Showing posts with label Teatime Treats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teatime Treats. Show all posts
If there is one thing my family loves more than almost anything on earth, except for Fish & Chips it is jam. We ADORE jam! We love it on our toast, over ice cream, in cakes, tarts, etc.
I would say it was our Scottish heritage, but my father is the real jam nut and he is French Canadian. Having said that, however, the Scots have always had a close tie to France. Mary, Queen of Scots, was brought up in France.
So jam is probably popular on both sides of the English Channel!
The Scottish do love their jam though and they love their coconut. These are some of the most popular tarts in Scotland. You will see them on offer in all of the bake shops.
They are just called Coconut Tarts there, but I like to call them Coconut & Jam Tarts. Whatever you call them, they are delicious!
One of my early ancestors, Boyd McNayr was born near Glasgow in the 1700's. He came to Canada as a young boy. His father was a soldier in the King's service named James.
He left Boyd in Halifax with friends at the tender age of 8 and left to do some soldiering duties. Not he, nor his ship, was ever seen or heard from again. Tragic really.
Boyd and his wife Rachel Beals started a settlement out in Springfield, Nova Scotia. They were built of strong stuff. All those early pioneers were. You can still go there and see their headstones. I am really proud of my pioneer heritage.
One of the favorite things I was able to do when I was in the UK was to travel to Scotland and Glasgow, as well as to the Highlands. It is a stunning, stunning country. If you ever get a chance to go, take it, don't pass it by!
Back to the tarts. These are quite simply fabulous. Crisp buttery pastry, with a raspberry jam filling and sweet coconut macaroon topping. They are incredibly moreish.
Especially enjoyed with a nice hot cuppa. Today I opened day four from my Tea Advent calendar and enjoyed it in my new Susan Branch Winter Mug. I have wanted one of those mugs for years so when I saw that they were back in stock, I snapped one up.
WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE SCOTTISH COCONUT & JAM TARTS
Simple store cupboard ingredients for the most part. Nothing more, nothing less. If you keep frozen tart shells in the freezer, you will never be very far away from making these.
- 12 unbaked tart shells (you can make your own from scratch if you like, I used the Tenderflake frozen ones.)
- raspberry jam (I used seedless today)
- shredded unsweetened coconut
- butter (I used salted. Most of the time that is all I have in my fridge)
- 1 large egg (I only use free range)
- sugar (I used granulated white sugar)
- vanilla extract (I only use pure vanilla extract)
I never saw flaked coconut the whole time I lived over there. It just wasn't available. I sometimes would bring some back from Canada when I visited home, and could often get it at an American supply warehouse, when it was in stock.
It often was sold out.
The tart shells I used are by Tenderflake, and come frozen in sets of 12. They are about 3 inches in diameter and work perfectly for this recipe.
I only ever use large eggs, unless otherwise specified and always free range. I will not support an inhumane industry if I can help it and avoid eggs from caged hens at all costs! I do not mind paying a bit more for my eggs.
HOW TO MAKE SCOTTISH COCONUT & JAM TARTS
Its very simple really. I would call this a doddle actually. You begin by preheating the oven. Once it has reached your temperature I like to prebake the tart shells for about 5 minutes.
This simple thing helps to prevent soggy bottoms, and the timing is just long enough to whisk together the filling ingredients. Nobody likes a soggy bottom.
Just whisk the sugar, egg, vanilla, melted butter and coconut together in a small bowl. It is almost like a loose macaroon mixture.
Take your partially baked shells out of the oven. Spoon about 1/2 teaspoon of your jam into the bottom of each shell.
I used seedless raspberry jam because that is the only raspberry jam I had in the house. I normally buy seedless as I have diverticulitis and the seeds play havoc with my system.
If all you have is seeded, then by all means use that!
The coconut filling gets spooned into the tart shell, over top of the jam and then you bake the tarts for 20 to 15 minutes.
