Candy Cane Brownies

Yesterday recipe for Christmas gift baking. Today, I’m posting a recipe for some entirely selfish Christmas baking (knitting posts will resume shortly, I promise!).

These brownies are ri.di.cu.lous.

Rich and dense and intensely chocolatey, they are one teeny tiny tippie toe away from being fudge. A true Christmas indulgence. Now, I’m an equal opportunities brownie lover – I’ll take them blonde, brown, cakey or fudgy. But if I had to choose… if I had to choose, fudgy would be it. And these are well and truly in the fudgy camp. Yum.

Like yesterday’s Russian tea cakes, these are a Christmas staple in my house, although I’m too selfish to gift them (although I sometimes get into the holiday spirit and cut a couple of slices for people who pop round!). According to the date on the recipe print out, I’ve been making these since 2006 and I don’t think I’ve missed a single year. These brownies are very much a highlight in my baking year. I’ve googled and googled, and I can’t find the website that I originally found the recipe on, although Google did throw up this, which seems to be a newspaper article of the exact same recipe I have. The article includes quite a sweet backstory to the recipe, so it’s worth a look if you’re anything like me and love reading “behind” the recipe.

Candy Cane Brownies
adapted from a recipe by J.M. Hirsch

(makes 9 generous servings)

1½ cups sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup plain flour
¾ cup (150g) unsalted butter
350g chocolate, chopped (I use a combination of milk and dark)
⅔ cup cocoa powder
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (see how to make your own vanilla extract here)
½ cup (120ml) warm milk
10 crushed candy canes

Preheat oven to Gas mark 4/180°C

1. Grease a 20cm/8inch square baking pan.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together sugar, salt and flour. Set aside.
3. In a double boiler combine the butter and half of the chopped chocolate. Melt, stirring often, then remove from the heat. Whisk in the cocoa, transfer to a large mixing bowl, and set aside.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, vanilla and milk. Add this to the chocolate and cocoa mixture and whisk well to combine.
5. Fold in the flour mixture, and then stir in the remaining chopped chocolate and the crushed candy canes, reserving 2 tablespoons of the candy canes for sprinkling.
6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Sprinkle the top with 1 tablespoon of the reserved crushed candy canes.
7. Bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out covered with cakey biys. The centre of the brownie should look set. I like the surface of my brownie to be nice and crisp to give a nice contrast to the soft fudginess underneath.
8. Dust the top of the brownies with the remaining crushed candy canes, then cool completely before serving.
   
   

I’ll be leaving a piece of this out for Santa tonight. Hope you all have a lovely Christmas!

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Russian Tea Cakes

A few years ago I was really stuck for Christmas gift ideas for the Boy’s parents. I’ve always loved an excuse to get busy in the kitchen, and being rather addicted to food blogs at the time I thought it’d be fun to make a Christmas hamper full of homemade goodies. I bought little baskets from Ikea and tucked all my paper packets of biscuits, cakes, and mulled ciders into them, and although I can’t remember everything that went into my homemade hamper that year, these biscuits were definitely the stand outs. When I asked the Boy how the hamper had gone down with the ‘rentals he said that his mother couldn’t get enough of these biscuits, and from then on I’ve popped a batch in their Christmas box every year, and brought another fresh batch along when we go round to their house for New Year’s Day lunch. They have become a Christmas staple.

