We Should Cocoa Challenge: Honey

This month's We Should Cocoa challenge is to combine the magic of honey with wonderful chocolate. I had found a few recipes where there was a token amount of honey in an otherwise chocolate centred recipe but I really felt the honey should be centre stage for this challenge. So after much flicking of cook book pages and fruitless googling I  finally came across a recipe that not only had a generous measure of honey but very conveniently used up some of my cupboard lurkers as well. So  here is a boozy honey, fig, and chocolate cake. 

For this recipe I was able to bring out a very satisfying number of ingredients from the back of the cupboards. The bargain bucket of honey, rather old dried figs, some ancient sweet red vermouth, spelt flour, spices, dark chocolate buttons and some butter and an egg.

The cake is based on a recipe from Leon, Baking and Puddings by Claire Ptak and Henry Dimbleby.

The original recipe does not have any chocolate in but I love chocolate with both figs and red wine so a handful of chocolate buttons seemed an appropriate deviation.

My silicone pan was not quite large enough so this resulted in a rather messy looking finish but this is how to it went:

375g of chopped dried figs were soaked in 350 ml of red vermouth for a couple of hours. This soaking step is not part of the original recipe but my figs were quite old and much drier than when I bought them, so it seemed a good idea.

The fig and wine mixture was then brought to a boil with 1.5 tsps cinnamon and 0.25tsp ground clove.

The pan is removed from the heat and allowed to cool for ten minutes before adding 125g butter and 250g honey, stirring well to melt and incorporate all together.

Then after another cooling period of 10 minutes you stir in one beaten egg.

In a separate bowl weigh out 200g spelt flour with 1.5tsp baking powder and 1tsp baking soda.

Pour the fig mixture over this and stir to combine adding a handful of chocolate buttons with the last few stirrings.

Pour into a 20cm square lined tin or silicone pan, sprinkle with a few more chocolate buttons and bake at 160C for about 45mins or until firm to touch in the centre.

Now you should allow the cake to cool in the tin but I was too impatient and you can probably see the chocolate is still melted in this photo but it was cake o'clock, no time to wait.

So this is my submission for the April We Should Cocoa challenge run by Choclette and Chele

 



A New Personal Best with thanks to 'Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, by Ken Forkish

This loaf is I believe my best home baked loaf of bread yet; and I have been making a mess in the kitchen for quite some years, believing that one day I will discover the alchemy of good bread.
 
Well I just took a very proud step in that direction with the help of a new book by Ken Forkish, titled Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast; The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza. The book recently won the Baking section of the IACP 2013 awards and based on my first loaf I would have given it the award too.

There are a lot of explanations at the beginning of the book and quite a bit of the background to how Ken Forkish took a complete career change to become an artisan baker. For the first time in memory I read the full introductions and notes before I started baking. A number of the techniques were not new to me now, but they would have seemed quite alternative several years ago.

The dough is kept very hydrated with a typical flour to water ration of 10:7.2. The dough is treated to a number of folds/turns during the bulk proving stage and the fermentation times are long with formulas that use minimal amounts of yeast. Time is treated as an ingredient whereby slow fermentation results in significantly greater flavour development.

The part where I found myself on totally fresh ground was in the baking. The book has you shaping boules of dough which are proved and then baked inside a dutch oven/cast iron pan with the lid on. 

With this first recipe I had been a bit impatient and shaped some of the dough into small rolls to get a small batch of dough baked off earlier. The rolls were fine in terms of flavour and were ok in texture but nothing remarkable. It was when I baked the boule things really took off.  All this magic, however, is taking place inside the pot, completely out of sight, so it was not until I dared take the lid off the pot that I knew the loaf had transformed itself as it baked. The rise, or oven spring, to give it a baker's term was way better than any bake I had managed in this oven before. As the loaf finished baking with the lid now removed from the pot, the colour of the crust turned a very healthy golden colour.

On cutting the loaf I was delighted to see a beautiful thin but crisp crust had developed, and the flavour was really very good. All this from the most simple recipe in the book, the Saturday loaf, which can be started in the morning and ready and on the table for your evening meal the same day.

 

Here is a picture of this loaf as shown in the book from which you can see I did not get the very open texture to the crumb and my crust was a much lighter colour, but not a bad comparison for a first go.

