White Chocolate & Custard Biscuits

Another lazy Sunday afternoon led to some more baking and once again it is from a copy of BBC Good Food. Rather than cakes, I decided to make biscuits. Not just any old biscuits, white chocolate & custard biscuits. Now making your own biscuits may seem a fairly archaic practice, considering the amazing range even the smallest of supermarkets offers. But making biscuits is one of the nicest baking experiences in my book, simply because it is so unnecessary.

You make biscuits because you want to potter around the kitchen – it’s not urgent and it’s not needed. It’s why I also like making things like granola, bread and chutney. You make them because you want to be cooking, not because you have to be cooking. And when you can make something as nice as these biscuits, it’s all the more worthwhile.

These lovely golden biscuits had the perfect texture. Soft enough to melt in your mouth but with enough of a shortbread-crunch to give it some interest. The pale, yellow of these biscuits cheers you up just by looking them and the little drops of white chocolate buried underneath their cracked surface makes them even more appetising.

The custard powder, which went into these, is subtle, but it gives the biscuits a lovely vanilla taste that far surpasses any shop bought custard cream. And until you can buy shop bought custard creams that are packed full of sweet, melt in the mouth specks of white chocolate, these will always come out on top.

From BBC Good Food June 2012:

140g softened butter

175g caster sugar (I used golden caster sugar to make these golden ovals even more sunny)

1 egg

½ tsp vanilla extract

225g self raising flour

85g custard powder

85g white chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan. Line 2-3 baking sheets with baking parchment. Put sugar and butter in a food processor and whiz until light and fluffy. (I couldn’t be bothered to get my food processor out of the cupboard so I did everything with an electric whisk in a mixing bowl and they turned out great).

2. Add the egg and vanilla and mix well.

3. Sift the flour and custard powder together and tip into the bowl and pulse to form a dough. Scrape out of the food processor and mix in the white chocolate chips by hand.

4. Pull out pieces of dough and roll them into portions just smaller than a walnut (you should get about 25 biscuits) then place on the baking sheets, with a little space between them to allow for spreading. Press each biscuit down lightly with your fingers.

5. Bake for 12=15 minutes until golden. Remove and cool on a wire rack.

BBC Good Food Cherry Oat Squares with Chocolate Drizzle

Having gone far too long without a spot of baking, my need for sweet cakey goodness led to my trying a new recipe from this month's BBC Good Food magazine. The whole feature on 'Baking for a Cake Stall' was filled with the most tempting pictures of bulgingly beautiful cakes and biscuits and frankly I could have quite happily baked (and eaten for that matter) the entire lot. But the picture of a tower of squat little squares of oaty goodness tempted me above all others and I settled on the Cherry Oat Squares with Chocolate Drizzle.

In my mind, these perfectly lend themselves to the idea of food as art. Golden building blocks of cake stacked so daintily on top of one another, they resemble a delicious food version of a jenga tower. The enticing deep, dark chocolate drizzled over the top provides a stark contrast to the warm golden brown of the cake.

Essentially, these are flapjacks but having been made with self-raising flour as well and with the omission of golden syrup, they are less dense and cloying. Instead, they are lighter, crumblier with a nice soft, biscuity texture that is still firm and satisfying.

Punctuated with glace cherries, that glisten like rubies, buried in the sandy rubble of the flapjack, they provided a pleasing mix of tastes. The chewy yet crumbly flavour of oats, the sweet bursts of cherry goodness and the sophisticated depth of dark chocolate all work together to provide a wonderful taste sensation, all packed into one little, dense square.

These went down so well at work, that I didn't even get one.

Recipe:

·         140g butter, melted, plus extra butter for the tin

·         100g self-raising flour

·         175g caster sugar

·         175g porridge oats

·         1 egg, beaten

·         100g glace cherries, halved

·         50g dark chocolate

1.       Heat oven to 180C/160C fan. Butter and line the base and sides of a 22cm square cake tin, allowing it to come up over the sides to make it easier to get out.

2.       Mix together the flour, sugar and oats in a bowl. Add the egg, melted butter and cherries and mix well to combine. Tip into the tin and press down with a fork to smooth the mixture and spread it evenly.

3.       Bake for 2-25 minutes until golden brown. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then carefully lift out using the paper and place on a board. Mark, but don’t cut, 3 lines each way to make 16 squares.

4.       Melt the chocolate in the microwave for a minute then drizzle over the squares. When the chocolate had set, cut the squares down the marked lines.

Easter Chocolate Fudge Cakes

Following on from yesterday's rant about cheap mini eggs, I mentioned that I made some Easter Chocolate Fudge Cakes. In my disgust at the knock off confectionary, I ended up not allowing them on top of my cakes and instead opted for Cadbury mini eggs.

This was necessary because when cakes are this good, they deserve to be royally crowned with Cadbury mini eggs, rather than being manhandled with a jester's hat of synthetic confectionary.

This recipe came from the BBC Good Food website, a digital treasure trove for the ecstatic eater, where I can lose myself for hours in the tempting array of culinary delights on offer. What with it being Easter Sunday this weekend, there was only one type of cake I would be making for work this week and hence my oven conceived these plump chocolatey babies, smeared in a sticky chocolate fudge buttercream with a nest of brightly hued mini eggs nestled on top.

I couldn't recommend this recipe enough. It requires only 5 ingredients for the cakes and a further two are needed for the buttercream and the cupcakes can be made and baked easily within half an hour. Not that you want to hurry to make these. The warming smell of chocolatey goodness permeating my kitchen made this something I could have happily have been making for hours.