Some people call these Mexican Wedding cakes or snowball cookies, but I’ve been calling them Russian tea cakes since I first made them six years ago. They’re buttery, crumbly, not too sweet, and melt in your mouth delicious. And perhaps more importantly, they’re a doddle to make. Always handy in the festive season when you have several simultaneous bakes on the go.
I can’t remember where I found this recipe, it might have been on a blog, it might be a hash of several different recipes I liked the sound of. What I do know is that I lost this recipe one or two years after I first found it, and that year I had to resort to another recipe, and for some reason or other I wasn’t overly thrilled with the results. I was so happy when my original recipe showed up again, so I’m typing it out here for posterity in case my original handwritten copy ever goes walkabouts again!
Russian Tea Cakes
(makes 36 – although I made mine rather large this year and only ended up with 27)
225g softened unsalted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (see how to make your own vanilla extract here)
6 tablespoons icing sugar
250g plain flour
120g chopped walnuts/pecans
40g icing sugar to dust
Preheat oven to Gas mark 4/175°C

1. In a medium bowl cream butter and vanilla until smooth.
2. Combine the the 6 tablespoons of icing sugar and flour. Stir into the butter mixture until just blended.
3. Mix in the chopped nuts.
4. Roll dough into 1 inch balls and place them 2 inches apart on a baking tray.
5. Bake for 12-15 minutes until they are just golden on the bottom. Transfer tray over to wire cooling racks, and while still warm roll the cookies in the icing sugar.
6. Let cool completely and roll again in icing sugar to give a second layer.
7. Scoff and enjoy! 

• For extra flavour try toasting the nuts, but be sure to let them cool before you add them to the dough.
• Sometimes I’m too lazy to roll the dough and get it all over my hands, so I simply press and shape a ball using two spoons.
• Similarly for rolling the biscuits in icing sugar, the high butter content in the biscuits (whilst making them utterly delicious) can cause them to melt a little in warm fingers which can get a little messy if you’re rolling them in icing sugar by hand. Instead I like to pop a couple of tablespoons of icing sugar into a bowl and use a couple of spoons to roll the biscuits around in the sugar. This also has the added benefit of allowing you to “pour” the icing sugar over the biscuits which sometimes coats them a little bit better.

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Obsession

Not a blog post about perfume, but rather about my latest obsession with dyeing fibre.

I’ve tried dying fibre in the past, with limited success. This time I think I’ve cracked it.

This was my test braid. I didn’t want to commit to dyeing too much in case I fulled the fibre again, and I played it safe with colours I knew worked well together. I used a lot less water this time around, resisted poking the fibre around too much, and it worked out brilliantly.

But I always seem to gravitate towards this sort of colour palette so I wanted to step outside my comfort zone a little and in the end I came up with this:

This is totally not something that I would normally go for, but my god I love it. It’s fresh, and vibrant, and feminine, and it just screams sunshine and flowers.

Just looking at it makes me long for summer, and I’m not even fed up of hunkering down for winter yet!

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birthday hauling

Yesterday was my birthday, and to celebrate my lovely Boy drove me down to Yorkshire and treat me to a little wool hauling. I had planned to bring my camera along, and show you pics of all the lovely places we visited, but in the rush and excitement of the morning I forgot to pop it in my bag! But I did manage to snap the occasional phone pic…

So here goes. A snapshot wool filled birthday tour…

Giant needles at Texere. These things were ridiculously large!

Beautiful snowy Bradford on the drive to Coldspring Mill. It’s nice to see pictures of Bradford being beautiful because I lived there for 5 years as a student, and the area that I lived in by the university was thoroughly awful. I won’t bore you with the details, but needless to say my last couple of years there were miserable. Hopefully my bad memories can be overwritten with images as lovely as this!

More of the drive to Coldspring Mill, followed by…

a nice cup of Yorkshire tea at the Mill! And a lovely lunch of giant Yorkshire pudding, sausages, gravy, mash and peas (that I was far too hungry to stop and take picture of) for the utterly bargainous price of £3! I’m a bit of a sausage snob, so I was dubious when I saw the price, but it was completely delicious, and I still can’t believe how cheap it was.

We rounded it all off with a stop at Whitby on the way home, and an obligatory visit to the Magpie Cafe for fish and chips and mulled cider, followed by lovely moonlit walk along the pier. There really is nothing nicer than being wrapped up in deliciously warm handknits, staring up at the stars with the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, and the wind whipping around your face. A perfect end to the day.

