt confident to abandon the hot water bottle and just ferment the starter/dough at room temperature.  It has been very reliable so far.  I have scaled up the starter so that I can easily make two loaves at a time and keep the starter in the fridge.  That way I can just bake sourdough once a week if I want to. The night before I want to make my loaves I refresh the starter and leave it at room temperature overnight.  I can then make and bake the final dough any time during the following day and the whole process takes no more than six hours with not too much work on my part.

Holey Grail – Part 1 – Perfect Pikelets

It has become a Saturday morning ritual in our house to make pikelets.  Or at least try.  I’ve been trying to find the perfect recipe for months.  We have strict criteria (which are largely related to my general laziness and the need for them to be perfect):

- The mixture must be suitable for preparing (quickly) the night before and ready to cook as soon as we wake up on Saturday morning regardless of whether we wake up at seven (likely) or nine (in my dreams).

- The recipe must be suitable for making pikelets and not require me to faff around with crumpet rings.

- The result must be very, very holey and deliciously chewy without any hint of old boot leather.

- There should be no bicarb’ in them as I don’t like the flavour.

- They must be easy enough to make whilst carrying an almost-toddler and singing The Wheels on the Bus ad nauseum.

We seem to have finally cracked it.  The final recipe is somewhere between this Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

recipe (but contains no bicarb’ or milk) and the one in Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters and uses plain flour rather than a strong bread-making flour which is too high in gluten.

Now I just throw all the ingredients into a large bowl the night before (be warned, using a small bowl can easily result in you being met by a pool of gloopy batter advancing across the worktop on your arrival in the kitchen in the morning) , give it a brief whisk with a balloon whisk (this seems to give much better results than using a wooden spoon) and cover the bowl with a plate overnight.

In the morning I thoroughly heat two lightly oiled, heavy based, frying pans to a moderate temperature before cooking three ladelfuls of batter at a time in each.  They need to be cooked on one side until the top is just set and then flipped over for a minute or two to brown on top.  My recipe makes about twenty so there should be a few left over for the following day (or maybe not).

Downton But Not Out

I have been away, without any proper excuse other than the fact that I have been filling my evenings with watching Downton Abbey on DVD, several months behind the rest of the nation.  It has become something of an addiction and it is not without some relief that I say that I am about to watch the last available episode (The Christmas Special) this evening.  I am hoping that there will be some resolution but I fear it will not come.

So, with that important distraction almost over I am making a return to baking (before you ask, I haven’t forgotten to feed the children during this time) and a visit from some lovely friends this afternoon was a perfect opportunity to show off the cake stand my parents bought me for Christmas.

The brown sugar cupcakes with malty frosting, lemon and basil mini-meringues and cheese scones seemed an appropriate ‘cake stand-christening’ menu (the left-overs might be an appropriate accompaniament to Downton viewing too)!

 

Food Bloggers Unplugged

I was recently tagged by Sadia who writes Baking Elements to take part in the Food bloggers unplugged started by Susan.  So, here are my answers, all in the name of a bit of seasonal fun (just like my snowman iced bun)!

1. What, or who inspired you to start a blog?

Before I had children I spent a lot of time talking with friends, often at work, about cooking and food or spent time cooking with friends.  When I was on maternity leave after having my second son I found I didn’t have that opportunity so often and it felt like a bit of a gap.  I was also using other people’s blogs for ideas for meals.  One day I thought “I could do that”.  So I did.

2. Who is your foodie inspiration?

My Grandad was my first inspiration for baking.  He happily played second fiddle to my Nanna, pottering about in the greenhouse and generally getting on with it quietly while she was alive and enchanting everyone that encountered her.  Sadly, she died shortly after he retired.  Over the years he gradually started taking up more and more hobbies and cooking for himself.  His baking was quite extraordinary, so good that you would have thought he had baked for his whole life.  We ate Sunday Tea with him nearly every week and would arrive to find a raised pork pie, a country fruit cake, a homemade loaf or all three!  Like most things he did, his cooking was quite homely but often with a quirky twist.  I hope mine is similar.

3. Your greasiest, batter – splattered food/drink book is?

Although I am most often found baking bread, it is the recipe books I use for making cakes that are the most splattered and battered…I have to follow a recipe.  I was never any good at chemistry.  So, it is probably Nigella Lawson’s Feast – Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame that has the most brown, chocolatey smudges all over it.

Delia’s Complete Cookery Course is also rather worn and even missing half of the index (which can be inconvenient)!  I find the recipes to be so reliable and there’s always a bit of background so you know why you’re doing each step of the recipe.  My Mum and I are going to use the Christmas Turkey recipe from this book this year for the first time.

