Showing posts with label Baking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baking. Show all posts
Another one of my husband's favourite things are Gingernut Biscuits, or cookies as they are known in North America. Crisp and buttery and filled with the warmth of ginger.
You can buy them in the shops and those are quite nice, but Todd prefers it when I bake them from scratch. The ones in the shops are a bit too hard for his liking. His 81 year old noshers have a bit of a difficult time coping with them.
And to be honest, I am not fond of really hard things these days either. When you get older the chance of breaking a tooth eating something hard increases. Yes, you can dunk them in hot drinks, which will render them nice and soft, but I confess . . . I am not a real hot drink lover.
Neither am I photographer! ha ha My friend Monique sent me this lovely presentation box for cupcakes or biscuits a long time ago. I save it for special occasions. I thought I would dig it out today and do some nice photos with it.
Presentation is clearly not my forte, but I do try . . . besides this is about the cookies is it not?
I do love that little Patisserie Shop box though . . . I do, I do, I do, I do, I do . . .
These cookies are put together a bit differently than most. You sift the flour, soda and salt together, along with the powdered ginger and mixed spice. Mixed spice is a warm baking spice mixture that you can buy over here. It is flavoured with cinnamon, coriander, ginger and cloves. Its used a lot in British baking. You can find my recipe to make your own here. Its very easy and you will find it comes in very handy
Once you have all of the dry ingredients sifted together, you stir in a quantity of brown sugar . . .
After that you drop in butter, which you have cut into bits and you rub the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs . . .
Finally you mix together some boiling water and golden syrup (you could also use corn syrup or maple syrup, or even honey if you wanted to). You mix it together until the golden syrup melts into the water . . . after which you stir it into the dry ingredients with a round bladed knife to make a soft dough. That's it!
No eggs, no milk. Roll the dough into balls, place onto a paper lined baking sheet, press lightly down a tiny bit with your fingers and bake . . . until they are set, and golden brown, crisp edged and scrumdiddlyumptious! These smell heavenly when they are baking.
Yield: makes about 50
Gingernuts
You can store these in an airtight container for up to 5 days. If you like you can whisk together an icing and spread it over top by whisking together 60g (1/2 cup) icing sugar with 1 TBS of soft butter and 2 to 3 tsp of lemon juice until smooth. Allow to set before storing.
ingredients:
- 280g plain flour (2 cups)
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
- 1 TBS ground ginger
- 1/2 tsp mixed spice
- 125g butter chopped into bits (1/2 cup)
- 200g soft light brown sugar (1 cup, lightly packed)
- 60ml boiling water (1/4 cup)
- 1 TBS golden syrup
instructions:
How to cook Gingernuts
- Preheat the oven to 180*C/350*F/ gas mark 4. Line a couple of baking sheets with baking parchment. Set aside.
- Sift the flour, soda, ginger and mixed spice into a bowl. Stir in the brown sugar. Drop in the butter and rub together with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. Mix together the boiling water and golden syrup until the syrup melts. Add to the flour mixture to mix to a soft dough with a round bladed knife. Roll into balls using 2 heaped tablespoons of the mixture at a time Place on the baking trays, at least 2 inches apart. Flatten slightly with your fingertips. Bake for 15 minutes, or until well coloured and firm. Leave to cool on the baking trays for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat until all have been baked.
- Store in an airtight container.
You can of course, ice these with a lemon icing, but I don't bother. We love them just as they are! Do note, it is possible to cut the recipe in half successfully. I do that all the time as there are only two of us in this house and I shouldn't be eating sweets. ♥
Up Tomorrow: Dirty Fries with Fry Sauce
Its my husband's 81st Birthday today. Its also the anniversary of the day we first met in person. I always tease him and tell him I am the best Birthday Present he ever received. Most of the time he would agree with me . . . unless we are in the car. Then it becomes quite debatable. He says he doesn't drive. He just steers.
Two of Todd's favourite things are Victoria Sponge Cakes and Raspberry Jam Tarts, well any jam tart really . . . he just loves anything with jam in it.
You know how you create ideas in your mind of things you want to do . . . and you picture them all out and in your mind they come out looking fantastic . . . but in reality, they don't even come close to touching what you had envisioned them as being?
This is one of those things. Every time I look at it I laugh. In my mind I saw this beautiful Victoria sponge with two layers of butter cream along with a layer of sweet jam in the middle. ✓✓
Two ticks . . . one for the Victoria Sponge . . . two for the butter cream . . . and wait a third . . . ✓ for the jam, raspberry jam. Bonne Maman, only the best for my man.