Well actually, the perfect end to the day was coming home to the birthday cake that my Mum had baked for me! Vanilla cake with lemon buttercream is my Mum’s specialty, and it is delicious.

But I suppose the important part of this post is the haulage, so here it is!

Some King Cole Riot DK, which is touted as being a Noro dupe. This ticks (almost) all my boxes (grey? Check. Jewel tones? Oh yes.)

Mystery yarn from Coldspring Mill. It’s a beautiful rust colour, looks like a DK weight, feels like merino and I’m pretty sure it’s Debbie Bliss but I haven’t a clue what line it is. Might have to do some investigating one of these days. They had a larger pack of this yarn, and I’m kicking myself for not getting it because it’s such a lovely colour!

Chocolatey brown Debbie Bliss Rialto, in what I think is an aran weight.

According to the pack this is Extra Fine Merino 4 ply, so although I initially thought this was a Debbie Bliss yarn, I now think it’s probably Sublime Extra Fine Merino 4 ply. Yellow is not a colour I’m usually drawn to, but I love this. It’s not quite dark enough to be a mustard, not bright enough to be lemon, and not brown enough to be biscuit. It’s just lovely and buttery, and I’m surprised at how much I love it.

There was more haulage. I picked up a couple of balls of colourful acrylic for my best friends daughter as I’m giving her knitting lessons for Christmas, and a few balls of Stylecraft 4 ply for knitting dolls clothes and accessories. There was also a huge amount of fibre haulage!

I’ve been a little obsessed with dyeing tops at the moment, so I’ve stocked up on undyed merino as well as picking up a few other fibres and blends so that I can try my hand at spinning wools other than merino. It looks like 2012 is going to be the year of the wheel!

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halfway (almost…)

Just a thumb short of being half way through knitting these mittens…

They’re actually a surprisingly fast knit, I just seem to be taking my time over it. I’ve restarted with different yarn since the last time these mittens appeared on the blog. Once I reached the decreases for the top of The Mittens Take 1, I realised that they were definitely too small. They looked freakishly narrow. Serves me right for not swatching. (although I still didn’t swatch for these Mittens Take 2!)

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Christmas Bark

I love homemade chocolate bark, it’s such a fun and easy treat to make at Christmas. This is the first batch I’ve made in a couple of years, and it’s so simple that I can’t understand why I don’t make it every year!

Like my Vanilla Extract post, this is so simple that I daren’t even call it a recipe.

All I did to make this batch was:

1. Spread an offcut of greaseproof paper onto a baking tray
2. Crush a few candy canes with a pestle and mortar
3. Melt a bar of milk chocolate
4. Pour melted milk chocolate onto greaseproof paper and spread into a vague rectangle shape
5. Melt a third of a bar of dark chocolate (it was all I had in the cupboard – I could have sworn I had more but apparently not…)
6. Gently dollop the melted dark chocolate onto the still-melted milk chocolate
7. Use a skewer to swirl the dark chocolate into the milk chocolate and make it all pretty (you don’t have to swirl if you don’t want to!)
8. Sprinkle the crushed candy canes onto the melted chocolate. Gently press the crushed canes into the surface of the chocolate if doesn’t look like it’s going to stick too well
9. Put the whole thing somewhere cool (fridge/garage) to set for a couple of hours
10. Once set, bash the slab up into nice big chocolatey shards and enjoy!

Easy as pie. It really only takes about 10 minutes to mix up, and then maybe an hour or so to set.

I actually wanted to use some almonds and raisins that I had for the topping on this bark, but the Boy wanted candy canes, so candy canes he got. There will definitely be some fruit and nut bark before the year is out though.

A couple of pics of how my bark looked it had set (I decided to make bark at about 9:30 at night so excuse the crappily lit photos!)