 

I am planning on giving this loaf another try in a few days and certainly want to repeat it before I move on to some of the more traditional recipes that use an overnight fermentation. I am also trying to build up a sourdough starter so I can eventually work my way through the whole book.

 

All the recipes in the book are for quite basic loaves, as the title suggest fundamentally just flour, water, salt, yeast. The pizza recipes also look very appealing and there is a section on working through the development of your own recipes.I wonder how much I would want to deviate mind as despite my love of fancy cakes I have always liked my bread to be simple, but perfect, so this book is just right for me.

 

A loaf of bread, some good butter and a glass of wine and I am very happy.

 

 

 

 

Random Recipes #26 cuttings, memories and clippings

This month's Random Recipe Challenge is to pick a random recipe from your collection of cuttings and clippings. Dom at belleaukitchen runs this challenge and I was delighted when we got to choose from our hoarded recipe cuttings.

I have a box file in which I put all of my hand written and torn out recipes. I have to confess that most of the recipes in it have never been used but I take comfort from knowing they are sitting there patiently waiting for the right moment.

So to get started I spread out the content of the box file. I closed my eyes and pulled out 5 different pieces of paper and then threw them up in the air and with my eyes still closed selected the first one I touched and it was a very old hand-written recipe card for chick pea pancakes or socca/farinata.  I have long wanted to try making these but have never quite got around to it. 

I even bought some chick pea flour from a Persian food store back in December but this is roasted chickpea flour and some suggest unroasted would be better.

 
The list of ingredients is very simple , just chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt and optional cumin seed.
 

 
I soon realised I had written down very little detail on how to cook these lovelies so I quickly found much more detailed information over on David Lebovitz's blog.

I spent a long time trying to correctly season my cast iron skillet but alas my pancake still stuck.

 
So when I served my pancake I folded it in half to try and keep the best side showing.

 
My socca pancake was served with a feta, tomato and olive salad, for a light supper and it went very well but I would try and get an unroasted flour next as the one I used had a very slight grittiness to it which was a little off putting. 

For the full round up of recipes from this challenge check back on Dom's site Challenge #26-cuttings & memories in a few days time.

Adventures with Chocolate: Ginger & Cardamom Tea Bread

First an apology.

I made this recipe for the February 2013 'We Should Cocoa' challenge and only as I was writing it up rather late in the day, on the last day of the challenge period, did I realise that it had been chosen before for a much earlier We Should Cocoa challenge. At that time the challenge was to combine chocolate with  tea, and this loaf was chosen by more than one person, so I am bringing nothing new to the party by presenting it here.

However, I loved this cake so much, and with no time left to do something different, I hope you will forgive the repetition.

Paul A Young's book is full of adventurous recipes and really lives up to its title.  This recipe for 'Chocolate Ginger and Cardamom Tea Bread' must be one of the most simple and most divine recipes in the whole book.  The recipe is based on a classic tea bread where the fruit is soaked overnight in good strong tea and then the loaf whipped together my mixing in the egg and the dry ingredients. The powerful but well balanced flavourings of orange zest and cardamom work beautifully with the depth of the Assam tea and chocolate and sweet spiciness of the ginger and raisins. The added bonus I felt was that despite having no added butter or oil the cake kept quite well for several days.

Here is my cake, almost finished now, but still looking very enticing (to a ginger and chocolate lover).

As I mentioned earlier this recipe has been blogged about before on We Should Cocoa and in the two fo the bloggers;  Using Mainly Spoons  and choclogblog, did detailed writes ups with their versions on the original recipe, so please pop over to their links if you have not got a copy of the book and fancy having a try at this one yourself.  I kept to the tea specified which is a strong Assam and used the full 250g of ginger. I used white flour and 2 level teaspoons of cardamom which seemed a lot of cardamom but it worked very well.

So here is the loaf straight out of the oven, while it was still too hot form me to slice into. I find it very hard to wait for any baked product to completely cool before I start sampling, bad habit I know but one that is hard to cure.

 

 

So rather apologetically this is my entry to We Should Cocoa - Ginger which this month is being hosted by bluekitchenbakes. You can find a list of all the submitted chocolate and ginger creations on Blue Kitchen Bakes web page.