4. Tell us all about the best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it, what was it?

I’ve been very lucky to have been able to travel to many different places through my work and on holiday.  I’ve enjoyed brik in Tunisia, pesto alla genovese in Genova and stunningly fresh calamari in Spain.  Then there was the very lightly seared whole foie gras, just a year after I stopped being vegetarian, that I (and a number of others) would rather forget at a work ‘do’ in Brussels.

One of the most memorable meals was chicken cooked over a wood-fired barbecue at a roadside cafe, on a hairpin bend, somethere in the middle of nowhere on Madeira, on my honeymoon.  I’m not sure if my husband’s gesturing and poor Portuguese was the problem or if he was just being greedy but he somehow managed to order two whole chickens.  I think we gnawed on every last bone.

6. What is the one kitchen gadget you would ask Santa for this year (money no object of course)?

I think I would gather up all the gadgets I have acquired over the years, give them to good new homes, and replace them all with attachments for my KitchenAid which I am unashamedly in love with.  But first, I need to get it serviced as there was an incident with a large amount of bread dough on the wrong setting that needs to be rectified before I can use it again.

7. Who taught you how to cook?

Lots of people really.  My Mum, my Grandad, my home economics teacher, friends and Andrew Whitley, who changed the way I make bread, forever.

8. I’m coming to you for dinner what’s your signature dish?

I’m quite lazy so it would probably be a large hunk of pork shoulder roasted as slowly as possible with not much done to it, some malted bread rolls, warm bramley apple sauce and a side salad.  A glass of rosehip prosecco and pavlova for pudding.

9. What is your guilty food pleasure?

There are a few too many of those to name all of them here but I absolutely can’t refuse a decent sticky toffee pudding or a lump or marzipan if it is put within visual range.

10. Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?

Well, I’ve already mentioned it, but I was a vegetarian for around six years.  Then I started working with vets and farmers as part of my job who couldn’t understand it at all and ethically raised meat became a lot easier to get hold of so, after a lot of consideration, I gradually started eating meat again.  I love it but I never forget where it came from.

Finally…tag 5 other food bloggers with these questions…like a hot baked potato…pass it on!

Here are five fellow food bloggers that I’d like to know more about…I hope you find them interesting too!

http://thelittleloaf.wordpress.com who (bizarrely) has also been making little marzipan bees and baguettes recently.

http://www.breadandmilkandblackberries.com/

http://zebbakes.com/ who (also bizarrely) has a bread basket and two tea-towels the same as mine.

http://messybaker.blogspot.com/

and, last but not least,

http://rufusguide.wordpress.com/ - the first foodie blog I ever followed!

Even Biga Bread

There has been a whole LOT of baking going on in the BFTB household this week.  In fact it has not just been confined to the BFTB household, I’ve gone mobile and taken bigas and bowls out and about.  And what fun it has been, a fabulous Saturday afternoon and (very late and mince-pie laden) Thursday night baking bread with friends and sharing gossip and a little wine along the way.  All, apparently willing, volunteers to try out a bread-making workshop.

We made basic bread rolls and bloomers and then got creative, designing our own enriched sweet or savoury breads, which ranged from focaccia to cheese bread to lemon brioche, all based around the same template recipe.  My demonstration piece was an Orange and Almond Christmas Bread which tasted delicious but, having made (and eaten) it four times this week, I was not at all surprised when my jeans seemed suspiciously tight this morning.

All this coincided with BBC 2′s The Big Bread Experiment which charted a group’s journey to establish a community bakery and saw them grow as bakers, as individuals and as a community along the way.  Heart-warming stuff.

It is so exciting to see people enthusing about making bread.  It tastes good and is fun to make, so grab a friend and go and bake!

Seedy Bar Baguettes

When we were in Normandy, back in the summer, we had a fabulously chewy, open textured seeded baguette in the generous bread basket every morning at our B&B.  I’ve been wanting to recreate something similar ever since.  For some reason I decided that ale (Fullers’ ESB as that was what we had in the fridge) was a necessary addition to my version although I’m almost certain it wouldn’t have been in the original!  It has got me thinking though: are there any Norman breads made with cider?

I usually put my dough in the fridge to rise slowly overnight but forgot this time and left it on the counter. It wasn’t any the worse for it and, as I had used fridge-cold ale and it had been a cool night, the dough still needed two hours for the final rising so my forgetfulness might have been a blessing.

The recipe is basically a seedy version of my malthouse rolls recipe but ale replaces most of water and I used a little more liquid to help create an open texture and a crusty exterior. I managed to wrestle the remainder of the bottle of Fullers’ from my husband’s arms (“oh, that’s my favourite, are you using that to make bread?”) to keep a little extra ale to use the following day to keep the rising dough moist and to brush on to the baguettes before putting them in the oven.

