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.

Baking Abridged

It's been a while since I last blogged; I have been baking, I just haven't found the time to write about it so I thought I would do a quick blog showing the things I've made in the last few weeks.

It's going to go quick - pay attention!

Lemon & Lime Drizzle Cupcakes

A few weeks ago I attempted a large version of this recipe, it was going swimmingly until I ran out of icing sugar for the drizzle. Lemon Drizzle cake without the drizzle is, well, just a cake.

This time I made sure I had icing sugar in abundance, and they turned out great. I think I actually prefer the mini version.

Verdict: They didn't hang around long at work, so they must have been good.

Poppy Seed Bagels 

I've always wondered how bagels were made, then the glorious programme that is The Great British Bake Off showed me a couple of weeks ago. The secret is that they are poached before being baked; I had to give them a try.

The hardest part of the process for me was the shaping; I tried a few different methods.  Very few of them looked anything near acceptable (why do you think there is only one in the picture!) I think my dough was a bit too dry, which made it tricky to shape them.

Verdict: They tasted more like English muffins (no bad thing - I hear you cry) and weren't much to look at but not bad for a first attempt! Will definitely be revisiting this one!

Two-Chocolate Zebra Biscuits 

This recipe in the Great British Bake Off book caught my eye from the first time I looked through it, but I knew it would not be straight forward. The hardest part is definitely assembling the biscuits. It took a fair bit of 'fannying around' and the results are far from perfect looking! I'm pretty sure the dough needed to be even more chilled than it was, to make the assembling and cutting easier.

Verdict: The real verdict will be tomorrow when my work mates get to taste them, but I think they taste pretty good - worth the hassle!

Bread Revisited

I haven't posted for a while, in fact,  I haven't baked in a while, due to actually having some kind of social engagements filling my weekends. Having a life is all good, except it leaves me with precious little time to bake.

However, I had a four day weekend this week so managed to squeeze in some (admittedly not as much as I had planned) time in the kitchen.

I have been meaning to give bread another go for a while, since I documented my first attempt on here a while back, but I gave up bread for July (it will go down in history as "no-bread July," it's like "no-shave November" just a bit more niche!) so I thought it best not to try and attempt to bake it, and tempt myself into falling off the wagon.

But, as we said goodbye to July and August crept in and I was free to eat, and bake, bread again! So,on Friday that's finally what I did; spurred on by this weeks bread episode of The Great British Bake Off.

I wanted to bake something other than the plain white loaf that I have tried before and wanted to do something that involved shaping the dough, so I chose a cheese and onion tear and share loaf recipe from my Great British Bake Off book.

After only one previous attempt I already felt more confident handling and needing the dough than I did last time, and was able to prepare the dough for its first proving easily enough. When it had proved I needed to divide it equally, (I got a calculator and scales out and everything as I've seen how badly different sized buns go down on The Great British Bake Off) flatten each section, fill with a cheese and onion filling and gather up into a bun shape. I placed all the buns in a honeycomb structure and left them to prove again. Before they went in the oven I sprinkled the top with cheese, then sat back and let the smell of fresh bread fill the house.

I was more than happy with the results, they tasted great and didn't look too shabby either. Bread really is time consuming, you need to set aside a whole afternoon, but for me it's one of (if not the) most satisfying things to bake.

 Later that day, to further cement my status as queen of the kitchen I made a chicken risotto for dinner - look what made a perfect accompaniment.

No Cow Pie

I've mentioned my housemate, Sophie, on this blog before, she's one of those people I always feel so, so sorry for- she cant eat dairy OR wheat! She can never enjoy  a smooth and silky Dairy Milk chocolate bar, or a bacon sandwich with fresh, white crustry bread or a camembert cheese that's been left out in the sun to go gloriously gooey - the main things that practically make life worth living!

It also means that she has never been able to enjoy any of the treats I've made since starting this hobby and this blog. So, in celebration of her birthday I decided to tackle the giant that is, a gluten free cake. For my birthday, Sophie and my other housemate Sammy, bought me a baking book - which had a recipe in it for gluten free chocolate cake.