 

The We Should Cocoa Blog Challenges are jointly run by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Tea Pot

  

 

Random Recipes #24 Erbsensuppe or Pea Soup

The January Random Recipe challenge from Dominic at Belleau's Kitchen has us cooking from another person's recipe collection and so I called on a colleague at work to pick a recipe for me from one of her books. This is the book she chose:

And the recipe was Erbsensuppe or Pea Soup, perfect for the January weather we are currently getting in Devon, where even when it is not very cold it has been very wet and very dreary.

Now I do not know more than a couple of words of German so she very kindly wrote out a translation of the recipe for me and I should have read this through more carefully before going shopping. I would have realised that the sausages and bacon I was picking up from the supermarket were not at all what the recipe called for.
I should have had a slab of smoked bacon and cured sausage, so my soup was not so German, but still very tasty.

Inspired by how good it was with the wrong sausage and bacon I paid a little more attention my colleagues comments and went online to the German Deli to source some proper German sausage. For the smoked bacon I paid a trip to my local butcher and bought a piece off a smoked gammon joint. Then I was able to make the soup again with a little more authenticity. Visually it may not seem so different but the flavour and texture of the German sausage was quite different and much better.

Pea Soup Recipe

300g dried green peas (soaked overnight in 1.5 litres water)
200g smoked bacon in the piece (soaked with the peas overnight)
1 'Bund Suppengemüse' (soup vegetables:1 leek, 1-2 carrots, quarter of a celeriac root &  parsley)
1 onion
400g waxy potatoes
half tsp dried marjoram
vegetable stock (.25 litre approx)
250g cured pork sausages
1 bunch parsley
salt & pepper

1. Put the soaked peas and bacon into a pan and bring to the boil.
2. Simmer, covered, for 1.5 hours or until the peas are soft.
3. Wash, peel and chop the soup vegetables.
4. Peel the onion and chop finely. 
5. Peel and chop the potatoes into 1 cm dice.
6. Add all the soup vegetables, onion and potatoes to the pan with the marjoram.
7. Simmer for a further 30 minutes.
8. Add additional stock if there is not enough liquid in the pan.
9. Peel the cooked sausage and cut into small cubes and add to the soup.
10. Simmer for a further 10 minutes.
11. Remove the piece of bacon and cut the meat into small cubes and add back to the soup.
12. Chop the parsley finely.
13. Season to taste with salt and pepper and sprinkle on the chopped parsley.
14. Serve hot.
15. The soup can be garnished with a little sauerkraut or creme fraiche.

The sauerkraut garnish was surprisingly good.

Cooking Through My Years - Intro

The passing away of revered food writer, Katie Stewart, last week, had me thinking back to some of the food writers that were my inspiration and guide as I learnt to cook. In the coming weeks and months I am going to revisit recipes from many of them as I look back through my culinary past and recreate some of the dishes that were either of their moment or particularly notable to me for the success or failure I had with them.

I was born in 1959 and both my parents had been brought up on very traditional plain food.  My mother's family were farmers in Norfolk and my father came from Tyneside; all 'very meat and two veg'. As far as I can remember, at the time I I started learning to cook there were just three cookbooks in my mother's collection. The one I remember using most was a Good Housekeeping Compendium. The pictures inside this book show ladies sensibly dressed in housecoats and working in quite spartan kitchens.  I was perhaps lucky to have a mother to whom cooking was very much a household chore, as it meant there was little competition for the kitchen and no strong traditions that dictated how anything was cooked.  I was always encouraged and given rather free reign; and only quietly cursed for the amount of mess I made in the process.

No surprise to anyone at home that the main things I wanted to make were sweets and cakes.

Chicken was still rather expensive and had not yet been bred into the fat beasts we see today.

But by the time I found myself at senior school and attending domestic science classes things had rather changed in the kitchen.

I too was a proud owner of one of those huge puff sleeved blouses and I cannot think of anything less practical to cook in, it was hard enough not getting those drooping sleeves in your gravy as you ate.

After school I went on a catering course and then worked as a cook for three years before realising I had neither the stamina nor the artistry to be a 'proper' chef. I decided to go back to college, but food has remained my life's preoccupation.