Normally I don't put butter cream on top of a Victoria Sponge, just in the middle. The top is usually dusted lightly with either icing sugar or caster sugar . . .
But today I had the idea in mind that I was going to decorate the top with raspberry jam tarts, again Bonne Maman ones (I could have made from scratch, but was stretched for time). I wanted to put a layer of vanilla butter cream on the top as well, to hold the jam tarts in place.
I decorated each jam tart with a small dollop of butter cream and a sprinkle of hundreds and thousands cake sprinkles . . . and then placed them lovingly all around the outside of the cake. I had an extra one and so I cut it up into little bits to decorate around the candle in the middle of the cake.
I just used one big fat candle in a tiny Bonne Maman jam jar as a holder. (Bonne Maman figured big in my cake plans today!)
You would have to have a really big cake to sport 81 candles, so I reckoned one big fat one was as good as 81 smaller ones.
Its not the prettiest Birthday Cake in the world. Not near as pretty as I had envisioned when I was dreaming it up . . .
But it didn't really matter because Todd loved it . . . two of his favourite things . . . plus all of the love I put into it. He was quite happy with it. He's not hard to please.
The cake itself is a really good cake, with a lovely moist crumb and beautiful texture . . .
Homemade Vanilla Butter cream Frosting? You can't go wrong. Its delicious too . . .
Bonne Maman Jams, next to homemade, they are the best in my opinion . . . .
And their jam tarts on their own are also rather moreish . . . not sure if it worked all together. I dare not hazard a taste because the sugar in all of this would send me into a Diabetic coma, but my dear husband was one very happy Camper, and that's what counts.
Yield: 8
Raspberry Jam Tart Birthday Cake
This is the kind of cake you bake for someones birthday when their favourite things are a Victoria sponge and raspberry jam tarts!
ingredients:
For the cake:
- 170g butter (12 TBS)
- 170g caster sugar (1 cup)
- 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 large free range eggs, beaten
- 170g self raising flour (a scant 1 1/4 cups)
For the butter cream:
- 225g butter, softened (1 cup)
- 390g icing sugar, sifted (3 cups, confectioners, powdered)
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
- 1 to 2 TBS double cream
To finish:
- 6 TBS of raspberry jam
- 8 raspberry jam tarts, plus one crumbled if desired
- hundreds and thousands cake sprinkles
instructions:
How to cook Raspberry Jam Tart Birthday Cake
- Butter and base line two 7 inch sandwich tins. Set aside. Preheat the oven to 180*C/350*F/ gas mark 4.
- Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla together until light in colour and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, a little at a time, beating well after each addition. If the mixture begins to curdle, add a spoonful of the flour.
- Fold in the flour with a metal spoon, taking care to use a cutting motion so as not to knock out too much of the air that you have beaten into the batter. Divide the batter evenly between the two cake tins, levelling off the surface. Make a slight dip in the centre of each.
- Bake on a centre rack of the oven for about 25 minutes, or until the sponges have risen well, are golden brown, and spring back when lightly touched. Allow to cool in the pan for five minutes before running a knife carefully around the edges and turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
- For the butter cream, beat the butter and sugar together on low until well blended and then continue to beat on medium for another few minutes until it begins to become fluffy. Beat in the vanilla and 1 TBS cream, only adding the second one if needed until you have a frosting of spreading consistency.
- Pipe a tiny bit of butter cream in the centre of each jam tart and sprinkle with the cake sprinkles.
- Place one layer of cake on a cake place, top side down. (I like to anchor it in place with a bit of butter cream. ) Spread with half of the butter cream you have left. Spoon the jam over top of the butter cream and spread it out a bit with the back of a spoon. Top with the other cake layer, bottom side down. Spread the top of the cake with the remaining butter cream. Place raspberry jam tarts decoratively around the top edges of the cake and sprinkle the centre of the cake with some more cake sprinkles and some chopped jam tart if you wish.
- Serve cut into wedges.
Happy Birthday Todd. I am going to be spoiling you all the day through with little things. We doing his proper celebration on Wednesday next when Tina and Tony are coming over for a slap up roast dinner.
Up tomorrow: Homemade Gingernut Biscuits/Cookies
I decided to bake Pitcaithly Bannock today in honor of Scottish Food & Drink Fortnight.