When reading the recipe, I was a little sceptical as to how the cake would turn out; it didnt include any type of gluten-free flour, like rice flour or ground almonds, as I was expecting, but instead was made from cocoa powder and melted dark chocolate (which Sophie can have, as it doesn't contain cow juice!) Luckily, (and somewhat bizarrely) she can have butter though. Without any flour or baking powder - the only ingredient that would make the cake rise, were the eggs, and I wasn't convinced those little guys could do it all on their own.

So with equal measures of anticipation and trepidation, I made up the batter and popped it in the oven. Thirty minutes or so later I returned to see a cake that had actually risen! Although, the rise didnt stay around long after I had taken it out if the oven. It wasn't much to look at but, as always, the proof is in the tasting.
My boyfriend, Sammy, Sophie and I sat down to taste the fruit of my labour together - there was a sense of anticipation probably larger than the one surrounding how London will cope with the Olympics.**Personally I didn't much care for it, although I think mainly that was because I really don't like dark chocolate and there was a large amount in the recipe and not too much sugar to offset the bitterness. It went down better with the others though, both Dave and Sammy said they enjoyed it, and Sophie- whose opinion mattered to me most - said that it was one of the best gluten free cakes she'd ever had. Not bad for a first attempt.
The finished product was more like the texture of a brownie than a cake - so maybe next time I'll cut up the cake and pass them off as brownies instead. Ironically, it probably would have tasted really nice served with a blob of cream or ice cream - although maybe I will have to get my hands on some goats milk ice cream instead.

While, the experiement was interesting and the one person who I wanted to enjoy it, did enjoy it, I think I still believe that if you want to make a cake that looks and tastes great you need a field full of wheat - and maybe a cow.

**Apparently it's impossible to write anything at the moment and not mention the games, so I thought I'd keep this blog topical, or jump on the bandwagon, whichever way you want to look at it.

21st Century Baking.

I've finally taken one step into the 21st century, as I was brought an electric hand mixer by my lovely boyfriend for my birthday last month. I must admit even though I liked the satisfaction of doing everything by hand, it does make it all so much quicker and easier.

My baking gifts! 

I needed a recipe to try out my new toy- so I turned to another of my presents - The Great British Bake Off Cookbook, its great! There are so many recipes in there covering everything from cupcakes to tarts,to biscuits, pies, breads and patisserie - I'd recommend it to any keen baker. As easy as recipes are to find online, there's something special about having an actual book to flick through, and flick through it I did and found recipe after recipe that I wanted to try.

Finally, I settled on a double chocolate marble loaf cake. It  was not too simple and not too complicated, so seemed perfect, and I'd never baked a loaf cake before. The process is more time consuming than something like a Victoria sponge as you need two different cake mixes - one white chocolate and one dark. The mix also includes melted chocolate so time also needs to be taken to melt two lots of chocolate. However the results are worth it.

I wanted to bake something to present to my parents when I saw them last week. I feel that their memories of me, as a young child, making a huge mess in the kitchen just to produce some ropey looking cupcakes has hindered there belief in me actual turning out some good stuff in the kitchen nowadays!

My plan worked, they were suitably impressed. My dad gave it an "8 out of 10" - praise indeed.

BREAD

When I started this baking hobby, I didn’t want to be a One Trick Pony, I wanted to experiment with all the different aspects of baking, not just making cupcakes in varying flavours. I’ve tackled the bog standard cupcakes, a variety of biscuits and pastry but one area still unchartered was bread; I always thought of bread making as being both so simple and yet so complicated at the same time. A simple white loaf has just four ingredients; flour, yeast, salt and water, yet it’s the techniques and processes that make it a fine art. It’s by no means a quick process; it needs time to rise, prove and then bake, but I think the satisfaction when it works is the best of all the things I’ve made so far. Being able to tell people at work that my lunchtime sandwich was made with my homemade bread, and see the impressed look on their faces was great - although I know they all prefer it when I make the biscuits and cakes as they get to enjoy them!

