Lemon Meringue Dreams

When I was a child one of my favourite desserts was Lemon Meringue Pie - I was always more excited than a 14 year old girl at a One Direction concert when my mum announced that it was what we were having that Sunday so I've been meaning to make one for a while. However, me and pastry still have a tumultuous relationship, so a couple of weekends ago I decided instead to play safe and make Lemon Meringue cupcakes.

Obviously I've made many a cupcake over the past 18 months but I've never ever made meringue before, so there was still a bit of jeopardy involved.

I made the cake mix as usual, except with the addition of some lemon rind and then added a blob of lemon curd into each case and then topped with a tiny bit more cake batter. I was worried that the lemon curd would sink to the bottom, as happened when I did the same process with jam, but all the recipes I read said to use this technique so I had faith and went for it!

Then came the time to make the elusive meringue; I've seen these go wrong many a time on TGBBO (if you don't know that abbreviation then shame on you*) but went at it with conviction hoping to power through. After a fair bit of whisking, when i thought it to be stiff enough I performed the tried and tested 'holding it upside down' test; I didn't have anyone around to use as a volunteer and I didn't have the balls to hold it over my own head so I just held it upside over the worktop for a few seconds. It passed the test so I loaded it into a piping bag and piped it onto the top of the cakes the same way I would butter icing  I think it could have perhaps done with a bot more beating but I know its hard to reverse meringue if you've overdone it so I played safe.

The last step was to brown the meringue, this steps would have been a lot easier if I had a blowtorch rather than having to use my very temperamental grill but I got there in the end with only a few 'almost setting the house alight with a meringue fire' moments.

On the whole they turned out pretty well, as I had thought the lemon curd had sunk to the bottom meaning they weren't as lemony as I would have liked but having the meringue topping rather than icing makes a nice change, and the browning of the meringue gives them a nice look.

One day soon me and pastry will have to have a sit down and work out our problems but until then these cupcakes will have to do and my want for making a Lemon Meringue pie will remain just a dream.


* The Great British Bake-Off - I wont tell you again!

Blowing away the cobwebs...

This blog has been gathering a substantial layer of dust over the last few months - mainly due to my laziness, actually entirely due to my laziness - however it doesn't mean that my kitchen has been gathering dust too. I have been baking even if its not as regularly as I would like. I've continued to try new things and I thought I would do a quick overview as to what's been coming out of the oven in the past few months.

English Muffins

When I tried to make bagels a few months back they ended up tasting more like English muffins, I figured that this was clearly where my natural strengths lie so I'd be stupid not to give them ago.

I really enjoyed this bake, they didn't quite have the rough texture inside that English muffins should, but they tasted great - toasted and slathered in butter. ( What doesn't taste good slathered in butter?!)

Banoffee Cupcakes

I'd been wanting to make banoffee cupcakes for a while, mainly just to see how they would taste and how adding mushed up banana would affect the cake.

Overall, these were a sort-of success; they didn't rise as much as I would have liked, I think I should have used more raising agent to offset the weight of the bananas, (this bake is when I also decided that my baking powder may have been passed its best) the toffee flavoured icing, however, was, divine.

I was feeling a bit adventurous, so I also made spun sugar decorations for the top; another new technique. I burnt the sugar on the first attempt (really not a good smell) but got it right for the second go - makes a nice little decoration.

(Yes, that is a new cake stand - Christmas present from the boyfriend! Gold star for noticing)

Lemon Curd Dimples

I can't remember what these biscuits were called in the original recipe but I've come up with this one and I'm going to run with it!. These biscuits came about because I had some lemon curd to use and I didn't fancy doing anything too taxing.

They are pretty much just a normal biscuit dough, shaped into balls and then pressed down with a thumb to form a dimple into which you put lemon curd. Simples.

Easy to make and they don't taste too bad either.

Bloomer Loaf

If you've ever read any of my other posts you will be well aware of my love/hate relationship with bread - I love making it, it hates working perfectly for me. The main problem I've always had is that my dough has been too dry meaning it's hard to shape and producing a dry end product. However I watched Paul Hollywood work his strangely sexy magic on a bloomer and he revealed the tip of needing the loaf in oil rather than flour, this allows the dough to be pretty wet and not get dried out by the flour or stick to your hands.