They are done when the tops are golden brown and set, and the pastry is crisp and golden brown as well. I dusted them with some icing sugar to pretty them up a bit.
The Scots really enjoy their sweets. Another popular bake up there are Scottish Snowballs Cakes. These are two puffy cookies, sandwiched together with jam and rolled in a glace icing and coconut. You can find my recipe for those here.
They are incredibly yummy!
Only a few mind you. I don't want her to feel beholding, and you know how older people can be sometimes. She might think she has to give me something back and I don't want anything.
I basically just want to thank her for being a good neighbor, and I think these cake/tarts are an excellent way to do just that!
Scottish Coconut & Jam Tarts
Yield: Makes 12 tarts
Prep time: 10 MinCook time: 25 MinTotal time: 35 Min
This is a classic Scottish treat. Incredibly delicious and very easy to make using frozen tart shells.
Ingredients
- 1 large free range egg
- 1/4 cup (50g) granulated sugar
- 2 TBS butter, melted
- 1/2 tsp. vanilla
- 1 1/2 cup (115g) shredded coconut, unsweetened
- raspberry jam
- 12 unbaked tart shells
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350*F/ 180*C/ gas mark 4. Place your tart shells on a baking sheet. Pre-bake for five minutes.
- Whisk the egg, sugar, butter, vanilla and coconut together in a bowl.
- Place 1/2 tsp of jam in the bottom of each tart shell. Top with 1/12th of the coconut mixture. (fill about 3/4 full)
- Bake in the preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes until golden brown.
- Leave to cool then remove from the tart tins. Serve at room temperature. Store any leftovers in an airtight container.
Blueberry Cheesecake Danish. Oh my, oh my. Where have you been all my life! I think you are really going to enjoy this quick and easy recipe I am sharing with you today.
One thing I always keep in my freezer is all butter puff pastry. It comes in handy for baking all sorts of things, both savory and sweet. When you have puff pastry in the freezer you are never very far away from being able to bake your family a sweet or savory treat!
This is a recipe I have adapted from one I discovered on the Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry site. Their original recipe made a dozen pastries.
There is only one of me and so I cut the recipe in half. I am going to my sister's for supper and I was going to bring the Pumpkin Pie I posted yesterday, but my dad informed me he doesn't like pumpkin pie and so I decided to bake these pastries so that he will have something to eat that he enjoys.
At least I hope that he will like these. He likes blueberries and he likes pastry, but oh heck, I just remembered he doesn't like cream cheese. Oh well. Guess I will have to stop off at the shops to pick something up that he will like.
Or else he will have to suffer one or the other. Hmmm . . . I don't like to make my dad suffer.
WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE BLUEBERRY CHEESECAKE DANISH
Nothing too complicated or out of the ordinary!
- ground cinnamon
- granulated sugar
- cream cheese (I use the full fat one)
- flour
- all butter puff pastry (one sheet)
- butter, melted
- blueberry preserves
- icing sugar (confectioners sugar)
- milk
- toasted flaked almonds
Danishes are a quick and easy brunch dish or dessert that always go down a real treat with everyone. Not only can you make them well ahead of time, but they always look so pretty sitting on a plate.
Nobody but you has to know that they are so easy and quick to make. We can keep it as our own little secret!
HOW TO MAKE BLUEBERRY CHEESECAKE DANISH
These are so simple to make you will find yourself wondering how something which is so beautiful to look can be so easy to make. They only look complicated.
These Danishes have two distinct fillings that deliciously mingle together on baking. You will need to make a very simple cream cheese filling which is as simple to do as stirring together softened cream cheese and sugar. You could also add a drop or two of vanilla if you wanted to.
The other filling is blueberry jam. Simple. No fuss no muss. I used my sister's homemade wild blueberry jam today.
Not fond of blueberries? Try using cherry jam or strawberry jam. In short you can use any kind of jam you do enjoy!