The cakes were beautifully moist, dark spongy pillows of cocoa batter, but it was the buttercream that really took them to the next level. I adapted the recipe by using Chocolate Philadelphia instead of the milk chocolate because I can't get enough of this tub of creamy delight. Fudgy and gooey without being sickly, sticky and sweet without being cloying, this was a dream frosting. I'm not ashamed to admit I scraped out and ate every last inch of the glorious goo out of my mixing bowl after all the cupcakes were iced.

Plus, the cakes look so charming with their pastel eggs huddled together on top. So this is a real winner in terms of ease, aesthetics and taste.

Ingredients:

For the cakes:

140g soft butter

140g golden caster sugar

3 medium eggs

100g self raising flour

25g cocoa sifted

For the icing:

85g milk chocolate, broken (I replaced this with some Chocolate Philadelphia).

85g soft butter

140g icing sugar

Plus 2x 35g bags of white chocolate malteasers and min foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. I, however, used mini eggs instead.

· Heat oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5 and put 16 gold cases into a fairy-cake tin. Tip all the ingredients for the cake into a mixing bowl and beat for 2 mins with an electric hand-whisk until smooth. Divide between the cases so they are two-thirds filled, then bake for 12-15 mins until risen. Cool on a wire rack.

· For the frosting, microwave the chocolate on High for 1 min. Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat in the melted chocolate. Spread on the cakes and decorate with Maltesers and chocolate eggs.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3481/chocolate-fudge-easter-cakes

Lorraine Pascale's Doris Grant Loaf

The weekend is always the perfect time for cooking and I love nothing more than to lose myself on a Saturday afternoon in spending time on a more involved recipe. Weekends offer the chance to do the type of cooking that we regrettably just do not have the time to do during the average week. It is a time when cooking becomes what it should be about, pleasure and the love of eating, rather than just throwing something together to fuel yourself for another day. For me, the weekend is about baking, in particular cakes and bread.

I'm a complete carboholic. I could never contemplate doing something like the Atkins diet. To exist without dense doughy sourdough, golden, crusty baguettes smeared with butter or bulging muffins bursting with chocolate chips or brilliant blueberries is just unthinkable.

One of my favourite baking bibles is Lorraine Pascale's 'Baking Made Easy' and today I made the Doris Grant Loaf. I've actually made this several times but I have such loaf love for this bread that I find myself always coming back to it, instead of trying the other bread recipes in the book.

Dense, deeply brown, textured but soft, grainy bread encased by a shell of satisfyingly crunchy crumb. This bread ticks off everything a carbomaniac could want. I prefer wholemeal bread generally and this is in a 'whole' different world to the pappy, soggy excuses our supermarkets palm off on us, wrapped in clinical polystyrene bags. The fact it is also a bread that you don't need to knead makes this a charming, leisurely Saturday afternoon activity rather than a strenous work out.

Frankly, this bread is so good, I literally needed nothing else with it to make a divine lunch. Well, actually that's a lie, I did have one little supplement - a pot of gleamingly golden extra virgin olive oil with a little puddle of dark, powerful balsamic vinegar to dunk my bread in.

And this bread is so soft and tender that it absorbed my little bath of oil and vinegar like a sponge. Popping warm slices of homemade bread in your mouth with olive oil dribbling down it -there's no finer lunch.

Ingredients

• 225g/8oz strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting
• 225g/8oz strong wholemeal flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 x 7g sachet fast-action dried yeast
• 1 tbsp clear honey
• 300ml/11fl oz warm water
• vegetable oil or oil spray, for oiling
• a little milk, for brushing

Preparation method

1. Dust a medium baking tray with flour.
2. Sift the flours into a large bowl and reserve the grain – the brown bits that are too big to fit through the sieve. Add the salt and yeast, then make a big hole in the centre and pour in the honey and water. Mix well to form a smooth dough, working it gently with your hands if necessary. If the dough feels a bit stiff, add an extra two tablespoons of water. Shape the mixture into a ball and place on the prepared baking tray. Make sure the top is smooth and wrinkle-free. Cover the dough loosely with oiled clingfilm, making sure it is airtight, and leave to rise in a warm place for a good hour, or until it has almost doubled in size.
3. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Remove the clingfilm from the dough and make a few slashes in the top with a sharp knife – I use a sharp, serrated knife and saw gently. Brush the loaf with milk, sprinkle with the reserved grain and then place in the oven.
4. Put about 10 ice cubes into the bottom of the oven – they will produce steam, which keeps the crust from hardening too quickly. (A quickly hardened crust prevents the bread from rising well.) Bake the bread for 30–40 minutes, or until it has risen, sounds hollow when tapped underneath and comes easily off the baking tray. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the tray.
5. Serve fresh from the oven with loads of butter. These loaves do not keep well. However, if the whole lot does not disappear in one sitting, slice up the remainder and put it in the freezer to eat as toast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/doris_grant_loaf_16985

Harissa Chicken Breast in a Foccaccia Bun with Caramelised Red Onion

This is barely a recipe at all. In fact, just reading the title of this post is pretty much it.

For a delicious lunch today, I simply took a chicken breast, bashed it with a rolling pin to flatten it and then rubbed it in a good tablespoon of lovely, earhy harissa paste.

Whilst leaving it to marinate, I took a foccaccia bread roll, which I got from the in store bakery at Waitrose, drizzled it in a little olive oil and then toasted both sides in a griddle pan over a medium-high heat.

I then swapped the now crispingly crumbly foccaccia rolls and kept them warm in the oven whilst I cooked the spicy chicken breast in the griddle pan. Then it was a case of putting the bird in the bun and smearing liberally with the gooily tangy caramelised red onion chuntey I bought from M&S (this stuff more than warrants its £1.99 price tag).

Andf that was it. But I can't describe how good this was. The crunch of the bread that had the depth of the olive oil pemeating it, the juicy chicken enlivened by the fiery heat of the harissa and the sweet sharpness of the chutney: three components each giving the most perfect mouthful of food.