In my belly within:
3 min of coming out of the oven,
2 min of being placed on the plate,
1 min of being photographed.
Another 11 buns in the dish. It’s going to be a busy day…
Sticky cinnamon bun!
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Tag Archives: baking
Ginger biccies
Made some ginger biscuits, recipe courtesy of BBC’s h2g2 pages. Three substitutions: used butter instead of margarine, raw crunchy brown turbinado sugar of forgotten name instead of demerara sugar, and maple syrup instead of golden syrup. Just because those were staple pantry items.
It worked pretty well. I plopped two different sizes of dough on the floured baking sheet since the original recipe called for “walnut”-sized pieces, and I wasn’t sure if they meant the two halves of the walnut interior or the entire walnut in shell. Both worked fine, but I’d improve it next time by squishing all with the back of a spoon. The centres of some of the biscuits weren’t biscuity and resembled soft cookie instead. The edges, however, were perfect ginger snap crispiness, just a minute short of being burnt. Another thing I might do is use molasses instead of maple syrup. And I definitely want to try it without the egg yolk to decrease the moisture content (which may have been increased by my use of turbinado sugar).
I’ll reproduce the recipe here with my modifications later. I just wanted to post something before it became too onerous a task to get it all down. Catch ya later, alligators. And here we go…
Ginger Biscuits
modified from h2g2 recipe
- 125g butter, softened on “defrost” in microwave for 10 seconds
- 125g turbinado sugar (sugar in the processing stages)
- 1 tbsp (15ml) maple syrup
- 1 egg yolk from a US large egg
- 180g self-raising flour¹
- 1 heaped tsp ground ginger
Method
(I pretty much followed the h2g2 protocol, but this is what I actually did)
- Pre-heated oven to 350°F / 180°C.
- Sprinkled some flour onto 2 baking sheets and smeared them around with my mucky paws. I shook the excess into the bin. Wasteful, no? Incidentally, I like this a whole lot more than greasing the sheets then flouring them. It actually worked this time.
- Prepared all the ingredients, taking care to WATCH the butter to prevent accidents like this happening again:
- Creamed the butter and sugar using my trusty hand-held beater. I have no idea what I did before inheriting this hand-held beater. I have wonderful memories of my mother’s Kenwood Chef/Professional standing mixers, then a almost blank period of painful recollections of hours spent whipping cream and mascarpone for tiramisu as a semi-impoverished, aspirational under- and post-graduate and postdoctorate in Edinburgh. I’m still semi-impoverished, but at least I inherited a hand-held beater from a friend who left the lab.
- Added the egg yolk and maple syrup, beating it in well. Saved the egg white for cocktails later because my impressionable mind had read in some fancy foody website that egg white-containing cocktails were da bomb these days. Is it still alright to say “da bomb”? OK, forget I said it.
- Mixed the flour and teaspoonful of ginger well, then sifted it into the creamed mix in batches (about 4). After each sifting, folded the flour/ginger mix into the creamed mix. Final product was considerably softer than shortbread, a little softer than American cookie dough, but still firm enough to form tight balls in my mucky paws.
- Formed tight balls in my mucky paws. h2g2 recipe suggests walnut-sized balls that will later double in spread. I agree. I tried walnut nut-sized balls, which made cute little biscuits you could serve for a teddy bear picnic, and walnut-with-shell-on-sized balls, which were far more satisfying in my grabby paws with a cuppa tea.
- Baked in oven for the suggested initial 12 minutes, after which I added 3 min for the smaller biscuits (total 15 min). The bigger biscuits were left in for 18 min, mainly because I kind of forgot to set the timer again. Their bottoms were a bit on the dark side, but still edible. 2 baking sheets would have been enough, but I split the dough into three because of the following troubleshooting help on the h2g2 page:
I don’t have biscuits! I have one biscuit, and it’s huge…
* You probably underestimated the space that you need to observe between each of the biscuits on the tray.
As he stuck this paws into the biscuit tin, P’s first question was: “Are they crunchy?”
I didn’t hear a word he said for the rest of the night…
¹ I make my own self-raising/rising flour to the tune of: 4 US cups flour, 2 tsp salt, 2 tbsp baking powder (not soda). I sift each ingredient into a plastic container and shake shake shake it all about. Makes life a little bit easier when making mini pancakes.