I like to use all butter puff pastry. I am not a fat of artificial fats, or trans fats. I prefer the simple pure taste of butter. For this recipe you will need one sheet of puff pastry.
Unroll the puff pastry onto a flour dusted surface. You will be brushing the surface of the pastry with some melted butter and then dusting it with cinnamon sugar, which is always very easy to make.
I do so love the flavor of cinnamon and it goes so very well with blueberries and with cream cheese.
When I was a child it was always a real treat if mom made us cinnamon toast. She didn't spoil us with anything like that very often and I can assure you Danish was never on the menu!
Now here is where it gets a bit complicated. You need to cut the sheet of cinnamon sugar dusted pastry into six equal strips. That's not the hard part.
The hard part is twisting each strip, one at a time, into a rope, or at least it was for me. I found it easier to twist each strip from both ends of the strip towards the middle.
Once you have done that it is a simple thing to shape the twisted strips into round coils. You can then place them onto a lined baking sheet.
Each strip is then brushed with more butter and the loose end tucked underneath so that they doesn't spring free when they are baking.
The recipe was quite vague as far as how to put the fillings onto the Danish. I took matters into my own hands and this is what I did.
I used my thumb to create a hollow in the center of each pastry and then dropped a teaspoon each of the cream cheese filling and the blueberry jam into those hollows.
They are now ready to bake. Just pop the baking sheet into the oven and let it do its job.
Twenty minutes is all it takes. I threw my almonds into the oven on a small baking sheet for the last five minutes of bake time so that they were toasted to perfection.
Baked these pastries are lovely and golden brown. Flaky and crisp. Just scoop them off the baking sheet and onto a wire rack to cool for a few minutes.
While they are cooling you can whisk together some icing sugar and milk to make a thin drizzle icing.
This is very easily done. You will only need a very small amount of milk. Once you have made the drizzle you can flick it over top of each pastry and then sprinkle the toasted flaked almonds on top.
And that's it! Your pastries are now complete and ready to serve!
Don't you love how pretty they are? I can see where these would be perfect to serve for brunch on Christmas morning, well any morning really.
Quick to make, easy to make and oh-so-delicious, these are destined to become firm family favorites!
Blueberry Cheesecake Danish
Yield: 6
Prep time: 10 MinCook time: 25 MinTotal time: 35 Min
Prepared puff pastry and a few other simple ingredients combine to make a delectable Danish pastry, filled with sweetened cream cheese and blueberry preserves!
Ingredients
- 1/2 TBS ground cinnamon
- 2 1/2 TBS granulated sugar
- 2 TBS cream cheese, softened
- 1 TBS flour
- 1 sheet (10 inches square) all butter puff pastry
- 1 TBS butter, melted
- 3 TBS blueberry preserves
- 1/3 cup (about 45g) icing sugar, sifted
- milk to thin
- 2 to 3 TBS toasted flaked almonds
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400*F/200*C/gas mark 6. Have ready a baking tray that you have lined with some baking parchment.
- To make the cream cheese filling, whisk together the cream cheese and 1/2 TBS of the sugar in a small bowl. Set aside.
- Whisk the remaining sugar together with the cinnamon in another bowl. Set aside.
- Dust your countertop with the flour and unroll the puff pastry on top. Brush with 1/2 the melted butter. Sprinkle evenly with the cinnamon sugar. Cut the pastry sheet into 6 even widths.
- Twist one cinnamon coated pastry strip and then form into a spiral coil. Place onto the baking sheet. Repeat with all six strips.
- Brush with the remaining melted butter and tuck the loose end underneath. Make a small indentation in the center of each coil with your thumb. Place 1 tsp each of the cream cheese filling and the blueberry jam into the indentation.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes until golden brown.
- Remove to a wire rack and cool for five minutes.
- Whisk the icing sugar together with just enough milk to make a drizzle icing. Drizzle this over top of each pastry and sprinkle on the toasted almonds.
- Store any leftovers in the refrigerator in a tightly covered container.