My finished bread masterpiece was far far from perfect, I didn’t really know how to knead the bread, the most important step, as I had only made it once before in high school food technology, but I turned to my little friend YouTube and he helped me out – the joys of the internet. It was all very experimental, and I honestly expected to make a disgusting, heavy, brick – something like the loaf that kills a duck in About A Boy - but it was pleasantly surprising.

So, I’ve tried cakes, biscuits ,pastry and now bread – all with varying degrees of success, there seems to only be one thing left – patisserie – but I think that a long way of yet! Better learn to walk properly first…

A Way to the Boy's Heart

The boyfriend isn't really one for desserts (crazy, I know! but I love him in spite of this awful affectation), all he really likes is an apple crumble or apple pie. Now, as we learnt from a previous blog post I have not yet mastered pastry, so I had to resort to an old classic that is his only other preferred dessert: Victoria Sponge.

When I was younger, for some reason, I could never manage "big cakes" despite very little difference in technique from their smaller counterparts, but I thought I'd throw caution to the wind and attempt it anyway.

Something must have changed over the years, as it was quite a success. I did have one major issue, the first half stuck to the tin and i had to break it a bit to get it out, but I used that one as the bottom so no-one would really know. For the second half I lined the tin with greaseproof paper and it came out with no worries.

The only cream I had was a week old, and pretty questionable, so I just used raspberry jam for the filling, and topped it with the classic sprinkle of icing sugar.

I actually surprised myself with how good it tasted! Even the week old left overs got eaten by my housemates family, so it must have been good.

Most importantly it got the thumbs up from the boyfriend. So, until I can master an apple pie, or failing that a cake based model of Bruce Springsteen, good old Victoria Sponge will have to do.

The Great Workplace Bake-Off

At work I sit on a pod (or booth as it has once been called, much to the amusement of the rest of the pod) with a couple of other keen amateur bakers, so last weekend we decided that we would all bake something delicious to share with everyone at work on Monday.

I've gained the nickname of "the biscuit queen" at work due to the fact that I mostly make biscuits rather than cakes; this teamed with the fact that I knew that one of the other girls was going to be making cupcakes, meant that I decided to make some kind of biscuits. I had white chocolate left over from the chocolate orange cupcakes so decided to make white chocolate cookies.

I've never made cookies before, but thought it was worth a shot, if they turned out horrendous I still had time to make something else, that I wouldn't be embarrassed to present at work. I followed a recipe found online, however it turned out to produce a dough that was far too wet, so with trepidation I added some more flour until the dough was a workable consistency and then just refrigerated it for a long while.  I wanted the cookies to have a rustic look so I didn't use a cutter, I simply rolled the dough into balls and then flattened each ball down with my fingers.

They looked pretty good, and they tasted great. They didn't hang around long at work, that's always a great test of how good they are. If they are still on my desk on a Tuesday, then I know I did something wrong!

After the success of my cookies I decided to further push the boat out and tackle something that I could never master as a child: pastry

It turns out I can't master it as an adult either. I tried to make jam tarts and they turned out, well, shit, is probably the most accurate word. I think I overworked and then overbaked the pastry. I also put too much jam in so that it overflowed. Even the boyfriend said they tasted bad, that's when I know it's a disaster!

They looked pretty shit and tasted pretty shit, but you live and learn.

There's always next time.....

All quiet on the blogging front...

This blog has been pretty quiet of late, I didn't realise just how long it had been until I saw the date of the last post! It doesn't mean I haven't been getting my hands dirty in the kitchen it's just that my camera was out of action for a while.

Quite the opposite in fact, I've been baking pretty regularly, my workmates now pretty much just expect treats on a Monday morning!

A couple of the highlights created over my quite period include, orange chocolate cupcakes with white chocolate icing and my own version of jammy dodgers. The cupcakes took two attempts to get right, the first time I followed a fancy recipe on-line that included melted chocolate in the cupcake mix, these turned out pretty disastrous, so in the end I fell back on the old faithful cupcake recipe I always use, and they were great. It was my first time using a piping bag to decorate too, whilst they didn't look amazing, the icing tasted amazing!

