bread and cookies

Confession time: I am a bargain hunter, and never more so than in the supermarkets, where my eyes are always on the lookout for those little brightly coloured reduced stickers. So when the Boy and I were wondering through the supermarket aisles yesterday afternoon and I spied a bottle of beautiful creamy Jersey milk reduced to just 24p, I couldn’t help myself. My mind instantly filled with thoughts of freshly baked warm cookies and a glass of cool creamy milk, and into the trolley the Jersey milk went.

Minutes later, the same thing happened down the fruit aisle with a bag of equally bargainous bananas, only this time it was thoughts of banana bread that grabbed me. I went through an obsession with banana bread a few years ago, where I would stop by the market in town on my way home from university and buy ridiculously large bags of bananas that I had no hope of finishing, just so that there would be plenty of overripe ones leftover that I could mash into banana bread. I’ve managed to curb my obsession since, but that still doesn’t stop me from passing over an opportunity for banana bread when one presents itself!

Banana Bread Recipe
adapted from Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking

3 mashed bananas
7.5oz / 230g plain flour
2.5oz / 75g wholemeal flour
2tsp baking powder
0.5tsp bicarbonate of soda
0.25tsp salt
0.25tsp cinnamon
1oz /30g chopped chocolate
1oz / 30g oats
2 eggs
2.5oz / 75g brown sugar (I used white sugar without any problems)
3oz / 90g melted butter
4fl oz / 125ml milk

Preheat oven to Gas Mark 4 and butter a loaf tin.

Mix together the dry ingredients (plain flour, wholemeal flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt, cinnamon, chopped chocolate and oats) and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and stir in the sugar, melted butter and milk. Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture in 3 batches, alternating with the mashed bananas. Mix until just combined but be careful not to overmix.

Pour the batter into the buttered tin and bake for about 60 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the bread comes out clean.

Leave to cool in the tin for about 5 minutes, and then turn out onto a cooling rack to cool completely. If you can wait that long…. I couldn’t, and the Boy and I only managed to wait about 20 minutes before helping ourselves to a couple of lovely warm slices!

This bread is delicious warm, cold, or lightly toasted and spread with a bit of butter. It’s also delicious with chopped toasted nuts added instead of the chocolate, or as well as if you’re feeling particularly indulgent.

But these cookies. Oh, these cookies.

They are all kinds of amazing. I am a sucker for oatmeal raisin cookies. Every time I dig in to a tub of Ben & Jerry’s I lament the fact that it isn’t my beloved and sadly discontinued Oatmeal Cookie Dough flavour, and I’m constantly craving the big chewy ones that the supermarkets sell in those waxed paper bags with the little plastic window. But they can be a little hit and miss, and sometimes they’re disappointingly crisp and dry. For years I’ve been searching for the perfect oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, because let’s face it, homemade is always better, but they’ve never been quite right. I think I might have finally cracked it though.

I adapted smitten kitchen’s thick, chewy oatmeal raisin cookies recipe (always with the adapting, but to be honest I very rarely follow a recipe exactly! I tend to use them more as springboards to something else, but that does sometimes make repeat results a little tricky) but added more raisins, a dash more vanilla and about twice as much cinnamon because I love the stuff. I was running low on brown sugar so I used white only, and I also chilled the dough for about 45 minutes. I then scooped it out into golf ball sized balls and then flattened them slightly before baking. I did a little experiment and flattened some of them out while leaving a few in a ball shape, and while they did all spread out I preferred the flattened cookies. The balled ones retained a bit of a dome shape and were a little bit too thick in the centre for my liking.

Strangely enough, I tried this recipe a few years ago and wasn’t overly thrilled with the results, but I think back then I made the cookies smaller and didn’t chill the dough.

Chilling certainly seemed to give this batch the edge that I was after. Warm from the oven last night, they were heavenly with crisp edges and lovely chewy centres, and they were just as good this morning at breakfast!

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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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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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Homemade Vanilla Extract

I love vanilla. I use it in so many things, in baking, in porridge, in drinks. I just love it.

Sadly, it can be pretty pricey stuff, and in the UK we only ever seem to get those little tiny bottles of extract, and I would go through those far too quickly. For a while I was super happy to find big bottles of vanilla extract in Costco, but for some reason or other they seem to have disappeared recently, so I went investigating how to make my own.

It turns out, vanilla extract is stupidly easy to make. Take some high grade vanilla beans bought cheaply on eBay, a bottle of bog standard vodka, slit the beans, stick them in the vodka, shake every so often and wait.

In fact, the waiting is the hardest part.

I started this batch back in late September I think, and initially added 12 vanilla beans to 700ml of vodka. I waited and waited for that beautiful deep rich amber colour, but it didn’t seem to be darkening up much so last week I whacked in another 4 beans and it now seems to be on it’s way. It smells heavenly already, and the best thing about this is that the longer you leave it, the stronger and richer it gets. And when you start running low, just top up with more vodka!

I think this would make a such a lovely gift, and that is exactly my plan. All I need to do is find a pretty little bottle to decant the extract in to, push a couple of vanilla beans inside for continued flavour and added prettiness, and tie a ribbon around it. Perfect for Christmas!

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