This is an annual celebration of all the best that Scotland has to offer from every corner of the country.
To honor it I chose to share a recipe of Historical import.
I have adapted the recipe from one in the book Scottish Baking, by Sue Lawrence. I picked it up a few years ago when we were in Scotland.
The original recipe was written by a Margaret Stewart in 1799, so its very old. She lived in the Manse in Erskine, near Glasgow, where her husband was minister.
One of my ancestors, Boyd McNayr was born near Glasgow, in the county of Lanarkshire in 1778.
His father was a soldier in the Kings Navy and he went with his father to the New World when he was 8 years old, so in 1786.
He was left with a family in Halifax, Nova Scotia, while his father went off to do Navy stuff. I can only assume he was in a ship wreck as his father was never seen nor heard from again.
When I saw the dates and origins of this recipe, I was particularly interested.
I can only assume that since Boyd was left with people in Halifax his mother was passed away and that he had no other family.
This must have been a sad little boy who had already faced many challenges in his life.
I like to think that he may have enjoyed slices of Pitcaithly Bannock with his mum as a small child.
It was known to be a type of celebratory type of Scottish shortbread biscuit, created to be served on special occasions.
The addition of caraway, orange peel and nuts was a very common place thing to do at that time.
Sugar would have been a luxury, and indeed these are not really sweet cookies.
Most of their luxurious flavour comes from the addition of caraway seed and orange zest.
Make sure your caraway seed is fresh, or you might just as well leave it out as it won't have much impact.
These are wonderfully crisp and buttery, with a bit of a sandy texture from the ground rice/rice flour.
You can make your own rice flour by blitzing raw rice in a food processor until finely ground, or in a spice/coffee grinder. Easy peasy.
They are very easy to make. You simply beat butter and sugar together until light and pale in colour.
I did mine by hand as I don't have an electric hand mixer and I didn't want to drag the stand mixer out from where it is stored.
Once you have achieved this you stir in the flour and rice flour, orange zest, caraway seed and a pinch of salt. I would do this by hand.
If it is over mixed you can toughen this delicate mixture. So best to do it by hand.
Once the soft dough is done, you press it into a prepared tin evenly, using floured hands. I tried to get it as evenly as I could.
You will need to prick it all over with a fork prior to popping it into a very slow oven.
Don't be too pedantic about the placement of these pricks . . . they bake out in the baking.
I went to the trouble of making a pattern with the fork and it all baked out, so it doesn't matter what it looks like . . . just prick it all over with a fork.
Dust it with more sugar and cut it into fingers or squares as soon as you take it out of the oven.
Once it has cooled it will be too late to do so.
You will be rewarded with beautifully crumbly, buttery, crisp shortbread fingers, wonderfully flavoured.
Pithcaithly Bannock
Yield: Makes 24 servings
A Scottish type of shortbread which was considered to be very festive and would often be decorated with large caraways and orange peel. You can bake it in a round and cut it into Petticoat Tails or bake it in a Swiss roll pan such as I have done and cut it into fingers. Either way it goes down a real treat with a hot cuppa!
ingredients:
- 225g butter, slightly softened (1 cup)
- 100g golden caster sugar, plus more for dusting (1/2 cup)
- 200g plain flour, sifted (1 1/2 cups all purpose, less 4 tsp.)
- 100g rice flour/ground rice (2/3 cup)
- pinch salt
- 1 heaped tsp of caraway seeds
- the finely grated zest of a small orange
- 40g finely chopped blanched almonds (7 1/2 TBS)
instructions:
How to cook Pithcaithly Bannock
- Preheat the oven to 150*C/300*F/ gas mark 2. Butter a 9 by 13 inch Swiss Roll tin and line the bottom with baking paper creating an overhang to help you lift the bannock out of the pan when you need to.
- Measure the butter and sugar into a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until pale. This will bake about 3 to 5 minutes. You can beat by hand as well, which will take roughly twice the time. Sift the flour and ground rice into the bowl. Add a pinch of salt and the orange zest and almonds. Stir to bring together into a soft dough. Don't over mix. Using floured hands press this into the prepared tin in an even layer. Prick all over with the tines of a fork.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 45 minutes, until uniformly pale golden brown. Remove from the oven and dust with more caster sugar. Cut with a sharp knife into squares or fingers. Let cool in the tin for about 10 minutes before lifting out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
- Store in an airtight container.