Granola thumbprints
It’s been a wasted weekend. Work and sleeping off the effects of a cold have fettered my precious free time. That and 285 posts on the RSS reader. Must streamline. First to go will be the Scotsman feed; too much repetition. I’d already thrown out the right-of-centre blogs a few months ago, but was sucked into reading their recent froths about the COE’s archbishop’s radio interview. Bad idea; even worse, I read some of the comments.
And to top it all, we are out of biscuits/cookies in the house. This is never a good state at the weekend. What exactly am I supposed to have with my tea if not a biscuit? And I was craving jammy dodgers. So it made sense to bake thumbprint cookies, which are just cookies in which you stick your thumb and fill the resulting indentation with jam. No recipe this time; it just wasn’t good enough. Note to self: putting granola in baking only makes it all taste like health food1.
Oh, they weren’t awful per se. Just chunky when what I wanted were slightly crisper biscuits, not chewy cookies.
Almost oatcakes
One of the things I missed the most on arrival in LA too-many-years-ago-now were oatcakes. Just plain old oatcakes.
[Backstory. Ignore and skip down a page for photo and recipe]
About 5 years ago, in a spurt of healthiness (i.e. I felt like creeaap and decided to do something about it), I caved in and consulted a nutritionist, who spotted a hole in my daily diet: the lack of regular breakfasts. This had been a perennial problem since childhood. There are only so many bowls of cereal and slices of toast I can stomach before the taste buds go into meltdown and my tongue seizes up and refuses to help me swallow any more. Growing up in Asia, there were options for the weekend: char siew bao, dao huey, dao suang, roti pratha, nasi lemak, kaya on plastic bread, dim sum; all usually eaten at our local wet market or kopi diam. These weekend breakfasts made jam on toast bearable for the other 5 days of the week; almost.
As an undergrad, I just never woke up early enough to have any breakfasts, and pretty much survived through lectures on water until that mid-morning pint. Ha! Only kidding; almost. As a post-grad, I lived on mid-morning ramen. The kind you stick in a bowl and pour hot water over. ‘Nuff said; I don’t eat that anymore; almost. And, more recently, as a post-doc, I’ve had a slightly more stable life with very slightly more regular hours (as in I get home before midnight almost 300-and-something days of the year), and hence have lost the ability to survive on one or two meals a day.
Oat porridge was what the nutritionist recommended. (Yes, the nostalgia tangent is finished with for now.) And failing porridge, at least 3 oatcakes, preferably slathered with some nut butter. Nairns and Patersons sales shot up that weekend. And we became regular customers of the cut-oats stall at Edinburgh’s twa-weekly Farmers Market. Nut butters since tried have included cashew (meh), hazelnut (not as good as Nutella), almond (ok, but not quite right) and peanut (it’s always the one worst for you that tastes the best). But I could eat oatcakes plain.
So, it was a bit of a shock to the system to find that oatcakes were not stocked in every corner shop, delicatessen and supermarket in LA. They’re endemic not just in Scotland; my parents find them with no problem in Singapore. The only places within walking distance or on a bus route that stocked Walkers oatcakes were Cost Plus World Market (one on Westwood Blvd) and Monsieur Marcel at the Third and Fairfax Farmers Market. Imagine going to a French store to buy Scottish oatcakes! At $6+ a box! Oh, the horror! Of course, now you can get blahdy Nairns oatcakes in Whole Foods, but that was nae use when I was going through cold turkey, now was it?
Anythehoo, the whole point of this blether was to announce that I’ve finally tried out a recipe for an oatcake-ish end-product that I can live with and not be constantly out of pocket to keep my stomach happy in the morning. It’s a classic back-of-packet recipe, off Arrowhead Mill’s Oat Flour. They’ve gone and called it a cheese bannock, which jars with my preconception of Selkirk bannocks, which are kind of like a giant fruit-but-unhealthy big bun thing from the Borders. Failing some misinterpretation of the recipe, I reckon the final product comes out more like cheesy oatcakes, or at least, the commercial oatcakes. Almost.
[/backstory. Sorry about the delay...]
Cheesy Almost-Oatcakes
Recipe (uses US cups)
- 1 cup quick-cooking oats
- 1 cup quick-cooking oats
- 1 cup oat flour
- 1/4 tsp sea salt
- 1/4 tsp mustard powder (substituted with paprika and cayenne in this instance ‘cos P threw out the ancient handed-down-through-2-postdocs Coleman’s mustard powder)
- 1/4 cup (equivalent of 4 tbsp) softened butter
- 1 cup of grated sharp cheddar cheese (used Parmesan cheese in this instance ‘cos that’s all the fridge yielded)
- 1/2 cup warm water
- Preheat oven to 200ºC (400ºF).
