The Best of British Blogger Challenge - Cornwall

My contribution to the this month's Best of British blog challenge is a saffron infused sweet yeast bun.  This month the region is Cornwall and is being hosted by The Chocolate Log Blog

I had thought I would follow a traditional Cornish saffron bread recipe but the ones I found were quite high in fat and my preference is to have a lower fat bun spread with a nice layer of sweet butter.

Have you noticed just how yellow the saffron buns sold in shops can be. I have my doubts how much of that colour comes from the saffron itself. You do not need a lot of this spice to add a good flavour. My buns were quite pale but did have good flavour, perhaps I am doing something wrong regarding the colour?

I recently started on a mission for the perfect bun recipe  and this is my stage two attempt whereby I up the recipe a little to include milk rather than water. Apart from the replacement of the mixed spice with saffron the base recipe is the same. I think the addition of the milk did produce a slightly softer crumb but not cakey, which is good.

500g strong bread flour

1 level tsp fine sea salt

10g fresh yeast

50g butter

50g caster sugar

20g milk powder

100g dried fruit

250-300 ml warm water

large pinch of saffron strands

The saffron was crushed with a pestle & mortar and then infused in 50ml of the warm water for a few minutes. I might have achieved a stronger colour if I had let the saffron infuse longer.

The salt, yeast, butter, sugar and milk powder were rubbed into the flour.

The saffron infusion and about 200ml of warm water were then added to the flour mix along with the dried fruits.

The mix is gradually brought together by hand, or using a dough scaper, adding more water if needed,  in order to end with a soft but not wet dough. As the dough is kneaded it becomes firmer and silky so do not start too dry or the dough will be too tight.

The dough is kneaded for a good 10 minutes and try hard to keep the dried fruit in the dough but some will inevitably flick out all over the counter and floor.

Form the dough into a ball and put back in the bowl. I usually encase the whole bowl in a plastic peddle bin liner kept just for this purpose. If you make a loose parcel around the bowl it will keep the dough moist while it is rising:

Once the dough has just about doubled in size it is ready to be shaped.

I turned the dough out onto the counter top and gave it a light knead to remove large air bubbles.

I then weighed out approx 75g pieces of dough and then placed them on a lined baking tray to have a further rise.

My oven has a 40C setting and I often use this for the final rise. I prewarm the oven, with a damp dish cloth inside, to 40C. I then place the tray of shaped buns in the oven and turn it off. This usually gives just the right amount of heat and moisture to rise the buns. The buns should almost double in size.

Before baking I brushed the buns with an eggwash but this is optional.

The oven was prewarmed to 200C.

The buns had ten minutes at 200C after which I turned the tray around and turned the oven temperature down to 180C for a further ten minutes.

Here is the tray of buns straight from the oven.

I have tried growing saffron bulbs in a pot under glass but only one of the twelve bulbs flowered. I am hoping for one hundred percent improvement in yield next season but not holding my breath.

For the Cornwall challenge round up later in June see The Face of New World Appliances or choclogblog

Bank Holiday Baking

I love the May bank holidays, even when the Queen moves one of them into June. It is my favourite time of year to be in the garden. Every thing looks fresh and vibrant, especially now we have also just had a good shower of rain.

The wild flowers are as beautiful as the cultivated ones and here is my garden selection from earlier in May when the wild garlic was in flower at the same time as the chives:

Now I have chives, and foxgloves with a few garden pinks that have such a great cottage garden look to them:

But this time of year also brings us such long days so after work is done in the garden it is still light long into the evening and plenty cool enough to feel like baking. I have been filling the freezer with treats to eat over the bank holiday weekends and here is a selection of the goodies:

The first recipe was for a fruit and nut loaf, first picture shows the sliced loaf and second the loaves straight out of the oven.

This is a recipe I modified from the book Warm Bread and honey cake by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra. It appears on page 92 and is a rye fruit loaf. I had to substituted hazelnuts for the walnuts and raisins for the currants. It makes a great breakfast bread as it is not too sweet and is also good with cheese for lunch.

There is a detailed review of the book here thegastronomersbookshelf blog. I love the eclectic range of recipes and interesting comments about the origins and history that surround them.


Continuing on the fruited bread theme I made these 'sticky buns' which came out beautifully light and with a very thin but crisp crust. Buns like these were often served at tea time on a weekend when I was a child and I seem to remember them coming is bags of 4 from the supermarket.