Stored in an airtight container these will keep for days and days. If anything they get better tasting as the days progress. They would indeed be very pretty at Christmas time with a bit of icing on top and some sprinkles, or even bits of candied cherry. In any case, Happy Scottish Food & Drink Fortnight!!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at mariealicejoan at aol dot com.
The Great British Bake Off started again this week. Personally, I don't think it is as good since it moved to Channel 4. I miss Mary Berry, I really do. I am not a huge fan of Channel 4. It panders to the younger population, with a lot of reality, shock and garbage shows. I have noticed each year that the contestants on Bake Off are getting younger and younger. This year there is only one who appears to be slightly older than 40, with most appearing still wet behind their ears. I'm not sure I like it. I prefer the old GBBO for sure.
Whenever I bake oatmeal muffins I always think of my middle son Doug, and the trips we used to take into Toronto to spend the day at my ex SIL's . They lived in a lovely house just off Avenue Road, in a somewhat Jewish area of the city.
My BIL would bring home a couple of big bags of fresh bagels from the Jewish bakery, and little paper sacks of fresh rugelach . . . my SIL would bake Oatmeal Muffins with plenty of chocolate chips added. She used the Quaker Oatmeal Muffin Mix, which is what we all used back then. It was perfect, or at least we thought so. We would spend half the day feasting on all of this and just enjoying each other's company.
Our wee Doug loved the oatmeal muffins especially and we had some lovely photos of him eating them, with his head full of Shirley Temple curls and chocolate all over his face. He was only about 2 or 3 at the time. He will be 38 in November . . . so a lot of time has passed since then.
Try as I might I have never been able to bake a homemade oatmeal muffin that tastes like the Quaker Oatmeal Muffin Mix did. Or maybe it is just that things always taste better in our memories . . .
Nothing can ever quite come up to our taste memories . . . I don't think. They are coloured with rose coloured glasses and have more to do with the people we share them with than they actually do with the food we were eating, if that makes sense. Love is a specific flavour that is very difficult to replicate.
These are very good oatmeal muffins. Flavoured with Maple syrup and brown sugar, with just a hint of cinnamon . . .
Stogged with toasted walnuts . . . I love to toast all my nuts before baking with them. They just taste nuttier, but perhaps that is just in my imagination, I don't know . . .
A hefty sprinkling of demerara sugar on the tops prior to baking gives them lovely crunchy tops, that we quite like . . .
Again, they rise beautifully. I find that if I almost fill my muffin cups then the batter seems to have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps that is my secret. I don't know. I only know my muffins always rise beautifully.
They have a lovely light texture . . . a perfect muffin texture . . . full of lovely little holes . . .
My younger self would have enjoyed these, eaten hot and liberally spread with butter . . .
My older self doesn't even dare think about such a thing . . .
Yield: 12
Crunchy Topped Maple Walnut Oatmeal Muffins
A delicious muffin filled with toasted walnuts, oats and maple syrup, with a crunchy demerara topping. What's not to fall in love with!
ingredients:
- 160g old fashioned rolled oats (2 cups)
- 240 ml whole milk (1 cup)
- 120ml pure maple syrup (1/2 cup)
- 80ml sunflower oil (1/3 cup)
- 145g soft light brown sugar (2/3 cup packed)
- 2 large free-range eggs, lightly beaten
- 210g plain flour (1 1/2 cups)
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 115g chopped toasted walnuts (1 cup)
- demerara sugar to sprinkle on top (turbinado)
instructions:
How to cook Crunchy Topped Maple Walnut Oatmeal Muffins
- Preheat the oven to 200*C/400*F/gas mark 4. Line a 12 cup medium muffin tin with paper liners. Set aside.
- Sift together the flour, soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.
- Measure the oats into a bowl. Add the maple syrup, milk, oil and beaten eggs. Mix together well and then stir in the eggs to combine well. Add the dry ingredients all at once and stir together just to combine. It is okay if there are lumps. Stir in the walnuts.
- Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin cups, dividing it equally. They will be about 7/8 full. That's okay! Sprinkle about 1 tsp of demerara sugar on top of each.
- Bake for 18 to 25 minutes, until well risen and the tops spring back when lightly touched. Cool in the tin for about 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to finish cooling completely. Store in an airtight container.
Just look at that lovely, crunchy top. These are perfect tucked into lunch boxes for our back-to-school scholars or enjoyed with a hot cuppa for elevenses or tea break. These are just perfect full stop!
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