I have shared a Swiss Roll recipe on here before. You can access my original post here. Swiss Rolls or Jelly Roll as it is also known is probably one of the favorite cakes of many people.
My mom didn't bake very often when I was a child. She worked full time, but when she did make a Jelly/Swiss roll, my siblings and I got very excited. To be honest we were even excited to get a store bought one.
Jam and cake, cake and jam, if its jam and cake everyone in my family is in seventh heaven. Simply put they are one of our favorite things, right up there with fish and chips!
Swiss rolls are the perfect cakes to bake for a weeknight or afterschool treat. Completely fat free, they are very easy to make and are one of what I consider to be no fuss, no muss cakes!
And yet, many people are intimidated by the idea of making a Swiss Roll cake. Today I want to demystify that notion and I wanted to try out Mary Berry's recipe for this beautiful fatless sponge.
She is the doyenne of the Great British Bake Off. I know she is no longer a part of that show, but to be honest in my opinion, she WAS that show and when she left, it lost a lot of its appeal for me.
She was always kind to the contestants on the show, even if she was being critical. Its called taking your medicine with a spoonful of sugar. Anyways, I like her.
Every recipe of hers that I have ever made has been impeccable. There have been no duds. I thought it would be fun today to share a tutorial with you on how to make a proper Swiss Roll a la Mary Berry! Her recipe is the best swiss roll recipe and I would expect nothing less!
HOW TO MAKE A PROPER SWISS ROLL CAKE
I took photographs of every step of my baking today's cake so I could show you every step of the way. One thing I always do when baking is to start with room temperature ingredients. My flour and sugar are always room temperature, but you might want to bring your eggs to room temperature. This is easily done by resting them in a bowl of quite warm (not boiling) tap water for a few minutes.
Measure your eggs and sugar into a clean, grease free bowl. Using an electric hand mixer (you can also use a stand mixer with the whisk attachment) you want to whisk these together for about five minutes. At that point you should have a light and frothy mixture which is thickish. Your beater/whisk should leave a trail or a ribbon when you lift it up out of the mixture. This is essential and there is no quick way to get around it.
Once you have achieved the proper consistency, you can start folding in the flour. You need self rising flour. (I tell you how to make your own in the recipe notes.) Fold this into the egg/sugar mixture using a rubber spatula as you are sifting the flour in. You want it to be thoroughly combined without any dry streaks but you also don't want to knock any air out of your batter that you have just gone to all that trouble of beating it in.
You want to be preheating your oven to 400*F/200*C. You also want to have a swiss roll pan buttered and lined with baking parchment. A Swiss roll pan is 9 X 13 inches in size.
You can also use a baking sheet of the same size so long as it has a lip around the edge. Your cake will rise approximately 3/4 to one inch.
Spread your batter evenly into the prepared pan, smoothing it out and making sure it gets into all of the edges. It is a cake that bakes really quickly so don't forget to put on your timer. It should be done in 10 minutes.
While it is baking prepared your paper that you are going to use to roll it up. Spread a sheet of baking parchment that is slightly larger than your cake tin on the counter and dust it all over evenly with finely granulated sugar.
The cake is done when it is golden brown and the sides have started to shrink away from the sides of the pan slightly.
You will need to invert the cake onto this sheet of paper as soon as you take it out of the oven. It should come out very easily if you have buttered your pan properly and lined it. But just in case, I do like to run a sharp knife down the long edge of both sides of the pan.
Once you have tipped the cake out onto the sugar dusted paper, you will need to remove the baking paper that is stuck to the bottom of it from where you baked it in the pan. Carefully loosen and slowly peel it off, discarding it when you are done.
Using a sharp serrated knife, trim the baked edges from all around the cake. Just cut a tiny sliver. If you have any kids in the house they will love eating these. Or you can throw them out to the birds.