- Mix the oats, flour, salt and spices well.
- Then cut in the softened butter (I cheat and microwave it on defrost for 10-20 seconds) using a fork or a pastry cutter if your kitchen drawers are well-equipped1.
- Stir in the cheese. Add 1/2 cup warm water and mix, kneading when the dough gets stiff2.
- Divide the dough in two and roll each half into circles that are 1/4 inch thick.
- Transfer to a lightly greased baking tray. Cut each circle into 4 wedges (made 8 in one which gave a more manageable farl to handle).
- Bake for 20min at 200ºC (400ºF).
- Hide from oatcake thief. If you don’t, as soon as the oatcakes are cool enough to handle, they’ll disappear off the tray, never to be seen again. I pounced and got a photo of the 3 remaining farls out of 8 (above) just in time. Just wait till I find that oatcake thief… It’ll be the spatula for him/her…
1 There’s innuendo there for anyone who wants to see it.
2 See 1.
A gas station cake where no gas is to be found
I’m a bit of a sucker for the “dump everything in” school of baking, given that I spend every day dealing with micro-volumes of nasty chemicals in multi-step, multi-day techniques dans les labo. So whenever Santos recommends an all-in-one-no-washing-no-hassle recipe, (see here for prior eg.), the baking pans come out. The timing of the recent blog-bake coincided perfectly with our Big Bear BreakTM. What better than to stash all ingredients in one tupperware and head out to the mountains where we could piss off all the neighbours by wafting the scent of chocolate home-baking of an evening?
So, we give you the not-exactly-”Polly Garilao gas station1 chocolate cake” that Santos made and we butchered2:
There’s nae after-shot because we ate it all. Yes, it’s that bloody good. Try it yourself.
1 Gas station [US] = petrol station [the parts of the world where i've lived]
2 Editor’s note: Watch the baking temperature. Our cabin’s oven was running hot and we had to shorten the baking time to just over 10 min.
Chocolate and Wine
Do I ever talk about anything else these days?
The mega-lab party was not quite as mega as I’d expected it to be. I guess the undergrads all have finals next week and weren’t in the partying mood. Ach well, more chocolate cake for everyone else. The “fixed” with ganache piss-easy-and-yet-I-duffed-it cakes went down very well. Not many comments on the muffins, but as the “healthy” option, that’s ok. But the surprise of the night was the chocolate mousse. You know, the one that seized on addition of egg yolks, which was then “saved” with some cream? Yeah… I forgot to mention that once I’d covered the mini-cakes-wot-I-duffed, I was left with a bowl of ganache I couldn’t justify eating while watching Firefly. A quick whip-up of some egg whites, patient folding to lighten the whole thing up and served in plastic champagne bowls, they were the clear winner of the night. Amazing how failures can still be such successes when chocolate is involved.
On the alcohol front, the 2001 Zinfandel we brought back from the Russian River Valley Korbel champagne house went down a treat. Another good one for the festive season: it went well with baked ham and chocolate. Sluurrp…
Perfectly imperfect chocolate cakes
Don’t you hate it when you bake a cake and it turns into a dog’s breakfast by the time a few folk have tried to saw through it with plastic knives? I thought I’d preempt that by making lots of bite-sized cakes for that mega-lab party I’m committed to attending tamara. Perfect for buffets and such. Just pick a mini-cake up, satisfy your chocolate urges, and not feel like a cannon ball has dropped into your stomach for the rest of the night. And I thought a silicone mini-muffin tray would be the absolute perfect way to get this done without mini cake cases, which I could not find in Ralphs last night.Ah. It would have been perfect if I’d only realised how wobbly the silicone tray was in the metal rack it was sold with. A previously purchased silicone madeleine tray made perfect madeleines when placed on a cookie tray. My mistake was not repeating that… But hey, it’s a casual affair, I’ve not been stressed about it, and if you’re going to pop a whole muffin or mini cake into your mouth, you’re hardly going to care if it’s lop-sided
So, I present to you my perfectly rough-shod, shove-in-face mini chocolate muffins:
No, I am not embarrassed. Because they taste great!
The piss-easy recipe recommended by Chotda also suffered the same warped silicon tray fate. You’d think I’d have learnt from the muffins, eh? But hey. The taste, though, was awesome, and the more pathetic looking ones will be stuffed in the freezer for desperate times when we have no sweeties in the house. Fortunately, that was merely half the mix. The other half went into the regular muffin tin. Where they rose and fell. What is wrong with me today? Ach well. They were shoved aside while the dog and I took our evening exercise.