I am trying to work out the best balance for a fruit bun between completely plain and quite rich. Too rich and the dough tends towards the cakey texture, too plain and the buns can stale very quickly. I started at the plain end of the scale so these were made with:

500 strong plain flour
1 level tsp sea salt
10g fresh yeast
50g sugar
50g butter
1 tsp mixed spice
100g dried fruit
enough water (~300g) to make a soft dough.

In subsequent bakes I am going to try substituting milk for water and then in the next batch adding in 1 egg and staying with milk. Some of each batch is being frozen and then at the end I am going to take out a couple of each and double check which I prefer.

I also made this focaccia  recipe from Paul Hollywood (picture below taken from the bbc website) but modified mine by also adding some sliced new potatoes to the top. I missed taking a photo before it was all gone so imagine this with crispy slices of new potato:

Have a great bank holiday weekend whatever you are doing.

Pizza to be Proud of

The picture is not so alluring but I was in a hurry to tuck in to my freshly baked pizza. The dough had puffed up beautifully around the edges and the underside had cooked through, a home-made pizza miracle had happened and I don't get those very often.

The dough recipe is from Dan Leppard's book Short and Sweet and pizza is this week's ShortandTweet challenge. The weather has turned beautifully warm and sunny and I really enjoyed tucking in to my pizza outside in the early evening sun.

I am going to attribute some of my pizza miracle to my new consignment of flour from Shipton Mill:

 

I ordered their strong white flour and am delighted with how easy it was to work with. It kneaded up into a silky smooth stretchy ball, rose beautifully and baked up without any gumminess at all. I ordered from their online shop and it arrived beautifully packed and pretty quickly too.

The pizza dough recipe is very straight forward but you are given options to make a slower rise dough which I must try to see if the dough tastes even better with a long rest. I use a baking stone in my oven to try and maintain a high temperature as the pizza goes in. I also prefer pizza to have very little topping which is useful as it does make it easier to get the base cooked through, as well as easier to eat with your fingers. Over on the BBC website there are some interesting  Pizza Notes put together by Dan on achieving a good home made pizza.

Dan's  recipe makes quite a large batch of dough and I turned what was left into a rosemary loaf which also baked up pretty well. This was a good accompaniment to cheese and cauliflower soup.

I missed writing up last week's challenge but I did have a go at the weetabix muffins and they were quite good, but no more. This was just personal taste and I could not even say why I would only describe them as quite good. I really liked the orange and cinnamon flavouring though and will try and incorporate that into a different muffin recipe next time I am looking to make some breakfast muffins.

 

Real Bread Maker Week

Well we have just come to the end of the 2012 Real Bread Maker Week which is being championed by the Real Bread Campaign so I was delighted that the #ShortandTweet challenge for this week focused on bread.

I have had a go at two of the challenge recipes, the two-day loaf, pictured above, and the wholemeal loaf, although the wholemeal recipe I actually baked as rolls. In celebration of good bread I also made some Bath Buns but not as part of the #ShortandTweet challenge.

The wholemeal loaf recipe made a very good batch of rolls with a nice thin crust and  a fairly moist crumb, not damp and not that awful sawdust texture you often meet in wholemeal bread. I prefer my bread to have a little more spring to it so I would add a fair portion of strong white flour to the dough if I made it again, but I would say this was a success and well worth playing around with to add in other flavours from seeds, malted grains etc.

It seemed very apt for a week celebrating real bread to make a two-day loaf as the slow pace of this loaf really does develop good flavour but I did not get the texture quite right. This may well be partly because my loaf was not left to rise quite long enough once shaped. I was using a stoneground flour from Gilchesters  in Northumberland which does have a good creamy colour and fresh flavour but I don't think I did it justice in terms of the finished loaf. If you are keen to try a 'real bread' style recipe and do not have Dan's book Short and Sweet then the recipe for this two-day loaf is also available online via Dan Lepard's Guardian series on  How to Bake. 

I finished the week on a sweet note as I baked Bath Buns from a book by Bernard Clayton . I have always had a great fondness for sweet buns and these are nicely spiced with a hint of mace. They were rather good and had to be put in the freezer quickly before I ate too many.

I have been in search of the sugar nibs that are usually found on bath buns for a while and finally found something similar at both  the German Deli and also this  pearl sugar from the Scandi Kitchen.

Finally I would like to show off my two new members of the recycle team who at 4 weeks old are not actually fully on board yet, but who did have a little nibble of a crumbled wholemeal roll.  I have only named the chick at the front so far, as her friend may be a boy and not allowed to stay very long, but the sweet one at the front is Cilla and they are Buff Orpingtons.