While the cake is still warm and once you have trimmed the edges, you will need to make a score mark about 1 inch from one of the short edges of the cake, taking care not to cut all the way down to the bottom. Let your cake cool slightly and while it is still a bit warm, spread the jam in a thin layer all over the surface.
Using your paper to help you push the cake along, roll the cake up tightly beginning at the scored edge.
When you are done it will look like this. Don't worry if the jam has not come out evenly at all the edges. Just trim those away, again the kids will be more than happy to help you get rid of them!
And that's it. Your cake is done and it was reasonably painless I am sure!
I think Mary would approve of my cake. I got a nice tight roll on it and there is not too much or too little jam.
The texture is nice as well. Light and fluffy. Not rubbery.
The last thing you want is a cake that has the texture of an omelet. This cake is quite simply beautiful.
You can also easily vary the recipe and fillings if you want. Its just as lovely filled with lemon curd. You can also make a buttercream icing to fill it with, varying the flavor of that. Coffee buttercream is quite popular.
For a simply coffee flavored buttercream icing simply beat together 3 ounces (75g) of butter, with 1 3/4 cup (225g) of sifted icing sugar, 2 tsp milk and 2 tsp of coffee flavoring. (Camp is good for this)
You can make any kind of buttercream icing you enjoy. Strawberry. Lemon. Orange. Or even use a combination of vanilla butter cream and your favorite jam.
People also like to fill them with whipped cream and fruit. Strawberries or raspberries (or both) are very nice!
In this case I don't sweetened the cream, as the cake itself is pretty sweet. I do fold a bit of sugar into the sliced berries. 1 cup or 1/2 pint of cream whipped is generally sufficient.
For the holidays you can fill it with a thin layer of spiced buttercream and fruity mincemeat. Always nice, or you can fold some chestnut cream into some whipped cream and fill it with that. Yummilicious!
Its beautiful just as is however, for an every day teatime/afterschool/ treat. Swiss Roll. Its a good thing, and Mary Berry's recipe for it is excellent and fail-proof!
Mary Berry's Swiss Roll
Yield: 8
Prep time: 15 MinCook time: 10 MinTotal time: 25 Min
This delicious fat-free sponge cake with its jam filling makes a delicious tea-time treat!
Ingredients
- 4 large free range eggs
- 1/2 cup (100g)fine granulated sugar (caster sugar)
- 3/4 cup (100g) self raising flour ( see note)
For the finishing and filling:
- 4 TBS finely granulated sugar
- 4 heaped TBS strawberry or raspberry jam
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400*F/200*C/ gas mark 6. Butter a 9 by 13 inch cake tin or rimmed baking sheet/jelly roll pan and line the bottom with baking parchment. Set aside.
- Beat the eggs and the sugar together in a large bowl with an electric mixer until the mixture is light and leaves a trail/ribbon in the bowl when you lift out the beaters. This will take a good five minutes.
- Sift the flour over the mixture, folding it in with a spatula as you do so. Take care not to knock the air out of the batter.
- Spread the batter in the prepared tin, making sure you get it in all of the corners.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes, or until golden brown and the edges the cake are beginning to shrink from the edges of the pan. Do not over bake.
- While the cake is baking place a sheet of baking parchment slightly larger than the cake tin on a counter top. Sprinkle the 4 TBS of sugar over top evenly.
- When the cake is one invert the cake onto the sugared baking parchment. Carefully peel the baking paper from the bottom of the cake and discard.
- Using a sharp serrated knife, trim the edges from the cake, and then make a score mark 1 inch away from one short edge, taking care not to cut all the way through.
- Let the cake cool for a few minutes to lukewarm. Spread the jam over the surface of the cake evenly. (Don't do this when the cake it too hot or it will absorb the jam which you don't want.)
- Working from the short edge that you made the score mark in roll the cake up firmly. Using the paper to push it along really helps.
- Cut into thick slices to serve.
Notes:
You can easily make your own self-rising flour by adding 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp of salt to every cup of flour. I make mine up by 4 cups and it always gets used.
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