My jammy dodgers went down an absolute treat at work, I've had requests since to make them again, so I definitely will be at some point. They were just a slightly modified shortbread recipe; i cut out circles and then cut smaller circles into half of them, then when cooked sandwiched them together with raspberry jam. They were great but I know I can make them better, in terms of both taste and appearance!

Sorry, no pictures due to my dead camera, but the pictures return in the next post!

Toad in a hole.

Whilst I'm not sure if it technically falls under the category of baking I dipped my toe in new waters again on Saturday and made toad in the hole. It's actually pretty easy, although there was a few nail biting minutes before it began to rise, where a floppy soggy Yorkshire mess was a real possibility!




But alas, it did rise, and they ate, and it was good.

Shortbread for a shortwhile.

Last week I got a little experimental in the old kitchen; I attempted to make Jam Donught cupcakes from an amalgamation of a couple of recipes I'd found on-line. They came out okay, but had one major issue; despite the fact that i filled the cake case almost to the top before adding the jam in, it had still sunk completely to the bottom by the time they had finished baking leaving a sticky jam mess in the bottom. They also tasted more like mini Victoria sponges than donughts, but that's no bad thing! A colleague at work even called them amazing. I definitely need to make them again at some point and try and figure out a way to avoid my jammy conundrum.

Due to the fact that my first bake hadn't been the complete success I had hoped, I decided on a whim to make some shortbread. I went with the simplest recipe I could find on-line and muddled my way through something I had never made before. The result was well.... not amazing. I think i overworked the dough a little before baking, mainly due to the fact I had to improvise a rolling pin which in turn made them a little tough and dry. However they couldn't have been that bad as my boyfriend managed to polish them off without complaint in a few days!

I couldn't let my shortbread failure beat me so this week I tried again, as my parents were visiting and I wanted something impressive to give them as a gift. This time I made the dough a bit different and found a much better substitute rolling pin. I also cut the dough into a big circle and the cut this into the traditional pizza slice shapes, like the shortbread your grandma used to have in a tartan tin.
My parents didn't believe I had made it; this means one of two things, it was pretty darn great or it was distinctly average and my parents just have very little faith in my baking ability! I'm going to convince myself its the latter!

Old Faithful

When I was little cupcakes weren't trendy, they didnt cost you £3 for one from some swanky west-end boutique and they weren't called cupcakes. They were fairy cakes, they were neither fancy nor impressive but they always tasted great. The recipe is easy and the process doesn't require much skill (except a strong arm for beating life into the little things and the knowledge to know when to take the out of the oven) yet everbody loves them; well everybody except my housemate who can't eat wheat or dairy but if she could she'd love them too.

My first batch of treats are the old faithful - Fairy Cakes. Nothing fancy, but I did put smarties on them.Verdict: Pretty darn tasty; and made without the use of a food mixer, i'll let you decide wether thats a decision made by my poverty or my integrity!

In the beginning...

My one and only New Years Resolution this year was to take up a new hobby and decided it should be baking. Seeing as it's now February and the excuse "well I'm moving house soon" is no longer going to fly thanks to our lovely new flat, I thought it about time to haul my ass to Tesco, buy some flour and make some magic.

I used to bake quite a bit when I was younger but nothing more than cupcakes and the odd failed jam tart, pastry never was my strong point! So I figured at the grand old age of 23 it was time to try and recapture some of my misspent youth; this teamed with the fact that society has recently deemed it socially acceptable to admit to having baking as a hobby (Fern Cotton bakes, and she hangs out with rockstars) made it seem like the perfect choice. It also means I'll soon be able to bribe my nearest and dearest into liking me more by promising them yummy treats!

This blog will chronicle my efforts, for better or worse. The ups, the downs, the burnt things and the great things. And who knows I might make it onto the next series of The Great British Bake Off.

I thought my life couldn't get any more rock and roll.... then I started baking.