Kitchen Catch Up

Despite good intentions my plans for last week did not happen quite the way I had hoped so this week I found myself with a lot of ingredients in the fridge that were in urgent need of cooking up. Every time I opened the fridge door I was reminded of all the things I did not get around to last week and it was getting quite annoying.

So today with time to use and no wish to garden in the pouring rain I caught up on some of that cooking. Highest on the list was the ShortandTweet challenge which for last week was cheesecake. I had missed the report back deadline by several days  but as I had bought all the ingredients and they were now very close to their use by dates it was time to knuckle down. I opted to make the 'Classic Cheesecake' from p458 of Dan Lepard's book Short and Sweet. The recipe makes rather a lot of cheesecake so I halved the ingredients and it worked out fine.

I did change the biscuit base a tiny bit as instead of adding butter to the  crushed oat biscuits I added a finely ground hazelnut butter (another ingredient lurking in the fridge in need of using up). I really like the taste of toasted hazelnuts but if you are not sure about them I would stick with butter as the hazelnut flavour is quite pronounced. I also baked my cheesecake in a square rather than round pan but only because I could not find a suitably sized round dish.

So here is my dessert garnished with a home produced blackcurrant sauce, a good tangy contrast to the smooth and rich cheesecake.

This cheesecake was very easy to make as there was no fuss with the usual separated eggs  having to be whisked and folded or water baths to struggle with. By the time the biscuit base had been baked for ten or so minutes in the oven I had the filling prepared. It was then into a slow oven for over an hour so plenty of time to get on with something else.

Next on the list was the excess of cauliflower. I had forgotten that last week's veg box cauli was still in the fridge when I ordered another one for this week. I have been using the www.eatyourbooks website for a while now to manage my collection of cookery books and 'must cook' lists and it is now the first place I look when I need a recipe to use something up. The web site authors are now also indexing popular food blogs and sites along with magazines so it has become quite a wide ranging resource. I quickly found a recipe from the ChocolateandZucchini blog for saffron roasted cauliflower The florets of cauliflower are roasted in saffron infused oil and are liberally sprinkled with ras el hanout spice mix. This made a perfect lunch along with some feta style cheese.

I am rapidly becoming a bit of a bread anorak and if you will forgive the indulgence my last pic is of a slice from a loaf I baked today. I was really pleased with the crust and even crumb texture, but yes, it is just bread.

My favourite things, in a cookie

This weeks #shortandtweet challenge focussed on cookies and I chose to make the 'Sesame, date and ginger bscuits' from page 255 of Dan Leppard's book Short and Sweet. It was a no contest choice as this recipe included some of my favourite ingredients when it comes to sweet baking: warm spices, sweet dates, minerally black treacle and sesame seeds.

The cookies are easy to mix together and following an hour of cooling in the fridge the dough becomes firm enough to handle without getting your hands or utensils in a mess. The instructions advise you to shape the dough into walnut size pieces but I must have a mean perception of the size of a walnut as I was shaping up far more than the 15-18 cookies that the recipe estimates you will make. I quickly resized my portions of dough to get closer to the target number of cookies and then rolled them into the sesame seeds and pressed them onto the baking tray.

They baked up nicely in the time stated and as Dan instructs you should leave them on the tray to cool. I was impatient to try one but they really are very delicate and crumbly while hot so best to wait if you can find the patience.

The cooled cookies have a lovely light and delicate texture but pack a punch of flavour.

I had one with an espresso style coffee as recommended and the two go really well together. I have yet to try the after dinner option with a shot of grappa but it sounds good to me.

So So Soda Bread

I have no idea why but I have never been enthusiastic about soda bread, but I love scones.

The ingredients, proportions and the method are not so dissimilar between the two, but for me the results are quite different. When I want something quick and savoury I always make cheese scones rather than a soda bread.

I still feel this way about soda bread despite making a quite tasty loaf of oatmeal soda bread for this weeks #shortandtweet challenge. Of the recipes up for trying I opted for the Oatmeal soda bread which has you making a porridge with the oatmeal before adding the other ingredients. You bake the batter in a square tin rather than a loaf or free form shape.

We ate the bread fresh from the oven with a ploughman's type lunch. I liked the chewy crust but found the crumb a little too damp for my taste.

I will try again with Dan Lepard's breakfast soda which uses baking powder rather than just baking soda. It seems a little wasteful but when my bread baking does not go as well as planned I have some 'ladies'  who are always grateful for anything other than chicken pellets and they are rather pleased when the baking is under par.

Meet Louise and Thelma, otherwise known as useless and the layer.