It definitely made for my best bread bake yet.

It also made for a pretty great bacon sandwich!

Brownies

Whilst I usually like to challenge myself in my baking sometimes it's nice to just kick back and knock something pretty simple up. Today, I decided to make brownies, and whilst I don't think I've ever actually made them before, they are ridiculously simple to make. I've definitely had enough practice at tasting the little devils so it's time I branched out and sampled some home-made ones.

I explored my many baking books for recipes however most of them tried to be a bit too 'fancy pantsy' and added nuts and all sorts to the mix whereas I wanted to do pretty plain and simple ones (plus it was too cold to go out to the shops so I had to stick with what I had in the cupboards!) So I found a few recipes on the internet and eventually went with one from a cadbury's website. However, most brownie recipes will use only dark chocolate in the mix but I decided to substitute some of the dark chocolate for milk chocolate  (about 110g of dark, 65g of milk.)  I did this for two reasons: I don't particularly like dark chocolate and sometimes find some shop bought brownies too bitter and because, as mentioned before, I was too warm and comfy inside to venture to the shops and I only had 110 grams of dark chocolate left.

As far as making the brownies goes - a child could could make them. Once you have melted the chocolate and butter its just beating things, mixing things and pouring things. Easy!

Before putting the brownies in the oven, I sprinkled some white chocolate that I had cut up as small as possible on top - partly as an experiment and partly to get rid of it as I didn't really have enough left  to do anything of substance with.

When removing the from the oven, I was a bit worried that I had over baked them but once I had left them to cool, turned them out and cut them up I realised that the insides were still nice and soft and fudgey.

Even though I'm on the common January diet that hits most people who have over eaten at Christmas, I had to give them a try, I'm not sure anyone in the world would have the will power to not give fresh brownies a go. I was worried they might be a bit too sweet with the addition of the milk chocolate but they are not at all, even the boyfriend who doesn't really have a sweet tooth ( more about that here: http://onegirloneoven.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-to-boys-heart.html) approved of them.

This recipe may be simple but it just proves that sometimes the simplest things are the best.

Pain in the Pretzel

Its been a while since I last baked - life seemed to get in the way a lot towards the end of last year but for Christmas I received a few recipe books as gifts and they renewed my desire to create great bakes once more. I spent a good while looking through them all and marking the recipes that took my fancy and one of those was Pretzels.

I decided to tackle these for a couple of reasons; I'd never made them before and as I've stated before on this blog I like to attempt lots of different types of bakes rather than just stick to one type, I also assumed they would probably be a bit of a challenge.

You probably could say (and I'm sure an experienced baker would...) that doing pretzels is a walk in the park and for the first part it is. The dough is a regular white bread dough, just enriched with a little melted butter and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. It's after the dough is needed that, for me, things got tricky.

In order to shape the pretzels you first need to roll out the dough into long sausages, it's during this process that I discovered that not only was I rubbish at writing with my left hand, I'm pretty darn spazzy at rolling out dough too. This meant that one side was continually thicker than the other - I tried to counteract this by flipping the dough around regularly. After a good while I finally found myself with a few sausages of dough. (incidentally its a REALLY good arm workout, mine were actually aching at the end, I'm going to convince myself its because its hard work not because I'm weak and unfit!)

Then came the most important thing: the shaping:

My recipe book did little to help explain how to do it correctly so I turned to old faithful,  Youtube, which quickly shined some light on the situation.

In the end I managed to create a few things that looked at least a little bit like pretzels; consistency is not my strong point, but it was a first attempt.  I decided to mix it up and made a couple of plaits and one big pretzel to go with the little ones. I think the one thing I could do to improve would to be to have thinner sausages so that the pretzels don't loose their shape as much when rising and cooking.

The overall verdict is that they don't taste too bad, I think the dough could do with being a little sweeter, but that can be tweaked easily enough. They taste nice even if they don't look quite so good. (This seems to be a theme of mine!)

All-in-all they are not so much a walk in the park, but a bit more of a sweaty jog in the park.