I now have over 800 cookery books along with a few boxes of magazines and paper clippings.  That is what happens when you have a lifelong collecting habit and have been around over 50 years.

For each post in this series I am going to choose a different book from my collection based on its year of publication and start with 1959. As far as possible I will try to work with the year the book was first published.

The Housekeeping Compendium was published before I was born but as a mark of the respect for the book that sent me on my culinary journey it will be the one I kick off with and the recipe I am doing is Chelsea Buns, a lifelong favourite sticky bun.

The dough is a basic lightly enriched bread dough. Once proved it is rolled into a rectangle and then the filling is scattered over before rolling up 'swiss roll style'. You cut slices through the roll as thick as you want, prove and bake. I added a half teaspoon of mixed spice to the sultana and sugar filling, although it wasn't in my recipe and I also daubed a bit of icing on the cooked buns.

A very similar recipe for Chelsea Buns can be found here on the bbc food website. If you have a bread machine you can prepare the dough with very little work at all.

The next post in this series will be a recipe from 'Sweets That Have Tempted Me' by Esme Gray Booker, 1959.



 Amazon

Using up the Pantry: Date and Orange Scones

I have made a pledge to myself this year to not stash more food into my pantry than I take out and use. For a compulsive food shopper who loves buying in bulk this can be a little hard.  I hope if I can get some storage credit going at the start of the year then I can still indulge when I spot ingredients I just have to buy. First confession is that I have just this weekend placed an order with the German Deli which will arrive later this week and I do not have much storage credit in the bank, so I need to get busy, and have chosen to make scones.

Date and Orange Scones, butter & marmalade

The ingredients that were staring at me demanding to be used were: 

• strong white flour, at least 12 months old
• remnants of crystallised honey in a jar, open for months
• candied orange zest, a pre-christmas experiment, never used
• too rich 'seriously creamy' waitrose custard, no good for the purpose it was bought
• dates, over 12 months old

Scone Ingredients

When using up ingredients you have to get a little bit creative with your recipes so the more forgiving a recipe the better, and whilst baking can be pretty unforgiving, scones are very obliging when it comes to substitutions.

The ingredient I most wanted to use up was the custard which was too rich to my taste. Whatever I made with the custard I wanted to be suitable for freezing so that I did not end up converting one 'needs to be eaten now' product into yet another, even larger one. So thoughts of bread and butter pudding and trifle were out.

Scones are quick to make, freeze pretty well, and are relatively healthy, as sweet snacks go; so I make them quite a lot.

My basic scone recipe is:

Pre-heat oven to 200C

• 500g strong white bread flour
• 25g of baking powder (best not to use old out of date stuff, it often does not work)
• 50g sugar
• 50g butter
• pinch salt
• 1 large or 2 small eggs
• 230ml milk

1. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl.
2. Rub in the butter
3. Stir in the sugar
4. Crack the egg(s) into a well in the bowl, add about half the milk and give a quick whisk to break up the egg(s).
5. Gently bring the ingredients together, hands or large fork work here, adding enough of the remaining milk to form a soft but not too sticky dough.
6. Tip the dough onto a floured work surface and work it gently together patting out to a rectangular slab about 4-5cm thick.
7. Cut into whatever size scones you want. A straight sided dough scraper is pretty useful here.
8. Place the scones on a parchment lined baking sheet.
9. Bake at 200C, Gas Mark 6 for 15-20 minutes, depending on how large you cut the scones.

Check the scones after 10 minutes as you may want to turn the tray in the oven to keep the baking even across the whole tray. In my oven the back is the hottest spot and I always need to turn the tray.

So the substitutions I made were:
replace the sugar with honey
replace the butter and milk with the creamy custard

And the flavourings added were:
100g chopped dates
1 tsp finely chopped candied orange zest (fresh orange zest just as good)

The recipe will work with plain flour but you will need less liquid and the crumb texture may be a little more cake like.

Eat fresh, freeze as soon as cool, perfect food to eat at your desk or just about anywhere really.

Date and Orange Scones Waiting to be Eaten 

I would like to submit this post to the organisers of the blog challenge Credit Crunch Munch  which is being run by Fuss Free Flavours and Camilla at fab food 4 all 

 Credit Crunch Munch-January