I’m really pleased with the result.  A bit too pleased it seems as there doesn’t seem to be much left.  It doesn’t have quite as open a texture as the original but it is close and the chewiness is exactly where I wanted it.  More importantly, the boys loved it!

The Ben Nevis

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to visit Angelina tea house in Paris you may have treated yourself to their world-famous Mont Blanc.  I seem to remember that I settled for watching my friend eat one while soaking up the atmosphere and taking a rest from the over-indulgence of lunch (not to mention breakfast).

A few weeks ago, when I tasted the medlars that have been slowly rotting under my bed, they reminded me a bit of chestnut puree and a little of slightly rotten apples.  I thought they would lend themselves well to a sort of British style Mont Blanc.  A Ben Nevis perhaps.

All the medlars were fully bletted when I opened up the box today.  Some of them had gone a bit too far in that direction, being a bit green around the gills, and I had to discard them.  I peeled the papery skins from the others, squeezed out the dark, slightly floury flesh and removed the seeds.  A little orange zest, orange juice and brown sugar lifed the flavour a little and I added a some water and blitzed the mixture in a mini food processor to make a smooth paste.

I then topped individual vanilla meringues with some lightly whipped cream and the puree and served to my slightly nervous husband who pronounced “I like it.  But I’m not really sure what to make of it”.  I think I agree.

Most importantly I’m really happy to have finally tasted medlars both unadulterated and in a dessert.

Chocolate Cake, Honey!

It seems I am working my way through the Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame in Nigella Lawson’s Feast.  It wasn’t really my intention and there are some I make over and over again so I’m really not being methodical about it.  If you hold the book and let it fall open it naturally it opens at the recipe for Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Cake which, incidentally, seems to have quite a lot of Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Cake mixture smeared across the page.

At the moment it is seven (incredibly rich and delicous cakes) down, and three to go:

Tropical Chocolate Cake – it looks delicious but every time I read that the recipe contains canned pineapple rings, cream cheese, cocoa and malibu I start to feel nauseous.  I’m pretty sure it would be delicious even so.

Chocolate Ginger Bread – I love gingerbread, I love chocolate, it looks amazing.  I keep buying the ingredients to make it and then deferring because the recipe doesn’t say whether the cake should be wrapped for a couple of days before icing so that it is unctuous and sticky.  I think I need to drop my ginger cake holy grail ambitions and just make it.

Chocolate Guinness Cake - I just haven’t found an excuse to make it yet.

I made the Honey Chocolate Cake for the first time for my son’s first birthday last week.  It has little marzipan bees on top so I thought it would appeal to the children and making it would be less stress-inducing than the fire engine cake I made for my eldest son’s third birthday earlier in the year.

The resulting cake is a bit like a Sachertorte in texture and my children and my nephews were very taken with the bees (as were any of the adults with a penchant for marzipan).  I found some royal icing decorations I had made a while back with some left-over icing lurking in a container at the back of the cupboard and used them to make some flowers for some of the bees to sit on.

Rosehip Royale

It has all been rather quiet on the cooking front as the cold weather seems to have brought all the winter viruses with it.  In need of some fresh air as we recovered at the end of October we decided to go for a walk to pick some vitamin-C rich rosehips to make rosehip syrup.  What with the clocks going back, and our lethargy, it was almost dark by the time we made it to the park.  There was just enough time to pick them and let the kids have a quick go on the swings before heading home for tea.  I made the syrup after the children had gone to bed.  The recipe was easy enough to follow but I think next time I might check the sweetness of the extract before adding the sugar as the end result was rather sweet.  It might also help to pick them a few weeks earlier, before the first frosts.

The syrup looks very pretty sitting in an old cider bottle and we’ve been diluting it with water to make drinks.  The best use by far so far, however, is as a mixer for champagne or prosecco.  The alcohol ofsets the sweetness perfectly giving a delicately flavoured and coloured aperitif.

The other news on the foraging front is that my medlars have begun to blet, in fact some of them are ready to eat.  With a little hesitation (they really do look brown and rotten) I tasted one of them a few days ago.  The texture was similar to chestnut puree and there was a faint whiff of rotting apple about it.  The flavour was similar.  A cross between chestnut puree and baked apple.  I can see why people rave about them as there is a delicateness and uniqueness about the flavour and texture that could be considered appealing, and I can imagine it could be delicious mixed with some cream (which seems to have been the most popular way of eating them in their uncooked state).  I can also see why people find them disgusting, there is no escaping the fact that the process of rotting and fermentation has set in.

As I only have a few I am still undecided about their fate but I know I must act fast as some of them will be genuinely rotten and inedible if I leave it too long.  I can imagine eating them in a medlar mont blanc.  I wonder what the boys will think of it!