This stuff is just so simple and delicious, and the possibilities are endless. My original intention was to make a 3 layer bark (dark, milk and white chocolate) but there wasn’t any white chocolate at the shop I went to and I was too lazy to go on a supermarket-crawl-white-chocolate-hunt. I’ll save it for next time.

Chocolate bark makes an excellent Christmas gift too. I’ve given little packets of them out as part of Secret Santa gifts before. Just package it up in a little cellophane or paper bag and add some pretty ribbon. Simples. And yummy.

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Seeing double

I had a little yarn splurge earlier on this week (the joys of a tax rebate!). Even though I ordered these skeins from two different shops at the same time, it wasn’t until both packages landed on my doorstep yesterday morning that I realised that I’d essentially ordered pretty much the same colours twice. Apparently I like this colour combination! Luckily there are enough differences between them to make me feel like I haven’t ordered a complete set of duplicates, and I can’t wait until my Christmas knitting is all done so that I can have a play around with these pretties :)

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That’s a wrap.

My cinema socks are finally off the needles and blocked! They were actually finished a few weeks ago, but I’ve been putting off blocking them out of sheer laziness.

But they are now finally done, blocked, and ready for the Boy’s Christmas box.

I didn’t really follow a pattern for these, they’re just plain stocking stitch with a ribbed cuff, but I did follow the Sleepy Hollow Socks heel construction.

I love the Sleepy Hollow heel for the fact that there are no stitches to pick up and no working back and forth; everything is knit in the round. It also creates a really nice shaped sole that really hugs the heel and then opens out slightly as the foot widens for fantastic fit.

I think something happened with my gauge when knitting these though, because when I finished them I asked the Boy to try and them on and the first sock fitted beautifully, but the second was incredibly snug. I hoped that blocking might sort this out, but I won’t find out until Christmas morning because I’m wrapping them up for him!

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Green & Grey

I’m very into IQ84 right now and I can’t quite seem to put it down. The stripey socks are perfect for knitting/reading fodder since they’re so simple.

They’ve been working up quite quickly as well, but they’ve been thrust aside for the moment because I’ve come to the heel, and even the simplest of heels are too much for knitting and reading!

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Bettys

Last Tuesday the Boy and I took a trip down to Harrogate for an impromptu day out.

No trip to Harrogate is ever complete without a visit to Bettys Tea Rooms, and to be honest that was the main reason for our trip!

I had the most delicious pumpkin and spinach tortellini for lunch, but I was so hungry and it looked so good that I dove right in without even thinking to take a picture. Instead, here’s a photo of the homemade lemonade we were drinking.

Dessert for me was my favourite jasmine tea accompanied by a yummy fat rascal which I could eat all over again from looking at this picture!

The Boy had a serving of cream tea all to himself, although I did help myself to half a scone loaded with clotted cream and jam – impossible to resist!

After Bettys there was shopping, coffee and hot chocolate. Perfect end to the day!

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Thursday

A couple of Thursdays ago I found myself with an unexpected day off work, so I followed the Boy into town (hampering some of his Christmas shopping plans in the progress – oops!).

Towards the end of the day we were running short on time, so while he ran off to get the car to collect some of our shopping I thought I’d pop around the corner into the Knit Studio. Unfortunately, the door was shut and I was too shy to knock, but at least this gave me some time to hang around Blackfriars and snap a few pictures.

I think I’ve briefly blogged about this place before, but it truly is one of my favourite parts of Newcastle. Tucked away in the city centre, it’s a beautiful little oasis of calm in an otherwise bustling city. It’s often used as a bit of a thoroughfare, but it still manages to be quiet and peaceful.

Blackfriars is also home to the Blackfriars Restaurant, which hails itself as being the oldest dining room in the UK. I’ve heard that their food is excellent, but it’s a little on the pricey side so I haven’t tried it yet. Hopefully I’ll get the chance one day!

There’s a cute little Korean restaurant in here that was much more within our budget and incredibly tasty. Can’t wait to go back!

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