We returned to tackle the chocolate mousse. It was all going so well: the 70% chocolate melted well, the whites went into their soft peaks nicely, then glossed up some with the addition of sugar. But either my slapdashness during yolk/white separation or slackness in choice of bowl must have introduced some water to the yolks, and blow me if they didn’t half seize my lovely melted chocolate. Bugger. Something is seriously wrong with me today. But who cares; it’s chocolate! A quick zap of heavy whipping cream in the microwave to warm it up to roughly the same temp as the seized chocolate and some stirring over a warm pan gave me…. Ganache! Which was perfect for spreading on those tasty-but-ugly little chocolate cakes.
If I’ve learnt anything today, it’s that I need to bake more often. I’ve lost the knack of baking with precision – something I do without thinking in the lab. I can set up my work bench to get through a crap load of work without a mistake while juggling two other experiments. But I can’t make a simple chocolate cake or mousse without messing up. Something’s screwy with my priorities… :p
P.S. Do you think I can get away with using this as the excuse why nobody received any Christmas cards from us last year?
Oats so good for you
In search of a half-healthy yet tasty oatmeal cookie recipe. This particular attempt was a result of a modified epicurious recipe for oatmeal cookie sandwiches with nectarine ice cream1. I made one minor but critical change: the addition of lots of orange zest as well as a teaspoon of orange oil. And to (my) half of the mix (next photo), a good handful of dried cranberries were added. I think the cranberry and orange additions made it something more than the plain oatmeal cookie P was craving, but it sustained our interest better for the whole course of the week.
One satisfied customer:
1 My interest at the time didn’t quite extend to nectarine ice cream, but it’s definitely one way to modify store-bought plain ice cream. Bereft of our very handy ice cream maker here, our sad attempts to make tea sorbet and coffee ice cream have been somewhat rough and icy. Stirring in roasted fruit may be one way to jazz things up without buying yet another 110V piece of equipment we can’t take home.
Mexican1 chocolate and almond cake
Another epicurious recipe: Mexican Chocolate and Almond Cake.
Made modifications to the serving idea since I was taking this to someone else’s house for Cinco de Mayo: replaced sauce and cream with a simple chocolate ganache (1/3cup cream boiled and poured over 2/3 to 1 cup of chopped-up chocolate). There wasn’t quite enough time to let it all set (2-3h would have been better), but the slightly gooey ganache still worked out ok. The orange slices were difficult to slice through though. Need to find a way to slice the garnishing without totally destroying the cake.
1 Not claiming that this is a Mexical cake; epicurious named it as such. To be more accurate, the flavours are inspired by spiced mexican hot chocolate.
Banana and blueberry muffins
I’m always envious of those Martha Stewart types who seem to have it all together. You know, nice home, nice garden, nice kids, good food on the table, nice table settings. And I’ve always suspected that while Martha Stewart herself has a huge operational team to make that happen for her, there really exist real women and men out there who live the life she has trademarked. Such people can get up in the morning, put the coffee on, make the bed, groom themselves, get breakfast ready, get the kids ready, yadda-yadda-ya… And that’s just within one hour in the morning.
On the best of mornings (and only weekend ones at that), I just about manage to get out of bed some time after 1000h, stumble to the shower, waste copious amounts of water to get my eyes open, and demand breakfast very loudly until P gets up and makes it. But today, for some odd and unknown reason, I made muffins. Banana and blueberry ones at that. I’ve never made muffins. Not successfully anyway. I can make the most intricate of damn sachertortes, but hand me a muffin tin and crap comes out. Figuratively. Please, what do you think I am? Cack-handed?
Recipe courtesy of Epicurious.com. Not having a Martha Stewart team of organised people to ensure all reagents were in place prior to baking, I was about 2 bananas short of a full cup and completely lacking oat bran. But I had frozen blueberries. That counts for something. Substituting oat bran with some weird New-Age seven-grain hot breakfast mix seemed to work, with the pleasant side-effect of crunchy, nutty bits without the sat fats of nuts. But substituting a shortfall of bananas with milk, vanilla and maple syrup results in an overly moist muffin lacking structure.
No matter. P liked it. While not a success, it wasn’t a complete failure.
Eww. I’ve just looked at this post on Firefox and my muffins look like crap. They looked OK on iPhoto and Safari. What’s up with that?
